NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower [video]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/

by cgshaw • 13 years ago

233 82 13 years ago

cgshaw6• 13 years ago

Most of us had heard about Binney before, but the other guys back up many of the same claims.

Binney's take on what they'll do to Snowden.

"Binney: First tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed."

rdl5• 13 years ago

Interesting that he now calls Snowden a traitor for the China-specific intel turned over, while supporting him broadly otherwise. Pretty much the same line I'd draw (although I think he should have gone to IG/Congress rather than the media, but with the threat of going to media if no action taken. It's possible he went to IG/Congress already, but I don't think so.)

cgshaw6• 13 years ago

Giving up British intelligence for the G20 surveillance is also probably crossing the line.

If developed countries can't trust each other not to spy on their diplomats where does that leave us?

I guess they should all assume they are being spied on at all times while on foreign soil, but airing that in public is likely to worsen his chance of avoiding jail time—or worse.

rdl5• 13 years ago

I have ~no problem with gov on gov spying. I actually have more problem with China's spying on US companies for commercial reasons than China's spying on the USG. USG spying on private individuals might be worse than China spying on USG from an abstract moral perspective.

I'd argue that US v USSR spying during the Cold War, particularly PHOTOINT and SIGINT and other forms of technical intelligence, largely averted a global thermonuclear war. Gov v Gov spying is just another form of transparency. (obviously as a US citizen I'd prefer the US to have an edge there, but generally for something like Brazil v Argentina I don't particularly care)

glurgh3• 13 years ago

If developed countries can't trust each other not to spy on their diplomats where does that leave us?

It leaves us precisely where we are - developed countries have been spying on each others' diplomats and using their diplomats for spying for, well, just about ever.

US Secretary of State Henry Simpson famously said "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail" some 80 odd years ago. A quaint attitude, even back then.

der3k• 13 years ago

"We were gathering bulk data from telecoms even before the Patriot Act" Thought this was important to note.

cgshaw6• 13 years ago

Perhaps even more important to note "before 9/11."

So if mass surveillance didn't prevent 9/11, is the rationale to expand it to TOTAL surveillance, if necessary?

pyre2• 13 years ago

  | Perhaps even more important to note
  | "before 9/11."

To me, at least, that's basically how I read "before the PATRIOT Act." I looked it up and the PATRIOT Act was signed into law on 2001-10-26; for some reason I thought that it was quickly pushed through a day or two after 9/11.

dllthomas3• 13 years ago

FWell, there was Total Information Awareness, which was "shut down" after public objection, where "shut down" meant moving the functions to various other places.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

I would be honestly surprised if it started as late as 1980.

wyck• 13 years ago

This is documented in several books including "The shadow factory", it's been going on for decades. The Telco's basically get absolved of any legal responsibility directly from the oval office. How exactly that works in terms of law, I have no idea, but I would assume it's locked inside a safe.

ps. Do not use satellite phones unless you want everything listened too:)

Zigurd• 13 years ago

Hobbes would be saying "No, no, I meant about the size of a very large whale,. Big enough to keep random individuals from running amok and spoiling things... This is more like Cthulu."

danso• 13 years ago

Binney: Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. > So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.

I have a feeling that the NSA deals with access control just like the rest of us...very poorly. Even more egregious is that Snowden was a contractor...if we're going to leave open the possibility of the NSA targeting us at their whim, can't they at least do that in-house?

pero• 13 years ago

Does the fact that they're contractors and not employees absolve the contractee of some/any liability/culpability? Perhaps, further, even recursively as the contractors themselves wouldn't be able to discuss the contractee's business to the extent a direct employee could?

It does seem absurd if there isn't politico-judicial rationale.

dllthomas3• 13 years ago

Which is funny, because I thought mandatory access controls was the key feature that the NSA added in SELinux.

rdl5• 13 years ago

Yeah, everything I've been seeing seems to be that they seriously threw out everything about being competent in the 1990s, and then blew up into something huge (and incompetent) in the post-9/11. Hayden does not seem to have been a good director at all, at either NSA or CIA, and was responsible for the big push toward contractors as well.

Daishiman• 13 years ago

SELinux is no match for a poorly set-up database.

einhverfr4• 13 years ago

Securing data against a systems administrator however is difficult on the best of days. I have done some of this for Efficito (http://www.efficito.com). Even with the best of care there are ways an administrator can get the info no matter what you do. All you really can do is restrict it to ensure that casual access is not an issue.

For example, we store virtual machine root passwords in an encrypted database for last resort purposes (so that someone can log in using virsh console as root when nothing else is working). There are three layers of encryption and as far as casual access goes (assuming nothing is reconfigured), mere root access to the box is not enough to reveal the information. However if you can change what is logged by PostgreSQL and reconfigure PostgreSQL's authentication options you could grab enough information to effectively read this data.

People with the sort of access required to make sure things are secure can effectively get the data off the system that they want, and the alternative in designing a system is to have one with no superusers and the possibility that information is irrevokably lost when someone forgets a password. The most secure systems end up somewhere between them.

hvidgaard• 13 years ago

It comes down to physical access (in the sense as they can log into the box as root) - if you value security someone (single or "multiple person user") must be able to log in as root. Someone must be able to access the data hardware that contains the data, otherwise you'll might as well not store it and save the headache. Once you have admins with the ability to be root on the box, they can get the data. There is no way around it. What you can (and should do) is have access logs saved at least at one location where noone can delete anything. I suppose you could encrypt the data and save the key on a dedicated tamperproof box (are IBM still the main provider of these?), but someone must manage this box. Trust is inevitable, at best you can divide it in such a way that the combined entity is unlikely to go rogue.

Zakharov• 13 years ago

Just a spur of the moment thought, but can you encrypt the master password such that you need passwords from three of four (or any N of M) people to decrypt it?

laurentoget• 13 years ago

off topic. who knew usa today has such a nice website?

nekopa• 13 years ago

I wouldn't know. It kept crashing my iPad safari browser. I will have to check it out later on my laptop, as judging from the comments here it looks like an interesting story.

jrockway• 13 years ago

Agreed. I mostly consider USA Today as "that newspaper dumb people read" so never checked out their website. The design is pleasing and the linked roundtable discussion was quite good. No controversy, no professional talking heads, just some folks having a chat on camera. I am impressed.

kentor• 13 years ago

i can't seek in the video. what the hell? i accidentally clicked outside of the popup box and now i have to watch from the beginning...

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

Good God, if that's what you call a "nice" website, I'm speechless.

miles3• 13 years ago

Somehow this quote from the interview by Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the NSA and a decorated Air Force and Navy veteran[1], carries a bit more weight for me than the widely trumpeted blatherings of Dick Cheney[2], winner of five draft deferments[3]:

I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake

[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0616/Dick-Chene...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/politics/campaign/01CHEN.h...

dfc12• 13 years ago

I agree with the overwhelming majority of your post but I have to say the draft dodging/deferring comment was a little odd. I think its really tough for us (people who have grown up under an all volunteer service) to pass judgement on how a previous generation dealt with the draft, even more so if we pass those judgements as civilians.

miles3• 13 years ago

Thanks for your reply, dfc. Sorry if the draft deferral comment was inappropriate. I mainly wanted to contrast their experience and expertise in the field. BTW, thanks for the recommendation on your profile page to use dfcdfc as the topcolor; I stumbled onto it over a year ago and have been using it ever since.

jeremyflores5• 13 years ago

I think Cheney's draft dodging status is fair game. He did, after all, co-architect our erroneous invasion and continued occupation of a country that did not actually attack us, so he has no problem sending others to war. Something other draft dodgers were not as directly responsible for.

btilly2• 13 years ago

I have never served in the military. But I am old enough that my brother fought in Vietnam (sort of not drafted, it is complicated) and my father was drafted for WW II. I also have relatives serving in the armed forces. (Including, at the moment, 2 nephews.)

I have observed what I've seen commented on elsewhere. There is a certain type of person who managed to skip the draft for themselves, and then proceeded to become overly supportive of the military and military aggression. Possibly as a reaction to the guilt of having not served when given the chance. There is a certain cowboy element to their approach. Prominent examples include Dick Cheney and George Bush.

By contrast people who actually served often, like John McCain or Al Gore, are strongly supportive of the military. But they tend to treat military service and action as the serious matters that they are.

The phrase that sums this up best is "chickenhawk".

rhizome• 13 years ago

There is plenty of evidence regarding the opinions of the people of Cheney's parents' generation (and earlier) about people who avoid mandatory military service, not to mention voluntary.

nikcub2• 13 years ago

I feel bad for Drake, he was facing federal charges and nobody seemed to notice. 89% of federal cases are plead before trial and of those that go to trial 90%+ are found guilty, that is how much the odds were stacked against him. He got nowhere near the attention that he deserves[1[]

William Binney is an absolute hero. I have absorbed everything this guy has ever said or done[2]. He was not only employed at the NSA, but he was a director who designed the software that is being used right now to dragnet all the communications. It is difficult for anybody - congressman, president, republican voter, etc. - to argue that what the NSA is doing is fine when the guy with all the technical details and design of the program says it isn't. That he is against what is happening is a big deal and needs more attention.

This video is on the front page of USA Today, so these guys and the topic is starting to get the recognition they deserve.

[1] The New Yorker did a great feature on him called 'The Secret Sharer' - good for background http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

[2] Search YouTube for Binney - he was the keynote speaker at the 2600 HOPE conference last year - a presentation that everybody must watch. Apparently Snowden decided to go the route he did after watching Binney in Laura Poitras' "The Program" for the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... Potras is the same person who was the first journalist Snowden contacted.

krek• 13 years ago

Binney didn't design the system that's currently being used, and that's his whole point. He designed a cheap way to do what the current program does but that would protect people's privacy (in part by not storing all the data that it filters). His point is that the NSA spent billions on a dragnet system that violates privacy and isn't even able to catch terrorists as well as the privacy-respecting system he designed internally for dirt cheap.

nikcub2• 13 years ago

In one of his interviews[1] he mentions that after he left and TrailBlazer was abandoned the NSA took what he built in ThinThread but removed the privacy shields he had in place that would encrypt US communications.

The rest of the platform is ThinThread (which was a lot cheaper than the failed TrailBlazer project).

Also interesting that a lot of the NSA platform is open source. OpenCloud for server management and Hadoop for distributed computing.

[1] I can't recall which one, in his keynote at HOPE he does make another reference to the crypto privacy shield being removed

notdrunkatall3• 13 years ago

I completely agree, especially about Binney. I've been following what the NSA's doing since the Room 641A scandal broke. I recently wrote a paper on the NSA versus privacy, and as usual, what I found during the course of my research pretty much blew my mind. Binney is a hero as much as Snowden is, as are Drake and Weibe. I've used every opportunity to post this short that the NYT did on Binney, and everyone who's interested in this (and especially everyone who's not) should watch it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...

e3pi• 13 years ago

The biggest impact I came away from that 2600 HOPE youtube vid was Binney's superiors told him to halt his Thinthread so they had time to wrap alot more budget around it so their revolving door out into commercial intel may more heavily wet their beaks. Being presumably professional mathematicians who should understand the egregious criminality of stealing public trust and funds, this was most particularly egregious. As all this was, and remains classified so this abuse will continue unchecked and unbounded.

dantheman• 13 years ago

His talk at HOPE 9 was great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI

mtgx• 13 years ago

This was a great talk by Binney, Drake and Jesselyn Radack, on whistleblowing and surveillance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDM3MqHln8U

nano111• 13 years ago

A few seconds where he talks about the metadata: http://youtu.be/XDM3MqHln8U?t=1h18m52s

jneen• 13 years ago

Warning: auto-playing video.

cgshaw6• 13 years ago

Apologies, I should have linked the print-friendly version.

I hate autoplays as well.

gruseom• 13 years ago

I couldn't stop watching this video. It is the most riveting thing I've seen since the Snowden interview itself. It's a pity they broke it up; you have to scroll down the page to get all the pieces. But I highly recommend watching the entire thing if you're interested in this story. It packs a wallop and it's... pretty damn convincing. Every one of the four interviewees is deeply impressive, each in a distinct way. It is hard to believe that they don't know what they're talking about. More striking than that, though, is what good people they all seem to be.

I'm surprised that USA Today put this out and I hope they do more like it. The contrast with typical news pap could not be stronger.

lemming• 13 years ago

Sentenced to a year of probation and community service, Drake was stripped of his security clearance. He now works at an Apple retail store.

I hope they have him employed as a Genius.

quattrofan• 13 years ago

On topic, the best critique I have read of the failed hope that is Obama: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/15/broken-promise-b...

NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower [video]

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