What did Edward Snowden get wrong? Everything | Hacker News Reader

What did Edward Snowden get wrong? Everything

latimes.com

49 pointsllambda51 comments

> This is done under tight and well-thought-out strictures. I witnessed firsthand the consequences of breaking the privacy rules of my former organization, the National Counterterrorism Center. As the center's deputy director, I had to fire people, good people, and remove others from their posts for failing to follow the rules about how information could be accessed and used.

1. We know from these leaks that is little to no practical control over access to all communications data, only a process that could simply be ignored without oversight. Andrew Liepman does not address this at all.

2. Liepman makes no argument whatsoever as to why a warrant is no longer required to get access to our 'hay', as he puts it.

3. It's fairly established the US is collecting the actual contents of private communications as well as meta data, Andrew Liepman strangely limits his discussion to metadata (which is also sensitive but less so).

4. Andrew Liepman is publicly arguing for the abolition of the forth Amendment, and perhaps other parts of the US constitution, and perhaps also the United States itself. We have no idea whether Andrew Liepman is planning violent action against Americans, and need to arm ourselves with the tools to protect ourselves from men like him who seek to do harm against the United States of America.

Having our communication intercepted, stored, and analyzed en masse is not bad because of whoever is in office today. It's bad because someone different, someone with less scruples, could be in office tomorrow.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I actually believe that the people in charge of this stuff today are at least trying to be careful about what they're doing with the information they've collected. But once the infrastructure to surveil, analyze, and more importantly store for all eternity everybody's communication is in place, you're leaving an awfully tempting pot of gold for the people in power a decade from now. That's who I don't trust.

In either case, saying mass surveillance and archiving of everybody's personal communications is OK because "trust me guys, I'm for realsies not gonna screw you" is ignorant at best and despicable at worst. I didn't elect this guy and I've never met him, and he doesn't have my interest at heart--his interests are catching terrorists, and soon everybody's going to be a terrorist. We're already calling nonviolent nuns terrorists: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/10/protesting-n...

> I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I actually believe that the people in charge of this stuff today are at least trying to be careful about what they're doing with the information they've collected.

They're passing intelligence to the DEA and IRS for domestic crimes, with orders from the top of the DOJ to hide that intelligence from everyone, even the courts, and only use it to construct a parallel case to prosecute with. I don't believe that's "trying to be careful" with the information. That's a blatant abuse of our legal system.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

Yup. We don't have to wait 10 years. The people with less scruples are in office now already abusing the system. If these are the norms of acceptable behavior now, I fear what they are going to consider acceptable (ab)use of the system in 10 years.

The author writes that, even though abuses are possible, they aren't happening and won't happen because, not only is the intelligence apparatus not interested in the mission-irrelevant data which could be abused, but those in a position to abuse are policed internally to ensure abuse doesn't happen.

Assuming this is all true, here's a thought experiment: in the event that this was no longer true and abuses were occurring, how would the public ever know? Since this entire process is impenetrably opaque to anyone on the outside, the public has only the assurances of those folks running these programs.

That is exactly the problem with these people: they refuse to acknowledge basic logic, so such a thought experiment is beyond them.

Does our discussion really benefit from comments attacking "these people" just for the sake of criticizing them?

Please don't take this personal, I'm not a US citizen and I don't like the NSA capturing and archiving my personal, "private" information either, but what do we get from just venting our anger in an online forum?

Suggest an alternative.

The thing that this OP-ed misses is that the fear around this surveillance is that once we're done with terrorism, the "haystack" of data will be searched for tax fraud, drug deals, etc. If the writer of the op-ed could address those fears, this would actually be an enlightening read, not just a boilerplate response from someone in the intelligence community.

I wonder when the well-connected neighbourhood white knights will get access to that information, and at that point we'll truly be in Hell. Voting records are currently anonymous, but what of our personal opinions? Some publicly identify as a certain political persuasion, but privately they identify another political persuasion.

For example, there are people who truly believe in communism but any public endorsement of it is dangerous, and others adhere to economic conservatism but their feelings extend farther towards libertarianism.

What about when our neighbours attack us based on our online conversations? It's not as uncommon as you could think, gerrymandering and the electoral college already stir up seething and venomous hatred of The Other Party(TM).

It's not a matter of if the NSA's treasure-trove of information leaks out, but when.

Imagine for a moment if Zimmerman were as evil as the media paints him, and, instead of callously shooting the Treyvon boy, he queried the local PRISM data distribution centre. He could instead engage in a smear campaign against the young man. In retaliation, Treyvon's allies gather data on Zimmerman that indicates he's a bisexual and he's a swinger with his wife. These "data wars" may seem far-fetched, but lately I've been feeling a bit more paranoid than usual.

How about job discrimination? Surely your public online activity can directly influence the kind of jobs you can get, but the private online activity could permanently damage your career prospects. Vetting processes nowadays check for a variety of red flags that are unrelated to activities that pertain to your job. Imagine if your entire browser history -- including the things you say, in addition to the websites you visit -- is indexed and stored in perpetuity. And it's all completely outside of your control.

Now let's take this a step further. The TSA manages a no-fly list that is well-known for false positives, and victims have no recourse over this at all. Now imagine that false positives occurred during job vetting processes and your job application is silently denied because someone else's unpleasant online activities were accidentally linked to your own. Again, you have no control over this, and you also have no recourse. There is nothing you can do to remedy the situation.

This is literally already happening, and has been in secret for years. The DEA and IRS, from what is known so far, receive intelligence from the NSA and others to tip them off for various domestic crimes, and they then use that tip to build a parallel criminal case against the people, while hiding the true illegally obtained source of intelligence from everyone, including the courts.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

It is a matter of few years when other federal agencies and private corporations will start wanting access to this information making it nearly impossible for private citizens to live freely.

I heard that bad elements are still active and kicking. Offence is not the best way to promote peace.

I think government has legitimate need of the information they collect but I also want them to establish regulation to delete all information after certain period of time, so, nobody is able to use this information to preemptively attack or blackmail private citizens.

>Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.

I'm quickly becoming the go-to person for "what about the foreigners" comments, but I couldn't let this one pass:

By thst logic, since the NSA is tasked with spying on any foreigner without any kind of warrant or safeguard, all foreigners are key terrorist leaders, at least in the eyes of NSA employees/the USG.

Addendum: "Let me break this to you gently" was not a very reassuring thing to read from an ex-spook. Apparently, we're stupid and the intelligence community has to nudge us out of our stupidity with an additional helping of condescendence.

> But the intelligence community — always a less sympathetic protagonist than a self-styled whistle-blower — actually has a good story to tell about how seriously the government takes privacy issues. We should tell it.

Ok. Go on. Better late than never, right? Or is the condescending paternalistic boilerplate you stuffed this op-ed with your "good story?"

He's actually wrong. If you read the executive orders that set up the legal basis for the classification system, it says to err on the side of lowering classification. I.e. not everything should be classified.

Sec. 1.2 (c) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-c...

Propaganda-filled statist bullshit. Appeals to authority, and uses ridiculous examples to justify it.

> But I worry less about what happens to this one man and more about the damage Snowden has done — and could still do — to America's long-term ability to strike the right balance between privacy and security.

The only valid balance is 100% privacy. A government that violates its citizens' privacy is not acting legitimately.

> Ever since Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, leaked top-secret material about its surveillance programs, he and the U.S. government have locked horns about the nature of those programs.

He's trying to rephrase the story to be one of Snowden vs. the U.S. rather than the U.S. government vs. the people.

> Second, despite the grumbling from Snowden and his admirers, the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy, not just because it respects privacy (which it does), but because it simply doesn't have the time to read irrelevant emails or listen in on conversations unconnected to possible plots against American civilians.

If it's archiving them, it has all the time in the world, and can search through them at later times and forward information to relevant agencies. And we already know this happens with the DEA and IRS, so his argument here is even more irrelevant.

> I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected.

It doesn't matter how many attacks they believe they have foiled, that doesn't justify dragnet surveillance. Nothing does.

> Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.

Trying to sideline the issue by suggesting ordinary people only talk about irrelevant things. What about journalists, politicians, political activists, and people who commit victimless crimes? As noted in a fantastic article by Moxie Marlinspike, laws can't be overturned without people breaking those laws: drug laws won't be overturned without people breaking the laws and using the drugs and wanting them to be legal, etc.

> Unfortunately, during the Snowden affair, many news outlets have spent more time examining ways the government could abuse the information it has access to while giving scant mention to the lengths to which the intelligence community goes to protect privacy. We have spent enormous amounts of time and effort figuring out how to disaggregate the important specks from the overwhelming bulk of irrelevant data.

"Trust us. We have a policy." Not everyone is guaranteed to always follow that policy, and it's a secret policy, with no legitimate oversight.

Absolutely. I'm so tired of these true believer bureaucrats telling me "it is all for my own good, and no, you can't know anything about it."

And even if the government is sincere in everything its doing, (no privacy violations, no mission creep, etc.) do we have confidence that it can keep the stored data secure from criminals, crackers, foreign governments or other malicious entities?

What is so mind boggling to me, beyond the double-speak, is how nobody on the government side acknowledges basic systematic risk. They assume their system is perfect and their people are impeccable... have they ever been the fucking post office or DMV?! Those are government employees!

> The only valid balance is 100% privacy. A government that violates its citizens' privacy is not acting legitimately.

What do you mean by "100% privacy"? For instance, are wiretaps authorized by a warrant from a district court OK, or do those violation your 100% privacy condition?

Modern crypto offers 100% privacy if you do it right. How would you enforce a court order to tap a conversation that's encrypted and the keys are discarded after use? It's tantamount to a court order to defy gravity. Sure, you can write such a document, and it might be constitutional to write such a document and you might even throw someone in jail for contempt for disobeying such an order. But... so what?

At the end of the day whatever crime you are trying to get them for is occurring in the real world as well. All that physical evidence should help with convictions.

When there is a murder, there is a body. When there is a rape, there is a victim. When there is a robbery, there are stolen goods. When drug trafficking has occurred, there are drugs. When there is child porn, there is a child involved. When there is a network breakin, there are server logs. When there is drug or bomb manufacture, there are raw materials.

The police should be able to put people in jail based entirely on evidence of a crime without ever having to rely on anything a potential suspect has said or written. If that's the only way they can put someone away, I question how much of an actual crime has even occurred. If you can't come up with physical evidence, has society suffered enough harm for it to be even worth jailing that person?

If all the physical evidence is still not enough for a conviction, then get a warrant and observe everything you can about that person of interest the old fashioned way. Eavesdrop on them with bugs (but don't remotely activate a backdoor in a phone that shouldn't exist). Stake out police officers at their house. Do undercover work. etc.

Will some people get away with their crimes? Certainly. And that's okay. That's the cost society pays for their privacy. Police work is expected to be expensive. The cost of investigative work is something that provides checks and balances to abuse. A corrupt individual will have a very hard time hiding the misappropriation of police resources for political or personal reasons. If you need to stake out cops at a politicians house to get dirt on them to blackmail with, that probably won't happen. If you can just type an email into the system, then the barrier is so low to committing such an abuse and the likelihood of getting caught so low, that you can be sure that that abuse will happen.

Also, keeping the cost high ensures that only those people who actually are terrorists, like active members of Al Quada are investigated. Right now the bar for investigation is so low that there has been a massive re-categorization of many domestic groups such as Occupy WallStreet as terrorists to be surveilled.

I have absolutely no qualms with paying more taxes to hire more detectives as the alternative to making sure that we catch the terrorists. Having a high price to pay for investigations forces us as a society to ask the hard question of what we actually think is worth investigating and what is merely a nuisance for some that we can live with. Paying for those investigations with our privacy is entirely too high a cost.

I was being somewhat hyperbolic, though one part of me rejects any sort of wiretap.

But in practice I would be happy with the way things are supposed to be, where a warrant backed up by probable cause is required for each individual being targeted for surveillance, and it must be for a specific investigation only, not for dragnet searching in the hopes of finding something on them.

"Second, despite the grumbling from Snowden and his admirers, the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy"

How can this guy be so sure? More importantly, how can WE be sure? It's all secret.

And over that, they made perfectly clear that they don't care at all about privacy of foreing people (or the people connected with them in any way), in fact the main focus of the surveillace are european countries.

I actually believe a lot of what he is saying about the culture of US intelligence agencies. I'd bet that there's little to none of people, for example, extorting people by threatening to expose their fetish-porn habits. I'll even believe that the people who work there care about protecting privacy (insofar as one can when you work at an agency that keeps everybody's communications on hard drives). But there needs to be some oversight. There should be people from outside the Executive Branch with some actual power watching them. If you believe in the US's mass surveillance programs, then you should be willing to concede that, at the bare minimum, this much should happen.

Of course, I don't think the mass collection should be going on at all. That data is too easily abused. If someone takes control of it who has less integrity, is less interested (or able) to prevent violation and corruption, then we have a massive problem. I believe this is what Snowden was referring to when he mentioned "turnkey tyranny".

Most ordinary people will never be on their radar. That's usually the case, even under tyrannical regimes. But that ignores the journalists, the lawyers, the rival politicians, the activists, the dissidents…

True, though historically in the U.S., the FBI has been the agency where those kinds of abuses show up. The foreign intelligence agencies have had more of a culture of viewing domestic affairs as petty and beneath them.

Trusting a three-letter agency's cultural norms isn't very solid protection, admittedly.

The NSA now does intelligence collection for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.

"Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader."

Let us contrast this with what Hayden's remarks were (after which going on to compare the following group to Al Qaeda and the attack on 9/11 if you watched the speech [lets not forget the DoD internal report that came out recently about how the DoD is currently funding them [0], but that is neither here nor there…]):

"Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years."

I guess this career CIA officer didn't get the memo that "terrorist" will be used when it is convenient.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/al-qaeda-backers-fo...

>(The NSA) simply doesn't have the time to read irrelevant emails or listen in on conversations unconnected to possible plots against American civilians.

Possible "plotters against American civilians": -Occupy -animal-rights protesters -environmentalists -tax evaders -prominent politicians (http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/new-york-times-nsa-ag...) -whistleblowers

human rights groups, eff, labour rights groups, black and latino leaders, etc.

We're talking about the kind of people keeping tabs and working against people like MLK.

In a country were some random governor can censor Howard Zinn from school libraries...

> I wish I could tell people the amazing things I witnessed during my 30 years in the CIA, that I've never seen people work harder or more selflessly, that for little money and long hours, people took it for granted that their flaws would be scrutinized and their successes ignored.

30 years? Then those flaws include helping overthrow a democratically elected government in my country, among many others. That's a kind of flaw that needs to be scrutinized and prevented at any cost.

> I realize many Americans don't trust their government. I wish I could change that. I wish I could tell people the amazing things I witnessed during my 30 years in the CIA, that I've never seen people work harder or more selflessly, that for little money and long hours, people took it for granted that their flaws would be scrutinized and their successes ignored.

It takes far more than doing Good to earn trust. You must also not do Bad.

The "I know secret stuff and you guys just have to believe me" doesn't cut it.

The CIA have a pretty atrocious record. Gun and drug running, undermining other countries democracies because they don't toe the Washington line, funding and founding Al-Qaeda through its proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan.

Really this guy need go take a long walk of a short bridge.

What is really sad is that they all think like this. He isn't an isolated case.

4th Amendment says warrants are supposed to be specific. I don't have the background, years of reading or sophistication to understand how the general Verizon and other warrants are constitutional, so I believe these programs are unconstitutional. So this opinion piece is falling on my deaf ears.

They need to figure out how to do this constitutionally, at least at the broad institutional and program level, or not at all.

"and if the goal is security, the harsh truth is that we should often err toward more secrets rather than fewer."

I thought the ongoing debate was to determine whether the security afforded by the secrets is worth it if it means establishing a surveillance state. The goal is not security at any cost, is it?

The actual truth is that we should err towards fewer secrets rather than more, because secrets make you stupid.

When the President and the people around him are acting on secret information, they have to lie about why they do things and they have to parse all response and criticism of their actions through a "if he knew what I know, would he still think that?" filter. The upshot is the President can be making boneheaded mistakes and utterly incapable of recognizing it because the relevant subject-matter experts that could TELL him this aren't part of the security apparatus - they can't tell him his "secret" info is bogus.

And the secret info the president sees isn't neutral. It gets assembled for him by people who have a point of view so he's likely to see the info that supports what other people want him to think or what other people think he wants to hear. So it's easy to get stuck in an error cascade, where everybody inside the tent has a false view like "Saddam Hussein has nukes" which anybody outside the tent can see is idiotic.

The solution to this problem is transparency. Get rid of the secrets and our politicians instantly get a lot smarter and more able to notice and learn from their mistakes.

> Yes, some things that are classified probably don't need to be. That may undermine public trust and dilute our ability to protect the data that really need protecting.

Import things that need protecting like the fact that the secret FISC court thinks what the NSA is doing is illegal -- that kind of important secrets. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...)

Well, this great, because it's a discussion about what Snowden leaked, and not about which hotel he's staying in.

Apparently, the debate finally got big enough that those who support the NSA's actions feel the need to defend themselves, in detail, and not just oneliners. This is an open debate, in the media, very different from e.g. Alexander's talk on Black Hat.

Sure, we all disagree with him, here on HN. That's not the point. Everyone reading this can make up their own mind. The point is Snowden's leak is starting to have the desired effect.

There are two issues here. The first issue is the author telling us that yes, there are real threats and that these systems have made the country safer. I fully agree with him here.

The second issue is whether these systems can continue functioning in a free society. Here we part ways. He wants to convince me by stressing that his personal experience is such that it's obvious. Once again, I have no doubt that he's telling the truth. The problem is that a democracy doesn't run on magic people having special knowledge that the average citizen is denied. Sure, we need secrets, but we can't have so much information under control by the people that have the power to imprison us. It just won't work, terrorism or no terrorism. (Although short term and on a small scale, sure, you can get away with it)

You can see the problem with this ends-justifies-the-means thinking when you think of all the other uses such a system could have helped. How can the government use this only for terrorism, and not murder trials? Why not civil cases? The problem isn't that the world is full of conspiracy-weaving ill-informed people; it's that this relationship of government to the people is non-functional over the long term.

What has the USG done that would engender this level of (misguided) trust??

“Distrust naturally creates distrust, and by nothing is good will and kind conduct more speedily changed.” ― John Jay, The Federalist Papers

If I might ask a meta-question, how could this story have gotten on the front page? The vast majority of the comments vehemently disagree with it.

Voting an article up implies interest, not agreement. People vote an article up to see it discussed more thoroughly. And, if they disagree with it, to have it get slapped down roundly.

Sometimes it's better to have stupid content exposed to the light so that it can be thoroughly rejected in public.

This is great that this article got to the front page and that many people disagree with it! It is imperative that we see both 'sides of the story'. This helps us strengthen our arguments, create new opinions and dictate our actions.

What did the LA Times get wrong? Everything.

To be fair, the LA Times has been fairly good in covering this issue overall. This is an op-ed by a career intelligence officer.

What about the numerous lies about the existence and scope of domestic spying and data-gathering?

The existence of domestic spying is not at all surprising to me, but lying about it to the American people is deeply unfortunate.

> The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt. Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.

Let me break this to you gently. The president of the United States would never send burglars into the opposing political parties national headquarters to ransack the place and conduct espionage, in addition to many other covert and illegal actions, in an attempt to force the next presidental election his way. If the FBI and press began uncovering this, he would never abuse executive powers to strongarm the FBI, have congressmen of the same party attack television media licenses of the media companies reporting this etc. Oh yaa, this actually did happen. Within my lifetime.

It's good to hear the CIA can be trusted. In the 1980s, Congress banned the US from sending money to terrorists who were fighting to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. Terrorists who killed Americans like Ben Linder. Oliver North joined the National Security Council and began secretly funding these terrorists in violation of Congressional mandate. When it became public he was doing this and Congress began investigating, North testified CIA director William Casey shred all documents pertaining to his illegal activity, so that Congress could not find out what had happened.

The average American has no idea what it means when it leaks out that fibre optic beam splitters are making records of our conversations and data connections, or how something like XKeyscore work. We have a better idea of what is actually happening in this respect, which is why we have some extra concern. And a more realistic view of what is happening, despite what this former-CIA Rand Corp. apparatchik says.

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