NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower [video]
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake
[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0616/Dick-Chene...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/politics/campaign/01CHEN.h...
I have observed what I've seen commented on elsewhere. There is a certain type of person who managed to skip the draft for themselves, and then proceeded to become overly supportive of the military and military aggression. Possibly as a reaction to the guilt of having not served when given the chance. There is a certain cowboy element to their approach. Prominent examples include Dick Cheney and George Bush.
By contrast people who actually served often, like John McCain or Al Gore, are strongly supportive of the military. But they tend to treat military service and action as the serious matters that they are.
The phrase that sums this up best is "chickenhawk".
As far as the rest goes I think we should evaluate policy positions based on the merits of the arguments. My position on Iraq would not be based on whether the president more resembled Gene McCarthy or Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay.
My brother joined the Marines 3 days before his 18th birthday because at the time if you did that you only served 3 years and couldn't go to Vietnam. 2.5 years later he was in a horrible accident. The recruiting officer got him to re-enlist because that was the only way to pay the medical bills. The reup also would put him through college, and he couldn't go to Vietnam for 5 years - no chance it would still be going on!
The recruiting officer word was carried out perfectly. But the war was still going on and my brother earned a purple heart there.
More generally should we only elect candidates who have also served so that we can avoid having a CinC who sends soldiers to battle even though they did not serve? If Cheney had a legitimate 4F during Vietnam would you be more supportive of his decision to invade Iraq?
If Cheney were simply a chicken-hawk, then there would be no issue. If he were simply a profiteer, there would also be no issue. But his active role as both is worrisome: he stands to profit from his direct ability to shape public opinion as a once-elected representative of the population.
As our society discusses this issue, it is important to take into account not only what is said, but why it is being said. This is what is meant by assessing credibility to speak about a certain matter. The sum of a person's actions informs the listener about his or her credibility and Cheney is no exception.
Why did you assume I used a Democrat as an example?
Sadly he died in 2012.
Cheney is defending the need for state secrets but has a proven record of benefitting from intelligence that has been obscured from the general public. Motive is extremely important here.
This would remain a valid example of moral hazard even if Cheney had been drafted and experienced combat in Vietnam. The draft was one of the reasons the Vietnam War was so unpopular, avoiding it could be construed as an act of civil disobedience. It's not an essential part of the argument.
On several occasions. He was the Secretary of Defense for the first Gulf War, and VP when both Afghanistan and the second Gulf War started up.
Added:
I just saw bit about topcolor=dfcdfc. That brought some much needed levity to the discussion. You are good people miles.
You too, dfc ;-)
William Binney is an absolute hero. I have absorbed everything this guy has ever said or done[2]. He was not only employed at the NSA, but he was a director who designed the software that is being used right now to dragnet all the communications. It is difficult for anybody - congressman, president, republican voter, etc. - to argue that what the NSA is doing is fine when the guy with all the technical details and design of the program says it isn't. That he is against what is happening is a big deal and needs more attention.
This video is on the front page of USA Today, so these guys and the topic is starting to get the recognition they deserve.
[1] The New Yorker did a great feature on him called 'The Secret Sharer' - good for background http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...
[2] Search YouTube for Binney - he was the keynote speaker at the 2600 HOPE conference last year - a presentation that everybody must watch. Apparently Snowden decided to go the route he did after watching Binney in Laura Poitras' "The Program" for the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... Potras is the same person who was the first journalist Snowden contacted.
The rest of the platform is ThinThread (which was a lot cheaper than the failed TrailBlazer project).
Also interesting that a lot of the NSA platform is open source. OpenCloud for server management and Hadoop for distributed computing.
[1] I can't recall which one, in his keynote at HOPE he does make another reference to the crypto privacy shield being removed
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
I have a feeling that the NSA deals with access control just like the rest of us...very poorly. Even more egregious is that Snowden was a contractor...if we're going to leave open the possibility of the NSA targeting us at their whim, can't they at least do that in-house?
For example, we store virtual machine root passwords in an encrypted database for last resort purposes (so that someone can log in using virsh console as root when nothing else is working). There are three layers of encryption and as far as casual access goes (assuming nothing is reconfigured), mere root access to the box is not enough to reveal the information. However if you can change what is logged by PostgreSQL and reconfigure PostgreSQL's authentication options you could grab enough information to effectively read this data.
People with the sort of access required to make sure things are secure can effectively get the data off the system that they want, and the alternative in designing a system is to have one with no superusers and the possibility that information is irrevokably lost when someone forgets a password. The most secure systems end up somewhere between them.
The problem though is that someone still has to have the right to rotate keys and this process can be attacked too. For example, one could rotate keys to a known value thus giving the attacker access to the plain text. Worse, the person who can rotate the keys has to have the right to access both old and new keys in an unencrypted state.
Now, given that reality, it isn't clear to me that the fact that someone could set up the database to log all queries, and allowing passphrases for encryption to be passed in in the query poses a real added danger.
Another option is just not to allow key rotation but that allows for attacks on the key itself. You can get aroudn this by having a different key for each piece of data and thus limit the utility of cracking each piece.
However if you go that route, then you have two computers to secure instead of one, and it is vulnerable to more types of attacks than before since you are now trusting the client.....
Of course the problem is that methods like this takes a lot of effort, and so it is a tradeoff between safety and the cost and convenience, and in reality very little data.
It does seem absurd if there isn't politico-judicial rationale.
I'm surprised that USA Today put this out and I hope they do more like it. The contrast with typical news pap could not be stronger.
If developed countries can't trust each other not to spy on their diplomats where does that leave us?
I guess they should all assume they are being spied on at all times while on foreign soil, but airing that in public is likely to worsen his chance of avoiding jail time—or worse.
It leaves us precisely where we are - developed countries have been spying on each others' diplomats and using their diplomats for spying for, well, just about ever.
US Secretary of State Henry Simpson famously said "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail" some 80 odd years ago. A quaint attitude, even back then.
In other words, the details Snowden has given are largely harmless affirmations of what everyone probably knows already. They don't cause significant harm to our diplomatic relations. They don't cause significant harm to our intelligence.
I suspect given his moves so far, he agrees with my assessment above, so the question is, what is he doing with them? I don't think that is a hard question to answer. He's making public what those in power have assumed is the case for a long time in order to send signals to all sides that he knows a lot more than he is saying. In essence he's upping the ante regarding any indictment and extradition request.
He's sending a threat to the US: Try to extradite me and maybe I will spill your secrets, real ones, not the ones hidden in plain view I have been talking about so far.
He's also sending a message to China: I know enough to be valuable.
Time will tell what happens. However this follows on "I chose Hong Kong because of their tradition of free speech and rule of law."
This totally follows his strategy of pitting the US against China, and Hong Kong against both.
They are, though, tremendously harmful to him and his purported cause - to the point that I have a very difficult time seeing this as some part of an intelligent, well-considered strategy. Should he ever end up in a US court, any hope of lenient treatment or something like an eventual presidential commutation or pardon is well out the window - you can't be both a principled defender of civil liberties and a low-grade spy. Worse is the damage to his credibility as a person acting out of conscience - he's handing his detractors a complete gimme and even giving his potential supporters serious pause. In the interview linked, William Binney straight up calls him a traitor and it's pretty tough to portray William Binney as some pliant NSA stooge.
I'd argue that US v USSR spying during the Cold War, particularly PHOTOINT and SIGINT and other forms of technical intelligence, largely averted a global thermonuclear war. Gov v Gov spying is just another form of transparency. (obviously as a US citizen I'd prefer the US to have an edge there, but generally for something like Brazil v Argentina I don't particularly care)
| requires
Binney's take on what they'll do to Snowden.
"Binney: First tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed."
So if mass surveillance didn't prevent 9/11, is the rationale to expand it to TOTAL surveillance, if necessary?
| Perhaps even more important to note
| "before 9/11."
I was trying to draw attention to the line that government keeps giving us about how "they are trying to prevent another 9/11" with the secret laws and secrets courts that enable warrantless wiretaps and constant surveillance.
ps. Do not use satellite phones unless you want everything listened too:)
I hope they have him employed as a Genius.
I hate autoplays as well.