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Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

theatlantic.com

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Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#51

Post by Spooky23 »

mpyne wrote: post #44
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest phrase that I see missing from the private vs government discussion is "monopoly on force". The Federal government has the authority to create regulations, create laws, collect taxes, send people to your house to enforce those laws, remove/restrict your rights, sentence you to a prison term, send in armed officers to take down civilians groups viewed as dangerous, etc etc all the way to declaring full sca…

I wouldn't be so sure about Google vs. Facebook. All they need to do is hire away the right person (or simply conduct corporate espionage themselves). But as you mention, that monopoly on force is tied to the will of the people. If the government were to use force in a way other than approved by the laws setup by the peoples' representatives then you're already talking about something much worse on the totalitarian c…

I disagree. The impact of Facebook being discovered stealing data from Google systems is complete and utter destruction of the company, Enron-style.

The real danger of programs like PRISM, outside of abuse of power by the executive branch, is access to the data leaking from the national security realm to the normal law enforcement channels. The data collected by commercial entities is dangerous because unlike NSA stuff, its just a subpoena away from any police department.

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#52

Post by Spooky23 »

asperous wrote: post #24
jenandre wrote: post #21

I would find it really interesting if some employees at companies like Google, Microsoft, etc would come forward and corroborate Snowden's claims as well. At some point, SOME engineering work was involved on their side to make it happen, and there is likely documentation. I would love to see design documentation on how the collection systems work so we can confirm exactly the government has automated access to.

In another thread some Google employees were saying that it's unlikely that Google has a secret backdoor system, since keeping products of any size online requires a lot of collaboration amongst the different teams, and the infrastructure changes so often anything that was at one point installed would be broken by now. But that's just hear-say.

I've deployed a large Office 365 system. It has the capability built in to do ediscovery searches across any item in the system, and can do so without the knowledge of the end user. The organization I'm familiar with audits employee emails that meet certain criteria. Google has e same capability.

Providing a "back door" to those systems is a simple as defining a user role.

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#53

Post by rdl »

gruseom wrote: post #2

The interview he's talking about [1] was posted here [2] and it really is extraordinary. I highly recommend watching all the videos—unfortunately, they carved it into pieces and you have to scroll down the page to get at them. But it's worth it. The transcript doesn't convey how dramatic the discussion was, or capture William Binney's muttered asides ("including content! including content!") or show the meaningful ex…

IMO Binney (and possibly all 3) deserve the next Nobel Peace Prize.

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#54

Post by logn »

Natsu wrote: post #48
logn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to predict elections. I'd recommend anyone running an election against a sitting president to encrypt all their email, probably with an encryption scheme not endorsed by NIST/NSA... or at a sufficiently high encryption level. Imagine preparing for a televised debate when you can access the competition's correspondence?

That's what makes me surprised that both political parties are on board with this. It has the potential to make the Watergate burglaries look positively small time. What, exactly, stops one political party from using this system against the other one? They're all up in arms about the IRS thing, but either party could very easily adapt a system like this into the most powerful opposition research tool ever known. Even…

"So every other country with half-decent spies can just tap the whole country's communications and blackmail any and everyone in power with whatever they find using the systems we set up on our own."

I'd imagine the spy world has already realized this, and we're already at a level of mutually assured blackmail. :)

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#55

Post by samstave »

rdl wrote: post #53
gruseom wrote: post #2

The interview he's talking about [1] was posted here [2] and it really is extraordinary. I highly recommend watching all the videos—unfortunately, they carved it into pieces and you have to scroll down the page to get at them. But it's worth it. The transcript doesn't convey how dramatic the discussion was, or capture William Binney's muttered asides ("including content! including content!") or show the meaningful ex…

IMO Binney (and possibly all 3) deserve the next Nobel Peace Prize.

Give them Obama's

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#56

Post by jpatokal »

Spooky23 wrote: post #52
asperous wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another thread some Google employees were saying that it's unlikely that Google has a secret backdoor system, since keeping products of any size online requires a lot of collaboration amongst the different teams, and the infrastructure changes so often anything that was at one point installed would be broken by now. But that's just hear-say.

I've deployed a large Office 365 system. It has the capability built in to do ediscovery searches across any item in the system, and can do so without the knowledge of the end user. The organization I'm familiar with audits employee emails that meet certain criteria. Google has e same capability. Providing a "back door" to those systems is a simple as defining a user role.

I'm not sure how large your "large" Office 365 system is, but I'd hazard a guess it's half a dozen orders of magnitude smaller in size and complexity than Google's systems.

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#57

Post by dfc »

rdl wrote: post #53
gruseom wrote: post #2

The interview he's talking about [1] was posted here [2] and it really is extraordinary. I highly recommend watching all the videos—unfortunately, they carved it into pieces and you have to scroll down the page to get at them. But it's worth it. The transcript doesn't convey how dramatic the discussion was, or capture William Binney's muttered asides ("including content! including content!") or show the meaningful ex…

IMO Binney (and possibly all 3) deserve the next Nobel Peace Prize.

You have to figure they are shoe-ins for EFF Pioneer awards.

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#58

Post by smky80 »

crucifiction wrote: post #49
grecy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better: Use the data to figure out when and where the citizens are going to organize a protest against the current government....

What would it matter? Does the extra lead time make it somehow easier to crush a protest (since we are assuming a tyrannical government). I am pretty sure you could get drones airborne and shooting missiles at protesters pretty quickly with or without NSA wiretapping.

No that's not what you do. If you have enough time, first you insert some fool like Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich into the movement, and slowly dismantle it from the inside (the Tea Party). If you need something quick, you insert a provocateur into the group that instigates some kind of violence that makes the whole group look stupid.

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#59

Post by logn »

scott_karana wrote: post #40
logn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to predict elections. I'd recommend anyone running an election against a sitting president to encrypt all their email, probably with an encryption scheme not endorsed by NIST/NSA... or at a sufficiently high encryption level. Imagine preparing for a televised debate when you can access the competition's correspondence?

Why does NSA endorsement of an encryption scheme mean anything, after hundreds of thousands of man-hours have been spent auditing and attempting to break those systems? Auditing is more important than origins. See also, Tor. The days of DES S-boxes are behind us, and in fact, the NSA's meddling helped the security of that scheme, though that fact wasn't known until decades later.

I'm not an encryption expert. I didn't mean to start that argument, sorry. But personally, I would rather use encryption now that didn't originate in an NSA lab than one that did. But I believe Snowden that the NSA probably doesn't try to crack much good encryption, and they have a good time finding easier vectors to read encrypted data.

Anyhow, my main reason for making my comment above was just that if politicians really stopped to think how the surveillance can hurt them personally, instead of scoffing at us commoners who are under surveillance, they might start to change their tune. My first thought when hearing all this news was just a thought of Bush/Obama reading politicians' emails about senate/house bills before going around bargaining with them (or more realistically, some mid-level staffer getting at that info and then summarizing it so the top-level politicians' hands never get dirty).

Re: Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

#60

Post by trendoid »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #3

Odd they referred to these other whistleblowers as "Former NSA Employees" in the headline. It seems disingenuous to leave that out of the headline, but then I suppose "Fellow NSA Whistleblowers Praise Newest Whistleblower..." probably doesn't sound as interesting.

It actually makes more sense to mention just "Former NSA Employees" as they were not whistleblowers per se. They went by the book and never went public the way Snowden did.
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