Snowden's talk at Bitcoin 2019 conference [video] | Hacker News Reader

Snowden's talk at Bitcoin 2019 conference [video]

youtube.com

126 pointsteutat3s47 comments

Sadly unable to understand half of what they were saying so I gave up after 3 minutes and found this version which seems to be at least a tiny bit better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVN13ad3UUk

Thanks for the better link!

Thanks for the link. It's still hard to listen sadly. If only an official version was released.

OK, we changed to that from https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OwGWkEjeoDGQ.

For those trying out either this link or the OP link, Snowden modifies his audio settings a bit around the 5 minute mark and is much more understandable then.

Thanks, I gave up too early.

"This conference is being live streamed, except for this session..."

Why's that?

Probably because Snowden is a VIP who has people looking for him (US government, for example). A live stream would be a liability, kind of a breadcrumb trail, potentially exposing his current location.

He's in Russia.

Unless he's worried about a drone strike while in his Moscow apartment, I can't see there'd be a problem.

Yeah, it's not like CIA agents would kidnap him or something. Would never happen, right?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/beyond-...

While I'm sure the they would love to get their hands on him, pulling off a kidnapping from under the noses of several Russian intelligence agencies in the heart of their domain seems like a stretch, even for the CIA.

I mean.. if I were him I'd be doing my best to not let the CIA and NSA know where my Moscow apartment was located...

Kim Philby lived in Moscow for decades, I don't think he went to any great lengths to dodge his former MI6 colleagues. I would bet the US government knows exactly where Snowden is living. It won't be that hard: he'll be surrounded by secret police keeping tabs.

Doesn't need to be live to reveal location.

2 loudspeakers playing pseudorandom white noise, inaudable from a few hundred yards away, would probably still leak any location in the city, as long as the stream isn't too aggressively compressed.

Correlating with a known signal over hundreds of thousands of audio samples has a massive snr gain...

Sorry, is this like Liam Neeson - drop a handgrenade in one part of town then another and Liam (or rather is listening to Snowden microphones) can work out where he is?

Can that possibly work IRL?

I believe he is implying the NSA or other entity using the microphone input from cellphones (or maybe the microphones placed around many major cities on utility poles?) to do the locating. I think it would probably be theoretically possible, but I don't recall anything in the leaks about them ever researching that sort of capability.

They can just listen to the 50hz ground hum in the signal coming from his audio equipment and determine which relay stations are providing that power ..

?how?

50Hz is 50Hz everywhere.

It's never exactly 50 Hz, as the frequency is affected by load and generators can't compensate this perfectly. So record it in many locations, then correlate the signal extracted from audio/video against the database.

Main article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_a...

Not sure what you are getting at at all.

he's referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation

this could be sound from loudspeakers or broadcast audiorate electromagnetic waves getting picked up in the audio cables, or even a passive system of sensors throughout russia, i.e. using cross-correlation with background noise ...

one could also view this as a pseudorandom form of lock-in amplification, and even with a high noise floor the results do improve with number of samples, so patience is all they need.

I have my doubts that his location is that much of a mystery that is needed to be protected.

If the US government really wanted Snowden dead, they could get him dead. They very likely know where he lives. They are the most sophisticated intelligence collection entity in the world, after all. Snowden is not protected by secrecy, he is protected by the fact that he lives in Russia and killing him would be a provocation to Russia, possibly resulting in the assasination of people that Russia dislikes who are under US protection. Also I guess because they want to put Snowden before a court of some sort, even if it's an unfair trial.

Now, why does he apply counterintelligence measures? Why doesn't he share his location on twitter all the time? My theory is that it's some kind of rule of the intelligence community: if you would be too open, you would basically insult the rules this world is playing by. It would be like dancing in the crosshair at the korean border. Nobody wants to be insulted.

>They are the most sophisticated intelligence collection entity in the world, after all.

Who were caught completely off guard by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, the Arab Spring, and basically every single geopolitical event in history. I wouldn't invest too much in their abilities.

Every single one is a bit harsh. There is also survivor bias here, a bit like MiB, when nothing happens no one knows. Not to say they are that good but unlimited resources is difficult to best, even if they are rubbish in general.

Intelligence gathering is not the same as predicting the future, no more than a thermometer can tell you whether it will rain on your wedding day. Data gathering is relatively easy, forecasting is hard.

Your analogy is poor; a barometer will indeed tell you it will rain on your wedding day, at least 12 hours in advance.

Forecasting is easy, if your collect the right data.

Russia already assassinates people all over the world, even in the US (e.g., Mikhail Lesin was likely offed by Russian agents right in the middle of Washington, DC in 2015).

It's a very fanciful idea that CIA has as much of a presence in Russia as you think it does. It's really not at all likely that the US could assassinate somebody in Russia _and_ get away with it. That second part is key. Russia isn't as concerned about getting away with it (see the recent cases in the UK) because its entire regime is predicated upon controlled misinformation, and because it isn't afraid to dispose of/disown/disavow an agent or a useful idiot when it is in the government's interest. For a country like the US, it's a bit more complicated.

To answer your questions, Snowden only does what he is allowed to do by the Russian government. Snowden is an ex-NSA contractor in Russia right now thanks to the good graces of Vladimir Putin; if you think that he isn't being handled daily by Russian secret services, that's pretty funny.

> It's really not at all likely that the US could assassinate somebody in Russia _and_ get away with it.

What does this stipulation mean?

They certainly could kill him, and even when it was a far more closed society quite difficult to get people in and out of Russia the US was able to do it. These days it wouldn't be hard at all.

And it's not like there wouldn't be someone willing to do it for money...

unsure why you got downvoted I totally agree. Putin is not doing Snowden a favour just because he is pro freedom of information and leaks.

True, they could kill him or capture him, etc. But I doubt the US is worried about a provocation to Russia. It would simply be a massively unpopular move. Mostly pointless.

I doubt the US is worried about Edward Snowden anymore. That’s not to say he could come back to the states without getting arrested, but I don’t think they’re going to send a spy over there to kill him. I think any covertness is just theatrics at this point, struggling to maintain relevance in a world that’s largely lost interest in him.

It certainly seems there wouldn't seem to be much value in dealing with him now.

Historically speaking there have been plenty of former spies, folks who handed over information and after escaping just lived their lives elsewhere.

Folks seem to think it operates like some movie where governments are extracting revenge left and right, that doesn't seem to be the case all that often.

AFAIK the governments (those who do) don't take revenge left and right out of rage or pettiness. The traitors are usually punished as brutally as possible as a way to discourage others to follow their example.

Someone I knew long time ago was from контрразведка (counterintelligence), concretely, from служба наружного наблюдения (field observation duty).

He bragged that Russia's (former USSR) counterintelligence was so sophisticated that higher ranks of spies from around the world all worked in Russia or USSR some time in their career. He presented enough evidence in form of mind experiment that I believe him (mainly due to his reaction time - he has answers readily).

So, for your "world's most sophisticated intelligence" I raise my "самая лучшая контрразведка в мире". Can world's best intelligence service be stopped by world's best counterintelligence service?

Otherwise we are going into pure speculation, like "spies agree on some kind of rule", etc.

This is not very relevant.

Snowdon is not in 'hiding' - if the Russians wanted to hide him, they probably could. But they are not, ergo, the US knows anything they want to know about him.

Russia is one of the best black boxes to obfuscate movement from the US.

Very possible he left Russia a long time ago. Nobody is closely tracking cargo ships traveling through the arctic.

There are journalists meeting him in Russia every now and then. You can hide the precise location from someone when you put them into a car, blindfold and drive them around. You can't hide it any more when you have to ship the journalist to a different continent and back in a matter of hours/minutes. Sure you can put the car into an airplane etc but those can be easily tracked. And I doubt they wouldn't spill the secret if they were aware.

Also of course the USA tracks everything that can be tracked using satellites. Everything. The CIA in fact had collected tons of satellite images of the arctic and antarctic and contributed them to the science community to study climate change.

They know _exactly_ where he is. Putin keeps him protected for shits & giggles.

Can someone provide a summary of what he says? Anything surprising?

In summary he said HODL.

He talked about the importance of anonymizing off-ramps and on-ramps for regular users by design and limiting history to one transaction for privacy protection.

Thanks.

He meant to say: just use Monero

Seriously, why do people keep trying to jump through hoops where it's very easy to make a mistake, rather than just using something with privacy built-in?

With Bitcoin, you have to trust that the mixer isn't a bad actor, that you don't get tainted coins in return, that you make enough hops or mix enough times, that no one discriminates against the sending address or recieving address or amount being sent, etc.

I don't do anything illegal with bitcoin, do I don't have to do all those steps anyway.

I do hope bitcoin gets better privacy features, ideally to the point that it's comparable to monero in that regard (not sure if actually possible).

I don't do anything illegal with Monero. So what?

I prefer cash for transaction privacy rather than credit cards. Doesn't mean I want to do illegal things.

(Bitcoin - essentially just as trackable as credit cards. Prepaid or ones tied to your identity.)

If I was a pregnant woman who didn't tell anyone, I don't want to start receiving pregnancy ads:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com