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Snowden took literally everything when he left. Shit is getting real.
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Davis_McGee
Member
The wonderful thing about encryption is that this is impossible to verify.
The competition would have all of NSA's knowledge while the NSA was being shutdown in foreign countries. So the NSA would not have easy access as before.
Buddha Beam
Banned
Nah, they're not aliens - they're a breakaway civilization going back to the late 1800's. The government has known about them for decades and their technology is what we commonly believe to be alien UFOs. That's why UFO descriptions are always about 40 years or so ahead of our technology.
The NSA knows this and have been spying on them. I imagine if the breakaways were to ever find out the NSA was spying on them we'd be fucked since they've been sharing their technology exclusively with the USA all these years. To them, there's no way the NSA should have the capability to spy on them like that.
They'd be 20 years behind in terms of access to OTHER countries' information that they'd been targeting, at least that's how I read it.
For all of you that actually want to out U.S personnel in dangerous regions. This is what happens to those folks when their cover is compromised.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/07/11/engaging-hezbollah-or-hezbollah-controlled-lebanon/
"Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking. ... The CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin."
This stopped being about the scary old NSA reading your emails when Snowden gave the list of agents under Non-Official Cover out.
EDIT: Source document is much must illustrative.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/07/11/engaging-hezbollah-or-hezbollah-controlled-lebanon/
"Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking. ... The CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin."
This stopped being about the scary old NSA reading your emails when Snowden gave the list of agents under Non-Official Cover out.
EDIT: Source document is much must illustrative.
That's the NSA's job. I'd think they would just like to commend him for a job well done.
Davis_McGee
Member
You may wish to realign your argument to take account of the fact your example was someone who did indeed operate under an official cover.
It'll still be a genuinely terrible argument, but honestly, you could at least put some effort into propping up such paper-thin hypernationalist bullshit.
Uh....
1. Have you been reading my still in progress novel?? If so, shame on you.
2. Stop it!
Didn't hear about this. I thought that I was just thought that he had lists of the names and whatnot, not that he'd actually leaked them already. Any links with this info?
What's impossible to verify?
Thomas_Daly
Banned
so he has all the secrets
why did he do it ? in the first place
remind me gaf ?
why did he do it ? in the first place
remind me gaf ?
He hasn't done that though?
who would have thunk the NOC list was real, and a lot easier to steal.
It is an example of what is done to U.S personnel captured by adversarial forces who have knowledge of their location and identity. Specifically those held by state sponsored groups. It is an argument that safe guarding the identity of exposed personnel is of paramount importance. If you cannot fathom how it applies to personnel who operate without the assistance of embassy protection, then the imperfection is yours.
"Disclosure of the material could put the lives of British intelligence agents or their families at risk, the court heard, and the general public could also be endangered if details about intelligence operations or methods fell into the wrong hands. "
In short, op plans and reports which make NOCs and penetrations trivial to detect.
Davis_McGee
Member
If the information exists, where the information exists, who has access to that information, whether it has been modified, whether it has been distributed.
Given simple sneakernet distribution under AES-256 on portable hard drives and laptops, which is how this has been handled, the only person who has any of the above information is the person in posession of their copy of the information and their version of the key, and their information is limited in scope to just their copy. Copying an encrypted file without any other systems in place actually precludes one from attaining the full CIA required for an information assurance system.
It's out there and no one knows who has a copy unless they have a copy and all they can tell you is that they have a copy.
Davis_McGee
Member
I wouldn't get too attached to a "NOC list" (which, let's face it, is a concept popularised entirely by mission impossible). Particularly in this day and age when we are talking about "adversarial forces" (what an absurd term) that are almost entirely non-state actors, whether or not someone has an official cover is pretty much irrelevant.
For those working officially, you would be astonished how widely available such material actually is. Have you ever thought about how government agents pay their taxes? Or get a mortgage? Or, hell, join a union?
It's all on the NSA. If that info becomes public, it's because of the agency's own incompetence. Why aren't you calling for heads to roll in the agency? The people in charge of state secrets couldn't manage to properly investigate someone before giving him the keys to everything.
Aside from the privacy issue, I don't have a whole lot of faith that this agency knows what it's doing.
Davis_McGee
Member
Except your example was working with embassy protection. He was working as a Political Officer at the US Embassy in Beirut. As I said, by all means, realign your argument so that it covers the protection of all at-risk personel (which as I posted above, is far more rational in this day and age), but you'll quickly find it's just as poor an argument when you strip away the emotive nonsense with no relevance to this case.
I'm still not seeing anything saying he actually released that information so far though. Your post that I quoted earlier made it sound like it was already out in the public.
TheContact
Member
I imagine his last day went something like this:
So as long as we're the dominant side of these monstrosities it's alright. Okie dokie.
That story was also sourced to, you guessed it, anonymous government officials.
They might also be bullshitting.
The argument I made was that there is a human cost when agents are exposed and captured, especially those that operate without official support. An example is John Kerry. The public disclosure of these agent's locations and activities would create dozens of Buckleys and Kerrys as non-state actors snapped them up. State agencies are less likely to act in this manner as they would rather play the game as it has always been played, playbacks and surveillance.
It was hand carried in a encrypted drive, by someone dumb enough to write the password down and carry both on his person. It's in the wind.
Citation and date of information? Also, dial back the vitriol you seem tense.
Davis_McGee
Member
You may wish to consider the full British perspective of this.
The government's official position that British operations and lives have been placed at risk, or could be placed at risk, has been widely rejected. Multiple former service heads have said as much, the current service heads were unable to produce any evidence proving their absurd assertions to the Home Affairs Select Committee (to the point where the executive vetoed a second appearance by the head of MI5), and the Home Secretary was similarly unable to provide any evidence of compromise, in either this case or the Manning case.
Davis_McGee
Member
It'd be extrajudicial murder, and he's still a US citizen. More pragmatically, there's no point. The information's out. You'd just create a Streisand effect of unprecedented proportions. Just look how much airtime that blowhard Assange still gets, and he probably wasn't even targeted by the US.
I don't doubt that. I'm asking you to explain how it's relevant to this case. Are you suggesting Snowden has put lives at risk? Can you prove that? Did Manning? Did Ellsberg? The same arguments of risk to life and limb and sovereignty have been trotted out in every case of postwar whistleblowing, and never has it actually occurred. Does operational risk completely preclude the act of whistleblowing? Is there a point, a red line, where it becomes unacceptable?
The Iron Yuppie
Member
The. Entire. Internet.
To be a whistleblower he would have had to try to end the programs via official channels. Failed, then appealed to the public. He copied everything he could, dumped scads of data in greenwald's lap and defected to Russia. With the ruling that the NSA surveillance activities were illegal, had Snowden remained in the country and leaked ONLY data that pertained the NSA's runaway surveillance program he would be eligible for protection under the U.S's whistleblower protection laws as his superiors were actually committing illegal acts. There is no justifiable reason for him to have dipped his toes into HUMINT activities whatsoever.
Holy shit, I just realized I copied the ExFBI guys name wrong earlier. His name is Robert Levinson, obviously not John Kerry. My bad.
See You Next Wednesday
Banned
He even took the shoes off their feet.
Davis_McGee
Member
He's a whistleblower. Argue flawed semantics all you wish; the united states' laughable whisteblower protection framework and lack of public-interest defences are not the barometer by which I asked you to assess your argument. It's a pretty simple question. Has Snowden placed american lives or intelligence operations at risk? Did Manning? Did Ellsberg? You're happy to attack the straw man - that he has - by bringing up emotive cases of inhuman abuse, torture and murder, but you've yet to establish that the risk or damage are substantive. Likewise you're quite happy to attack his actions with technically-laden language, but there are two simple facts - if you were working in the industry you wouldn't be posting, and the information isn't publicly available - one therefore has to assume you're arguing again from your own mental construction rather than evidence.
Like I said, your arguments are poor. Please refine them.
Can't blame you. When he told us what the goverment was doing to its own citizens, he was a hero/whistleblower. When he told other countries what our government was doing to them, he became a traitor (albeit the global community appreciated that).
He's kinda working for some of our interests while working against other interests.
First of all, whistleblowing is by definition not going through official channels, and sheeeeit, what does official channels even mean in this case?
Go to his boss?
You don't think the NSA knew about what the NSA is doing?
And given the Obama's administration record on whistleblowers, there is really no reason to believe he wouldn't been prosecuted under the espionage act.
p.s.
There is no evidence he risked the lives of any agent and the only reason he's in Russia is because that's the only place he could think of where he wouldn't be extradited to the US.
lol
My point exactly, and it was a ref to MI btw
People want to pretend that snowden handed over THE noc list, and that is why hes a traitor, because of the innocent agents getting killed because of it. It popped up in this thread, but its the standard uncle sam narrative we are all supposed to follow. The information is embarrassing to the government, and the NSA. HardlyI can, and did, prove that he placed data that can be used to trace U.S and UK intelligence personnel into the hands of unapproved persons who are incapable of safeguarding that information. By falling to safeguard HUMINT related information you by definition place those assets and handlers at risk. Further more, when he was in the foreplay stage of his defection he outed a source in Sweden and used personal identifying information to back it up. This was his way of proving what he had to prospective host nations. He lacks only the fourth condition if you want to call it treason.
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!
Member
that would literally be a huge security hole if they literally gave access of literally all their secrets to literally one person
Davis_McGee
Member
You should do some reading on this. The processes for american whistleblowers are insane and the options to do anything are thin on the ground. There's an independent agency (Office of Special Counsel) that one can submit concerns and evidence to, but the maximum extent of their powers is to require the responsible agency's executive to initiate an investigation. When you're dealing with classified operations authorised by secret courts authorised by both the executive and legislature (possibly in secret), that recourse is obviously not of any use or protection. It's a system designed for exposing corruption of individuals, not of systems. The best option in those cases has always been and probably always will be the press. Unfortunately while prosecuting the press is political suicide, prosecuting their source is considered practically essential.
It's been reported that while at the NSA he asked other people for their passwords so he could do his job as the computer systems admin, and they gave them to him. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/net-us-usa-security-snowden-idUSBRE9A703020131108
It's amazing how this thing makes the NSA look incredibly incompetent and incredibly scary at the same time.
Davis_McGee
Member
No, you didn't. You quoted one bit of text out of the context of the wider debate. It is generally accepted in the UK that no additional risk to operations, and certainly no actual damage has been brought as a result of these leaks. I'd make the same assertion of the US but I simply don't follow your news closely enough to be sure.
You particularly didn't prove that the individuals and organisations in question have no way of safeguarding the information. You have no knowledge of how they operate - you simply cannot prove that.
And getting off track, you seem to be implying that the TLAs from which this information originated are capable of safeguarding this information. The very fact we're having this discussion proves that is obviously not the case. Therefore the "risk" that you are implying to exist already exists, making the impact of Snowden's allegations precisely zero.
You should be discussing the real impact of the releases, not hypothetical risks - you've clearly never done an Impact Assessment or Risk Assessment.
Risk is inherent. I direct you back to my earlier posts. At what point does the risk become unacceptable?
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