Greenwald: Snowden docs contain NSA 'blueprint'

http://news.yahoo.com/greenwald-snowden-docs-contain-nsa-blueprint-235836523.html

by daegloe • 13 years ago

74 41 13 years ago

news.yahoo.com

quaunaut4• 13 years ago

Honest question, is anyone else completely past the point of caring until he actually shows more? (Please read to the end.) So far all we've gotten is some powerpoint slides, claims that they have other evidence, and a lot of interviews.

I've seen people in various communities saying, "Why is the media focusing on Edward Snowden, instead of the breach of civil liberties", but frankly, I wouldn't know how to cover this. He hasn't presented any concrete evidence, just the same powerpoint slides we saw a month ago. He claims he has some, but we're not seeing anything.

I'm not saying he's lying, or that this isn't a big deal- it is. I have a huge problem with the government ignoring the rule of law, especially in regards to treating digital content like it isn't supported by the 4th Amendment. I also don't like the idea of us treating our allies' citizens like they don't matter- legally speaking they don't, but morally speaking I'd rather we did better.

But at this point, how do you continue to cover a story when the key source of the story is taking it's incredibly sweet time in giving us anything more than "No really, guys, you've gotta believe me, you should be really mad!"

beedogs2• 13 years ago

Uh, have you been paying any attention at all, or are you just simply trolling?

There's new information and solid evidence coming out on a near-daily basis.

quaunaut4• 13 years ago

Where is it. Seriously, link me some stuff. I've read everything Greenwald and Snowden have put out, and so far, it's a lot of conjecture, not a lot of hard evidence. I believe him. But we literally are incapable of making more concrete progress without more.

I want more than words. Give me some pictures, give me methods, give some evidence. Some of what he's said doesn't make a lick of sense, likely because it's skewed slightly to make people more cautious about their privacy(which would be great) but is light on others. Specifically, his accusations of direct access to servers- I have a seriously hard time believing these companies, with an amazing amount of capital sitting around, would risk their potential profits to provide this backdoor(in terms of users leaving) and not fight it legally.

blhack2• 13 years ago

The fact that the United States has burned as much political capital as they have chasing him, at least to me, demonstrates a couple of possibilities:

1) What he is saying is true

2) He has something extremely damaging.

Otherwise why haven't they just said "lol conspiracy theorists"

quaunaut4• 13 years ago

I totally agree. But at this point, we're kinda just having to take his word for it.

I want something specific here. Vague claims of spying over all these services, without specifics, without explaining why it might make sense for these companies to comply and not try to fight it legally(especially when they have grounds provided directly by the US Supreme Court in regards to the NSA letters), is just wearing on me. My attention, my ability to care about this is just running out, plain and simple. I want to be active in this, but when my demands are about as vague as those of the Occupy Wall Street movement, well, not a lot can be done.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

Bradley Manning had nothing extremely damaging, yet has been treated very harshly. The spooks will prosecute you because in their mind, anything classified that is released is serious.

Honestly, some of what Snowden/Greenwald claim sounds like embellishment or bluster, and saying that Snowden has a dead-man's switch is a good way to get him assassinated by enemies of the US. It would be tragic if he is harmed because of bluffing.

dlss• 13 years ago

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling.

You're asking for evidence... but are apparently not happy with first hand accounts, and classified documents.

The authenticity has been confirmed -- take for example the senate hearings where the Snowden revealed programs are discussed... or the US government charging him with releasing classified documents (the ones he gave us).

You "have a huge problem with the government ignoring the rule of law, especially in regards to treating digital content like it isn't supported by the 4th Amendment" but don't seem to understand how you came to know about these violations of the 4th.

Are you trolling us? I'm asking because I honestly don't know.

What more evidence are you waiting for? Or you just don't want to get mad until you know everything? /me is so confused right now

ianhawes3• 13 years ago

No, he's not trolling. Nor is he a government plant or right-wing nutjob. He's just someone posting on HN with a legitimate viewpoint not shared by the majority of people here. Regardless, it is a valid point and shouldn't be dismissed so readily.

No one is doubting the authenticity of the Prism Powerpoint, however only a handful of slides have been released. And as shocking as first hand accounts are, without any evidence to support them, it's extremely hard to verify or trust.

dwild• 13 years ago

Personally I believe him but I also believe that the powerpoint is far from enough. It contains nearly no information about what's Prism except that it exist and keep information from different companies.

A good evidence would be an actual use of the system. If I remember correctly, he said in an interview that he could go as far as getting informations about Obama. That is the best evidence you could show.

chetanahuja2• 13 years ago

I'm confused. Did you not read any media past the prism slides exposure ? The mode of this leak is not a pure data dump on the internet a la wikileaks but through a responsible journalist. Glenn Greenwald has been publishing detailed and specific accounts of different NSA activities almost on a daily basis... As an example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-co...

How much more specific do you need it to be ?

ianhawes3• 13 years ago

There is no smoking gun. These articles, without the documents/slides/files, to back them up, are little more than conjecture.

SimHacker3• 13 years ago

Glenn Greenwald has been showing us this stuff for years, we just haven't been paying attention. Now all of a sudden he's sitting on thousands of documents that prove he was right all along, and events are unfolding just as he predicted. See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6044406

grey-area3• 13 years ago

So far all we've gotten is some powerpoint slides, claims that they have other evidence, and a lot of interviews.

He hasn't presented any concrete evidence, just the same powerpoint slides we saw a month ago. He claims he has some, but we're not seeing anything.

This is incorrect. Have you read any of the Guardian or WP stories? Quite a few documents have been leaked, covering a broad gamut of programs in the US and abroad. Whether the information about intelligence programs was presented in powerpoint format or not is irrelevant (though not all of it was), it has shown the broad outlines of the ambitions of the NSA and other intelligence services like GCHQ, many of which are supplying information wholesale to the NSA (on Americans and citizens of other nations). Other whistleblowers like Binney have also confirmed the truth of Snowden's allegations, so it's not as if we have a lack of evidence here, just a lack of accountability. Most stories have cited a different document, so if you are genuinely interested, I suggest you start here. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-nsa-files+content/docume...

If you don't care about Snowden or find Greenwald uninteresting that's fine, but you should be demanding answers from your government and representatives, not from Greenwald. Is he responsible for a massive spying program and the ambition to collect all the data in the world in centralised, searchable repositories? Is he the only or even the best authority on these programs? I'd say the people responsible for setting them up should be the ones we ask for more information and more answers.

What has been shown so far is enough in my opinion to enable us to ask hard questions of our respective governments, and of ourselves if we continue to enable them to collect this information over the long term and to realise their ambitions of total surveillance.

beedogs2• 13 years ago

So much for the bogus mainstream press narrative about Snowden being a "low level" NSA operative.

ianhawes3• 13 years ago

Actually I don't think you can prove he was higher ranking one way or another. It would appear, based on the wide variety of documents he stole, that they were in fact hacked – with Snowden abusing his privileges on NSA computers. No single person would have access to that much compartmentalized information without being at NSA HQ.

blhack2• 13 years ago

Duplicate seems a little dubious here... Unless there is some insane never before published vuln in some core routing protocol or the DNS that seems a bit misstated.

...I hope.

shin_lao• 13 years ago

Right. Because one "blueprint" can defeat a multi-billion dollar security agency. I call this bullshit.

lukifer• 13 years ago

This sounds to me like journalistic license from Greenwald, who probably does not fully understand the technology involved. I'm guessing it's a little more nuanced: one could learn about known exploits and compromised services to stay on "safe" communication methods, or use some of the exploits themselves.

falk• 13 years ago

Snowden hand selected thousands of documents. I'm sure this blueprint isn't a single piece of paper.

gscott• 13 years ago

The problem with this is upping the ante too much. The Government would prefer the secrets spilled to someone goading over them with it. The Government certainly would prefer this in the news for a year rather then for 40 years... Putin will use further disclosures as an excuse to hand him over expect not more then 30 days more.

infinity0• 13 years ago

In the light of the Reuters misquoting and subsequent reply by Greenwald yesterday (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040182), I would be extremely extremely skeptical about any secondary interpretations of Glen Greenwald's own words. It seriously sounds more like the writer of this article has nothing better to do than grossly extrapolate a few words into a whole fucking fantasy conjecture. I mean, come on, the ENTIRE article consists of editorialising about someone else's own words, and padding it out with old facts.

timbrooke• 13 years ago

Open-source that stuff already!

SimHacker3• 13 years ago

What If Snowden Was on Board the Bolivian President's Jet?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/violeta-ayala/what-if-snowden-...

"I would like people to know that today the U.S. hosts some of Bolivia's largest criminals. One such person is the former president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and two of his ministers who are wanted in Bolivia, not for information leaks, but to face charges for the killing of 60 people who were protesting against his government's policies to sell Bolivia's resources to U.S. corporations. Sanchez de Lozada escaped Bolivia in a jet in 2003 and to this day the U.S. refuses to accept Bolivia's extradition request for him."

Glenn Greenwald covered this almost a year ago:

America's refusal to extradite Bolivia's ex-president to face genocide charges: Obama justice officials have all but granted asylum to Sánchez de Lozada – a puppet who payrolled key Democratic advisers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/09/america-...

How prescient of Greenwald: "Relatedly, we find the prevailing sentiment that asylum is something that is only to be granted by the US and its western allies against unfriendly governments. The notion that one may need asylum from the US or the west – or that small Latin American countries unfavorable to the US can grant it rather than have it granted against them – is offensive and perverse to all good and decent western citizens, who know that political persecution is something that happens only far away from them." -Glenn Greenwald, 9 September 2012.

igravious2• 13 years ago

<rant> It is precisely this hypocrisy that has rankled more and more as the years roll by. Sure other countries do horrible stuff but nobody else claims to be such a bastion of freedom and democracy. As one learns about the sordid interventionist past of the USA one then realizes that the superficial rhetoric is at variance with past actions.

These double standards reek of the colonial mindset that is meant to be well behind us. I follow a couple of blogs and it is this they return to time and again. The double standards. The hypocrisy. Imagine if the USA didn't make such claims then when the whole NSA/Snowden thing broke people would just say, "oh well, that's just par for course then".

So can we just drop the whole freedom and democracy rhetoric now? Can we drop the pretense? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and all that. Measure for measure the USA is one of the more hostile and anti-democratic regimes globally. </rant>

Also, can I have my privacy back please?

twoodfin• 13 years ago

I think you need to follow a few more blogs.

Amadou• 13 years ago

If it weren't for the rhetoric, guys like Snowden would never have been indoctrinated with the ideas of freedom and democracy, the very ideas that caused him to act. So no, I do not want to drop the rhetoric.

krenoten• 13 years ago

In the words of Steven Rambam - "privacy is dead, get over it!"

It would be foolish to assume that our gov't will be fixing any of this any time soon. It would also be foolish to discard the one advantage the citizens have - a general awareness that freedom is something they cherish. That they don't understand what freedom is, exactly, is another issue.

But never fear - physics is stronger than US law, and we can create tools that allow those with the awareness of the importance of freedom and the ability to seek them out (another issue you can help with) to not be impeded by those pervasive forces.

eli2• 13 years ago

This just seems incredibly reckless and selfish. The odds of these documents, which everyone appears to agree will harm legitimate US interests, being accidentally released seems dangerously high. I really hope his Dead Man Switch encryption system is better than the one that allowed wikileaks to accidentally leak unredacted and unvetted cables.

shabble2• 13 years ago

What actions do you think you would take if you were in his situation that would be less reckless or selfish?

eli2• 13 years ago

I honestly don't know, but I don't think that's a very good excuse.

I don't think I'd ever risk stealing documents that could genuinely bring harm to America.

I hope for everyone's sake that this is either a bluff or a misquote.

grey-area3• 13 years ago

The password for the wikileaks cables were leaked by a Guardian journalist in a book rushed out about the story:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zJr4qXVzdEAC&q=crystallis...

not really wikileaks fault - at a certain point you have to trust journalists you're working with, or no work can be done with the data. You could encrypt files individually I suppose, but you still rely on someone to release it responsibly.

Greenwald: Snowden docs contain NSA 'blueprint'

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