Some facts about how NSA stories are reported

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/23/facts-nsa-stories-reported/

by trauco • 12 years ago

161 44 12 years ago

intslack• 12 years ago

A big takeaway is in the second point:

By publishing yesterday’s Huawei story, the NYT obviously made the editorial judgment that these revelations are both newsworthy and in the public interest, should be disclosed, and will not unduly harm “American national security.” For reasons I explain below, I agree with that choice.
But if you disagree – if you want to argue that this NSA story is reckless, dangerous, treasonous or whatever – then have the courage to take it up with the people who reached the opposite conclusion: in this case, the editors and reporters of the NYT (indeed, as former DOJ official Jack Goldsmith observed[1], the NYT‘s Huawei story was “based on leaks other than the Snowden documents”).

[1] http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/03/the-nyt-on-nsas-huawei-pe...

cinquemb• 12 years ago

I found these parts interesting:

Now, obviously, anyone is free to agree or disagree with Snowden’s framework for how these materials be handled and reported. I personally think the process of government consultation is often used to suppress newsworthy information, though for the NSA stories I’ve worked on, government arguments to suppress information have been rejected in at least 99% of the cases; I also think non-traditional outlets such as WikiLeaks have done a superior job in many cases with reporting classified documents than government-loyal traditional outlets.

Ok, so mention how people can disagree with Snowdens framework, mention suppression of information through traditional media outlets (NYT, Guardian, etc), mention the superior job non-traditional outlets have had when it comes to classified documents with WL as the example, and some how trying to put Firstlook on the same pedestal indirectly if we ignore or are ignorant of the conception of the two identities/orgs? Amusing.

But what you shouldn’t feel free to do is ignore that this is the framework on which Snowden insisted. You shouldn’t demand that journalists violate their agreements with him (by publishing all the documents) unless you are willing to admit that this is what you’re advocating. And you definitely shouldn’t pretend that it’s Snowden, rather than these media outlets, who are making the choices about what gets published in order to demonize him for the latest disclosures you dislike while cowardly refusing to criticize the media outlets that actually made the choice to publish them.

Because amongst this "public service" that is to determine what is "public interest", there remains the profiteering of the "leaks" (that have been mentioned to the public by Binney, Drake and many others in the past to some degree), kind of makes this moral argument to the sanctity of an agreement between multiple parties (founded on treasonous grounds if you would ask the Five Eyes) pretty laughable.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Why do those people think "it's ok" for NSA to hack Huawei's servers? Is it ok for China to hack Google's servers, then? You can't have it both ways. Also, I remember Obama saying that a "cyberattack" is just as bad as a real world attack. That reinforces the fact it's bad for both China and US to be doing these sort of attacks - unless they are outright calling each other "war rivals".

This is still very much WW2 thinking that you need to have spies within a country and hack into them at all times. It also exposes US for its hypocrisy, because until now they've only said about "how bad China is for hacking others". Something tells me they'll shut up about that now.

I also disagree with the Lawfare guy. Here's the thing, if either NSA or CIA starts conflicts abroad, then it's very much in the interest of the US public. The people deserve to know when it's the US starting conflicts for various reasons, otherwise they'll only experience the backlash from those conflicts, and they'll wrongly think that country is the aggressor. And of course the US government will do whatever it can to paint them like that, too. This is why it's so important in such cases to unveil the truth, even if it "damages national security".

Governments are often led by corrupt psychopaths, and the people should know the truth so it can stop its own government, before creating a major crisis that everyone will pay for with blood. The American people deserve to know if the US gov is pissing off China with its hacks, to the brink of war, just like the Chinese people deserve to know if its own government is doing the same with its cyberattacks against US. Either way, the people need to know, and secret ops should be kept at a minimum.

EGreg3• 12 years ago

OK is relative to whoever is making the judgment. US, Russia and China have an imperialistic mindset. They violate sovereignty of other nations to further their own nationalistic agenda, often to increase their influence on the international world stage. Sad to say, the USA now truly believes that controlling the world is crucial for its national security, when in fact this foreign policy invites blowback in many different forms.

Elected officials are known to do backroom deals. However, bureaus and agencies such as the NSA can be even less accountable, since they have YEARS before anyone representing the public would find out. And someone with the technology and incentives like the NSA would OF COURSE go overboard doing whatever they could do and push the envelope because they could do it.

Sadly the system of oversight and checks and balances in empires always gets corrupted.

nemesisj3• 12 years ago

Actually, of the three, China is the only country that has no demonstrable history of imperialism outside of its historically occupied borders. Setting Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan aside (for at various times throughout history, all three of them have been occupied or fallen under the umbrella of Chinese influence), China as a civilisation has operated on a tribute model. Not one of imperialism.

The same can't be said of Russia or the USA.

While it's convenient to portray China as just another modern (western) country with the typical aims of a modern western power, the facts don't really fit this view. For thousands of years China has been content to stay within it's nominal boundaries. Even now, most of the forays China makes that the USA or Russia feels threatened by are economic overtures (hospital ships to africa, supporting less desirable governments, etc) designed to secure raw materials and achieve economic (not imperialistic) objectives.

eliteraspberrie2• 12 years ago

If I were to export a single chip to Iran, I would be a legitimate target of NSA. When Huawei sold network monitoring equipment to Iran -- knowing full well that equipment is used to target and kill people, and in contravention of US export laws -- they made themselves legitimate targets of the NSA.

Spearchucker• 12 years ago

Lets say you're exporting a single chip to the US. You know full well that your chip will end up in a drone. That drone then obliterates an innocent child in some godforsaken backwater in Africa or somewhere. Does that legitimize their making a target of you?

eliteraspberrie2• 12 years ago

If exporting chips to the US were against Chinese laws, yes, of course.

pkinsky• 12 years ago

Does the same logic apply to companies dealing with Taiwan, in (probable) convention of Chinese law? Huawei has no responsibility to follow US export law.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Yes it does; China most definitely attempts to spy on foreign companies that do business in Taiwan.

sethrin• 12 years ago

The NSA's legitimate targets are those bearing arms against the United States, and foreign intelligence more broadly. If you were to export a single chip to Iran, you would be the legitimate target of the FBI, which is an internal law enforcement agency, and not a military intelligence agency.

Internal law enforcement bodies are bound by laws and procedures, yet while rules of warfare exist, they are what one might term fairly permissive. Even more briefly, "War is Hell," and we do not bring Hell home. It is a universally applicable principle that the use of any military force against its own people is a treasonous offense; almost a tautology. More than this, it is sheer stupidity. Why should we seek to use the engines of war against the shores that bore them?

No one will deny the legitimate use of military intelligence-gathering. May we all be eternally spared the brutality of conflict, but if it must be, let it be conducted with wisdom and swift sure purpose. I'm not particularly bothered by the US military investigating bellicose nations and/or nationals, but I'd prefer to avoid military operations in allied territory to whatever degree possible -- we should pretend to some degree of civilization. Using military forces against civilians is generally considered criminal, and using them against citizens -- why don't you come up with some descriptive adjectives?

Intermernet• 12 years ago

I would argue that there isn't really such a thing as a legitimate target of the NSA.

From Wikipedia [1]: "Unlike the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), both of which specialize primarily in foreign human espionage, the NSA has no authority to conduct human-source intelligence gathering".

This is a very dubious remit. I'd argue that, in the current digital climate, the recording of phone and internet traffic is the primary method of "human-source intelligence gathering". If so, the NSA is operating out of it's defined area of responsibility and has made itself illegitimate.

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

dan_bk• 12 years ago

these journalists argue that these revelations are unjustified, even treasonous, because this is the type of spying the NSA should be doing

No, the NSA should NOT be doing this. It's not done to prevent any attacks on the US, it's simply economic espionage. It's economic warfare. It doesn't belong in any "democratic" country.

carlosdp• 12 years ago

Democratic doesn't mean docile. We would be naive to think that the US is the only one doing such things.

thisiswrong• 12 years ago

It sure doesn't. And the USA is so 'democratic' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeHzc1h8k7o

bediger4000• 12 years ago

I'd vote you up, if you you had written "the USA government". At this point in time, it seems like a good thing to distinguish "USA Government" and "USA citizens".

I agree: naive to think that the USA government is the only one doing such things. But now that we know at least one government or breakaway agency is doing such things, we can defend ourselves against them.

GabrielF00• 12 years ago

The NYTimes article provides some valuable context. This isn't economic espionage in the sense that the NSA wants Cisco to have Huawei's plans and technology in order for Cisco to compete better. The US government has concerns about how independent Huawei is of the Chinese government and the PLA. They want to know whether China is able to use Huawei's networking equipment to spy on other countries or conduct cyberwarfare. They want to use information from Huawei to assess China's larger plans. They want to be able to target Huawei's customers, many of which are not friendly to the US (specifically cited: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Cuba). All of these seem like fairly legitimate intelligence goals.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-ch...]

One of the frustrations I have with the Snowden leaks is that we see some of the process of intelligence gathering but we don't see the results. We don't see what the intelligence community found out about the relationship between Huawei and the PLA, for instance. It's difficult to assess tactics without knowing their effectiveness at answering broader questions. It's also concerning that because of these leaks, the US government may not be able to answer these questions. Understanding the Chinese military's capabilities and goals (not to mention understanding what's going on in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) is a strategic necessity.

gareim• 12 years ago

They want to know whether China is able to use Huawei's networking equipment to spy on other countries or conduct cyberwarfare.

The answer is yes, they are able to. If we got into Huawei, the Chinese government could too (if they wanted to).

I really dislike the "we have to spy on them because they might spy on us" argument. Especially when we point fingers at how everyone else is doing wrong and then come back and while forgetting when we have committed the same wrongs and while we are still committing those wrongs.

We give billions of dollars in aid to Israel, who refuses to stop expanding their settlements into Palestinian territory. We condemn Russia for reclaiming land that was theirs not so long ago, land that has more Russians than Ukrainians living there.

The hypocrisy is starting to drive me insane.

CamperBob2• 12 years ago

One of the frustrations I have with the Snowden leaks is that we see some of the process of intelligence gathering but we don't see the results.

This is the problem of utilitarianism. For any action of significance, there are both short-term results and long-term results. Some of those consequences, particularly the long-term ones, may not be predictable. Some of them may not be to your liking, even if you thought you were maximizing a utility function when you committed to the action.

Some of the consequences may be pretty fucking disastrous, in fact.

Hacking Huawei strikes me as one of those things that seems like a good idea when it's proposed in a locked-down SCIF at Fort Meade, and it may still seem like a good idea to some when it's disclosed in the New York Times. But I can't begin to imagine any long-term upside. I believe that if these people are left unchecked, their actions will lead to the mutually-assured destruction of privacy, or at least the sundering of the Internet.

dreamdu5t2• 12 years ago

We need less journalism more information. We need less journalists more Snowdens.

alecdbrooks• 12 years ago

As the article describes Snowden's decision to leak to journalists rather than directly to the public, this isn't a coherent argument. If we had "more Snowdens" we'd potentially need more journalists to cover the leaks.

Even if you had said "more Mannings" instead, how many people would have heard about anything she leaked without journalists?

dreamdu5t2• 12 years ago

The reason we haven't heard most of it is journalists. Snowden should have just posted it all to 4chan.

EGreg3• 12 years ago

You know guys, to be fair... with all these stories coming about Snowden revelations, it's not very clear how this information is obtained or revealed. Until now I had been actually wondering why the stuff is coming out piecemeal. If I, a person who is interested in this kind of stuff and reads HN quite a bit, could have missed the mechanism of how NSA stories are reported -- for months, mind you -- then so can other more vocal people. Including journalists.

In short ... this info should be more widely disseminated.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

with all these stories coming about Snowden revelations, it's not very clear how this information is obtained or revealed

It's been written about quite a bit. Unless you want it mentioned in every single article that reveals another document, it's pretty well out there. I don't even think this is the first time Greenwald has written a clarification article about it.

mcphilip• 12 years ago

It's not just "US Journalists Against Transparency” up in arms about this release, apparently popular opinion is mixed too, as evidenced by the reddit comment section on the NYT article submission [1]. This firstlook.org article is important in that it highlights how journalists and editorial boards are deciding what to publish.

However, this safeguard is made more problematic by the fact that journalists outside of the US have access to the same set of documents and don't have the same degree of concern over exposing US national security interests.

I can't decide whether or not I think this info should have been published. I liked the irony of the NSA deeming it necessary to compromise telecom equipment while simultaneously declaring said equipment unsuitable for use in the US since it may have back doors. On the other hand, this does seem like an expected function of the NSA best left implicit instead of explicitly exposed.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2139b3/snowden_do...

acqq4• 12 years ago

I can't decide whether or not I think this info should have been published

It's easy: the information would have been available (the book, the article by Der Spiegel) no matter what the actions of the NYT had been, see my other comment here.

I consider it definitely newsworthy.

sentenza• 12 years ago

Many of us over here in Europe lost a lot of respect for the NYT when it failed to denounce the complete garbageness of the Saddam-WMD connection, which was widely reported on over here.

Personally, I was also disappointed when Cablegate happened. I still own all five newspapers that collaborated in the dissemination and back in the day I read through the reporting of every single one of them.

Only one did not apologize for reporing on the cables (El País). The NYT, on the other hand, was the most apologetic by far.

A free press should report on all the secret shenanigans. Clearly, in the past, most major newspapers in most countries were not free in that sense, as they have refrained from reporting certain things on the intelligence agencies of their home countries.

This includes the Western World. In my home country, Germany, we recently were made aware of the fact that the West German intelligence agencies had opened and read all correspondence between citizens of East and West. Best detail: If they couldn't re-seal the letter in such a manner that you wouldn't know it had been read, they would just throw it away!

Somehow, this was kept a secret for decades, even though a massive amount of people were involved. So much for free press.

I guess the Americans have to decide. Do you want to be West Germany? Or do you want to be the United States of fucking America?

l0stb0y• 12 years ago

I'm looking forward to the revelation that the NSA was providing US companies with knowledge to aid their international competitiveness, you know, exactly what they state that the PLA are doing. What better payment for all the backdoor access they have?

acqq4• 12 years ago

The book, apparently soon going to be published in Germany, from which Der Spiegel and the NYT took the Huawei story for their last articles:

http://www.amazon.de/Der-NSA-Komplex-Edward-Snowden-Überwach...

The article by Der Spiegel:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chine...

The information is already internationally known no matter what the NYT decides to cover. The NYT was only able to decide if they are going to be the first to report it or to leave it to some other (U.S.?) media.

Can anybody really imagine supporting U.S. doing censorship like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

plorg3• 12 years ago

Greenwald quotes Goldsmith in saying that this information was received from sources "other than Snowden", while the articles that both cite (the NYT and der Spiegel) state expressly that the information did come from Mr. Snowden's releases.

I'm not sure what to make of the argument that by releasing the trove of documents to journalists (instead of, say, as a big torrent) Snowden is absolved of complicity in any releases of information. That almost sounds like doublespeak. It also suggests that he either didn't know what he was releasing or didn't understand all of its ramifications. Both could be permissible (and, indeed, given the things that we have learned from the releases, is probably laudable from at least a utilitarian perspective), but it complicates the idea of Snowden as a brave truth-teller. Then again, that whole thought is filtered through the lens of this particular piece, in which Greenwald seems to be trying to separate a part of the leaks and recontextualize it separate from the other, definitely necessary stories.

acqq4• 12 years ago

Daniel Ellsberg also released a trove of the material about Vietnam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

"In 1967, he contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara.[7] These documents, completed in 1968, later became known collectively as the Pentagon Papers. It was because Ellsberg held an extremely high-level security clearance and desired to create a further synthesis from this research effort that he was one of very few individuals who had access to the complete set of documents."

Do you also question he being a brave truth-teller? Ellsberg has no doubts about Snowden:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vahsi/i_am_pentagon_p...

"I am Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden is my hero. (...) I believe that Edward Snowden has done more to support and defend the Constitution—in particular, the First and Fourth Amendments—than any member of Congress or any other employee or official of the Executive branch, up to the president: every one of whom took that same oath, which many of them have violated."

The oath of the president is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_office_of_the_President...

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

plorg3• 12 years ago

Largely, yes, I believe he's done some great work bringing to light constitutional abuses. I am glad Mr. Ellsberg believes him to be his hero. I believe he is a flawed hero, though I also believe that all humans have their own flaws.

However, this is somewhat tangential to my post. Whether you want to call him a criminal, a miscreant, a hero, or even a minor deity on account of his actions, you cannot do so while simultaneously claiming that the information the public receives from these leaks is, morally speaking, completely removed from Mr. Snowden because he handed it off to media outlets. That's what Mr. Greenwald is arguing, and it's confounding.

Finally, Greenwald's post was literally written to respond to the claim that the info released about the NSA compromising Huawei has little to nothing to do with the upholding the Constitution. If that's what the leaks are about (which you seem to be suggesting), this is the wrong place to use that as a basis for calling the leaker a hero.

Some facts about how NSA stories are reported

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