NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

[FrankL]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

i have never heard of that and doubt anyone is going through the effort of paying for and sniffing all the packets routed through an ISP.

in regards to the content being analyzed i sell the product that ibm developed with the government to analyze it in my "big data" toolkit. it's pretty powerful stuff.

Unfortunately, packets sniffing using DPI is already commonplace among ISPs; they use it for example to (but not confined to) throttling back P2P traffic to prevent congestion;

Leveraging existing systems in place to build profiles for targeted advertisement sold to third parties is only a logical extension of this.

Some of the simplest data analysis your ISP could do, which does not require DPI, would be just to look at their DNS server logs (as most customers use the DNS provided by their ISP). One step above this, using DPI, and you can collect statistics about actual http requests (as DNS replies get cached locally on the client, it does not map 1:1 to the amount of page visits). Yet another step above, and you can do content analysis on all plain-text data send/received.

I'd love to be completely wrong on this, so please tell me where information in my post is incorrect. If you are in the position to tell us a bit more on which content gets analyzed by your 'big data' toolkit, that would also be very interesting.

[Woodsman]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

"Milo, people can't eat cotton!"
"They've got to. It's for the syndicate!"

[lakedaemonian]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

I suppose it could be. But part of me also knows that Catch-22 is required reading in high schools in a lot of states, and if an impressionable kid happens to have the same name as a key character, he might get the idea that he was meant for that role, and seek it out.

Call it "narrative causality," perhaps?

Even if his was an unlikely fit for his background, persistence and drive can go a long way. And being a sysadmin is often seen as the grunt work of computing by the "real" computer scientists who would populate the NSA, so his resume doesn't seem that big a stretch to me.

I'm thinking sysadmin as well.

Now is it the journo sexing it up for readership?

Turning a cubicle drone sysadmin into a "spy".

Very common in mass media to portray all OGA employees as James Bond instead of cubicle cellar dweller.

I'd like to know whether he was really in on the HUMINT recruitment story he mentions from Switzerland or if he only heard it next to the watercooler while replacing the printer toner.

He certainly doesn't possess even a hint of operations pedigree.

Nor does he have the pedigree for analysis.

Specificity of his role and responsibilities will be interesting to learn.

If he was a sysadmin and he signed NDAs as employee and contractor, is he at risk of genuine criminal/civil prosecution?

IF his job was managing the network, what's he doing playing around with the data?

I'm wondering if he was working outside or possibly well outside his remit.

That could have serious consequences from even a position of reasonably strong support for him wouldn't it?

Isn't that a bit like making sure the trains run on time? How does that job involve nosying around with what cargo is going to which customer?

More stuff to follow I'm sure.

To be honest I haven't read anything this compelling in newspapers since Bowden's Black Hawk Down Column series.

[don]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

What Is The Government’s Agenda?

Paul Craig Roberts

It has been public information for a decade that the US government secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally spies on its citizens. Congress and the federal courts have done nothing about this extreme violation of the US Constitution and statutory law, and the insouciant US public seems unperturbed.

In 2004 a whistleblower informed the New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by ignoring the FISA court and spying on Americans without obtaining the necessary warrants. The corrupt New York Times put the interests of the US government ahead of those of the American public and sat on the story for one year until George W. Bush was safely reelected.

By the time the New York Times published the story of the illegal spying one year later, the law-breaking government had had time to mitigate the offense with ex post facto law or executive orders and explain away its law-breaking as being in the country’s interest.

Last year William Binney, who was in charge of NSA’s global digital data gathering program revealed that NSA had everyone in the US under total surveillance. Every email, Internet site visited and phone call is captured and stored. In 2012 Binney received the Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an annual award given to those who champion constitutional rights at risk to their professional and personal lives.

There have been a number of whistleblowers. For example, in 2006 Mark Klein revealed that AT&T had a secret room in its San Francisco office that NSA used to collect Internet and phone-call data from US citizens who were under no suspicion.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ews/klein.html

The presstitute media handled these stories in ways that protected the government’s lawlessness from scrutiny and public outrage. The usual spin was that the public needs to be safe from terrorists, and safety is what the government is providing.

The latest whistle blower, Edward Snowden, has sought refuge in Hong Kong, which has a better record of protecting free speech than the US government. Snowden did not trust any US news source and took the story to the British newspaper, the Guardian.

There is no longer any doubt whatsoever that the US government is lawless, that it regards the US Constitution as a scrap of paper, that it does not believe Americans have any rights other than those that the government tolerates at any point in time, and that the government has no fear of being held accountable by the weak and castrated US Congress, the sycophantic federal courts, a controlled media, and an insouciant public.

Binney and Snowden have described in precisely accurate detail the extreme danger from the government’s surveillance of the population. No one is exempt, not the Director of the CIA, US Army Generals, Senators and Representatives, not even the president himself.

Anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can find interviews with Binney and Snowden and become acquainted with why you do have very much indeed to fear whether or not you are doing anything wrong.

James Clapper, the lying Director of National Intelligence, who would have been perfectly at home in the Hitler or Stalin regimes, condemned Snowden as “reprehensible” for insisting that in a democracy the public should know what the government is doing. Clapper insisted that secretly spying on every ordinary American was essential in order to “protect our nation.” http://news.antiwar.com/2013/06/07/u...llance-scheme/

Clapper is “offended” that Americans now know that the NSA is spying on the ordinary life of every American. Clapper wants Snowden to be severely punished for his “reckless disclosure” that the US government is totally violating the privacy that the US Constitution guarantees to every US citizen.

President Obama, allegedly educated in constitutional law, justified Clapper’s program of spying on every communication of every American citizen as a necessary violation of Americans’ civil liberties that “protects your civil liberties.” Contrast the lack of veracity of the President of the United States with the truthfulness of Snowden, who correctly stated that the NSA spying is an “existential threat to democracy.”

The presstitutes are busy at work defending Clapper and Obama. On June 9, CNN rolled out former CIA case officer Bob Baer to implant into the public’s mind that Snowden, far from trying to preserve US civil liberties, might be a Chinese spy and that Snowden’s revelations might be indicative of a Chinese espionage case.

Demonization is the US government’s technique for discrediting Bradley Manning for complying with the US Military Code and reporting war crimes and for persecuting Julian Assage of Wikileaks for reporting leaked information about the US government’s crimes. Demonization and false charges will be the government’s weapon against Snowden.

If Washington and its presstitutes can convince Americans that courageous people, who are trying to inform Americans that their historic rights are disappearing into a police state, are espionage agents of foreign powers, America can continue to be subverted by its own government.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. What is the purpose of the spying program?

Even if an American believes the official stories of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombing, these are the only two terrorist acts in the US that resulted in the lost of human life in 12 years. Far more people are killed in traffic accidents and from bad diets. Why should the Constitution and civil liberty be deep-sixed because of two alleged terrorist acts in 12 years?

What is astounding is the absence of terrorist attacks. Washington is in the second decade of invading and destroying Muslim governments and countries. Civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are extremely high, and in those countries that Washington has not yet invaded, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, civilians are being murdered by Washington’s drones and proxies on the ground.

It is extraordinary that Washington’s brutal 12 year assault on Muslim lives in six countries has not resulted in at least one dozen real, not fake FBI orchestrated, terrorist attacks in the US every day.

How can something as rare as terrorism justify the destruction of the US Constitution and US civil liberty? How safe is any American when their government regards every citizen as a potential suspect who has no rights?

Why is there no discussion of this in American public life? Watch the presstitutes turn Snowden’s revelations into an account of his disaffection and motives and away from the existential threat to democracy and civil liberty.

What is the government’s real agenda? Clearly, “the war on terror” is a front for an undeclared agenda. In “freedom and democracy” America, citizens have no idea what their government’s motives are in fomenting endless wars and a gestapo police state. The only information Americans have comes from whistleblowers, who Obama ruthlessly prosecutes. The presstitutes quickly discredit the information and demonize the whistleblowers.

Germans in the Third Reich and Soviet citizens in the Stalin era had a better idea of their government’s agendas than do “freedom and democracy” Americans today. The American people are the most uninformed people in modern history.

In America there is no democracy that holds government accountable. There is only a brainwashed people who are chaff in the wind.


http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

[Polish_Silver]

Constitution vs Patriot Act

EJ, this is one of the most important posts you've ever made. Thank you!

...

But when in history has a government ever amassed power that it hasn't used? Never. IMO the men of ill are already at work, testing how far they can go not only without arousing resistance, but with the actual support of the public: Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Patriot Act, NDAA, TSA. The 'Shelter in Place' of Boston recently was just a euphamism for martial law.

Human nature being what it is, there is no way these men will relinquish their power. ....
...

The BATF, FBI, DHS NSA and IRS have already acted against citizens. The police state is already happening.

I ask this in the historical context of the Jews in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. All were perturbed as their rights gradually diminished, but their normalcy bias prevented them from comprehending how bad it would become. The minority who saw the signs, took their money and left the country encountered resistance and disbelief from their friends and families who thought they were unduly alarmist. By the time the police state tightened that noose around those who remained, it was too late to save themselves.

. .. .

Shiny, you are either channeling Naomi Wolf or me.

I had not heard of normalcy bias, but the idea seems to explain a lot of what I heard about the behavior of Jews in Nazi Germany. The "alarmists" caught hell from their spouses, business partners, etc.
But they survived.

Interesting to contemplate the experiments of Solomon Ashe.

[c1ue]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

I will state again that I am hopeful and lean towards Snowden acting with the best of intent with his decisions.

But it is worth repeating that there were considerable numbers of actions committed in the 20th century where the superficial intent most believed also carried/masked less altruistic objectives backed by foreign actors.

Two examples that have come to light with considerable evidence to support them would be the Vietnam War protest movement as well as the Western European anti-nuclear weapons movement. Both quite considerable and altruistic movements on the surface, and both proven to have had considerable investment made by the Soviet Union and others to shape perceptions.

The question is the chicken or the egg. If said movements were created by the Soviet Union and others, as opposed to merely supported because it was convenient, then it is very difficult to say that the movements exist solely due to foreign intervention.

From my view, the draft was the primary motivator behind the anti-war Vietnam movement, and in turn the radical Greens in Europe behind the anti-nuclear.

Equally I might point out the role of US NGOs in the various 'revolutions' in Eastern Europe.

I am hopeful that Snowden is acting somewhat altruistically......BUT:

I wonder why he didn't hopscotch across US/Canada to Iceland, his reported final destination if he's looking at exile?

Or maybe New Zealand, due to the very recent debacle surrounding the US push for Megaupload/Kim Dotcom arrest/prosecution that fell apart which included a GCSB/5 Powers intelligence component, if he was only looking for a temporary harbor.

Although it would be easier to ring-fence onward destinations from NZ if he intended to remain in exile.

Neither Iceland nor New Zealand have any form of leverage against the US should the US push. New Zealand also has been notably compliant with regards to American RIAA type prosecution - see Kim Dotcom. Let's not even get into the military angle.

China, as I've said before, is more than enough of a player with regards to its ongoing trade with the US (and its large Treasury holdings) to at least be willing to consider asylum. Hong Kong equally has at least an opportunity to show that it is independent of mainland China.

Lastly China has a ambivalent view towards Snowden's leak: on the one hand, it is a convenient backslap to Obama and Co: hypocritical to beat up China over cyberspying when the US is doing so ubiquitously. On the other hand, the mainlanders all get this treatment already albeit without nearly as much technology.

Net net: China doesn't have any clear benefit to acting either way. Best case: let it drag on and die out - which is the best Snowden can hope for anyway.

I suppose it could be. But part of me also knows that Catch-22 is required reading in high schools in a lot of states, and if an impressionable kid happens to have the same name as a key character, he might get the idea that he was meant for that role, and seek it out.

That may be, but from what I heard in the interview, his diagnosis with epilepsy probably had a lot more to do with it. While epilepsy isn't like pancreatic cancer, on the other hand it is a very strong slap of mortality to the face.

Thus while he may have been living in Hawaii with a stripper, and had tons of money, at the same time he was suddenly confronted with the prospect of his own mortality and legacy.

[dcarrigg]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

I'm wondering if Snowden's disclosed career and accomplishments isn't quite real either.

Something just doesn't seem right.

His education/work background is a REAL outlier to be making the money and working the jobs he claims or alludes to.

A significant outlier.....even if he had the bonifides of family working within the same community(which I suspect)

I thought the same thing. His mother's a court clerk and his father's a coastie, so no big in there. But this is one weird resume:

2000 - drop out of high school

2002 - get GED

2003 - drop out of community college

2004 - enlist in army

2005 - drop out of army after training accident

2006 - get security guard job at NSA facility at U Maryland

2007 - suddenly a CIA IT expert under diplomatic cover in Geneva

2009 - private contractor job at unnamed NSA Japan facility

2013 - $200k per year job for Booz Allen in Hawaii

[shiny!]

Normalcy Bias

From Wikipedia's page on Normalcy Bias:

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.


Possible causes

The normalcy bias may be caused in part by the way the brain processes new data. Research suggests that even when the brain is calm, it takes 8–10 seconds to process new information. Stress slows the process, and when the brain cannot find an acceptable response to a situation, it fixates on a single and sometimes default solution that may or may not be correct. An evolutionary reason for this response could be that paralysis gives an animal a better chance of surviving an attack; predators are less likely to eat prey that isn't struggling.^[2]

Effects

The normalcy bias often results in unnecessary deaths in disaster situations. The lack of preparation for disasters often leads to inadequate shelter, supplies, and evacuation plans. Even when all these things are in place, individuals with a normalcy bias often refuse to leave their homes. Studies have shown that more than 70% of people check with others before deciding to evacuate.^[2]
The normalcy bias also causes people to drastically underestimate the effects of the disaster. Therefore, they think that everything will be all right, while information from the radio, television, or neighbors gives them reason to believe there is a risk. This creates a cognitive dissonance that they then must work to eliminate. Some manage to eliminate it by refusing to believe new warnings coming in and refusing to evacuate (maintaining the normalcy bias), while others eliminate the dissonance by escaping the danger. The possibility that some may refuse to evacuate causes significant problems in disaster planning.^[3]

Examples

Not limited to, but most notably: The Nazi genocide of millions of Jews. Even after knowing friends and family were being taken against their will, the Jewish community still stayed put, and refused to believe something was "going on." Because of the extreme nature of the situation it is understandable why most would deny it.
Little Sioux Scout camp in June 2008. Despite being in the middle of "Tornado Alley," the campground had no tornado shelter to offer protection from a strong tornado.^[4]
New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. Inadequate government and citizen preparation and the denial that the levees could fail were an example of the normalcy bias, as were the thousands of people who refused to evacuate.^{[citation needed]}
During the September 11 attacks, many in the World Trade Center returned to their offices during the evacuation to turn off their computers and ultimately died when the towers collapsed.

[cobben]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

If the journalists haven't seriously blown it, then has the USofA's military-industrial-espionage complex's integrity become seriously compromised through rampant corruption in the privatization frenzy?

Meet the contractors analyzing your private data

. . .

With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector – a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon– contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA’s high-speed interception software, to CSC, the “systems integrator” that runs NSA’s internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world’s largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.


But it’s probably much more than that.


“The largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32,” says Michael V. Hayden, who oversaw the privatization effort as NSA director from 1999 to 2005. He was referring not to the NSA itself but to the business park about a mile down the road from the giant black edifice that houses NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. There, all of NSA’s major contractors, from Booz to SAIC to Northrop Grumman, carry out their surveillance and intelligence work for the agency.


With many of these contractors now focused on cyber-security, Hayden has even coined a new term — “Digital Blackwater” – for the industry. “I use that for the concept of the private sector in cyber,” he told a recent conference in Washington, in an odd reference to the notorious mercenary army. “I saw this in government and saw it a lot over the last four years. The private sector has really moved forward in terms of providing security,” he said. Hayden himself has cashed out too: He is now a principal with the Chertoff Group, the intelligence advisory company led by Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of Homeland Security.


. . .

Could the Verizon-NSA Metadata Collection Be a Stealth Political Kickback?


If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden With Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA?


. . .

Snowden’s leak is thus doubly damaging. The scandal isn’t just that the government is spying on us. It’s also that it’s giving guys like Snowden keys to the spying program. It suggests the worst combination of overreach and amateurishness, of power leveraged by incompetence. The Keystone Cops are listening to us all.

[astonas]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

I thought the same thing. His mother's a court clerk and his father's a coastie, so no big in there. But this is one weird resume:

2000 - drop out of high school

2002 - get GED

2003 - drop out of community college

2004 - enlist in army

2005 - drop out of army after training accident

2006 - get security guard job at NSA facility at U Maryland

2007 - suddenly a CIA IT expert under diplomatic cover in Geneva

2009 - private contractor job at unnamed NSA Japan facility

2013 - $200k per year job for Booz Allen in Hawaii

I don't think it is all that strange. It doesn't take that much time or training to be a sysadmin, if you've got a mind to do so. A lot of CS programs in college don't even bother teaching it explicitly, since it's not always seen as "real" computer science, and a bit of community college could well be enough to be as qualified as he'd need to be. Sysadmins are needed everywhere, even in places that require diplomatic cover, so that doesn't surprise me, either. Once you've got a security clearance like his (top secret), even relatively mundane jobs can get really good pay, given the time an expense required for an employer to get another person cleared. I know plenty of >$100k sysadmins in the SF Bay Area, so I can easily imagine a ~$200k sysadmin in Hawaii with top secret clearance, especially if the work is contract (with no benefits).

I would imagine that quite a few people who picked up a security clearance in the military have left to find relatively well-paid, if boring, jobs that require clearance as more and more intelligence work is subcontracted out. If the security apparatus is expanding fast, there will be huge demand (and opportunity) for even marginally skilled workers with the right clearance.

And the sysadmin is the only one with root access to all the computers (which might have been what he meant when he said he had "authorization"). That also provides a lot of opportunity to browse through a computer system's contents, if one gets bored.

[astonas]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

I am hopeful that Snowden is acting somewhat altruistically......BUT:

I wonder why he didn't hopscotch across US/Canada to Iceland, his reported final destination if he's looking at exile?

If I had two years to plan this (like he did) I would record the interview, make a deal with the reporter to delay release by a week, leave myself checked in at the hotel for a few extra weeks, and move on to another country before the story breaks.

For all we know, he already IS in Iceland. Or somewhere else.

[astonas]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

If I had two years to plan this (like he did) I would record the interview, make a deal with the reporter to delay release by a week, leave myself checked in at the hotel for a few extra weeks, and move on to another country before the story breaks.

For all we know, he already IS in Iceland. Or somewhere else.

NY Times apparently already posted a similar timeline:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us...tory.html?_r=0

[jk]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

iirc, bill gates, steve jobs and larry ellison were all college drop outs. their resumes are even weirder. not that this guy is in their class, but stranger things have hpapened. in i.t., in particular, there are a group of self-educated college or h.s. drop-outs who manage to get very good jobs because they're good at what they do.

[astonas]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

Wow. The petition to pardon Snowden is really taking off:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions

The EFF also has a "stop surveillance" letter that can be sent on one's behalf to one's representatives with just a few clicks here:

https://www.eff.org/

[Woodsman]

Re: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

IMHO, it's the clearance and the COLA in Hawaii that accounts for the salary. Bet it was a cost-plus contract, too.

I don't know and it's largely impossible to find out for sure, but this dude does not add up. The Snowden/Catch-22 thing is just too much of a coincidence. In fact, all of these back-to-back revelations and scandals seem a bit too pat for me.