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Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

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Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#11

Post by acqq »

revelation wrote: post #7

This article keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty. I don't see why, given that educating the US public about security best practices perfectly aligns with their mission. Back in 2001 they even released the first version of SELinux: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2001/se-linux.shtm... It is only in the post 9/11 world that we…

"This article keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty."

No, the actual words are just "That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto party while he was working for the NSA." It was a risk for him, the kind of like organizing "don't drink sugar water" event while working for Coca Cola which has effectively its own police, and that at the time the employee already downloaded the secrets from the Coca Cola's secure network and he even contacted some journalists to give them those.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#12

Post by iamsalman »

There's nothing as absolute privacy on the internet. Even Tor cannot keep you truly anonymous (http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/34294/tor-is-not-a...)

However, perhaps Snowden's biggest achievement is to bring security to the forefront of everything and create a wave of new half-baked "security" products which want to ride the wave.

The notion of security is relative and the weakest link is always us. A small overlook or an error is all it takes...

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#13

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Cynically perhaps I'd imagine that increasing number of tor users for his node would be a great benefit if he wanted to reduce the possibility that his own traffic could be easily tracked. If you're the only user of a Tor node I'd imagine it's far easier to track traffic and potentially deanonymise if not decrypt some communications.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#14

Post by cs02rm0 »

revelation wrote: post #7

This article keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty. I don't see why, given that educating the US public about security best practices perfectly aligns with their mission. Back in 2001 they even released the first version of SELinux: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2001/se-linux.shtm... It is only in the post 9/11 world that we…

I don't see why, given that educating the US public about security best practices perfectly aligns with their mission.

I suspect how well it aligns depends on which part of the large and complex organisation that is the NSA any given individual works in.

If it is seen as subversive to a few of the many within the NSA I doubt they'd do a straw poll across the organisation as a whole to see how they address such an issue.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#15

Post by wfn »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #10

> He was leading a local “Crypto Party,” teaching less than two dozen Hawaii residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the internet anonymously. I found this quite interesting. I wonder how many more of these events are happening around the world. They could teach how to use truecrypt, how to turn on two factor authentication for the popular services that use it and what it is, good password policies, and wh…

Yup, quite a few of them are happening around the world - the overall 'movement' is / can be called the 'cryptoparty movement' (if one could say it was indeed a 'movement'). We did our own event in our local town (http://cryptoparty.lt/) (well, "i participated in one" is more like it), and hopefully we'll pick it up and do it again.

There's always this delicate thing of having a balance between being interesting to local hackers, vs. being understandable by laypeople. We veered towards the former, and it was great fun, but it would be very beneficial to try and be more welcoming towards the general crowd, too. It's not always easy when introducing complex technologies - I try to avoid using leaky metaphors, but sometimes that's not possible.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#16

Post by Karunamon »

iamsalman wrote: post #12

There's nothing as absolute privacy on the internet. Even Tor cannot keep you truly anonymous ( http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/34294/tor-is-not-a... ) However, perhaps Snowden's biggest achievement is to bring security to the forefront of everything and create a wave of new half-baked "security" products which want to ride the wave. The notion of security is relative and the weakest link is always us. A sm…

This is very true. But all that needs to happen is a non-trivial amount of people making the bastards work for it, in order to make the kind of at-scale mass monitoring the NSA and friends are doing become prohibitively expensive. And oh yeah, as a bonus, it makes you a less attractive target to your everyday script kiddie.

That means truecrypt all the drives, https all the websites, pgp all the emails.

In short, If you have an option between a secure and nonsecure (but slightly more difficult) way of doing something, always pick the secure one.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#17

Post by newscracker »

icholboy wrote: post #8

Regardless of all the controversy, I see this man as a hero and I hope history gives him the recognition he deserves.

It's obvious that Edward Snowden was upset with mass surveillance for quite sometime and did a lot of preparation before taking the final leap to disclose the truth.

He is a hero and has brought out a (long due and) renewed interest in privacy and security. We'll all be the better for it in the coming years.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#18

Post by mikeash »

revelation wrote: post #7

This article keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty. I don't see why, given that educating the US public about security best practices perfectly aligns with their mission. Back in 2001 they even released the first version of SELinux: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2001/se-linux.shtm... It is only in the post 9/11 world that we…

The NSA has (at least) two separate missions: keep domestic systems secure, and break into foreign systems.

These systems come into conflict a lot because it has become nearly impossible to secure domestic systems without also securing foreign systems.

For a while, NSA appeared to favor securing domestic systems when the two came into conflict. Thus events like the withdrawal of SHA-0 and its strengthening and re-release as SHA-1.

Now, it appears to have swung back in the other direction, and pretty hard. They're keeping vulnerabilities secret and even deliberately introducing weaknesses in order to make their spying mission easier.

Educating the public about computer security aligns with one of their missions, and not the one they appear to really care about now.

Re: Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

#19

Post by gloverkcn »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #13

Cynically perhaps I'd imagine that increasing number of tor users for his node would be a great benefit if he wanted to reduce the possibility that his own traffic could be easily tracked. If you're the only user of a Tor node I'd imagine it's far easier to track traffic and potentially deanonymise if not decrypt some communications.

This was my first thought as well. And specifically if anything he was doing got flagged the crypto party would be an excellent cover for why he was using Tor and TrueCrypt to send things to random people
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