Detaining David Miranda | Hacker News Reader

Detaining David Miranda

schneier.com

138 pointsdllthomas42 comments

Why hasn't anyone considered that David Miranda's detention could have been orchestrated in order to radicalize Glenn Greenwald, to bring him to "full froth", so to speak? Make him angry, make it personal by abusing his husband, so that his reporting becomes more emotional to the point where he starts risking his legitimacy and moral authority as a journalist. Something very similar happened with WikiLeaks.

I know Glenn and I'm certain he's smarter than this, but this is an explanation I've had in my head since day one and everyone seems to have missed. And, at least for the first couple of days, Glenn certainly did appear quite frustrated and did say he'll publish more aggressively. But isn't acting like this playing into their hands, by giving up his legitimacy as an impartial journalist? He must not allow them to make it a personal fight between him and the NSA.

I am not sure of the end balance of such action. Sure, maybe he would get emotional but on the other hand I'd expect the public to excuse that, given their knowledge of this particular abuse.

"And, at least for the first couple of days, Glenn certainly did appear quite frustrated and did say he'll publish more aggressively. But isn't acting like this playing into their hands, by giving up his legitimacy as an impartial journalist?"

The story about Greenwald vowing revenge seems to have been really effective propaganda. It isn't true:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rm09tf

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/19...

And Greenwald doesn't present himself as impartial.

And impartiality is not required for a journalist to have legitimacy.

And "impartiality" as practiced really means oscillating between voices of Republicans and Democrats and no one else, making the conversation always inherently pro-government.

Greenwald has written a New York Times bestselling book on executive authority, broken lots of stories on my blog about wiretapping that led to front-page stories on most major newspapers in the country, and Russ Feingold read from his blog during the Censure hearings. I think his reputation is beyond being questioned.

I find it surreal the way Greenwald is portrayed sometimes.

If you actually read what he writes, its logical, sober commentary. Now it happens that following logic leads you to some pretty wild sounding conclusions because it turns out reality looks a bit like a conspiracy theory.

That doesn't really pass the sniff test. That's a conniving strategy, which isn't reflected in the extremely clumsy execution.

There's often no need to look for more complicated explanations when simple incompetence will suffice. This felt like a bad, impulsive decision.

Right, don't attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence. The problem is that when it's the NSA et. al, the spies, incompetence is treated as less likely than manipulation. I really don't know whether this is correct; I just know the underlying assumption of incompetence might not be warranted in every case.

Inherent in your guess at motivation is a belief that the intelligence services don't make mistakes. But they do, they screw up all the time.

If we're going to go up against the intelligence services using civil discourse we need to stop assuming they're infallible. They're not. They're a vast bureaucracy of fallible people isolated by their own walls and regularly tripped up by their own foolish office politics and bureaucratic machinations.

We should maybe start thinking of them more as the DMV and less like James Bond.

"But they do, they screw up all the time."

A man wants to cheat on his wife. So he purposely appears to be sloppy and gets caught at trivial things instead of appearing to be all together where he would be watched more closely.

Am I saying they don't screw up by this statement? No. I'm saying that don't assume that there aren't other reasons for what they do or what you know about. The smoking gun isn't always the smoking gun at this level of sophistication.

"Why hasn't anyone considered that David Miranda's detention could have been orchestrated in order to radicalize Glenn Greenwald"

Why? Because the same reason that people think they should be able to second guess why people in power do what they do (to protect us). Because they think they are privy to all the thinking and all the reasons why someone would do anything. Even Schneier does this coming up with all sorts of reasons for why he thinks what has happened has happened as if he has some truly unique inside information on what is going on and why. He doesn't. I mean his ideas are certainly better than the person who served me coffee this morning but he is still just speculating (like we all are).

As an aside I like what you have come up with and think it's very creative and could possibly be true. Where possibly means reasonable chance of a strategy. Sometimes strategies aren't obvious.

Look at what Putin is doing or has done with respect to Snowden. We could speculate a million ways including that Obama is fully aware of why Putin did what he did because he knows that Putin has other fish to fry as well and Obama understands that. We will never be privy to the inner workings of all of this and guess what much of this is not going to make sense because we don't have the full picture.

"Even Schneier does this coming up with all sorts of reasons for why he thinks what has happened has happened as if he has some truly unique inside information on what is going on and why"

Did we read the same article? Schneier doesn't come across as if he's implying that 'he has some truly unique inside information.'

Some quotes: "I have to admit this story has me puzzled." .. "My initial assumption was .. but .. I'm not sure anymore." .. "I have a hard time believing" .. "Another possibility" .. "This leaves one last possible explanation" .. "I didn't mean to say that intimidation wasn't the government's motive. I believe it was, and that it was poorly thought intimidation".

This comes across as a set of hypotheses about what's happened, and attempts to evaluate their likelihood and appropriateness based on available (public) information. Not based on inside information.

You raised a good point on how I phrased what I said which was incorrect. I guess I meant to say "has no unique inside information so this is of only entertainment and discussion value" as opposed to "as if he has some truly unique inside information". This is the type of stuff that gets repeated in news stories because to a reporter Schneier has something quotable to say.

My point is that he is speculating and would be taken seriously because of who he is which to me at least is somewhat dangerous.

Sometimes people speculate but they have more first hand knowledge of the workings of something (someone who used to be high level at the NSA or a member of congress that was on some intelligence committee or PG talking about other incubators etc.

>He was a sysadmin. He had access. Most of the audits and controls protect against normal users; someone with root access is going to be able to bypass a lot of them. And he had the technical chops to cover his tracks when he couldn't just evade the auditing systems.

SElinux, from our friends at the NSA, was specifically built to remove the special powers that root holds on a Linux box. Not saying you can't bypass these things, but it's a lot more involved than "I'm root, so I'm in".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

Right, that's one of the more embarrassing pieces of this whole mess, to my mind...

Obviously not having knowledge as to how the NSA uses it on their systems, but out of the box and in every realworld configuration I've come across it has little to no impact on what the root user can do.

Have you ever worked on a Mandatory Access Control computer system of any kind? They are extremely inconvenient, and thus rare to find outside classified environments. The engineering effort to write and maintain a functional set of SELinux policies is a large budget item. But the NSA did not engineer and release SELinux because it doesn't work.

Mostly due to so many programs "requiring" if you have selinux enabled, disable it prior to installation and use.

That and its not always trivial to setup policies to make things work (or to "know" that you haven't missed something) I see a lot of selinux set to just not enforce at all.

My theory is that they know exactly what he took, bitwise. It's just shitty work looking through 500GB of shitty power point presentations to try to figure out which one he's going to use next and how to respond to that... It's not an exact science here. So they know the information he has, they just don't know how it, or which of it, will be used. Also, He probably just has .ppt/.doc/.xls program level kinda files, it's not like he siphoned of the data under super duper lock and key that is on completely separate systems with completely separate auditing practices. (Ie all the data they actually have collected on you, etc..)

The biggest problem the public has is not knowing what to do about it. People seem to finally grasp that voting is useless. Understandably they don't want revolutions and violence, because they have things to lose. And because they can't see any way out of this mess, they become apathetic.

Of course, only a little step is required: understanding that all this is done on their own [tax] money. When the world wakes up to this truth, the first thing it's gonna do is stop paying immediately.

Modern states have the ability to operate without tax money longer than you have the ability to stay out of jail. Besides, most people keep their money in a bank where a state can seize it without resistance. More currency can be printed as needed.

If you jail half the population you'd have to pay for extra prisons, guards and policemen and you're gonna have to get these money out of someone else's pockets. Whose pockets? Modern states are certainly powerful, but not to the extent when they can operate with half the population not paying.

Also, if you simply seize the money from the bank accounts, it's gonna be worthless the next day, as no one will think it's worth using the currency that can evaporate at your master's will.

If you have the influence to get half the population to stop paying their taxes, you probably have easier ways of grinding society to a halt. (See: General Strike)

None of this will happen because it is mutually assured destruction. Only unhappy men volunteer for war.

The US has a deficit that's ~35% of the budget in the last few years, and most of the budget is spent on healthcare, fighting wars and other things that can easily be scaled back if needed (even though politicians say they can't).

As they say, the markets can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent.

Voting is not useless; by spreading this meme you are playing right into the hands of people you claim to be fighting.

How is that? Voting is beginning your masters for changes (and, why should they listen? Where are the incentives?). You can only vote with your money. If you stop paying your ISP because your connection is crappy, and all your neighbors do the same - it goes bankrupt. Plain simple.

If you don't vote for someone, and all your neighbors do the same--that person can stay in office as long as they vote for themselves.

But if you vote against someone, and all your neighbors do the same--that person will get voted out of office.

Thus the value of voting is illustrated.

You should start with the question of why do you need someone to be in an office in the first place. And if the position is indeed so valuable and necessary, why can't you just hire and pay this person, instead of voting for him and asking him to take money out of you and others by force?

I would happily hire the leader of my choice, it's just that I don't have enough to pay him or her. Other people have money I could use, but they want to hire different people than I do. How to resolve all these differences? Voting.

You might also be shocked to learn that boards of directors, when considering candidates for CEO, usually resolve their differences by voting.

It might require adding yourself as alternative to the ballot (using the defined processes, not by writing yourself on the paper, which merely invalidates it).

I was considering getting myself on the ballot for some local elections if only to be able to vote for someone else but the two politicians that, from experience, are equally bad.

In the UK (probably other countries too) you have to put up a deposit, designed to prevent frivolous candidatures. I suppose if you can afford to lose your deposit it's not a bad way to protest; even better if you get more votes than the threshold amount!

In Germany you have to collect signatures from a certain sample of the electorate (typically 0.1%) with which they affirm that they want to see you on the ballot.

For municipal elections that's possible to achieve for an individual.

Douglas Adams illustrated this beautifully [1].

[1] http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html

I have seen a couple of examples of UK PM David Cameron commenting prematurely on issues that he hasn't fully researched or understood, and as a result being wholly wrong, then having to back track, and BTW, getting clean away with it. This sort of hair trigger reaction, with out being sure of the facts, fits with Schneier's idea of of irrational revenge thinking in the UK government. Not enough facts, but still acts or pronounces. Its not getting it wrong that is the issue, its the too quick to act or pronounce bit I find significant. I thought it a dangerous sign at the times I saw it.

I have to say, I don't believe the US government had anything to do with initiating the detaining of Miranda. I'm sure they would have been informed, but I suspect their reaction would have probably been something like, "OK if that is what you want to do, fine. Its your country, your laws. We are happy to accept any thing you share as a result". I believe this was a 100% British action, while the US offered no objections. And why should or would the US gov object to it? So, as as far a the US gov is concerned in this specific action; fair enough, I say.

What I think Schneier is missing is the British pathological need to be the USA's BFF (For grown ups: Best Friends Forever). That has always been the vibe here in the UK, but it became real when a story came out about a message personally given to ex PM Tony Blair as he took office by the UK Ambassador to Washington. IIRC, it came out in the Iraq war inquiry. Blair was simply told essentially this, "With regards to the Americans, crawl as far up their backsides as you can, and make damn sure you stay there". Yes, although that is not a direct quote, the advice was worded in that direct coarse way. Presumably, David Cameron clearly has had the same advice.

Looking back, it seems clear to me that we Brits have behaved thus since WW2. And lets face it, from a rational cold UK POV, it is probably the right advice. If you cant be the big man, have one as your best buddy. And, didn't the UK owe the US a few dollars to rebuild after WW2? Im sure it was the case prior to WW2, but WW2 cemented it.

On the surface, all fair enough, really. But, in extremes like the Snowden affair or post 9/11, it seems obvious to me how this relationship can get very out of hand, and how invisible pressure can influence people in to dangerous areas. I suggest it happened to Blair, its now happening to Cameron.

So, I kinda agree with what Schneier is saying, but I think its more to do with proving UK worth to the US government than pure desperate revenge. A British sacrifice on the alter of the US government, given willingly and freely, as a very keen junior partner.

I am very glad that people keep talking about this. I wish that I had more to contribute to the debate and conversation that isn't just rehashing the same discussions we've had for the past month. Something more than "Shut down the NSA!", something that can keep the ball rolling here.

The "ball rolling here" will accomplish absolutely nothing. The ball has to get out of the building where 'real people' live, where politicians are, and so on.

What will stop the ball rolling is if vast dossiers of information was released about the politicians themselves, that the "security" program had been collecting on them. As soon as dirty laundry is aired about a huge amount of them, with the knowledge that more has yet to come they will spring into action faster than the road runner to get this program shut down. And I'm not talking about national security stuff, just stuff you wouldn't want everyone else to know.

I don't believe such files exist, and none of Snowden's or other leaks have left the impression that they do.

Maybe Snowden didn't have access to them, but if they existed before the internet revolution, then I'm sure they exist now.

I would be very surprised if they didn't, it's better to know about your dirty laundry, than to have your "enemies" or other states air them for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

Eh. Detaining David Miranda did what it was supposed to. Of course it's not gonna scare away journalists from doing their jobs. Their idols are often people who brought big news despite govnt opposition.

But the common man, the man that has most opportunities to blow a whistle? They don't want to be detained at the airport, they don't have the protections that journalists do (like, say, having close journalist friends that can get your story out on the same day).

Arresting Miranda does not deter Greenwald, but it might deter other people from following his act.

An excellent piece.

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