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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

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Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#52

Post by arethuza »

toyg wrote: post #44
nabla9 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA started to move towards "two-man rule" system where system administrators work in pairs when accessing servers with highly classified information only after Snowden leaks. When you know that Russia and China have good track record of long running human intelligence operations in the US, this looks like really gigantic security lapse. They are not stupid and they must have been discussing it. There must have been…

> I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China That's an exaggeration, IMHO. This is not the Cold War, where many actors were moved by ideological considerations that crossed national borders (like the Cambridge Five, for example). Nowadays, national and cultural lines are extremely well drawn, so motivations for "traitors" boil down to money and/or blackmail, which are usu…

"which are usually easier to defend against at the top level"

I'm not so sure about that - it strikes me that spies motivated purely by ideology are pretty rare and were only created in rather unusual circumstances (e.g. pre-WW2 UK) while those who are motivated by fear/greed/ego could occur anywhere.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#54

Post by jobu »

adityab wrote: post #18

Two key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown: 1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great. 2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% autom…

Another interesting item I hadn't heard before is that Snowden tried to leave clues as to which files he copied, and which files he looked at but didn't take:

But he believes the NSA's audit missed those clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched—1.7 million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.) “I figured they would have a hard time,” he says. “I didn't figure they would be completely incapable.”

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#55

Post by toyg »

nabla9 wrote: post #49
toyg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China That's an exaggeration, IMHO. This is not the Cold War, where many actors were moved by ideological considerations that crossed national borders (like the Cambridge Five, for example). Nowadays, national and cultural lines are extremely well drawn, so motivations for "traitors" boil down to money and/or blackmail, which are usu…

I think records speak against your IMHO. 1. Ideology has not been the major modus operandi in long time (since 50's). Nowadays idealogical reasons are replaced by cultural and ethnic loyalties. Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operation... 2. Money and personal problems/reasons seems to be major reason for spying against US and f…

your point 1 proves what I was saying: it's technically very easy to defend against Chinese spies -- just enact more stringent ethnic profiling. I'm not saying this is desirable, but even at very high level it clearly restricts attacking surface quite dramatically. The difficulties are political rather than technical in nature.

I partially agree with your point 2, but "according to American counterintelligence" the sky is falling every other day unless the spooks get more money and less supervision. Relying on government sources in a thread about Snowden feels a bit weird.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#56

Post by logfromblammo »

toyg wrote: post #44
nabla9 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA started to move towards "two-man rule" system where system administrators work in pairs when accessing servers with highly classified information only after Snowden leaks. When you know that Russia and China have good track record of long running human intelligence operations in the US, this looks like really gigantic security lapse. They are not stupid and they must have been discussing it. There must have been…

> I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China That's an exaggeration, IMHO. This is not the Cold War, where many actors were moved by ideological considerations that crossed national borders (like the Cambridge Five, for example). Nowadays, national and cultural lines are extremely well drawn, so motivations for "traitors" boil down to money and/or blackmail, which are usu…

The Chinese spies are not in the NSA. They're in the Beltway Bandit and Silicon Valley companies, copying the source code for the drivers used in industrial machinery and weapons systems.

They are smart enough to make spying into a profitable business instead of just a mechanism to move tax dollars to the right people. And with respect to using it as a tool of oppression, we simply don't have anything new to teach them, as they just don't need to know anything about FISA courts or parallel construction.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#57

Post by archagon »

Great article. Snowden's closing thoughts make me excited about the idea of mesh networking with all these mobile devices in our pockets. Hopefully Google or Apple will give it the push it deserves. (Apple is already taking baby steps in this direction with its Multipeer Connectivity API.)

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#58

Post by dan_bk »

toyg wrote: post #39
Rapzid wrote: post #35

Well.. I knew our(US) government downplaying Snowden's credentials was just propaganda(lies)... But wow, were they ever downplaying his credentials. And our media was mostly content to just spread the propaganda with a smile :|

As a European, I've always been somewhat aware of a certain degree of internal propaganda going on in US media (things like different magazine covers for international editions were always quite glaring), but since 2001 the situation worsened so much, I do feel for you guys. Lessons from the '00s were not learnt, US newsrooms are full of sycophantic Judith Millers and people like Greenwald are still ostracized. EDIT:…

> a certain degree of internal propaganda going on in US media

The movie industry is one of the very powerful tools for shaping the public opinion in the US. This obviously includes TV series ("24" is an example for not-so-subtle manipulative material).

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