Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.

That is a huge claim. I do not imagine that his training involved being tortured to make sure. If he's wrong, there could be dire consequences for the US.

You might even say his ego is writing checks his body can't cash.

Either way, if he really wants the focus back on the documents, he should probably write fewer letters about his beliefs, his security, and his personal situation.

I have several close friends and family members who have been to SERE(Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape) School. One of the first things you learn, is that EVERYBODY talks when they are being tortured. Forget all of the nonsense you see in movies and television shows. If Putin wants to know what Edward Snowden knows, he will.

Even if they don't choose to go the direct physical route by inflicting pain, there are other ways. Sleep deprivation and near-starvation cause your mental state to degrade rapidly. Eventually, no matter how strong willed you may think you are, you are going to start talking.

Odd choice of words. Maybe he doesn't consider himself stateless after all.

I'm disturbed by Snowden's grandiosity in those statements. He fits the personality type interrogators would call a "grand egoist." He exaggerates his individual importance and skills to the point of self-delusion.

Ironically, this package of traits is often found in people of extraordinary skill. He has managed to abscond from the country with thousands of our deepest secrets, and prevent his own capture amidst the biggest manhunt in the history of the world.

But at the same time, he seems to be losing his grip under the pressure. There simply is no way that an individual can guarantee he or she won't give away information under threat of torture or under the manipulation of interrogation. The secrets live in his head, and the operating system that runs on our grey matter is eminently hackable.

Deeply, deeply disturbing rhetoric.

This. Most of the people I have discussed this issue with have failed to separate the data that was revealed with the manner in which it was. Thank you for doing so.

You appear to assume here that politicians take decisions purely or even mostly based on what is best for their constituencies? There could be many reasons for European leaders to be so supine, mostly I imagine it's pressure from the US and not wishing to be made a pariah, but also they are engaged in their own spying which is just as pervasive as the NSA, and to a great or lesser extent are reliant on the NSA for intelligence - most of the governments of Europe are partnered with the NSA on some level since Echelon and integration is probably tighter now, many have US bases on their soil. They have absolutely no interest in seeing any more revelations about the global surveillance network they have helped to create.

Could you please qualify that statement with an example?

The high degree of cooperation many countries appear to be giving the United States so far in efforts to have Snowden return to the United States for legal proceedings suggests that quite a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose than in his standing trial to weigh his claims against United States law.

Your theory assumes both rational and benevolent politicians.

Respectfully, I think you are wrong; the US (our country) is an excellent bully and likes to threaten trade. Further, I look at the behaviors of those countries that have acted to halt transit (i.e. the recent Bolivian fiasco) as evidence of complicity with US espionage activities.

Listening to him speak, he obviously has very well-reasoned and logical positions which contrasts sharply with official response. And I don't place much weight on the opinions of foreign leaders whose hands are tied by political concerns.

If Snowden lied or exaggerated, the USG would ensure that every media outlet shouted about if from the mountain tops until no one couldn't know. Snowden would be destroyed as a liar. If the USG lie or exaggerates, Snowden cannot ensure the same. Additionally, government is based on lies, lying is what government does. The ratio of power and information control is not exactly on Snowden's side. The consequences for Snowden if he were caught lying or massively exaggerating are dire. The consequences for the USG lying really minor, they lie all the time, we expect it. The for Snowden is massively less likely to be lying, since doing so would absolutely kill him off.

Additionally, we are not at the point where we have seen all the dirt the USG can dig up on him. Turns out, they cant find much at all. There for its reasonable to assume Snowden is clean. DIrt on the USG is so numerous, its so overwhelming that its essentially back ground noise.

That is why people prepared to give him the benefit of if the doubt. That is also why people are less likely to do the same with the USG, or any other government.

It's not difficult - if you haven't seen all the data. You encrypt the data with a large, randomly generated password, and give pieces of the password (without looking at it) to several people in different countries. You also tell them that they need to be 100% certain you're not being tortured to get the passwords from them.

If you're tortured, then you actually cannot reveal the data. You can reveal who has the password pieces, but if they're all in different countries it will be nearly impossible to get them. It would be easier to get the data directly from the U.S. government.

Well, assuming that torture is an effective interrogation technique, the amount he can reveal is nonetheless limited by his own memory. It is quite possible that any datum critical enough to present a risk to national security if it were revealed is simultaneously too much for an ordinary person to remember -- e.g. a private key, an organizational plan, etc.

However, I fail to see a distinction between the potential capture and torture of Edward Snowden and the potential capture and torture of any other intelligence operative or official, particularly anyone in the CIA/NCS. Snowden is probably at greater risk of capture due to his notoriety, but this is really all the more reason for him to obtain asylum in a neutral country as soon as possible. If a country such as Germany were truly concerned about this, they could certainly enter him into a national witness-protection program with a new identity, making his involuntary debriefing all the more unlikely.

I think you're enormously overestimating the capacity for planning that any single individual could be capable of. Jason Bourne exists in the movies, not in real life.

Or, more plausibly, these leaders also have something to hide from their ostensibly democratic constituencies and would find it beneficial for any more potential Snowdens of their own to think twice.

The recent articles about UK, France, etc. surveillance and data gathering bear this out.

Manwhile, leaders in more authoritarian governments or in weak sham/corrupt democracies are less concerned with Snowdens (people already corrupt or cowed), and more interested in taking US's tiresome high handedness down a peg.

Most of what Mr. Snowden has revealed has been pretty damn extraordinary. Upon first hearing many of his claims, I'll admit that I (more often than not) thought "no, surely not" and, shortly thereafter, government officials quickly came forward to deny many of his claims.

Then, almost without fail, Mr. Greenwald would publicize documents backing Mr. Snowden's claims and showing the government as the liars.

What it comes down to is, simply, trust and credibility. To me, at this point, Mr. Snowden has eons more credibility -- and I trust him much more -- than the United States government.

In the absence of evidence, I am certainly more willing to take him at his word than I am the various government officials who have proven themselves liars time and again over the last six weeks or so.

That's actually not an extraordinary claim. It is standard operating procedure to teach people in the military how to do this, and the techniques are widely known. Here is how my brother (who received this training before serving in Vietnam explained it).

The first thing to realize is that you will break. When you break, you will say whatever you think will make the torturer happy. Once you have broken, you will no longer know what reality is.

So be a wimp. Pretend to break early. Feed the torturer enough interesting false information (with some truth mixed in) to get them interested. When you break for real they will continue to ask about the false leads, and you'll tell them whatever you imagine they want to hear. Nobody - including you - will have any way to sort out truth from lies.

This is, of course, just theory for me. However I'm assured that it works. And our standard training procedures include practice being tortured to drill in the point.

This is actually a serious mistake from a USA national security perspective, in that it ensures that whatever info Snowden has and fails to secure will be given directly to rival nations. If those in charge were worried primarily about national security, they would have let him run to a normal country like Finland or Chile or New Zealand, where Snowden could have been observed reliably. If he ever progressed from criticism of domestic surveillance to active assistance of rogue states, the host nation could have brought its own charges.

That those in charge didn't allow this tells us one of two things: A) they're really not very good at their jobs or B) their primary concern is not Snowden revealing secrets which will harm the USA, but rather secrets that will harm their own careers. It were ever thus.

I did turn off requestpolicy, ghostery and noscript to check if there was additional crapola I was missing and it didn't seem all that different but I did notice 30+ cross-site requests, none of which added to the usefulness of the page.

The guy is risking his life, and no one even wonder who is the branch/person in government that should be responsible for what he says is going on.

Who should be taken accountable for this? why people is not on the streets? ...well people are on the streets, but for the wrong reasons. media is transforming a, sadly, commonplace killing in hate/race crime. Any conspiracy theorist already linked the time they scheduled the trial with the snowden thing? didn't another army whistle blower was on trial on the very same day as the zimmerman one?

Could this be a website/forum? Wherein we compile the evidence on the people in abstentia because the regular system aint doing it.

I'm not saying mob rule. I'm just kind of saying let's identify the really bad apples and kind of do what Groklaw did for IBM v. SCO - except this would be global citizen's privacy expectations versus spooks.

Edit: or this: http://www.securityweek.com/19-groups-sue-nsa-over-data-coll... (But it needs to be global - as in, massive and mass surveillance by any state or non-state actor though now feasibly possibly must be well outside international norms and laws)

The more logical interpretation is that he doesn't have the decryption keys and has given partial keys to multiple people, thus making his secrets safe from torturing just him.

I interpret this as it's protected in such a way that any information he can give is not sufficient to access the documents.

In the UK GCHQ provides intel to the Ministry of Defence. MoD then uses that intel. The intel is secret, and thus we don't know if it has helped or not. The intel is also misused (see, for example, the "sexing up" of documents) or ignored.

But in general you don't know what the spies are doing. It's the nature of spies. You could ask your representative politician to ask some of the oversight politicians, but the answer you'll get back is going to be on the same lines. "The provide valuable intel, and we use it, and we are safer because of it".

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ord...