Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Edit: also, the transcript is incomplete and leaves out some of the best parts, such as Binney's story of how he called "Tom" (i.e. Drake, whose phone he knew was being tapped) to let the government know that he had evidence of malicious prosecution. Plus the endearing smile on his face as he points out that his prosecution was dropped after that.
USA Today should put up the whole unbroken discussion. Apart from the obviously important content and the obvious authoritativeness of the speakers, it's just a great piece of television—and it's not even television. It puts actual news TV to shame.
1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...
It is the second video down on your link and about 4 min in.
So, the ideal thing would be some kind of prize or other financial reward (or higher paying job) for Drake, or scholarships for his children.
Foreign intelligence services certainly have a far better picture of US intelligence capabilities than the American public. It is really of no help to them when NSA whistleblowers tell Americans "hey our government is illegally listening to your phone calls and reading your emails".
Criminals gaining this access is definitely plausible.
Foreign governments using it for oppression/retaliation is also very plausible.
Auditing is more important than origins. See also, Tor.
The days of DES S-boxes are behind us, and in fact, the NSA's meddling helped the security of that scheme, though that fact wasn't known until decades later.
Anyhow, my main reason for making my comment above was just that if politicians really stopped to think how the surveillance can hurt them personally, instead of scoffing at us commoners who are under surveillance, they might start to change their tune. My first thought when hearing all this news was just a thought of Bush/Obama reading politicians' emails about senate/house bills before going around bargaining with them (or more realistically, some mid-level staffer getting at that info and then summarizing it so the top-level politicians' hands never get dirty).
What, exactly, stops one political party from using this system against the other one? They're all up in arms about the IRS thing, but either party could very easily adapt a system like this into the most powerful opposition research tool ever known.
Even more interesting is that, with loose controls like these, we have to assume that enemy spies are able to see everything. So every other country with half-decent spies can just tap the whole country's communications and blackmail any and everyone in power with whatever they find using the systems we set up on our own.
I'd imagine the spy world has already realized this, and we're already at a level of mutually assured blackmail. :)
In fact, I think this state of affairs by and large predates the digital age, which is why there are so many "gentleman's agreements" and semi-informal reciprocal codes of honour among intelligence organisations. They have their roots in the Cold War.
For instance, Russia's FSB recently received some opprobrium for revealing the identity of a CIA operative in Russia. It's not because the FSB doesn't know who they are; the FSB knows who they are, and the CIA knows that the FSB knows who they are, and they both know far more about each other's intelligence operations than we realise. It's just not the custom to come out and publicise this information.
Albeit to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I was supposing: you cannot have such a huge organization working "properly" on a day-to-day threat-response basis without some "elastic" access control. Even less if you are a contractor like B-A-H.
This, in a private entity, is less dangerous. You can have a lot of sysadmins with some access to Google's data because the data is properly partitioned and especially because there are no "targets". When each individual is a target, it is too hard to get proper partitioning.
Also, Google's employees have little to no incentives to make those data "public." And I guess direct access to the real emails is pretty hard: Google's money is not there but in the analytics. So internal anonymization may be not only performed but even easy to do. And this is good for Google & its clients.
The Federal government has the authority to create regulations, create laws, collect taxes, send people to your house to enforce those laws, remove/restrict your rights, sentence you to a prison term, send in armed officers to take down civilians groups viewed as dangerous, etc etc all the way to declaring full scale war. And, perhaps most importantly, the government has the authority to coherence third parties to cooperate in information sharing. Google will never be able to force Facebook to hand over their data, but the Federal government can force both of these parties to hand over their data to them.
The catch with having a monopoly on force is that your hands are supposed to be tied by the will of the people. There is a tremendous and intentional asymmetry in power. This necessitates an equally tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight.
I think once a day I hear "people willingly give all there data to facebook, why do they care if the NSA is listening", people need to understand what "monopoly on force" truly means.
But as you mention, that monopoly on force is tied to the will of the people.
If the government were to use force in a way other than approved by the laws setup by the peoples' representatives then you're already talking about something much worse on the totalitarian continuum than phone metadata.
And at that point, once the law has no limiting effect on the government anyways they could setup things hundreds of times worse. But they would hardly need to, as they could manufacture evidence of supposed "crimes" if need be and carry out sentences of their choosing for any reason at all.
They would only need things like Prism for dissidents, and dissidents would already assume that things hundreds of times worse were in place and take defensive measures accordingly.
So you're right that the monopoly on force is dangerous, but it has always been so. That's why it requires that tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight that you mention.
But given that we're able to provide those controls in the first place (controls which we cannot enforce on private companies, btw!) it makes sense again to ask the question of whether programs like these are both reasonable and effective, whether they can be properly supervised, and if so whether current systems are "proper supervision".
"Monopoly on force" is a warning about government, not the NSA. And especially not in the context of knowledge, where the government is mostly far out of its league compared with the private sector, and it's only getting worse.
The real danger of programs like PRISM, outside of abuse of power by the executive branch, is access to the data leaking from the national security realm to the normal law enforcement channels. The data collected by commercial entities is dangerous because unlike NSA stuff, its just a subpoena away from any police department.
He said its a myth they need all the data to make the connections in order to catch terrorists.
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2475191994001/former-nsa-empl...
He starts talking about at the 2:57 mark.
"But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.
"So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor."
"Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people."
> one thinks he may have crossed a line by talking about surveillance on China
But you are correct about the politics, as it is politics that creates the loopholes to begin with. But that's a matter of annoyance, not illegality.
If the IRS is unable to execute enforcement of the law concerning taxation then that's not a loophole, it's likely a criminal act. That would imply that something could possibly change in the future that would no longer prevent the IRS from collecting the tax, with penalties.
I see these two as completely separate things.
People need to get out of this mindset that the big companies are using loopholes in the tax code to cheat the government out of tax revenue. If the loophole exists due to the law then there is no cheating, just bad law. Public companies are practically obligated to reduce their tax liabilities as much as possible and if the government gives them the abilities to do so, then why is that the company is considered the evil entity in the matter? They are simply doing exactly what the government and the law has told them they are obligated to do.
The best is to do exactly what the GP said: invade a popular existing party. Though, my choice would be the republicans because I anticipate backlash against the dems in the next election cycle.
We used to think that in the UK too.
But that's just hear-say.
Providing a "back door" to those systems is a simple as defining a user role.
But again, Google offers a similar functionality to enterprise Google Apps customers: Google Vault. (https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en)
Also, for criminal matters law enforcement has been able to obtain search history from Google with a search warrant. So they have the ability to search search history, which is a dataset several orders of magnitude larger in size & scope than GMail.
If you seriously believe that Google doesn't have the capability to perform discovery on the public facing GMail, that's fine, but the capabilities that Google has in production today suggest that your belief is not quite correct.
ps. Can they start using other photos of Snowden? I mean come on, is that the only one the media has?
I just fear for him if he is caught, he will certainly be tortured by any side including USA.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering )