Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/3-former-nsa-employees-praise-edward-snowden-corroborate-key-claims/276964/

by emingo • 13 years ago

580 71 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

gruseom2• 13 years ago

The interview he's talking about [1] was posted here [2] and it really is extraordinary. I highly recommend watching all the videos—unfortunately, they carved it into pieces and you have to scroll down the page to get at them. But it's worth it. The transcript doesn't convey how dramatic the discussion was, or capture William Binney's muttered asides ("including content! including content!") or show the meaningful expressions on their faces, or how the others react as each one is talking. I found the whole thing riveting and I'm still surprised that USA Today put it together. Having all four of them around a table created something entirely more compelling than one-on-one interviews.

Edit: also, the transcript is incomplete and leaves out some of the best parts, such as Binney's story of how he called "Tom" (i.e. Drake, whose phone he knew was being tapped) to let the government know that he had evidence of malicious prosecution. Plus the endearing smile on his face as he points out that his prosecution was dropped after that.

USA Today should put up the whole unbroken discussion. Apart from the obviously important content and the obvious authoritativeness of the speakers, it's just a great piece of television—and it's not even television. It puts actual news TV to shame.

1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891101

mehmehshoe• 13 years ago

Binney's comment on the serial number of the Verizon order was great. I never caught the number when studying the doc. By his logic there were as many as 79 other orders to other companies this year.

It is the second video down on your link and about 4 min in.

sneak• 13 years ago

Indeed. I think that by congressional logic, that makes him a traitor though, for aiding the enemy by letting them know ALL the phones are tapped.

rdl2• 13 years ago

IMO Binney (and possibly all 3) deserve the next Nobel Peace Prize.

samstave• 13 years ago

Give them Obama's

dfc• 13 years ago

You have to figure they are shoe-ins for EFF Pioneer awards.

rdl2• 13 years ago

Actually, today I learned Thomas Drake essentially got screwed out of his federal pension from his whistleblowing, and currently works in an Apple retail store in the DC suburbs. He has 4 sons who are approaching college age. Both Binney and Wiebe are retired (and presumably got their full pensions).

So, the ideal thing would be some kind of prize or other financial reward (or higher paying job) for Drake, or scholarships for his children.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

Odd they referred to these other whistleblowers as "Former NSA Employees" in the headline. It seems disingenuous to leave that out of the headline, but then I suppose "Fellow NSA Whistleblowers Praise Newest Whistleblower..." probably doesn't sound as interesting.

trendoid• 13 years ago

It actually makes more sense to mention just "Former NSA Employees" as they were not whistleblowers per se. They went by the book and never went public the way Snowden did.

ck22• 13 years ago

Another good article from The Atlantic.

ps. Can they start using other photos of Snowden? I mean come on, is that the only one the media has?

kylelibra• 13 years ago

I think the lack of photos is intentional. If I were him, I'd make sure everyone thinks I look a certain way and not give evidence of a variety of ways I could look.

pkfrank• 13 years ago

He's also said repeatedly he wants the focus to be on his disclosures and the wrongdoing; NOT on him, how his girlfriend looks, etc. Using the same boring picture over-and-over is probably what he wants and appreciates.

ck22• 13 years ago

You mean the "clever" way he has a half grown beard so we instantly know both how he would look with a beard and without?

I just fear for him if he is caught, he will certainly be tortured by any side including USA.

mhartl• 13 years ago

The Onion has your back: "Nation Demands New Photograph Of Edward Snowden"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5H_b3mVz8s

saraid216• 13 years ago

Facial recognition is, amusingly, flagging other people as Snowden. "Is this you?"

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

On facial recognition: my understanding is that in addition to using data points that are relatively easy to change with makeup or surgery (cheekbone height, nose, etc), they use some that are not such as eyeball distance. However, could the eyeball based datapoints be tricked with specially crafted lenses in glasses frames?

pfortuny• 13 years ago

"The idea that we have robust checks and balances is a myth."

Albeit to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I was supposing: you cannot have such a huge organization working "properly" on a day-to-day threat-response basis without some "elastic" access control. Even less if you are a contractor like B-A-H.

This, in a private entity, is less dangerous. You can have a lot of sysadmins with some access to Google's data because the data is properly partitioned and especially because there are no "targets". When each individual is a target, it is too hard to get proper partitioning.

Also, Google's employees have little to no incentives to make those data "public." And I guess direct access to the real emails is pretty hard: Google's money is not there but in the analytics. So internal anonymization may be not only performed but even easy to do. And this is good for Google & its clients.

Homunculiheaded• 13 years ago

The biggest phrase that I see missing from the private vs government discussion is "monopoly on force".

The Federal government has the authority to create regulations, create laws, collect taxes, send people to your house to enforce those laws, remove/restrict your rights, sentence you to a prison term, send in armed officers to take down civilians groups viewed as dangerous, etc etc all the way to declaring full scale war. And, perhaps most importantly, the government has the authority to coherence third parties to cooperate in information sharing. Google will never be able to force Facebook to hand over their data, but the Federal government can force both of these parties to hand over their data to them.

The catch with having a monopoly on force is that your hands are supposed to be tied by the will of the people. There is a tremendous and intentional asymmetry in power. This necessitates an equally tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight.

I think once a day I hear "people willingly give all there data to facebook, why do they care if the NSA is listening", people need to understand what "monopoly on force" truly means.

mpyne2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure about Google vs. Facebook. All they need to do is hire away the right person (or simply conduct corporate espionage themselves).

But as you mention, that monopoly on force is tied to the will of the people.

If the government were to use force in a way other than approved by the laws setup by the peoples' representatives then you're already talking about something much worse on the totalitarian continuum than phone metadata.

And at that point, once the law has no limiting effect on the government anyways they could setup things hundreds of times worse. But they would hardly need to, as they could manufacture evidence of supposed "crimes" if need be and carry out sentences of their choosing for any reason at all.

They would only need things like Prism for dissidents, and dissidents would already assume that things hundreds of times worse were in place and take defensive measures accordingly.

So you're right that the monopoly on force is dangerous, but it has always been so. That's why it requires that tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight that you mention.

But given that we're able to provide those controls in the first place (controls which we cannot enforce on private companies, btw!) it makes sense again to ask the question of whether programs like these are both reasonable and effective, whether they can be properly supervised, and if so whether current systems are "proper supervision".

"Monopoly on force" is a warning about government, not the NSA. And especially not in the context of knowledge, where the government is mostly far out of its league compared with the private sector, and it's only getting worse.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Now all we need is someone like Edward Snowden to step forward from the IRS.

xradionut• 13 years ago

The major problem with the IRS is that is handicapped by law and politics from doing it's job. There's an insane amount of capital sitting in offshore accounts that probably should have been taxed. Loopholes for the big players are crazy.

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

That sounds like a major problem for the IRS, not a major problem with the IRS.

talmand2• 13 years ago

If the law prevents the capital from being taxed, such as loopholes, then those laws are not handicapping the IRS in any way as the practice is perfectly legal. The IRS has no standing to do anything pertaining to that capital in the first place. If the capital should have been taxed and hasn't, then that implies law-breaking that's a bit beyond what involves just the IRS.

But you are correct about the politics, as it is politics that creates the loopholes to begin with. But that's a matter of annoyance, not illegality.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

The IRS has been put in an impossible position by the current state of election laws, which allow the creation of a variety of different types of special political organizations, each of which has different disclosure, tax, and spending restrictions.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

Interesting that no one seems to be talking about what a treasure-trove such a storage system would be for organized crime and foreign intelligence services (such as China). Imagine if someone could compromise it and get to the same data. Doesn't seem all that far-fetched.

marshray• 13 years ago

In fact, the Operation Aurora attacker were said to have accessed surveillance databases. But note that the root cause of this extraordinary vulnerability is the existence of the surveillance backdoors, rather than its public exposure.

Foreign intelligence services certainly have a far better picture of US intelligence capabilities than the American public. It is really of no help to them when NSA whistleblowers tell Americans "hey our government is illegally listening to your phone calls and reading your emails".

nano1114• 13 years ago

This data could probably also be analyzed to help predict the stock market.

grecy• 13 years ago

Even better: Use the data to figure out when and where the citizens are going to organize a protest against the current government....

logn3• 13 years ago

Or to predict elections. I'd recommend anyone running an election against a sitting president to encrypt all their email, probably with an encryption scheme not endorsed by NIST/NSA... or at a sufficiently high encryption level. Imagine preparing for a televised debate when you can access the competition's correspondence?

wyck• 13 years ago

Well there is company called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_Future that was created by Google and the CIA, they just need another partner;)

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

Interesting video with Binney who says they would've stopped every terrorist attack, including 9/11 had they used a simple technique him and his team outlined which he referred to as a "two degree principle".

He said its a myth they need all the data to make the connections in order to catch terrorists.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2475191994001/former-nsa-empl...

He starts talking about at the 2:57 mark.

freyr2• 13 years ago

It's been purported here that the media is coloring its reporting to paint Snowden in a bad light. But when the bias favors Snowden, everyone looks the other way. For instance, they conveniently left out any mention of this quote by Binney:

"But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.

"So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor."

ianterrell• 13 years ago

They didn't leave it out entirely. From the last paragraph:

one thinks he may have crossed a line by talking about surveillance on China

freyr2• 13 years ago

Ah, I completely missed that, thanks.

IgorPartola• 13 years ago

A traitor is someone who says "Hey China, we are hacking you and here is how." Someone who says "I have heard/read that the US is trying to hack China" is everyone on the internet. At worst that is libel.

pvnick• 13 years ago

Personally, I think Binney has a difficult time speaking and, if he had written out his response, would have chosen a different word than "traitor," just based on the way he stuttered and struggled to complete that sentence.

gruseom2• 13 years ago

I think you're right, and I think grey-area's quote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5902353) is probably more indicative of Binney's view. But his tentative way of speaking is for me one of the things that makes him both charming and compelling. I may be naive, but he strikes me as a decent person. (Actually, all four of them did.) I also love how Binney can't help but blurt out what goes through his mind sometimes, and the geeky passion with which he launches into his plan for how to do things better, if anyone expresses the least interest.

Amadou• 13 years ago

I read the transcript to this interview a few days ago, before Snowden did his recent Q&A session. In that session he seemed to directly address the charge of being a traitor, he said:

"Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people."

grey-area• 13 years ago

Binney also said he should be prosecuted... 'after all the leaders of the previous administration...after the current administration.. and the leaders of the NSA, in order, then perhaps Snowden', so I don't think your quote above out of context really does his views justice.

jenandre2• 13 years ago

I would find it really interesting if some employees at companies like Google, Microsoft, etc would come forward and corroborate Snowden's claims as well. At some point, SOME engineering work was involved on their side to make it happen, and there is likely documentation. I would love to see design documentation on how the collection systems work so we can confirm exactly the government has automated access to.

asperous• 13 years ago

In another thread some Google employees were saying that it's unlikely that Google has a secret backdoor system, since keeping products of any size online requires a lot of collaboration amongst the different teams, and the infrastructure changes so often anything that was at one point installed would be broken by now.

But that's just hear-say.

jenandre2• 13 years ago

Yeah, my point is, we don't really know what the scope is -- we have Snowden's word and some slides that mention direct access to servers. But the engineers who worked at the companies and performed the integrations know and probably have evidence if it was just standing up a box they scp'd data to manually upon request, or a more elaborate automated system. If some of those people would step forward with evidence, we could could confirm or refute Snowden's claims.

Spooky233• 13 years ago

I've deployed a large Office 365 system. It has the capability built in to do ediscovery searches across any item in the system, and can do so without the knowledge of the end user. The organization I'm familiar with audits employee emails that meet certain criteria. Google has e same capability.

Providing a "back door" to those systems is a simple as defining a user role.

jacoblyles• 13 years ago

It's time for a "Tea Party" of the left to take down pro-surveillance Democrats in the primaries.

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

Maybe all right-thinking (as in clear headed, not right vs left politics) Americans should dispense with the corporate duopoly presented to us by both the GOP and the Democrats.

flyinRyan• 13 years ago

You're 100% right, but you can't win on 3rd party in the US and even if you did your options are people like Ron Paul (good with many policies but dangerous on others).

The best is to do exactly what the GP said: invade a popular existing party. Though, my choice would be the republicans because I anticipate backlash against the dems in the next election cycle.

Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

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