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.
Recent Comments