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 many important stories about NSA in previous years. The writing is worth reading and discussing here, and it's too bad Wired's editors mucked up the reader experience so much with the strange user interface and formatting.
"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries."
As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.
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.
> As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.
There is a troubling problem with any increase in government firepower: be it heavy weaponry in our police stations, advanced monitoring capabilities that can be used on the entire populace at once, or drones that can hit targets on the other side of the planet.
What happens when these weapons are used against us?
Let's just assume for a minute that our government has our best interests in mind and is basically benevolent. With a database of potential intelligence against every person in the US, you create a dangerous situation: what happens if the Chinese or Russian government has covert access to this system and strategically leaks information with the purpose of influencing US elections? This feels completely plausible in my mind: there are real risks to having so much information available in one place. The fact that the controls were so weak to begin with makes me almost certain that foreign intelligence has continued access to these databases.
Every weapon we develop can potentially be used against us. In the case of cyberwarfare, those weapons can be used against us without our knowledge. The scariest part of Snowden's leaks is how awful the government is at technology: most people on the Internet were pretty sure the government was spying on everyone anyway. Geopolitics gets messy, so that stuff is forgivable. But when a single government contractor is able to walk away with so much information and they don't even know what he has?
It's worth noting that in addition to being the author of the Wired story that originally leaked news about the Bluffdale, Utah facility, James Bamford also wrote the Puzzle Palace, which IIRC is the first book ever published about the NSA.
Regarding, the formatting, editing the style of `p` elements with the dev tools makes it much more readable.
16/24 or 14/21 combos for the font-size and line height work well for me, depending on widow width.
Right click a paragraph other than the intro -> "inspect element". In the right column, you can untick the "font-size: 21px;" and "line-height: 37px;" rules, to get 16/24 or set them to whatever you like.
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% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.
EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.
Press coverage of the Syrian internet outage at the time:
http://www.cnet.com/news/blackout-syria-vanishes-from-intern...
"The Middle Eastern country has been experiencing an Internet outage for several hours, and many people on Twitter are reporting that phone lines are down as well."
http://www.renesys.com/2012/11/syria-off-the-air/
"There was one brief whole-country outage of less than ten minutes on 25 November. By the time that one was confirmed, the outage was over. It would be reaching to call that a “precursor event” or “practice run,” but that’s a possibility."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/anonymous-declares-...
"The Syrian government said that terrorists were behind the outages, but CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said it would have been extremely difficult for any type of sabotage to cause such a comprehensive blackout, according to Reuters."
http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-internet
"All the edge routers are controlled by Syrian Telecommunications. The systematic way in which routes were withdrawn suggests that this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut."
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 incapable.”
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 communication network of a country like Syria the exact thing the NSA is supposed to be doing? And what positive value comes from Snowden releasing something like that?
>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.
Please, I read Hacker News for intelligent discourse, away from Reddit-type nonsense.
There is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that the NSA hacked the Syrian core router. Snowden was passing on office gossip which he heard. Why isn't that fact mentioned? Because it doesn't suit the cultural narrative?
This mentioned the NSA's "Mission Data Repository" in Bluffdale, Utah. They mentioned it could hold 1 yottabyte of data.
Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte:
All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) +
All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) +
All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) +
Library of Congress (10-30 PB) +
Wikipedia (0.0005 PB)
The Pentagon is a big building (6,636,360 sqft over 5 floors). If you started stacking hard drives inside the Pentagon it would take about 50 pentagons to hold 250 billion hard drives.
At scale you might be able to make a 4TB hard drive for somewhere between $10 and $100.
1 Yottabyte would be $2.5 trillion - $25 trillion in hard drives. That's a couple USA GDPs.
Okay, I think a yottabyte clearly can't be what they mean because that's just unfathomable.
They also mention a 1 million sqft facility.
In a 1 million sqft you can probably pack about 250 million 3.5" hard drives. If each drive was 4TB you'd end up with 1 million PB, or 1000 EB, or 1 Zettabyte
So by Yottabyte they might (maybe) mean Zettabyte. Only off by a factor of 1,000.
Even still, all of the data of Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Library of Congress, etc is still probably only ~10% of this data center.
"The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified."
Could they be using tape drives? This wikipedia entry says limits of 35TB were achieved in 2011 and limits of 185TB were achieved in 2014. The 2011 achievement wasn't expected to be commercially available for 10 years. Would that also preclude industrial/government availability?
Backblaze wrote an article last year where, based on the government agencies that have expressed interested in building their own Storage Pods, including the CIA, they conclude:
"So does the NSA store surveillance data on Backblaze Storage Pods?
We don’t know for sure and certainly the NSA is certainly not publishing their storage architecture. However, between the multiple government agencies using and exploring Backblaze Storage Pods and the pods characteristics as highly-dense, cost-efficient, and open source systems, certainly makes them a very likely candidate." [1]
Ever heard of something called web service ? Why govt would duplicate data if it is already available somewhere ? These companies have built APIs and services that provide data directly to NSA ( allegedly ! )
Just because you can do multiplication and division doesn't mean they are doing way you are thinking. These are 1000 time smart-ass people than you who have pretty solid ways of petabytes of data. By the way 1 yottabyte is theoretical capacity you dumb ass.
Next time think a little before you present your hypothesis and before writing off all claims made by others.
> One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn't know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
It's very interesting that TAO attempted to remotely compromise a core router. What happened to diverting Cisco boxes to an "undisclosed location" for installing implants?
"Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That's a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”"
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.
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 enhance the reading experience.
It's amusing to think that some believe Apple is deliberately crippling browsers on older devices. It's sites like Wired that are doing the work for them.
> Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)
FYI, Glenn Greenwald is denying that any of the claims in this paragraph are true, and says that Wired never even contacted him or Miranda about the article:
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 :|
A division of NSA hackers attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead, which caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet.
So in middle of a war zone, US conducted sabotage to core infrastructure of an other nation, with unknown cost to property or human lives.
It really should be seen as the obvious reason why hacking is not an acceptable tool to use in peacetime against other nations. Its not a defensive weapon, it hurt people, and it done with no responsibility what so ever.
So which is it? There was (is) a war raging in Syria, the US has interests there -- like it or not -- and the NSA is a US intelligence agency. This story sounds like an example of the NSA just doing its job.
I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA for?
What I do have a problem with is that the NSA makes apparently zero effort to disambiguate between foreign, and domestic, communications.
If the last straw to leak this information was when Snowden learned about this MonsterMind program, why are we learning about it more than a year later without any prior mention whatsoever? (and without documents to back up the claims) Also, if he learned about it after taking up his job with Booz Allen Hamilton in 2013, why was he contacting Glenn Greenwald in December of 2012?[1] Ditto with the excuse that Clapper's testimony in March 2013 factored into his decision to leak...
I'm honestly curious why so many people are willing to take Snowden's claims at face value. The NSA rightly got a lot of flack for the softball interviews on Dateline a few months back, but it feels like the general consensus is that the softball interviews with Snowden are beyond questioning.
This question: "Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs?" .. hasn't it already been answered by now? Snowden did what he did because he feels the American people have been betrayed by their out of control government. He's said it enough times now for it to be perfectly clear.
In that article, Snowden said that "We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.” The answer, he says, is robust encryption.
And that's exactly what I'm doing through JackPair, a low-cost voice encryption device that empower every citizen to protect their privacy over the phone:
It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and stream cipher with keystream from pseudo random number generator seeded from DH. It's similar to one-time key pad with no key management and zero-configuration.
As Snowden mentioned in the article, by adopting end-to-end encryption technologies like this, we can collectively end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.
Great article. Snowden's closing thoughts make me excited about the idea of mesh networking with all these mobile devices in our pockets. Hopefully Google or Apple will give it the push it deserves. (Apple is already taking baby steps in this direction with its Multipeer Connectivity API.)
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 is espionage no matter how you slice it. If it was just leak it to the USA and the world at the same time then sure I could buy the whistleblower if it is go run and hide in Russia or China and sell information that is a different story. I dont think anyone has all the facts about this though.
[+] [-] tokenadult|11 years ago|reply
"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries."
As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.
[+] [-] nabla9|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] exelius|11 years ago|reply
There is a troubling problem with any increase in government firepower: be it heavy weaponry in our police stations, advanced monitoring capabilities that can be used on the entire populace at once, or drones that can hit targets on the other side of the planet.
What happens when these weapons are used against us?
Let's just assume for a minute that our government has our best interests in mind and is basically benevolent. With a database of potential intelligence against every person in the US, you create a dangerous situation: what happens if the Chinese or Russian government has covert access to this system and strategically leaks information with the purpose of influencing US elections? This feels completely plausible in my mind: there are real risks to having so much information available in one place. The fact that the controls were so weak to begin with makes me almost certain that foreign intelligence has continued access to these databases.
Every weapon we develop can potentially be used against us. In the case of cyberwarfare, those weapons can be used against us without our knowledge. The scariest part of Snowden's leaks is how awful the government is at technology: most people on the Internet were pretty sure the government was spying on everyone anyway. Geopolitics gets messy, so that stuff is forgivable. But when a single government contractor is able to walk away with so much information and they don't even know what he has?
[+] [-] aestetix|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pygy_|11 years ago|reply
16/24 or 14/21 combos for the font-size and line height work well for me, depending on widow width.
Right click a paragraph other than the intro -> "inspect element". In the right column, you can untick the "font-size: 21px;" and "line-height: 37px;" rules, to get 16/24 or set them to whatever you like.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stephengillie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nktr1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adityab|11 years ago|reply
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% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.
EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.
[+] [-] Maxious|11 years ago|reply
http://www.renesys.com/2012/11/syria-off-the-air/ "There was one brief whole-country outage of less than ten minutes on 25 November. By the time that one was confirmed, the outage was over. It would be reaching to call that a “precursor event” or “practice run,” but that’s a possibility."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/anonymous-declares-... "The Syrian government said that terrorists were behind the outages, but CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said it would have been extremely difficult for any type of sabotage to cause such a comprehensive blackout, according to Reuters."
http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-internet "All the edge routers are controlled by Syrian Telecommunications. The systematic way in which routes were withdrawn suggests that this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut."
[+] [-] jobu|11 years ago|reply
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 incapable.”
[+] [-] slg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darksim905|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] khc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glenneroo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dolimiter|11 years ago|reply
Please, I read Hacker News for intelligent discourse, away from Reddit-type nonsense.
There is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that the NSA hacked the Syrian core router. Snowden was passing on office gossip which he heard. Why isn't that fact mentioned? Because it doesn't suit the cultural narrative?
[+] [-] e0m|11 years ago|reply
Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte:
All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) + All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) + All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) + Library of Congress (10-30 PB) + Wikipedia (0.0005 PB)
= ~7000 PB = 7 Exabytes. = 0.0007% of 1 Yottabyte!!!
1 Yottabyte = 250 billion 4TB hard drives.
A hard drive is about 4" x 1" x 5.75".
The Pentagon is a big building (6,636,360 sqft over 5 floors). If you started stacking hard drives inside the Pentagon it would take about 50 pentagons to hold 250 billion hard drives.
At scale you might be able to make a 4TB hard drive for somewhere between $10 and $100.
1 Yottabyte would be $2.5 trillion - $25 trillion in hard drives. That's a couple USA GDPs.
Okay, I think a yottabyte clearly can't be what they mean because that's just unfathomable.
They also mention a 1 million sqft facility.
In a 1 million sqft you can probably pack about 250 million 3.5" hard drives. If each drive was 4TB you'd end up with 1 million PB, or 1000 EB, or 1 Zettabyte
So by Yottabyte they might (maybe) mean Zettabyte. Only off by a factor of 1,000.
Even still, all of the data of Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Library of Congress, etc is still probably only ~10% of this data center.
Nuts.
[+] [-] adventured|11 years ago|reply
NPR says zettabytes: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controvers...
Wired (2012) says yottabytes (maybe where this originally came from): http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
From the NPR article:
"The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified."
[+] [-] jerhinesmith|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#Capacity
Edit: Ha, nevermind, even if they had 185TB tape drives, they'd still need 5 billion of them (unless my math is way off).
[+] [-] billyhoffman|11 years ago|reply
"So does the NSA store surveillance data on Backblaze Storage Pods?
We don’t know for sure and certainly the NSA is certainly not publishing their storage architecture. However, between the multiple government agencies using and exploring Backblaze Storage Pods and the pods characteristics as highly-dense, cost-efficient, and open source systems, certainly makes them a very likely candidate." [1]
[1] - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/is-the-nsa-using-backblaze-st...
[+] [-] idone6|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elwell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crunchcaptain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ch4s3|11 years ago|reply
This piece is pretty interesting.
[+] [-] normloman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smanuel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weavie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waylandsmithers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bausson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|11 years ago|reply
It's amusing to think that some believe Apple is deliberately crippling browsers on older devices. It's sites like Wired that are doing the work for them.
[+] [-] borplk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pflanze|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/m...
(Plain text version in the history, at https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/c...)
[+] [-] bgentry|11 years ago|reply
FYI, Glenn Greenwald is denying that any of the claims in this paragraph are true, and says that Wired never even contacted him or Miranda about the article:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800
[+] [-] Rapzid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|11 years ago|reply
So in middle of a war zone, US conducted sabotage to core infrastructure of an other nation, with unknown cost to property or human lives.
It really should be seen as the obvious reason why hacking is not an acceptable tool to use in peacetime against other nations. Its not a defensive weapon, it hurt people, and it done with no responsibility what so ever.
[+] [-] chatmasta|11 years ago|reply
> In peacetime
So which is it? There was (is) a war raging in Syria, the US has interests there -- like it or not -- and the NSA is a US intelligence agency. This story sounds like an example of the NSA just doing its job.
I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA for?
What I do have a problem with is that the NSA makes apparently zero effort to disambiguate between foreign, and domestic, communications.
[+] [-] csandreasen|11 years ago|reply
I'm honestly curious why so many people are willing to take Snowden's claims at face value. The NSA rightly got a lot of flack for the softball interviews on Dateline a few months back, but it feels like the general consensus is that the softball interviews with Snowden are beyond questioning.
[1] http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734
[+] [-] ArtDev|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psychboo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vdm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2close4comfort|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibisum|11 years ago|reply
Is this just lazy journalism?
[+] [-] jeffrey8chang|11 years ago|reply
And that's exactly what I'm doing through JackPair, a low-cost voice encryption device that empower every citizen to protect their privacy over the phone:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safe...
It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and stream cipher with keystream from pseudo random number generator seeded from DH. It's similar to one-time key pad with no key management and zero-configuration.
As Snowden mentioned in the article, by adopting end-to-end encryption technologies like this, we can collectively end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.
[+] [-] archagon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nadstat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmscharff2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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