My Summer of Snowden | Hacker News Reader

My Summer of Snowden

theatlantic.com

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Fascinating article, well worth reading for those who have been following the Snowden story and (US) government surveillance in general.

It's interesting to read about the lengths to which journalists go to maintain proper information security. Layers of encryption, safes for hardware, physical removal of wireless chips, and so on. I'm curious as to whether all of that is anything more than a mild annoyance to the NSA or other major intelligence agencies, but I imagine they can hack into those computers with relative ease. There's just no viable way of preventing tempest attacks against your home or office, of preventing surveillance through vents, and more.

One thing about Snowden specifically, he's understandably careful about protecting the secrecy of his residence, but I'd be really surprised if the US government didn't know where he lives. Snowden lives in Moscow, legally, is known to move around the city, he uses the Internet, he's not just holed up in some cave. Between all the CIA people in Moscow and the NSA's near limitless capabilities, Snowden's whereabouts are almost surely known - he's being kept safe by the fact that Moscow is Moscow.

>One thing about Snowden specifically, he's understandably careful about protecting the secrecy of his residence. I'd be really surprised if the US government didn't know where he lives

I agree with that, but it's reasonable to assume other countries would have some interest in him. His international value has likely dropped by now, but I'm sure many agencies wondered what else he might have.

>"He resisted questioning about his private life, but he allowed that he missed small things from home. Milkshakes, for one. Why not make your own? Snowden refused to confirm or deny possession of a blender. Like all appliances, blenders have an electrical signature when switched on. He believed that the U.S. government was trying to discover where he lived. He did not wish to offer clues, electromagnetic or otherwise. U.S. intelligence agencies had closely studied electrical emissions when scouting Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan."

This reminds me of one of the discussion threads that was happening here last week [0] where people were speculating about the next generation of spy satellites.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151301

First they’d have to know he has a weakness for milkshakes in the first place. Second, he could have friends make them, third you could use an old fashioned hand blender/whisk/mixer[1]... you know the kinds with a mechanical crank... like the old hand drills. So he’s in the least embellishing for the interviewer. Oh, fourth, he could use a pneumatic blender...

[1]https://www.pinterest.com/repk/vintage-hand-mixers/

Has anyone got a citation for "U.S. intelligence agencies had closely studied electrical emissions when scouting Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan"

Being very liberal with the truth, using a radio scanner could be classed as "closely studying electrical emissions".

Firstly, to get a blender's electrical signature you'd need to be pretty close to the blender, even along the transmission line. And I think it would be tough to tell one person's blender motor from any other cheap motor powering kitchen gadgetry in the local area.

A cursory duckduckgo reveals: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/to-hu...

which in turn links to: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-f...

Which talks specifically about the RQ-170 Sentinel monitoring electronic transmissions in the area, so it might be conflating the two?

The information about the Sentinel comes out of this leaked black budget: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black...

If I recall correctly Bin Laden mostly used couriers to transmit information and didn't use much tech because they were well aware that it would be a huge security risk.

This Intercept article based on leaked internal NSA newsletters has a lot of juicy details: https://theintercept.com/2015/05/18/snowden-osama-bin-laden-...

That reminds me:

I recently finished listening to Cryptonomicon. I was surprised to find out that Van Eck phreaking was a real thing and not just a fictional tech Stephenson made up for the novel. Does anyone here know if it works on modern displays, specifically phone/tablets?

Going to be quite interesting to see how Starlink will be co-opted as well

> On the Gmail page, a pink alert bar appeared at the top, reading, “Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now.”

Fascinating that Google does this. How do they know?

They won't tell us according to https://security.googleblog.com/2012/06/security-warnings-fo...

And I doubt they display this warning any more, it seems like it was a bit of a publicity stunt back in 2012.

The complexity of the amount of security measures a modern day journalist needs to take to manage the digital, physical and operational of themselves and their sources is immense. It's why we built Umbrella App (https://www.secfirst.org, so they could have one simple location, open source, open content that they could quickly reference on a phone.

I've quite often seen people claim Russia and/or China had full copies of the Snowden documents, and try to use that to accuse him of being a foreign agent. It's interesting to see a high ranking NSA employee say the journalist were likely the unwitting source.

It makes complete sense if other countries got the files from the journalists. Snowden deleted everything before the first articles were published, and he's also a more difficult target than the journalists. The journalists that were initially in contact with Snowden are neither intelligence nor technology experts, and they had never even used PGP email. They had to get an infosec crash course from Snowden, so their systems could probably be breached with relative comfort by intelligence agencies like Russia's or China's.

If you're referring to this:

> "My take is, whatever you guys had was pretty immediately in the hands of any foreign intelligence service that wanted it," he said, "whether it was Russians, Chinese, French, the Israelis, the Brits. Between you, Poitras, and Greenwald, pretty sure you guys can’t stand up to a full-fledged nation-state attempt to exploit your IT. To include not just remote stuff, but hands-on, sneak-into-your-house-at-night kind of stuff. That’s my guess."

It's unsubstantiated chest thumping. "You're acting irresponsibly because you're vulnerable without our protection, which you don't have because you went against us". It completely brushes aside the idea that if these agencies weren't acting as domestic enemies in the first place, whistleblowers and journalists wouldn't be adversaries.

> It completely brushes aside the idea that if these agencies weren't acting as domestic enemies in the first place, whistleblowers and journalists wouldn't be adversaries

Even if the NSA wasn't treating them like domestic enemies, all of those other countries would likely want their own copy of the complete leak. And the rest of the article shows other agencies arw probably capable of such acts.

The motive is there, but the evidence is not. For all we know, the mysterious device behavior could have been the NSA itself, if only trying to delete any files that were on insecure devices. It obviously could be foreign actors too, but there is nothing in the empty NSA statement to inform that possibility. The best way to view such a statement is simple misdirection / public relations.

I'm unsure of what mysterious device behavior you are talking about, and I don't see the point of running such a misdirection years after the fact accomplishes.

My only point was that even the Chinese/Russian copy some people claim exist still wouldn't mean Snowden gave it to them.

Cool story.

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