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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

wired.com

31–40 of 232 posts

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#31

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.

Using page-down instead of scrolling help. Still horriblue UX/design, though.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#32
post #21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Horrible to scroll on mobile as well That's interesting. I came here to say that it looks and works great on mobile, specifically chrome on android. Sounds like it's wildly inconsistent between devices.

I am using a Nexus 7 2012.

Nexus 5 looks great. Tried it on a Nexus 7 and got the Snowden head floating over pages of black.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#33

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.

At least they all had a "skip intro" that would get rid of it all

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#34

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.

Everyone seems to be trying to reinvent the scrolling these days. Meanwhile the craigslist's designers and UX engineers (if there are any) are having hell of a fun.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#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 :|

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#36

I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken…

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 strategic decision where they prioritized the expansion of intelligence collection over internal security (effectively cutting the work that skilled people with security clearances can do to almost half must be real cost and resource bottleneck).

If I had to guess the situation, I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China and they have collected all documents they can. Russians&Chinese spying US spying the world. The cost of setting up good HUMINT must be fraction of the cost of the NSA infrastructure.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#37

I am not sure what part of the story was not already told.

TAO bricking the Syrian main router and MonsterMind implementing a sort of cyber-MAD system, are explicitly called out as exclusive revelations. They are important because:

* Until now, any loss of Internet connectivity in Syria has always been interpreted as "bad dictator censoring people". I'm not saying that's never been the case, but now we know the US can have more control on global internet infrastructure than we knew possible. Next time some "bad" middle-eastern country loses the internet, US propaganda will have a harder time making people believe it's all due to bad actors.

* As Snowden eloquently says, an automated response system has very serious ethical challenges. Automation is not flawless, we've learnt it in the '70s and '80s through a number of very close calls with nuclear missiles; and in such an ethereal world as the internet (where bits can be faked almost at will), aggressive response should probably never be automatic.

The article also fleshes out Snowden's career in a better way than most similar pieces, and heavily suggests that the "second leaker" theory has some legs (at one point, personally I thought the second leaker was actually a USgov operation to distract reporters from the Snowden trove and/or spend some capital to re-establish relationships with them; but if Poitras really lawyered up when asked, chances are that there's something else as well).

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#38

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.

It is articles like this where Instapaper text comes in very handy. Clear out all the flash, and just show the content.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#39
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: not that Europe is much better, eh -- just slightly (or it's just done more subtly over here).
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