Snowden tweets 156 characters, which is deleted; speculation re assassination | Hacker News Reader

Snowden tweets 156 characters, which is deleted; speculation re assassination

yournewswire.com

53 pointsappleflaxen22 comments

Non-sensational possible explanation: it's the checksum of a file he sent to a journalist or friend. He deleted the tweet because the receiver saw it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/4wc9ep/huge_edw...

I was thinking the same thing. Is there any way to tell?

no; not with cryptography, unless you decrypt it / determine what it decrypts.

It's a sha256. It could definitely be a checksum for a file, although hashes like this is not an uncommon way to generate a large, unique password from a small string or phrase.

Most passwords can be easily brute forced. A 64-byte string is a lot harder to brute force.

I actually think a sha2 is a little bit weird for a file checksum. I would expect md5 or a regular sha1. Or simply send the file with a gpg signature to validate the integrity (provided he still has some sort of trusted public key). Either way any off-the-shelf Mac can generate and verify these checksums.

My guess is that Snowden is starting to feel homesick and wants to start the process of returning to the USA. That's why he said "It's time." The tweet could be a password or a code to something but I don't think it's meant to embarrass or expose anybody.

How do you know it's a sha256, beyond the length?

I don't know for sure. It's 64-length hex string (not 156 like a lot of people are reporting), the same output as a sha256 checksum.

Looks an awful lot like somebody opened up a terminal and typed in:

> $ echo -n "some password" | shasum -a 256

MD5 is easy to generate collisions for (multiple chosen inputs with the same hash value), and SHA1 also just recently failed in collision security. Nothing odd with SHA256 for somebody like Snowden.

Don't you find it strange that I'd rely on twitter?

If you want to send a message (or confirmation) to someone, and don't want to create a track of who it's to, a public posting board is useful.

So: Twitter. Any of @Snowden's 2.29 million followers -- or anyone else reading the tweet without following his profile, could be the intended recipient.

I first ran across the concept in Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. The protagonist is in a bar with another character looking at messages being posted. A name and phone number could well be a coded signal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_of_the_Galaxy

(Heinlein almost certainly took the concept from elsewhere, CotG is based on Kipling's Kim, also about tradecraft. Just reflecting my first association.)

A) people don't know for sure whether Snowden has access to his twitter account. They're relying on twitter to keep everything in order.

B) twitter will know which of Snowdens 2.29 million followers who could have read the tweet, actually read the tweet. Depending on how fast he deleted it and the level of activity of his followers, I'm guessing this number will be in the thousands. Actually, if this was a concerned of Snowden, then it wouldn't make sense to delete it, which makes me think this wasn't a concern for him.

Both reasonable responses, but not necessarily valid.

A is addressed by the nature of a hash. The person who needs to know, will know. Those who don't, can't be sure. If the source of the hash was communicated by other means (out of band), then the hash itself might be serving to confirm that Snowden himself does influence what's sent over that Twitter account.

B is possible, yes, though again, the tweet and hash itself can be replicated across multiple systems, and were. You'd have to look not only at Twitter access, but at all recipients of that message across all possibly channels. Though the likelihood of one of Snowden's followers who accessed the tweet while it was up being the intended target is probably fairly high.

Posted 19 hours ago[0] with a less sensationalist headline "Snowden tweets code without context then deletes."

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12235563

fair enough, but I think the coincidental timing with a torrent tracker crackdown was an interesting observation that was not captured in the prior posting.

in addition, he made a call for collaborators to contact him, which was then taken down.

First reported on 3 days ago:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/whistleblower-edward-snowden-sparks...

http://sputniknews.com/science/20160803/1043913532/snowden-t...

And he's tweeted since, so it's a pretty good bet that he's not dead:

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/761609959213789184

The 'cryptic' tweet was at 9:14pm and the one you linked is at ~1pm, so actually he hasn't tweeted since.

Mainstream media in Germany are now starting slowly to cover the topic (based on a DPA release):

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/news/service/internet-mysterioese...

Greenwald tweets Snowden "is fine": https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/761995125824360448

Inquisitr: http://www.inquisitr.com/3389936/edward-snowden-dead-mysteri...

and well, yournewswire.com as a source - oh my.

Wait. What?

Twitter's limit is 140 characters.

It's actually 64 characters long. The length of a sha2 hash. I had to count it myself to verify.

Exactly, why nobody is talking about this?

I had assumed from the headline that he somehow managed to surpass Twitter's limit, and that's what the story was about.

I tried to make the headline less sensationalistic; sorry I couldn't with the 80-character limit.

The article addresses what the 156-letter tweet means, whether it could be the dead-man code to the insurance files, and whether the recent torrent tracker crackdown could be related.

Of note: he did tweet 22 hours ago, but since the tweet in question was deleted, I can't tell the chronology.

I hope he is ok, and this speculation is utterly wrong. The fact that it's utterly possible, though, speaks to how messed up things are.

https://twitter.com/snowden

the screenshot in the article shows the time as 9:14pm.

I assume that's Snowden's timezone, and not the viewers, I admit I dont know how twitter handles timezones.

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