Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

This provides a useful way to frame people concerns' about Snowden's revelations.

Every intelligence service exists at the intersection of two completely opposite goals: in order to fulfill their mandate to protect their country from its enemies, they need as much information about the actions of their enemies as possible. On the other hand, in order to protect their country from themselves, they need to have as light a touch as possible. There is no solution; you have to compromise.

The thing about compromises is that even though they tend to kinda sorta almost make sense when viewed in context, no one is every happy with them. Any large agency is going to employ a substantial number of people who find these compromises distasteful.

This report indicates that Al Qaeda, an organization that no one in their right mind would say should be allowed to operate freely, benefits from these sorts of disclosures. They learn what's vulnerable, they change their behavior, and they become more difficult to fight. What's worse, it's conceivable that the intelligence agency's response could be to increase the intensity of their activity, the better to capture the enemy's new behaviors.

Now imagine the quandary the intelligence agency faces. They try every day to meet mandates that are fundamentally unreconcilable. They employ people who disagree with the compromises at which they've arrived, and each and every one of them could potentially let the cat out of the bag and render their current work useless.

I don't mean this argument to criticize of praise the actions of the NSA. I only suggest that those (Americans) among you who demonize the NSA and advocate for it's removal consider this reframing of the discussion.

The idea that al Qaeda might not be a terrorist group is a false controversy, as is the idea that participating in open source might be treason.

Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't care. Terrorism is not a very significant real risk to people living in the first world (compared to the risk of fatal lightning strike or drowning in a bathtub, for example), but pervasive mass surveillance is.

In general, it's kinda absurd to imagine that anything that helps terrorists is something we don't want to do. Terrorist operations are probably helped by lots of things like cheap availability of computer and communications equipment, low travel costs, access to clean drinking water and food, etc.

Where in the world are you getting #2 and #3?

Al Qaeda is very clearly a terrorist group, and no where in that article is it suggested that open source software is either treasonous or related to terrorism, nor does it say the NSA thinks this.

Correlation does not equal causation.

I don't think it came as a surprise to terrorist organizations that the NSA was working to break their encryption techniques—just as I'm sure it wouldn't have been a surprise to the Soviets during the Cold War.

The group that was surprised and caught off-guard was the American people.

It's been just over a year since the Snowden leaks. Overhauling an entire communication system likely took more than a year. Ground-up rewrites rarely go that well.

This strikes me more as a publicity grab for this firm than any kind of objective science.