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?
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