Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 232 posts

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#121

Post by toyg »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #98
jobu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

When the article chose to put quotes around "touched", my thought was that Snowden was being clever and running a script that ran 'touch $file' for everything he had stolen. That's what I'm going to choose to believe, anyways. :)

Almost -- I think he used "touch" to show all the documents he could take, but did something else to the ones he actually did take (maybe flipping a permission bit, granting full access to a "leakyleaky" group or something like that). Hence, authorities reporting only "the total number of documents he touched" is a failure from Snowden's point of view, because they didn't see the whole scheme.

In that sense, I think he's being slightly naive there -- it's clear that, once the story got huge, Clapper and Alexander had an interest in exaggerating the number as much as possible; so for all we know, they might have actually understood Snowden's scheme but willfully chosen to ignore it.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#122

Post by foxhedgehog »

slg wrote: post #79
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…

It is in revealing things like this that make me question Snowden. While both points are interesting and maybe a little troubling, they are certainly not whistleblowing in the name of protecting the rights of American citizens. He has moved from simply exposing the breadth of the domestic spying apparatus to exposing the tactics the United States uses in legitimate espionage operations. Isn't trying to compromise the…

The vast majority of the documents that Snowden took are related not to NSA snooping, but to military order of battle (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/dia-di...). The only entities that would have an interest in that kind of information would be foreign governments. I'm not sure what positive value would result from that kind of leak.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#123

Post by toyg »

jmscharff2 wrote: post #89

I can buy that he saw a lot of things that made him mistrust the government. What I have a problem with is that it seems as though he took jobs and looked for positions that would give him access to even more data. If he was really just working and saw this stuff that is one thing to go in and try and steal it is another, whether or not he did the right thing is up for debate. Selling USA secrets to other governments…

He didn't sell anything to any government. If you can prove otherwise, please do; but I note that not even the almighty US intelligence apparatus going into overdrive like a wounded animal could point to anything indicating any of Snowden's statements were false at any point in time. If you have better sources at your disposal than the US President, by all means feel free to share them with us.

He's stuck in Russia because no other government wants to compromise their relationship with the US, to our eternal shame (as in "us citizens of non-US countries"); and because if he had remained in the US, he would have been renditioned in Guantanamo on day 1.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#124

Post by normloman »

waylandsmithers wrote: post #109
normloman wrote: post #16

What the hell. I start scrolling with my mouse wheel, but nothing moves. I'm thinking my mouse must be broken, until 30 seconds later, I notice the "cover image" fade in and out. I swear, crappy flash intros are alive and well. They just don't use flash anymore.

I think they might have been attempting to simulate a magazine-like experience, where the pictures that required more scrolling than normal were supposed to be like turning the page to a full page image. I feel like I've seen this attempted before but with flashing down arrows to tell you that you need to keep scrolling. Based on the reactions here, I don't think it was successful, but I do appreciate efforts to enha…

Magazine experience sounds right. You know, the flat design people who railed against skeuomorphism missed the point. Sure, faux-wood textures on your website are a waste of time. But forcing a digital medium to behave like a piece of paper is as skeuomorphic as you can get.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#126

Post by darksim905 »

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…

>There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.

I have peers who have known about that for a solid 6 months who talk about it. It's nothing new. The Gov't has been working on stuff like that, with stuff like that & have those ideas at the core of everything they do for years.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#127

Post by yardie »

cyorir wrote: post #92
yardie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of setting up good HUMINT must be fraction of the cost of the NSA infrastructure. Considering the fact that the US was completely caught off guard by the scope and effectiveness of ISIS I have to question the effectiveness of SIGINT programs like the NSA. I have to assume honestly that these programs outlandish budgets are not for tracking terrorists but to control the domestic populace.

>Considering the fact that the US was completely caught off guard by the scope and effectiveness of ISIS I have to question the effectiveness of SIGINT programs like the NSA. I have to assume honestly that these programs outlandish budgets are not for tracking terrorists but to control the domestic populace. I must disagree with this interpretation. I think that only the American public and (some) American media were…

A terrorist organisation has established a caliphate state in a country the US formerly occupied and control. If they are being coy about it they must love taking pie in the face. It doesn't look like it, that is a fact. The US doesn't have an answer to these guys. There is no upside to us losing influence in a region to a terrorist organisation and then letting them embed themselves as a valid government. How did that play out for us last time?

Also, you have it backwards, ISIS started in Iraq, (the second I) and spread to Syria (second S). They started with the instability in Iraq, saw the instability in Syria, and went for it.

1) support at home has never stopped the US military from engaging before. 2) We didn't have much before, we have way less now. 3) you find new friends when your old friends stop taking your phone call.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#128

Post by yardie »

marktangotango wrote: post #104
cyorir wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Considering the fact that the US was completely caught off guard by the scope and effectiveness of ISIS I have to question the effectiveness of SIGINT programs like the NSA. I have to assume honestly that these programs outlandish budgets are not for tracking terrorists but to control the domestic populace. I must disagree with this interpretation. I think that only the American public and (some) American media were…

I'm sure they love the perception they were caught off guard. A critical piece of espionage is to keep the capabilities you do have secret. At the risk of sound conspiracy/fanatical, all this sigint stuff is a red herring, they're just glad the REAL capabilities haven't been revealed.

Oh yes the old, "they know that you don't know that they don't know that you don't know" defense.

This worked brilliantly when the USSR collapsed and we didn't send a crackshot team of experts to secure their nuclear arsenal because we didn't want them to know that we knew they were going to collapse. It was much better to scramble around for the following few years trying to track down all that dangerous inventory.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#129

Post by nostrademons »

logfromblammo wrote: post #56
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…

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 th…

The Chinese spies are in China. They install malware onto the computers of American engineers in Silicon Valley, which then takes on the task of copying the source code needed for critical software systems.

This is the 21st century. There's no need to put yourself in physical danger by entering the country you wish to spy upon. Everything is done electronically.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#130

Post by tatterdemalion »

XorNot wrote: post #3

So there's a bigger story here: good lord is the web-design here irritating. They've overridden scroll events so they at best don't work properly. Scrolling on a laptop gives you a weird non-mapping slide animation. This is seriously one of the most unreadable articles, from a design sense, that I've ever seen.

My experience is that the scroll effects do not negatively impact readability and are mostly nice. I like the magazine effect. The intro effect w/ the fade in I don't like so much because it creates a sense that your scroll isn't working. But I like the scrolling effect of section headers a lot.

I am using Firefox & Ubuntu on an HP laptop.

Post reply on HN