RT @kurtopsahl Picture of Edward Snowden with @EFF sticker on his laptop. pic.twitter.com/ldR8kHt4TS
— John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) June 9, 2013
Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Much pouncing is being done now on Twitter as various Snowden-watchers decide that he has contradicted himself and they can make much of this.
I'm as critical of Snowden as the next person -- indeed, likely more critical, because I see him not just as a fugitive and a felon and a traitor; I think he represents a virulent strain of a class of hackers really destructive to liberal democracy and antithetical to human rights who have shockingly come to power without much resistance.
And I think his entire story about "zero" chance that his files -- or any intelligence -- were taken by the Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies simply isn't credible. Obviously you don't ask a thief whether a crime was committed, nor do you take a thief's assessment for how much damage was done.
It reminds me of what Philip Shishkin said about Mao: "if you commit mass murder, your thoughts on education become irrelevant."
The entire laptop fandango -- complete with their provocative stickers from Electronic Frontier Foundation and Tor Project and the tap-dancing that EFF did around this in June and again in October -- strikes me as disingenuous and duplicitious.
I was reminded of all this anew when dealing with a scammer in in Second Life yesterday who put invisiprims around my rental boxes so that either unwitting customers or his friends would pay into that prim and not me. When I caught him, he said the usual angry denunciations that these types always do -- it was all my fault, who dare I, etc. etc. Then when I pointed out the prim, he began strenuously objecting. Why, all I knew was that one prim owned by him was on the parcel, I didn't know what it did. When I showed the screenshot, then he kept bluffing, but that object doesn't even have a script - as if you need a script to pay into a prim set to "buy," duh. And so on -- obfuscation, denial, distraction, counter-charges --- the works. I am SOOOO familiar with this geeky gambit not only from SL, but from every other platform I've been involved with from Twitter to Scoop.it. Literalisms. Defensive dodges. Irrelevancies.
So I'm quite sure that what we're getting from Snowden -- who has very compelling manufactured his own virtual world and lives in it -- is just this kind of dodgy, literalist, geeky prevarication.
Yes, literally, those files may not have been on the laptops -- I have always said they could be decoys (based on my own experience greeting several defectors from the Soviet Union at the airport) or three-card monte sorts of devices to juggle comms, some of them the "innocent" layers of the "rubber hose" or Tor program or who-knows-what.
The laptops likely contain the path to the files, but not the files themselves. We are told by Greenwald at least in one interview (in another, it's not so clear) that he speaks to Snowden "every day". So that means from Russia, Snowden is communicating -- and I'm betting he isn't in an Internet cafe. And we're supposed to believe that no intelligence agency anywhere hasn't gotten in the middle of such regular chats?!
But there are other options:
o He may have memorized certain files or blue prints.
o He may have palmed them off on Sarah Harrison so that he can genuinely claim he doesn't have them.
o He may have actually handed them to the Russians in Hong Kong in their consulate when he spent two days there, or they may have gotten them then. Notice he never talks about that or explains where his laptops were during those crucial hours. If in his hotel room, they were vulnerable to the Chinese. If with him, they were vulnerable to the Russians, especially if they gave him one of those drugs where you are in a twilight state and don't remember what happened to you.
o Maybe the Russians didn't literally copy the files -- so they all could keep that alibi going! -- but just swapped out the laptop and gave him an identical empty one -- complete with an EFF sticker, har har!
o He may have sent them all to some vault somewhere, maybe with WikiLeaks help.
o He may have given all of them to journalists who kept one "clean" set of files in an archive they all could touch, but read-only, and the rest in the possession of journalists encrypted that he couldn't touch.
Any and all of these variants are possible. It's both possible to take Snowden literally -- and realize then that he's not telling you everything behind the literalism -- or take him literally and realize simply he's lying.
Streetwise Professor was struck by the contradiction in James Risen's piece that makes it seem as if on the one hand, Snowden claimed to vet all documents but on the other hand, claimed to leave it to the judgement of journalists because he thought that would be more impartial or something. This is based on a Q&A with Edward largely involving the Guardian's own journalists, and a situation where once again, we don't know if we have "the True HOOHAH" -- as Snowden grandly called his online persona -- or an FSB agent at the other end of the line (or Sarah or who-knows-what).
Streetwise quotes this telling paragraph, where Snowden grandiosely tells us how he is better than Manning:
I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.
But you have to go to the next paragraph in the very same Guardian piece to see how he squares this circle with his other claim to have given journalists discretion:
He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.
So that's entirely in keeping with what he says to Risen:
Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated. He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to them because he wanted his own bias “divorced from the decision-making of publication,” and that “technical solutions were in place to ensure the work of the journalists couldn’t be interfered with
I really don't see a successful "gotcha" here although I'm happy to see more evidence. Streetwise tweeted that I merely suffer from "Not Invented Here" syndrome, i.e. I'm picking the notion apart because I didn't think of it. But I didn't discover the Hawaiian hacker convergence, either, but once it was presented, I could find it plausible and even dig up my own set of facts that added to the hypothesis.
Another contradiction we're seeing now discussed on Twitter now was discovered by Jeremy Duns. And this has to due with Duns' theory, which others have found compelling, that in fact Greenwald claimed Snowden had "the NSA blueprint" with him (read here), and that seemingly flies in the face of his statement elsewhere backing up of Snowden's insistence that he has no files, and therefore Russian intelligence has "zero" from him.
I think here, too, there isn't much of a contradiction. Greenwald was obviously talking in a general kind of way about what Snowden "had" -- which doesn't mean literally with him in his possession as it has likely been spirited away.
There's also the question of the "dead man's switch" and how that works -- which Greenwald won't divulge details about.
I have to say that the fact that Greenwald not only invokes the dead man's switch, but knows its mechanism and won't tell you adds to the strikes against his claims to be an ethical journalist. Instead, he's a political blackmailer.
We saw this when he threatened to report more leaks about the UK after his husband David Miranda was arrested at the airport with files. He then did make good on those threats later and report even more on the GCH!, but not before first claiming that Reuters got the "threat" story all wrong, and didn't understand the Portugese, and blah blah blah. Sorry, but when you say "you'll be sorry" in any language - or anything of the sort -- that's a threat; this was a threat. He keeps insisting on special dispensations and readings of context -- he wants to have his cake and eat it, too.
And it's in keeping with the entire tenor of Greenwald on this story. Take a look at what he said to Ken Auleta in the puff piece in the New Yorker about the Guardian:
The Guardian did seek comment from government officials about the revelations. But Greenwald, outraged by the content of the material, pushed to publish quickly. “I was getting really frustrated,” he told me. “I was putting a lot of pressure on them and insinuating that I was going to go publish elsewhere.” He helped produce five stories that ran on five consecutive days in June. “I wanted people in Washington to have fear in their hearts over how this journalism was going to be done, over the unpredictability of it,” he said. “Of the fact that we were going to be completely unrestrained by the unwritten rules of American journalism. The only reason we stopped after five days was that even our allies were saying, ‘Look, this is too much information. We can’t keep up with what you’re publishing.’ ”
Really, Glenn? Fear in their hearts? That's journalism? And not revenge?
Now Greenwald is using the term "adversarial journalism" -- notably in his recent interview with Anderson Cooper. But is journalism like democracy -- when you have to put an adjective in front of it, it already isn't what it is?
There's another contradiction I'm finding her. Snowden was a systems analyst, and an infrastructure analyst. So I presume that this job description means dealing with assessment of the system from the top down (which is regrettably gave him so much access) and doing pen testing (which gave him the plausible deniability that he wasn't hacking but testing). But that's checking the system for vulnerability to hostile attacks. I don't know that this was his job description, and maybe the NSA won't say because it would divulge too much about how they do things.
Here are the job titles he himself gives in his interview with Greenwald and Poitras:
o infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii for BHA
o systems engineer
o systems administrator
o senior advisor for the CIA
o solutions consultant
o telecommunications informations systems officer
But I think we can agree that his job was about the internal workings of the NSA. It wasn't about making attacks on the enemy, i.e. China. These are very different roles -- offense and defense. That's not to say that both might not be combined in one job, but I think that when Snowden says in his interview with Poitras that China isn't really the enemy, he's speaking from a place of profound geekky arrogance based on his own thinking, not from seeing the real damage the Chinese were doing, and how to fight them. That he could casually leak stuff in China that would help them technically AND politically on the eve of Obama's summit with the Chinese lets us know that he has geopolitical motives, not motives only related to Americans' privacy, and that he is hardly the best judge of what is damaging!
Yet Greenwald tells Anderson Cooper now that Snowden is "highly credible" about what is or isn't damaging to the US and what the Chinese may or may not be able to steal or decrypt from him because he was "a highly sophisticated cyber operative trained to penetrate" their defenses.
Oh? He was? How do we know that? That is, Snowden may have told Glenn, but we haven't had this before, AFAIK. I'd like a second opinion on all this. Can one geek make that determination anyway?
Let's say that the Chinese offered to, oh, drop a percentage of our debt, if we gave them X or Y files. Wouldn't you want different departments in the NSA, offense and defense, so to speak, to be assessing this? Wouldn't you want an issue like "this information, if given to the Chinese, won't harm our country" to be decided even at the level of Gen. Alexander? Wouldn't you want the Senate Foreign Intelligence people to approve? Maybe the POTUS? I'm just not accepting on the face of it that one felonious hacker and his adversarial journalist friend can decide this for all of us.
Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”
- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpufSnowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”
- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpufvSnowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”
- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf
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