Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-farrell-tenyearsafter-00.html

by Bender • 3 years ago

547 273 3 years ago

tootie2• 3 years ago

Serious question, why are the Snowden leaks so revered and not the reporting of James Risen several years earlier? Risen exposed operation Stellar Wind which was the grossest abuse of spying apparatus approved by the Bush admin over the express objections of their own DOJ. Risen also appeared in court for every summons about his activities and was dutifully defended by the NYT until he was ultimately exonerated.

WarOnPrivacy3• 3 years ago

Serious question, why are the Snowden leaks so revered and not the reporting of James Risen several years earlier?

Because, historically, the US Press is compulsively deferential to the NatSec state.

It's the same reason the press twistered themselves to report the Mark Klein revelations as a warrantless wiretapping issue - instead of the NSA live cloning internet backbone traffic in a room custom built by AT&T for the purpose.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein

That the US press was loudly silent over US Gov's revenge campaign against - not only James Rosen but also James Risen and other journalists who outed NatSec wrongdoing - is for me one of US Journalism's most defining (non)actions.

ref: US Gov's persecution of James Risen https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/03/james-risen-anonymou...

ref: US Gov's persecution of James Rosen https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/05/james-rosen-name...

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

The US major media reported on this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

viktorcode• 3 years ago

IMO because of the impact they had in the media. I would argue Snowden revelations put privacy and data protection questions on top of the list across the world, for instance.

colordrops• 3 years ago

Because you had journalists and documentarians like Greenwald and Poitras doing an amazing job of getting the story out there.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

2004, far less Internet connectivity to sustain awareness and outrage, and less impact.

Our lives weren't nearly as completely mediated by online services.

"Total Information Awareness" made a splash in the news around 2004 also, but then faded.

Also, Bush's team was busy outraging everyone so many other ways, like blowing up Iraq for oil money, and making up nonsense legal defenses for kidnapping and physical torture of civilians.

tootie2• 3 years ago

I don't think that's it. I think it's more that the public was just more accepting of this kind of thing closer to the wake of 9/11. But regardless, that may explain the muted reaction when the story broke, but not why everyone seems to have forgotten about it. I honestly have a hard time understanding what it is that Snowden even exposed given that the PATRIOT ACT was public record.

edge17• 3 years ago

I think because one day everyone woke up and heard about PRISM, including a lot of the tech companies, which had to go into damage control to deny their involvement. It was big news with brands that every American was familiar with.

lern_too_spel7• 3 years ago

That explains why Snowden was a big deal, but as soon as we all figured out that PRISM wasn't what he claimed it was (and Greenwald stupidly believed without running the docs he was given by experts) and instead just a data integration project for processing communications from targeted foreigners, Snowden should have become a smaller deal.

monetus• 3 years ago

Not to diminish anything he did, risen pushing the NYT to eventually publish was really cool, but delaying that push himself until he could monetize it in a book always bothered me. I always thought snowden, hale, and the "insider" whistleblowers were looked at kind of differently; they faced prosecution. Really wild what has become of bill binney and kiriakou; they aren't like snowden IMO either.

rektide• 3 years ago

Bellovin's Governments and Cryptography: The Crypto Wars is the most grand & sweeping review of governments & encryption across time that I've seen! https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-farrell-tenyearsafter-...

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Indeed. I guess that whole DUAL_EC_DRBG random-number-generator story - the NSA backdoor deal with RSA is essentially true? No confessions yet it seems, however.

iJohnDoe3• 3 years ago

I think people would be surprised and sickened to know just how cooperative the big tech companies are with the intelligence agencies. Microsoft is especially cooperative, even as going so far to make sure their systems are compatible with surveillance systems. Yes, Telcos have had to this as well, but I don’t think many people know that Microsoft has proactively done this.

WarOnPrivacy3• 3 years ago

Microsoft is especially cooperative, even as going so far to make sure their systems are compatible with surveillance systems.

I don't doubt you but a reference would help folks know what to make of this.

danielovichdk• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Enterprise_Defense_Inf...

This for example

iJohnDoe3• 3 years ago

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

Kind of an older article, but illustrates the situation pretty nicely.

Microsoft has also done development work in recent years to enrich the data with more identifiable information and to make the data easier to process for surveillance.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Azure and AWS have so much money coming in from the government that I doubt either company is going to find anything but jelly in their backbones when it comes to government demands for data.

93po• 3 years ago

Amount of courage doesn't even matter, NSLs are handed out like candy and force companies to comply without saying anything.

newZWhoDis3• 3 years ago

Microsoft is also responsible for the Orwellian (and as far as I know still secret/closed source) PhotoDNA, which is an incredible tool for censorship and surveillance.

A lot of people are dead or in jail because of that software, and not just “predators”.

acdha4• 3 years ago

Do you have any examples?

trunic• 3 years ago

It's only used to match on known child sexual abuse images. If you're someone who has collected any of these, then you deserve to be locked up in jail. No excuses.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

Microsoft is especially cooperative, even as going so far to make sure their systems are compatible with surveillance systems.

What is a good example?

monocasa• 3 years ago

Xbox live is mainly built on a custom VPN protocol. The only part they don't encrypt is their chat in order to allow "lawful intercept". This is a custom protocol to allow this at the level of TCP and UDP called VDP so that you can't really forget to flip the 'don't encrypt' flag for surveillance.

They also switched Skype to using a centralized system for signalling when they acquired it. It's still decentralized at the protocol level, simply Microsoft whitelists their own nodes as supernodes.

iJohnDoe3• 3 years ago

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

Kind of an older article, but illustrates the situation pretty nicely.

Microsoft has also done development work in recent years to enrich the data with more identifiable information and to make the data easier to process for surveillance.

TimedToasts• 3 years ago

_NSAKEY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

confoundcofound• 3 years ago

We have a crisis of morality in tech and society at large. When the ends justify the means, and the ends are in fact unending pursuits of power, then no amount of deception, deceit, collusion is off the table. And yes, people who work at FAANG et al are complicit.

ivlad• 3 years ago

Looks like people at FAANG did not like this comment.:-)

geek_at• 3 years ago

Or Dell who allows the NSA to use them as a fake employer for their spies/hackers

ineedausername• 3 years ago

Honestly, people couldn't care less.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

youtube has radicalized jihadi terrorists and white supremacists, facebook has manipulated emotions and played a role facilitating genocide in myanmar, tiktok is controlled by a genocidal regime, instagram depresses teen girls…

though this isn’t much new I suppose, how many times has nike been caught using child labor? how many waterways has nestle depleted, how many animals have been tortured for cosmetics… how many bison were slaughtered to spite the natives, how many whales for lamp oil…

we seem to always find something or someone to exploit

avgcorrection2• 3 years ago

Not caring less and feeling utterly powerless to change anything look identical at a distance of more than twelve feet.

lern_too_spel7• 3 years ago

Or people care, but they don't care in the direction that GP wants. I want US spy agencies to spy on non-American living outside the US who have information that affects national security without being slowed down by too many procedures. I don't want them to spy on Americans, but the government actively works to prevent the agencies from doing this, so it's working as intended.

badrabbit3• 3 years ago

Not just cooperative but eagerly begging to be useful to them, to develop profitable relationships.

But people will not be sickened by this. People mostly only react to consequences and will find someone else to blame.

CTDOCodebases• 3 years ago

Honestly I am not really surprised.

Companies only grow if they are allowed to otherwise they are legislated out of existence. I imagine that growth is actually encouraged if they are bearing fruit.

opportune4• 3 years ago

There are enough examples of what happens if you as a tech company don’t cooperate with intelligence that I don’t blame them. There is nothing you can do against people with guns, gag orders, and secret courts when they show up and tell you to do something.

Though yes, Microsoft is a particularly grossly sycophantic player - their strategy clearly is to be the IC’s best friends because it will get them IC contracts and probably help protect/benefit them in many other aspects.

amoshi2• 3 years ago

Intelligence professionals talk about how disorienting it is living on the inside. You read so much classified information about the world’s geopolitical events that you start seeing the world differently. You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping you from ignorance is that constant stream of classified knowledge. It’s hard not to feel superior, not to say things like “If you only knew what we know” all the time. I can understand how General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, comes across as so supercilious; I only saw a minute fraction of that secret world, and I started feeling it.

This really well describes the feelings I was getting around the time of the revelations, as I scrolled through the secret documents, it's like a different world out there.

Hackers can hack. But these agencies can do so much more.

Intelligence agencies have the law behind them, can force you/the hardware suppliers (so called "interdiction")/software providers (PRISM etc) to play ball and force you to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) at the end of the day.

Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply). The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.

Again, it's just a different world out there. Would love to know what their capabilities look like nowadays.

anonymousiam• 3 years ago

To take what you've said a little further, intelligence agencies have the "law" behind them, but once you become aware of everything they (all of them, worldwide) are doing, you get a completely different perspective on the "law" itself.

Being involved in these activities can also diminish your ethical base, which I guess explains some of the crazy law-ignoring/law-breaking activities within all governments.

markus_zhang• 3 years ago

Law is a weapon of the ruling class.

That's why I laugh at whoever suggests about unions. Downvote me as you wish, but it won't fix the problem for ya.

kossTKR• 3 years ago

So true. And don’t forget that these agencies answer to an elite group of people that benefit from specific world orders that promote various industrial complexes transnationally.

And people that get too specific get daphnied, lombardied, assanged or jfk’ed.

Or maybe not, but you won't find out because all media above a certain threshold is in a spotlight, and has been since before CIA bragged about its all encompassing media operations 50+ years ago.

I remember this info being somewhat widespread when the internet was still new, but wikis, forums and blogs are slowly being disappeared from search or drowned in noise while clownish conspiracies have conveniently smoke-screened all attempts to create an alternative to the status quo.

dathos• 3 years ago

I often wondered what could be the reason that triggers the “dead internet” theory. And muddying the information we can share freely means we cannot share freely anymore.

toyg2• 3 years ago

Yes, agencies have all these capabilities, but at the same time they rarely sway the practical course of history. When the "euromaidan" demos in Ukraine forced regime change, and the Russians hacked and leaked all US/EU diplomatic chatter around it, the contents were utterly banal and predictable. There was no grand conspiracy or execution, just a bunch of interests scrambling to react.

Intercepting communications gives them a leg up, but that's about it.

scraptor2• 3 years ago

I didn't follow that at the time and I'm finding it hard to find information about it, would love a link to those leaked documents.

opportune4• 3 years ago

People love to assume that the CIA/NSA/etc are all powerful all knowing cabals running the entire world, while also believing that government is inherently incompetent.

Anybody who’s been in a large organization, even one that’s highly selective or difficult to join, knows that they’re as a rule chaotic, dysfunctional, and reactive with no coherent or coordinated planning. They’re also composed of individuals who usually run the gamut of moral and honest to deceitful and self serving - but the “sociopathic puppet master genius” is more of a fictional archetype than something that exists in reality.

jruohonen3• 3 years ago

This would be my take too. From all the past leaks of cables, the perhaps most hilarious revelation is the overall humdrum, including the speculative, often incorrect, and sometimes rude chatter between diplomats and intel people.

theaussiestew7• 3 years ago

Regarding Qwest, wasn’t the CEO jailed for insider trading? Or is there another side to this story?

ls6122• 3 years ago

He claimed that he was actually jailed in retaliation for not playing ball with the NSA before 9/11. Idk if what he did specifically is something you’d usually be charged with insider trading or fraud for, which would seem to me the best indirect evidence of who’s story is right.

avgcorrection2• 3 years ago

> It’s hard not to feel superior,

Schneier would know.

hosteur• 3 years ago

Care to elaborate?

m4jor• 3 years ago

Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply). The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.

also the Lavabit owner, Ladar Levison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

amoshi2• 3 years ago

Afterwards, Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one. He also wrote that in addition to being denied a hearing about the warrant to obtain Lavabit's user information, he was held in contempt of court. The appellate court denied his appeal due to no objection, however, he wrote that because there had been no hearing, no objection could have been raised. His contempt of court charge was also upheld on the ground that it was not disputed; similarly, he was unable to dispute the charge because there had been no hearing to do it in. He also wrote that "the government argued that, since the 'inspection' of the data was to be carried out by a machine, it was exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment."

This is just absurd.

slim• 3 years ago

this says that decision makers literally live in a different reality than us, thus making them unsuitable to make decisions on our behalf

drumhead• 3 years ago

Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.

nabogh• 3 years ago

Some cyphers maybe. But it's highly unlikely that all or even most in use are compromised. There are many cryptography researchers who aren't part of the NSA. Other nations for example. And banks obviously trust some cryptography.

throwawaymaths• 3 years ago

Even if they were compromised I imagine the nsa would probably hesitate to use it in a detectable way and "save it for a real threat"

DontchaKnowit2• 3 years ago

I recall reading that government agencues forced the NIST to relax certain crypography standards so that they could still be reasonably broken with super computers.

MathMonkeyMan• 3 years ago

I want to downvote you but can't think of a better reason than I don't like what you say.

Surely we can encode better behavior into our institutions.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't.

The thing that was pretty apparent from Snowden's leaks is primarily that they don't need to. This fear that "NSA can crack cryptography" is the wrong fear. First, as others have noted, there are legions of other researchers evaluating and attempting to break widely used crypto-systems. There is no reason to believe the NSA has some unique brilliant minds that aren't available elsewhere.

More importantly, though, why bother with a "frontal assault" on breaking crypto schemes when endpoint security is a million times more hackable. That is, usually at some point someone wants to view the encrypted data that is being sent, and at that point it needs to be decrypted, so why not just try to hack at that point (which is exactly what they do). As an example, just look at all the stolen cryptocurrency heists. All of these heists resulted from stolen keys or from implementation bugs, not from cracking the crypto schemes that protect cryptocurrency in the first place.

FormerBandmate3• 3 years ago

https://xkcd.com/538/ writ large

fsflover• 3 years ago

A case against security nihilism (cryptographyengineering.com)

468 points by feross on July 20, 2021 | un‑favorite | 333 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

leptons• 3 years ago

Take this as an anecdote, but I have a friend that works at the top of a large quantum computing program at a well known company and he related once that the government is making it very difficult for them to retain talent in the field and make progress. The government feels it has to be at the forefront of quantum tech because of the possibly game-changing encryption capabilities. It was a bit chilling to hear but not at all surprising.

As a participant in the "digital underground" since the early 80's, we were very aware of "ECHELON", "5 eyes", and other spying programs. The "Snowden revelations" are not really anything new, living a life around digital communications 20 years before most people ever heard of the internet it was clear very early that surveillance is just something the government is going to do. And yes, they definitely would consider it top-secret info if they did create a quantum computer capable of cracking modern encryption. We wouldn't know about it unless someone leaks it, but I don't really care if anyone leaks that info - they either already have it or will have it first so it's fair to just assume that they do have that capability.

flangola7• 3 years ago

I find odd enjoyment in observing how one arm of the government is pushing for quantum surveillance abilities while another is urging everyone to quickly adopt PQC.

scrum-treats5• 3 years ago

The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.

And if the criminals are government entities or government-sponsored entities?

motohagiography• 3 years ago

When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points / IX's during the 90s that had just been called "some old police telco stuff, ignore it."

I think an unintended consequence was that it also emboldened a lot of authoritarian personalities to just say, "yeah, we do this, you are with us or against us, here's the line, toe it." A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.

Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. They made sustaining dissonance about how the sausage of empire gets made a lot harder for regular people - even if we also learned that most people really just like sausage.

I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive, and I can't judge what people do to keep their families fed. But the ones who know what's true, yet take a kind of pleasure in repeating official lies because it makes them feel powerful - I think the real impact Snowden had is showing people like that for what they are, and how low the bar is for getting involved in public service and just doing better. There are amazing people in public service, and they are mostly sidelined by a minority of these eels who demoralize their agencies by normalizing small acts of deviance, corruption, and partisan favours. You can change that.

The best way for a technologist to leverage their skills to effect change in government is to go get a Privacy Professional certification https://iapp.org/certify/cipp/, and do work for your state, municipality, or a federal agency. Privacy laws everywhere got absolutely gutted over the pandemic, but the work privacy pros did in the decade prior prevented some of the worst abuses by people leveraging that crisis, and it's going to take a lot of smart technical people working in government to ensure there are technical limits on what a few sleazy appointees like the very ones who exploited 9/11 to build the panopticon Snowden exposed, can do.

theaussiestew7• 3 years ago

Very eloquently phrased. Some of the commonly accepted truths and geopolitics narratives are quite disturbing and actually very Orwellian in a genuine (and not clichéd) sense. Narratives around China and Russia, narratives around our own liberty are completed warped, and to speak out singles you out. There’s definitely a chilling effect about what is acceptable to talk about and what isn’t.

See my other comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097082#36098762

landryraccoon• 3 years ago

A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.

I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?

bboygravity• 3 years ago

Random examples that I can think of: Trump has/had (strong) ties with Russia, needed those Russian ties to win the election and used them to win the elections.

People still believe this to this day. Globally.

theaussiestew7• 3 years ago

Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. It’s the space around politics and think tanks and national security. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power. It’s a vague description but that’s because of the nature of this unspoken expectation.

More concrete examples would be how you’re expected to just completely agree that Russia and China are essentially evil and enemies. Like that’s the unspoken premise. Or in the US, playing this game of theatre around how Democrats or Republicans are bad. I’m not American but there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life. That’s the kind of skill that’s seen as necessary in these kinds of “elite” circles, where you’re just expected to be able to hold two contradicting views and milk them to your advantage. You’re expected to be able to peddle mistruths and warp facts convincingly and worse, you’re seen as higher status and more “refined” for being about to pull this off convincingly.

Another example I’m reminded of is an Australian one, where a think tank that is funded by arms manufacturers called ASPI, had its CEO defend itself on live television. As you’d expect, he was surprisingly able to spin a tale where they were seen as the good guys using all sorts of deception and rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how these people sleep at night but it’s the very definition of double think from 1984. I do believe more people will see this subtle aspect of how opinion is shaped in future.

tlow• 3 years ago

Would that require CIPP/G to be able to participate at the state, muni or fed level?

hackerlight2• 3 years ago

parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive

That was out of left field. What about people who believe it was plausible that Russian intelligence services were behind the leaks of the DNC and Podesta emails, that the intent behind those leaks was to interfere in elections, and that such leaks had a non-trivial influence given the election was so narrow? That seems like a reasonable set of beliefs to hold, not "absurd official lines". I don't have access to the evidence behind the set of claims, but it strikes me as highly plausible.

Many of these "spook-adjacent types" (why not just call them "NPCs", wasn't that the lingo as of a week ago?), don't believe such attempts are primarily trying to skew the outcome in favor of Trump, they believe a general effort is being made by Russia and China to weaken confidence in elections, liberalism, democracy and the West broadly. Not because Russia and China are intrinsically evil, but because they are rivals, and as rivals have found an effective tool capable of undermining from within. The DNC/Podesta email leaks being only one of the more visible outcomes of these efforts.

dralley• 3 years ago

I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive

I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account.

https://twitter.com/blackintheempir

How do I know it's a troll account? Take a look at this: https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1662112840554098688

Just like "There is no panic in Balakliya", there are occasionally moments when whole networks of these accounts tweet clearly scripted messages all at the same time which kind of gives the game away.

https://twitter.com/JoniPyysalo/status/1567799462751309826/p...

It's quite interesting to read, honestly. They have a decent pulse on what narratives are effective, but present it in such an consistently hamfisted and exaggerated form that it makes it just a bit too obvious if you're taking in more than one or two tweets. But it's twitter, most people don't do that.

We can argue about how effective this kind of stuff is, but that it's happening is pretty indisputable. You can say it's just a lie that everyone pretends to believe, but the documents leaked by Teixeira talk about this stuff in detail too.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russians-boasted-tha...

This document for example says that the Russian Main Scientific Computing Research Center internally reports that only 1% of their social media bot accounts get shut down.

https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA19...

smcl2• 3 years ago

There's so many of them and they're so hyperbolic and wrong. Take good old @witte_sergei, claiming here during the huge gains Ukraine had last year that the "scale of Ukraine’s defeat at Lyman will become clear in the coming days": https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1575975278652043264

Meanwhile Lyman remains under Ukrainian control: https://deepstatemap.live/en#11/48.9534/37.8129

That's just one of them, this guy was on an absolute tear during this period. He deactivated his account to clean it up a little because it got a bit too obvious and hard to hide at one point.

Their strategy seems to be to just flood every channel with all sorts of ridiculous things to make people think "I can't make sense of this stupid conflict, it's too complex" and tune out. It's not a bad approach within Russia and it certainly strikes a chord within a few people in the west. It's just that if they don't clear their tracks when they're wrong you can pretty easily identify them for as pro-Kremlin trolls

jancsika• 3 years ago

I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account.

Looks pretty recent and active.

At this point, is there an employee behind that account or a LLM?

opportune4• 3 years ago

One thing that always bothers me when pointing the finger at US spooks is that we conveniently ignore that there are certainly Russian and Chinese spooks. If you were a spook of a geopolitical adversary, one of the most effective things you could do to undermine the US would be to undermine their (hugely powerful) intelligence apparatus. There is a reason a a lot of US-critical media comes out of Russian and Chinese state sponsored media.

While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones.

Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.

user3939382• 3 years ago

blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard

Why because she’s anti-war? What’s your proof of this, can’t wait to hear it.

throw1920• 3 years ago

Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience.

You clearly haven't read the leaks. If you had, you would have quickly realized that the vast majority of the leaked documents are totally unrelated to spying on citizens.

It's crystal clear to anyone who looks at the evidence itself that Snowden was not having a crisis of conscience, but was instead committing espionage.

Everything in the above comment is propaganda by someone who wants you to not look at the evidence because it would instantly discredit their position. If you want to know what Snowden actually did - go look at a random sampling of the documents, and tell us what you see.

cout• 3 years ago

I thought it was pretty widely believed before the snowden leaks that the US (and in particular the NSA) did warrantless surveillance of US citizens. What was lacking was credible evidence; anyone who claimed it was widespread before snowden could easily be written off as a conspiracy theorist.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

It would have been a big scandal if Snowden revealed that the NSA was not doing what he said they were doing. That is, it was well known that the purpose of the NSA was to do exactly that.

user67232• 3 years ago

When I tell someone to use Signal app and they say "I'm not that important" all I can do is smile and nod: "no.. you are not that important".

bee_rider4• 3 years ago

I prefer to point out: if only “interesting” people encrypt their messages, then encrypting your messages becomes a signal that you are interesting. As a boring person who thinks the state shouldn’t be allowed to focus the Eye of Sauron on anybody, I have a responsibility to encrypt my boring brunch plans.

I think “I’m not that important” is basically either the result of someone not thinking very hard, or it is a dishonest anti-encryption position. Embedded in it is the message that only certain types of people ought to be worried about the scrutiny of the state, and that the person holding the position is happy to take advantage of the fact that they aren’t that sort of person. Force them to face that position head-on, I think.

Zetice3• 3 years ago

What about as a boring person who does think the state should be allowed to focus the Eye of Sauron on people?

And that person doesn't have to be anti-encryption, just anti-bad opsec.

opportune4• 3 years ago

Depending on your threat model, Signal is security theater. It does nothing to protect against an OS-level breach.

36097082• 3 years ago

TIL that the Arab polymath al-Kindi invented frequency analysis & wrote the first cryptanalysis book ‘Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages’, in the 9th century.

StrangeATractor• 3 years ago

If you're interested in this sort of thing you'd probably like David Kahn's The Codebreakers. It's pretty much the authoritative source of what's publicly known about the history of cryptography. I believe he had some trouble getting it published at first, actually, because he made what was considered sensitive material more accessible.

theaussiestew7• 3 years ago

I have a vaguely related question about Signal. People say it’s secure and encrypted but it was widely publicised that Sam Bankman Fried’s Signal messages were inspected by authorities. How did this happen?

ben_w• 3 years ago

While I can't prove this, my expectation in this case is:

The authorities asked for them and, possibly after consulting a lawyer, he handed them over.

from• 3 years ago

There were cooperators in the same chatroom, a participant in the chats gave up their phone at an airport, or he volunteered it (probably not this). Same way it was obtained in all these cases: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%22signal%22+AND+%22encrypt...

c420• 3 years ago

Interception occurs prior to encryption

scrum-treats5• 3 years ago

How? Is it exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities (e.g., processor vulnerabilities), software vulnerabilities (e.g., apple's webkit vulnerabilities, google chrome + search JS vulnerabilities), or Wifi/Bluetooth vulnerabilities?

The only way I can think to intercept prior to encryption would be Key logger, so this would require an already compromised device. Alternatively the government could force a vulnerability state (e.g., the Perseus text message of doom). Is this also your understanding?

dmbche• 3 years ago

Signal protects your messages while it's on the web, on the way to your recipient. During this time, it is encrypted - but while on your or the recipients device, its plain text (as you can read it).

There are many ways to get to those messages, like getting access to your unlocked phone/unlocking your phone, if your signal is not password locked (and if they can't break that password), or doing this with your recipient.

OpSec is a process, not single tools!

funbil• 3 years ago

Funny how all the comments critical of Snowden and his actions are being flagged. No dissent allowed?

win32k3• 3 years ago

Groupthink amongst techies. It's amazing how everyone takes Snowden at his word. Literal traitor and they can't see that he has an agenda.

scrum-treats5• 3 years ago

The pendulum swings in both directions...

throwaway8922383• 3 years ago

Years ago, when I interviewed at places that did USG-related work, the stuff I heard about that I didn't have to sign an NDA to hear, scared me enough that I knew Snowden-scale stuff was entirely within the capabilities of the US Govt. I didn't realize they would use it against us just blatantly in direct violation of every law put in place to prevent it, though.

I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks is, if the government can do it, the government will do it - if not now, one day soon. That's... kind of a value-changing, life-changing realization. That no law will stop a government from doing what it wants. We can't stop it. But what we can do is install enough peep-holes (transparency) that when it happens, we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.

EGreg• 3 years ago

Same with corporations, too:

https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

passer_byer• 3 years ago

Sadly, this seems to be the case. Which means we the people, have lost control of our government.

freerangebat• 3 years ago

I wonder if historically governments were ever controlled by the people. It seems democracies that can somewhat control the government are extreme outliers in human history.

throwaway8922383• 3 years ago

In 2020, the Presidential election voter turnout was the highest it's been in three decades, at just over 60%. But that's still 40% of eligible voters that didn't "lose" their voice in government, like losing their car keys. 80 million people decided to give up their voice.

In other countries, people really do lose their voice in government. Plenty of countries are under the jack-boot of totalitarian regimes that will torture and execute whoever steps out of line. We live in a country that is so far away from that, that all we have to do to change our government is mail in a form. And we still can't be bothered to do that. So any lack of government control is completely our own fault.

The government's still gonna do whatever it wants to do. But we also have the power to bring it to heel. The thing is, you have to actually do something with that power.

badrabbit3• 3 years ago

I think your takeaway is wrong. It isn't the government doing naughty secret things but the government doing so with support from a plurality of the people. The patriot act is a non-partisan issue that gets renewed every administration. Snowden and Assange should be locked up accroding to a majority of americans.

Your takeaway should be that a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected.

You worry about privacy and laws, they worry about answering for even a relatively small terrorist attack.

The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.

imiric2• 3 years ago

The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.

Where do you think that fear comes from? It can be fabricated using real or fake events anytime the government wants to pursue a political or financial goal. Modern media is a government mouthpiece, even in apparent liberal democracies, and is used to sway public opinion in any direction.

This mechanism is also exploited by political enemies, to sow dissent and social unrest, crippling democratic systems.

zahllos• 3 years ago

I'm reading your comment as saying that if I don't think Snowden/Assange should be pardoned and set free, I'm implicitly supporting mass surveillance.

I wanted to provide a counterbalance to that view. Snowden is a complicated case - in my view it isn't as simple as 100% hero or 100% villain - but Assange is in my view relatively clear.

Wikileaks and Manning appear to have leaked anything they can. I don't support such a scattergun approach. Also, while some of their leaks pertain to surveillance (the vault 7 ones) most of them do not.

Then there's Assange. He was facing extradition to Sweden under a European Arrest Warrant for rape alleged to have taken place there, but instead skipped bail on the pretext it was all some US conspiracy. Until extradition was approved he was free on bail. Likely had he been extradited to Sweden he would also have been free on bail, and the burden of proof would have remained on prosecutors. I'm sure he would have had a fair trial.

Instead he made it to the Ecuadorian embassy and stayed until he made himself unwelcome. At which point he was arrested by the UK for skipping bail and has since been subject to the very extradition procedure that was his pretext.

I'm British, although I no longer live there. If you are the US government and you want to extradite someone legally I can't imagine a friendlier jurisdiction than the UK.

I'm also mildly irritated that the UN torture experts keep sounding off that this is torture. Not at all. Assange chose to enter the Ecuadorian embassy and in doing so chose to break the law by not attending court. He chose to remain there for a considerable time, making labelling him a flight risk so obvious as to be automatic. When he came out of the embassy, he was convicted and jailed of that crime. He has also remained there because he's currently subject to extradition proceedings and no judge is going to grant him bail. I'm certain living in a confined space in the embassy wasn't pleasant, but that was a choice. I'm certain prison isn't pleasant either (no matter what UK tabloids say) but that is a consequence. This is a far cry from what, say, the Syrian regime does.

I support encryption and anything that frustrates mass surveillance because I believe fundamentally that private citizens have a right to a private life and that invasion of that privacy should be specific and justified, including when it comes to electronic communications. I accept that law enforcement will sometimes be faced with a situation in which they cannot decrypt communications between two almost certain criminals and this may make their job harder, and I'm happy with that trade-off. In the end, all a pervasive backdoor does is target law abiding citizens, as criminals by definition won't feel bound to put their keys in escrow or whatever. They're already developing their own handsets and the police have shown themselves capable of targeting them (encrochat).

At the same time, if Assange is extradited to the US tomorrow then good riddance. I don't see that I have to support him in any way in order to object to mass surveillance, pervasive monitoring and mandated backdoors.

Aerbil3135• 3 years ago

The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.

The modern state is far more freedom-restricting than any other type of state which came before, and this is due to technology. Historically there were many slaves who were freer than the “free” man of today. You’re also right that fear is the predominant feeling/force that maintains order in a modern state. See the book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Tec...

throwaway8922383• 3 years ago

a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected

Except that's never been how democracies work. Going back to the first democratic greek city-states, to now, they all tend to operate on a number of different motivators, the last of which is law-makers changing what they do to fit the public interest.

Landed gentry and the aristocracy get priority, followed by merchants, and then the rest of the government gets its say, which often competes/clashes with other parts of the government. For the most part, anyone who gets elected got there through political savvy, money, and being exceptionally good at convincing people to trust them and give them power. So they're quite good at doing what they want despite what the people might want.

I agree that the people are often quick to give away their rights to secure their safety (or desires). But with transparency in government, people will notice the things they don't like (despite what they've given away or sold, including their principles) and can become outraged enough to reverse their previous acquiescence. You actually see this outside of democracies in most nations where people see enough bullshit that they eventually revolt.

vasco• 3 years ago

This is what proponents of small government fear, and by extension why creating more organizations where a small group of people deciding for a large group is bad, because they can be corrupted. See for example any union that has existed for more than 10 years and how they are called "corporate unions", in an intentionally blind case of "no true Scotsman".

Also one of the reasons communism doesn't work - the mechanisms needed for it to be implemented centralize even more power to a central committee than with other systems of government.

I agree, the world-view really changes once you realize this.

brabel2• 3 years ago

Transparency is the key. Governments love secrecy because that allows them to do whatever nasty stuff they want while pretending to be righteous at the surface.

Just look at past secrets that have been disclosed recently and think: should those things really be secret? I say absolutely no.

The mentality of keeping things secret to hide your real intentions, or to not upset people too much (or they will panic!), or to keep other governments on their toes so you're ready to take them by surprise in the event of a conflict (how has that worked so far? The real threat actors will know anyway what naughty stuff you're doing to make sure they'll be the losers if the need arises - like when you just urgently need more cheap oil) is something we, all peoples of the world, need to overcome as soon as possible.

You may argue the situation in the world right now proves that governments need to be ready for conflict all the time, and secrecy gives them more power to take enemies by surprise... but you're mistaken, it's exactly the opposite! The whole China/Russia animosities are due to the West patently doing things, like keeping military bases in every weak country[1] that will let them around China and Russia, that clearly shows they have every intention to escalate to a war with them at the earliest sign of trouble, yet we lie without hesitation about it... like we're the peaceful people who keep trying to convince evil governments to change their belligerent ways. Perhaps if we stopped putting weapons pointing right at them, right at their neighbourhood, they would be better persuaded that war is not a possibility?

We do the same with climate change by the way... we want everyone else to change, or we won't do it alone, forgetting that we're the ones who pumped 90% of the CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 200 years of industrialization, while some countries that are now considered "climate villains" have been on it for only a couple of decades... hypocrisy at its worst.

[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/where-are-us-and-russian-military-ba...

heywhatupboys• 3 years ago

See also this columnist's take on secrets:

"Biden’s classified leak isn’t the problem. The government shouldn’t have secrets in the first place."

https://cinchnews.com/2023/01/26/bidens-classified-leak-isnt...

genman11• 3 years ago

I think you completely misinterpret the situation with Russia and China.

Russia and China have the objectives of their own. For Russia it is to expand their empire that in their own mind rightfully belongs to them. They didn't attack Ukraine because of US actions but because they seriously believe that they have some kind of right over Ukrainians lands, or even more seriously, that Ukrainians don't exists.

If US would have been in Ukraine, or moved in rapidly when the situation became dangerous, there wouldn't be war at them moment. We see this clearly play out in far east, where China has ambition to overtake Taiwan (what they like Russia with Ukraine believe to belong rightfully to themselves). They clearly would have already attacked if it wasn't clear that US will prevent them doing so.

I'm certain that they would have done it, had US backed away from Ukraine. I'm also certain that what led Russia to believe that they could pull off Ukrainian invasion, was the US departure from Afghanistan, not that they did it but how they did it by letting Taliban completely humiliate them without any response. Russia believed that US is weak, not interested, and it would possibly have been like that, had Ukraine not managed to pull off very strong response.

US is there to fill the vacuum. If it was not US, it would be China (or it could Russia possibly). If not today, then eventually it would be one of them. I prefer US because it is more predictable and rule based and in the long run more favorable for the people.

snarfy• 3 years ago

I kind of had this realization when reading about things the government did in the past, like air-drop LSD onto soldiers, agent-orange, psychic experiments, and other nonsense.

My first instinct was 'wow, those wacky 60's', but then it slowly dawned on me 'what's changed?'. Nothing, nothing has changed.

I wonder what they are doing today.

win32k3• 3 years ago

I didn't realize they would use it against us just blatantly in direct violation of every law put in place to prevent it, though.

They didn't. You interpreted the Snowden revelations incorrectly. The government actually cares a LOT about civil liberties.

andrepd• 3 years ago

Transparency and a strong and independent investigative press is our best defense.

marssaxman• 3 years ago

we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.

How does that help? For me the lesson of the Snowden affair has been that it does not matter whether we know what the government is up to, because they will do what they want to us regardless; there is nothing we can do about it.

pbj1968• 3 years ago

The revelations… meh. We all knew it was happening.

What I found particularly interesting was he had a distinct look, and either he was a trend setter or following a popular trend amongst young men as I saw it everywhere at the time amongst professionals. I would have thrown away my glasses and gotten a haircut immediately if I had been in that lane.

And he was totes a Russian spy.

DontchaKnowit2• 3 years ago

Snowden released an uncinscionably large amount of state secrets far beyind what would have been required to raise flags about surveillance on American citizens. Then he sought asylum in the USAs greatest political enemies? He is a traitor.

mbg721• 3 years ago

We got a campaign of "Let's tear down the unelected and unaccountable government agencies," and millions of Americans voted for it. It largely didn't work.

scrum-treats5• 3 years ago

Looks like what we got was more unaccountable government agencies, and a pissing match between FBI and CIA (FBI lost, btw).

zoogeny• 3 years ago

In the last ten years technology has increased substantially. In the last five years AI has advanced significantly.

That is worth really letting sink in.

I try my best to avoid every kind of online discussion on these topics that I reasonably can avoid. Some might even see it as paranoia. But I assume that every single thing I post online (or say on the phone, send in text, or write in emails) is traceable back to me directly, that it is being captured and stored by multiple agencies and countries and that it is all fed into AIs that are at least as capable as GPT-4.

Imagine a Gov-GPT where you can ask it: "Tell me everything I need to know about John Smith" and the AI can related his job history, credit score, recent emails at home and work, his phone calls, his purchases, his political opinions, his spiritual beliefs, his likely weaknesses ... all smartly formatted in a succinct essay that we know and love from ChatGPT.

My question is, if we aren't there already, how long until we are?

soraminazuki• 3 years ago

That's the chilling effect in action and the reason why mass surveillance policies are so undemocratic.

mkbkn• 3 years ago

Just an example, if you're into the Google ecosystem (which kids are, right from the school days) - it knows almost everything about you, more than your ex-friends and spouse - and combined with Bard or AI, very well... you can now imagine.

neuronic• 3 years ago

Will Gov-GPT then invent answers and generate a profile that is a potpourri of several random folks details?

If you need clear facts without the possibility for r/confidentlyincorrect material then I don't believe GPTs are the tools of choice.

Aerbil3135• 3 years ago

Langchain and such tools can do it.

epolanski• 3 years ago

I share the spirit. Encription and privacy are important, not sharing important data digitally even more so.

Aerbil3135• 3 years ago

Encryption and privacy is futile when posting online. If what you post is publicly accessible, it’s accessible to govts too.

wrp2• 3 years ago

I didn't follow the Snowden story because I don't have the background to evaluate the claims, but there is something I recall that hasn't been discussed yet.

Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.

boomboomsubban2• 3 years ago

Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor.

This is a bastardized version of events. Snowden had a number of jobs that required high level clearance from 2006-2013. He supposedly took the final Booz Allen Hamilton job because it had a great deal of access to data, but he had long since passed the security checks necessary to get the job.

You can argue that there should be more checks done upon switching jobs, or that people with clearance should face more periodic checks to their current status, but there was no real reason for Snowden to fail the security checks.

wrp2• 3 years ago

So, was Snowden a visibly active protester against government surveillance before getting the job? If so, did the government fail to notice or did they notice and not care? How extreme should such activity be before it become a "real reason for Snowden to fail the security checks"?

rkagerer• 3 years ago

I'm saddened that ordinary people still don't care enough about their digital privacy.

win32k3• 3 years ago

Basically, few people are able to escape the "Snowden good, US Gov bad" groupthink and really see what happened with Snowden. The guy was a massive traitor that made the US much, much less safe for probably a very long time. Remember US Gov actually DOES care about your rights. The CCP and Putin do NOT. He made the latter much stronger.

The revelations didn't even show anything malicious. He basically won the court of opinion with all his interviews and books because his opponent literally can't argue back (would reveal classified info). He sucks, and hopefully more people will come around to it, though I fear the groupthink is too strong.

scrum-treats5• 3 years ago

By your comments on this thread I am assuming reading comprehension and complex critical thinking are not your strong suits. And that's okay. Do realize that there are people who excel in these areas in which you are so clearly lacking.

sxhunga• 3 years ago

The government can do whatever it wants in a non-democratic system. People in this case must use any means to organize themselves to overthrow the government cannot openly violate the rights of citizens because the mechanism of overthrowing the government through protest or votes work

ganesh7• 3 years ago

While we commemorate the violation of privacy of US citizens and others, we should also commemorate the victims of US foreign interventions. There were 251 such interventions in the name of "freedom in democracy" in the last 30 years: https://mronline.org/2022/09/16/u-s-launched-251-military-in... https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

coding123• 3 years ago

The stretches that various organizations go through to get people's attention is bizarre. Seriously an RFC? What's next an RFC on jailing Trump?

c00lio• 3 years ago

The Snowden revelations had profound consequences on the standardisation process, because mass surveilance was thereby proven as a real and present attack that has to be considered. Undue influence on standardisation processes by the NSA was also a relevant point. Later protocols and standards started to take both into account. All those are in scope for RFCs, there are quite a few about standardisation procedures, circumstances, etc.

Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

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