Surveillance in the 21st Century: Press CTRL-C to Copy the Internet (NSA Thread)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Surveillance in the 21st Century: Press CTRL-C to Copy the Internet (NSA Thread)

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Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Tezzor posted:

The most interesting thing about the kind of thinking that game theory induces is that it allows you, the aggressor, to believe that you're acting in self-defense. Look at the most recent crop of apologists. We have to spy on allied nations, because if not they would spy on us. There's not a shred of available evidence anywhere that any nation aside from Russia or China has even thought about any collection system of this magnitude directed against us, and we've certainly never been the victim of it, but we're just defending ourselves against their sinister plans which we have imagined into existence. Maybe this logic was somewhat defensible when what was riding on the line was the collapse of human civilization and the death of billions, but now? What happens now if we act sub-optimally? Some dirty foreigners might get a bit of an unfair advantage in some business deals and diplomatic arrangements until such time as we find them out. Not really the same game.

None of the other nations could have done this even if they wanted to. America is in a very privileged position with regards to the amount of Internet traffic that goes through our computers and the number of internationally popular websites hosted within our jurisdiction.

At the end of the day it is naked imperialism. "Economic interests" and "political interests" are just another way of asserting that our status as a superpower is an end in itself, one that justifies any means whatsoever. And as with all imperialism, we're now we're seeing the first signs of blowback.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Oct 29, 2013

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 20:00

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 12:20

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...a4dd_story.html

quote:

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA�s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency�s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records � ranging from �metadata,� which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA�s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency�s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies.

White House officials and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, declined to confirm, deny or explain why the agency infiltrates Google and Yahoo networks overseas.

In a statement, Google said it was �troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity.�

�We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we continue to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links,� the company said.

At Yahoo, a spokeswoman said: �We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.�

Essentially, MUSCULAR appears to be the backdoor counterpart to PRISM, done without the companies' consent (well, explicit consent).

I feel very comfortable saying the NSA has no business engaging in full-take tapping domestic cables, especially not data links between the servers of massive, private companies.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 17:49

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

SSL is dead, I give these revelations three unironic "Thanks Obama"s

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 18:08

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

I hope this forces the tech companies to take a more adversarial stance.

Shut up I can dream

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 20:39

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

I can parse this!

quote:

Alexander added that the agency is "not authorized" to access the tech companies' data centers without going through a "court process," according to Politico. The Guardian reported earlier this year that the NSA's PRISM program allows the agency direct access to the servers of certain tech companies, including Google and Yahoo, that were required under U.S. law to comply with requests for users' communications.

Remember this is a program focused on tapping cloud storage in concert with GCHQ. Presumably GCHQ handles traffic from American data centers as a courtesy while the NSA taps the rest. No court process required.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 23:02

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

You missed the money quote:

quote:

"Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism..."

# ¿ Nov 2, 2013 15:41

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Levison/Zimmerman are kickstarting their new encryption protocol for emails.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mail-initiative

I'm genuinely curious if this stays up. I'm sure the Kickstarter folks will at least get a threatening letter.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 20:59

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

http://pando.com/2013/11/27/keeping-secrets/

Mark Ames is mad at... something. :shrug:

# ¿ Nov 29, 2013 00:10

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Ames comes off as a left-wing Glenn Beck. He has a Manichean view of journalism and any series of connections, no matter how tenuous or borne of convenience, can be used to mark someone as a Sellout.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2013 02:30

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Kid Gloves posted:

Don't know if anyone still cares about this but Pando responded to Greenwald yesterday.

quote:

As for the �grassroots� anti-TSA movement which Tyner helped promote � well, you can read [link to story about TSA shooting] to see how that turned out.

Holy poo poo these people are loving basket cases

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 22:01

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

Someone pointed out on NPR that that we got the report at all is kinda a surprise: based on the administration's posture when the commission was formed, he was expecting the report to have been classified or redacted.

I'm surprised it wasn't a puff piece, frankly, from the composition of the group and what we knew of its conditions I was expecting a whitewash.

Being a cynic this leads me to believe that they're cutting their losses before anyone hauls anything out from deeper inside the rabbit hole.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2013 16:08

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Forums Terrorist posted:

I hope you're all ready for a good loving courtesy of Scalia

Kyllo and Hamdi give me a tiny, tiny glimmer of hope when it comes to Scalia's opinion.

Thomas will, of course, sleep through the arguments and then write a short "s'all good man" concurrence.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2013 23:06

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

*Snowden gives first public statements in literally months after living in Russian squalor* OH MY GOD WHAT A DIVA

I have no idea who Ruth Marcus is. Was WaPo required to bring on a new, even hackier NSA hack after Richard Cohen folded?

Elotana fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jan 1, 2014

# ¿ Jan 1, 2014 21:53

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Tezzor posted:

Which events? When? Why can't you get into them? Which questions does it raise? From whom? Why? Can we see any independent confirmation whatsoever that you're not lying? Why is a news organization allowing this completely baseless innuendo and slander by an (allegedly) former professional liar skate by without any criticism whatsoever?

When the Russian agent talking point got revived again this week not a single member of the news media even thought to point out the very basic fact that he is only in Russia and not South America because his passport was revoked in the middle of a transit zone. They're goldfish.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 21:43

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

SedanChair posted:

Yeah splendid, they're knights in shining armor. Except they will bring all the substance of BENGHAZI SOLYNDRA to a real issue.

I wouldn't mind that, actually. The issue with the Republicans' BENGHAZI SOLYNDRA IRS arglebargle is they've been desperately trying to squeeze blood from stones. Those non-scandals, for the most part, don't have anything in the way of actual smoking guns and were one-off gently caress-ups and not systemic indictments of the way we conduct policy. But there is plenty of meat on the NSA bone, the Republicans have just been too internally conflicted to go there. I'm only a civil libertarian at best anymore but I'm with Arkane, this is encouraging if only because it has the potential to channel their partisan energy into something halfway productive.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jan 25, 2014

# ¿ Jan 25, 2014 02:05

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

DeusExMachinima posted:

The D&D tears and denial over the fact that we wouldn't know about this program if it wasn't for a guy who voted for a "third party" and donated to Ron Paul in 2008 (draw you own conclusions) are delicious.

I haven't noticed a whole lot of D&D tears and denial, at least not since the first few weeks of leaks. There's been some tears in the liberal blogosphere like Mark Ames' eternal grudge against Greenwald and that dumbass Sean Willentz article but for the most part they haven't been taken seriously.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2014 03:52

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

There's an FOIA now showing details from the DEA's end on how they handle "parallel construction" tips.

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/dea-policies-on-parallel-construction-6434/

Gist of it is they absolutely never reveal the source of the information in open court. They will drop the evidence and rewrite the indictments before they consent to anything more than an in camera review, and only that as a last resort; case managers are encouraged to shape evidence chains so neither field-level agents nor the prosecution are even aware of the ultimate source of the tip so as to avoid those pesky Brady obligations. (Paging Kalman.) There is also something called a Taint Review Team (huaehuaehuae) which acts as a backstop in case these processes fail.

Bonus points for including the world's most obvious redaction:

Having skimmed the case, let me reverse engineer the redacted part for you: "All of the caveats we listed above, however, don't matter if you can catch the perp in the act. Then you don't have to reveal poo poo. Therefore, when handling parallel construction cases, timing your bust is everything." The sheer number of B7E redactions on the traffic stop slide decks tends to confirm the anonymous testimony in the original Reuters story about how parallel construction actually works in practice the vast majority of the time. A local K9 unit gets told "search this car at this time" and nothing else, and no one involved with the case will ever be the wiser unless someone fucks up.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Feb 4, 2014

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 16:27

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Tezzor posted:

You know the fact that a federal law enforcement agency is using a terrorism program to engage in a massive conspiracy to commit systemic perjury really isn't getting enough traction in the media, I've never heard it mentioned on television, it's all talk about metadata.

It's actually not systemic perjury, the slides are very explicit about the fact that you do not let it get to the point where someone is testifying as to the source of the tips. Like I said, it's all about managing the chain of evidence so that it stays just beyond the reach of the defendant, which usually means keeping it in the upper reaches of LE (who don't normally testify) and out of the field agents (who do testify) and the prosecution (subject to Brady).

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 18:27

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Yes, exactly. Under the current rules of evidence plus the Scher precedent, if the cop pulls someone over and they're caught red-handed, the prosecution will object to any inquiry as to the source of the tip as irrelevant and it will be sustained and that will be the end of it. On the off chance something goes wrong, this is all happening in limine, which gives the Taint Review Team time to come in and initiate a CIPA hearing to limit the damage and try their damndest to keep it out of open court.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Feb 4, 2014

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 21:43

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Sure, but those kinds of low-level reasonable suspicion / probable cause lies go on all the time. A K9 unit itself is pretty much a legal fiction. The point is they're not lying about the tips; parallel construction is about putting them in a position where it's unnecessary to testify about them in the first place.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 02:05

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Tezzor posted:

Greenwald and Scahill with a new story:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/

The site just launched and has been up and down, but the general gist of it is that a new source has come forward from the NSA to detail that the way drone assassination targets are selected is by their phone SIM cards, often with no confirmation or human intelligence whatsoever. We're not targeting people but SIM cards which can and are in the possession of others or even swapped around. Also, US drones are flying over Yemen and acting as false cell towers and essentially wardriving on the scale of cities.

Stringer Bell was changing SIM cards in goddamn Season 3 of The Wire. This is stupid as all hell.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2014 04:31

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Aurubin posted:

The part of this I've found most fascinating to watch is the journalistic factioning, and in news related to that Matt Taibbi is joining Omidyar's First Look as an editor. I imagine Mark Ames is connecting all the dots at this point.

That's some top-notch trolling by Omidyar. Taibbi wrote all the good political bomb-throwing at eXile anyway, Ames was in charge of their "so-edgy-such-pederasty-very-cocaine" division.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Feb 20, 2014

# ¿ Feb 20, 2014 15:25

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Kalman posted:

The Intercept's summary is godawfully bad.

Andersnordic posted:

Did the Intercept go back and edit that section into the opinion?

Kalman posted:

Saying something is legally solid does not mean I approve. Both antidiscrimination law and standing law are terrible. But they are what exists, not what I might wish exists.

Please tell me why that section you quoted is wrong under existing case law.

I think he's asking, specifically, why the Intercept's summary is godawfully bad.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2014 23:26

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Main Paineframe posted:

The documents in your article describe GCHQ doing those things, not the NSA.

Do you think the NSA isn't doing this? It's been well-established that the Five Eyes work closely on these matters to sidestep their respective restrictions on domestic activities. GCHQ taps Americans, NSA taps Canadians, etc. Every slide in the article is marked REL TO US, FVEY, and the NBC news articles linked make clear the context was a strategy presentation given to the other agencies, which wouldn't make much sense if they didn't have or want to have similar programs in place.

And even assuming "the documents only describe GCHQ doing these things" is equivalent to "the NSA is not doing these things" it's the Internet, both countries have plentiful English-speaking operatives who can switch their Zs and Ss as required. Not sure what your point would be.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Feb 25, 2014

# ¿ Feb 25, 2014 18:26

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Kalman posted:

You should actually read the Sunstein article, rather than taking for granted that the summary accurately captures what it discussed. We've discussed it here before, for that matter.

quote:

Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House�s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-�independent� advocates to �cognitively infiltrate� online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups.

Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into �chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups� which spread what he views as false and damaging �conspiracy theories� about the government.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

quote:

[under section entitled "Cognitive Infiltration"]

Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.
...
In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities.

Is this your new thing now? Because that summary seems completely fair.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Feb 25, 2014

# ¿ Feb 25, 2014 18:37

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Kalman posted:

Sunstein also notes that that tactic would produce distrust and backfire. Or did you miss the "if the tactic becomes known, the conspiracy theory may become further entrenched, and any genuine member of the relevant groups who raises doubts may be suspected of government connections. And as we have emphasized throughout, in an open society it is difficult to conceal government conspiracies, even the sort of conspiratorial tactic we have suggested, whose aim is to undermine false and harmful conspiracy theorizing." paragraph?

It's an academic paper identifying approaches and citing the "do it anonymously" section as if it was a prescription without noting that it identifies it as having significant downsides and that it's presented as the alternative to doing it openly is dishonest.

Or perhaps because the other, more open approach isn't relevant to the GCHQ slide deck? You're holding the Intercept to a ridiculous standard by saying that because a two-sentence reference to a similar proposal in Sunstein's paper doesn't also make mention of all of his possible disadvantages it is therefore inaccurate. It doesn't discuss the advantages either, because it's not an in-depth analysis, it's a simple statement of fact as to what the article contained, and the verbiage says "Sunstein proposed" not "Sunstein encouraged" or "Sunstein full-throatedly advocated." It's a completely accurate summary of the facts of Sunstein's proposal as they are relevant to the subject of the article.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2014 20:04

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Main Paineframe posted:

Did you know, that despite what the media would have you believe, white people can be terrorists too? Yes, they can be "actual terrorists", even if they're not Muslim! Domestic terrorists - American citizens born and raised in the good old US of A - are far more of a threat than Al-Qaeda. That's why every time somebody makes a joke or sarcastic remark about harming the president on Facebook or internet forums or anything else public, Secret Service agents show up at their house and interview them. The anti-terrorist agencies want to keep an eye on potential American terrorists just as much as they want to keep an eye on potential foreign terrorists, since all the Afghani surveillance in the world isn't going to stop the next Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, John Allen Muhammad, Eric Rudolph, or Tim McVeigh.

Two of the five people on your list are spree killers, not terrorists. I don't see how any of these programs would've had the slightest potential for stopping them.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 00:59

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Gathering the data is difficult, cumbersome, and requires herculean effort and cooperation (or at least exploitable security holes) from numerous private companies. That difficulty makes it the best chokepoint for effective legal controls. Once the data is gathered in one place behind the black box of national security, I don't see how you can put effective safeguards on querying and access. You could pass a law that says they need the FISC to approve a query, but without some practical layer of separation between the analysts and the database, those corners are going to get cut, and cut often. The temptation is too large.

We already know the NSA's access control is awful, and Snowden has stated that the only way the NSA can discover these abuses is through self-reporting; given what he was able to take and how insistently the government is pushing the "we still don't know what he has" talking point, I don't see any reason to disbelieve him on that point. (This was further illustrated by the LOVEINT examples.) The environment at the time Snowden was employed obviated the need for any sort of documented blackmail program.

What needs to die is the judicial fiction that "collection" does not occur until the database is queried.

Elotana fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Feb 28, 2014

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 07:00

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Kalman posted:

Gathering the first piece of data is difficult, cumbersome, and requires Herculean effort.

Gathering the next piece of data is trivial.

What does this even mean and why aren't you addressing the rest of my post

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 07:10

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Tezzor posted:

But ending that means that paychecks stop getting funneled into the pockets of Kalman and his masters and that's really unrealistic and naive

I'd like to sincerely thank Kalman for having to courage to admit that he is a complicit low-level functionary in all of this, it makes things make quite a bit more sense. One can't help but wonder who else has similar motivations.

I'm pretty sure Kalman is referring to being a legal intern for a Congressional office. Maybe I'm wrong and he's Rajesh De's goon sockpuppet account, but either way, please don't turn this into "poster X is a disinfo agent." If there are any disinfo agents on SA, they're probably not spamming this thread. And humoring you that there are, do you think they're going to admit it, or get scared and stop posting? No, they're going to say "I'm a humble [background story] you crazy person" and then you'll get probated.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 07:29

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

This seems like a good time to remind the thread that, per the NSA's own general counsel, any American data "incidentally" collected as part of a Section 702 or EO 12333 program such as MYSTIC (and also including XKEYSCORE, MUSCULAR, etc.) can be searched by an analyst using US person identifiers and disseminated to other agencies without any sort of court permission or even a Reasonable Articulable Suspicion standard (which is the standard for the phone metadata and PRISM programs under Section 215).

# ¿ Mar 18, 2014 18:36

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Also Ames really loving hates libertarians, and Greenwald wrote a paper for CATO once (a pretty good one on Portugese drug policy) so therefore he is tainted as a Kochsucker forever despite also writing for a shitload of liberal publications and being an obvious left-libertarian. Making common cause is for sellouts, kids.

This is especially funny because exclusionary right-libertarians aren't much fond of him either.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2014 02:07

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Marcy Wheeler suggested that the NYT story might be a limited hangout to both preempt Der Spiegel and give more ammo to Snowden's detractors, as the story freely switches between quoting the SHOTGIANT slide deck and quoting background officials about PLA hacking, a distinction which approximately zero of the people eager to label him a traitor will make.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2014 08:43

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

I honestly don't care much about the phone metadata dragnet at this point, I'm far more interested in teasing out exactly to what extent and at what points the American internet data hoovered under 702/12333 programs like XKEYSCORE and MUSCULAR can be backdoor queried, and by what agencies. Given the reluctance of NSA flacks to even give a consistent, clear definition of "search" in this context, I'm fairly convinced that the primary purpose of these programs has shifted to acting as a giant feeding trough for parallel construction involving an alphabet soup of law enforcement. To that end, complete backdoor content access under 702/12333 is a lot more concerning than 215 phone metadata. The latter is at least theoretically limited to terrorism, while the NSA has already admitted that their standard for disseminating information collected on Americans under the former is simply "evidence of a crime."

Elotana fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Mar 25, 2014

# ¿ Mar 25, 2014 04:45

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

guidoanselmi posted:

Is there a reason there needs to be a bill to end NSA wiretapping? Can't Obama order an end within the executive?

Aurubin's link points this out, but the bill is very much a fake fix that constitutes an overall expansion of the NSA's powers by requiring automated queries and codifying the NSA's preferred RAS standard rather than PC or "relevance to terrorism" standards currently used by 215. The fact that it's being written by Dutch Ruppersberger should be a big clue as to its actual aims, he's Mike Rogers' Democratic counterpart (or if you like, Feinstein's House counterpart).

Elotana fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Mar 25, 2014

# ¿ Mar 25, 2014 17:27

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Snowden, as a mid-level private contractor working in an IT capacity, had access to an entire universe of NSA documents which apparently were not at all compartmentalized. Additionally, he was able to delete his own access logs behind him. And shortly after these leaks, the NSA apparently decided it needed to reduce its sysadmin rights by a factor of 10.

Snowden was not the first person to walk out with these documents, just the first to publicize them. Nothing he is revealing is news to either the Russians or the Chinese.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 02:48

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

internaut posted:

�There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,� Clapper wrote in the letter, which has been obtained by the Guardian.

That is some artful comma placement. (In case you're not catching it, the purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US yada yada yada. We already know that. But the queries? Well, those can be for whatever the gently caress we want.)

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 03:35

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

I've been pretty understanding of Snowden since he clearly did not intend to end up in Russia, but this is not defensible. It's not like he was calling into C-SPAN, this was a tightly controlled propaganda session. Snowden had to know Putin was just going to smoothly deny anything, and it's not like he would have any opportunity to ask a follow-up question or access to some trove of FSB documents to contradict him. This was either coerced or stupid.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 04:25

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

shrike82 posted:

At the outset of the entire affair, I recall Snowden supporters bristling at the notion that he was making a dumb move running into the arms of Putin.
Guess what, he's a propaganda prop tool now.

He did not "run into the arms of Putin." He was attempting to get to Latin America and got stuck in Russia because his passport was revoked and the West closed ranks and showed they were willing to force down heads of state over suspicion he was on board, so a Havana Aeroflot was out. There are no direct flights from HKG to Latin America; SVO was by far the best choice for a connection in terms of not immediately turning him over to the US (AUS/NZ) or getting exfiltrated (insert small African/Asian country here). You can say leaving Hong Kong in the first place was a dumb move, but that's hindsight.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2014 06:08

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 12:20

Elotana: Dec 12, 2003; and i'm putting it all on the goddamn expense account

Jacobin posted:

You assert 'he had to know he was going to deny anything' (without any actual import to why that matters) and then go on a bunch of irrelevant stuff. You then apply the classic false dichotomy that it was either coerced or stupid. What this actually boils down to you is that you speculate it may be coerced but have no evident but personally think its stupid.

Anyways, do I think its stupid? Im not entirely formed of a view yet.

Snowden is.

quote:

NSA leaker Edward Snowden instantly regretted asking Russian President Vladimir Putin a softball question on live television about the Kremlin�s mass surveillance effort, two sources close to the leaker tell The Daily Beast.

�It certainly didn�t go as he would�ve hoped,� one of these sources said. �I don�t think there�s any shame in saying that he made an error in judgment.�

...

�It was the strongest possible question that could possibly get through [Putin�s propagandists],� one source close to Snowden said. Which is to say: not very strong at all.

Snowden may have thought he could catch Putin in a lie; Russia, in fact, has one of the world�s most pervasive systems for state surveillance. Snowden may have crafted the question to mirror Sen. Ron Wyden�s questioning under oath of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as Snowden later claimed in his Guardian op-ed. (Clapper wound up spouting, as he later put it, the �least untruthful� statement he could about the NSA�s domestic spying.) But that assumes Putin � or Russia � cares about such untruths in the same way America or its leaders do. �Trapping Putin in a lie is not the same as trapping Obama or Clapper,� one of Snowden�s advisers sighed.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2014 20:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Surveillance in the 21st Century: Press CTRL-C to Copy the Internet (NSA Thread)

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