omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

Snowden's online past looks super fucking mild

Totally. Plus that cartoon has the worst drawn t-shirt I've ever seen - thought he was holding a billboard at first.

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.

Relevant book on the early history of this type of wiretapping

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/BMBcover.jpg

Sadly paw at my man totem is kinda lolzy

the hazing/vilifying of snowden by the media is kind of shocking to me. shocking and hateful. it's like a host of putatively reasonable just become schoolyard bullies at the first opportunity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/us/nsa-chief-says-phone-record-logs-halted-terror-threats.html?hp&_r=1&

In a robust defense of the phone program, General Alexander said that it had been critical in helping to prevent “dozens of terrorist attacks” both in the United States and abroad and that the intelligence community was considering declassifying examples to better explain the program. He did not clarify whether the records used in such investigations would have been available through individual subpoenas without the database. He also later walked back the assertion slightly, saying the phone log database was used in conjunction with other programs.

Yeah, I think if I was in power, my next move would be to make a programme on TV taking a hypothetical risk and go through step by step to demonstrate how the information is used, leading to the neutralisation of the hypothetical risk. Maybe even have Obama present it, lead you through it. It would be fairly easy to present an innocuous and effective process (no matter what the realities), and most people, when faced with the abstraction of all this data, will probably not be all that alarmed by it. Obviously this would just be propaganda, but it's what I would do if I believed in such a structure. The downside would perhaps be the revelation of techniques that have previously been secret, but that might be something the State will have to accept.

At this point they are probably already working on a new similar and secret project. Spies will be spies.

He said the surveillance programs were critical to unraveling terrorist plots at home and abroad. In particular, he cited the cases of Najibullah Zazi

That's from today's Washington Post quoting the head of NSA yesterday. But days before this testimony various sites have asserted that these programs were NOT what was key in Zazi. Alas, the senators did not do follow-up questions and the Post reporter didn't even use google

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/06/07/mike-rogers-as-confused-about-telecom-surveillance-as-he-is-about-drone-strikes/

more references to the debunking of n.s.a.'s Zazi story

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/06/11/18902828-did-the-nsa-stop-najibullah-zazi

The Associated Press' Adam Goldman explained that the NSA program was very likely irrelevant -- British intelligence had already identified an al Qaeda email address, and shared that information with U.S. officials. Zazi did, in fact, send an urgent message to that address, which ultimately led to his arrest before he could successfully murder a lot of people.

So, what does this have to do with NSA surveillance, metadata, and PRISM? Given what we know, nothing.

But maybe, the argument goes, British intelligence learned of the al Qaeda email address in the first place thanks NSA programs. Right? No, as it turns out, the address was found on a laptop when a different terrorist was captured in 2009.

is Kathryn Bigelow at work on the NSA spin yet?

one time (and now again?) far-right blogger goes there:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42124_Images-_Edward_Snowden_Modeling_Shoot_Found

Rick Perlstein suggests Greenwald made a mistake.

man i hate that fawkes mask but that photo is a sight

For all you potential whistleblowers here on ilx: this is what will happen if you come forward.

We are currently seeking a person of interest named Excelsior from the secret online collective known as 77 borad

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/946661_496948723709933_306826955_n.jpg

Jack Shafer:

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” Cheney said. Later, Bush’s national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward “a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing” to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” were, Isikoff wrote, “the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”

holy shit the nsa knows our phone numbers now?

yeah the white house leaking intel to political or policy advantage is as old as the hills, clinton managed to raise the game to an absurdly trivial level leaking things that would normally be rightly ignored - where they intended to take their summer vacation for example - and turning them into 'exclusives' (hilariously they would often poll this kind of data beforehand, in a weird way for the time it was a pretty sophisticated operation). occasionally there will be grumbling about investigating the leaks by the out of power party and occasionally the leak will be genuinely obv serious enough to provoke outrage and an actual investigation (hello again scooter libby) but by and large it's treated as another example of the kind of bullshit that works in politics. it's also obv an example of to what absurd degree overclassification has taken place, that the entire case for a war is made via leaks or that the existence of a massive program everybody (including the ppl it targeted) effectively knew existed can only be confirmed after many years via leak. and it's very effectiveness points to why the need for greater transparency, that it is such an effective tool w/ the press but that so much of what is classified can be de facto declassified and leaked to press not on the basis of national security but political expediency distorts and corrupts public debate. at the same time to not acknowledge that there is a gulf of differences between the white house leaking something and some independant contractor is to not get the difference between averill harriman and anna chennault.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/encrypted-e-mail-how-much-annoyance-will-you-tolerate-to-keep-the-nsa-away/

otm

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/snowden-and-greenwald-beginning-to-self-destruct-the-nation-and-mother-jones-raise-questions/

that kinda smacks of counter-narrative work, right down to the headline, though the small Kevin Drum piece it links seems good and avoids the pitfalls of narrative-building/unbuidling

I also think more attention should be given to the misleading testimony of the head of the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence, and their histories

some of the counter-narrative stuff strikes as akin to "if the glove don't fit, you must acquit" -- meaning if snowden and greenwald's claims aren't completely accurate, there's no longer any show. which seems far from the case.

Should note that The Daily Banter, which I've never heard of, has been at this stuff all.week.

I haven't heard of it either; just stumbled across it.

false flag

false blog

I'm just glad Beetbort didn't live to see any of this.

I'm just glad Beetbort didn't live to see any of this.

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters this week that Obama “certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he’s given.”

maybe his heart and his best intentions tell him that's true, but the evidence, oh shit

straight and direct has nothing to do with the truth, of course

Prism will help maintain order and vanquish pesky anti-Waterworld activists

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism

"Climate Change Energy Shocks NSA Prism"

cool. gov't analysts and scenario planners foresee potential disaster. government's response is not to actually do anything to prevent disaster, but to let it roll on and control us instead. great.

reminds me of that gov't memo that said we could all adapt and live in underground caves in case of climate change.

Strangelove 2019

with shit like this I honestly wonder if we're nearing the end of the current order of things. wtf is going on.

in fairness, Spectrum, they know it's too late to prevent it.

xxpost giant bell jar or gtfo.

that whole article is so poorly argued

like the crux is linking this:

"Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance"

to random quotes from random reports

like its that dude's job to churn out blog posts about the environment so it's easy to see why he'd be tempted to try to link it to the subject du jour that is a nonsense article

but that*

but the pieces, they all fit. i hope the impression i'm getting from this is wrong.

some of us don't give a shit about brilliantly argued articles, this ain't moot court

yes, the pieces being quotes from a bunch of different studies done by places that do thousands of nonsense studies

xp

do you guys think obama subscribes to the DoD's "Quadrennial Defense Review"