Edward Snowden: Classified US data shows Hong Kong hacking targets
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Just because they are Chinese means they don't deserve basic human liberties? Just because you live in a different country doesn't mean you lose these rights, they may not be recognized but you are still entitled to them.
Furthermore, there's an extremely large cognitive dissonance here. China owns trillions of US national debt... this is debt that the leaders of our country have given willingly, and gladly pocketed the resulting cash. How is that any less treason than alerting our lenders that their systems have been broken into?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
Chinese, American, British, Pakistani, Russian, French, it doesn't matter. The targeting of innocents by drones is wrong no matter where you are from, why does the right to privacy and property (or happiness, depending on your school of philosophy) not follow that same logic?
Perhaps we should be more concerned that we are continuing to pick petty fights with our fellow man over ideologies, rather than the fact that one man is perceived to have violated our specific ideology. But I guess my idealist is showing.
My 2 cents.
They were completely behind him when he revealed the NSA was doing a lot of spying. Now that he's basically given our enemies our playbook, they all think he's a traitor and should be treated as such. This crossing into releasing documents also gives credence to some of the conspiracy people saying he was a Chinese plant from the get go.
Someone brought up an interesting point which is the incredible hypocrisy on both isles. Republicans were ok when Bush got nailed with warrant-less wiretaps and the Democrats lost their minds. Now, it's the Republicans losing their minds and the Democrats seem to be ok with it.
Also, just an FYI, the FISA court has been around since 1978, it wasn't until after 9/11 did people finally know about it. It's also important to note they've never rejected a warrant which was brought before the court:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...
"Snowden said secret and illegal attacks on Hong Kong computers by the US National Security Agency, which he said had been taking place since 2009, had recorded a success rate of more than 75 per cent. One of the targets he identified was the Chinese University of Hong Kong, home to the Hong Kong Internet Exchange - a central hub of servers that most web traffic in the city passes through."
"Political pressure is mounting on the government to demand answers from the United States over how and to what extent Hong Kong has been targeted by Washington's top-secret cyberspying programme, exposed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden."
"During an official visit to London, Legislative Council president Jasper Tsang Yok-sing became one of the city's first top political figures to comment on the hacking allegations.
"Hong Kong people will feel worried if the allegations are found to be backed by facts," Tsang told the BBC's Chinese Service, adding: "The Hong Kong government should launch an investigation."
"What will the government do to ensure it will not happen again? Will it take action against the US government or demand remedies?"
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1261179/hong-kong...
Also, there exists no human rights against having your computer hacked by a foreign government. It might be illegal in 10 different ways (actually, I don't even think it is, given the relative novelty of the crime and the slowness of international law), but it's not a human rights issue.
Of course the Chinese government also hacks US civilian targets, primarily American tech companies, but two wrongs don't make a right.
Sure it is; US law differs greatly on the two groups. So does Chinese law.
> Innocent people's privacy is still being violated on a large scale.
And if China cares to protect its citizens from foreign interference or espionage, it has many options.
What I'm saying is that the effect of either action is more or less the same. The NSA is secretly obtaining the personal information of a lot of people who are in no way a threat to the US. Whether those people are American or Chinese doesn't matter one way or the other to me.
Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you can exaggerate your point. China doesn't "own trillions of US national debt" like you suggest. Plus that debt is "given willingly, and gladly" to them because they purchase it. We are after all a capitalist system. If China is willing to pay more for US debt than Japan (who holds somewhere between 80% and 90% of the amount that China holds last time I check), than they should have the right to purchase it. Just because they are Chinese doesn't mean they don't deserve the same basic free market opportunities.
Perhaps we should be more concerned with the issue at hand instead of tangentially mentioning an issue we don't know a whole lot about in the hopes that no one will point out our mistakes.
My 2 cents.
[1] http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/ti...
[1] Minus the "trillions" bit... see posts below. Perhaps "over a trillion" would have been a better phrase.
A passage like this perpetuates the misconception that China owns a dangerous portion of US debt. It is stretching the facts of the case so it better supports your argument. They own 1.25 trillion, which is not "trillions". It is also less than either the Federal Reserve or Social Security trust hold and right around the last numbers I saw for private US holders. The phrasing you use to explain the transaction makes it seem like the US government shouldn't sell this type of debt to China. In your post you are claiming that the Chinese should have the same level of human rights as us but that we shouldn't provide them the same level of economic rights? Finally it is also disingenuous to say that our leaders "gladly pocketed the resulting cash". That implies some sort of embezzlement, which is just furthered by your comparison to treason.
Selling debt is a critical part of the economic equation for almost all world governments (yes, even China). It annoys me when people state that selling debt to China is somehow destroying this country or causing long term damage.
The point of this currency manipulation was to artificially keep Chinese goods cheap for export. This is why we have a perpetual trade imbalance with China. This has hurt U.S. manufacturers and cost untold numbers of American jobs.
It's silly to think that we owe China any favors for manipulating their currency for their own advantage and our detriment, and bringing it into this debate to try to make China seem like some poor victim is really, really reaching.
Unfortunately discussions about God in the general tech community are virtually impossible. Prov 29:9 talks about this too.
I agree with you that the Chinese deserve the same dignity and respect that Americans and every other person in the world. That Schaeffer series is really dated, a bit corny, and difficult to get past the production values. But the content is still bang on.
This means that we will never all agree on an unalienable set of rights, but so what? With apologies to Sir Charles Napier, let us all act according to our own sense of morality.
Without God, all morality and ethics are completely voluntary.
You consider that the creator has to be God. Why?
Imagine that an intelligent, very advanced extraterrestrial form of life created DNA, and life itself in planet earth.
It always amazes me how intelligent people could believe in evolution on earth totally isolated of the trillions of billions of galaxies out there. If you believe in evolution on earth(that just chaos and chance could create life), the probability that life itself was created outside earth is way higher.
Discussions of hard believes(sex, politics and religion) are very hard in any public heterogenous group. I remember when Reddit was occupied by atheist they believed they were free there, but that was only if you were atheist.
In a sense, I think that, in the absence of evidence that particularly demands panspermia over more local theories of the emergence of life, this is a bigger problem than the "space is big" problem.
So basically even if you go with "aliens made us", you've still got to have abiogenesis for those aliens, or the aliens that created those aliens, or the aliens that created....
Running to panspermia to avoid the hypothesis of life beginning on earth out of natural processes is just silly. Silly because Occams Razor slices it off, and silly because it doesn't even get you away from life being a natural phenomenon.
The concept of certain rights being inalienable is a moral proposition that does not require a Creator -- certainly, the existence of a Creator who is also a moral lawgiver and who has defined certain rights as inalienable is a popular explanation for inalienable rights, but its certainly not a necessary condition for such rights.
So he has no idea what foreign entity the NSA is targeting or why, yet he decides to warn them about it? This is supposed to be ethical, responsible whistleblowing?
I'm OK with whistleblowing of illegal actions performed by secret services (enough of this sh*t!). Though I don't know whether he's right regarding the illegality of NSA's actions.
This is public knowledge but never spoken about, Snowden was looking for years [0] to find something to leak. He didn't stumble across this and have an overwhelming moral urge to do "the right thing."
I'll take the very unpopular opinion: I have a very strong feeling he is almost completely wrong in what he thinks he knows. [1]
[0] If you read the timeline you will see this. I'm looking for better sources, as I read it directly, but can't find at the moment. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/timeline-edward-snowdens-life/...
[1] This tone of feeling wronged and spied upon is borne of complete ignorance. http://news.yahoo.com/edward-snowden-completely-wrong-104432...
I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint and I think the entire reporting by The Guardian/Greenwald has been shit. Greenwald does not appear technically competent in the slightest and there's no mention in the reporting I've seen of anyone with any technical knowledge being involved and so we simply have no idea what is in the 'thousands' of documents that Snowden has taken. And neither does Greenwald.
The complete lack of any standard for evidence here, so long as it confirms preconceived notions, has been stupefying. People trotting out his high pay as proof of competence, when in any other context such an argument would be considered so stupid that it's beyond need of retort. His flimsy and dubious claims about being able to expose every secret of the entire intelligence community sound so unbelievable that no competent engineer could accept them. And the slides themselves -- for fuck's sake they say, at a maximum, almost nothing actionable. Do we even know if those were created by the NSA, or by Booz contractors?
A sober, rational look at his claims would have to yield the conclusion that he's confused about what he thinks he knows. He certainly sounds like it.
This is intelligence, where misdirection and outright deception are ways of life. Why should we take anything he--or what anyone involved in this--says at face value?
An excerpt from this article (http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/edward-snowden-is-co...):
> Baker says the government built in as many controls and oversights as it could think of. “Two different presidents from two different parties with very different perspectives. Two different Intelligence committees led by two different parties. A dozen judges chosen from among the life-appointed judiciary. None of them thought this was legally problematic,” Baker says. “And one guy says, ‘Yeah, I disagree, so I’m going to blow it up.’ If the insistence is, ‘It only satisfies me if it’s out in public,’ then we’re not talking about intelligence-gathering. We’re not even talking about law enforcement. We’re talking about research. And I’m not sure you can run a large country in a dangerous world just by doing open-source research.”
> Other advocates of the NSA operation say the sheer vastness of the program is what helps shield citizens. “Individuals are protected by the anonymity granted by the quantity of information,” says Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor. “It’s just too difficult to spy on such a vast number of people in a way that’s meaningful.”
I know that we Americans like to see al qaeda around every corner. But, for instance, when you target a university's system in a non-Muslim country, the odds are much better that you're conducting industrial espionage than that you're targeting al qaeda.
At the least, from a public policy point of view, it shows the hypocrisy of recent articles in the USA complaining about the extent of Chinese hacking into US civilian targets.
It's completely possible that these computers (or netblocks) were used as jumping off points for attacks against the U.S. or U.S. companies. We'll probably never know, but there certainly isn't enough information in the article to determine whether or not this was legitimate counterintelligence activity or whether these computers were reasonably targeted.
It seems out of character to go from "I'm not trying to get anyone hurt/in trouble, just showing the public what's wrong." to "Here's some info about China WHAT NOW USA!?"
So is the entire concept of espionage!
The entire purpose of espionage is to convince people in other countries to break their oaths and tell you their secrets.
If this guy doesn't like the morally gray or dark areas of intelligence, why did he spend 7 years in the industry?
"Patriotism is Bigotry"
The status of his four computers (whether in his possession, or hidden elsewhere in HK) is significant because China could overrule HK and get its hands on all of Snowden's data if he's arrested.
I personally trust Snowden's actions, and believe his personal motives are ethical, albeit controversial.
国民我相信，美国和中国政府不相信。
See related NY Times article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880362
So he is offering aid to the Chinese government in the form of top secret US data. I understand the need to have whistle blowers and respect that some things need light shined on them. However, I draw the line at specifically assisting foreign governments who are often hostile to democracy and the West. If the reverse happened and a Chinese security contractor fled to the U.S. with state secrets I would be less worried but I do think that person would be a traitor to China.
The handlers often turn the guy over once he's outlived his usefulness to his homeland, or eventually he gets gotten.
Snowden's play here seems to be that he assumes the U.S. is going to lock him up for life or worse, so he's throwing his lot in with China and showing up with, "Hey, here you go! Loads of free stuff!"
But he apparently doesn't know much about the Chinese, or the history of turncoats and how these things usually play out.
Nobody trusts a traitor, not even if he showed up with plentiful offerings. It's like having a gal cheat on her husband with you, then tell you she wants to divorce him and marry you. No chance of her doing the same thing to you now, right?
This is more or less what the NSA is supposed to be doing, and many Americans are going to openly support these activities. It will make many much more sympathetic to accusations of espionage against Snowden.
Undermines the privacy concerns raised earlier, unfortunately.
Why is it okay that US government institution is above the law in this regard? How can people feel okay with governmental institutions breaking the law?
I suspect most Americans are comfortable with government operating outside the laws of other countries that are viewed as having an adversarial relationship with the US. Individuals may differ on this, but Snowden's credibility will be lost in the court of public opinion if he starts handing over information to China.
Of course the law states an exception for such cases, and usually includes(at least as far as nordic countries are concerned, which of course has no relation to the law in US, but it's something I am more familiar with) a statement which requires/encourages "least required force" too. So you can't just beat someone up in the name of "self defense".
The public opinion itself, as far as it seems to be, is that whatever is good as long as it's in the interest of US, be it morally justified or not. For example violating the privacy of foreign internet users is all good and somehow justified because "it keeps US citizens safe". Yeah right.
The interesting thing is that the U.S. system seems to function from within the head of the accused: given the situation as you perceived it, did you believe you had no other options other than deadly force on your attacker? While your description of the Nordic system indicates that it functions from a more dispassionate, third-party observer's perspective.
If you fear for your life or are in danger of serious bodily harm you normally have the right to use deadly force (sometimes you must also have no way to escape, but let's just assume you're clear to use deadly force). Once you're in that situation it's advantageous to actually use that force. You wouldn't try to shoot someone in a hard-to-hit area like their knee or shoulder because as you say, if you had the time or perceived the danger to be low enough to line up for a shot like that, you were probably not in a situation so extreme that would warrant use of deadly force. It would be legally more defensible to go all Mozambique drill on somebody on put two in the chest and one in the head.
However, given that you are in the situation where you must defend yourself, but where deadly force would not be allowed, proportional response is usually still the operative concept.
If someone comes at you with a bat and you manage to disarm them that doesn't give you carte blanche in the U.S. to beat the attacker to within an inch of their life.
And what should happen with the Chinese higher ups who authorized hacking teams to infiltrate the U.S. and other Western targets?
Further, who gets to decide what should happen and why, exactly, that's what should happen?
No country is going to deport the people running its defense programs to countries those defense programs are being run against, unless it's surrendering unconditionally and that's one of the demands it must yield to.
The whole act of "gathering foreign intelligence" seems very immoral to me. Saying that everybody does it is no justification, neither is saying that it is a requirement for national security, because national security threats, as I see it, in the US, are a consequence of US the invasive and offensive foreign politics and military presence. While I understand that there's an inherent need for national security, I fail to see how that justifies breaching the privacy of foreign/domestic targets if the same issue can be dealt with by changing the stance on foreign nations through foreign and military politics.
Just as it is immoral for me to probe around my neighbours house to see if he has plans to break into mine, it is immoral to breach foreign security measures even if they are digital. Things like this should not be just shrugged at, be the perpetrator US, Chinese, Russian or Middle-Eastern.
So is suggesting that a guy who did something totally legal in his country (UK) should be extradited to the US to face charges there.
This is a very immature view of how countries interact with each other.
I wasn't aware there were ones that applied to persons/institutions OUTSIDE the country.
What if those computers are breaking into computers in your country? While I wouldn't be surprised if we are involved in things like this more broadly, we have no way of knowing, from the information presented, if this was the result of counter-espionage attempts.
Perhaps, the court of popular opinion might have swayed the forces that be into thinking different. Looking at other whistleblowers like Manning would only lead a foolish person to believe that likely.
As a result, I firmly believe Snowden used this as his get out of jail card to gain sympathy from Hong Kong residents. The US and its citizens already failed him, why would he place his life in their hands? He very clearly stated he was going to place his life in the hands of Hong Kong and its rule of law, not the US.
You can number the countries in this world who would be powerful enough to withstand US pressure.
Never forget he is only 29 without an escape plan you dont make this kind of journey. If he has to live his remaining life in China/HK he is probably fine with that.
And please step out of your box it does not matter where someone is from. Now everyone is screaming "traitor traitor" and you all forget what he uncovered and brought to main media attention.
But soon he will be forgotten marked as a traitor and everything will move back to square one. And secret courts will grant agencies powers nobody knows about :).
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/06/13/...
Snowden, a US citizen, chose to leak the documents to Guardian and not New York Times, meant to be published while he is in Hong Kong, which is under Chinese rule in the matters of foreign policy.
I'm genuinely trying to understand as to why he didn't trust a single person from his country? With the claims of the access he made, it should have been far easier to find one, without going to a non-US newspaper* and boarding a plane to a nation that is not on exactly the friendliest terms to US.
(* Nothing against Guardian, it's just that the visible pieces of the puzzle do not seem to fit together.)
It is very hard to believe that he had sweeping access levels. For one, NSA has its own chip manufacturing facilities, teams of mathematicians and security experts. Even if we don't know how NSA works, we can deduce from its contributions to open source: selinux, Apache Accumulo. Surely, they are expected to have tighter systems.
Besides, he was an employee of a contractor. Even less reason to provide elevated access to him. So, if he has material in his hands, than his security clearance would allow, then it is way more surprising.
Snowden's statements ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
Edited: grammar.
Update: thanks to zecho and brown9-2 for their comments; Snowden leaked it to an American.
This is untrue. Snowden contacted The Washington Post first, according to their account, but when they did not move as quickly as he would like, he approached The Guardian.
However, the accounts from the Washington Post and The Guardian conflict with one another, so it's possible he worked with both in tandem while trying not to tip his hand to either.
You're going to trust the people in power to make the judgement calls over their own power....? "Hey guys we can blackmail anyone. Let's make sure that the proper checks and balances are placed on that, I hate unlimited knowledge and power."
The definition of power is making these decisions. Those in power legitimately deserve some latitude to excercise that power. "Those in power" is now Snowden because he took that power illegitimately. There is a time and a place for that, and some of these leaks may be that. Some of this is definitely borderline.
The internet open, free, etc but the world is still defined by borders and national interest. Nations have always needed to collect intel to inform their decision making and they've employed spies to do it. It just so happens the medium that the NSA operates in is the digital one, with their spies sitting in a big black building in Virginia instead of being some James Bond style agent.
While I am grateful for what he has done, and he's welcome to hide at my place anytime, the moment a warrant is issued, he is toast. He has overplayed his hand, and unfortunately he is about to feel the wrath of a very vindictive US Government. He will be locked up, likely for the rest of his life.
He is literally committing espionage, I am glad the privacy related items came out, and frankly I hope the bulk of what he stockpiled eventually becomes public knowledge.
But he is without doubt releasing US government secrets to a 'friendemy' foreign nation with the express intent of personal benefit. thats spying, text book, thats not whistle blowing.
Now we know why the U.S. was looking for him so hard. Revealing that the country is tracking its citizens is one thing. Revealing covert cyber espionage secrets to a country the U.S. has a lot of tension with is something else.
It appears the delay in releasing this information was to let him build up a good guy and hero image in the Western press first. "Hero selflessly outs nefarious government plot for the common good!"
Then he goes and tells China about the U.S. infiltrating its systems, so that China will protect him.
So much for the whole hero thing.
The NSA didn't even have to roll out a tar-and-feather campaign. Snowden took care of it all by himself.
that does, frankly, seem the most likely outcome of all this, specific orchestrations aside.
no one really has the stomach to roll back the security state, so after a good catharsis, these programs will get legitimized, we'll accept pervasive surveillance as the new normal, and adjust our lives accordingly.
If this were the case it's already worked reasonably well in muddying the opinion / perception here on HN, and would obviously give significant ammunition to the mainstream media.
A standoff is better than all out escalation with increasingly dramatic incursions and dialog where each side loses face, raising political tensions.
We should realize the beneficiaries of cyberwar escalation are the contractor companies coupled tightly to the NSA. I don't think that many hackers are getting rich, comfortable maybe, but not the big bucks.
"Hey HK, the US gov is spying on you too! We're in this together! Please don't send me back."
Alas, there are easier ways to accomplish that, an operation this big would never remain secret, and acting in the open like this has to have a hundred other downsides.
https://twitter.com/NewsBreaker/status/346074606270038017
Strictly coincidence?
It's one way to make sure the US doesn't insist too much for the right to extradite.
...and secondary time released emails and other publishing events not trusting the Washington Post or Guardian.
A HK legislator is backing Snowden because civilian infrastructure in HK has been hacked. This is a criminal offence and must be investigated.
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/06/13/...
There will also be a rally in HK to support Snowden on Saturday.