themeek

I am disputing that I broke the rules.

The OP had said that tptacek was a shill. I defended tptacek by saying I didn't know that he was paid or whether he was just in the circle of security contractors (he is) or whether he merely bought into and was regurgitating their propaganda.

I did not call tptacek a shill nor make a baseless accusation. It's absolutely true that tptacek is a stalwart defender of public narrative. This is the base of OP (not baseless) of his calling tptacek a shill. I entertained the possibility that he wasn't paid or anything like that.

Anyway, this isn't really interesting content any more. I think the real shame is that the main topic was downvoted to oblivion where people will not see the comparison to the US. The information about Binney (that tptacek clearly showed he was noncharitably and polemically engaging) and Risen and others won't be seen.

That's okay. One battle at a time.

Thanks dang, for your help and attention.

Which ones in particular? That's just not right.

Everything I said has been perfectly straightforward and honest.

Downvote brigades are usually only a thing on Reddit, but I experience them here occasionally.

The OP claimed you were a shill - I questioned whether you were paid. I said maybe you were just in the circle or bought into the narrative.

You should have posted this to OP. I am defending tptacek.

The Military-Industrial-Lol Complex, in fact - and the Build-a-lollers.

Lol.

Yes, see the other thread. Responded there.

Right, he was involved in insider trading. If you don't do anything illegal it's hard to blackmail you for it. That was the claim. Blackmail. Sure, he did something wrong(-ish).

You are right about Risen and Sterling. I think you get the point though. The leverage placed on Risen to reveal his sources and the placement of Sterling under the Espionage Act - the use of backroom deals to keep Risen's publication of mass surveillance out of the Times when it was first published - the use of NSLs - the hacking of the Associated Press to spoil their sources during the Benghazi Affair. The US uses these things to curdle journalistic coverage and their sources.

Binney wasn't indicted for anything. He and his family was held at gunpoint and threatened.

The link you gave just had people calling Nacchio pathetic. Was there a specific fact you were trying to highlight? (I mentioned character defamation in the top post.)

He was charged with the Espionage Act. Please refer to the original comment to see that I did not claim the US charges individuals with treason.

Risen got it better than others though in some ways. Binney and his family were held at gunpoint. Nacchio was blackmailed.

Not the ACLU. James Risen. Journalist.

Germany's Secret Service just charged their leading Civil Rights group on treason for publishing information about the German government's plans to further expand domestic mass surveillance.

This is not different than what has happened in the United States - though the US uses National Security Letters, gag orders, financial and criminal leverage and defamation - its only when these don't work that the US will reach toward the Espionage Act.

We look back in history and question why citizens in history asked their governments to send civil rights activists to prison and to silence certain stories in the press.

Today we get modern answers to these questions at least every few months.

I have polled friends, family and acquaintances: the overwhelming response is that we don't feel safe.

I have also sampled the official stance from press releases and speeches: the overwhelming justification is that we are not safe.

As all things are, the truth is much more complicated.

Oh yeah. That's totally happening. The Sunshine Policy was ended some time ago. President Geun-hye called for international support for the unification at the UN. SK, the US and Japan have joint plans for the destabilization of the regime and other contingencies, US foreign policy thinktanks are devising plans for the event (http://www.brookings.edu/research/presentations/2015/01/20-k...), SK and US are in talks with China about getting their support, interception capabilities have been moved out to the Korean peninsula, anthrax was sent from the DoD to a bunch of labs in the Asia Pacific (North Korea is afraid of being framed - came to the UN with a complaint and offered to open up inspection of its laboratories to the international community).

Uh, a bunch of other associated facts. But yeah, give it a pretty short couple of years and you're going to see this happen.

I find this neither complete nor accurate but it's good to see a list like this. Thanks for doing the legwork.

Don't forget the Japan mutual defense deal, the upcoming Korea unification and all the other hundred things in the Asia Pacific.

Be careful about many of these things - the way you present them needs to be pretty careful. The goal in the Asia-Pacific (TPP included) is to contain China with a balance of power in their region. This includes Australia, Philippines, Japan of course, Guam, and Singapore, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Northern Mariana Islands, etc. Ukraine was being purposefully Westernized (Project UNITER) for inclusion into the EU and Russia is the goal after Ukraine. It is against the backdrop of NATO, EU and in general Western liberal expansion that Russia solidified its position in Crimea. In other words many of the things you list here can be seen as policy failures or at least haven't played themselves out (Saudi Arabia and Israel with Iranian nuclear deal, etc). We don't know whether this will actually prevent Israel from invading Iran yet.

Yadda yadda.

Anyway, thanks for compiling a list. It's hard to follow American domestic politics without understanding American Foreign policy and Geostrategy. So it's good to see information and dialogue posted here.

During the White House press briefing the WH spokesperson mentioned that normalizing ties was being done for international strategic purposes (and of course, Cuba was blacklisted for similar and for political reasons - not because they had anything to do with terrorism). I don't actually know what they mean by this. Do you have some idea of what strategic investment/partnership is being made?

I do not. Microsoft Research and Google Research and IBM are examples of places where some of this research is done - and there's Universities. MITRE does as well as other semi-public orgs.

But it's the case that all of these places also sponsor work and work with the military. I guess the answer is yes that it exists, but no it doesn't exist (AFAIK) completely military free.

I don't have very good visibility into pharma companies and agro companies. I know that they do some long term research and I don't know (I would suspect) whether they have partnerships with DoD folks.

The work that DARPA does is incredible and we should be proud, as a country, that we pursue transformational research. One of the big weaknesses of the private sector is that there are few opportunities to pursue high-risk high-reward research and research that must be done on long timelines.

The stuff DARPA funds is fundamentally important and has an incredible track record.

That said, their primary customer is the DoD which has demands for technology that is sometimes rather creepy. Without going too far down that route and forcing a tangent on the thread I'll just plug here that technology is power and that power can be used for good and evil, for noble and ignoble and for personal or public gain. We need to cheer on DARPA for its development of technology and keep its customers accountable for how it applies that technology.

This would be for a cryptographic attack - not someone with the hardware.

No, what my post was claiming is that the presence of malware didn't hurt my system and wasn't an issue when I browsed the files (on a practical basis).

I understand the potential.

I think it's valuable for you to do this.

You should continue to look for malicious files in a variety of places online.

Good work.

Unfortunately it is more difficult than this.

Even if you practice safe computing it's likely that your information will be compromised - especially in the long term and especially if you are an organization.

That's not to say this practice isn't important. It's just that it's not enough. We need both of these things (and more).

The state of computer security is fundamentally asymmetric.

Oh sorry.

The Stratfor leaks had a TON of shady stuff.

I missed all that–can you point me in the right direction?

Sure!

The CEO of SONY, high level state department officials, RAND specialist on nuclear deproliferation, regime change and North Korea, and Special Envoy to Korea discussed what direction the ending of the movie should go for it to most optimally destabilize the Kim regime. Special Envoy talked about plans (and RAND specialist Bennett) mention plans to seed the film into NK:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/17/exclusive-s...

Covered in the prior link and here (http://www.democracynow.org/2014/12/22/the_interview_pokes_f...) the State Department was given early screenings of the Interview.

The CIA and Hillary staffers were on set of the Interview (https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/109275); Seth Rogan even mentioned getting inside information about Kim Jong Un's disappearance for surgery during the production from officials on set he thought were CIA (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/movies/james-franco-and-se...).

The decision to name the leader of NK in the film came down from executives - in the original script it had entirely fictional names (http://www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/2014/12/15/40758/how-...). This is also confirmed by the SONY leaks, which have the executives trade emails concerned about the appearance of their having brought up the idea.

This all came out pretty early during the hacks but unfortunately the skepticism over it having been NK behind the hacks overwhelmed the media at the time. (It did turn out to be pretty definitively North Korea, or at least sympathizers, after all).

99% v. 1%

I happen to agree with you wholeheartedly. I do like the way that Wikileaks operates, though. They don't want to be the people in charge of curating and censoring information because they feel that this process can become politicized. So they publish everything.

The cost of their publications is extremely high. The returns are also high and IMO the ROI is good so in general I'm for them. But yeah if the ROI wasn't very good I would question it a lot more.

Definitely Wikileaks operates in pretty challenging legal waters.

The emails from SONY had some controversial stuff in them.

For example here is an interaction between the CEO and the State Department about setting up a group of media executives to develop US propaganda for the Middle East and Russia: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/117082

Of course it was also revealed that The Interview was a propaganda product aimed at destabilizing North Korea (in anticipation of the upcoming planned unification).

These sorts of things can only be found when there's wide access given to journalists. It's also true that the emails were available via torrent and hosted other places online.

To play the other side, 99% of the SONY leaks were innocuous. While it is a company with management that works, like most US international corporations, with the US government on 'shady things', it is also in large part also a private company with the usual mundane concerns of a corporation.

I really like this solution.

Critics might be able to say that Wikileaks BOTH hosts malware AND tampers with evidence - but if Wikileaks has a voice to respond it has a pretty good reply.

Filters and services sometimes block entire domains because one page hosts malware. So it might be that the excuse could still be used to block Wikileaks if they did host both - but again agreed that hosting both is pretty good.

It does increase the work staff at Wikileaks must do and the amount of data they have to host/manage.

But yeah overall if this becomes a problem for them doing both seems like a pretty good solution.

Nice!

It's an interesting problem:

* If Wikileaks edits the content it can be criticized for tampering.

* If Wikileaks leaves malware in it can be criticized for circulating malware.

It may also give an excuse to search engines and other partners of the government to block the site on account of it hosting files that are infected.

A pretty nasty no-win situation.

Also think about what this means for the sources of the documents. It means that the surveillance and intelligence information from these firms was likely compromised. Yikes.

So it looks like there's not much of a worry someone has from looking through those files themselves.

Personally I have looked through these files and have not run into any malware issues pointed out by the article.

I found it very informative and interesting to look through the intelligence files. One of my favorite finds are the docs on CANVAS and some of the US destabilization operations in Venezuela and color revolutions.

That sounds mostly right to me. Barely floating or even running in the red (making shit for money) also provides financial incentives. But beyond the monetary there are plenty of types of leverage - legal, "human", and access to information (in reddit this is probably also not as strong leverage). There's also rewards that can be given to individuals who have some say in the direction of reddit. For example Pao was on the board of National Defense Thinktanks in Washington - an opportunity to both give a small stipend and for conversations to open dialogue and for perception.

Journalism:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitte...

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-secretly-created-cuban-twi...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-t...

There's a bunch of programs like these. CANVAS for example works with the US government to stir dissent in VZ. Similar to how the US then uses crackdowns on its clandestine programs as illustrations of a corrupt VZ government when the Cuban government cracked down on phones due to US messaging programs (both to SMS and through apps like ZunZuneo) it was criticized by the US government for cracking down on civil rights. This is also similar to (project UNITER) activity by the CIA in organizing the Euromaiden protests and for shell media companies in Ukraine, and the following cry about the crackdown on 'civil society' there.

These things are incredibly smart, of course, and I'm glad our government has these capabilities and is so good at it. But there's also a level at which some debates need to be had and while specific programs and details hurt national security a general conversation among the people on what sorts of tactics they approve of and what boundaries should be in place in this murky area of law should be a good thing.

This is 100% absolutely the case.

But it's important to ask hard questions and get denials: even when they are blatant lies it makes the organization responsible for the lies (and any associated fallout) and it puts pressure 'upstream' for more comprehensive public discussion and justification.

It also has the virtue of being public, where other redditors and HN folk can peruse it and maybe become interested in the topic.

I'm not wholey against or for any 'side'. I'm actually pretty confused and can see good reasons abound on all sides and my guess is that solutions, whatever they are to whatever challenges are percieved, are probably pretty complicated.

But I believe in public deliberation and awareness: the more people who participate in these discussions I think the better. Finally widespread awareness of sockpuppeting and other means of content curation - no matter who the perpetrator - weakens sockpuppeting as a tactic. So I think it's also important to publicly challenge social media CEOs to speak publicly about these challenges for this reason.

We do but it's unfortunately not widely covered.

The Snowden document released on the strategic objectives - the high level goals driving all NSA technology - included strategic communication, which we know from DoD investment in the last two presidents has increasingly been focused toward social media (with some programs like SMISC and MINERVA as public research instanciations of the policy).

We know quite a bit about the US attempted partnerships with Twitter (historically Twitter has refused partnership but now is more congenial) from FOIA documents and news sources and that the US uses sockpuppets in many places, including Twitter for its own propaganda purposes worldwide. We know that the Facebook studies on nudging voting behavior and emotions had ties to these programs as well.

We know that threat intelligence systems include patterns to block certain URLs and content that is foreign controlled propaganda - notably of Russian origin and that there are people in the government full time on tracking Salafist ideas online for both blocking when they reach American audiences and engagement of various sorts overseas.

We know that there is a firewall between the State Department and DoD when it comes to the programs (State Department has the overt programs for the most part and the DoD the covert). We know a few things from various leaks about partnerships (HB Gary Federal, etc) with private sector intelligence firms.

We also have reports from the US and journalists about some of the techniques of adversary nations and we have some details especially about GCHQs JTRIG capabilities and some of the areas the NSA and GCHQ have worked in due to Snowden document. We have a couple of other examples - things like ZunZuneo - that some social media platforms are fronts for various countries rather than merely partners.

We also know some things about the law in the United States for messaging: foreign messaging the US has pretty much no limitations. While it will censor American political speech (al-Alwaki's youtube videos, etc) for the most part it can justify minimal amounts of this and focuses on foreign speech and foreign aimed influence.

It is legal in the United States to message Americans under wartime powers, states of emergency (Occupy and Ferguson were both considered states of emergency), and for the purposes of getting domestic support for overseas military operations. The Smith-Mundt Act was recently revised to remove the limitation on the US government to prevent foreign-aimed propaganda from being incidentally consumed by Americans (the internet makes this hard) but it's unfortunate that this happens quite a lot (why they had to make the revision) and that it has, in the past, been purposefully abused.

We also know some things about historical partnerships, but most of that has to do with 'old media' and it's hard to draw real policy and technical implications from programs that existed a generation ago. The things we know about those partnerships today (partnerships with media executives, leaked editing of journalism coverage) that look like the old stuff don't focus on social media so much - the social media programs are a relatively new initiative.

Not quite.

I wanted to get a picture of whether the socketpuppeting that is done on reddit was colored by particular objectives - whether US and partner sockpuppeting is allowed where adversary sockpuppeting is not - and whether censorship of certain types of content was performed on the behest of partnerships.

Basically, an overall clarification about the policies, the technologies and the coded language for reddit's stance on sockpuppeting and content curation.

During his AMA I asked clarifying questions that never got answered about Reddit's policies about federal programs and partnerships regarding the management of political discussion attributed to foreign actors - and whether like other social media sites - foreign political content including propaganda are considered by Reddit to be 'spam' and 'trolling' and therefore subject to Reddit's comment deletion and shadowbanning capabilities.

I unfortunately did not see a reply. It's my understanding that many of these executives of social media websites face the challenge of negotiating what the community wants and the curation requests and preferences of partners - both governmental, 'civil society' and business customers and investors.

To expand on the bit about there being more torture than we know: 80% of the CIA report was censored from public view.

This is a 'networking issue' not yet attributed to an adversarial compromise.

There is also an outage at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal - none so far attributed to an attack.