Decline of ‘60 Minutes’ Continues With This Week’s NSA Whitewash | Hacker News Reader

Decline of ‘60 Minutes’ Continues With This Week’s NSA Whitewash

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331 pointspain_perdu92 comments

I am really glad people (or at least some) saw right through them.

I caught only like 10 minutes of it, but one of the NSA official was talking about how they discovered a state sponsored malware that could infect your BIOS and brick your computer. I was like, wait, what? So you spy on our phone and internet communication so you can protect us from computer viruses?

But if you were to view that as a lay person, what the NSA official said about cyber attacks must have sounded really damn scary. After hearing something like that, most people would accept that the NSA's actions are justifiable.

IMO we're past the point of the layperson being so technically hopeless they'd swallow this whole. I grant the numbers are still out there, but I think the people convinced/reassured/calmed by this kind of PR are that way because they genuinely think it's worth it. Maybe even a "better the devil you know" scenario?; it's worth "our guys" having their hands on all of this power, with its potential for abuse, than the "other guys".

What I don't get is why, if you're the NSA, would you go through the PR effort for people already on "your side"; you're not going to sway a large swath of the population and there surely can't be that many fence sitters on this issue.

So their supporters can point to something that appears legitimate when they're trying to "win hearts and minds" of their friends and family.

A college friend of mine that works in DC defended the NSA in a FB comment by saying, "we sort of knew all along they were doing this anyway." So, because they haven't done anything bad that we know of they should continue the course. This is a college educated, engineer grad defending NSA practices. I feel the layperson knows this is wrong but feels mentally, outgunned by all the smart people telling them they are right in doing this.

Why would someone being an engineer make them more hostile to NSA spying? There are tons of engineers working for the NSA.

He doesn't work for the NSA, he could work for an NSA contractor but I wouldn't know.

That's the thing. Like most liberals he doesn't have a problem with this administration and spying. We'd be on the same side if this was a republican administration but because he is a democrat and canvases for the DNC he sees nothing wrong with what this administration is doing. To me it's really frustrating. It's like trying to argue with Diane Feinstein over the intelligence bill.

> "we sort of knew all along they were doing this anyway."

In the wake of the original leaks, reading this particular snippet on FB posted by otherwise intelligent friends was one of my ultimate pet peeves.

It neatly encapsulates both self-affirmation ("oh I totally knew this was going on, because I'm wicked smaht") and a shocking degree of complacency.

.. Or just disgust at the complacency pre-Snowden and continuing adoption of broken technologies stemming from lack of critical forethought. The centralized data silos of web 2.0 were and are never not going to be used against you.

I've noticed that there is considerable overlap between those who derided as unsupported the claims of NSA abuses pre-Snowden and those who minimize the same abuses as "we all knew that they were doing that, what do you expect them to do" after the Snowden leaks.

> "we sort of knew all along they were doing this anyway.

That's an interesting way of justifying actions:

We sort of knew Hitler was killing millions anyway.

We sort of knew the CIA was testing nasty diseases on the Guatemalan population anyway.

We sort of knew North Korea was violating a ton of human rights anyway.

etc. etc.

Many people haven't realized this yet, but that's exactly what they're saying. Their thinking is that they're like an "anti-virus", and they can protect everyone if you just let them infiltrate everything.

They've had this thinking since at least 2010 when I saw them talking about it in a public debate with Bruce Schneier, but probably much earlier, since it already seemed like a planned thing. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it came soon after US Cyber Command was formed, and then merged with the NSA. That's when this corrupted idea (probably from Keith Alexander himself) started emerging, and why it's so dangerous to keep them merged (something Obama keeps defending, even after his own non-independent review panel suggested him to separate the two).

So their idea of security, isn't actually having secure systems (anymore?!), but for them to have backdoors into everything, which of course is nonsense, and they are creating more problems than solving. But for all we know that's exactly how they like it, much like the war on terror, which keeps being prolonged by creating more terrorists, and keeping the Military Industrial Complex well fed and profitable.

Or they think all the data they are collecting about the whole world is well worth risking having compromised systems, even at home, but they present the idea of themselves having to do this to "protect Americans" as a lie to cover for that, and because they know it sounds better to the public and (some) politicians.

And didnt the BIOS virus require admin interaction to activate the attack? An admin would have to OK a firmware update. So, its not like this would ripple through entire systems. An admin might approve the first update, see the hardware just got bricked and stop. Virus or not, if an update bricked my computer, I'm not going to try it again on the thousands of machines that I manage.

They made it seem like this exploit could have knocked out every computer in the nation. What was the real risk here?

Which is why escalation of privilege attacks are as important as remote code execution. A sophisticated attack will use multiple exploits.

I was curious with how they claimed they worked with manufactures to fix the exploit. Presumably this meant a mass update of the BIOS of hundreds of thousands of computers across the financial industry.

Haven't seen this, sitting in Germany. But do I understand it right, that NSA told everybody, the helped/messed with BIOS-Versions from different vendors, to "help us all (TM)".

Do I really want the NSA to dabble in the BIOS of my computer?

[tinfoilhatoff]

I think its good to remember that these people are professionals in disinformation and psyops. If we don't understand what they are attempting then it's more likely due to our lack of experience in the area rather then their incompetence.

One plausible explanation is it is an effort to give cover to friendly politicians during political campaigns. They can't just leave these people without a story. They need to supply them with something to counter all the negative news. The story doesn't have to be airtight. It just needs to be good enough for the majority of the population to remain accepting of the status quo.

As an example of another bit in this campaign I would point to the recent instances of politicians claiming that Snowden must have had help from the Chinese or Russians. No proof was given but he just had to have help because how else could he have done it.

It would be good to remember that the first goal of any organization is survival. There is no reason to think that the offensive capabilities of the NSA and the rest of the defense establishment aren't being used to protect themselves.

CBS is really pumping up the PR for the NSA.

Recent episodes of NCIS have a NSA agent on loan to the NCIS staff. She's cute, smart, and quirky and does a great job protecting us all from the scary people.

Also, Hawaii 5.0, had a hack attack on an episode lately and they were all "Thank god we have the NSA to protect us". Ok, I forget the details on that one, but I remember rolling my eyes.

Now with 60 minutes jumping on board, it's plain to see there's a coordinated effort to spin the NSA in a good light. Not just a whitewash, the message is "The NSA spying on Americans is a good thing".

This is true. I wonder how much of it is just CBS pandering to its demographic rather than coordinated propaganda, though. The CBS audience skews old (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-06/from-cbs-adv...), and loves police procedurals, which as a genre unfailingly cheerlead for institutional authorities. (Think how many procedural plotlines turn on the Good Guy Cops lying to or physically threatening someone they've got in an interrogation room, for instance. This is always presented as the Good Guy Cops being smart and savvy, not as an abuse of power.)

So if you've got an audience that wants to be told that the authorities are always right, you could decide strictly for business reasons to just give them more of that.

Never mind Person of Interest, where an all-seeing computer helps extralegal lawbending crimefighters save lives...

An easy bite for a real journalist would've been Alexander's statement in the opening segment that NSA does not collect data ("phone calls and emails") on Americans. He then goes on to detail all the safeguards (FISA courts, access controls) to prevent analysts from mis-using this actually-collected "uncollected" data.

A real journalist, which Miller isn't, would've been all over that. But if it hadn't been Miller, and it had a real journalist, there would've been no way NSA would've allowed CBS inside any part of the complex.

Later in the segment, it is mentioned we share all this data with our FIVE EYES partner countries, where presumably, they don't have safeguards regarding foreign nationals (eg. Americans). Another something a real journalist would've jumped all over.

Another little aside: Miller asked Ledgett (the Snwoden task force head and soon-to-be Deputy Director, NSA) how many times he's been interviewed by the media and he replied "One. Now.". He's been interviewed at least a few times before, most recently by the WSJ. A quick Google search pulled up this URL: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230460710...

I am one of the few who remember a time when 60 Minutes actually did investigative journalism and not biased propaganda pieces for the likes of the NSA. Now you'll be hard-pressed to find any investigation in a 60 Minutes story, let alone the journalism part. Sad.

What should they have done differently? I think the sentiment here mainly is going to be any report from 60 Minutes that isn't 100% negative about everything the NSA is doing is not going to be good enough.

How about asking some hard questions instead of tossing softballs? For instance, why wasn't Keith Alexander confronted by the fact that he lied to Congress and the FISA courts? But no, that would have cut into their driveby on Snowden. Did you know that Edward Snowden kicks puppies? &c.

I watched the interview and it was a real puff piece. Last week, 60 Minutes doled out advertising to Amazon. This week, they did it for NSA.

The lying to Congress issues aren't so black and white as I mentioned in another thread. Here is a writeup about Clapper:

> There is an added wrinkle here, however, is that it is not clear to me whether Clapper could have given a direct (and truthful) answer in a public hearing, as such an answer would have required him to disclose the existence of a then-classified government program. Even a non-answer or evasion could have revealed the existence of operations the NSA was trying to keep secret.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/11/did-james-clapper-lie-to-co...

Well, maybe they should have touched on it, then. I wonder why they didn't!

He could have said "I can't comment on that in a public forum".

I think that might where the miscommunication comes in with lay people. Commenting at all would confirm the existence of a classified program. That's the rule everyone is taught when you get read in. You're taught to never divulge. So whereas a case could be made that this program was illegal, the fact that it's classified means it's next to impossible to comment at all about it in a public forum. So, you lie

As far as lying to congress, I seem to recall that both parties leaders trotted out to say that all was well, and that this is done to keep us all safe. It's hard to claim anyone was lied to when it seems the intelligence committees and leaders in both houses knew full well what was going on. Does anyone really believe these highly connected politicians didn't know? It's just seems like political convenience for congress to continue that meme, when the intelligence committees seem to have know exactly what was going on. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I suspect the politicians knew and are more than happy to throw anyone else under the bus. Otherwise, if they'd didn't know, then why haven't they done anything?

Does anyone really believe these highly connected politicians didn't know?

Doesn't hiding the details of the program protect it from those who would oppose it? Wouldn't some effort be expended there?

"It's hard to claim anyone was lied to"

His statements are on the Congressional Record. That means he lied to everyone in the world, since the record is public.

So, you lie

And, presumably honorably, take the consequences for hiding an illegal program.

How does it change this that he was given the questions ahead of time? He is not a low level employes, he has the ears of people at the highest levels and could have requested a closed hearing. He probably could have asked the president to request one. Was this an orchestrated lie?

If there wasn't a policy change to acknowledge the program, it would be closed.

I would've been happy with any treatment of parallel construction. They seemed to avoid that like it was puppy-killing. Which, it probably is as bad.

Here is another example. They spent like a good 5 minutes talking about how they hired all these smart kids to work on cryptography, specifically code breaking. Maybe 60 minutes could have simply asked them, "We have reports that you are working to undermine secure internet communication, is that what your code breaking work is for? And why are you doing that?

>We have reports that you are working to undermine secure internet communication

That isn't a loaded question whatsoever.

This response is justifying my statement above. The piece needed to have many 'When did you stop beating your wife?' type questions before the majority of the audience here would be happy with the reporting.

How is that a loaded question? It's a statement of fact. 1) They had people working on intercepting Google's private internet, 2) They actively wanted to weaken SSL.

For your example: Yes, if the interviewee was charged with beating his wife, that would be a very fair question. Not asking that would just be dishonest.

How is saying they're working on code breaking not admitting they are working on breaking internet cryptography? Isn't that the same thing? What other widely used codes could they be working on besides the algorithms used in TLS and SSL. It's seems to me they answered your question on TV. And really, don't we already know they do it, and don't we already know why they do it: because they can, because congress lets them do it, because the president ordered them to do it. If the politicians were truly opposed to this, wouldn't they have shut it down by now?

Pay no attention to the politicians behind the curtain: Blame the out of control NSA!

No politician ever shut down J. Edgar Hoover, and not for lack of wanting or trying. Hell, they have a hard enough time with relatively innocent bureaucracies. Do you really think No Such Agency lacks defenses from political interference?

>Yes, if the interviewee was charged with beating his wife

No. Convicted, yes. Charged, no. Here in the United States we have the presumption of innocence.

"We have reports that you beat your wife" is not an unfair question to ask someone charged with beating his wife. Just because our legal system presumes innocence doesn't mean you can't question someone until they've been convicted of a crime.

"We have reports that you beat your wife" is fair and to question someone on that is fair and is much much different from "when did you stop beating your wife?" which the GP said was a fair question. I never said or even implied you can't question someone until they have been convicted of a crime, I just said questioning them like they are already guilty isn't fair and I think is shitty journalism.

Except its not a loaded question when you ask a wife-beater whether they've stopped beating their wife.

Just as its not a loaded question to ask the NSA, who is using cryptographers to try to break encryption on the internet, whether their cryptographers are trying to break encryption on the internet...

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" is a loaded question. "Do you beat your wife?" is not.

So after they say "yes" how would you go about asking them if they stopped in a non-loaded manner?

Ironically, they are chartered to secure our signals as well, what exactly are they doing to that end?

I get they had to play softball to get access. However there are ways to still do honest journalism despite this. They could have interviewed anyone outside of the NSA skeptical of their practices and spliced together numerous views. They could have asked hard questions and then shown NSA's refusal to answer them. And this whole piece was very light on facts. I kept expecting a voiceover of the journalist to explain how the NSA's story doesn't match the facts leaked. And there's no historical context of the NSA's dishonesty.

"I get they had to play softball to get access"

Maybe they shouldn't bother then. The NSA should not be given a propaganda platform; if they will not answer hard questions, then they should not get a chance to talk at all.

Getting an official on the air gets views and sells ads.

> I think the sentiment here mainly is going to be any report from 60 Minutes that isn't 100% negative about everything the NSA is doing is not going to be good enough.

Or maybe just something that's not 100% positive.

this is called "Manufacturing Consent" and its the major purpose that 60 minutes has always served. it is not new.

Actually, 60 Minutes has quite a checkered past. The first thing that comes to mind is their misrepresentation in the 80s of reports of "unintended acceleration" in Audi 5000s. Their colored journalism almost ruined the company.

CBS's "60 Minutes" ran a devastating expose of the Audi 5000. Audi customers fled. Lawyers cashed in. The American public was saved, yet again, from the perils of technology gone awry. Only one little noticed footnote remains at the end: There was nothing wrong with the car.

... '60 Minutes,' in one of journalism's most shameful hours, gave air time in November 1986 to a selfstyled expert who drilled a hole in an Audi transmission and pumped in air at high pressure. Viewers didn't see the drill or the pump—just the doctored car blasting off like a rocket.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cjm_18.htm

Sorry to reply to myself, but I just want to append a couple of other ethical lapses on their part:

- Softballing Obama and Clinton on Benghazi [1], in which the journalist interviewing about a controversial topic asks mindless questions.

- Dan Rather's credulity on GWB National Guard forgeries [2] (leading to firings and eventually Rather's retirement)

[1] http://newsbusters.org/blogs/pj-gladnick/2013/01/28/60-minut...

[2] http://www.mrc.org/bozells-column/dan-rathers-forgery-fit

Unsurprisingly, the words "targeting" and "collecting" were used interchangeably when convenient.

In similar fashion, "metadata" was again used as a red herring.

All domestic communications within the United States are currently intercepted and stored for at least 5 years, including content. Perhaps that wasn't a desirable talking point.

EDIT Did anybody find that segment about the codebreakers and the Rubik's cube kind of silly? It seemed to send a message to me like, "These guys can solve a damn Rubik's cube okay. Their work is way over your head. Don't ask questions, just trust them."

Agreed.

The 1:30 solve for a rubix cube is a bunk time too. I think I got mine down to 45 seconds which I referred to as "faster than anyone who can't solve a rubix cube" since it sounds impressive, but most guys who are amazing at it can do it in less than 15.

"The fact is, we're not collecting everybody's email, we're not collecting everybody's phone things, we're not listening to that."

Uh... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

How easy it has become for them to lie.

The word "collecting" means something different in NSA vocabulary than it does in our vocabulary: to them, it is defined as "specifically looking at". Gather/store and collect are completely different things, to them...

It allows for them to make such statements to people who don't know their definition, and later claim they did not lie.

I really don't understand why they're allowed to redefine terms like this.

Shouldn't the media be calling them out?

Yes. they should. now think real hard about why that might not be happening here.

Even the use of the phrase "phone things" could be an attempt at being unspecific-enough to avoid lying. What are "phone things"? They're nothing ... or they're whatever we later describe them to be when confronted with conflicting information. On one of the most critical areas of disclosure - and the statement on it is meaningless.

He's telling the truth. His phone is the one untapped phone in the country. His emails are the ones that are not being collected. Therefore, not everyone's phones are being tapped and not everyone's emails are being collected. Q.E.D.

FRONTLINE seems to be the only investigative journalism program of note left on television. Will be interesting to see their report on the NSA, assuming that they're working on one.

They already did. Even before this whole Snowden business.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/

Additionally, the 'Spying on the Homefront' [1] episode in 2007 brought up FISA, domestic wiretaps, AT&T's 'Room 641A' [2], etc.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/

[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews...

I remember watching this and being shocked! A real eye opener, even after snowden. It shows just how big the spying industry has gotten in the last 10 years.

This. I would have replied here instead of posting a new thread if I saw your post first. Frontline is THE standard for in-depth reporting on TV.

remember to donate to your local PBS station, the last bastion of journalism.

Once Rooney died they were all free to stop complaining which does not make for good news. That grumpy old man was protecting our freedoms by protecting our lawn.

I saw the show here[1]. It's beyond ridiculous. The saddest thing is how stupid they consider average Joe to be.

[1] http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/12/60-minutes-nsa-good-...

Another question that always puzzles me... Are operating system THAT vulnerable? Every Agency, Criminal, whatever-organization has a remote 0day windows/linux/macosx exploit????

Some more than others. But I'm pretty sure that the average consumer os is vulnerable to someone with the skills. Even if the os itself isn't, there will typically be hundreds of unaudited programs running under escalated privileges. Any one of those would suffice.

I think that the situation is hopeless for joe users, if someone wants to own their computer they will. I wouldn't really even trust many IT admins to not get owned if someone actually targets them (instead of the normal random stuff everyone gets). Even if you know what you're doing, in the worst case you just need to browse to the wrong URL to get instantly owned without user interaction. I think it's hopeless for systems that are used in standard "desktop" manner, the attack surface is so large.

See for example this: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/03/fake-femme-fatale...

"Even if you know what you're doing, in the worst case you just need to browse to the wrong URL to get instantly owned without user interaction"

You'll have to make a better case. In the exploit in your link, the user was tricked by social engineering, had his computer configured to automatically run Java applets from arbitrary sources, and in all probability was running Microsoft Windows - hardly someone practicing good security.

Yes, anybody who wants definitely has remote 0days - they're available on the market, you simply buy them. Of course, they might 'expire' at any point, but there's a whole industry that's finding (or making?) new ones and selling them to be exploited, not fixed.

Well Stuxnet (which is believed to be written by government(s)) had an unprecedented four zero-day exploits.

Thanks for the link. I'm pretty sure Barbara Walters has lobbed harder questions than the ones seen here on 60 minutes.

60 Minutes pawned by Jeff Bezos and now a paid stooge for the NSA who tried to further discredit Snowden.

Sigh, more about phone records.

Phone records! Just metadata collection! Data collection? Oh, right, we do that, too.

It's really disturbing how 'it's just metadata' is one of the lines being used to make the whole NSA debacle sound like not such a big deal, when in reality metadata is what makes this information USEFUL.

Shit, somewhere in there is a point.

My point was that phone records is often used as a distraction from the rest of the programs, "see look, it's just the outside of a letter!".

In reality, two things are wrong: a lot of letters' insides are analyzed as well, and keeping a central database of just the outsides turns out to be a huge privacy violation, anyway.

And the first example they use is a "pirate"??!! That justifies a lack of privacy and an ungodly sum of tax money?!

:throws up in mouth:

Those Somali warlords tap undersea fiber optic cables, intercepting file transfers. Right now, there at least three different safe houses in the outskirts of Mogadishu with several terabyte hard drives rigged to blow up if their demands aren't met. Billions of dollars worth of the world's music is blown up every year by these monsters. Music piracy is a major threat to the US recording industry, and a legitimate target of the NSA.

The notion that 60 Minutes had a position from which to decline is curious.

NSA and there mass media partners are basically running psyops on Americans. The sad thing is that it will probably work on many of the sheeple and provide ample cover for morning talk shows and op-ed articles ad nauseam.

Are they this bad in their other current reporting?

Worse, possibly.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364929/behind-60-minut...

their love affair with the current administration has basically neutered them.

So was it a hate affair with Bush that led them to unquestioningly believe something they wanted so hard to be true with the memos?

Since when did anyone still consider 60 minutes serious journalism? They've long gone the way of "gee-whiz" reporting for the aging (and probably sleeping) baby-boomers. You want hard hitting journalism covering the worse situations around the world? Frontline has you covered.

Watch the commercials. They're aimed older than the boomers. Aimed more for the Lawrance Whelk generation than the Beetles. They kept Rooney around because he reminded their average viewer of themselves.

Please make a distinction for me that I'm not saying all old people are senile or even that its a good idea for one of our very few media corporations to push the idea that all old people are senile, but I am stating objectively there exists an infotainment news magazine format TV show oriented specifically toward the idea of selling advertising to nursing home viewers and their editorial spin is based on the idea the viewers are senile.

They're pretty good at their job, for better or worse. What I mean, is if you don't like it, you're probably not part of the target market.

(Also I agree with you, Frontline gives the BBC a serious run for their money)

I think the majority of the US public doesn't even need any of that propaganda to hang Snowden in public and continue to put up with corrupt DC.

Who is the target? I mean, seriously. Nazism had Jews. Communism had bourgeois. Who is the enemy of the US Totalitarian Government. Because as we all (well, maybe not all) know from school, the totalitarian Government to exist needs two types of enemies: internal. And external. We know who the external enemies are: so called "terrorists". So this begs the question, who the internal enemy will be. They will probably also be called "terrorists". But will these be "islam fundamentalists" like in the case with external enemy. Or maybe so called "patriots"? Or OWS movements? I have no clue to be honest. Who is the enemy? Which group the propaganda machine will sacrifice to keep the wider populace in check, obedient and scared?

Seriously asking because from me this is the only point from understanding if we are in fact dealing with totalitarians already or not yet. I assume this is morphing slowly into a totalitarian state. But who will be sacrificed? Who will be the internal enemy. That puzzle is missing for me. Who will be used to keep us scared?

The scenario I think is possible: like with world trade centers, via/nsa/whatever will do some kind of horrible 'terrorist' attack on the US soil. Thousands will be killed. And the whole thing blamed on OWS -- or -- Patriots -- or -- both of these groups at the same time -- and prosecuted without courts in concentration camps a.k.a "Gauntanmo Bay". I know, I know, sounds like sci-fi. Anyone taking bets on that though?

Because that's the only part of the puzzle they are missing. And if you ask me, the reason why they selected 'terrorism' as the target is not an incident. That's the only tactics that can be employed successfully against strong, organized total government effectively. Both Polish and French underground soldiers were called terrorists by the Nazis.

If you take away democracy from people - at has already happened in the US where whoever we vote into the office will just do the same thing - the only option you leave them is violence. Terror. If you know and understand that - as they USG had known for a long time - your first step will be making them the public enemy #1 even before you start morphing the country into a totalitarian state.

Who can be accused of terrorism? Even 82-old nuns are. http://jezebel.com/5943373/82+year+old-nun-breaks-into-the-f...

Why not me for writing the above? The punishment? No right to lawyer, no right to due process, torture, indefinite imprisonment in de facto concentration camp. WAKE UP!

> Who is the target?

Every other nation. But there are no clear opponents. The struggle is to keep the US economy alive and growing. Industrial espionage. Trade agreements. Deregulation of markets if it is beneficial strong regulation otherwise. Enforcement of policies that are beneficial to US based industries.

The war is an economic one.

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