UK government now leaking documents about itself

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

by MarcScott • 13 years ago

210 72 13 years ago

theguardian.com

haakon• 13 years ago

It figures - this "leak" seemed completely uncharacteristic of Snowden's other leaks.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

Edit: my reading skills suck today. Feel free to ignore/downvote this.

The independent article [1] referred to has an interesting claim:

The Independent understands that The Guardian agreed to the Government’s request not to publish any material contained in the Snowden documents that could damage national security.
As well as destroying a computer containing one copy of the Snowden files, the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, agreed to restrict the newspaper’s reporting of the documents.

From this submission's guardian article:

Greenwald: "Speaking for myself, let me make one thing clear: I'm not aware of, nor subject to, any agreement that imposes any limitations of any kind on the reporting that I am doing on these documents"

It might be helpful if the Guardian explicitly clears this up. What a strange situation...

[1]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-...

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

The guardian have always been open about not publishing operational details. Those black slides in the prism ppt were redacted by the guardian, not by the NSA.

Whether or not this means they "agreed to government demands" is a boring matter of semantics if they were going to do it anyway.

alan_cx7• 13 years ago

I'd say its the Guardian being responsible. The idea is to hold government to account, not risk people on the ground.

alan_cx7• 13 years ago

As you have quoted, its the Independent who claims there are agreements in place, not the Guardian or Greenwald.

So, it's the Independent who need to clarify their claim, the Guardian employee has flat out denied it. How clear does it need to be from the Guardian if a total denial is not enough?

Edit: seen you edit now. Fair play to you. I've done the exact same thing in the past!!!!

grey-area5• 13 years ago

The Guardian editors did an interview a while ago with Charlie Rose explaining the process[1], and I don't think it's so much an agreement as that they run stories past the government first, for comment, and for the government to give them specific objections to revealing information - so far they've not heard anything concrete, just 'don't publish this' - though this was before the laptop debacle. The Guardian and WaPo redact the documents before publication (sometimes heavily). The Independent is restating that in a slightly misleading way to imply that The Guardian has some sort of firm agreement with the government on vague terms like 'national security'. So I don't think the Guardian needs to clear anything up, they've been quite clear, and even if there were an agreement, I think the Guardian would argue that nothing they have or will publish does endanger 'national security' - it would come down to arguments over the meaning of that term. Does it meant the comfort and ease of our politicians and security services to keep their activities secret, or does it mean actual danger to citizens of the UK?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7pdz...

From the Independent story:

The Independent is not revealing the precise location of the station but information on its activities was contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden.

This looks really bad for the Independent, as the article makes it sound like this is based on a leak from Snowden, and yet Snowden has specifically denied this, and if you go back and reread the article in that light, it becomes clear that they have simply reproduced a leak at the behest of GCHQ, carefully worded in order to preempt future scoops while giving little away, and yet get in front of the news with their best possible spin. I love the ending as well where they give up pretending to be independent:

Intelligence sources have denied the aim is a blanket gathering of all communications, insisting the operation is targeted at security, terror and organised crime.

We know they already collect it all, and the only limits are technical ones (for GCHQ at least, and it's starting to look like the NSA are similar). We already know they target individuals who are nothing to do with terror and organised crime (Laura Poitras, Appelbaum, Miranda etc).

dtf• 13 years ago

I've seen a few suggestions that the SIGINT station is Masirah Island in Oman, which isn't exactly a secret.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=j5J10im3ETMC&lpg=PA212&dq...

devx• 13 years ago

You know, when I read that story I immediately thought "oh boy, now they're going to say Snowden leaks 'hurt them' because they uncovered military operations", or something along those lines.

So if it's coming straight from the UK government, I could see why they'd want to blame Snowden for that, and make him lose favor with the public. If this is why they did it, I could even see US "advising" them on following the same model to destroy his image, just like they did with Manning and Assange (and where somewhat successful in that, I'd say).

brey• 13 years ago

While I'm with the tin-foil hat brigade on this whole debacle, I'm not quite sure that 'it wasn't from Snowden' necessarily means 'so it must be misinformation from the Government'.

especially as it would be so easily disproven that Snowden had anything to do with it.

7952• 13 years ago

Its perfectly possible that they have known about these monitoring stations for years, but lacked confirmation, or a narrative.

malandrew2• 13 years ago

I think it would be awesome if they played along on this one and then followed up a few days later explaining that the tin-foil hat crowd was right and that the information was in fact leaked by the government in an attempt to discredit Snowden and Greenwald.

If I ran a news business and was approached to disinform the public, to me that is a huge story. I would milk it and play along and gather as much irrefutable evidence of willful acts to mislead the public and then drop that story later on.

If you simply say that you won't play along, you lose the opportunity to discover how deep that rabbit hole goes.

MarcScott• 13 years ago

I wonder whether the Independent would reveal their source, or at least confirm or deny that it came from the UK government.

chiph2• 13 years ago

There could be a second Snowden.

alan_cx7• 13 years ago

If only....

That would be one hell of a twist. Just to really push it, what if he has an unknown identical twin???

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

That would make passing through customs interesting.

earnubs• 13 years ago

Or many, but they prefer to do things the old fashioned way.

AimHere2• 13 years ago

A hypothetical second Snowden wouldn't really know what files the first Snowden is leaking though.

acqq3• 13 years ago

Independent's article is really strange: It contains the name of the internal portal from which it claims Snowden downloaded files, it contains the time of Snowden's download and the apparent number of downloaded files. Then it describes the foreign probably military-controlled port which GCHQ uses. Otherwise repeats old information.

Why would anybody want to disclose that new info when the goal of Snowden's leaks was to point to the cases of unconstitutional US acts or broad attacks on liberties?

It definitely doesn't fit. The new information only "incriminates" Snowden more, otherwise doesn't contribute anything. In who's interest is that then?

chalst• 13 years ago

I recall that the NSA admitted that they hadn't any audit trail from which they could figure out what downloads Snowden had made. But apparently GCHQ has better information...

acqq3• 13 years ago

False argument. It's not "either we know everything or we know nothing." For example, they can have incomplete logs.

epo• 13 years ago

This is a propaganda war, take nothing at face value. Is the Government lying (or ill-informed)? The Independent? The Guardian? Snowden? Is there another source of leaks?

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

Note very carefully: "contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden".

Now, that doesn't say the documents came from Snowden, only that it was contained in them. They're both likely telling the truth when Snowden says 'it wasn't from me!' and the Indy says they've not been duped. We know that the UK government has just gotten hold of these documents, but we don't know whether there's anyone sympathetic to the cause mixed in there.

There's a lot of facets to this and care is needed from both sides of the fence, but there's no love loss between The Guardian and The Independent. Maybe The Indie has been told one thing off the record that might have a nugget of truth that's been paired down by Chinese whispers, we just don't know. The Guardian is probably sanitising what they publish after what happened with Wikileaks (no one ever took blame, the password was published by them after assurances it was temporary), and would prefer another firefighting exercise.

Upshot is, The Indie revealed another piece of the puzzle in the reach of the surveillance culture that's being built.

grey-area5• 13 years ago

Upshot is, The Indie revealed another piece of the puzzle in the reach of the surveillance culture that's being built.

I suspect this is a direct leak from GCHQ, trying to get ahead of future stories, and also trying to undermine Snowden's stance as a responsible whistleblower. No-one else is in possession of this information, and the article reads like a puff piece for GCHQ, particularly the ending.

This is incredibly misleading from the Independent - if it was from government sources that should have been clearly stated. If not they should name their source, it's not The Guardian (info destroyed one month ago), Snowden (denied, seems unlikely), Greenwald (Brazil), or Poitras, so where did it come from if not the government? It's really embarrassing for them if they have been duped, and even worse if they are complicit and reproducing press-releases from GCHQ without attribution, and with the implication that they have seen secret documents.

If they have seen secret documents and the UK government provided them, this undermines the argument against whistleblowers like Snowden, if not, who is the source? Without a source being specified, their story is not credible.

panacea• 13 years ago

To be fair, the Indie has been completely missing from the conversation so far. Understandable that they want in.

Despicable, if they're using 'undisclosed sources' who are the UK spy services though.

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

Yes it does read like dirty tricks alright, particularly this which might as well be a statement from Theresa May who stands over the abuse of the terrorism law:

"the Metropolitan Police announced it was launching a terrorism investigation.. Scotland Yard said material examined so far from the computer of Mr Miranda was “highly sensitive”, the disclosure of which “could put lives at risk”. "

I see that as an attempt at discrediting Miranda/Greenwald/The Guardian.

The Government also demanded that the paper not publish details of how UK telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, were secretly collaborating with GCHQ... But it only published information on the scheme... after the allegations appeared in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

More of the same

The Independent understands that The Guardian agreed to the Government’s request not to publish any material contained in the Snowden documents that could damage national security... But there are fears in Government that Mr Greenwald – who still has access to the files – could attempt to release damaging information.

More of the same

I think the fact there is a base in the middle east is already known from this: http://oglobo.globo.com/infograficos/volume-rastreamento-gov...

I think the GCHQ involvement and the BT, Vodafone are the only new information. So it smells pretty bad, especially combined with the misdirection about being in Snowden's files.

espeed2• 13 years ago

I suspect this is a direct leak from GCHQ, trying to get ahead of future stories

Among other things, it shifts the focus from domestic surveillance to Middle East surveillance, which presumably less people have an issue with.

dendory• 13 years ago

I also noticed that, and I bet the words were choose carefully. Still, placing an image of Snowden with Greenwald in their article is quite a bit misleading.

AimHere2• 13 years ago

We know that the UK government has just gotten hold of these documents, but we don't know whether there's anyone sympathetic to the cause mixed in there.

It's likely the leaker is unsympathetic to the cause. Leaking operational details that could spark that 'OMG, if someone finds that out, our guys could get killed' panic would be one way of gaining public support for more of the heavy-handed government censorship that the UK government is inflicting on this case.

It's obvious that the Indie is embarrassed about the very nature of it's source here, and it claims to not be 'duped'. So this could be an actual government propaganda piece of some sort, it could come from the spooks who pulled Miranda's hard drives, or they might be spying on fellow journalists, or the source is just so unreliable that the journalism here is laughable. The last of these sounds fairly unlikely given the lack of any kind of denial of the alleged facts.

rst• 13 years ago

The Independent also said that Snowden had downloaded pretty much all of an internal GCHQ wiki. There has to be lots of source-and-methods info in there, and Snowden himself has so far chosen to leak none of it.

Given that, the weasel-worded "among the documents" framing, which specifically avoids saying that that's where they got the documents, really does stick out.

malandrew2• 13 years ago

What I don't get it what obligation Snowden has to the GCHQ. Being responsible with the NSA information makes sense since the NSA was his employer and at one time may have represented the welfare of his fellow citizens, but all the information from the other of the 5 Eyes I imagine he, Glenn and Laura could be much more liberal with the reporting. I'm sure there are downsides to such a tactic, but it seems that at the very least it would make all the rest of the 5 Eyes look bad enough that those other nations in the future would be a lot more conservative with respect to how much they cooperate with the NSA. At the end of the day, only the US and the UK have been actual terror targets. I really don't get what the politicians of the other 3 of the 5 Eyes are getting out of the deal that makes involvement worth their while.

hyperventilator3• 13 years ago

The claim that the UK gov leaked this appears to be complete conjecture. It may be correct, but there are no facts, even circumstantial, to back this claim.

alan_cx7• 13 years ago

Until the the UK gov confirms political leaking, its is all we have. So, either we have a bit of a chat and see what we can work out, or we say nothing because its conjecture and so forth. Are you suggesting that we cant have that conversation? Or are you suggesting that we all think we are talking god's fact and are deluding ourselves? Yes, we know it is conjecture.

Remind me, when was the last time a government freely admitted to leaking information for political reasons?

hyperventilator3• 13 years ago

I never said any of that. The title states it as fact, there are no facts.

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

One day there will be a movie about all this.

acqq3• 13 years ago

"The Return of All the President's Men."

chiph2• 13 years ago

"All the President's Men: The Quickening"

pivnicek• 13 years ago

Does anyone know what kind of encryption was used on those drives that were taken from Miranda at Heathrow? Is it feasible to break that in this little time? That seems to be the angle here, that that info was on those drives. At least that's my wild stab in the dark.

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

There is some confusion on this front. Apparently Miranda gave them either the keys to the encrypted devices, the passwords to his online accounts or both.

It should be possible to clear this up but I can't find a direct quote of either Miranda or Greenwald on the matter.

justincormack• 13 years ago

It seems unlikely he had the keys to the files, he says he did not know what was there and it would make no sense to give the keys until he arrived.

grey-area5• 13 years ago

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/370512998017683457

grey-area5• 13 years ago

GCHQ and the NSA are the origin of the files, they have no need to break encryption in order to know anything released in this article.

uptown• 13 years ago

Snowden was quoted as saying the capabilities of the agencies he was dealing with were “capable of a trillion guesses per second” in decrypting communications.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...

jgrahamc• 13 years ago

Richard Aldirch's book on GCHQ lists three locations in the Middle East used by GCHQ/NSA:

1. Masirah Island near Oman

2. Muharraq, Bahrain

3. Mutlah Ridge, Kuwait

Given its location and the layout of cables in that region I'd guess #1.

I'm not quite sure why The Independent published this article though. Surely, it's not news that GCHQ operates bases around the world? Are they going to reveal the location of Diego Garcia next?

alan_cx7• 13 years ago

Well, here is my theory. Could well be missing something, or a hell of a lot, but here goes....

First thing is that my impression has been that the Independent has so far been pretty much parroting the Guardian articles. Now, I read this article as a "good spying" article. Its there for the government and GCHQ to show that spying is good, or had a good side. From a British security POV, if we believe the terror threat, this article actually shows spying as useful or worth while, and to Brits, good. Arabs wont like it, but to those who matter to the UK and US, I assume they know, and comply. Well, don't want to be bombed back to the stone age or be invaded, right?

Next, why the Independent, and not the Murdoch Times, Telegraph (Known in the UK as the Torygraph), or one of the tabloids? Well, the story needs the weight of a proper newspaper, so that's the tabloids out. That leaves the broadsheets. Pro conservative papers are too obvious, so that leaves the Independent.

Looks to me like a divide and rule thing. So far, the Independent and Guardian have been in step. Now we have the Guardian pushing "bad spying" and the Independent is the "good spying" advocate. The two step has been split.

I say the Independent has been used and somewhere along the line, we will see what they got for it.

rahoulb• 13 years ago

Also interesting that the Telegraph's reporting on the same story (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1026117...) is pretty much a straight regurgitation of the Independent's version with no editorialising.

Normally there's always a dig when reporting something that originally came from the Guardian or the Independent.

alan_cx7• 13 years ago

Yeah, they would normally have a pop at those papers.

So, with in the world of my theory, I'd say this is a Tory paper echoing the "good spying" line.

dTal2• 13 years ago

Lots of circumstantial evidence supports this view. Apart from the specific focus of the story being a "positive" use of spying, the use of distorting phrases like "the Snowden controversy" and "the arrest of Mr. Miranda" (who was "illegally" detained, not arrested) are suspicious.

Also, it comes almost immediately after the government became aware of what was leaked (thanks to David Miranda). Not knowing this put them at a severe disadvantage before, as they were constantly a step behind and being continually caught lying was ruining their credibility. As others have noted, "was contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" are weasel words of the highest order, and the linked article by the Guardian is clearly calling this out.

It's easy to picture a narrative where the government wishes to ham up the "national security risk" posed by these leaks, which they couldn't do effectively when they didn't know what was in them. Intercept David Miranda to find out, cherry pick some information that sounds important but non-threatening to UK nationals, and leak it to The Independent in exchange for a sympathetic story. This also explains even the nonsensical "destroyed hard drives" affair - they weren't trying to delete the data, they wanted to make a big show of "trying" to.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

An interesting and insightful analysis. +1

scoggs• 13 years ago

I think in an interview with David and Glenn, Glenn had said that what they could have taken from David either couldn't be decrypted or was the type of information that wouldn't change a thing in terms of Glenn's journalism and the flow of leaks.

woj• 13 years ago

I wonder if Snowden and co. were that stupid to keep all their files with Miranda. The fact is the gov can never be sure if whatever he was carrying is in fact the complete set.

joejohnson• 13 years ago

It's a tactic called Flak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

beaker522• 13 years ago

An unsavoury attempt at demonising Edward Snowden and those associated with him (Glenn Greenwald) based on false information, with a view to achieving public rationalisation of the actions of the government in the destruction of Guardian data and the detention of David Miranda, hence rationalising the reduction of civil liberties, increased surveillance and enforcement of "law" in the name of protecting the public from terrorism.

[Edit: Removed some emotive exaggeration]

hahainternet2• 13 years ago

This, is nonsense hyperbole.

beaker522• 13 years ago

Thank you :)

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

Fascinating. The Independent doesn't seem to say they got the documents from Snowden. They appear instead to be accepting UK intelligence agencies claiming that Snowden had certain information.

Maybe these were documents that the NSA has identified as likely compromised? Or maybe they were found on someone else (Miranda?) but it seems like this is an interesting development.

I am not even sure the Independent is being dishonest about it. However, something pretty odd is going on and the UK government is starting to look pretty incompetent.

espeed2• 13 years ago

Yesterday Schneier was trying to make sense out of the British authorities' play to detain Miranda...

"Schneier: The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda" (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the...)

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

Where I differ from Schneier here is that I think it is quite plausible that the NSA doesn't know what Snowden actually took. One can more easily audit what he had access to and what he could have taken than one can audit what he did and given his long period of service, what he could have taken is likely to be very large.

You have to remember that even mandatory access control systems aren't really designed to keep sysadmins out, and logging has its limits both in the sorts of information you can extrapolate from a log entry and what you can log.

My point is that it is quite possible that the NSA has a list of documents that Snowden could have taken and has no idea which of those he did.

belorn• 13 years ago

Its called a false flag operation, commonly used to implicate a nation rather than an individual.

The Snowden camp is rather well defended at this point. He has received asylum in a country where US forces can't simply collect him from. The leaks are given out carefully, with lessons learned from the events surrounding Wikileaks. The news are given out in pace with readers ability to absorb them.

So what can a government do? Stopping airplanes with national leaders in them only caused more uproar. Trying to strong-arm journalist just created more news articles. Trying to physical destroy copies only resulted in a somewhat burned laptop, and maybe made someone to release an "insurance file". I guess they tried next with a false flag operation, hoping that it could go unnoticed. I wonder the think tanks will think of next.

deveac• 13 years ago

Trying to physical destroy copies only resulted in a somewhat burned laptop, and maybe made someone to release an "insurance file".

If you buy the plausible argument that this was a UK govt leak designed to discredit Snowden while stating that the stolen information and the handling of it is a national security threat, then the grandiose and very public destruction of the hard drives actually makes sense. It was the gov't calling attention to its "attempt to destroy the information to limit harmful disclosure." The public grandstanding of that act would be a sensical precursor to a controlled leak of the sort the Independent published.

gargoiler002• 13 years ago

I remember when hacker news used to be about hacking, programming, startups etc.

What the hell has this political article got to do with any of the above?

forgottenpass• 13 years ago

Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum disconnected from the world, it's constantly interacting with society as the two evolve with and by eachother. It has the power to fundamentally alter the world, the most grandiose among programmers and entrepreneurs will even voice that as a goal.

Large scale monitoring of computerized communication infrastructure. The cat and mouse implementation of crypto technologies in response. The ethos of the people on the forefront of computer privacy. The fact that the leaker was a sysadmin. All these dots connect to form a larger story that is just as much about tech in society as it is politics. This article in specific and Snowden's leaks in general may be more on the social side, but is still a component of the larger story that is fundamental to tech.

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

This is a defining moment in history, one which will shape the digital environment in which we all operate for decades to come. By the time the last echoes have fades HTTP and SMTP will likely no longer exist, every last bit of every communication will be encrypted and the general public will be about as paranoid as the most tinfoil hat type of 2 years ago.

All it takes for that to be the case is a few more things to happen:

  - someone leaks a substantial body of cleartext records on citizens

  - ditto on some foreign head of state / politician / judge

  - ditto on an American politician

The term 'plaintext' will be as antiquated as 'morse'. Still occasionally in use but not for anything that matters. Intelligence agencies will be reduced to traffic analysis and likely not even that with a vast chunk of the internet simply going dark, either as a mesh network or in some other decentralized fashion where there are no more supernodes such as Mae-East, Mae-West and Front 151.

The other alternative is not so much fun so I won't outline that here. There is a good reason why 'may you live in interesting times' is considered a curse.

The fall-out from this will affect every hacker, every start-up and likely every company operating at the moment with even a peripheral interface with the digital world, which is probably all of them.

gargoiler002• 13 years ago

It's really not a defining moment, in any sense of the word.

Same old, same old.

In actual fact though, The independent has stated that it wasn't leaked anything by the government, so the original post is moot. This is no better than gossip about celebrities.

So governments monitor the internet. Wouldn't it be really bizarre if they didn't monitor the internet?

Fuxy• 13 years ago

Let the chess games begin. UK on the attack now desperately trying to find an angle to sell to the public.

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

Maybe the independent should drop the 'in' from it's name.

UK government now leaking documents about itself

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