Film by Laura Poitras. A rare moment when poker-faced sober-sides Snowden smiles in the film, when asked if he had in fact planned to burrow into the NSA as a mole via his job at Booz, Hamilton Allen.
I've been a long-time critic of Tor, going back to 2009 and earlier even before I heard of WikiLeaks and its use and championing of Tor. I've criticized Tor and its government origins and its evolution in the hand of unaccountable coders (and the arrogant and ethics-free coders are both inside and outside of government, and that's why the phenomena of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden happens).
You can read my back pieces here (on Jacob Appelbaum's assistance to WikiLeaks in shameful propagandizing); on the murky business of Tor, the Navy, the State Department, and Jacob Appelbaum (who was once a grantee of the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, but who wound up being wanted for questioning by the WikiLeaks grand jury); on Appelbaum's shameless bashing of his rivals in the granting process; on Appelbaum's paranoic and rabid pursuit of the NSA even before the Snowden affair, calling for sabotage of the NSA's cables; on his shameful display at a public meeting at Open Society Institute where he heckled an FBI agent saying he could hack her phone; and recently on his strange contradictions regarding the Snowden story; and his admission that the data trail places him in Hawaii with Snowden at the same time in April 2013, earlier than he originally claimed -- and that perhaps he's the "suspected hacker" in Snowden's story of the "suspected hacker's girlfriend".
THE TROUBLE WITH TOR AND JACOB APPELBAUM
Even back in Second Life, when I first began strenuously debating Shava Nerad (whom I came to call "the Tor crone" for her vicious defense of Tor and attacks on me), I had heard from some ethical coders that Tor had a bad reputation because its people had taken advantage of its users and sniffed the packets of Chinese dissidents. That seemed pretty sleazy, but par for the course in the world of arrogant nihilist hackers with which I first became acquainted with in 1999 in the Sims Online beta, and then observed more closely later in the early days of Second Life in 2004, where I found the first versions of Anonymous harassing critics of their vigilantism like me, and planning their attacks on Scientology even before they surfaced in real life.
THE SOFTWARE AUTOCRACY
I spent a lot of time blogging about the Software Autocracy for years then because I found these people really menacing and disturbing, and the implications of how they would abrogate all our rights through our increasing dependency on their coded artifacts a real concern. I had no idea that some of these people I met in Second Life would actually end up advising the president of the United States in real life (Lawrence Lessig); that they would even be in office in the White House and have influence over Congress (Beth Noveck -- who is out of office now but continues to have deep influence). I could never have dreamed that the people like Julian Assange or Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, of the hacker types that I encountered in Second Life all the time crashing my Sims, or trying to throw the devs in the early days of Twitter, would wind up wrecking havoc in real life; that the prototyped incidents I saw of document hacking and privacy hacking and destabilization of authority in Second Life would have their real-life counterparts in the hacks of Cablegate, Stratfor, Sony, the Pentagon, the CIA, and now the NSA (with one infamous hacker, Barrett Brown even connected both the Second Life and real life).
WIKILEAKS HAPPENED DUE TO WIKIFICATION OF GOVERNMENT
These people are all part of a movement; they are all part of a continuum; they are all in a tribe or network. WikiLeaks couldn't happen unless first, a group of arrogant hackers in government, and their academic and corporate counterparts began having Wikipedia weekend seminars and wound up wikifying the entire US government, to its doom. (And what has to be understood about this isn't just some literal wiki with some mundane useful stuff on it, but the mentality of the software autocrats). Snowden's hack could happen if it weren't for the casual arrogance and neglect and even sabotage with which most systems analysts and programmers and coders do their work in government and outside in contractors.
DEFCON
Some people think that the message about the ethics-free nihilist hackers inside and out of government, inside and out of corporations, is that this persona, especially its most remedy-resistant forms, is the problem -- male machismo, if you will, and the arrogance of the Anonymous hacker heckling and doxing someone is no different than the arrogant NSA analyst who spies on people and pulls their files.
And that's true enough, although not a complete description of the problem. But let's look at it in this most basic form first. DefCon is one of the places where that is on display. I remember a friend of mine went to DefCon in the year that HPGary was hacked by Anonymous and the government's efforts to try to do something to combat Anonymous, and combat the destructiveness of Glen Greenwald, the activist lawyer-blogger and ardent hacker supporter, ultimately blew up in their faces (unless it was a sting?). This friend -- with deep concerns about unethical hackers -- felt that HPGary and Anonymous were no different in their nasty methods and their dubious methods like creation of personas on line to fool the public. DefCon was always one of those conference watering holes where spooks and contractors and script kiddies in mom's basement would all mingle and exchange shop talk, because ultimately, their tribe is where their loyalties lay, and not their various affiliations -- which are fungible as they are bid out and bought by the highest bidder constantly among the Big IT firms, all of which have a revolving door into government.
Then recently, one DefCon organizer announced that NSA was not welcome this year (they had come covertly, or semi-covertly in the past, and many people found it titilating and it added to the enjoyment for some of the civilian hackers). Interestingly, at Ars Technica, one of the top nerd forums, a contributor in the forums under this piece objected to the undemocratic way in which this announcement was made, as he didn't agree that NSA should be blocked from the conference. I wonder how that will pan out.
In any event, while Jacob Appelbaum goes to great lengths in his Chaos Communications Club speech in December 2012 to define a dividing line between the "unethical" hackers inside government who have "gone to the dark side," and himself and his friend whom he believes are the "ethical" ones on the "light side" (it's actually just the opposite), if you look at how WikiLeaks and Appelbaum's role in it evolved, you would have to conclude that WikiLeaks is really no different than the NSA in its philosophy of "collect 'em all".
THE ORIGINS OF WIKILEAKS IS A BIG DATA HACK
Just as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which many perceive as some bastion of free speech and online freedom actually got its start in legal defense and edgecasing and lawfaring for phreakers (phone exploiters) and hackers facing criminal charges -- i.e. originated in criminality -- so did WikiLeaks.
I've been reading the book by Luke Harding (who is also a great reporter on Russia) and David Leigh, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. This book came out in 2012 and I meant to get it but it slipped my mind with everything else -- and now I see it's a must buy.
The authors describe Tor:
Tor introduces an uncrackable level of obfuscation. Say Appelbaum in Seattle wants to send a message to Domscheit-Berg in Berlin. Both men need to run the tor program on their machines. Appelbaum might take the precaution of encrypting it first using the free-of-charge PGP system.
They then describe the "onion-layer" mode of encryption which you can read about on Wikipedia or Tor's site or other locations -- basically, to simply if it, by splitting up packets of data and spreading them over nodes, no one person accessing the system can see the whole story and therefore obfuscation encrypts your communications. But the people with the top-level view of the system who know where the nodes are or who can access the end points can snoop on you. And of course, as ethics-free hackers with a sense that they are right and everyone else is wrong, they do so with no sense of shame and even with a sense of entitlement -- you know, just the way they claim US government agents do. And if we were ever to submit to the encryption regime that the crypto kiddies like Jacob Appelbaum and their enablers like Rebecca McKinnon envision, we'd merely have them as the coders in charge with the top-down system-wide view, with far less checks and balances than the NSA (which is why I chose the NSA over them any day).
We knew this story of the unethical origins of WikiLeaks, but Harding and Leigh in fact have pulled it all together very coherently so you can really see it starkly:
"Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange told Rolling Stone, when they profiled Appelbaum, his west coast US hacker associate. But Tor has an interesting weakness. If a message isn't specially encrypted from the outset, then its actual contents can sometimes be read by other people. This may sound like an obscure technical point. But there is evidence that it explains the true reason for the launch of WikiLeaks at the end of 2006 -- not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words: eavesdropping.
On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, Assange excited messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of material was coming from:
"Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We're going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new... We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, opec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and falun dafa associations and...russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We're drowning. We don't even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1TB [one terrabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes]."
A few weeks later, in August 2007, a Swedish Tor expert, Dan Egerstand, told Wired magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest documents, email contents, user names and passwords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor "exit" node. This was the final server at the end of the Tor system through which documents without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstand "found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India's Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the INdian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama's liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. "It kind of shocked me," he said. "I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out."
The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when Assange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The New Yorker staffer wrote: "One of the WikiLeaks activists owend a server that was being used as a node for the tor network. Millions of secret trnasmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers form China were using the network to gather foreign governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction h as ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site's foundation, and Assange wa able to say, "We have received over one million documents from 13 countries.' In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a 'secret decision', signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China."
The authors then proceed to describe how WikiLeaks also grew out of the anti-capitalist radicals movements and a WikiLeaks stall was first set up at the World Social Forum in 2007 -- as I said -- must read!
Now, what can we draw from this? Yes, that WikiLeaks is just like the NSA. Or rather, just like the way they claim that NSA is.
Hackers' actions aren't about making a better world ever; they are about turf wars and grabs for power. Anonymous picks a fight with the cult of Scientology because it's a competitor online - they're a cult themselve. They pick a fight with Westboro because Westboro gets all the attention from its horrid antics -- and Anonymous would like to do that. They pick a fight with certain governments like Iran temporarily because those governments crack down on free and open Internet hacking, essentially. They aren't principled and consistent, which is why they don't attack Russia or China -- they prefer to be enemies of those they feel need weakening or which are already weak and ripe for anarchist shattering.
Look at how greedy Assange sounds in Harding and Leigh's account; look at how much he gloats, sitting on those zillions of documents. And I hadn't realized (although I should have known better!) -- it wasn't some kind of human rights work that got them involved in that Somalian warlord; that just fell in their laps as they were slurping up the data everywhere of users of Tor, apparently. So if you are a Tor user, you are just as hosed as Edward Snowden claims you are if you are a user of USA, Inc. (i.e. a resident of America) and "spied on".
Except, here's the point I want to make about all this.
I don't think what Snowden is saying is true; I think it's exaggerated; I think all of these people have a dastardly and sinister political agenda, and it's not just to weaken a liberal democratic state and take power, which might not actually be possible for them to do, but it's to distract from their own crimes by claiming that those bringing them to account are just as bad or worse.
This is a very, very common griefer tactic in Second Life, and anyone who has had to deal with the Eddie Haskell deniers in the hacking world who claim that their victims are at fault because their security is weak will know what I mean.
DISTRACTED FROM DISTRACTION BY DISTRACTION
What is there to distract from, exactly?
Well, the Manning trial, for one. The role of Tor and the controversies of Tor, and the way that Tor was used by the US military and the State Department hasn't really come out in this trial, although it should. In fact, if there were Congress people other than Wyden and Udall better briefed on these issues, who hijack all the mindshare on this issue most days, there would be more scrutiny.
It was my view that the timing of the Snowden "hack" was concocted to distract from Manning's trial (and for extra credit, from Magnitsky's and Navalny's, too). That's because Greenwald and Appelbaum, huge supporters of Manning, realized they had lost the struggle when he confessed. They might have hoped to make a grandstand over Cablegate and Manning, but it really fizzled for so many reasons -- loss of faith in Assange, no war crimes actually found in the cables; and Manning not really credible as a person who was crusading for good -- he was just too messed up and seemed too much aligned with Assange's anarchist notion of whacking democratic states to force them to close and become unlike themselves, and then discredit them in favour of radical "sovereign groups" who will replace "sovereign states."
With the Manning trial -- and the not-unrelated Swartz investigation at MIT which has stalled and/or been covered up -- the noose was tightening on the WikiLeaks grand jury. Perhaps it would finally issue indictments -- of Julian Assange, maybe even of Jacob Appelbaum and Brigit Jonsdottir and others. Perhaps it might have the goods from hackers who spilled all or from surveillance.
So in my view, the entire game of Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange needed to create a massive distraction to the prosecution of WikiLeaks happening with Manning -- and possibly soon to go further with the separate grand jury. They had to pre-emptively show that the real people who damaged us all, and harmed our privacy, wasn't some young soldier who spilled some cables, but the NSA that vacuumed up all our stuff and perused it.
I think a certain amount of rigorous and clever planning went into this but that they had to speed things up or some development in the trial or the grand jury -- perhaps as the judge in the Manning trial moved toward determining that yes, the charge could remain that Manning had aided and abetted the enemy (which would mean that others associated with WikiLeaks could face the same charges).
Everyone always though Assange was completely ridiculous pretending that the US would demand that Sweden extradite him -- if it didn't when he was at large in the UK. But maybe Assange knows something we don't know about people questioned in the grand jury and other cases. (And we only know the accounts of David House related to Manning and partial accounts of Quinn Norton in the Swartz case, and we may not know everything). I won't be surprised if we find Aaron Swartz was caught up in helping WikiLeaks as well and that more than JSTOR formed the basis for the charges against him. (Norton came out with her story in March, just when Snowden was making his PGB keys and getting ready to contact WikiLeaks -- Poitras and Appelbaum).
So I think Snowden's stuff is a snow job. That even he knows that it isn't really true, but that all he had to do was play-act it as if it were true enough, and string it out long enough to distract from Manning and whatever else. (Appelbaum says in his recent speech in Germany that he's not mentioned in the trial -- but he's still worried.)
SNOW JOB
I went back and watched Snowden's 12-minute film made by Laura Poitras again. And I realized that the fake information that the NSA had "direct access" to Internet service providers isn't just Greenwald's rendering of more complex technical realities he didn't grasp, and not just the PRISM slides which represent the same kind of contractors' fluff job for the NSA as the HPGary slides did in their day for the FBI (and maybe the latter was a rehearsal for the former).
No, Snowden really lays it on directly and thickly himself -- and that's supposed to make it more convincing. He claims he could he could "shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon" -- and claims to have all the authorities necessary to bug even the president. That seems far-fetched, because he'd have to spoof every authorization perfectly so that no check and balance in this system every noticed than an unauthorized party was doing this.
That's silly of course -- it's like saying that the janitor vacuuming NSA's offices, by unplugging all the computers at once, could take down national security.
When asked if he had the "intention of weaseling and undermining as a mole" (which we know he did from a later admission) he evaded the question and replied, "I joined when I was very young, the government as a whole, I enlisted in the army after the invasion of Iraq. I believed in the nobility of our intentions, but over time, over the length of my career I was exposed to true information" and that changed his mind. You know, the Illuminati. Infatuation with one's own virtuousness.
Why China, although they hack us? (He never mentions that, really). Because "China is not our enemy; we trade freely." Hong Kong is "free" compred to Western governments under the thumb of the US, and as for Russia, why, "he could always could suck out secrets to give to Russia, they always have an open door." That's an interesting statement, given that after that June 6 interview, he wound up going to Russia, and he may have done just that.
"They'll say I've violated Espionage Act and aided our enemies, but that argument will be made against anyone," he says -- which adds to my sense of the hack as a distraction from Manning's trial.
THE COLLECTORS
Regarding the NSA's capacity, he says "it collects all communications that transit the US". There's a great deal of sophistry about this argued by nerds on Twitter. Spencer Ackerman or @attackerman, who left the Atlantic and joined Greenwald at the Guardian, has retweeted arguments of the NSA like "taking all your stuff is like stealing everything in your house but not touching it."
I pointed out that the NSA logic of only scanning meta data, or only making machine scans that have no human engagement is a lot like the techies' snarky explanation of why piracy does not "copy" because the owner is "left with the original" (an argument I reject). It's like Facebook's or Instagram's TOS caveat that they must make copies of your original intellectual property by technically violating your rights and not seeking permission merely to serve you copies of the images so you can see them and share them with your friends. That's that "paid up, perpetual, non-revokeable license to content". The US government has the same thing when it scans communications to find patterns to fight crime. Facebook doesn't exploit your user-generated content for ill gain, i.e. selling your content directly; in the same way the NSA says it doesn't rifle your actual content, either.
And I take them at face value, mindful that they are all of a piece, and that the theory of the NSA's collection is no different than the theory of the ISPs and Internet platforms' collections -- and I know which is worse -- the big Internet platforms.
Snowden -- groweling in the gravel in the hipster manner that the Second Life blogger rightly derided as the nerd's belief that women love a deep voice like that -- claims the NSA can get in at every every enter and exit of data -- you know, like Tor? They can get everyone's call records and Internet records -- they have a system called "Boundless Informant" which is a global auditing system, and they claimed that the NSA lied about the existence of this tool to Congress in response to previous inquiries.
WHY DOES SNOWDEN LIE ABOUT DIRECT ACCESS?
Says Snowden, falsely:
"They provide direct access to the back ends of all the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life and they give NSA direct access that they don't need to oversee so they can't be held liable for it. I think that's a dangerous capability."
But no IT platform like Google or Facebook or Twitter does that -- they don't have backdoors for the government and there isn't a way for the government to slurp up even your birthday wishes unelss they are public (in which case they are easily scraped as open data). All of this has been discounted since Snowden -- who knows better -- made this sensational claim.
Why is he making this claim? Well, for one, he could just be taking part in the grand exercise to distract and spin the WikiLeaks trial and the grand jury. For two, as a top-down viewer of the system as an engineer on it, he may arrogantly believe that his knowledge of how the system works as a whole also equates the ability to hack it and exploit it as he wishes.
There's at least one conspiracy theory that says the NSA has ecipsed the CIA -- sigint now trumps humint because Internt trumps meat-world -- and the Snowden affairs is seen as a turf war. Regardless of whether the theory is true, the point that Snowden "exaggerates his capacity by miles" is one most geeks looking at this seriously wind up saying themselves.
GRAND JURY
Some of the general public may think we have a lovely "national conversation" on secrecy and privacy now, and the usual convulsions in the media leading to the closure of legislative initiatives to curb FISA courts or data scraped by the government will take care of it. These convulsions happen periodically (remember Clifford Case in the 1970s). Entire spy novels are written on this theme.
What we have now, though, is a distraction from distraction - the WikiLeaks grand jury. You can catch up on some of this on WikiLeaks scribe Alexa O'Brien's list.
Electronic Frontier Foundation has mightily spun this, trying to fasten on the abstract issues of journalists' freedom to disguise the problem of unethical journalist-hackers. Salon has predictably spun it as well. Mainstream media like the New York Times and Washington Post haven't bought this line, and I await their more sober reporting on the grand jury.
My hunch is that soon we will learn something new from the WikiLeaks grand jury, and that something may be what Snowden was trying to distract us from, at least until they could all make a getaway.
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