Edward Snowden 'missing' in Hong Kong | Hacker News Reader

Edward Snowden 'missing' in Hong Kong

bbc.co.uk

206 pointsFinbarr92 comments

There is all this talk about how he made a mistake going to Hong Kong because Hong Kong actually has a strong extradition treaty with the United States (although ultimately, mainland China can veto anything if it chooses to do so). Snowden did not make a mistake going to Hong Kong, he was exceptionally clever because most likely he knows more about NSA spying than just the domestic spying that he revealed. He probably knows details of international spying and how the U.S. manages to snoop on countries through technological means. By sitting in Hong Kong he is signaling that he could easily defect to the Chinese and reveal real damage to National Security or perhaps the U.S. will cut a deal with him to let him go home without much jail time. Also, at a time when the U.S. has been admonishing the Chinese for spying, this would be a propaganda gold mine for the Chinese as well as an intelligence windfall if he were to defect to their country. The U.S. would be seething if this were to happen but the Chinese know that the Americans are so tied up with business deals with China that they would not or could not do much to damage relations between the two countries. Snowden could have went to Iceland first but his trump card is sensitive security information that U.S. real adversaries would like to have. Iceland could not use that information.

This is sensationalist use of the word "missing". The BBC doesn't know where Snowden currently is -- that's all the article says.

Especially if he "checked out" of his hotel. That suggests it's a lot more purposeful than the maid coming to his room and finding him "gone."

... and the reason he checked out might be that the BBC (along with other media and governments) knew where he was.

Exactly, this article doesn't deserve to be on the frontpage of HN. It's sensationalism, we really don't need to know where is Snowden at all time. It's not a sitcom.

Stuck in Hong Kong?

Short on money?

On the run from the Triads or the Man?

Come stay at the (formerly) fabulous Chung King Mansions!

The only hotel you can live in 24/7, get a job and raise a family in. In balmy Kowloon! Rooms start at $30.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XiRF1OOuw8&list=PL12CEAFFE67...

Have you stayed there?

No, but I've heard stories.

I have, as a young oblivious backpacker. I chuckled. As far as I remember, the room was basically a broom closet with just enough room for a single bed and the door to swing open. Downstairs was ... interesting. But I enjoyed my mansion :)

I've stayed there, too. I felt like I was living in the movie Blade Runner.

Stayed right next door in another "Mansion" place -- with my whole 5-person family. Had a great time. We got one of the few family-sized rooms. Big enough for two beds + a bathroom. And if one person got out of the way, the other could walk through the room. Plus, when we asked the housekeeper, she gave us a third mattress and extra towel!

Actually, the kids loved it -- the previous two nights we stayed in a Teepee on a beach. First night great. By the second night we'd had enough of the mosquitoes and rugby-playing boy scouts. By comparison, the Mansion was "Mom, Dad, there are no mosquitoes! And it's so quiet when we close the windows! And air conditioning!" They didn't want to leave the room for two days.

Had to tell the kids not to wander the building without us though.

Don't even have to leave the building to buy hashish.

Fascinating, I wish my German was better. The Broad Group is potentially building their 220 floor building [1] which would seem like something you could do in Hong Kong and profit quite handsomely from. I suspect though that the Broad group is thinking about this sort of environment as a potential result.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Group

There's a few tourist tours of the mansions as well. It's been described as a smaller, nicer, friendlier version of Kowloon Walled City with licensed dentists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Mansions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_walled_city

$30 is too much. I stayed there for $7-$10. Hint: negotiate in languages other than English, yes, tens of languages are spoken in that building, with "hoteliers" from every continent.

Sounds like it's not so much "he's missing" as "he checked out of his hotel".

Thus far it seems like Mr. Snowden has taken the utmost precaution in maintaining OPSEC while releasing these documents. I wouldn't be surprised if he was long gone from Hong Kong days ago or never there to begin with.

Or, maybe he was there and didn't fully think through his choice of hiding places until it became abundantly obvious that Hong Kong was a terrible choice.

So far all of his decisions have been very well calculated. I think this is apart of his reveal, to either keep the focus on the story, or maintain some type of safety and appear to have disappeared into China's intelligence agency....the real point I think is to keep the focus on the reveal.

If you watch the video - the interviewee says that he's been planning this for a few years. I bet this is more calculated than people would like to imagine.

Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months. That sounds really interesting, I thought he would have worked there for longer since he claims he was planning this for a long time and the reporter said he was in contact for months.

If you read what the Wash Post reporter said Snowden tried to get him to release the entire slide deck. Why couldn't he put it on the internet? It is also interesting to me that he said this required a lot of preparation. If he had the accesses he claimed he had copying classified slide decks would be risky for him but not something that would take a long time.

He also claimed that the NSA could track all emails in the USA and he (or an analyst not sure what he meant) could access the email of the president if he had the personal address. If that is the case, surely evidence of that type of deep telecommunications interception would be more important than PRISM especially since he raised that claim specifically to explain why he did it. With the access he had it would be easy to prove.

I don't know what to make of his decisions. Not saying he isn't who he said he is but I think there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Taking classified data away from the organization in question may not be trivial. Email is probably monitored, using USB storage is probably not allowed, printers are probably monitored as well, CDR drives might not be readily available, internet access is probably quite limited and monitored.

On the other hand, he was apparently a system administrator of some sort so perhaps he had ways of getting data out of their system that other employees would not have had available to them.

If he was a systems admin, there were undoubtedly other system admins around to keep an eye on each other. If he got data out, he likely walked out with it physically in some way, or there was a severe breakdown in the network security.

> If he was a systems admin, there were undoubtedly other system admins around to keep an eye on each other.

Of course. The question is are sys-admins as effective at watching other sys-admins as they are at watching regular users? It seems reasonable that they are not, if only because sys-admins are more skilled than other users. Sys-admins likely also implicitly trust other sys-admins more than other users, not intentionally of course, but enough to bias their ability to see things.

That's why you frequently deploy moles who try to get away with something (e.g, with writing a password on a post-it), and seriously reprimand persons who do not report that.

All your personnel must be paranoid; you cannot get there with only the real break-in/data theft attempts, as those are too rare.

Also, you regularly shift the roles, turning an operator into a watcher and vice versa.

Finally, you cannot have someone teamed up with the same person for weeks, because they might befriend each other and start to let things slip.

> Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months.

I don't really get this Snowden guy. From what I've read about him, I don't see why someone like him would be given access to the whole picture in the way he claims to have had access to. Unless someone was positioning him with the intention that he would become a whistleblower /conspiracy

I just have a hard time buying that of all the people that have worked for the NSA, of all the people who must have had access to what he did, only one would become a big whistleblower. Either somebody dropped the ball in psych profiling Snowden, or this must have been intentional, right?

First of all, there have been several NSA whistleblowers that have spoken on this issue. William Binney even gave the CCC a copy of some code that was a similar model to what his team initially designed for the NSA. Second, his current job at a contractor is relatively new, but before joining Booz Allen he worked directly under an intelligence agency.

Where is it recorded that he worked directly under an intelligence agency? (Honest question; i've not found that.)

He worked for the CIA on IT security since approximatly 2004-2005.

In 2007 he was stationed in Switzerland (CIA), he left the CIA in 2009.

In 2009 he started to work for a private contractor in the U.S and Japan which had him stationed at a NSA facility.

I don't get all the media reports that he only been on the inside for 3 months. This adds up to 7+ years.

It all on his wiki page with footnotes to sources.

Another scenario is that the NSA (and friends) are just far looser with "secrets" than we would have imagined. It is incredible to me that the NSA has almost entry-level contractor employers -- who have little loyalty or long-term career aspirations within the NSA -- running the show. Simply incredible.

He worked for the intelligence apparatus in various other capacities. Booz Allen just had the misfortune of being the one who hired him recently when he decided to do this.

> Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months. That sounds really interesting, I thought he would have worked there for longer since he claims he was planning this for a long time and the reporter said he was in contact for months.

That actually makes me wonder if he actually is Edward Snowden. I mean... who could we possibly ask to check?

> If you read what the Wash Post reporter said Snowden tried to get him to release the entire slide deck. Why couldn't he put it on the internet?

Credibility, perhaps?

In other government/megacorp settings, contractors can end up staying in the same position for years working for different companies. Back in the early 2000's I worked for a State government where some of the contractors had been around for twenty years working for Digital, IBM, Dell, HP, a half dozen companies you never heard of, etc.

There tends to be a small world around big organizations, as social proof is important for getting jobs and closing deals.

I'll just throw in my two cents: It seems pretty simple from my point of view. People switch between companies that win bids and contracts. Those companies now need to staff and they staff with the people from the companies that lost bids. The people that are picked up happen to know the systems that they're dealing with.

Also word gets around to which contractors look "hot" compared to others. They start getting resumes from people looking to jump ship.

Combine that with laws that stipulate some amount of contracting money must go to small minority owned businesses... yeah.

"Reveal" is a verb, not noun, historically; that said, it seems many are copying many others, to cast reveal as a noun. Random observation.

It's odd, isn't it? -- Considering we have this perfectly good noun "revelation", whose connotations are, to my mind, more than apt. Oh well.

I don't think the words are equivalent. "Reveal" (as a noun, like it or not... :] ) carries connotations of showiness and intentional manufactured drama; it's the explicit act of making information available. A "revelation" on the other hand, is something that just happens, a sudden awareness of information (which may have previously been available).

if you want showiness and intentional manufactured drama, I would go with "unveiling".

Commenters at http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63056/reveal-vs-r... say it appears in the 1973 OED, possibly originally from cinema.

This is a pet peeve of mine as well. Another common one is when people cast "addict" as a verb and inflect it to create "addicting", seemingly unaware of the perfectly adequate "addictive".

According to the dictionary, these are all valid forms but I just find them irksome for some reason.

Mine is "performant" used to mean pretty much anything you want it to mean. It might mean "high performance" (this algorithm is performant - highly performant is even funnier) or "performs better" (more performant).

I'm veering dangerously away from the topic with this, but according to Henry Hitchings, "'Reveal' has been used as a noun since the 16th century. Even in its narrow broadcasting context, as a term for the final revelation at the end of a show, it has been around since the 1950s."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/henry-hitchings/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hitchings

Just thought I'd throw my two cents in on that, since the history of English is a particular interest of mine.

Indeed. This is not someone I would want to be wagering my modest chess skills against. His choices have been extremely well calculated, with a clear understanding of what is being sacrificed every step of the way. He gave an interview which may have been enough for folks with sources to figure out which hotel he was staying at. Checking out and going to an undisclosed location makes perfect sense.

Additionally the choice of Hong Kong and the timing is looking more and more careful to me. The fact that there is a temporary moratorium on extraditions and it is during the Sunnylands Summit cannot be calculations that escaped him.

One thing for sure... I would not want to be working for the State Department right now.

He planed this really well, I've been almost more facisnated with his execution then the story.

One if the most amazing things that some may not know (if you look through my submissions - I only have 3), he pressured the Post to publish by going to the Guardian. Even the Post consulted gov officials (which is understandable) prior to publishing.

If he continued to stay at that hotel, it would of been his folly I believe. I'm sure his anxiety level is off the charts, so to stick to these well calculated decisions is almost like hearing a Jason Bourne action flick.

Could just as easily be Edward Snowden 'hiding' in Hong Kong. In his position, I wouldn't exactly be checking in on foursquare right now either.

"You just became the mayor of Snowden's Hiding Place, congratulations!"

Trust me -- if Snowden wasn't anywhere he wanted to be, Greenwald would know and would be letting everyone else know.

Hypothetically, I mean I'm sure he's got it all planned out, but he could convincingly change his appearance, stock up on supplies and a backpack, and grab a ferry over to one of the nearby islands to hide out until the news dies down a little bit. Then it's pretty trivial to make your way south-east. I mean he can't expect to get back safely to any Western country any time soon..

Appears from cursory video vs. hotel website that he was using the less expensive room types at this hotel: 'club rooms' or 'mira suites'. http://www.themirahotel.com/en/rooms/room-choices.aspx

There's some really good food around there. Seems such a shame to limit yourself to room service when you're facing jail!

(Edit: What kind of warped mind would downvote such witty and perceptive analysis? Hahaha.)

I imagine that he will keep moving until he gets asylum or some guarantees from the Chinese government.

... or is pardoned: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...

Not that I am holding out a lot of hope, but the more signatures the better. It does seem like the best outcome; we need greater transparency, and whistle-blowers help with that substantially.

not sure how it works in the US, but my understanding of a pardon is that you have to be trialed and convicted first, you can't be pardoned in blanco.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Pardon_of_Nixon

oh wow.

ridiculous petitions aside, too bad he doesn't have any reason to pardon him - it's his last office anyway and the poor dude already put all his cards on the table.

If we collect enough signatures, he'll have to revisit if he wants to retain any credibility. Of course, "enough signatures" might well be upwards of 300 million...

You can be granted immunity.

This is not the case in the US - the President's power to pardon is pretty broad, and has been used before conviction numerous times.

But normally you pardon rich people that did something stupid, like Wall Street bankers who commit fraud.

There would certainly be some unusual things about this pardon, but none of those have a bearing on whether it is within the power of the presidency.

It seems entirely sensible that after he gave the interview to The Guardian, he left his hotel and found other accommodations before his identity became public.

I would not be surprised if The Guardian are in touch with him, but are not publicly stating so until they have a good reason to.

Why would anyone who worked at NSA and is publicly known to have had a very high security clearance go to Hong Kong in the first place? Wouldn't Chinese intelligence agencies love to get a hold of such a person and interrogate him?

CIA was down the road from his hotel at the embassy.

I am not sure if he really had a plan there.

The CIA has a office 'down the road' from every hotel.

I wonder if this will go the way of Mcafee.

That depends, is Edward Snowden plainly out of his mind like McAfee clearly was even before the murder flap?

What if he is not actually in Hong Kong? Just a ploy

Hopefully he's making his was to a country with not extradition back to the States.

I'm certain that the US government is able to easily track someone traveling on their own legitimate passport. So that kind of ruse makes no sense.

It's sort of a shame he didn't travel to the EU, as I suspect he'd get better support from most countries and would be able to travel in the EU without a passport.

This guy is former CIA...

CIA does not imply field agent. If you worked for the CIA behind a desk for years, does that give you 'secret agent' skills?

No, but I bet you would allude to it at the bar.

He worked as a "technical assistant" for the CIA. He probably picked up a few tricks during his tenure but he didn't go through the clandestine service trainee program, which are the people you're thinking of when you think of spooky CIA types.

Or so they're telling us.

Not that I disbelieve on this count, but who was doing just what in the CIA seems like something we don't tend to know with certainty.

That didn't take long.

Can't they use the NSA logs to find him? hah

Welp he's dead.

Edit: (Sarcasm, I can't imagine the US being this obvious/idiotic)

You're still giving the US the benefit of the doubt post 9/11? Brave.

You mean, you can't imagine the US government executing its own citizens for speaking out against the government in a foreign country without trial? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

The idea that Anwar al-Awlaki was only guilty of 'speaking out against the government' is bananas.

Anwar al-Awlaki may have been a terrorist or he may not have been, however he wasn't tried in a court of law so he wasn't guilty of anything.

The above statement looks very awkward but we shouldn't advocate extra-judicial killings.

On the other hand, America would have shown no regard for the citizenship of the enemy in the equivalent situation of a German-American serving in the Nazi armies.

Congress has told the President to use military force to eradicate Al Qaeda, al-Awlaki was in AQ, so even that isn't what you make it seem.

I am a guy in a 3rd world country. Your government could assassinate me tomorrow, and then simply say that I was in Al Qaeda. They have proof of this, but of course they can't reveal that information for reasons of "National Security".

You think this is OK, because your Congress has given the president authority to kill anyone who (according to whoever is holding the trigger) is involved in that organisation.

Fuck you.

"Military force" doesn't actually mean indiscriminate killing is OK, otherwise we wouldn't consider My Lai a massacre.

So my government would have to, at the very least, demonstrate that you actually play some operational role within AQ where a targeted killing of you would appreciably impair the military capacity of AQ.

This was the logic used by the U.S. to send what was essentially a kill mission against the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto during WWII, but it probably helped end that war faster so people don't seem to complain as much about that one, for some reason.

But either way, if you're a non-U.S. citizen in a 3rd world country then for whatever reason you're not someone that our civil libertarians in the U.S. care about, as they only care about the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.

I'm assuming when you say that they have proof that you are implying that the government is pretending they have proof but won't show it. If you're actually in AQ and involved in the violent death and destruction of Muslims, Americans, civilians and our allies throughout the world then I can't honestly say that I'd feel too sorry for you...

If 'you' (not you personally) really thought My Lai was a massacre then there would have been some more serious sentencing around that event.

From the relevant wikipedia page:

"While 26 U.S. soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at Mỹ Lai, only Second Lieutenant William Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest."

Putting this event forward as an example of how well the US deals with military excesses is really not clever. See Fallujah for a more recent example.

My point is not that the U.S. "deals well" with military excesses. Like most other nations we have a hard time coming to grips at the time of an atrocity with the blood on our hands. We do usually come around though, such as My Lai which is now considered a massacre even by the U.S. Army, which now uses My Lai (among other notable crises) as a case study in their officer training curriculum at West Point. The massacre is taught as a "massacre" in our history books, and our guilt is not shirked or avoided.

On the other hand you'll even today see people claim that the German Heer (Army) wasn't so bad during WWII, that they were simply a professional army that wasn't involved in atrocities like the actual villains such as the Nazis, the Waffen SS, and the Gestapo. It's not actually true; senior German Army officers were just as involved in atrocities as the rest, even if they didn't participate in the worst extremes. I won't say that the current German Army training curriculum and senior leadership don't look at that aspect of their own history (in fact I'm sure they do), but if more armies had been like America's over the past 100 years world history would have been very different.

My point instead related to the comment about Anwar al-Awlaki. He was playing a military game and was treated as such, nothing more or less. If he didn't want to be treated by military rules then he shouldn't have joined a quasi-military organization that ended up at war with the U.S. But once it became a martial conflict different rules apply, including the Law of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Conventions.

Anwar-alAlaqui was a lot closer to being an Alex Jones, or Glenn Beck type of figure than being some terrorist mastermind; he was basically killed for calling for spiritual struggle against the United States Government. There's not much in the way of evidence that he was more than a loudmouth with a youtube channel. And while I wouldn't feel to broken up if Glenn Beck's RV were taken out in the parking lot of the Preakness; I would still object on principle if it were the US Government doing it, rather than one of his creditors.

"There's not much in the way of evidence that he was more than a loudmouth with a youtube channel."

That he recruited and trained Abdulmutallab (underwear bomber) alone puts him several categories out of "loudmouth" status.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/world/middleeast/anwar-al-...

And also IIRC he had contact with Major Nidal Hasan before Hasan killed all those soldiers at Ft. Hood.

PSYOPS is a military specialty just as much as shooting rifles and digging ditches...

This close after the leak? Surely give it some time before snatching him, this is such a hot story right now that people are going to draw this conclusion...

(Although obviously China etc might also want him for a few "questions")

Hahaha. Way too much credit is being given.

China is a big player here, too. And they don't shy away from kidnapping.

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