There's no bombshell here. The section on "foreign influence" is still heavily redacted -- leaving literally just one and half sentences to read, in a sea of black. And both of the assertions it makes in those 1.5 sentences are quite vague:
"Snowden has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services" (with no specifics). Yes, there are probably plants among the various Russian nationals he deals with. So what? (They make it sound like he's holding regular briefings with these people in a mahogany-paneled room somewhere).
"And in June 2016, [a Russian PM] asserted that 'Snowden did share intelligence' with his government." (That's not what the Russian PM, Frantz Klintsevich said -- and it's dishonest of the IC to assert otherwise). Also, this non-revelation was already made when the initial version of this problematic report was first published over the summer.
The overall weakness of these statements suggest that even now -- 3+ years after being stranded in Moscow, as a more or less direct result of the Obama administration's yanking his passport -- they still don't have anything to nail the guy with.
> they still don't have anything to nail the guy with.
And they have now resorted to an attempt at slander with a familiar story-line. "He was a disgruntled employee... He was a loner who didn't get along with his supervisors..."
Blah, blah, blah. Just go for the hat trick, call him a pedophile, and let's all go home.
> Yes, there are probably plants among the various Russian nationals he deals with.
That's not even claiming that the contact in question was initiated or is sustained by Snowden, rather than being a result of Russian intelligence investigating him.
If there was any reasonable evidence proving the position of the USG it would be front and center in size 50 font, underlined and bolded. This only further proves that Mr. Snowden is truly one of the great selfless heroes of the modern era. Not that they'll be reasonable and let him come home, but at least those who care enough to pay attention and think critically will know a little more of the truth. Snowden links to this well done takedown of some of the many blatant lies in this report: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/house-intelligence-commit...
If America's adversaries benefit from Snowden's leaks that would be unfortunate, but far less of a problem than the existence of the excesses Snowden revealed.
Until the government starts to take seriously the idea that it has seriously broken trust with the American people, it's hard to take seriously any talk of the damage alleged to have happened due to Snowden's leaks.
Until the government starts to take seriously the idea that it has seriously broken trust with the American people, it's hard to take seriously any talk of the damage alleged to have happened due to Snowden's leaks.
Exactly this. Our government has to own up to the wrongs it has committed and take responsibility for fixing the problems that allowed those things to happen, and quit looking to make Snowden a scapegoat. Trying to handwave around the real issue and make this about Snowden is just doubling down on the same mindset that caused this trouble in the first place.
The problem I have with this entire situation rests in the following timeline of events.
June 2012 at NSA Hawaii:
Snowden receives a quick rebuke for roping in a deputy head of NSA's technical services directorate on an email conversation regarding a workplace spat over issues updating a few servers. Snowden does not deny that this incident occurred, and the NSA has quoted directly from the resulting reprimand showing Snowden's apologetic attitude in regard to his actions after the fact.
June or July 2012 (a few weeks later) at NSA Hawaii:
"Snowden began the unauthorized, mass downloading of information from NSA networks."
December 2012 at NSA Hawaii:
"Snowden attempted to contact journalist Glenn Greenwald."
January 2013 at NSA Hawaii:
"[Snowden] contacted filmmaker Laura Poitras."
March 2013, James Clapper's Congressional Testimony:
Snowden deems this his "breaking point" in regard to the question as to "Why he did it?" Although, as the report states, he began his mass download nearly a year prior to this event, as well as contacting both a journalist and filmmaker before even taking another NSA position as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton.
Nowhere has Snowden particularly refuted this timeline. He, and those journalists who support him, have only cherry picked falsehoods from the overall report alluding to the rest as merely fruit of the poisonous tree. Yet, this timeline seem quite factual and troubling.
>It will take a long time to mitigate the damage he caused
I am assuming he means a long time to fix the trust btwn the US govt and people? Because I am not aware of any concrete evidence that shows damages specifically caused by the disclousres.
Pretty sure most terrosits already knew that they had to be careful with their comm. as it was most likley monitored. And the bombings in europe where not coordinated by advanced encryption, but normal social media accounts as i understand.
There's a serious misunderstanding by the American people that the NSA concerns itself with terrorism/counterterrorism. It does not. It's a technical agency who attempts to collect as much information as possible. It provides some information to some other agencies some of the time.
Other agencies are in charge of counter terrorism intelligence such as the FBI, DHS and NCTC.
Disclosures about their global surveillance program had much more to do with human intelligence (mass propaganda), industrial espionage, and diplomatic intelligence than terrorism.
The media seriously misinformed the American people about the duties and prerogatives on the NSA, mostly to link the NSA and its excesses to something equally controversial, however, untrue.
Anyway walking back from that line of reasoning: yes. Insurgencies around the world have had their operational security studied for decades and they are very sanitary wrt carrying around cellphones that have their batteries in, etc.
These claims are extremely weak. Even taking them all at face value you get a straightforward account of a whistleblower. The only statement of harm speculates that documents that were not released got into the hands of Chinese or Russian intelligence.
One of the things I'm seeing there that strikes me is the lack of criticism of using contractors in this kind of work. I'm curious as to how many off the cuff conversations about the programs weren't brought up in hearings because he was a contractor, and thus not afforded as many of the rights under whistleblower statutes that employees are afforded. His chain of command is so meandering and circuitous that it would discourage damn near anyone from reporting if the toilet was backed up, let alone real problems.
Snowden has done important work, but only by making an example of him will the state ensure anyone who entertains similar thoughts knows the cost of exposing wrong doing.
You essentially have to give up your life like Snowden has and for those with kids and family this might be a price too high.
The media, commentators and assorted vested interests are old hands at dismissing concerns that do not fit an agenda as 'conspiracy theories' so the importance and rarity of 'the smoking gun' that Snowden produced cannot be underestimated. And as a side effect he exposed the galling hypocrisy and pretension of Europe as the enlightened refuge for dissentors and the 'orchestration' of the global media with it.
The only way to address the fallout is 'normalization'. And it seems the narrative is the world is such a dangerous place that total surveillance is essential, never mind our security forces and foreign policy is directly involved in propping up terorrist funders and groups.
And this narrative is being expaned daily. We should realise the state is supposed to represent our interests and the only endame for such unaccountable and powerful security services is eventually our supression.
Back in the '90s some government agency released a redacted report where someone had gone in and drawn black boxes in the PDF file, but the full text was of course still in the underlying data and people were able to get at it relatively easily.
EDIT: apparently this has happened repeatedly, according to a quick google search.
No doubt some sort of knee jerk process was put in place to ensure that any digital release of redacted documents must be scans of a physically redacted source.
It's understandable as a reasonable process for redaction. If you flatten it to a pure black and white image you get something you can print (the government loves that), but not something you can easily search (good for whoever's doing the publishing), and the security step is the flattening of the mask over the data with complete overlap and uniformity.
Edit: Of course actually printing it at any point in that process IS insane/beyond paranoid.
Interesting read, and sheds some more light on Snowden's motivations and attitude. I thought it quite ironic that while he complains about supposed privacy violations of Americans, he was doing the exact same thing - on a smaller scale - to his co-workers. Of most concern is the huge excess of documents exfiltrated that had nothing to do with mass surveillance.
Also interesting is how well the accounts of his work behaviour match up with these posts from an HN user earlier this year, who claimed insider knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=buttcoin
His actions were perfectly consistent with his attitude toward global mass surveillance.
In particular since there wasn't an individual document that stated "we are surveilling the American homeland in addition to the remainder of the innocent world", Snowden choose - I think history vindicated him in this regard - to grab many documents and let journalists choose what to publish.
I think the journalists who disclosed the documents did a wonderful job selecting what to publish directly, what to report on, and what to black hole. They chose to report on what was in the public interest.
The public interest included revelations about mass surveillance of allied nations, espionage to help American business prospects, memoranda for allies to spy on one another's citizens, backdooring and infiltrating American products and standards so that they could be military weapons overseas and a great many other things.
Another wonderful outcome of Snowden having provided a large collection of documents to journalists is that in reading them as a wholistic collection gave journalists the context to understand the motivations and methods of mass global surveillance - indeed it allowed journalists to effectively question American official denials about its behavior. America had been guessing what was taken and so it wasn't sure about what it could get away with lying about. Journalists were able to publish documents that contradicted the official narrative coming out of the White House when it tried to downplay the massive illegal and unethical apparatus.
In any case, it's wrong to abuse Snowden in this case. Journalists made the decision about what to publish. I don't remember anyone's privacy inside the agency getting ruined, but if that did happen the blame rests with the media.
The tone and ambiguous thought process of the press release is alarming. He was justified and has allowed for us to have a clearer conversation in regards to security. The consequence is sifting though the noise for credentials and concreteness. Glad to see that many, but not the majority, have the ability to look at all of this critically and logically.
I can't help but stand this next to the Challenger Space Shuttle O-ring thread, without feeling a profound sense of resonance between these 2 scenarios.
(U) Third, two weeks before Snowden began mass
downloads of classified documents, he was
reprimanded after engaging in a workplace
spat with NSA managers. Snowden was repeatedly
counseled by his managers regarding his behavior
at work. For example, in June 2012, Snowden became
involved in a fiery email argument with a
supervisor about how computer updates should be
managed. Snowden added an NSA senior executive
several levels above the supervisor to the email
thread, an action that earned him a swift
reprimand from his contracting officer for failing
to follow the proper protocol for raising
grievances through the chain of command. Two weeks
later, Snowden began his mass downloads of
classified information from NSA networks.
Compare to:
2) The engineers actually knew the risk (~1% chance
of loss per launch, not specific to the o-rings,
compared with two actual losses of the shuttle
over ~130 missions). Management used entirely
invented numbers for the risk which were not
justified.
It's like, hey, Snowden tried to tell them to apply their updates. He tried to tell them the o-rings might blow. He warned them that there was a one-in-one-hundred probability of failure.
If he didn't blow the gasket on the launchpad himself, before launch, how disasterously awful might this have really been, if he had behaved like a good little cubicle drone, followed protocol, drank the Kool-Ade, and permitted this so-called "counseling" to brainwash him?
I really don't see the resonance between these events.
The damage to signals intelligence capabilities, through the leaking of classified documents, was deliberately and maliciously done through the actions of Snowden himself, most likely in response to a bruised ego.
In contrast, the engineers involved in the Challenger shuttle did their very best to try to avert disaster - albeit to no avail - through their selfless adherence to professional ethics and engineering safety concerns.
The two scenarios couldn't be more different really.
Except he didn't blow the gasket on the launchpad. He just dumped fuel everywhere and threw a match as maintenance crews and innocent civilians were standing around.
He didn't have to release all the documents in the manner he did. He could have leaked them to Krebs on Security or something else. Krebs is very trustworthy at protecting sources and data itself. Instead he just dumped it all to the world with disregard for the damage it would cause and the innocent lives it would impact.
There's a difference between drinking coolaid and realizing there's drugs in the coolaid so you blow up the entire party coolaid is served at damn the consequences to the innocent waiters and waitresses tending the party.
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
"Snowden has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services" (with no specifics). Yes, there are probably plants among the various Russian nationals he deals with. So what? (They make it sound like he's holding regular briefings with these people in a mahogany-paneled room somewhere).
"And in June 2016, [a Russian PM] asserted that 'Snowden did share intelligence' with his government." (That's not what the Russian PM, Frantz Klintsevich said -- and it's dishonest of the IC to assert otherwise). Also, this non-revelation was already made when the initial version of this problematic report was first published over the summer.
The overall weakness of these statements suggest that even now -- 3+ years after being stranded in Moscow, as a more or less direct result of the Obama administration's yanking his passport -- they still don't have anything to nail the guy with.
[+] [-] wheelerwj|9 years ago|reply
And they have now resorted to an attempt at slander with a familiar story-line. "He was a disgruntled employee... He was a loner who didn't get along with his supervisors..."
Blah, blah, blah. Just go for the hat trick, call him a pedophile, and let's all go home.
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|9 years ago|reply
That's not even claiming that the contact in question was initiated or is sustained by Snowden, rather than being a result of Russian intelligence investigating him.
[+] [-] pulse7|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|9 years ago|reply
If and what information was handed over to them is another thing.
Likely that they got the same package that the reporters got plus maybe some documents related specifically to Russia that weren't released.
[+] [-] givinguflac|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|9 years ago|reply
Until the government starts to take seriously the idea that it has seriously broken trust with the American people, it's hard to take seriously any talk of the damage alleged to have happened due to Snowden's leaks.
[+] [-] mindcrime|9 years ago|reply
Exactly this. Our government has to own up to the wrongs it has committed and take responsibility for fixing the problems that allowed those things to happen, and quit looking to make Snowden a scapegoat. Trying to handwave around the real issue and make this about Snowden is just doubling down on the same mindset that caused this trouble in the first place.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tupshin|9 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/i/moments/812014048866877440
[+] [-] pstuart|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmoy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlorianRappl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msimpson|9 years ago|reply
June 2012 at NSA Hawaii: Snowden receives a quick rebuke for roping in a deputy head of NSA's technical services directorate on an email conversation regarding a workplace spat over issues updating a few servers. Snowden does not deny that this incident occurred, and the NSA has quoted directly from the resulting reprimand showing Snowden's apologetic attitude in regard to his actions after the fact.
June or July 2012 (a few weeks later) at NSA Hawaii: "Snowden began the unauthorized, mass downloading of information from NSA networks."
December 2012 at NSA Hawaii: "Snowden attempted to contact journalist Glenn Greenwald."
January 2013 at NSA Hawaii: "[Snowden] contacted filmmaker Laura Poitras."
March 2013, James Clapper's Congressional Testimony: Snowden deems this his "breaking point" in regard to the question as to "Why he did it?" Although, as the report states, he began his mass download nearly a year prior to this event, as well as contacting both a journalist and filmmaker before even taking another NSA position as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton.
Nowhere has Snowden particularly refuted this timeline. He, and those journalists who support him, have only cherry picked falsehoods from the overall report alluding to the rest as merely fruit of the poisonous tree. Yet, this timeline seem quite factual and troubling.
[+] [-] _audakel|9 years ago|reply
I am assuming he means a long time to fix the trust btwn the US govt and people? Because I am not aware of any concrete evidence that shows damages specifically caused by the disclousres.
Pretty sure most terrosits already knew that they had to be careful with their comm. as it was most likley monitored. And the bombings in europe where not coordinated by advanced encryption, but normal social media accounts as i understand.
[+] [-] jwtadvice|9 years ago|reply
Other agencies are in charge of counter terrorism intelligence such as the FBI, DHS and NCTC.
Disclosures about their global surveillance program had much more to do with human intelligence (mass propaganda), industrial espionage, and diplomatic intelligence than terrorism.
The media seriously misinformed the American people about the duties and prerogatives on the NSA, mostly to link the NSA and its excesses to something equally controversial, however, untrue.
Anyway walking back from that line of reasoning: yes. Insurgencies around the world have had their operational security studied for decades and they are very sanitary wrt carrying around cellphones that have their batteries in, etc.
[+] [-] BoringCode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wdr1|9 years ago|reply
Wait... the NSA is complaining their privacy was infringed upon because documents were searched without proper approval?
Wat?
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sanddancer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dom0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
You essentially have to give up your life like Snowden has and for those with kids and family this might be a price too high.
The media, commentators and assorted vested interests are old hands at dismissing concerns that do not fit an agenda as 'conspiracy theories' so the importance and rarity of 'the smoking gun' that Snowden produced cannot be underestimated. And as a side effect he exposed the galling hypocrisy and pretension of Europe as the enlightened refuge for dissentors and the 'orchestration' of the global media with it.
The only way to address the fallout is 'normalization'. And it seems the narrative is the world is such a dangerous place that total surveillance is essential, never mind our security forces and foreign policy is directly involved in propping up terorrist funders and groups.
And this narrative is being expaned daily. We should realise the state is supposed to represent our interests and the only endame for such unaccountable and powerful security services is eventually our supression.
[+] [-] oneplane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinofcain|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: apparently this has happened repeatedly, according to a quick google search.
No doubt some sort of knee jerk process was put in place to ensure that any digital release of redacted documents must be scans of a physically redacted source.
Sort of like an analog memory hole.
[+] [-] mjevans|9 years ago|reply
Edit: Of course actually printing it at any point in that process IS insane/beyond paranoid.
[+] [-] dragonbonheur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] besselheim|9 years ago|reply
Also interesting is how well the accounts of his work behaviour match up with these posts from an HN user earlier this year, who claimed insider knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=buttcoin
[+] [-] jwtadvice|9 years ago|reply
In particular since there wasn't an individual document that stated "we are surveilling the American homeland in addition to the remainder of the innocent world", Snowden choose - I think history vindicated him in this regard - to grab many documents and let journalists choose what to publish.
I think the journalists who disclosed the documents did a wonderful job selecting what to publish directly, what to report on, and what to black hole. They chose to report on what was in the public interest.
The public interest included revelations about mass surveillance of allied nations, espionage to help American business prospects, memoranda for allies to spy on one another's citizens, backdooring and infiltrating American products and standards so that they could be military weapons overseas and a great many other things.
Another wonderful outcome of Snowden having provided a large collection of documents to journalists is that in reading them as a wholistic collection gave journalists the context to understand the motivations and methods of mass global surveillance - indeed it allowed journalists to effectively question American official denials about its behavior. America had been guessing what was taken and so it wasn't sure about what it could get away with lying about. Journalists were able to publish documents that contradicted the official narrative coming out of the White House when it tried to downplay the massive illegal and unethical apparatus.
In any case, it's wrong to abuse Snowden in this case. Journalists made the decision about what to publish. I don't remember anyone's privacy inside the agency getting ruined, but if that did happen the blame rests with the media.
[+] [-] michaelmrose|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] immortalmathgod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gurneyHaleck|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13238346
Compare this passage:
Compare to: It's like, hey, Snowden tried to tell them to apply their updates. He tried to tell them the o-rings might blow. He warned them that there was a one-in-one-hundred probability of failure.If he didn't blow the gasket on the launchpad himself, before launch, how disasterously awful might this have really been, if he had behaved like a good little cubicle drone, followed protocol, drank the Kool-Ade, and permitted this so-called "counseling" to brainwash him?
[+] [-] besselheim|9 years ago|reply
The damage to signals intelligence capabilities, through the leaking of classified documents, was deliberately and maliciously done through the actions of Snowden himself, most likely in response to a bruised ego.
In contrast, the engineers involved in the Challenger shuttle did their very best to try to avert disaster - albeit to no avail - through their selfless adherence to professional ethics and engineering safety concerns.
The two scenarios couldn't be more different really.
[+] [-] 234dd57d2c8db|9 years ago|reply
He didn't have to release all the documents in the manner he did. He could have leaked them to Krebs on Security or something else. Krebs is very trustworthy at protecting sources and data itself. Instead he just dumped it all to the world with disregard for the damage it would cause and the innocent lives it would impact.
There's a difference between drinking coolaid and realizing there's drugs in the coolaid so you blow up the entire party coolaid is served at damn the consequences to the innocent waiters and waitresses tending the party.
[+] [-] ihaveahadron|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]