Laura Poitras Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance/

by eplanit • 10 years ago

325 80 10 years ago

Every time I hear one of these Bernie supporters talk, I want to remind them of Obama in '08. We thought Obama would be the guy to save the country this. But reality is a lot more complicated than ideals. It's actually a bit like startups in that sense. You can have all the ideals you want but it doesn't matter a whit without execution.

rdl2• 10 years ago

This was mostly on GWB's watch.

ZoF• 10 years ago

What was mostly on GWB's watch?

The parent doesn't imply that Obama was president when events in the article took place.

Also; Trump 2016. Make America Great Again.

x0x04• 10 years ago

The structure of the US government has an unusually high number of veto points. Presidents have, as opposed to similar positions in other countries, much less power to push their agenda. People who don't understand that change comes slowly in the US, and requires serious organization to push through the house and senate, are being silly and simultaneously sabotaging their ostensible goals. viz Obama supporters not voting in off-presidential year elections and hence crippling his ability to push legislation.

lambdasquirrel2• 10 years ago

Well go ahead. All of you mod me down. But you cannot explain the executive Branch's response to Snowden. Did the Republicans in legislature do that? No. That was purely the administration's choice.

Yaggo• 10 years ago

The structure of the US government has an unusually high number of veto points. Presidents have, as opposed to similar positions in other countries, much less power to push their agenda.

Actually the opposite is true. In many (Western) countries the head of state has zero actual power. The US president has some actual power, e.g. limited veto right on bills.

bigufufhug• 10 years ago

Funny, Obama certainly didn't lack the power to wage mass genocide on brown skinned people.

yourapostasy• 10 years ago

People who don't understand that change comes slowly in the US, and requires serious organization to push through the house and senate...

A lot of people new to the US political process (that is, get consistently involved beyond simply voting, even more involved than voting in primaries), do not understand the slow pace of change is a deliberate feature designed-in from the start, not a bug. Normative slow policy change means it is just as slow to implement adverse policies as well, giving time for citizens to put in the effort and time to roll it back just as slowly. Hence Benjamin Franklin's "...if you can keep it" quip.

What we see as alarming, fast-paced changes today are the culmination of generations of dogged efforts at policy changes frequently made opportunistically rather than specifically goal-directed, incubating emergent adverse behavior given rise by generations of insufficient citizen participation assiduously maintaining the republic's edifice.

The US political arena has its version of Usenet's Eternal September, where newcomers arrive (often timed to presidential elections) in a fresh, eager batch putting in tons of time and effort, then ebb like the tide when they don't see the results they anticipated (forgetting Bismarck's dictum that "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.") within 1-4 years. Only a smattering remain to welcome the next batch. When life changes (job-related moves, children, extended family medical issues, etc.) enter the picture, it filters out even more (interesting relationships to explore here between most citizens unable to find stability navigating those life changes, and political participation). It's a stamina-oriented sport with results often measured in decades, and the work that produces real results is often very tedious and distinctly lacking glamor.

chippy2• 10 years ago

We thought Obama would be the guy to save the country this. But reality is a lot more complicated than ideals.

People generally don't like being reminded that they have been duped into believing the hype, even when believing it was actually the best thing.

It's also a human psychological trick that we cannot easily imagine what would have happened if we did not believe or did not have "hope".

So there is fact that things didn't get rectified as much as promised, the fact that many people believed that would happen, and the probable actuality that things got much better than if they didn't believe.

sitkack• 10 years ago

It was pretty apparent in '08 that Obama wasn't going to _save_ anything. Obama, is, was and will always be a Statist. Everyone was exuberant for the removal of Bush and nothing more, the fact that he is considered black was just a bonus. In '12, it was literally the lesser of two evils.

flurpitude• 10 years ago

To his credit, Sanders has explicitly said that a president can't change the country singlehandedly and a grassroots political movement is needed to achieve any meaningful change. Any supporter who thinks electing him is the end of it isn't listening to his message.

GigabyteCoin• 10 years ago

a book she’s publishing to accompany the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance, recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject, along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the secret NSA leaker she then knew only as “Citizenfour.”

That line really highlighted the fallacy that "mass surveillance is effective" for me.

They were actively spying on her concurrently while she was "the subject of a grand jury investigation" and still were unable to deduce that she was actively conspiring with Edward Snowden which would ultimately decimate their reputation worldwide.

jlgaddis3• 10 years ago

PGP FTW!

mirimir• 10 years ago

Yes, and Tor :)

exo7623• 10 years ago

Technical means are not enough. We need political change.

justinjlynn3• 10 years ago

PGP, if used incorrectly, can actually be worse than if you had communicated in plain text (assuming you have some preshared phrases that make sense in context to use). PGP can reveal not only to whom your talking but without a doubt that it is you and only you and them and only them no matter what email addresses you use.

PGP doesn't necessarily protect against replay attacks either and when sent via email, the email the headers and subject lines are, of course, unencrypted and unprotected. Accordingly never put sensitive information in mail headers and, by extension, the subject line.

You can use a well-known strongset key for rendezvous but once contact is established always rotate PGP identities with every communication and discard target keys with the throw-keyid(s) option. PGP/GPG can keep you safe but it takes a significant amount of work to use correctly and one screw up can bring it all crashing down.

If you need it to keep you alive you must practice, practice and practice some more. Develop your own tools and filters to catch mistakes and always consider the metadata trail you might be leaving. Metadata can convict. Remember, the United States Government targets people for execution based on metadata alone.

Consider posting crypted/signed messages to Usenet instead of using email to obscure your communications. Sign and encrypt your messages on an offline system and distribute them online using a different and preferably public computer you don't own and only use once. Distribute and collect your correspondence via ToR if at all possible. Keep your keys offline on encrypted storage. Set up a duress key, always chain different keys (never thread messages with the same key) and always plan for failure, because if it can fail it will.

Only then will PGP/GPG have a chance at helping you stay alive and free.

exo7623• 10 years ago

>a book she’s publishing to accompany the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance, recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject, along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the secret NSA leaker she then knew only as “Citizenfour.”
That line really highlighted the fallacy that "mass surveillance is effective" for me.

Ohh it is so much worse than that. For me eye opening moment was CCC 2015 talk "What does Big Brother see, while he is watching?".

The main takeaway. People engaged in surveillance are not "evil", "villainous", "dark", "shadowy" or "dangerous", or even "malicious". They are bunch of very sad, very pathetic wankers. Their job has less meaning than any other job I can think of. (Even TSA airport checks may be more meaningful)

This is a powerful talk. And it frames global surveillance just as it should be framed. As a waste of money, people going through soul killing, democracy killing, privacy killing motions. Without any chance of getting closer to declared goal, using methodology that if anything, hurts their declared goals.

Unless their real goal is control! But in such case they should be called out on that and de-funded.

acqq2• 10 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. The link to the talk you mention:

"What does Big Brother see, while he is watching? [32c3]"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Teu5qXJDFow

The site of the presenter:

http://simonmenner.com/

anon4• 10 years ago

So you're saying the "pretend to upkeep security while in reality maintaining an iron grip on society for your friends in [REDACTED]" market is ripe for disruption? ...

chippy2• 10 years ago

People engaged in surveillance...They are bunch of very sad, very pathetic wankers

However the reality is neither "evil" nor "pathetic" - they are us, the people reading this article, they are techies, hacker news readers, hackspace users, friends, geeks. They believe what they are doing is right, or they like being challenged by the mathematics, or they want to make a difference for their country, or they want to be at the leading edge of crypto.

That's the reality - the people engaged in the technical side of surveillance are hacker news readers.

vostok• 10 years ago

They are bunch of very sad, very pathetic wankers. Their job has less meaning than any other job I can think of.

I would love to solve the problems that one would encounter in this industry if I did not have to avoid it for moral reasons.

gonehome2• 10 years ago

I think Mass Surveillance is a bad idea, extremely high risk and the potential for abuse is high. I also think that it consolidates too much power in one place which is dangerous for the future and the secrecy is a big problem.

That said there is an obvious use for it in helping stop attacks and pretending there isn't is weird to me.

That line really highlighted the fallacy that "mass surveillance is effective" for me.

Specific evidence of success is likely to be classified. It's possible attacks have been stopped - the classification of information makes it hard to know either way.

Though mass collection can help, if you have intel of suspicious people you could look through the entire history of their communication - see what they've been saying and to whom. When you newly learn that a person is a part of ISIS (for example) you can look through their entire communication stream retroactively. Since the attackers are not always that sophisticated (they used SMS in Paris) you can potentially learn a lot of information by doing this (their network, maybe plans).

They're posting videos of themselves on youtube showing off weapons and locations - I suspect there's a lot of information available in their communication that's useful for stopping attacks. It's a tool you would obviously want if you had to do the job.

That said I think the secrecy is dangerous because it prevents the public from being able to determine what level we'd accept (and legal recourse against abuse). It also is more likely to encourage abuse and since James Clapper lied to congress about it we can't trust the organizations that have tasked themselves to do it.

Thinking long-term, it took a long time to get relatively benign governments - consolidating this much power in one place (especially in secrecy) is something we probably shouldn't do.

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

That's a great counterpoint to their methods. I'll add that to my list of stuff to use if I get to face off with a FBI or NSA director on TV. Long shot there but gotta be ready anyway. ;)

rdl2• 10 years ago

I was in Iraq at the time, and probably interacting with people one step away from the people involved in persecuting her. Based on everything I saw at the time, they were perhaps well meaning but utterly overwhelmed and without any handle on the situation, and once something like this starts, it snowballs and has a life of its own. The terrifying thing is when this happens to someone who isn't a white US citizen journalist...they can easily end up in local detention or even theater detention or more, indefinitely, or be killed.

I wish I could apologize to her for what she went through. It probably is better for the world that she went through it, was then an even more effective journalist, and then in contact with Snowden, but it was a huge sacrifice I'm sure.

x0x04• 10 years ago

The iraq war, where we gave the bottom 10% of your high school class the ability to cause the US to harass this woman for a decade on a hunch. Sans evidence. As you obliquely mentioned, it also explains half or more of the people in Guantanamo.

The whole thing should be viewed as a horrific embarrassment, but I think it reveals quite a bit about our actual (as opposed to our rah rah freedom) principles.

calibraxis• 10 years ago

Yes, it's truly a polite understatement to call it a "horrific embarrassment". In a reasonable world, many of our software projects would center on the entire countries of people running away from the carnage our murderous rampage caused, what with the inevitable militias fighting over the remains.

But of course refugees are not known for having the social status points we call "money" and obsess over, so the vast majority of us instead work to improve some dude's social point score. Truly a silly system.

acqq2• 10 years ago

The whole thing should be viewed as a horrific embarrassment

Even if her problems are something which can easier provoke empathy in readers here (as in "I could be her") they are insignificant compared to the problems of the people in Iraq in which they are as the effect of the political decisions of the government for which we assume that it did what its duty is and which got the wide support for the war: the US government which according to their own press statements did this "to bring democracy" and "because of WMD" in Iraq. It turned out there were no WMD there and that the "proofs" were a lie.

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/george_w_bushs_cia_briefer_a...

The US soldiers who were there are probably the most credible source to talk about what they've actually brought there. For the current results just look at the map that includes ISIS controlled territories:

https://pietervanostaeyen.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_50...

And the statistics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraqi_insurg...

Not to mention neighboring Syria and what's left from the country there.

Are we able to have empathy for the people there too?

hellbanner2• 10 years ago

Insidious language that "our principles" really means the operating government principles (I'm assuming your personal principles differ).

People are not their "nation"!

rl32• 10 years ago

She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free.

Peculiar. There's a decent chance that it wasn't related to espionage. There's also a smaller chance that it was espionage gone awry, but I highly doubt state level actors are that clumsy.

If it was espionage it was probably intentional. To what end I'm not sure. Attempts to interfere with the interview seem pointless at best, at least for the sake of interference itself. Probably some sort of psychological game or intimidation. A unit like TAO likely has encyclopedic manuals dedicated to the art of using their capability to mess with people's heads.

On the bright side, it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. State actors have the capability to do this if they want.

jlgaddis3• 10 years ago

... it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit.

Yet.

As far as we know, anyways.

ptha• 10 years ago

She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life., the psychological aspect is very troubling. A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance.

The unintended consequence of the surveillance may have hardened her resolve to be a privacy advocate, but it certainly didn't do her mental health much good.

Kristine1975• 10 years ago

A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance.

It's the old idea of the Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham: Achieve compliance not by watching everybody all the time, but by creating a system where everybody could be watched at any time.

hellbanner2• 10 years ago

One way to counter this attack is to have everyone broadcast a livestream, constantly. Perfect alibi.

rl32• 10 years ago

The problem is that the attackers could just jam said stream, or otherwise render it inoperable.

That said, my own thinking along these lines is very similar to yours. Having a persistent cryptographically secure live stream would go a long way towards protecting one against a wide range of false accusations.

linkregister• 10 years ago

I guessed it was a less-competent state actor in search of some of the secrets she was brokering. Or run-of-the-mill malware.

The way TAO and FBI are structured, "messing with people's heads" is considered outside of the acceptable risk threshold. That usually means the malware would be reported and then blacklisted by anti-virus vendors. Not mention, risk blowing a criminal case. If the FBI infected her computer with malware, it would just quietly do its job.

Journalists have an incredibly difficult time avoiding spear phishing emails when their job depends on them reviewing documents sent to them . I don't envy the level of risk they take every day just checking their email.

jlgaddis3• 10 years ago

I pre-ordered her book on Amazon a few days ago and am anxiously looking forward to the day it arrives.

mynewtb• 10 years ago

I wish they would focus on releasing more documents instead of navel gazing...

privong• 10 years ago

I wish they would focus on releasing more documents instead of navel gazing...

Both are useful. In this case, it is providing an explicit, human narrative for the harm that surveillance can inflict. Many people respond more strongly to emotional anecdoes than to hard data (pretty much the reason why low-probability terrorist attacks are disproportionately feared over more common ways to die), so having a more emotional, anecdotal account of the actual effect of surveillance on people is also important.

vorg• 10 years ago

the surveillance targeting Poitras had transformed her into a nervous wreck. [...] she describes feeling constantly watched, entirely robbed of privacy. “I haven’t written in over a year for fear these words are not private,” [...] She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares

Poitras and others being surveilled by people in the US and other governments represent an extreme point on a spectrum. Lower down the spectrum are many more people who each have one or more busybodies from government, academia, the media, business, entertainment/sports, or religion, etc after them for some reason/s. Those busybodies often discover and collude with each other. The resulting surveillance and interference against us is probably quite tame compared to what the US govt has done against Poitras, but intense enough that we can extrapolate to more easily appreciate what she's gone through.

webjames• 10 years ago

I'll preorder the book, interestingly it wont be available until May in the UK but Amazon will ship from the US.

Can anyone recommend any other similar books in the meantime?

dineshp2• 10 years ago

If you imagine yourself in the future(maybe 50 years in the future) and look back at the present and think about the present,specifically regarding privacy,mass surveillance,data collection,the state of the law and the power that the Government and corporations have over people's life, it seems totally ridiculous to me.

This is a problem that can only be solved if the vast majority of the population gets involved and cares about the pressing issues in the world.

One of the great side effects of the explosion of the internet is that it has created a potential medium for everyone to participate in the process of democracy and law making. With the awareness and the right tools to enable participation of the masses in every decision that the Government makes, we can limit the power that the Government and corporations have in the process of democracy and law making.

And with participation of the common man,we can finally move towards a democracy in the true sense of the word.

arca_vorago• 10 years ago

Which is exactly why the totalitarian state has been kicked into high gear in response. Throughout history technological change that has enabled communication and the passing of information has been responded to by the oligarchy by taking control of and limited that media. Telegraph/gram, radio, telivision, the printing press and so on.

Part of my theory is that it just took them a little while to understand exactly how dangerous the internet is to them, but now they have fully realized this it has almost forced the implimentation of the surveillance state so that later the cat can be walked back on dissidents.

Its what William Binney and Thomas Drake call the "turn key totalitarian state". It may not be turned on yet, but the structure is being put in place. All it takes is a martial law enabling event and a potus willing to turn the key.

Which is why I think everyones going to be amazed when Jeb gets the nom and steals the election.

infinite8s• 10 years ago

And the 2 degree climate change over the next 50 years is likely just the trigger needed to justify martial law (much of coastal Florida is expected to flood, the North East of the US will have the extremes of weather that we've just started experiencing, much of the farm belt is expected to undergo drought).

secfirstmd2• 10 years ago

Excuse blatant Plug :)

When we built Umbrella, we had in mind the example of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras meeting Edwards Snowden. Initially Snowden tried to make contact but Greenwald found the process of digital security too cumbersome and awkward. Poitras however was more persistant. Also, when Greenwald and Poitras went to Hong Kong, they knew little or nothing about physical security. We wanted to change that and make it easier to have everything a journalist like Glenn Greenwald would need to do to meet a source in their pocket - everything from sending a secure email to meeting a source in a high risk location where they may be under surveillance from a regime which may threaten their vital work. So we launched an open source Android app called Umbrella -

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...

https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android

It's still a long way from being perfect but hopefully will make the life of future Laura Poitras, just a little bit easier.

junto2• 10 years ago

While I think your cause is noble, can you really trust Android, and even if you can trust Android, can you really trust the baseband firmware?

secfirstmd2• 10 years ago

No. But as we all know, there is practically no firmware which can be trusted. I think the issue is always about measuring risk versus the threat level. Journalists that we train every day all over the world are always going to carry out high risk activities. The temptation is always to try to build a tool for the most extreme threat model and in the process, bypass the most common threats - leaving the average journalist with even less protection. Indeed, we increasingly find far much focus amongst our trainees on high level NSA Prism the stuff while little consideration of the basics - passwords, who has access to information in your own office, dealing with physical surveillance etc etc - all of which oir experience has taught us is far more common security hazard to journalists.

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

Then you failed unless you're talking about defending against people that aren't hackers or have no resources. Going against nation-states, your foundation and security at each layer are probed for weaknesses. Any complex, mainstream platform or application they usually have 0-days for already. So, you have to avoid all that by default. Here's a list of methods of knocking out risk and where to apply them:

http://pastebin.com/y3PufJ0V

You gotta go back to the drawing board. Also, best to leverage components you know they can't beat or have trouble with. GPG and Tor are only two I remember them mentioning by name in leaks as stopping them from reading and tracing respectively. Build a user-friendly tool around that or use its key code in your app to get leverage. Avoid anything they hack easily.

junto2• 10 years ago

With regards to the excerpt below and out of general interest (since I'm not a journalist, nor know any), what ethical responsibility should journalists have concerning intervention when reporting in wartime?

  He later told the Army investigators that he “strongly
  believed”—but without apparent evidence—“POITRAS had 
  prior knowledge of the ambush and had the means to report 
  it to U.S. Forces; however, she purposely did not report 
  it so she could film the attack for her documentary.”

Should they remain objective in such a hypothetical situation? Are there standard rules of guidance for journalists?

15thandwhatever• 10 years ago

http://keywiki.org/Laura_Poitras#Pre-knowledge_of_ambush.3F

lawnchair_larry• 10 years ago

That one doesn't make sense to me unless all US reporters must also notify all locals that the US is planning a surprise attack. What gives them the impression that her duty is to preserve the life of one man (of an invading force, no less), but not another?

_jomo• 10 years ago

it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free.

If she has a lot of small files she might have run out of inodes [0] which will report "no space left on device" when trying to create a new file, although there's still space left. Inodes store a file's attributes. In ext4 they're limited to total disk space / 16Kb, so a lot of files <16kb will cause trouble.

You can check inode usage via `df -i`.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode

Laura Poitras Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance

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