NullCharacter

You can extend this logic indefinitely. From the Futurama episode I Dated A Robot:

All civilization was just an effort to impress the opposite sex.

Completely agree with you. I fly tons for work, and was just fine until I got into my mid-late twenties when I started to have horrible anxiety.

And like you, I don't necessarily fear death, but I definitely don't want to see death coming. More than anything, I fear helplessness.

Thank god for the military, America's backdoor to the middle class. Best decision I've ever made.

Kinda not within the spirit of the exercise don't you think.

Totally agree with you. I struggle to write a bio for companies I work for, can't imagine dedicating an entire website just to memorialize myself.

He asked a general question regarding authorities to OGC. What's the bar of "availing" himself to a channel? If he sent an email to OGC asking how their weekend was, he would have technically "consulted with OGC", would he not?

As it stands, there is zero evidence (from either side) that Snowden complained to the proper channels.

And why would he when his plan was to leave the country with 1.5 million classified documents?

If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.

The dude planned this for years, he said it himself. He had plenty of time to simply take evidence of what he was going to blow the whistle on. I don't understand your argument.

impossible to expose the information in any other way

Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.

For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working.

If I understand your argument correctly, it's: "it's possible something here is illegal so let's just take all of it." I shouldn't have to explain why that doesn't jive.

Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.

None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.

My point is how do you pardon someone for whistleblowing when literally 99.99% of what they took from a classified space has nothing to do with what they were supposedly blowing the whistle on?

If you're going to leak 1.5 million documents and flee to China on the grounds of being a whistleblower after following proper channels, wouldn't you want to display some, any sort of proof that you indeed did attempt to follow the proper channels?

People claim this dude was a genius, make him out as some sort of tech/hacker savant, so why not make the slightest effort to show the world you really are a whistleblower?

Is patently false. He did attempt to use those channels and was ignored [1] - at least once as confirmed by the NSA itself, and many other times according to him, which the NSA disputes.

The same article you link says Snowden "tried to go through channels". It's not "patently false". It's "he claimed he tried". Meanwhile, investigations show only one email he sent regarding general clarification on NSA authorities but zero raising any concern or complaints: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...

WRONG - He has stated many times that he did approach all manner of "Oversight" people who basically told him to shut up. What happened to Tomas Drake and the others who tired the insider approach - nothing ever came of it.

Then why not bring proof? 1.5 million documents and he can't bring the emails he sent? No, we saw the emails (that is to say, one email: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...) that were sent to OGC, and nothing in them indicated he was raising any concerns.

How do you verify this? you can't

He took 1.5 million documents and we've seen what, maybe 100-200 documents and slides over the course of three years? What's the other 1,499,800 million classified documents about?

Meanwhile the NSA was illegally infringing the privacy of almost 310 million americans

Fine, if he had only taken documents pertaining to his qualms then there would have been a much greater chance of him being labeled a whistleblower or at least be met with some leniency even if he didn't in fact follow the proper channels.

the activities were NOT lawful (as in legally defensible when challenged in a court), they were not overseen by anyone and some of them were unrelated to intelligence.

1,499,800 documents that likely have absolutely zero to do with what he was supposed to be blowing the whistle on.

IIRC, in this case the FBI served up a "diagnostic" executable to users. Since they're using Tor browser, in general, simply enabling Javascript won't do anything to de-anonymize the user (unless the Feds had a TBB 0-day or something of the like). This executable obviously called out to FBI-controlled servers and provided a real IP.

Basically, the only people they ended up busting were people who for some reason decided it was a good idea to download and run an executable being served by their favorite CP site on the "darknet".

I'd totally move to Transylvania. Wonder if I can still work remotely from there... I mean they're only 11 hours ahead of PST.

Other guy in the video was Chris Hadnagy who literally wrote the book on social engineering.

Cool dude, too. Great class if you ever get the chance to take it at Black Hat.

I love how headlines like this are supposed to incite anger and fear.

The article mentioned nothing about manipulating "social media" (like reddit or HN as the headline would lead you to believe), in fact it mentions that none of the correspondence will even be in English. All this is is creating fake personas on extremist/underground forums as a source of intelligence.

This Internet is so quick to outrage.

I'll weigh in; work (remotely) for a startup in the Bay Area, around 100k salary with .5% equity.

I'm hoping to have more equity granted to me in the form of options in the coming months as the company turns a profit.

Otherwise, life is good.

Firetrucks carry water.

I can almost guarantee the people against ALPR are most likely the same people who have no problem throwing a camera in somebody's face in your local Starbucks or something, and then when asked to stop recording, they say "but bro it's a public place".

As someone in the computer science/cyber security field who didn't go to college, I tend to agree with this article in a few ways. Having no college degree has really hindered me in terms of landing interviews, but once I'm given a chance on the job I'm always flourished and proved my worth.

I've also found it strange that it didn't matter what my degree was in, just having one wold have secured me interviews. A theoretical degree in Turfgrass Science would have benefited equally as a proper degree in CompSci.

But the point is a botnet could, instead of mining bitcoins for example, stream content of which the rights are owned by the botnet operator.

If you had bought this picture for $2 later to find out it's worth $5,000,000, would you feel an obligation to share some of the proceeds with the shop from which it was purchased?

I used quotes because I don't know if it's actually possible to assassinate the character of a government organization, in the sense that I'm not sure if a government organization has a character to be assassinated per se. Generally I'd save that term for individuals. I wasn't being flippant.

Using your same logic here, you could claim that those documents are forgeries to begin with, leaked to "assassinate" the "character" of the NSA. You can't have it both ways. Either you're skeptical of the documents origin/source or you aren't.

I realize Snowden personally didn't leak the documents (unless you qualify handing the trove to journalists as "leaking" which some might). This is why I used the word "abscond" as well as "leak". Fact is he left with thousands of legitimate documents that had no business being a part of his collection.

But I've never received a straight answer to that question and I guess this is no exception.

So is Snowden still a whistleblower? Honest question, not trying to be snide.

If you abscond with 1,000 legitimate mission-oriented documents for every 1 document you leak that pertains to something you think an agency shouldn't be doing, are you still blowing the whistle? At what point are you no longer able to use that title as a defense? 10,000 documents for every 1? 100,000? Can he be both a whistleblower and a criminal or are the two mutually exclusive?

I don't have answers to these questions so I hope someone else does.

Try not to downvote for simply disagreeing with the question, as though it were even possible to disagree with a question.

A signals intelligence agency conducting intelligence operations on foreign signals?

Stop the presses!

I was a huge fan of /war-is-boring (and could name a bunch of authors), but they moved to their own dedicated site with crappy liveleak-esque ads.

C'est la vie.

In the words of XCKD: The important thing is you've found a way to feel superior. Good for you!

Haha wow. Schneier fan, are we? Did I touch a nerve? The hilarious thing is you don't even know who I am or what I do. You have no fucking clue.

How dare someone think critically. Not on your watch.

I definitely never claimed to be anything more than someone who thinks making bullshit assumptions based on other bullshit assumptions is, well, bullshit.