Wired State

Why Doesn't Joshua Foust Ever Write About Jacob Appelbaum in the WikiLeaks and Snowden Story?

Joshua Foust has yet another piece up drawing the lines between the Kremlin and WikiLeaks, and yet the name Jacob Appelbaum is conspicuous by its absence. The piece gives absolutely no credit to various bloggers who have already tilled this ground for weeks (me, Streetwise Professor, LibertyLynx) -- that's vintage Foust. When challenged about it -- he just shrugs and claims he has done his own research -- by which he means he has put the links others distributed in Twitter into his own blog.

Whatever. The real question to ask is:

Why doesn't Foust ever mention Jacob Appelbaum? It really is uncanny.

While he might claim that he doesn't have enough information, or that he doesn't follow hackers as much as international affairs and defense (although he's written at least one admiring piece about the hackers), the real story is this -- Joshua Foust is now trying to shop himself out to the Intelligence Community, using his credentials as a former defense contractor, tweeting up and blogging a storm on the Snowden case and the Russian intelligence connection and getting retweeted and mentioned by a number of much higher-profile bloggers.

And here's the thing: Jacob Appelbaum is one of their own.

They created him and they sustained him for years.

He is the developer of Tor and Tor was created by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), a fact I've been writing about and criticizing for years, long, long before the Wikileaks and the Snowden story. Going back to 2005, I began debating Shava Nerad, former executive director of Tor and still involved as a supporter, because I believed the entire principle of Tor and circumvention in this scheme was corrupt and wrong.

I think we should have Congressional hearings on this subject.

Basically, what the Navy did was create circumvention software for people to be able to surf the Net without being traceable. They did this because they needed their own device to do this for certain tasks they had of monitoring hostile websites or collecting information or even chatting through personas. Sure, they must have their own white label encryption software they don't share, but they needed something to blend in.

So they needed to release this open source software into the wild for use by "the community" of geeks because they needed to populate the Internet with lots and lots of nodes of people using Tor -- and bouncing around the packets of information in electronic communications in different split-up layers going hither and yon so they would not be traceable to their origin, in principle. So if Chinese or Iranian dissidents used it -- great -- but the Navy and Tor looked the other way while anarchists bent on overthrowing capitalism and Western governments used it, or drug dealers or child pornographers also used it.

Except for one developer I contacted who refused to talk even off the record, the original Tor developers are gone from the Navy now. They're out in the wild now, too.

Yet even so, the Department of Defense continued to support Tor the nonprofit organization financially and still does -- Tor today, despite Jacob Appelbaum's direct relationship to WikiLeaks, still gets 60% of its funding from the US government (!) by its own admission. I know the State Department funded Appelbaum's circumvention software overseas as part of an Internet Freedom program -- until it apparently became embarassing for them to do so when the grand jury was asking for Jake's tweets.

You would think that after the scandals around WikiLeaks, the flight of Snowden to Moscow with WikiLeaks' help, and Appelbaum at the helm helping with encryption and communications, and then the FBI's crackdown on Tor in busting the child pornography ring, taking down half the nodes and exposing many of the users, that Tor might be done for. But the management says not on their website August 10:

On August 10th, 2013 Anonymous said:

No, the demise of Tor is not imminent. The Office of Naval Intelligence developed it, and the State Department uses it for diplomatic traffic. The U.S. government also promotes its use to oppressed populations (at least those we support) internationally. Tor is not going anywhere. Tor mail is another matter. That was probably the target.
Gnovalis

So as you can see, Tor, with all its crimes and messes, still invokes ONI and the State Department as still using it and still appreciating the mission it ostensibly fulfills helping "oppressed populations" (even though that includes destructive anarchists, drug dealers, child pornographers -- and of course convincted traitors like Chelsea Manning and defectors like Snowden).

This lets you know that the Jacob Appelbaum story and the Snowden story that involve Tor and stealing from the NSA are, well, complicated. There may be forces in the US intelligence and military circles fighting each other over this; they may want to cover up the Appelbaum angle; they may want only selective versions of this story to get out; they may want it to go away. Certainly we didn't hear much about the role of Tor in the Manning court martial!

Unfortunately, as I've discovered from critiquing the Navy office that has taken over virtual worlds' interoperability in the IEEE committee, the geeks in the military are wedded to the open source software religion and the surrounding geek culture that goes with it. The Navy bought Nebraska, which is the enterprise version of the Second Life virtual world software after IBM rejected it. They then got basically waited out all the arguing geeks in the sub-committee of IEEE on virtual worlds and took it over to establish the standards to their liking -- this is the dirty secret of these "standards" committees which are supposed to be "scientific" but are at times the playthings of special interests.

I view open source fetishism as an absolutely awful thing for national security. The military brawnily and arrogantly insists on this in part because they think it saves money (although once you get a Snowden out of this open-source culture, you would think you'd understand the real cost!) and they do it in part out of an ideology that says open source is "better" because "a bug is visible to a thousand eyes". Of course, I've spent most of my blogging life in the last decade trying to explain the various political and technical idiocies of this software cult, but it boils down to this: thousands of idiots tripping over each other with varying agendas and no real commitment to real customers aren't always the best thing to find bugs as they don't really understand the customer requirements.

In our case, the customer requirements are the requirements of the People of the United States, and by connection over the Internet, the world, and I don't think the half-assed "wikification of everything" and the "Benign Dictator" abusive culture of open source is serving those requirements. Geeks inside and outside of government are bringing us to ruin; the phenomenon of Edward Snowden could not exist unless previously there existed an entire substrate of culture that found it just fine to do things like wikify everything into Chelsea Manning's lap and keep the unaccountable and destructable Jacob Appelbaum on the taxpaper-paid payroll of the USG for years and years.

So...I don't expect Joshua Foust will likely write about Jacob Appelbaum critically, or if he does, it will be in his usual way to distractive from other essentials.

What is the way you distract from that fact if you are an IR Realist who inevitably supports the Kremlin or if you are the Kremlin itself? You do a suppression move (as the fire-fighters call 'fighting fire with fire") and you concede the point -- except leave out some key parts of the story.

Like the hackers' convergence in Hawaii. Like the role of Jacob Appelbaum. Like the role of the Chaos Computer Club.

Just for the record -- let's go over everything I've already written about Appelbaum for some three years now -- I don't think there's another soul who has been as critical -- except for geeks within his own community, sometimes not in public, who have written far more than I have, and far, far more bitterly, about his irresponsible activities and the relationship Tor has with the US government.

o The Chaos Computer Club and its links to Assange and Snowden -- wherein Appelbaum meets German hackers in a club in Germany, some of whose members hacked the US military for the KGB in the 1980s. Appelbaum then meets Assange's fellow WikiLeaks at the CCC in 2006 and literally gets into bed with him in 2007.

o Appelbaum's role in propagating "Collateral Murder" and lying about it; representing WikiLeaks in the US and taking Assange's place at the hacker conference; and savaging critics in cahoots with Anonymous. A day doesn't go by that I don't get dozens of hits on this article The Unaccountable Jacob Appelbaum. Because there are plenty of people right in his own movement that have concerns about him.

o Then there's my compendium of WikiLeaks and Snowden, documenting the relationships between Appelbaum, Poitras, and Snowden.

o Then a discussion of his presentation at the Whitney last year with another NSA defector, William Binney, which prefigures the Snowden story.

o A discussion of whether the feds should get to see Appelbaum's email and Twitter account messages -- a secret court related to the WikiLeaks investigation made the request and despite having the best lawyers go to bat for him, he lost the case. Naturally the trail was rather cold by then.

o Here I examine Jacob's data trail today which he is so worried about links him to the wrong conclusions about WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

o A post on the crackdown on Tor by the FBI when it was used by a host that had a huge child pornography ring out of Ireland.

o A post on the criticism Appelbaum personally faced because of his negligence about patching the Tor Browser Bundle to prevent the exploits that ultimately were allegedly used by the FBI to inject scripts to capture user information.

o A post on my research about the Navy and its relationship to Tor and Appelbaum -- citing some critics that feel Tor remains vulnerable not only to government snooping but the carelessness and unaccountability of hackers.

o The story of how Jacob Appelbaum launched an unconscionable assault on a proprietary software program, Ultrasurf, used by Chinese dissidents, accusing it of having flaws and being unavilable to "the community" to look over its shoulder in the usual open-source bullying and collectivism. Appelbaum's infamous critique failed to mention that he was competing for the same pot of funds -- and the same minds and hearts at the State Department -- regarding the future of the Internet Freedom program.

o Appelbaum's tap-dancing around these criticisms, his attack on my blog, and my response.

o My overall timeline on US, Russia and the world regarding the attacks on US cybersecurity.

o Appelbaum's speech in Berlin giving his alibi for a trip to Hawaii in April 2013 that just happens to coincide with when Snowden was in Hawaii -- when Appelbaum already knew who Snowden was and what he was doing.

o Further on Appelbaum, his colleague Moxie Marlinspike and other hackers who converge in Hawaii just when Snowden is getting hired by Booz, Allen, Hamilton.

I think the Navy has a lot to answer for when it comes to WikiLeaks, Manning, Appelbaum, and Snowden.

It's no good saying that using Tor is like using Adobe -- it's just a program, it's neutral, different people use it for different things, blah blah.

Because Tor is a community; Tor is an ideology; Tor is a culture; Tor is what links the US military and intelligence communities to the horrors that have now resulted in WikiLeaks and Snowden and everything related.

They have created a monster.

John Young, editor of Cryptome, who started out working with WikiLeaks but then abandoned him because he was mercenary and arrogant, leaked this email from Assange that really sums up the problem with this asshole:

J. We are going to fuck them all. Chinese mostly, but not entirely a feint. Invention abounds. Lies, twists and distorts everywhere needed for protection. Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inxhaustible 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. If fleecing the CIA will assist us, then fleece we will. We have pullbacks from NED, CFR, Freedomhouse and other CIA teats. We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, apec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and fulan dafa associations and... russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We're drowing. We don't even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1Tb.

What this bragging email from Assange means, if you haven't followed this, is that the people who used Tor to encrypt their communications could have their messages visible to some of those geeks looking at the system top-down, if you will, or looking at some exit nodes where they could monitor traffic and "pull" out information and read it.

In other words, WikiLeaks got its first stash of documents not from people voluntarily leaking them, but from stealing them from the nodes of Tor from people unwittingly.

WikiLeaks never "fucked" the Chinese; they also didn't "fleece" the CIA unless we're going to learn -- probably from some conspiracy site somewhere -- that the CIA paid WikiLeaks to mess up foreign governments' traffic. Doesn't seem likely. What happened is that WikiLeaks fucked America, and continues to do so with Snowden.

So when is Foust going to write about this real story behind the WikiLeaks active measure known as Snowden's defection? Maybe never. Maybe he views it as his job to endlessly distract from these facts that don't make his past or future bosses paying for all this look very good.

If he does write about it, everyone should take a highly weather eye to what the "message" is being sent by those who created and still control Tor from the high seas.

I don't know why the Navy is even in the circumvention software business or Internet-related stuff -- when you think of the four branches of the military, it seems like the Air Force -- air -- would relate more to the Internet as a concept than the sea LOL. Well, maybe there are those undersea cables to think of. And latter-day pirates! There is now a joint cybercommand, of course, and we don't know how they've been affected by the NSA leak or what they are doing about it -- you never hear anything.

The problem is like a Pogo cartoon, however, where instead of the flotsam and jetsam of the garbage dump of the 1970s, you would see numerous computers, ipads, tablets, iphones, etc. and Pogo talking perhaps to Roger Dingledine: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

But of course you can't hold the Internet in a burlap sack...

 

 

The Chaos Computer Club's Past Links to the KGB and Present Links to WikiLeaks, Assange, and Snowden

Karl Koch, German hacker who collaborated with the KGB, hacking a phone.

In online virtual worlds and MMORPGs, in forums and news sites, the role of groups is hugely important for hackers, Anonymous, Occupy sympathizers and anarchists of all types:  groups keep the memory of the past and the projection of the future; they keep the lore and the learning and the memes; they are there to return to when you are banned and have to re-spawn and create an alt; you can load up your griefing objects into your inventory again from mules or sandboxes on your new account precisely because groups exist. Often, the people who hold the group together and keep it as a virtual or even real institution of sorts themselves never commit hacking or law-breaking of any type precisely so they can hold the group -- but they're there to victory-dance with you when you want to celebrate your exploits, sometimes taking the screenshots...

As much as they live online on IRC channels or encrypted chatrooms or Twitter or Pastebin or Ycombinator, hackers like to meet "in real" too because that's how they build trust. And there is some knowledge and secrets that can only be passed by an actual real-world meet-up.

ITS NAME DESCRIBES IT

The Chaos Computer Club, nearing its 30th birthday (don't miss it!), is older than the Internet as most of us know it and dates back to the phone-phreaking days of hackers breaking into public and private phone systems to extract information, particularly codes or credit cards to use to do more communications via phones - and often "just because they can" -- which is the credo for a lot of hacking.

You may not have realized when you saw Jacob Appelbaum speak at 29C3 on YouTube that the funny name meant 29th Congress of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. In this speech, titled "Not My Department," he openly recruits those computer programmers who are working for governments in what he views as "surveillance states" in the West to come "from the dark side" (as he sees their lawful activity) into the "light" -- the dark underground world of anarchist coders he represents.

At the time of the speech, in December 2012, he may have already known that Edward Snowden existed, because Snowden supposedly first contacted Glenn Greenwald and then Laura Poitras that time -- and she would have undoubtedly contacted Appelbaum and asked him to help her verify Snowden's claims and encrypt the hacked files involved. Perhaps he even helped create a wish list of what would be best to hack.

But looking at this speech superficially as just one of the literally hundreds of speeches Appelbaum has given all around the world at various hacker fests misses an important point: the Chaos Computer Club has been central to WikiLeaks, to Julian Assange and his colleagues, and to the Snowden affair and his defection to Moscow.

And, as they say, perhaps it is no accident, comrades, because the CCC has a history of dealing with the KGB, even selling the KGB hacked files from Western governments for drugs and money. This sensational past is rarely discussed when WikiLeaks is covered, and when the question is raised as to how WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence are related. The KGB, of course, has a long history of working through leftist German movements, publishing houses and newspapers and taking advantage of the extensive ties between Germany and Russia throughout history.

LEIGH AND HARDING ON CCC

In their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, David Leigh and Luke Harding devote only one page to the Chaos Computer Club and its Congress, as if it were just some obscure nerdy coders' groups not worthy of a second look. They note that Julian Assange and his now estranged colleague WikiLeaks colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg met at the 24th Congress in 2007. Ultimately, Domscheit-Berg was to break with Assange.

It is the foundation formed by the CCC founder Wau Holland-Moritz, now deceased, that forms the basis for WikiLeaks fund-raising to this day at a time when US payments processors refuse to take donations for WikiLeaks because it is the subject of a grand jury investigation involving the theft of classified government files.

Leigh and Harding write:

Chaos Computer Club members at the Berlin Congress such as Domscheit-Berg along with his Dutch hacker colleague Rop Gonggrijp had mature talents that proved to be crucial to the development of Assange's guerilla project.

They go on to explain that Assange tried to shed the hacker label himself, despite his own past prosecution for hacking, saying it was "mostly deployed by the Russian mafia to steal your grandmother's bank accounts."

Oh, not just the Russian mafia. The Russian state, which is commingled with the mafia, of course, which we know from Luke Harding's other books.  But they leave it at that in this book.

ANDY GREENBERG ON CCC

Andy Greenberg, the staff writer for Forbes who writes about cybersecurity, hackers, cryptography   and the Internet (his book contains a cryptogram that three hackers have already broken), likely understands hackers more than these other two journalists despite their foreign and domestic affairs chops. He is famous for getting an early and long interview of Assange himself for Forbes. And for his book This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information, published in 2012, Greenberg went and spent a lot of time hanging out with the German hackers, even attending the CCC, and of all things, even stumbling on the famous WikiLeaks co-conspirator who goes by the name of The Architect and learning his identity (which in true crypto-kid fashion, he doesn't reveal to us).

As much as I appreciate Greenberg's skillful reporting, to get to his sources, and to gain his proximity, he has to "get in" with these hackers and gain their trust -- which is why he always seems rather admiring of them even as he occasionally criticizes them. I used to think this was a reporter's pose to get the story; I no longer think that. It's just not that he endlessly reports and never judges, if the alibi is that reporters aren't supposed to judge; it's that he too often celebrates, and that's simply unacceptable in a moral universe.

But the Chaos Computer Club isn't a moral universe, except in the sense of "thieves' law" as in the Russian prisons and mafias.

JACOB APPELBAUM, THE CCC AND ASSANGE

Greenberg has a good deal more material on the CCC in his book, and in the chapter titled "The Onion Routers," he covers Jacob Appelbaum's connection to the group.

When Appelbaum returned from New Orleans, his tour through two levels of hell had left him more committed than ever to the liberating powers of technology. But he had yet to find the community that would be his own cypherpunks, the crypto-obsessed peers who would enwrap him in a larger movement and push him to greater feats of crypto-anarchy.

That group would be the Chaos Computer Club.

In many ways, the CCC had progressed years ahead of Tim May and Eric Hughes' crypt0-liberation movement in California. Founded by the Germany hacker luminary Wau Holland in 1981, the hamburgand erlin-based nonprofit had been demonstrating the insecurity of public computer systems as early as 1984, when its hackers used the home terminal system created by the German postal system to transfer the equivalent of $50,000 from a bank to the CCC's accounts. (The money was given back in a public ceremony the next day.) With a true survelilance state looming just over the Berlin Wall, privacy, antiauthoritarianism, and the need for strong crypto had been steep into the group's core.

That sort of statement is exactly the sort of thing that exasperates so with Greenberg's writing. Just because they were next door to East Germany doesn't mean this group did anything to liberate East Germany; their focus then as now was myopically on the West and the "surveillance state" they feared and loathed was the US and its allies in Western Europe.

A year after his father's death in December before Christmas, Appelbaum flew to the CCC in Berlin, writes Appelbaum, engrossed with "the same problem that had troubled Julian Assange years earlier, one central to any activist who believes in the power of cryptography: how to keep encrypted data encrypted, even when authorities are standing over the user, rubber hose in hand, demanding the key." (The reference is to a program invented by Assange in 1997 actually titled "Rubberhose" that was written so that no torturer would be motivated to torture to get the key.)

In his talk that year,  Appelbaum derided Apple for its lack of security and then evidently independently came to the problem of "violent key extraction" which was Assange's invention. Tackling the problem of a torturer who is never satisfied "Alice" or "Bob" have told the truth, he suggested that there be Mutually Assured Information Destruction (MAID) so that if the victim, in prison, doesn't check into their account, their keys automatically delete and the torturer knows that. One hopes.

"That drew Appelbaum into Assange's circle albeit indirectly," says Greenberg; another hacker, Ralf-Philipp Winmann, who had developed Rubberhose with Assange earlier, debated Appelbaum at the Congress and then they agreed to meet later.

Writes Greenberg about the first connection between Assange and Appelbaum:

Appelbaum became a CCC regular, and Assange would attend the next year to introduce a project he was working on: WikiLeaks

Friends say they met at that wintry Berlin conference [emphasis added]. Their paths must have felt uncannily parallel: broken, wayward childhoods. IQs beyond those of the hated authorities that tried to exert power over their lives and a belief in the redemptive power of cryptography to defeat those forces.

Sigh. You would never catch me writing a paragraph like that! Frustratingly, Greenberg doesn't directly give the year in this account but if we are to believe Wikipedia, it was 2007 -- meaning Appelbaum's first contact with the CCC was 2006.

APPELBAUM IN BED WITH ASSANGE

And then he writes this, which also can be used to figure the first date as 2006:

By Appelbaum's fourth year at the conference, they [Assange and he] had become close. Appelbuam told me he woke up on New Year's Day after the Twenty-Sixth Chaos Communications Congress in bed with Assange and two women. "That's how we rolled in 2010," he says smiling. (He later clarifies that they had busied themselves the night before with programming, not sex, and slept in different beds. "I can dream," he adds.)

He told Greenberg this was "the start of a good friendship." Indeed.

So Jacob Appelbaum has been in bed with Assange, perhaps only figuratively, for nearly seven years. That's plenty of time to plan and execute many things, including quite possibly the recruitment of an NSA contractor to hack the United States and then defect to Russia. Appelbaum did not spring into the story of Snowden suddenly only in the spring of this year; Laura Poitras had relied on him for years to help her with crypto, ever since they were both traveling to Iraq at the same time in 2004-2005.

Greenberg goes on to attend a Chaos Computer Congress in a tent in the mud and rain in an abandoned East German army base -- fitting.  He tells the fascinating story of interviewing Domscheit-Berg just as he is trying to launch a leaks site in competition with WikiLeaks, from which he has departed bitterly on bad terms in September 2010, with a left-wing German newspaper Die Tagezeitung. But it's a flop, and Tag's editor Reinter Metzger leaves "extremely pissed off." Ultimately, in a series of dramas, involving claims that Domscheit-Berg took files that "belonged" to that info-leaking liberator WikiLeaks gang that had stolen them in the first place, the CCC ends up holding a council and expelling Domscheit-Berg, after he is interrogated by a number of hacker elders including the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gillmore. Among the judges who rules to expel Domscheit-Berg (and later, take him back in after a sufficient period of exile) is Andy Muller-Maguhn -- who, along with Jacob Appelbaum, was co-author with Julian Assange of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. Muller-Maguhn accused Domscheit-Berg of working with Western intelligence agencies -- a charge D-B laughed off in an interview with Greenberg, making a counter-charge that Muller-Maguhn himself had relationships with government agencies through sales in his CryptoPhone company.

Greenberg goes into more detail than most about the internal WikiLeaks crisis that led first to an accidental leak of the key, then a download of all the documents, then to The Architect and Domscheit-Berg destroying the files by throwing away the keys to them.

While Greenberg nails it by calling Camp, as the hackers call CCC a "colder, wetter Burning Man for the radical geek elite," he does not describe its ancient history involving the KGB, when a young German hacker Karl Koch and others contacted the KGB on their own, and sold their hacked files for money and drugs -- Koch was said to be a cocaine addict.

THE CONSPIRACY LOONS' MINEFIELD

To get that sordid story, you have to go to other books and old website archives -- and first try to skirt the minefield of the Wayne Madsen conspiracy sort of stuff -- which as we know is so radioactive that the Guardian deleted an article using this former NSA loon as a source the minute they realized where the story came from. Wayne Madsen believes that the Chaos Computer Club hackers cooperating with the Soviets were under the watch of none other than Robert Hanssen, one of the CIA's most famous defectors to Russia, and that's why they didn't come to light right away. I haven't found that story anywhere else, and it definitely needs checking. Anybody? I have no use for Wayne Madsen and I "get it" about him totally, thanks; I place this link here merely as part of the gorgeous mosaic around this story.

In addition to Wayne Madsen, there's another conspiracy writer, Daniel Estulin, who has written a book, Deconstructing WikiLeaks. He is a Russian emigre from the Soviet era who claims his father was a dissident and that he was tortured and imprisoned by the KGB. I never heard of him, I don't see the name in any Soviet political prisoners' list known at the time or since, and I wonder if the story is true, or at least true in all its elements. Estulin says he and his family fled Russia in 1980. That would have been rare indeed, as the detente period of the 1970s when some Soviet Jews and various dissidents were allowed to leave was pretty much over by then - it was very difficult to get out  unless you were a high official allowed to travel. In any event, for what it's worth, Estulin writes in this book -- although Amazon won't let you see the whole page -- that Jacob Appelbaum was in touch with some hacker named Zatko and Dirk Brzezinski of the CCC. To be continued.

RELIABLE HISTORIANS ON CCC AND KGB

But you don't need either of these conspiracy nuts to get this back story of the CCC. For example, here is what Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence by Jeffrey Adams says:

It was in 1989 that some computer hackers were suspected of working with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Soviet KGB, to break into western defense computers. Through a link provided by the Chaos Computer Club, a group of German hackers — Karl Koch, aka "Hagbard;" Markus Hess, aka "Urmel;" Hans Heinrich Hubner, aka "Pengo;" and Dirk-Otto Brezinski, aka "DOB" – teamed up with hackers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and in Melbourne, Australia to penetrate U.S. military computers. It was Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory system administrator Clifford Stoll who first discovered the hackers’ portal into military computers — at the University of Bremen via the German DATEX-P network into Lawrence Berkeley via Tymnet and out into some 400 military computers from the Ramstein Airbase in Germany to Fort Buckner, Okinawa and the OPTIMIS database at the Pentagon. Koch, or "Hagbard," was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle, West Germany in 1989. Police ruled the death a suicide.

Melbourne, you say? What was the teen-age Assange doing then? And of course you can go back to Clifford Stoll's own book, the Cuckoo's Egg, and the film made of the story at the time, even before the modern Internet, about how a young computer scientist found hackers in government computers who were selling information to the KGB, and eventually, through persistence, persuaded US law-enforcement to catch them.

An interesting aspect of the Cuckoo's Egg gives us a clue as to how the KGB's successor in Russia today, the FSB or its sister agencies, could be doubling up on Snowden and checking his bona fides through their other existing moles in the NSA -- which as I theorized, could be how the Independent story could have happened:

The hacker's name was Markus Hess, and he had been engaged for some years in selling the results of his hacking to the Soviet KGB. There was ancillary proof of this when a Hungarian spy contacted the fictitious SDInet at LBL by mail, based on information he could only have obtained through Hess (apparently this was the KGB's method of double-checking to see if Hess was just making up the information he was selling them).

You can find references to these German hackers in the archives of the Internet's earliest forums.

Edward Snowden Partied with the Russians in Hong Kong on His 30th Birthday

Chinese Special Agents escort Edward Snowden from Honk Kong China to Moscow Russia. Collage by Rob Tom 2013.

This should clinch it about Snowden's early collaboration with the Kremlin -- the news is out now that Edward Snowden actually spent several days, i.e. overnight stays, in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, even celebrating his 30th birthday (June 21st) at the fashionable location. I guess they must have plied him with vodka.

The only reason he would be spending overnights in the Russian consulate is if he feared that in fact the Chinese might arrest him -- or the CIA might kidnap him? -- and needed the Russians' help.

Let's not forget that it was on June 11th -- just days after Glenn Greenwald published his first story in the Guardian from Snowden's stash stolen from the NSA -- that Vladimir Putin himself said he would consider Snowden's appeal for asylum in Russia. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman added that such statements "do not occur in the subjunctive". By that he meant evidently that it was a real consideration, with a yes or no, not a theoretical consideration. Or that it was a done deal.

Despite this obvious, blatant telegraphing that Putin, the wily old KGB agent, was welcoming Snowden with open arms using the legal cover of asylum-granting, there are people who still think that this doesn't mean anything, or that Putin isn't really sure, or that it was really some kind of open-ended process. Snort. Of course it wasn't. It was a giant COME HITHER.

There's a theory that the Chinese were nervous having Snowden on their territory and wanted to unload him on the Russians; but of course, it's possible that these two ancient antagonists cooperated together, against their mutual enemy, the United States.

Of course, Snowden, in his deliberately-deepened voice to impress girls, tells us with supreme geeky confidence that China isn't really our enemy, because our two peoples have so much trade together...you know, like the Chinese workers slaving away in Apple factories.... It's as if he has never read America the Vulnerable by Joel Brenner, which I'm reading now, or Vanity Fair's expose a few years ago about the appalling hacks by the Chinese government of our country. Wouldn't he have been required to know this in his job? To fight against it? To see it? How could he possibly talk like this after working years in intelligence? This lack of culture; this lack of understanding what and who the enemy is -- where does it come from?!

I said this clinched it, and many Russia-watchers think so -- but amazingly, it doesn't do that at all for some people who continue to see this as evidence that the US closed off all the exits. Snowden was only going to pass through Russia to Cuba, you see, but the Americans pressured Cuba into not letting him travel through their air space. There was that one Russian media report that Snowden was greeted by the Ecuadorean and Venezuelan diplomats on the tarmac at Sheremetyevo when he landed, and whisked away in their cards to one of their residences. That report has not appeared anywhere else and who knows if it is true.

But wait, there's no flights to Cuba from Hong Kong except through Russia? This entire problem with the air space and America couldn't have been ascertained from HK?

That is, if we are to believe it. And PS there's not a thing wrong with the US telling other countries that they should not permit a profound disrupter of their national security to go through their air space--the international system depends on such understandings and legalities.

The US also didn't do a thing wrong revoking Edward's passport the minute they realized he had committed treason and espionage -- and to expect a thing different is just naive. And again, the international system of the kind of sovereignty that Russia always insists on depends on this, and Russia would do no differently and has done exactly the same thing, numerous times before.

Business Insider is hyping all this, complete with references to Joshua Foust claiming that this "changes the game. What both of them are doing is distracting from WikiLeaks, Poitras, and Appelbaum, whom they never mention, and focusing on Snowden, as if the entire thing might all be pinned on him alone in the end.

It doesn't "dramatically" change the game because you can't get Russia or its allies or fellow-travellers to admit that -- yet -- because they can only use this to bolster their claim that Snowden was "forced" into their arms. Of course, Putin inviting Snowden to apply  for asylum on June 11th, Russian officials later saying he was "surprised" that Snowden came to them ought to let you know that the Russians lie like rugs. It's never enough for the fellow travelers, however.

Looking at the Kommersant story, I have some questions about all these chatty sources who made this story materialize at this juncture, for some reason.

The first source is said to be "a source close to Snowden" or literally "in Snowden's circle" or even "in Snowden's entourage".

По информации источника "Ъ" в окружении экс-сотрудника ЦРУ и АНБ Эдварда Сноудена

So who the hell is that? Sarah Harrison talks to Kommersant about what her charge is doing?

Or is it these mysterious "Americans" who were described as taking care of him by Kucherena in the Russian media when he left the airport? Is that John Robles? Why don't any US newspapers go after this story in Moscow?! I am mystified as to why we have not seen a single report coming out of Moscow about Snowden -- no efforts to get at his lawyer, no efforts to find information by trawling through the pro-Kremlin ex-pat community. Didn't anybody trail him from the airport?

This unamed source in his "circle" is the one who told Kommersant that Snowden spent his 30th birthday at the consulate -- so they must be in fact close enough to Snowden to spend his birthday with him, too. The Hong Kong lawyers deny knowing anything about this and it seems it is not them.

Is this in fact Sarah Harrison, trying to spin a line that makes it seem like the US blocked the exits and that he was "driven" into the arms of Putin? Does she not realize how it backfires and only shows that he was conniving with Russian intelligence way earlier than either he, Glenn Greenwald, or the Russians admitted?

But maybe she is merely following instructions from the wily Assange, and this is all part of the plot, which he thinks will work.

Now let's look at Kommersant's second source: Источник "Ъ" в российских госструктурах

This is somebody in government -- a government agency. This source says Snowden really was in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong but spent "only" two days there.

And this official emphasizes that Snowden himself came there, he was not invited.  He was said to show his ticket to Cuba, via Moscow on Aeroflot, and say that he planned to ask for asylum in Venezuela if he could make his way there.

Naturally we're all dying to know why this whole crew didn't START their excellent adventure by going FIRST to Caracas THEN leaking all their stuff. No one ever, ever explains that. Maybe, as Evgeny Morozov claims, it was because Snowden had "poor trip planning skills."

Snowden was said to tell the Russians that "due to his human rights activity his life was in danger" and asked for help, referencing the refugee convention.

This all sounds really fake to me. In the interviews with Snowden, such as they are, he doesn't speak of "human rights activity" -- it's not his lexicon. This sounds like the Russian government's formulation to try to make it look "universalized" as some international human rights issue -- and distract from the criminality of it, in an effort to make an annoying fake moral equivalence with Russian dissidents seeking asylum legitimately.

Somehow -- Kommersant doesn't press as to why -- this source claims that this story he is now telling about Snowden's prior relationship with Russia in Hong Kong doesn't contradict Putin's later claim that it all came as a complete surprise to him.

Kommersant recaps the time line:

June 9 -- Greenwald's first article based on Snowden's material

June 10 --  Snowden leaves his hotel in Hong Kong and disappears

June 11 -- Putin offers Snowden to apply for political asylum

June 13 -- US opens up a criminal case on charges of espionage against Snowden and warn countries not to accept him

June 15 -- British authorities bar his overflight and Iceland says it can only consider his application if he comes to their country

June 16 -- Hong Kong authorities say they would review US extradition request re: Snowden

June 20 -- US sends extradition request to Hong Kong

June 20 - Snowden goes to Russian consulate in Hong Kong; stays overnight.

June 21 - US revokes passport. Snowden's second day in consulate and his birthday.

June 23 - Snowden flies to Moscow without passport; press reports revocation.

Kommersant writes that presumably, during this time Snowden was at the home of a friend in Hong Kong, and Sarah Harrison from WikiLeaks joined him.

He met with his Hong Kong lawyers, and they said they didn't know if the government would act on the extradition request, but that they might arrest him while they reviewed it. They also said the authorities would not object if he just left the country.

This last detail doesn't seem to have been mentioned elsewhere in the press (although I could have missed it). That spurred Snowden to flee to the Russian consulate.

On that same day, i.e. on June 20th US time, or already June 21st Hong Kong time, while Snowden was at the Russian consulate overnight, the US revoked Snowden's passport.

So FIRST comes the extradition request; THEN the realization that China will not accept him; THEN the flight to the Russian consulate THEN pulling the passport.

Many people seem to forget that EIGHT DAYS passed between the time the US opened the criminal case (June 13) which came AFTER Putin's June 11th offer to apply for asylum -- as good as a signal that asylum would be granted, as it is not done frequently and this was at the level of the president.

Again, you wonder why they didn't plan this out ahead of time, because certainly Assange in particular has had lots of experience -- and time -- to study the ways in which countries can extradite you -- or not.

Kommersant cites "informed sources" that say Cuba was under US pressure not to admit Snowden and then cites "a source in the State Department" saying that a US warning did go to Cuba.

There was the chance to leave with the president of Bolivia, says Kommersant, but that way was closed off when most of the countries in the flight path rejected the request to pass through and a forced landing was made in Vienna. I'm still wondering if the news that Snowden was on that plane was in fact planted by Russian intelligence or WikiLeaks.

I just wish there was some journalism on this story. Somebody calling up MID and asking what kind of visa they have issued Sarah Harrison -- and from which institution, and for which purpose.

One positive thing about this latest story is that it has gotten BuzzFeed and some other media to take a second look at the Russian connection and to ask, really, why Snowden wound up in Moscow.

Whether they will do more to link up the dots remains to be seen.

 

 

 

 

 

Where Was Edward Snowden in March and April 2013?

A grinning Snowden answering a question about moles in the NSA in the film made by Laura Poitras released in May 2013.

In continuing to contemplate my compendium of material on Edward Snowden and his WikiLeaks enablers Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, I keep coming back to the question of what Snowden was doing in March-April 2013. As I noted in this post, when you contemplate the scenarios for the leak particularly at the Independent, the possibility opens up that his digital trail may have been discovered, and that the claim by the NSA source that he didn't leave a trail could be a false decoy; or only what those particular sources know -- and they may not know everything and may not be up to day.

Nuclear Diner has a concise but full timeline for Snowden personally and his co-conspirators. She writes:

March 2013: Poitras convinces Greenwald to listen to Snowden. Snowden joins Booz Allen Hamilton on work for NSA [link added 2].  [2] Reuters says this was in April, with training sessions for “a week or two” at Fort Meade, Maryland.  [2]

Late March or early April, 2013: Greenwald begins communicating directly with Snowden.

April 2013: Snowden is assigned to an NSA facility in Hawaii.  [2]

In my compendium, I wrote:

Snowden first came to Hawaii to work for Dell. Then he left Dell to go to Booz Allen Hamilton where he worked less than three months as BAH tells us in a terse statement on their web site after these events.

The Times is the only source I've seen (correct me if I'm wrong) that posits a segue between Dell and BAH where his hacking for the ultimate great revelation starts at Dell, and gives him reason then to move to BAH. The Times writes:

In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of “Windows infrastructure” in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen

And as I noted in my post about the hackers converging in Hawaii from dredging up Snowden's pole-dancing girlfriend's blog from April 1, about Edward's flight on Saturday, March 30:

Flight was the theme of my weekend. Okay, who am I kidding? Flight is the theme of nearly all my recent days. Maybe I just have hollow bones! E flew off Saturday evening giving me six hours to kill before I had to pick up DucatiD from the airport. Luckily Hawaii has good food and friends to pass the time. With E soaring through the sky and friends dropped off, I snuggled to sleep in my empty home. Only to start Sunday circus with another airport pickup — taxi license in my future?

Remember, as the South China Morning Post originally reported,  Snowden joined Booz, Hamilton Allen in March 2013 deliberately to hack more?

Then in the next entry, Snowden's girlfriend writes:

Just me and turtle for the next week or two. If you don’t have a house turtle I highly recommend procuring one. They are comforting and make a house feel like a home. And I will surely need his snuggle powers this month with all that is going down. April is turning into spring cleaning on crack — houses, travel, relationships — and the month hasn’t even begun! E is leaving tomorrow for two weeks of business on the mainland. If you know of any fun slumber parties going down over the next two weeks count me in! There may be a ticket to the east coast with my name on it somewhere in those two weeks or potentially later in April/early May (you know I’m a last minute decider). On top of mainland adventures there is this pesky task of moving.

So these two entries indicate "business on the mainland" -- not a trip to Maui. Yet he might have combined both, and not told her. There's also her own reference to a trip to Maui as well -- but that's not until an entry on September 21.

As we know, the hackers' crew were in Maui in late March/early April. We know that Jacob Appelbaum and his friends Moxie Marlinspike and Christine Corbett were all in Maui, and possibly Poitras (the journalist referenced in the diary -- or that might have been Xeni Jardin) and others.

Did they meet?

The Spring Break of Code organized rather hastily starting in January 2013 (when Snowden first made contact with Poitras) by Moxie Marlingspike ran from March 23 to March 31.

Appelbaum tweeted (and later mentioned in his speech in Berlin trying to create the alibi for the coincidence) that his friends treated him to a trip to Hawaii for his birthday, which is April 3. Obviously, he did get to Hawaii before his birthday because he tweeted about diving on March 30;  we know that the Spring Break of Code attendees overlapped with Appelbaum because of Claudine Colbert's instagram picture of Appelbaum in Hawaii on April 6 amidst exotic flora.

People joke (or?) about his cutting underseas Internet cables and of course there is his cryptic comment, "Subsurface 3.0.2-79-g218fd994eea9".  Maybe this is a geocode and maybe somebody smarter than me can get it to work here or someplace like this

Having witnessed myself in person at the Whitney Museum how Appelbaum distributed a list of coordinates where one could find NSA cables (!) and presumably disable them, maybe he was looking for one!

In any event, there were a few days when Snowden and Appelbaum could have overlapped -- a day or two. I hope the people investigating all this are checking his departures and arrivals carefully...

What was most likely on the mainland in Ft. Meade (the location of the NSA) was some kind of orientation or training.

As we know if we were paying attention, the feds were hunting for Snowden even before he published his article because Booz, Allen evidently reported him missing. But what would make them report his disappearance to the NSA, unless they had also found evidence of his hacking? Would someone who left on sick leave automatically trigger a fear of a security breech by the fact of their being missing alone?

And why the need to go missing, anyway? That is the mystery to me. If we posit that there is a conspiracy, and Snowden went and joined BHA in order to hack better and hack more according to a wish list either of his own making or given to him by Greenwald, Poitras or Appelbaum, singly or together, then why would he risk the entire thing by disappearing -- and then showing up in Hong Kong and publicizing himself?

People speculating about this on hackers' forums often say that they think he feared he would be killed by the CIA/NSA or the Illuminati or WHOEVER, and that's why he decided to go public.

Reuters reports the following about this period:

Snowden already had a Top Secret clearance before he joined Booz Allen in April, two sources said, adding that he likely obtained that clearance - which involves passing a polygraph exam - when he previously worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

For his first week or two with Booz Allen, Snowden attended training sessions near Fort Meade, the Maryland military installation where NSA headquarters is located and where numerous agency contractors have offices.

After that, Snowden moved to take up his assignment with a company team based at the NSA installation in Hawaii. He was only on the job for around four weeks when he told his employers he was ill and requested leave without pay, the sources said.

In each case this trip is described, it is always "week or two". His girlfriend says "week or two". Reuters says "week or two". Why aren't they precise?

Is it because he made two trips -- one clandestinely to contact Appelbaum and other hackers in Maui, and the other as part of his official emploment training, to Ft. Meade on the mainland?

Why does this matter?

Well, now that we know that Snowden contacted the Russians much earlier than when was originally reported (by Greenwald, Poitras, and Appelbaum, none of whom mentioned this at all in any of their reports), it's possible there are earlier meetings among all or any of them.

And the reason that matters is not only because if they lie or omit facts about one thing, they can do it about lots of other things; what matters is that they may have created a wishlist for Snowden to hack. Greenwald might not have had an informed opinion about what would be useful to hack, but Appelbaum would, and then Greenwald could have commented on whether a news story could be made out of it or not.

What they needed, obviously, from the perspective of their movement's imperative (the movement to attack what they viewed as "the surveillance state") was evidence that the NSA spied directly on citizens for no good reason. They have not yet shown this. But they have created the impression that they have shown this by having Greenwald put out story after story that sounds as if the NSA reads your mail indiscriminately. Actually, they haven't been able to prove this, and certainly have no cases. Screening of cell phone call metadata or keyword searches even through held overseas Internet traffic is not that.

Would they have bent over backward not to seem as if they were directing him, so as not to look like the co-conspirators they look like now? I think Appelbaum wouldn't have bothered because he is extreme, and also more than any of them lives in a virtual world; next after him in radicalism and virtuality comes Poitras. Greenwald is savvy and a lawyer and knows how to lawfare his way out of any tight situation and would always try to maintain that plausible deniability required.

If journalists were really pursuing this story properly, they would be trying to get information now out of BHA as to what the dates were of their training or orientation for Snowden, and whether they found a digital audit of his leaking.

They would be trying to get the airlines to talk or be at least checking flight times and trying to see if they could find any other intersections between Appelbaum and Snowden.

Knowing how much Poitras relied on Appelbaum for encryption stuff, I can't believe she didn't let him in on the secret of Snowden immediately; indeed, she has implicated him by saying in interviews that he helped her with the comms involved in maintaining contact with Snowden and getting his stuff out.

And the reason I think they did meet before they broke their own story, and met in Hawaii, is because I think they needed to have a face-to-face meeting to make sure Snowden was the real thing.

Maybe Jake had to sit with Ed at a laptop and watch him use his credentials to log on to the NSA's servers to believe him.  It's not like he could say, "Go on Team Viewer and let me watch you hack the NSA's servers."

Or was the sojourn at BHA merely planned all along as something very short to get in and out and get what had already been identified to take?

But what happened? Why did he have to go AWOL and only create more suspicion, then flea to Hong Kong? Reuters reported this:

When Booz Allen checked in with him, Snowden said he was suffering from epilepsy and needed more time off. When he failed to return after a longer period, and the company could not find him, it notified intelligence officials because of Snowden's high-level security clearance, one of the sources said.

Back in June, Politico's Josh Gerstein reported that Gen. Alexander said in a briefing that Snowden obtained the information about the FISA court and Verizon and the metaday from his training in Hawaii, at the Threat Operations Center, from a special server there -- not from training in Ft. Meade (as originally incorrectly reported). That was the very first story that Greenwald ran. Did he or any of the others know that access to this information became available during trainings, and that was the time to grab it?

 

Related articles

Where is the Rest of Edward Snowden's Online Footprint?

Jacob Appelbaum's Data Trail

Surf's Up or What's Up: Hacker Convergences in Hawaii

Another Scenario for Snowden's Documents at The Independent

Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

Unicorns and Rainbows and Edward Snowden?

Snowden, at Dell, saw NSA's reach earlier than previously thought

Snowden Reportedly Downloaded NSA Secrets While Working At Dell

Kaepora Goes to New America Foundation

Photo of Nadim Kobeissi, August 3, 2013, by Quinn Norton, Aaron Swartz's ex-girlfriend, who writes, "And now, @kaepora revealed: brain controled cat ears & burning demon eyes".

Good Lord, @kaepora is now an advisor to the New America Foundation (joining a cast of "progressives" that formerly included net-de-deluder Evgeny Morozov and still includes darknet devotee Rebecca McKinnon). He now writes on his Twitter profile, "OpenITP Special Advisor at the New America Foundation". That's not staff or even a fellow but "special advisor" (like a consultant) but it means he can use the affiliation everywhere to further legitimize himself. It's not the first time that people from the hacker movement have sought positions in left or liberal foundations or nonprofits so that they can mainstream their radicalism.

Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) is the Lebanon-born boy wonder (he emigrated to Montreal four years ago) who burst on the hacking scene some years ago with a magic encrypted chat program called Cryptocat that at first some crypto kids were enthralled with, but then began to be taken apart and criticizied as full of holes, enabling a view of all the group chat for the previous year. He has constantly fended off critics, and likely has become stronger for it.

Bruce Schneier, whom I call an anti-security expert because he's constantly in fact minimizing cyberwar and terrorism and undermining the government's efforts to fight them (and not surprisingly, has now joined EFF), tore Cryptocat apart here -- on the basis of others' trashing -- a year ago. That whole discussion there is a good bird's eye view on all the crypto arguments and why they are always pecking each others' eyes out and why, well, if you really want something secret, you should not go on the Internet at all with it.

The Wired editor's very long comeback against Schneier (and Chris Soghoian, who also weighed in witheringly against both Kobeissi and Quinn Norton, who penned the glowing repport on his Cryptocat) is very telling: it shows you how there are hackers' hackers, and then hackers' hackers' hackers...or something. The older generation of experts and the newer generation coming of age around WikiLeaks and Aaron Swartz and Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden -- even more wild than their predecessors. It's kind of like what happened to Haystack -- in the hands of Evgeny Morozov.

Now that lavabit closed down, and Tor was so exposed (half its nodes taken down and purple dye injected into it to show who all the users were via their browsers downloaded from the Tor browser bundle), I've been wondering if all the cool kids, including Edward Snowden, have moved to Cryptocat. Cryptocat isn't the only encrypted chat program out there -- there are bunches as you can see from his talk (video below) but it's one that the cool kids use because it has cat stuff, see.

Nadim continues to heckle Jacob Appelbaum, his rival (developer of Tor and WikiLeaks representative in America, er, now Germany) on Liberationtech, the Stanford University mailing list. He continued so aggressively that finally the moderator, who is always policing speech on this, um, Internet freedom list, made more draconian speech rules to shut him up.

Basically, Kaepora was accusing Appelbaum of poor management of his circumvention software, since so many users got nailed with it, including activists in dangerous places -- they got exposed along with the child pornographers.

Now, speaking of child pornography, there was a scandal more than a year ago in which Kaepora himself was accused of enabling child pornography through negligence and indifference related to a website he was said to control.

Those bringing this to light were LibertyLynx, a pseudonomyous persona on Twitter who writes mainly about Russia and foreign policy but also follows the hacker movement and @PGPBOARD (Alan Taylor who is a major WikiLeaks'  critic and maintains a running polemics and alternative to their manipulated news). You can still see some evidence of this scandal here and here, but Nadim threatened them with libel suits or abuse reports or something at the time, and they had to take down the pages. You can still more or less pick out the alleged story here -- but I have no idea of its reliability.

At one point LibertyLynx even believed that Kaepora might stand for "KP" which is the term for "kiddie porn" on the Internet. But it's more likely taken from Zelda's Kaepora Gaebora. I don't know if he himself has ever commented on the origin of his name.

What does this boil down to? It's quite possible that a very young, 20-something enthusiastic radical coder neglected his housekeeping duties on some server and/or looked the other way while it was misused by child pornographers. The reality is, as with Tor and Appelbaum, they don't care; in fact, we have to go back to our own US military for this "don't care" attitude about what clutters up and infests servers because they feel they need this sort of thing as "cover" to do...whatever it is that they do.

Is the world a safer place now that Kaepora has a "real job" and is off the streets?

No. Because now he has all of the Soros funding and other liberal funding keeping the NAF afloat on its mission to minimize Putin, terrorism, hacking, and espionage -- just read all the NAF authors and you'll see what it's about. Don't forget that the chairman of the board of NAF now is Eric Shmidt, the executive chairman of Google; power-tweeter Anne Marie Slaughter is going to become the president of NAF (and she may have talent-spotted @kaepora on Twitter if Rebecca McKinnon didn't).

What can we expect Kaepora to do at NAF?

Well, with more institutional backing and funding, do what he essentially did to get stopped at the Canadian-US border -- make encryption that the NSA and other intelligence agencies can't get at.

Here's how Wikipedia described this:

Kobeissi was detained and questioned at the U.S. border by the DHS in June 2012 about Cryptocat's censorship resistance. He tweeted about the incident afterwards, resulting in media coverage and a spike in the popularity of Cryptocat.[22][23] Kobeissi was regularly searched and questioned whenever he flew in the U.S. in 2012.[24]

In 2012, the FBI attempted to entrap Kobeissi using Sabu – an American hacker involved with LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous – as an undercover informant.[25] Kobeissi responded on his blog: "To all young hackers out there – use your talents for research. Never acquiesce to anything illegal with anyone, even if they do it with you."[26]

Oops. #fail as they say.

You can catch up with Kaepora's thinking at the News from YCombinator page, which is always a good place to go and see what all the young hackers are saying about other hackers. Here's an interesting comment about the Miranda arrest under his name "magicpike":

Why hasn't anyone considered that David Miranda's detention could have been orchestrated in order to radicalize Glenn Greenwald, to bring him to "full froth", so to speak? Make him angry, make it personal by abusing his husband, so that his reporting becomes more emotional to the point where he starts risking his legitimacy and moral authority as a journalist. Something very similar happened with WikiLeaks.

I know Glenn and I'm certain he's smarter than this, but this is an explanation I've had in my head since day one and everyone seems to have missed. And, at least for the first couple of days, Glenn certainly did appear quite frustrated and did say he'll publish more aggressively. But isn't acting like this playing into their hands, by giving up his legitimacy as an impartial journalist? He must not allow them to make it a personal fight between him and the NSA.

Well, gosh.

I'll note why I didn't think of this: because, well, Glenn is already radical and frothing anyway.

I wondered, as did others, if he in fact stage-managed the entire caper to trip-wire British intelligence into arresting his husband-mule to better appear the victim and gain sympathy -- and make Her Majesty's Government look the fool.  And I also wondered if he did this to distract from some other muling caper out of Germany, involving Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras -- which as a result, we never noticed.

The appearance of a story seeming to come from the Snowden stash in the Independent then made it seem as if somehow British intelligence or Russian intelligence had Snowden files they were leaking, and now Greenwald was being put off balance. He threatened -- yes, indeed he did, despite his back-tracking later -- to deliberatley release UK stuff to get back at the British, and then this story came out in the Independent -- that he swears he didn't leak. Maybe they're just playing with his head now.

In any event, you'll want to continue to follow all the pearls of wisdom that come out from Kaepora even more now, like this notion that CFAA interpretations now make use of Tor in the US illegal.

It's terrible that the only way we get a critique of Tor is by having an equally creepy-crypto kid attack it -- so that it gets like the Cat 'n the Hat in your house, you need someone else to finally clean up after him before Mom gets home.

Kaepora thinks counterintelligence should be taught in journalism schools -- you need to chat on Cryptocat or GibberBot or other systems where "even the server can't see you talk" (and I'd like a second opinion on that)

 

Which makes Kaepora and everything he is allied with, well, a conspiratorial clandestine movement.

One thing I really hate about all these people's notions is that unless you slavishly follow their dickish little ideas about what is properly encrypted -- and you can see they all disagree and tear each others' eyes out -- you are harming your client, your source, your customer, your relative -- whomever you are trying to protect from encrypted chat or emails.

And that's just putting WAY too much power and trust into an artifact of technology -- and worse, its coder. No coder or piece of technology deserves such trust -- ever.

If you have a social movement that depends solely on encryption to succeed, then you don't have a social movement, you have a conspiracy and a clandestine partisan movement. It can't succeed when it is so dependent on encryption. It is antithetical to the open society you are ostensibly trying to build.

 

How Did Snowden Really Do It?

NSA HQ. Photo by octal, 2007.

NBC Investigations has a story, How Snowden Did It by Richard Esposito and Matthew Cole which is probably the most detailed story to date on the mechanics of Snowden's hack (and thank you, NBC, for continuing to care about the whys and wherefores of Snowden himself and his hacking itself instead of just promoting the fake "national conversation" on how much America should expose its secrets in a hostile world):

When Edward Snowden stole the crown jewels of the National Security Agency, he didn’t need to use any sophisticated devices or software or go around any computer firewall.

All he needed, said multiple intelligence community sources, was a few thumb drives and the willingness to exploit a gaping hole in an antiquated security system to rummage at will through the NSA’s servers and take 20,000 documents without leaving a trace.

“It’s 2013 and the NSA is stuck in 2003 technology,” said an intelligence official.

When journalists use an expression like "an intelligence official," do they mean one in the NSA right now, in place? I don't think so. It could mean another agency or Congress, couldn't it?

This story appears to have different sources than the August 20 story also by the same NBC reporters plus Michael Isikoff about Snowden not leaving a trail. The August 20 story is sourced to two separate individuals "who were briefed," i.e. not necessarily in the NSA but perhaps in Congress; the August 26 story is sourced similarly not to actual NSA officials but to "intelligence community sources" which could mean almost anything; and most of the speculation for how Snowden "didn't hack" comes from Jack Healy, a former Bush administration cybersecurity expert; and "a person briefed on the postmortem of Snowden’s theft" is the one describing Snowden as a "ghost" (the fake name Aaron Swartz used to log on unlawfully to MIT's computers to hack JSTOR, remember?)

Using these sources, NBC says Snowden had direct access through a "thin client":

In a “thin client” system, each remote computer is essentially a glorified monitor, with most of the computing power in the central server. The individual computers tend to be assigned to specific individuals, and access for most users can be limited to specific types of files based on a user profile.

But Snowden was not most users. A typical NSA worker has a “top secret” security clearance, which gives access to most, but not all, classified information. Snowden also had the enhanced privileges of a “system administrator.” The NSA, which has as many as 40,000 employees, has 1,000 system administrators, most of them contractors.

As a system administrator, Snowden was allowed to look at any file he wanted, and his actions were largely unaudited. “At certain levels, you are the audit,” said an intelligence official.

He was also able to access NSAnet, the agency’s intranet, without leaving any signature, said a person briefed on the postmortem of Snowden’s theft. He was essentially a “ghost user,” said the source, making it difficult to trace when he signed on or what files he accessed.

If he wanted, he would even have been able to pose as any other user with access to NSAnet, said the source.

I definitely want a second opinion on this.  This NBC report is as good as it gets now -- in part because nobody else is bothering to follow up on Snowden's hacking, but are too busy fretting about the government's alleged intrusive spying. But the sources are merely officials briefed about the Snowden story, not inside the NSA. They  may have an educated opinion, but it's only an opinion.

The NBC reporters makes the point that 5,000 miles away in Hawaii on a different time zone, Snowden can hack more easily because he is working after hours for the people in Maryland, and they can't see him using thumb drives in what is supposed to be an air gap only available to properly authorized administrators.

 I'm having trouble believing that even someone logging on as systems administrator doesn't have an audit trial -- knowing of the deep suspicion geeks hold for other geeks, and knowing how this is standard in many office systems and would likely be much more the case in a spy agency.

Then there's this, from the August 20 story:

NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas. By using a “thin client” computer he remotely accessed the NSA data from his base in Hawaii.

One U.S. intelligence official said government officials “are overwhelmed" trying to account for what Snowden took. Another said that the NSA has a poor audit capability, which is frustrating efforts to complete a damage assessment.

Appearing at the Aspen Security Forum on July 18, NSA Director Alexander responded "Yes" when NBC News correspondent Pete Williams asked, "Do you feel you now know what (Snowden) got?" Asked "Was it a lot?", Alexander again said, "Yes."

The NSA had to walk back this cat, as they keep having to do with journos playing "gotcha":

On Tuesday, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said Alexander's Aspen answer was not intended as "a hard, 'We know everything, completely,' answer to Williams' question."

"He did not say the assessment had been completed in absolute terms," Vines added in an email. "The Director answered a question about his general sense."

So please tell me how they went from having a general sense of what he took, to "not knowing" what he took, in this story alone. Just doesn't track.

Yes, this points to the "wikification of everything" as being the cause of this, too, like Manning's hack. Didn't they make sure, when they wikified, to make the audit trails even stronger?

Remember, this goes back to geeks in the USG getting religion about Wikipedia and wikis of all kinds at Wikimania, which was in Boston in 2006, when Wikipedia hackers turned them on to this drug.

If you read the story from the Independent, you will see this wiki issue also crop up again:

The Middle East installation is regarded as particularly valuable by the British and Americans because it can access submarine cables passing through the region. All of the messages and data passed back and forth on the cables is copied into giant computer storage “buffers” and then sifted for data of special interest.

Information about the project was contained in 50,000 GCHQ documents that Mr Snowden downloaded during 2012. Many of them came from an internal Wikipedia-style information site called GC-Wiki. Unlike the public Wikipedia, GCHQ’s wiki was generally classified Top Secret  or above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Scenario for Snowden's Documents at The Independent

The appearance in The Independent of material that purported to be leaked by defector Edward Snowden -- and his purported denial that it came from him -- have opened up new avenues of speculation around this whole series of events originally contrived by WikiLeaks (Julian Assange).

Joshua Foust is one of those close to intelligence circles (he now always describes himself as "journalist and former defense contractor, particularly after a mini-scandal questioning his lack of disclosures) who is saying there could be "three reasons" for this:

• Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, or David Miranda handed them to the Independent.
• The UK leaked its own compartmented espionage program, exposing and thus nullifying its effectiveness, to “discredit” somehow a guy who has already leaked and therefore damaged other programs.
• A new party, unknown to us, also has control of said documents and is spreading them to new outlets. This would also imply that, contrary to their constant public assertions, Team Greenwald-Poitras has lost control of their cache of source material.

He could have mentioned encryption and circumvention expert Jacob Appelbaum as involved in any of this; he doesn't.

Of course, Foust is not to be trusted as I've written many times, and his analysis can often be designed merely to dissemble or distract. It's very hard to get the Washington think-tank establishment or the various existing or former intelligence and defense types to second-guess him or even contradict him, because too much of "the honour of uniform" is at stake when it comes to this social hacker (he knows how to speak their language, work the memes, and "pass.")

So while anyone could come up with those three reasons, it's important to go beyond them.

Another obvious scenario is that just as Dell has come up with a digital trail showing Snowden stole documents more than a year ago (a fact simply being ignored by all the journalists so enthralled with Snowden), so the NSA (or Booz, Hamilton, Allen, where he worked) may have come up with more of Snowden's digital trail, and is now in a position to selectively leak from it themselves.

Thus, precisely because the NSA now knows what Snowden hacked -- or some of what he hacked, such as even to discuss "50,000 documents," with the help of British intelligence, they can now selectively leak some of his materials as a kind of "fire suppression" technique, fighting fire with other fire.  They can do this directly or through "trusted usually reliable sources" with whom the Independent dealt. Notice that this "hot" item they leaked is a nothing -- it doesn't tell you what this Middle Eastern listening post did, or what it heard. That British intelligence has a listening post in the Middle East is hardly a surprise or a secret. So they could let this one go (and possibly there were other internecine warfare skirmishes involved, knowing how some Brits loathe Israel and will do anything to embarass or stop it).

So perhaps by now they've found Snowden's trail of bread-crumbs. If there's one thing that geeks hate and mistrust, it's their fellow geeks. And so most systems track what other systems managers do when they log on, and they lock out and block and/or punish relentlessly the unauthorized (even MIT had to do this with Aaron Swartz). To be sure, the US military didn't do that in Iraq with Chelsea Manning when she was hacking back in the day, but then, the US military hasn't learned how to be enough of a geek (and that's possibly a good thing).

But the NSA is filled with geeks and surely they know how to make digital trails such as to prevent mere contractors from logging on and having their way with systems and even proclaim boldly that they can sit at their desks and hack even the president of the United States if they want, without being stopped or detected.

That's not something I believe, because I think the checks and authorizations needed for such a thing, even for "infrastructure analysts" who have a top-down view of the system as a whole, can't just do that.  Of course, sometimes people even in secret institutions are stupid enough to use passwords like "guest' or "password" or "12345".

HOWEVER, just in time to disprove this theory for another scenario of mine, along comes this story, Edward Snowden's Digital Maneuvers Still Stumping US Government.

The U.S. government's efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden's sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.

The government's forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden's apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.

Hmm. It's funny how the same liberal press that tells us every other minute how "the government lies" and everybody in this story from Clapper to Obama is "misleading the American people," when it comes to a classical secret policeman's distraction maneuver like "we have no idea what they took," they report it as if it were true, without question. And they really have no choice, because they really have no other way of finding out, unless Jacob Appelbaum or Snowden himself talks.

You'll notice Snowden never talks on his own, however. From the very beginning of this story, he has only talked while surrounded by WikiLeaks operatives, reading from a paper, and only made statements through Assange, Poitras and Appelbaum, or Greenwald, never on his own.

You do have to wonder how Snowden can make a statement to discount the Independent's publication as "not his," or make a statement discounting the Washington lawyers and his father as part of a "tragic vacuum," yet never talk any other times or say anything else or answer the millions of questions people have, like "Why didn't you just go to Venezuela from the get-go and leak from there instead of ending up in the arms of Putin?"

And it's hard to imagine any scenario of Snowden's secret comms from Russia. What, Sarah had a miniature ham radio up her dress that she was able to get past not only customs but the intense scrutiny of the GRU ever since they landed? She's -- what -- able to go out in the forest and tune into some secret frequency and broadcast encrypted messages to London? Moving every time like a partisan in the woods to avoid detection?

Because any Internet connection will be monitored three ways from Sunday. We have to figure such Internet connection is controlled and rationed, because Snowden never says anything -- except supposedly through these other people like Greenwald, occasionally.

You know, how quickly the stampeding journalistic corps forgets the early days of the Snowden story. (And I missed this myself while in the midst of a family emergency.) Did you know that the feds knew Snowden was going to be breaking bad BEFORE Greenwald's article appeared in the Guardian?

According to this Reuters story:

U.S. government investigators began an urgent search for Edward Snowden several days before the first media reports were published on the government's secret surveillance programs, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Snowden, who has admitted to providing details of the top-secret programs, had worked on assignment at a Hawaii facility run by the National Security Agency for about four weeks before he said he was ill and requested leave without pay, according to the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Somehow, I don't think it was merely Snowden's MIA status that triggered the hunt. I think the digital trial of him making unauthorized access could have made the hunt more urgent.

Of course, it's always worth asking once again: why the strange absence in the first place? If Snowden had been hacking for a year, as we now know from Dell, and had contacted Poitras, Appelbaum and Greenwald already for some months, and maybe many more than they admit, why the sudden need to go missing, making up a story about epilepsy treatment? Why not stay in place and keep quiet?

At the very least, why not run to Venezuela or Ecuador first, the places where you actually have a chance of getting asylum, instead of lurching first to China and then Russia -- moves that only discredit your cause by pushing you into the arms of certain hostile intelligence agencies? This has never been explained at all by Greenwald and co. and it is one of the weakest parts of their story. What was the rush? What was the stumbling (if that's what it was) all about? What precipitated it?

And the answer is: the digital trail being discovered, and somebody, possibly a fellow sympathizer, tipping off Snowden to this fact. This could be any think from merely a drinking buddy in the next cubicle to the FSB's other agents in the NSA.

And we know it's a practice of Russian intelligence to double up on their defecting agents by having their other agents check to see if what they are stealing is authentic, going over their supposed trails (I will return to this point in the next post). Obviously, Snowden isn't the only party out there trying to penetrate the NSA. There are numerous others, some still trying, some already in, some foreigners, some insiders. Any one of those operatives could have tipped off Snowden about his digital audit finally ringing alarm bells. (So yes, there's yet another scenario besides the NSA discovering his digital audit; the Kremlin's moles could discover it.)

Reuters carps indignantly about the intelligence sources' yarn:

The disclosure undermines the Obama administration's assurances to Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can't be abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA's own tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or contractors could do the same?

But it answers its own question. Other moles could tip off Snowden that now they were hunting for him in earnest inside the system -- and they already found trip wires snipped.

Or -- more mundanely -- the NSA's digital auditing systems work, and do show the purple dye where Snowden has been poking around, but it just takes awhile, or has to be replicated, like all geek bug things.

It's curious that he had to leave this job for unpaid leave in order to accomplish the hack or the hand-off to Poitras, Appelbaum and Greenwald. He could have done this at any time, while still in place. To be sure, encrypting comms and getting files to safe encrypted servers isn't always easy and there's always the "human factor" where things mess up.

But there really isn't an explanation for why he has to first disappear to do this -- unless something happened to tip him off to them knowing that he was hacking. So my bet is that the digital audit began glowing red at BHA or NSA or both and he was tipped off, and that's why things got rushed (and possibly mistakes got made).

Yes, it's my view that Greenwald and his WikiLeaks co-conspirators are part of a larger war against the NSA with other actors, and themselves were timing this whole NSA caper to distract from Manning's trial, where they knew she would confess and express regret, and where other people might be implicated and her cause exposed as really illegitimate, except for only a radical movement of fanboyz in Anonymous or around Firedog Lake, the Nation, and Democracy Now. Ultimately, the message Manning's trial conveyed was one of failure and defeat, and "the movement" needed another pump-up quick. Snowden was it.

 

 

 

 

 

How You Shouldn't Talk When You Tweet for a Brand Like Carnegie

1. Alexis C. Madrigal ‏@alexismadrigal 6h

   On the parallels between spreading literacy and spreading Internet, the Facebook way. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/spreading-literacy-spreading-internet/279007/ … by @philnichols

   Details
2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

   @alexismadrigal @carnegiePI @philnichols Translation: "Zuckerberg isn't going to spread collectivist political ideology we prefer"

   Details
3. Policy Innovations ‏@carnegiePI 5h

   @catfitz @alexismadrigal @philnichols Pardon my thickness but who is the "we" in that translation?

   Details
4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 5h

   @carnegiePI the "we" is @alexismadrigal @philnichols

   Details
5. Policy Innovations ‏@carnegiePI 4h

   @catfitz @alexismadrigal @philnichols Those good for nothin' collectivists! Surprised they have time to blog. Should be repairing tractors!

   Details
6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 3h

   @carnegiePI Did u ever stop to wonder (in ur limited education) why Nazism is never ridiculed but condemned yet communism is met w laughs?

   Details
7. Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 2h

   @catfitz Your collectivist jab in the dark... A strange way to open a conversation.

   Details
8. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 41m

   @evanoneil Hardly "in the dark". I've been debating those 2 for years. I know exactly what they're about and why they're bitching abt FB.

   Details
9. Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 40m

   @catfitz Ok, well please don't loop me into that.

   Details
10. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 15m

    @evanoneil Shield your eyes, big guy.

    Details

Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil

@catfitz Alright, Prokofy. Now yer just trollin' ... get that Stoli out of the freezer and have yourself a good relax.

8:05 PM - 23 Aug 13

1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1m

   @evanoneil Did you imagine you've "discovered" some sort of "secret link" to my avatar? You'll have to work harder. http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/google_witch_hunters.html …

   Details
2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 59s

   @evanoneil No one at Carnegie should be talking like that to the public, it's really bad for your image.
3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 14s

   @evanoneil "Trolling" is always what insolent narrow-minded types like you invoke when anyone seriously debates your lame ideas.

1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

   @evanoneil And here's the thing. I *am* a large woman. Whereas you are not a big guy, really.

   Expand
2. Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 1h

   @catfitz Well, I hope you weren't offended by my absurdity. I wasn't by your snide barb, just the fact you felt the need to use it.

   Expand
3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 58m

   @evanoneil Let's go back to your *pure assholery* in saying "don't loop me in on that* like a total *douche* okay? Are we done now?

   Expand
4. Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 45m

   @catfitz Fictions, all! I said "please" don't loop me in, and I meant it. I don't wish to be included in your Bolshevik witch hunt.

6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 2h @evanoneil Shield your eyes, big guy.

2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

   @evanoneil "Trolling" is always what insolent narrow-minded types like you invoke when anyone seriously debates your lame ideas.

   Expand
3. Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 1h

   @catfitz No, large woman. Time to abandon the fairy tale. Trolling is what rude people do *instead* of using judgment, conversing.

   Expand
4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

   @evanoneil And here's the thing. I *am* a large woman. Whereas you are not a big guy, really.

   Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 1h @catfitz Well, I hope you weren't offended by my absurdity. I wasn't by your snide barb, just the fact you felt the need to use it.

2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 41m

   @evanoneil Let's see. I criticize techno-progs for their hate on FB's more centrist position. All of a sudden this is Bolshevik witch hunt?!

   Expand
3. Evan O'Neil ‏@evanoneil 19m

   @catfitz I'm sorry we got off on a bad tangent, I really am. But one (maybe bad) joke about a tractor does not warrant a barrage of insults.

   
   
4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10m

   @evanoneil Um, you need to review your rude TL, slams abt having an avatar (?!), claims of Bolshevik witch hunts, etc. You're ridiculous.
5. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 8m

   @evanoneil Calling you "big guy" is hardly much of an "insult". Repeated use of "large woman" is creepy. Oh, well. You are a small man.

"A Family of Monkeys Raids the Banana Trees and Engages in Shrieking Battles with Dogs"

Photo by Enygmatic-Halycon

I tweeted a lot already about Peter Maass's story in the New York Times magazine about Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden so you can read my timeline, but let me reflect some more.

It's sickening to me to see how many people who should know better think that this story is about some grand heroine, some Joan of Arc who is taking the veil from the eyes of the American people so they see the dastardly crimes of their evil government "done in their name," blah blah.

This entire saga seems so contrived to me -- so fake, so manipulated, so hysterical, so very Second Life, that I simply cannot find a single thing wrong with a single "revelation". So the NSA took metadata about Verizon business phone calls. So, nu? They had a big phone book of everybody's cell phones (you can't get those like you can for land lines!) and who they called, and they scanned them to see if they matched info about criminals. Good! They scanned overseas fiber optic cables for metadata and dipped in when they had a warrant. Good! They made 2700 mistakes or errors and unlawfully dredged content they shouldn't have. Good, the system works, it knows right from wrong, somebody is watching.

I'm just not going to chime in with this "we need a national conversation" stuff that everyone is repeating like zombies because...I remember where that phrase came from. It comes from the socialist movements. Back in the 1980s, when the Socialist Scholars conferences and DSA meetings and union hall meetings and peace movement meetings were all being held in New York -- and I attended them -- I would always hear this same concept.

"We need a national conversation on X." This was fake. This was part of the entire stealth-socialism gimmick and contrivance whereby failed socialists who couldn't win elections and couldn't get the American people to believe in their ideals would break up their agenda into "single issues". Then they'd plug those single issues, as if they only cared about child care or health or education or women's rights as "ordinary people". Meanwhile, they'd be plotting and planning to "put over" what amounted to "the party line" conceived up by the comrades. It really annoyed me -- and today it appalls me when I see Obama and his cronies doing the same thing.

The conversation in this case was coerced and forced by a hack -- an anarchist hack meant to bring US security to its knees, hatched by WikiLeaks with the help of the Russian government. That's not a conversation, that's a self-criticism circle with the fear of firing or jailing if you don't toe the Party line.

The idea that Obama has now "validated" Snowden -- Assange's cunning and malevolent contention -- is really sickening. In fact, I think Obama *is* doing this because I think quite frankly, Obama is happy to have some outside force batter at the forces of the military and intelligence that he never quite got comfortable with or got control over (the fact that at first he kept the same people as Bush had was quite telling). There are times that I think that if Obama isn't in on this, he's at least facilitating it. It's all really disturbing.

I used to think, when I encountered the griefers and hackers and channers in Second Life about 10 years ago, that everybody would get it about them if you could just explain they were just like the Bolsheviks. Same nihilist ideology! Same Leninist "the worst, the better" or "the end justifies the means" or "no no vote"!

I would never have dreamed back then when characters who seemed merely like marginal, odd-ball professors -- Beth Noveck or Lawrence Lessig or Peter Ludlow -- would actually be advising the president of the United States, getting on the New York Times op-ed pages, and even ending up with jobs in the White House. I thought the hackers might remain in virtuality; I never dreamed they would so metasticize, and spread, and go into real life, and actually shut down government and corporate websites by the hundreds or court houses or even water mains. Then I thought lately that surely when this bunch -- the former Tor director was somebody I always debated in Second Life -- finally found their way to Moscow, that surely everybody would get it. Surely everybody would see now! These are the new Bolsheviks of our time!

So it feels to me constantly now as if everybody is under some kind of mass hysteria. Can't they see what this is? Can't they get it? I marvel that people who should really know better, people in my field, former colleagues even, smart people, are so utterly entranced with the Crypto Kids, as if the New Journalism and the New Black consists of writing code or gibberish or social media loops "about themselves". It's just damn freaky when it doesn't seem actually scary.

I'm nearly at a loss as to what to do about these awful times when people can't think critically about the most obvious, blatant Big Lie, but I think all you can do is try to write down what you know and keep debating. It was for just such a giant hugely-viewed and widely-praised article on Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras that I wrote my long 7,000 word compendium of everything I had gathered about them for several years, even before Snowden became a story.

Of course, for some people pretty jaded about radical anti-government activists and Greenwald in particular, this article is mainly entertainment. Yes, there's this:

Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.

Gosh, that last line -- a trope for the Internet, you know, as some wits have already pointed out!

And that fridge, with just a little enjambment, it's like a William Carlos Williams poem:

The refrigerator

     is not always filled

            with fresh vegetables...

or

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

So yes, there's a good deal of spectacle in all this, even in the artful, shadowy photographing of Laura Poitras without her Rasputin eyes usually glowing so ominously -- you can almost hear the editor at NYT Magazine instruct the photographer -- try to make it so that she's intense, but not with her eyes looking too crazily, like Michelle Bachman, you know?.

I put up several comments at the New York Times, and then on this replay by the notorious Natasha Lennard at Salon: 

Natasha Lennard has long been a WikiLeaks and Occupy Wall Street activist. I think more critical journalists have to be assigned to this story. There are just too many discrepancies, shifting narratives, gaps. Salon says: "As was pointed out by Irin Carmon for Salon in a profile of Poitras following the first flush of NSA revelations, Greenwald and Poitras had been working with Snowden since February.

But in the Maass piece, it says this:

"Snowden told her early on that she would need to work with someone else, and that she should reach out to Greenwald. She was unaware that Snowden had already tried to contact Greenwald, and Greenwald would not realize until he met Snowden in Hong Kong that this was the person who had contacted him more than six months earlier. " That means November 2012 or earlier. 

Snowden posted his PGP key in March 2013 with his lavabit email address.

Greenwald and Poitras both have told the story of how and when they first contacted Snowden multiple ways. And even allowing for the fact that first he contacted them with a pseudonym, then they only spoke to him online, then they met him in person, so it was a process, the story and its emphasis just keeps changing.

And this matters, because the timeline for when Snowden could have gotten his NSA materials after *deliberately* joining BHA in *March 2013* is very, very short for hacking, torrenting, encrypting and handling these materials.

That means long before he went deliberately to BHA, Snowden had materials that he hacked, and he worked with Poitras, Greenwald and of course Appelbaum on this, and the question is whether they are in collusion with his deliberate joining of BHA to hack more.

There is the entire wacky story of his defection to Moscow with their assistance and scripting by Julian Assange.

And there are other funny questions to ask about why all the hackers converge in Hawaii in April 2012 and April 2013 when Snowden is there, and then later in Hong Kong.

If only these people were as accountable and transparent as they want the US government to be.

As I noted about this piece, it had two big holes:

1. Laura Poitras' flip-flop on whether or not she was on the roof -- she says she was up and down on the roof to Maass but she had denied it to US soldiers -- Joshua Foust caught this contradiction on Twitter.

2. Yet another variation -- this is the fifth by my count -- of Greenwald's story of how they all contacted Snowden and when.

He swore up and down in the debate on Twitter with the Business Insider editor that he first heard from Snowden in February. Now it sounds like he is saying November/early December 2012 (if we go by Maass' statement that Snowden contacted them "more than six weeks" before they met in Hong Kong, which was June 2nd (they took a flight from New York on June 1st). Yeah, I get that he has explanations for all this, and Washpo journos try to smooth it out for him, as does Maass.

The one question Maass does ask that is the slightest probing of Poitras -- other than to dig for more personal details which he failed at -- was to ask about this exact date question. He may not have realized what a controversy it was -- how Walter Pincus tried to pin it down and get whallopped (though his instincts and perceptions were true); how others kept trying to confront Greenwald on this -- and for their troubles would be told they were drooling idiots (!). Guess they probed a nerve.

But Maass then seems satisfied, unfortunately, with this answer (emphasis added);

Snowden began to provide documents to the two of them. Poitras wouldn’t tell me when he began sending her documents; she does not want to provide the government with information that could be used in a trial against Snowden or herself. He also said he would soon be ready to meet them.

Now that the information has also come out that Snowden in fact stole documents when he worked at Dell -- and left a digital trial -- a year before he was said to start working with Poitras and Greenwald, what does this make of their narrative?

I think it makes hash of it. There was already the discrepancy between Greenwald saying "months" were taken to go over the documents, yet they made contact only in April -- which meant only one month was available. Now it's a year? There's also a sense of haste and of overload, as if they can't get through everything "in time" -- in time for what? What was the hurry? Why couldn't they take their time? It's not as if Snowden would be found if they didn't leak anything, no one would notice and he had the alibi of his epilepsy treatment. I think they were rushing because they needed to hew to a larger propaganda time-table in part or in full prepared as an active measure in Moscow, involving distraction and manipulation of public opinion around the time of Bradley Manning's trial -- and other events that we need to piece together. If ever there was a time for Guy Debord to call his office, it would be for this:

Greenwald’s first articles — including the initial one detailing the Verizon order he read about on the flight to Hong Kong — appeared while they were still in the process of interviewing Snowden. It made for a strange experience, creating the news together, then watching it spread. “We could see it being covered,” Poitras said. “We were all surprised at how much attention it was getting. Our work was very focused, and we were paying attention to that, but we could see on TV that it was taking off. We were in this closed circle, and around us we knew that reverberations were happening, and they could be seen and they could be felt.”

Yes, that media pond that the narcissists could stare in and admire their own reflection rippling endlessly...

And speaking of digital trails, I was reading the trove of Snowden comments at Ars Technica again which were discovered here by Reuters -- Ars Technica is the forum for the "better geek" who actually has a job working in Big IT or even government and keeps the conversation more to technical issues than is usually the case at other forums.

And aside from his bitching about corporations that cooperate too spookily with the government for his anarchist taste, there's this:

Last visited:

Sat Sep 01, 2012 5:56 pm

I had noted before that Snowden's entire digital footprint seems to drop off in 2009. You just don't see him post or do things from then until he posts his PGP key and starts his life as a defector. But in fact there are a few posts on Ars Technica -- like once or twice a year in 2010, 2011, 2012. So it's interesting that he last visited in 2012 -- but then even being an obsessive geek who probably loved reading the Internet about his favourite topics, he didn't come back to Ars Technica. At least not on that name.

His last substantive non-gamer post there was this.

On December 29, 2001, he wrote sarcastically:

NSA's new surveillance program.

That's the sound of freedom, citizen!

The ruins of 9/11 were still smoldering. How could he write shit like that? How do people like this get jobs in the government? I've wondered this about other people claiming to be government coders on that forums -- and I just hope that the people who run these agencies are tightening up the ship now and looking to the ethics and personality issues, and reducing the number of narcissistic psychopaths they are hiring...

 

 

How is Edward Snowden Communicating with the Outside World?

I used to work at the Open Society Foundation (Soros) in Moscow in the 1990s. The Internet was in its early days and in Russia was set to "1 out of 99 tries" on the dial-up. There was some creaky email program, and I remember that one day when I examined its inner workings to try to make it go faster, I discovered that a "bcc" of every single email was going to this one guy in the foundation. He was one of the people suspected as really working for the KGB or GRU or its successors. I remember deleting him and he then came bounding out of his office later and said that unless he was copied, the system couldn't function. Sure.

So I imagine that every single analog or digital connection Edward Snowden has in Russia, even with the dezhurnaya in the hotel or the cloakroom lady, is tabulated and examined.

It's awful strange that Edward Snowden is never able to talk on his own. He's never able to make a Youtube on his own starring himself, uploaded to his own channel. He's never in a Google Hangout on G+. He can't even seem to make a Vine or a Glide and put it on Twitter or Facebook. No AMA on Redditt for Edward!

That one time he appeared in public at the airport, it was surrounded by goons and regime lawyers and think-takers plus some now coopted international human rights groups. He was flanked by WikiLeaks operative Sarah Harrison, who stuck out her hand to get everyone to stop recording. He read from a prepared script. The emails that had gone out inviting people to this event, which turned into a circus, didn't seem like they came from him -- "centre" was spelled in a way no American would spell it, and there were grammatical errors sounding like a non-native speaker of English.

I wondered when the Veterans' Union said they'd bring him a tablet to he could talk online with his family, they meant to signal to the CIA, "Yo, bitches, we have his four laptops."

It was always my impression that the four laptops didn't contain the stolen files themselves, but only encrypted communication tools to reach them.

In any event, since that day in the airport, and Snowden's gaining of temporary refugee status in Russia, he has only been heard from through Assange, who says he speaks for him, or Glenn Greenwald.

Then yesterday, we learned from the Russian press that Snowden was having an encrypted chat with his dad.

Then, we began to see the disarray in the Snowden camp as Snowden's father and his lawyers complained that Assange and Greenwald had their own agenda (you don't say!) and they feared they weren't operating in Edward's best interests.

Then Snowden released a strange statement but only through Michael Calderone of the left-leaning Huffington Post, who has reported only sympathetically about him and his capers against the NSA.

Calderone declined to answer my query about how he communicated with Snowden, i.e. what program or device, and whether he was really sure it was really Snowden.

Snowden's pipe-in statement spoke about "the tragic vacuum of my father's emotional compromise" which was a bit odd, given that his father has made bunches of pro-Putin statements, even grovelling and saying he felt Putin was the greatest protector of his son (Arkadag is the word we would use in Ashgabat for this phenomenon).

(Or is that in fact what Snowden means, that his father is actually taking pro-Russian positions that he wouldn't normally take in the belief it will ingratiate him to the Russian authorities? What "tragic vacuum"?)

There was the funny little play-acting where Snowden's Washington lawyers said he shouldn't be speaking at all to his Dad, without his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who cooperates closely with the FSB, knowing about it. Huh? And the Russian lawyer was on vacation -- which in Russia means the solid block of inactivity known as August, when everyone hopes the annual Jinx will not occur, like a coup plot or a submarine sinking...

But Kucherena wasn't so vacated that he couldn't pipe up immediately and say he understood about these "father-son relations" are like -- as a good student of Turgenev. Yes, Snowden is Bazarov, and we are only waiting for that moment when he spills the boiling water on his hand, doesn't feel it, and realizes he is infected, too...

So...how do they talk? Now that lavabit, the service that Snowden supposedly used for his communications, has been shut down, what can he use? Lavabit struck a tragic pose and said rather than accept a probe from the feds over Snowden, and possibly his enablers from WikiLeaks and Greenwald, too.

Well, it could just be some throw-away gmail account -- because he could be still using PGP. Even the same key he once generated. Pretty Good, they say. Or maybe he would generate a new one as a false identity or get his Russian lawyer to do it. Can the FBI crack PGP? I don't know.

Liberation Technology, that Stanford mailing list of loony e-revolutionaries, digital anarchists, and future Big IT employees now working as unpaid open source interns, is filled with outrage and uproar over the closure of lavabit. But these kids don't seem to realize how legitimate law-enforcement requests for wire-tapping works. They are outraged that the feds appeared to ask for ongoing surveillance of Snowden instead of just set dated set of files. Well, um, that's what you do when the fugitive from justice is still on the run, you know?

Perhaps Snowden could be using Crypto Chat, the brainchild of Nadim Kobeissi -- @kaepora -- and rival to Jacob Appelbaum's Tor, Kobeissi has also filled up Libtech with denunciations of Appelbaum for exposing his customers to loss of their websites and accounts and data when the FBI just took down half of Tor's nodes in a big child pornography raid. This is endlessly fascinating although Kobissi has no credibility, either, because we see the terrible culture of the software autocracy -- screw the users, screw accountability to any standards or ethics, the main thing is to cover my ass and be "innovative".

But Snowden could even use Snapchat, I suppose! Or maybe some version of the Russian-made Chat Roulette, which was great for anonymous types who liked to suddenly expose themselves online to unsuspecting interlocutors.

Oh, I was just thinking that the phrase "expose themselves" used to only meant one thing in the past, but nowadays, it means having poorly encrypted email -- or no encryption at all.

Where is Edward Snowden?

Well, he has now been given khachipuri to try by his lawyer  -- and Kucherena used the word privozil which means he "brought while driving" -- i.e. he's not living with him and walking from the kitchen but making it somewhere else and driving to see him.

He also said while Snowden seemed to like Russian cuisine, he hasn't really had a dish coming from "the Russian hinterlands". Does he mean to say this about khachipuri? Well, if you consider Georgia a part of the Great Russian hinterlands (and a lot of what is "Russian cuisine" is in fact "Georgian cuisine"), I suppose so...but...maybe this means Snowden is in Northern Ossetia or Abkhazia? Those areas are pretty locked up! Remember they threatened to take him to a refugee camp in the Ural Mountains near Perm...but he could be almost anywhere. I suspect he's still around Moscow, because the secret police will want to make it easy on themselves watching him.

Michael Bohm seems to be the only journalist that noticed that "American friends" stuff mentioned by Snowden's lawyer awhile ago. American friends? Which ones? You mean like John Robles?

Kucherena also told RIA Novosti that Snowden wants to "travel around Russia". Really, they're going to let a prize like that just travel around in the open, risking not just CIA snatching but just random kidnappers who might see him as a great prize to sell to any side in the cyberwars?

In any event, Blogs of War has a great idea.