This is the very smart question that Jay Cline asks at CIO, and he has some very smart answers.
This is a very useful article to read to think about the whole narrative of Snowden (see my huge compendium of all the players here) and to ask, as I've been asking today even before I saw Cline's article, whether he hacked to order using a wish-list from Jacob Appelbaum or the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation list.
It's also smart to ask what he might do to fix his credibility problem, as real encryption experts are starting to demand more goods from him, especially on the claim that the NSA undermined or polluted the algorithms in encryption standards.
There's also the question to ask as always whether the narrative is driven by Moscow's understanding of how to wreck the American state more devastatingly, or by Assange's old Marxist-Leninist notions of destroying the state - -and going for an easy one to get, the most liberal and vulnerable in its history.
Always and everywhere we must ask why Snowden has no cases. And to see if they plotted all this in ways they arn't telling us, to ask what he was doing in March 2012 and March 2013 when Appelbaum was also in Hawaii at the same time.
Some news stories keep telling us that either the NSA doesn't know what he took, or Booz, Hamilton Allen and/or the NSA can't see a trail of what he took, yet they're forgetting that a source within Dell, where he also worked as a contractor for government secret projects say they *did* find his trail. So maybe we aren't getting the whole story.
I've also explained that Snowden is not a whistleblower because he is not presenting the real-live, individual humans really harmed by this, but just yammering on about machines and what they can do, and what they might do, hypothetically.
So it's VERY INTERESTING that when Jay Cline looks at all of what he's looking at -- the documents and technical topics themselves from the technical CIO perspective -- which isn't the psycho-drama of hacker culture that I've been looking at from the traditional human rights perspective -- he still comes to EXACTLY the same conclusion (emphasis added) of what's missing in this picture:
Innocent Americans harmed. Snowden's case so far is only hitting things at the program level. He hasn't yet shown how a single named American has been harmed. Without showing how any group of Americans, such as libertarians or Muslims, is being targeted, it's less likely an advocacy group will form to press for legislative reforms. This is why I think he's buried this card toward the bottom of the files.
Interesting, eh?
My operating theory has always been that Snowden will never get to the cases because there aren't any. If he had them, say, an Islamic charity like already-existing cases, or an anti-war activist monitored, or a journalist like Rosen whose phone calls are monitored, surely he would have showed it. He didn't. So will he to "trump all"?
I don't think so. Or else, he'll come up with one of "their own," i.e. Poitras or Appelbaum, and then purport to whitewash them away with faux-exonerating information.
But I could be surprised.
Cline has another very, very astute hypothesis of what's missing from Snowden's stash:
No terrorist attacks averted. If another 9/11 has been prevented primarily because of these surveillance programs, Snowden's case is dead in the water. He'll lose at least half of the American public. The trump card he has left to play is if he somehow got his hands on an internal memo summarizing the successes and failures of these programs. He seems to be a smart-enough guy to know this is the ace to keep in the hole.
Right. That's been the theme of the "progressives" all along -- that waaaaah all this NSA watching, and they didn't stop the Tsarnaevs or the Navy Yard shooter. Leftists LOVE that sort of "gotcha" because they can look like patriotic red-blooded Americans who really believe in security but just want it to be effective, and gosh, it isn't so...let's weaken it! But the fact is, they don't want security because they minimize terror and crime for the sake of revolutionary upheaval to bring themselves to power in a new society, and they want the maximum space for licentiousness. The notion of a balance of rights among themselves -- let alone a balance of rights and security -- is never one they admit as valid.
So we might just get that -- no terrorism averted.
For what it's worth, I don't buy the nefarious Mike Masnick's claim (which he "put together" from Snowden leaks) that the NSA could be spoofing Google -- and therefore ruining that giant's brand.
I have to say that Google has been the dog that hasn't barked on Snowden. I'm not sure Google likes Snowden. They made a few peremptory disclaimers that they didn't allow direct access to their servers, but there hasn't been a lot of...anything from Google executives or even those rank and file Google engineers that clog up G+. Usually Google runs in a pack with EFF and company, and this time, well, I'm not sure... Where's that big white Google page with action to take on Snowden?
Cline also speculates that Snowden could leak (or rather, Greenwald could take files he already has from Snowden and leak) something about monitoring of GPS or cell phones' geolocation. Like we're all on one big giant Sims Online or Second Life map with the "map me" not turned off...
My guess is he won't do that because it would ding Google too hard. For all we know, Google is in hard talks behind the scenes with Glenn and co. telling them to watch what they say -- "this is why we can't have nice things," as the kids same on the MMORPGs.
I guess for now I will conclude that while these theories are brilliant and the analysis is brilliant, I don't think we'll see quite this stuff because:
a) Greenwald would have played this card before, especially before the Congressional vote on the NSA -- he would have had to in order to achieve his goals.
b) Snowden has no more stuff to leak, can't leak anything from Russia, and can't gain access again except...so maybe Snowden is the conduit through which the Russians will now leak their existing moles' stuff, and pretend Snowden got it, to put it all on him (and he may not realize they are about to set him up on this).
So my wild-assed guess is that "Snowden's next leak" is actually going to be the Kremlin's leak and it will be something like:
o Obama's communist past, Obama's college paper, Obama's Marxist/socialist ties, Obama's birth certificate - Putin will kick him when he's down
o some mole or traitor within the Democratic Party actually found to be working for the Russians and/or China and/or Iran
o US spying on Russia over something that the Kremlin can get everyone mad at...
Whatever it will be, there aren't that many more things to leak that capture the imagination, the public is saturated and tired of leaking, and it's not personalized enough -- Cablegates had a very long life because it dealt with real countries and real figures in the real world, not algorithms and mechanical processes.
Recent Comments