NSA Owns Everything (2015)

What snowden did was provide independently verifiable content and details of their activities. His leaks were outdates by half a decade by the time they were public too. Everyone sort of accepted the IC will do shady stuff to stop terrorists after 9/11 because "american lives" so it was a solid conspiracy theory backed (not proven) by facts at the time. We sort of hoped they didn't care enough to snoop into our boring lives.

When a few key entities are central points of information distribution it is very simple to monitor everything. End-to-end encryption is helpful, but it isn't enough, becaues no effort is required to know where to find everything. If you really want to lower the probability of state monitoring you need end-to-end encryption and point-to-point communication without a central service provider.

Major information providers and social media have no motivation to solve that problem. Removing them from the communication channel between you and your grandma instantly renders them irrelevant.

This article is asking how the NSA managed a hacking empire leaving practically no evidence. Many people correctly assumed it was happening, they just couldn't prove much.

"Why did we never see it coming?" Is a poor way of phrasing their premise, but it's not false.

The better questions then would be "why didn't people listen? and "why didn't the general public see it coming?" It would be useful to understand these well to prevent future occurrences and even possibly to escape the current situation and future unfolding.

It was a theory that there was a conspiracy. The issue is that people dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand - even when the theory is backed by means, motive and incentives.

"This power is being used to influence the political process in the US" is still a conspiracy theory and will likely turn out to be true as well one day - because again the people involved have means, motive and incentives. But incentives based predictions are a bit subjective and most people don't seem to believe that incentives overrule character.

>> "Why did we never see it coming?"

You were never taught it in a rote fashion.

Fact is all intelligence services are heavily into their science and control. Its not just computer hacking they are into, they use psychology, medicine and finance to control the population. They have evolved the techniques first used and developed by successive religions since at least as far back as the ancient Sumerians.

Solomon Asch and his conformity experiments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA which continue to evolve to this day, is a useful tool for keeping people out of trouble, otherwise to quote an ancient religious expression "The devil makes work for idle hands to do" and who wants to go backwards in the Maslow's Hierarchy of needs?

So just like some people do not want to believe that God doesnt exist, some people do not want to believe their country's security services are spying on them 24/7 since the day they were born, hence why the hierarchical structure of society, currently called democracy, but included Royal governance and religious governance in the past, is still the leading way to operate in plain sight after more than 10,000 years of society. Maybe I should be called Mustapha Mond ;-)

This thread is full of opportunities for me to contribute, but this is the comment that is the most important.

I've spent a long time sifting through conspiracy theories, and I came to a conclusion at one point that the most important thing in the world the oligarchs and TPTB have at their disposal is control and influence of various degrees on the mass media in all it's forms. Therefor, the most important task is to inform people. Problem one is that the propaganda mass conciousness influence has been almost perfected, and it's very numbers based. So for example, lets say I showed you some of the more crazy conspiracies that have been at play in the US. If you are someone who wants an ugly truth over a beautiful lie, you might see the merit to my arguments. I can take the time to do that, but my numbers will never reach the MSM numbers... and so they keep doing what they are doing, because we are far away from the critical mass needed to actually push back against that power with power. The few movements that do start with that intention are quickly infiltrated and taken over, etc. Essentially, as long as the media can fool X percentage of people, it doesn't matter how many people want to fight the system, the fooled masses in their herd mentality will quash any dissent, and the perpetual cycle of abuse continues.

Second, is that I have discovered that most people simple don't want to know the truth, and in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. I've "woken" (sorry it's cliche but appropos) people up who at a later point said "I don't want to know, that's too dark..." etc, but a lot of people really would rather hang on to any lie that makes them feel better than to hear about how borked the US is (and the world).

Combined, these two principles work in tandem to make sure even those who might still have a spark of dissent in their bones tend to be extra dismissive of any "conspiracy theory", either for self-preservation whether concious or not, because of herd mentality, and/or because they've been propagandized too heavily.

Also, there was a definite leap in sockpuppetry tech about ~2010, and I think there are a lot more "digital dissociative disorder people" on the web than anyone is willing to admit. (largely working to create the illusion of that herd mentality which then becomes reality)

The problem I'm running into now isn't yesterdays NSA conspiracy, it's trying to tell people about what TPTB are doing now! So maybe some people were forced to eat their words about NSA (not that many admitted that), but if you bring up the scandal of today or of tomorrow, you go right back to being considered a "wackjob crazy conspiracy nut" or some such nonsense. I don't know how you could possibly break through the control of mass conciousness to change this...

These reasons are also why the oligarchs are after control of the internet. As a withering but still standing bastion of anarchistic freedom of speech, it is their primary threat right now.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the truth, the real world, is chock full of actual conspiracies that are so much stranger than fiction.

You'll notice I kept it meta to avoid digressing into a debate about a particular conspiracy, but the number one issue is that people seem to have completely forgotten what inductive logic is, and how powerful it can be. Of course evidence (deductive logic) is preferred wherever possible, but in the arena of intelligence agencies and billionares who spend a lot of time covering up their tracks (especially by degrees of seperations), you aren't going to get that evidence except in the most rare cases. Even in the cases where the evidence does show up, it is often covered up, destroyed, lost, inadmissable, gag ordered, blackbagged, etc.

Although I will shamefully admit that I was one of the naysayers. I might have even called someone a Conspiracy Nut in a prior conversation, with my perception of the person being obsessed with potential NSA spying / collection.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Side note: I find it interesting that a period of time developed where any type of deep curiosity into government activity was enough to get oneself stamped as a Conspiracy Nut. If I were the person pumping these narratives and troupes out, I'd be very happy with my result, in retrospect.

> We were called _Conspiracy Theorists_

Depends who "we" is. If "we" is people on HN, who are tuned in and more closely associated with this stuff, then yeah. _You are not_ just some rando on the internet who follows the mainstream news, you are tech literate and actively participating in a niche technology forum.

But if "we" is more a general term then the premise isn't false and I'd argue is still relatively true today. The general public is only starting to turn away from ideas like "I don't care if Google reads my emails, what are they going to do?" And that's only because ad suggestions have gotten too good, enough that they believe that Facebook is turning on their microphones. Obviously didn't learn from Target[0]. You're clearly aware of this because of your last sentence!

You can sit with your pride telling everyone that you were right all along and not crazy, or you can further the reach to the more generalized "we." The two options are not really inclusive.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

> Yet another circumstance must be mentioned which proves favorable for the Nazis and their immensely powerful apparatus of oppression: the development of modern technology gives the rulers, as has long been insufficiently understood, an advantage over the ruled. The more effective the weapons become and the less you can protect yourself against them, the more the armed is superior to the unarmed. The Bastille could not be successfully stormed in the age of airplanes and tear gas. Rifles equipped with rifles have no chance against motorized police forces; it makes no sense to build barricades against a government that has tanks. And in the event of a revolution, it is not only weapons development that favors those in power, the state over the individual: modern technical development and the associated sophisticated organization work in the same direction. Traffic has led to the countries becoming small and easy to monitor. How many hiding places there were in a country a hundred years ago! At that time, every power hit natural barriers! Today there is no loophole and no hideout for the rebel anymore. Even the thoughts that are able to penetrate the walls have become "controllable" because they are tied to the mass distribution of news, to radio, film and the press. How long will it take before every house has its own microphone and every private word, like every telephone call today, can be heard? The ant state is at hand. It may not be a coincidence that states like Germany and Russia have elevated technology to the status of a religion. Conversely, this development of modern technology makes the preservation of freedom a human task that is more urgent than ever.

-- Sebastian Haffner "Germany: Jekyll & Hyde (1939 - Deutschland von innen betrachtet)"

The above is my crappy translation because I don't have the English original (!). Apologies to Haffner as author and anyone who enjoys reading good English, but I think the content speaks for itself.

It's not just so-called conspiracy theorists who warned us, but also people in the midst of our society, near the zenith of human achievement. Our best and brightest. And we paid a LOT of lip service to respecting a LOT of people who warned us, while trampling what they held up as most important underfoot. We just wanted their gimmicks, their clever oneliners, the stuff we could kill time with.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

She wasn't the type to get excited and pushy, about anything. And maybe she wasn't aware of how she hit bulls eye when she wrote that. But here we are, and we know she did.

> If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

-- George Orwell

What if society became completely digital? What if people completely loose the ability to remember things, and look up their own lifes and history in the data stores? I've seen dozens, countless comments on HN that seem to be longing for something like that, of course while completely ignoring the implications, the destruction of humans and human society that would entail.

> Meanwhile, in the course of this "Terrorist Generation" campaign, for Obama to claim, "you know, I'm really worried about terrorists, so I have to to read -- well, they claim they don't read it -- I have to get information about your email, where you are, who you're talking to, what you have on Facebook; I've gotta put that on my big database"... actually, we're moving into a world which was described, pretty accurately I think, by one of the founders of Google... I don't know if you followed the stories about Google Glass? Well, Google has some new, ridiculous thing, they're marketing glasses which have a small computer on them. So you can be on the internet 24 hours a day, just what you want. It's a way of destroying people, but quite apart from that, this little device has a camera, and presumably, if it doesn't already it will soon have a recorder, which means that everything that's going on around you, goes up on the internet. Some reporter asked Erich Schmidt, didn't he think this was an invasion of privacy, and his answer was exactly right, comes right out of the Obama administration, he said: "If you're doing anything that you don't want to be on the internet, you shouldn't be doing it." This is a dream that Orwell couldn't have concocted. We're moving into it, and it's not the only case. if you read the technical journals, there's more stuff coming along. So, for example, right now there are corporations that are concerned about using computers with components made in China, because it's technically possible to build into the hardware devices which will record what the computer is doing and send it to those bad guys. well, the articles don't point out that if the Chinese can do it, we can do it better, and probably are, so it may end up in Obama's database the next time you hit the computer.

-- Noam Chomsky

That was located at http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade-deals-... but that site is dead and directs somewhere else. Don't click. I transcribed it 7 years ago, I can't prove that, but if seriously challenged I would go try looking for another source.

My point is, that's not some old man who doesn't understand technology. He understands it better than the people who are used to make it. And did you catch what he called Google Glass? "a way of destroying people" That's not exaggeration, that's cutting right to the heart of the matter.

Maybe they mean that most security providers didn't see it coming. Some people would think that the NSA are part of the set of security providers and hence, in a way, it's not that you don't see something coming, it's simply that you don't see them as the aggressor.

If you change from the topic of "computer security" to "nuclear weapons" then perhaps you can see how intelligence gathering, obfuscation and subterfuge is perhaps not an inherently offensive thing. For nuclear weapons, I think the only objective is to prevent nuclear explosions. Some people think the US's role is to stop nuclear war; some people think the US is part of the problem.

My personal take on the topic is that Snowden's main role was to challenge the idea that the NSA is keeping the peace.

My parents' friend who had lived in New Zealand for a decade at that point came to the country to bury his father and was over at our house for dinner. He's an electrical engineer and used to work for a telco in New Zealand. He had heard about this ECHELON thing from multiple colleagues and found it plausible enough to talk about. He was told that all internet and phone traffic was being recorded realtime. Mind you, this was pre-9/11, so no 'terrorist threats'. The world ran on shitty computers and expensive storage and voice in any form (even compressed telephony) was considered bulky at the time. And this is 15 years prior to the machine learning boom, voice transcription was really bad, I still doubt it was used at that point, even though he mentioned it.

But he had witnessed an expansion of fiber and datacenter capacity sometime in 1997-99 and it seemed plausible to him (a real serious and professional guy).

Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be true. I mean, the story slowly became less and less far fetched over the following decade, but was still a total surprise when Snowden blew the whistle.

This is wrong. It took a LOT more than that. It took one man forgoing his life and liberty, and a group of people endangering theirs to assist him. Snowdon is not going to get his life nor his liberty back, ever.

It took multiple institutions dedicated to publishing the truth to actually bring the news to a wide audience, and it didn't end without a degree of betrayal.

Snowden's leak is a good example of something that proved a lot of conspiracy theories to be true

This is likely why people just combined theory, conspiracy theory all together, because the moment you look at the grey area, it becomes nuanced.

The idea that "conspiracy theory"===false comes right out of COINTELPRO. You know, the big secret (at the time) conspiracy to subvert domestic US movements. In fact, much of the 20th C was defined by secret conspiracies - the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of the Nazis, every post-colonial coup, etc. Project Echelon was well understood in the 80s. What is the USS Jimmy Carter even for?

No, it's not. It's a theory that a conspiracy has taken place.

They didn't have the legal right.

> All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof.

Snowden proved that the NSA does not vacuum everything up in the US and only vacuums everything in a few countries. You seem to be reading different documents from the ones that Snowden released.

One of the strategies can be to completely poison information, as you said "label". In that way it would be hard to distinguish between "true" and "untrue", and in that way basically force researchers to even approaching subject. In that way only person from inside could uncover truth... I guess ...

And this is same problem like with corrupt government, if they hold all the keys it is very hard to overthrow dictator, as it is very hard for truth to surface out.

As an admin at BAH he was using his colleagues' passwords for discovery. He was willing to burn their careers to hack access to more leaks.

So much leaks that he could not vet these all. This was no Ellsberg tasked with copying some confidential papers and reading lies in them. It was wholesale collection of all Snowden could get his hands on.

Then, instead of making his point with his own whistleblower findings, he went to journalists and handed them over all the documents, instantly making them available to intelligence agencies all over the world, burning all NSA/CIA analysts with records in the dump (for instance, everyone who contributed to Intellipedia, which had zero reason to be in a dump meant for whistleblower purposes).

Then instead of facing justice (and there are whistleblower protections for doing the right thing), he cooperated with Wikileaks and fled to China and Russia, causing a permanent PR disaster for US intelligence with his new public speakings, book deals, and social media influencing career.

The reason Snowden's leaks got a lot of attention is that they "proved" (we never got confirmation that they were real) that data on Americans is being collected. We already knew, by law, that the Americans are allowed to fully spy on European civilians. That's how they are able to warn on impending terrorist attacks and improve their buy-in with European countries leadership (or how they are able to perfectly copy Germany-invented motors or Belgium-invented speech-to-text technology before these countries are even building it, because a strong US economy is a matter of national security).

Not particularly nitpicking.

However, Snowden risked his whole life. He was pretty sure that he will be sentenced as traitor, and putting him life on the line.

1. Good tradecraft means that, except for skilled IR folk, they wouldn't see mass exfil/C2.

2. American IR companies know what side of their bread is buttered on. From both employees' personal allegiances to their former employers and the company's active government contracts, there's not a lot of incentive to report on their own government's actions.

Maybe maybe not, but it can also be that you are a "opinion magnet" ;) See that's the fun in politics, agencies, diplomats and game of thrones, you can play mind/war-games. But often Secret services work much leaner and cleaner than you probably think, first you don't need complicated stuff to find a 'secret' and second, the more complicated the more errors can happen.

So you're essentially saying the revelations were a false flag operation? I considered that possibility, but Snowden's background is well researched and the first thing media outlets look at before publishing their findings. The Guardian probably thoroughly doxed him before publishing anything. And in interviews he comes across as sincere and genuinely politically passionate. There's no way someone could fake all that. Snowden is the real deal.

If the NSA wanted to showcase their 'box of tricks' then they would have other ways of doing that like fake leaks that have a bunch of decoy material to confuse their enemies; not the real/actual tooling that is used to surveil (as that would be stupid). They would release plausible-looking material that advertises their capability, but be scant on the details and mechanics of the tooling itself.

If it was an affair beneficial to NSA, please elaborate why non-US state actors didn't have their own Snowdens?

but what i found out is most people conducting interviews don't want to know and they don't want to hire nor work with anyone who does want to know the big T Truth. I have been able to tell the interview conversation tone just shut down after I mention Snowden or the Shadowbrokers. All of the interviewers were ex-DoD and/or ex-Intelligence. I could tell they would not be proceeding to hire me because they got very quiet and quickly transitioned to the "let's wrap this up" phase of the conversation.

it greatly puzzled me for a long time why would the class of civillian infosec workers be affraid of the knowledge of how NSA had ran circles around them in the dark and why would these workers on the front lines of security want to NOT know how to defend themselves and their customers?

maybe ex-DoD folks are scared of Snowden, because they were always forbidden from reading Snowden leaks, since they would be violating their classification authority by learning about top secrets for which they were not cleared to know. i find that funny and scary in an Emperor's New Clothes sense, that us unwashed civillians on the streets can know more about cyberwar than DoD's own cyberwarriors, because we can study public information, while DoD indoctrinated workers have to pretend the Snowden leaks and Shadowbrokers never happened. there is probably also a factor of shame and face saving that makes DoD infosec types choose to be willingly ignorant. Snowden and the Shadowbrokers were the biggest embarassments to NSA.

imagine you are NSA. you are untouchable, you have as good as an infinite black budget and you are above all laws. you have pulled off the biggest victory in intelligence history--for 12 years after the Patriot Act, you have been hacking everyone and spying on everyone and nobody has figured it out and nobody can prove a thing. then along comes Snowden and the Shadowbrokers and your whole cover is blown. that's gotta make anyone who drink the Pentagon's kool-aid pretty personally mad. so anyone else who comes along and is blabbing about things they read in Snowden leaks will be treated like an outcast and shunned for adding insult to injury.

Context? I remember that Snowden regarded PGP as a usable defence against his former bosses.

what this 1998 date means is that NSA TURMOIL--passive sensor ingest, had to exist PRIOR TO 2001.

this even screws Bill Binney's narrative that the system he designed--THINTHREAD, which he says would spy on all traffic without violating our privacy laws, was built in 1999-2000. THINTHREAD was ultimately canceled and Hayden chose STELLARWIND instead.

but this screencap show FASHIONCLEFT already existed in 1998. therefore NSA has been spying on the whole Internet for waaaay longer than the official narrative says.

i was one of those conspiracy theorists ranting on USENET about ECHELON back in 1998. turns out, we were RIGHT.

This kind of reputation makes them the an easy target for every other actor to take advantage of.

This tactic was invented by the KGB. It's not that they don't care, it's that if it looks like you did it, and there was no apparent attempt to conceal that it was you, then it actually seems more like you were framed by someone else and you didn't do it. In other words, the truth acts like its own disinformation campaign because people often assume the real criminal would try to conceal themselves.

This allows immense corruption and profiteering. However, its not all just "ma' capitalism" - there are very strong indicators that a socialist superstate is being constructed within this society, which is parasitically feeding on the corpse of America today. Many consider the US military industrial complex the largest socialist organization that ever existed - it certainly crosses a lot of the boxes.

Mind you, a lot of these projects are post-9/11 so I'm confident a lot of it has been a result of it and the massive financial injections that the US government put into counter-terrorism since then.

Finally, I like to think that the NSA and co don't want to advertise how much attempts they thwart; if they, for example, stop an attack every day, the people will become afraid of terrorists because incidents happen so often. But I'm not sure if they are being kept silent.

Their mission has become “collect it all”, but I think they (and a lot of commentators and even everyday people) can’t really imagine what a large percentage of intelligence is useless noise, deliberately wrong (such as counterintelligence but they don’t realise), just plain wrong (like most intel gathered from torture - people will say literally anything they think you want to hear), correct but misinterpreted, etc.. And it’s extremely hard to meaningfully sort through that much information. I expect they do expend a lot of effort trying to combat this, but historically I don’t believe they’re very good at it, and I’m sceptical machine learning and things like that is really going to help that much.

And then just watching the wrong people. Take the Boston bombing, for instance. There are reports that the key focus of groups like the DHS at the time in that area were the Occupy Boston protests, so the bombing happened even though the FBI had been tipped off about one of the bombers from Russian intelligence services. Then things like the NZ mosque attack, where this far-right wing white supremacist came from Australia and murdered a bunch of people. At the time, the media where I am in Australia was reporting FUD campaigns from Australian security agencies about ISIS and Islamic terrorism, radicalisation etc., so I imagine that’s where the focus was and he slipped through.

This goes way back throughout history. Just think of the massive amount of wasted resources surveilling suspected “communists and homosexuals” back in the day. Here they had agents actually infiltrating university communist groups. The groups got up to extremely dangerous things like going to protests - great use of millions of dollars of surveillance...

Given the documents and budgets which have leaked so far - it seems more sensible to assume that all hardware & software is compromised until proven otherwise. From the limited information provided so far we can see that if you use any Intel CPU, any Seagate/Hitachi/Fujitsu/Samsung hard drive, any version of windows, most commercially available routers, notepad++, or VLC - the NSA has access. Their scope is ridiculous.

but NSA has access to the emails, internal bug trackers and source code repos of the entire dev teams at all of those vendors. think how easy it would be to hack all firmware on an indistrial scale when you can cheat and read the blueprints?

NSA is the biggest cheater. i no longer consider them as being gods of cyberwar. rather, they merely tricked us all to believe NSA was not mass surveilling everyone, then we were blinded to the scale of what was really possible behind the curtain.

if we had the source code to the firmware of every hard drive, we could do exactly the same thing NSA did.

also, yes, do not ever trust a computer. remember the photo of David Miranda's macbook motherboard after his laptop was siezed when he was connecting to a flight in London and acting as the courier between Laura Poitras in Berlin and Greenwald in Brazil? the photo showed GCHQ melted like a dozen chip on his motherboards. when that photo came out, it was puzzling, because the Snowden leaks about NSA hacking firmwares had not yet leaked. in hindsight, now we know. NSA and FVEYs physically destroyed every chip that they could implant, out of fear that someone else could BADBIOS attack David's macbook and steal the Snowden cache.

Could well be a threat there but I want actual evidence when the threat bogeyman is invoked in the name of more power. I believed the WMD lie. I hope I have learned from that.

If we believe the NSA then your question is exactly the right one to ask and has some obvious implications.

Can you proof that or is that maybe something the CIA or the Pentagon would say?

Encryption is against lower level non-state actors.

State-level surveillance can be eliminated through physical data diodes but it is would be very capital intensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

If that public Cloud is from an American company: obviously no. And whether you prefer some Chinese intelligence service having access to your data probably depends on what you want to do.

Yes with two conditions: 1. your public cloud is run by an Amazon, Google, Microsoft-type company (FANMAG) 2. You trust the company to lean on rule of law.

1. Very few providers have the capability and desire to put the work into supply chain security, things like OpenTitan, etc.

2. They might hand over your data in response to warrant, but their systems are designed to prevent covert extraction of data. The company should have a track-record of pushing back against overly broad warrants.

No, because cloud providers are one subpeona, court order or warrant away from surveillance and exfiltration of your data without your knowledge.

If the DHS deems you a threat, then all proceedings can happen through secret courts and you'll be none the wiser to it happening, and you'll get a gag order on top of it.

there are 2 sites which archive the complete Snowden leaks:

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=spi...

https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.c...