Edward Snowden at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. (C) Tanya Lokshina/Human Rights Watch
The Snowden story is one I view as a disgrace for Human Rights Watch for siding with him under pressure from the radical hackers, and one that certainly not Glenn Greenwald but even Andy Greenberg will never persuade me is somehow redeemed by him telling us something that is being "done in our name" that is "bad".
He's a traitor, he's an unethical and destructive hacker, and he is not a human rights activist or whistleblower. He's part of a network of such nihilists and anarchists who are antithetical to human rights and therefore should be viewed critically by liberals, not embraced.
If you're like me, and you've followed the hacker movements for ten years, you learn to look for online footprints. Not only social media, but various forums on hacker issues or Cryptome, a popular hacker website, or Ars Technica, where the real nerds gather to talk tech, or various Pastebins and IRC channel chat logs.
The online footprint is always there -- it's just a question of finding it. Even the online footprint of the Newton killer Adam Lanza, which seemed so elusive at first because he had smashed his hard drive before committing the murders of children, eventually surfaced after intensive forensic work, revealing him to participate in various gun and crime forums.
So I wasn't surprised that it didn't take the geeks long to turn up Edward Snowden's online persona, TheTrueHOOHAH, who turned out to be an avid Ars Technica forum participant who even once wrote that he thought hackers who compromised national security should be shot -- imagine that! Sure, that could be a hoax as so many accounts turn out to be when famous hackers get in the news, but it does seem to be him. And say, isn't it damn strange that Anthony de Rosa, the Reuters social media editor who has blocked me for criticism of his pro-hacker posts on Facebook, should be the one to break this story about five hours before Ars Technica does (based on John Shiffman's discovery on his online persona). Funny, that. A Russian believes he talked to him online and it's him
But TheTrueHOOHAH disappears after 2009, never more to be seen, and then the next online persona we hear about is Verax, or true-teller who doesn't seem to exist before mid-2013 when Snowden made his fabulous disclosures.
So where has he been for the last three years or so? Garrulous geeks like that with intensive opinions on everything from the gold standard to European culture don't just shut up and die, even if they get girlfriends. To be sure, the blog his ex-girlfriend kept for a number of years did look like it may have kept him busy for a time -- if he were the one taking all the pictures of her in her many narcissistic and suggestive poses. (Her blog is now taken down, as he dumped her when he decided to go break bad.)
When Aaron Swatz committed suicide, you had his Twitter account still to follow and miles of online blogging and video presentations to mine for motivations and theories of his case -- even characters like Barrett Brown have everything from a Second Life account (still being hunted) to Twitter to damning Youtubes -- Weev managed even to tweet from jail. These infantile young men without father figures always babble, and even if they are encrypting themselves endlessly, like @ioerror, you can still find a fair amount about them online, particularly their endless manifestos and speeches -- because they want to be seen and heard.
What I've always found about hackers is that a) eventually they slip up in the IRC channel or forget to use a proxy and disclose their real IP address or a damning clue in a JPEG file or b) their need for victory-dancing about their exploits and recording their victories always leaves a record somewhere, if nothing else, a FB photo or something connecting them to somebody at a conference in real life; or c) they brag elsewhere because they want influence and power for their radical ideals and they aren't content to follow the advice of a sage, "There is no limit to the good you can do if you are willing not to get the credit". Snowden, who claimed he wanted there to be a national debate on security not about him, was posing for the WikiLeaks cameras within days of his leak and spilling all (or at least some) to Glenn Greenwald.
Ok, so where is it, guys? I can't believe he was free and independent, as he has claimed, for the last three weeks while he sat in the lounge at SVO. What, not a Facetime, a Vine on Twitter, a Skype, a something? Snowden had methodically deleted -- or made sure never to have -- any accounts on FB or Twitter (that one claiming to be him with 45,000 followers is utterly fake). What, Glenn Greenwald couldn't get him on a day-old anonymous Skype or Twitter they had worked out with his WikiLeaks counsel and provide a proof of life? Why did everything that Edward say for weeks on end get filtered through Greenwald and WikiLeaks in this day of instant personal mass media? It just doesn't add up. I think he was held against his will, and that his WikiLeaks handlers were either muscled or in on it from the beginning or went on pretending he wasn't held against his will.
We'll all have to keep looking for Snowden o line, just as we had to keep doing life checks the last few weeks, but here's a clue that is worth investigating.
There's always the search for the PGP public key, and some have been doing that. So now this document has turned up at the Doc Store.
It's not clear (to me anyway) where this came from other than "the Internet" but Cryptome's publication shows under the name "Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum"
About the time Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum claim in Der Spiegel to have communicated by encrypted emails with Edward Snowden in "mid-May" the following PGP keys were generated ("Verax" is allegedly a Snowden pseudonym):
I've been looking for the connection to Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange and/or other WikiLeaks and related hacker groups and Snowden that no doubt exists before May 2013 when he claims he first contacted Laura Poitras, the film-maker who has been repeatedly searched at US borders because she is alleged to have embedded with militants in Iraq who planned and executed an attack on US soldiers which she didn't see fit to warn her fellow Americans about. I'm not the only one who believes Appelbaum was helping Snowden with encryption and long before May 2013 most likely. More on that another time, but Cryptome and other sites that have published this same document show an interesting bit at the end including March 2013 activity:
Ed Snowden/Edward Snowden generated these earlier keys:
Ed Snowden/Edward Snowden generated these earlier keys:
Search results for 'snowden edward'
Type bits/keyID Date User ID
pub 4096R/21B7141F 2013-03-24 Ed Snowden <[email protected]> Edward Snowden <[email protected]> Edward Snowden <[email protected]> Edward Snowden <[email protected]> Fingerprint=98E6 3244 07FA 26AD B358 7C95 4DB8 A088 21B7 141F From PGPdump Interface: Public key creation time - Sun Mar 24 12:21:52 UTC 2013
Search results for '0x08b73ae9e423698a' (disregard ubiquitous Vario sig):
Type bits/keyID cr. time exp time key expir
pub 4096R/E423698A 2010-01-26 uid Ed Snowden <[email protected]> sig sig3 E423698A 2010-01-26 __________ __________ [selfsig] sig sig EDD31E2A 2013-06-11 __________ __________ Michael Vario <[email protected]> sub 4096R/6F3B623E 2010-01-26 sig sbind E423698A 2010-01-26 __________ __________ [] From PGPdump Interface:Public key creation time - Tue Jan 26 01:35:31 UTC 2010
Yes, it's possible we're supposed to disregard as irrelevant this "ubiquitous" Michael Vario who apparently has infected a lot of other people. But even so, you have to ask the question whether "Michael Vario" or "Mike Vario" *is* Edward Snowden and has been for years and continues to be Edward Snowden.
Michael Vario has a fairly big presence on social media, but he scrubbed his Facebook recently and claimed that he was re-doing all his friends and you had to send a new friend request to him. He also scrubbed his Scribd, but Google cache still has this:
Michael Vario on Scribd | Scribd
www.scribd.com/michael_vario
Hoffman, Abbie - Steal This Book. Reads: 40. Pages: 109. Published by
People Followed. The Circle Poster · Terrence Kelsey. Reads: 106. Pages: 1.
Hahaha -- steal this book! That's funny, Ed.
Then there's Plurk, the favourite hangout of Second Lifers -- where he has a timeline that has all the usual radical geek causes -- anti-SOPA, Glenn Greenwald and more Glenn Greenwald, to the point where you wonder if it is a GG sock puppet that he uses to create links and boost traffic to his columns LOL. The Plurk line also has stuff critical of the NSA.
Then there's the rich trove of the Youtube, which has everything from Jacob Appelbaum's keynotes, so popular among hacker youth; videos on maple syrup that could be a code message or just an ADHD kid's sugar addiction; videos on the NSA; videos on Snowden -- lots of them. He celebrates gay marriage and also has a film in Dutch about the Rijksmuseum -- so that may not be our hetero American spy who didn't like Europe. Even so, narcissistic youths like to watch movies about themselves, but they can't do it online with their own names and a URL tracing to their locations or other data.
Michael Vario is on Twitter, where he celebrates -- you guessed it, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and so on.
But see, that could just be any geek. Many geeks have this profile. Even so, his Youtube list, and the favourites in particular, have a bit of a contrived feeling to me.
BTW, that picture looks like a movie star's picture and I don't think that's the person's real picture. Sunglasses? And a button that says...what? Creep?
Then there's that Barrow, Alaska. Come on, guys. You have to work harder than that. Barrow, Alaska is what my teenage daughter and her friends put as their online location to keep creepy men from stalking them. It does have its downside when people contact you asking for tourist tips but it works pretty good. Excuse me if I just don't believe that someone who likes Glenn Greenwald, hates the NSA, and craves maple syrup is in Barrow, Alaska.
Let me tell you how these Youtubes feel to me, however: they feel like the very, very long list of Youtube videos that Kurbanov, the Uzbek suspect in Idaho has, who has been arrested by the FBI and charged with material aid to terrorists. Either the Uzbek is stupid, and doesn't realize that watching hundreds of videos that teach how to make bombs, glorify terrorism and jihad and blowing up the World Trade Center, and celebrate the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and hate on the Jews are activities that may get you noticed by the FBI -- or he and his Youtube are part of a crafted offline and online persona made by the Uzbek Ministry of National Security (MNB) in order to attract and sting emigres and get them in trouble, or maybe part of an FBI sting (but my theory is that either Kurbanov is really supporting the IMU or he is part of an MNB caper).
So make of Michael Vario's Youtubes what you will but they are something to think about.
I had another thought, which is precisely because Michael Vario seemed to infect so many prominent PGP users and yet still lives on Twitter, he could be an NSA operative or related to any other intelligence operation and maybe this is a thread that if you pull on it, will prove that Snowden's defection was an NSA/CIA operation all along to retaliate against the Russians' retaliation against our retaliation -- in other words, a tar baby for Putin. This is what the crazy Naomi Klein thinks.
Yes, Michael Vario which may or may not mean "variation on Edward Michael Snowden" could simply be everywhere and a douche and not the NSA, someone can explain it to me. The PGP public key system -- by which you can find someone's public key to initiate the encrypted communications with them in the first place -- is based on a "web of trust" and somebody can invade it by signing falsely as you despite safeguards.
But even if he isn't Snowden, he admires him and Greenwald and may know him and, well, maybe it is Snowden and maybe he did that infecting from the NSA on instructions or just to be a douche.
Were you wondering what name and domain and so on Snowden used to contact those human rights activists yesterday to lure them to the Moscow airport?
"The Internet" answers your question quickly - the very same name and email address that is associated in some way with Michael Vario in the PGP document on Cryptome.
A careful study of that email, if it is authentic, and it could be re-typed or faked, raises some questions:
o there's a typo of the word "discussion" as "disucssion" -- nervous? Under stress? In a hurry?
o there's a PS with instructions that spells the word "center" in the European fashion as "centre". Now, even people like me who spent many years studying abroad and working for companies that asked you to use European spellings on things like "labour" and get into this habit, don't tend to write "centre" unless they're actually writing a company document. Snowden spent some years in Switzerland and no doubt other places, but you just can't get me to believe he would start naturally and organically writing "centre" as an American.
That means someone else wrote it for him.
No, I don't know what G9 is because it's not the gate; the gate was F, as you can see. G9 can be Internet slang for "good night," as in Edward Snowden telling us "Goodnight, Chet" before he disappears into the Lubyanka. It could be a department from M15 (hat tip to David Duff on Twitter), but it isn't a department that makes sense. I think it's a pun on the G8, and that there is a G9 -- nine people, maybe Assange, Poitras, Appelbaum and six others including Snowden -- or G9 is the 9th great power in the world, the hackers, or something. You know, "I buried Paul" backwards.
Lavabit.com is of course the "premier email company" for supersekrit kids who want to use PGP on their email.
Bulletins as they break...
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