Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2013

CSEC’s sudden media prominence … in Brazil

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

If you haven’t heard of CSEC before, you’re certainly not alone. The signals intelligence service known as Communications Security Establishment Canada has been eager not to be in the public eye, but allegations are being made that CSEC has been spying on the Brazilian government’s mining and energy ministry:

The impact for Canada of these revelations could be equally grave: they come at a time when Brazil has become a top destination for Canadian exports, when a stream of delegations from the oil and gas industries are making pilgrimages to Rio de Janeiro to try to get a piece of the booming offshore oil industry, and when the Canadian government is eager to burnish ties with Brasilia. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird visited Brazil in August, and spoke repeatedly about the country as a critical partner for Canadian business.

[…]

While CSEC’s role in conducting economic espionage has been alluded to before, how it does this job has not. The significance of the documents obtained by Globo in Brazil is that they speak to how “metadata” analysis by CSEC can be used to exploit a rival country’s computer systems.

The CSEC-labeled slides about the “Olympia” program describe the “Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy” as a “new target to develop” despite “limited access/target knowledge.”

The presentation goes on to map out how an individual’s smartphone — “target’s handset” — can be discerned by analysis, including by cross-referencing the smartphone’s Sim card with the network telephone number assigned to it and also to the handset’s unique number (IMEI).

The “top secret” presentation also refers to attacks on email servers.

“I have identified MX [email] servers which have been targeted to passive collection by the Intel analysts,” one slide says, without explaining who the speaker is.

October 4, 2013

John Lanchester on the Guardian‘s GCHQ files

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:44

Novelist John Lanchester was invited to look at the trove of files the Guardian received from Edward Snowden:

In August, the editor of the Guardian rang me up and asked if I would spend a week in New York, reading the GCHQ files whose UK copy the Guardian was forced to destroy. His suggestion was that it might be worthwhile to look at the material not from a perspective of making news but from that of a novelist with an interest in the way we live now.

I took Alan Rusbridger up on his invitation, after an initial reluctance that was based on two main reasons. The first of them was that I don’t share the instinctive sense felt by many on the left that it is always wrong for states to have secrets. I’d put it more strongly than that: democratic states need spies.

And all’s well in the world and we’re worried over nothing?

My week spent reading things that were never meant to be read by outsiders was, from this point of view, largely reassuring. Most of what GCHQ does is exactly the kind of thing we all want it to do. It takes an interest in places such as the Horn of Africa, Iran, and North Korea; it takes an interest in energy security, nuclear proliferation, and in state-sponsored computer hacking.

There doesn’t seem to be much in the documents about serious crime, for which GCHQ has a surveillance mandate, but it seems that much of this activity is covered by warrants that belong to other branches of the security apparatus. Most of this surveillance is individually targeted: it concerns specific individuals and specific acts (or intentions to act), and as such, it is not the threat.

Few people are saying we don’t need intelligence-gathering organizations like GCHQ, but we do have a right to be concerned about what they are doing when they’re not watching actual, known threats. They have capabilities that we generally thought were just from the pages of James Bond novels or Tom Clancy thrillers … and they use them all the time, not just for keeping tabs on the “bad guys”.

In the case of modern signals intelligence, this is no longer true. Life has changed. It has changed because of the centrality of computers and digital activity to every aspect of modern living. Digital life is central to work: many of us, perhaps most of us, spend most of our working day using a computer. Digital life is central to our leisure: a huge portion of our discretionary activity has a digital component, even things which look like they are irreducibly un-digital, from cycling to cooking.

[…]

As for our relationships and family lives, that has, especially for younger people, become a digital-first activity. Take away Facebook and Twitter, instant messaging and Skype and YouTube, and then — it’s hard to imagine, but try — take away the mobile phone, and see the yawning gap where all human interaction used to take place. About the only time we don’t use computers is when we’re asleep — that’s unless we have a gadget that tracks our sleep, or monitors our house temperature, or our burglar alarm, or whatever.

This is the central point about what our spies and security services can now do. They can, for the first time, monitor everything about us, and they can do so with a few clicks of a mouse and — to placate the lawyers — a drop-down menu of justifications.

Looking at the GCHQ papers, it is clear that there is an ambition to get access to everything digital. That’s what engineers do: they seek new capabilities. When it applies to the people who wish us harm, that’s fair enough. Take a hypothetical, but maybe not unthinkable, ability to eavesdrop on any room via an electrical socket. From the GCHQ engineers’ point of view, they would do that if they could. And there are a few people out there on whom it would be useful to be able to eavesdrop via an electrical socket. But the price of doing so would be a society that really did have total surveillance. Would it be worth it? Is the risk worth the intrusion?

That example might sound far-fetched, but trust me, it isn’t quite as far fetched as all that, and the basic intention on the part of the GCHQ engineers — to get everything — is there.

August 15, 2013

MI5 – more Maxwell Smart than 007

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Britain’s counter-intelligence service, MI5, comes in for some unkind words on the BBC website from Adam Curtis:

The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they — and all the reactions to them — had one enormous assumption at their heart.

That the spies know what they are doing.

It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what’s going on in ways that we don’t.

It doesn’t matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.

But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.

It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

I want to tell some stories about MI5 — and the very strange people who worked there. They are often funny, sometimes rather sad — but always very odd.

The stories also show how elites in Britain have used the aura of secret knowledge as a way of maintaining their power. But as their power waned the “secrets” became weirder and weirder.

They were helped in this by another group who also felt their power was waning — journalists. And together the journalists and spies concocted a strange, dark world of treachery and deceit which bore very little relationship to what was really going on. And still doesn’t.

And no retelling of MI5’s hits and misses is complete without the time they accused their own chief of being a Soviet spy:

The small group in MI5 now became convinced that their organisation was not just penetrated by the Russians, it was actually run by a Soviet agent. They knew they had to get the truth out somehow even if it meant breaking the law. So they found a friendly journalist called Chapman Pincher and told him the hidden truth.

Here is Chapman Pincher being interviewed on the Wogan programme about what then happened. Up to this point Pincher had been the Defence correspondent on the Daily Express. He was successful for getting “scoops” from “inside sources” — although the historian EP Thompson said that really Chapman Pincher was:

    “A kind of official urinal in which ministers and intelligence and defence chiefs could stand patiently leaking.”

What the dissident MI5 agents now told Pincher was like super high-grade piss. Or, as he puts it in the Wogan interview, “it was like walking into an Aladdin’s Cave”. But what Pincher wrote was going to open the floodgates to a new kind of conspiracy journalism that still holds sway over large parts of the media imagination.

Have a look at him and decide yourself — high grade toilet or investigative journalist? Or maybe often they are the same thing?

July 29, 2013

Why Germany is the venue for the loudest denunciations of NSA surveillance

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Alex Harrowell explains the deep suspicions among Germans which long predate the NSA surveillance revelations:

Obviously, privacy and data protection are especially sensitive in Germany. After the Stasi, the centrality of big databases to the West German state’s response to the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s, and the extensive Nazi use of telephone intercepts during the seizure of power, it couldn’t really be otherwise. Privacy and digital activism is older and better established in Germany than anywhere else — in the US, for example, I consider the founding text of the movement to be the FBI vs. Steve Jackson Games case from 1990 or thereabouts, while the key text in Germany is the court judgment on the national census from ten years earlier. But the UK has a (strong) data protection act and no-one seems anywhere near as exercised, although they probably should be.

So here’s an important German word, which we could well import into English: Deutungshoheit. This translates literally as “interpretative superiority” and is analogous to “air superiority”. Deutungshoheit is what politicians and their spin doctors attempt to win by putting forward their interpretations and framings of the semirandom events that constitute the “news”. In this case, the key event was Snowden’s disclosure of the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slides, which show that the NSA’s Internet surveillance operations collect large amounts of information from sources in Germany.

The slides don’t say anything about how, whether this was information on German customers handed over by US cloud companies under PRISM orders, tapped from cables elsewhere, somehow collected inside Germany, or perhaps shared with the NSA by German intelligence. This last option is by far the most controversial and the most illegal in Germany. The battle for Deutungshoheit, therefore, consisted in denying any German involvement and projecting the German government, like the people in question, as passive victims of US intrusion.

On the other hand, Snowden’s support-network in the Berlin digital activist world, centred around Jacob “ioerror” Applebaum, strove to imply that in fact German agencies had been active participants, and Snowden’s own choice of further disclosures seems to have been guided by an intent to influence German politicians. Der Spiegel, rather than the Guardian, has been getting documents first and their content is mostly about Germany.

In this second phase, the German political elite has shifted its feet; rather than trying to deny any involvement whatsoever, they have instead tried to interpret the possibility of something really outrageous as being necessary for your security, and part of fundamental alliance commitments which cannot be questioned within the limits of respectable discourse. The ur-text here is Die Zeit‘s interview with Angela Merkel, in which Merkel argues that she knew nothing, further that there was a balance to strike between freedom and security, that although some kinds of spying were unacceptable, the alliance came first. The effectiveness of this, at least in the context of the interview, can be measured by astonishingly uncritical questions like the one in which she was asked “what additional efforts were necessary from the Germans to maintain their competitiveness”.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

July 17, 2013

QotD: The war on general-purpose computing

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As we wait for dessert, I ask him about his recent speeches at technology conferences discussing the “war on general purpose computing”. He runs through the argument with practised fluency. Computers are by nature general-purpose machines. It’s impossible to make a computer that does all the kinds of things we want computers to do yet is somehow disabled from making copies of copyrighted material, or viewing child pornography, or sending instructions to a 3D printer to produce a gun.

“Oh my God, that’s good,” says Doctorow after his first mouthful of crumble. My peanut butter shortbread is fantastic too, if absurdly calorific. We are interrupted only by another waiter dropping a tray of glasses.

He continues with the argument. The impossibility of making limited-purpose computers won’t stop governments or corporations trying to put on the locks, or changing laws to try to make those locks effective. But the only way these limits can possibly work is subterfuge: computers therefore tend to contain concealed software that spies on what their users are trying to do. Such software is inevitably open to abuse and has often been abused in the past.

Digital rights management systems intended to prevent copying have been hijacked by virus-writers. In one notorious case, the Federal Trade Commission acted against seven computer rental companies and the software company that supplied them, alleging that the rental companies could activate hidden software to grab passwords, bank account details and even switch on the webcam to take photos of what the FTC coyly calls “intimate activities at home”. As computers surround us — in our cars, our homes, our pacemakers — Doctorow is determined to make people realise what’s at stake.

Tim Harford, “Cory Doctorow has Lunch with the FT“, TimHarford.com (originally published at the Financial Times), 2013-07-15

July 16, 2013

State of play in the surveillance state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

If you’re just getting back from an extended vacation with no access to the news, “George Washington” at Zero Hedge has a cheat-sheet on spying that you might want to have a look at:

Lots more at Zero Hedge.

July 15, 2013

Edward Snowden as the modern Prisoner

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

Justin Raimondo responds to Melissa Harris-Perry’s open letter to Edward Snowden:

Why didn’t Edward Snowden agree to be jailed, abused, silenced, and quite possibly tortured? This is what Melissa Harris-Perry wants to know.

Harris-Perry is one of MSNBC’s minor weekend anchors, a professor currently at Tulane University who started out retailing her academic pretensions as a sometime guest on the Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes shows: her job was to inject fancy words like “discourse” and “paradigm” into the standard lefty-“progressive” boilerplate propaganda we’ve come to expect from that venue. With a magisterial tone bordering on the parodic, and complete protection from having to defend her views against any contrary opinions, Harris-Perry soon carved out a niche for herself as a dogged defender of the Obama administration, no matter what the circumstances. So when Snowden emerged as the biggest whistleblower in American history, exposing the existence of a secret surveillance apparatus that snakes into every aspect of American life, she sprang to the Dear Leader’s defense and delivered an “open letter” to Snowden that underscores why no one needs to take her seriously

[. . .]

Listening to Harris-Perry’s tirade, I wondered whether I had stumbled on a heretofore unknown episode of The Prisoner, the cult classic 1960s television series written by and starring Patrick McGoohan, in which a former British intelligence agent who has committed some unknown treason finds himself imprisoned in a place known as The Village. McGoohan’s pioneering series presents a prescient portrait of the anesthetizing Prozac-ed out mass culture of America today: the Village, with it’s pastel houses, outfitted with every comfort, are set in a garden-like “controlled community,” where calming voices are carried on the wind and daily medication prevents coherent thought. Everyone is subject to 24-hour surveillance, and cameras are everywhere. Each episode tells the story of one unsuccessful escape attempt after another, while McGoohan – the prisoner – probes ever deeper into the true nature of the Village. We don’t know what crime he’s been imprisoned for, but the clear implication is that it’s something big, almost Snowden-like. I’m surprised no one has brought up the McGoohan connection: the story lines are parallel if not identical. Snowden seems to be fleshing out McGoohan’s scripts in the front page headlines of every newspaper.

In the series, the Village employs its agents, who are constantly trying to entrap McGoohan into confessing to his alleged crimes, and giving up some Big Secret he supposedly possesses, but he resists. Harris-Perry, in her faux concern for the issues raised by Snowden’s exposure of massive government spying on innocent Americans, is straight out of an episode of The Prisoner, in which an agent of the Village tells him to give up his secret because his “level of celebrity” will somehow protect him. Really? Not, I suspect, if Harris-Perry and her fellow Madam Defarges over at MSNBC have anything to say about it.

I agree with Harris-Perry on one point: it is valid to discuss Snowden, his politics, his personal journey from agent of the state to enemy of the state, but unlike her I don’t think this detracts at all from the actual content of the documents he has made available to Glenn Greenwald and the staff of the Guardian newspaper. Greenwald tells a very interesting back story to all this in his talk given at the “Socialism” conference, in which he relates how and under what circumstances he met Snowden, and how that meeting inspired him to think about how real change comes about.

July 7, 2013

America’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Rick Falkvinge looks at an interesting appropriate pairing: the former German Democratic Republic’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) and the American NSA:

If you were to compare the evil, reprehensible Stasi to the NSA side by side in a visual comparison, who’s the worse surveillance hawk? The people over at OpenDataCity have put together a nice visual guide with astonishing results. We tend to think of Stasi-scale surveillance as the epitome of evil surveillance, and have completely lost track of what today’s governments are doing to their people.

When you go to this page (in German), you are presented with a nice map that compares the size of the Stasi archives — a large building in Berlin — with the corresponding NSA archives. It’s clear that the NSA’s archives — if used with Stasi technology, for an apples-to-apples comparison — would be quite a bit larger:

Comparison of the Stasi and NSA archives. The Stasi archives were a building in Berlin, the NSA archives seem to be more like a couple of entire blocks.

Comparison of the Stasi and NSA archives. The Stasi archives were a building in Berlin, the NSA archives seem to be more like a couple of entire blocks.

Keep reading … it’s like a “powers of ten” exercise.

June 30, 2013

The Observer has an embarrassing day

Filed under: Britain, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

In his Forbes column, Tim Worstall gleefully recounts the steps in a publishing cock-up by The Observer:

It looks like The Guardian/Observer* has managed to get itself mightily stung over a revelation about PRISM and the NSA. Which is all very amusing given the paper’s part in the Glenn Greenwald/Edward Snowden revelations. But what turns it into an absolute joy is that, while the news originally came from someone with, hmm, rather “out there” views, the actual information itself seems to be roughly true. And yet they’ve still taken the piece down.

The story starts here, at a site called The Privacy Surgeon. The site does an interview with an ex-NSA guy called Wayne Madsen. In which he claims that there are various European and other countries that cooperate with the NSA in the collection and then dissemination of information picked up from the monitoring of communications.

[. . .]

So, The Guardian/Observer has published a piece using allegations made by someone we’d already be predisposed to think of as being less than entirely correct in his descriptions of the real world. And, as a result, they’ve taken the piece down:

    This article has been taken down pending an investigation.

So far so good, just as in any other walk of life you think you’ve made a mistake you try to correct it. Just as Mother always told you you should. The slightly unfortunate thing is that the Sunday papers in the UK print quite early on the Saturday evening. Thus we get this front page of the physical paper:

Observer front page 20130630

The paper is now running as its front page a story that it has already retracted online. This is something of an “Ooops!” moment and as such one to be treasured as an example of the fallibility of both human beings and organisations that contain them.

However, the story really gets even better than this.

Steps towards a police state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Rick Falkvinge thinks that the United States is at the point of no return as far as civil liberties are concerned:

While this may seem a trivial observation, it is critical in this context: people tend to be focused on what affects them in the here and now. While some people can connect the dots and follow the line with their eyes into the future, the vast majority of people don’t bother with something that doesn’t affect them directly, personally, and in the present. In 1932, families were still skating in the park in Berlin on weekends. All that nasty stuff was theoretical, rumored, and somewhere else. People who look ahead and try to sound the alarm bell tend to be regarded as tinfoil hats, eccentric, and nuts.

One of the first things that happens past the point of no return into a police state is the persecution of reporters. As a society is closing down, those persecuted first are those with the audience and an interest in reporting the worrying trends that society seems to be closing. This is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. This is the alarm bell. Once that happens, get out of the mine.

An event horizon is a term from astrophysics. It is the edge of a black hole – so the event horizon appears like a black sphere, if you like. Nothing, not even light, can escape from within the event horizon – hence the term black hole. But if you were traveling through space, in direction of the black hole (which may be as large as an entire solar system), then you would notice absolutely nothing as you crossed the event horizon. You would pass a point of no return, and register not a single thing while doing so. The analogy is depressingly apt.

I’ve written before that I believe that the U.S. is lost to encroaching totalitarianism, which it will likely endure for a number of years before it collapses under its own weight (as all empires do sooner or later). With Edward Snowden being hunted relentlessly across the globe for leaking evidence of systematic abuse of power, Glenn Greenwald – who published Snowden’s leaks – was recently criticized for aiding and abetting the leak itself. This is a key choice of words, for aiding and abetting a crime is itself a crime – the wording suggested that the reporter who published evidence of abuse of power is himself a criminal.

June 25, 2013

Snowden’s character doesn’t matter – Snowden’s revelations matter a great deal

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:08

Gene Healy says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed:

Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that information is a potential treasure trove for political abuse — it can be used to ferret out the sort of information governments have historically used to blackmail and neutralize political opponents: who’s leaking, who’s organizing, who’s having an affair. The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations.

In an post last week, Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith makes the key point: “You Don’t Have to Like Edward Snowden.” Snowden, Smith argues, is “a source,” and the information sources convey is far more important than their “moral status” or the “fate of [their] eternal soul[s].”

Smith mentions Mark Felt, the FBI honcho who served as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” during their investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Felt, it turned out, was simply settling scores in a bureaucratic power struggle. He had no scruples against criminal violations of privacy — in 1980 he was convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans through warrantless break-ins as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

It was important for Americans to know that their president was a crook. That Mark Felt was also a crook is neither here nor there. As Smith puts it, “who cares?”

June 23, 2013

Two remarkable press releases on the Snowden case

Filed under: China, Government, Law, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

First, here’s the official Hong Kong government’s statement:

Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.

The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US Government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR Government has requested the US Government to provide additional information so that the Department of Justice could consider whether the US Government’s request can meet the relevant legal conditions. As the HKSAR Government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.

The HKSAR Government has already informed the US Government of Mr Snowden’s departure.

Meanwhile, the HKSAR Government has formally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.

And here’s a statement from Wikileaks:

Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally. He is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.

Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives at his final destination his request will be formally processed.

Former Spanish Judge Mr Baltasar Garzon, legal director of Wikileaks and lawyer for Julian Assange has made the following statement:

“The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr Snowden’s rights and protecting him as a person. What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange — for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest — is an assault against the people”.

To the vast amusement of many commentators, the reported route out of Hong Kong leads to Russia, with other stopping points including Cuba and Venezuela. It’s like a free press/civil liberties tour of the planet!

June 22, 2013

US charges against Snowden were filed on June 14th

Filed under: China, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

It apparently takes a week for the US government to publicize that it has laid charges…

Federal prosecutors filed espionage charges against alleged National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, officials familiar with the process said. Authorities have also begun the process of getting Snowden back to the United States to stand trial.

The charges were filed June 14 under seal in federal court in Alexandria, Va. — and only disclosed Friday.

Snowden has been charged with three violations: theft of government property and two offenses under the espionage statutes, specifically giving national defense information to someone without a security clearance and revealing classified information about “communications intelligence.”

Each of the charges carries a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Snowden, who is a former employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked details about far-reaching Internet and phone surveillance programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post earlier this month. He revealed his identity while in Hong Kong, where it is believed he is still hiding.

It’s not clear whether the extradition will be straightforward:

Andy Tsang, Hong Kong’s police commissioner, said that if an extradition request was sent from a country that had a “mutual legal assistance agreement” with Hong Kong, its government would “handle it in accordance with current Hong Kong laws and systems.”

Simon Young, a professor at Hong Kong University’s faculty of law, suggested it was unclear whether Snowden would win or lose any attempt to fight extradition.

He said theft was listed in the U.S.-Hong Kong extradition treaty. “There is an offence listed in the treaty of unlawful handling of property, but this raises the question as to whether information is property and the answer is not clear,” he said in an email.

June 14, 2013

Reason.tv – Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:07

June 11, 2013

“Who hired this goofball?”

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Jim Geraghty talks about Edward Snowden and the NSA:

Everybody’s going to have an opinion on Edward Snowden, today the world’s most famous leaker.

In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of people talking past each other, conflating two issues: one, did he do the right thing by disclosing all these details of the vast NSA system to gather data on Americans? And two, should he be prosecuted for it?

Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.

[. . .]

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn’t recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he’s the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over — completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation — and concluding, “yup, looks like a nice kid?”

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego — one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex.)

Snowden feels he has an understanding of what’s going on well beyond most of his colleagues:

    When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.

What’s more, he feels that no one listens to his concerns or takes them seriously:

    And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you’re ignored. The more you’re told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”

My God, he must have been an insufferable co-worker.

    ‘Look, you guys just don’t understand, okay? You just can’t grasp the moral complexities of what I’m being asked to do here! Nobody here really gets what’s going on, or can see the big picture when you ask me to do something like that!’

    ‘Ed, I just asked if you could put a new bottle on the water cooler when you get a chance.’

Update: Politico put together a fact sheet on what we know about Edward Snowden. It’s best summed up by Iowahawk:

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