Perhaps, although actually, I actually don't think we are, just yet, because don't forget, Obama is trying to ram through "reforms" after brief consultations mainly engineered by Ron Wyden and other pro-Snowden congress people -- and they will likely succeed.
So a lot must be done before this national hysteria starts to subside, but there are articles starting to appear that are more critical, alongside the work that Michael Kelley of Business Insider has done for months with little company. For him to link to my blog which shows that bloggers were raising questions about the hackers' convergence in Hawaii from the start of this saga means the ice is broken. Here's what he said:
Some suspect Russia and/or WikiLeaks contacted Snowden before June 12, but there is no clear evidence of that.
So at least "some suspect" is now introduced into the narrative, and then the circumstantial evidence that raises the very question is linked to.
But the point isn't that "there is no clear evidence" even though there isn't -- yet.
The point is that Jacob Appelbaum felt so fearful of these linkages being made between his travel and Edward Snowden's that he hastened to make an alibi in a speech June 25th in Germany.
And he had to make sure that everything matched what he had originally said in his June Der Spiegel article: "In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."
"In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."
"She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment. We sent our securely encrypted questions to our source. I had no knowledge of Edward Snowden's identity before he was revealed to the world in Hong Kong. He also didn't know who I was. I expected that when the anonymity was removed, we would find a man in his sixties."
I just feel not enough research has gone into this to claim "there is no proof" except "there is no proof -- yet." Has anyone gone and checked flight manifests, hotels, landladies who might talk, neighbours in Hawaii? No, not that we know of. We don't know if law-enforcement has done this, but one hopes they've done that much.
And the point about all this isn't to establish physical contact because that may not actually be the issue. If they had encrypted chat contact that may have been sufficient grounds to tell Snowden what would be good to hack.
THAT is the issue. And we have the glaring fact that Snowden admitted to the South China Morning Post that he deliberately moved to Booz, Hamilton Allen, the consulting firm contracted to the NSA, in order to position himself to hack more. The hacking activity seems to have occurred mainly in Hawaii, but there was also concerned expressed that by going through the Ft. Meade, Maryland training process, Snowden could have gotten access to the wiki directory and things like that.
Even so, knowing how geeks work, I continue to think that there was some kind of physical contact in real life before June, and that the Spring Break of Code provided a cover -- a cover that even its organizers may not have realized. It's precisely because of Appelbaum's level of paranoia and fear that he could be in a sting operation that would compel him to have that real-life meet-up in meat-world. Maybe Hong Kong was enough and maybe they spent those "lost weeks" when we cant' see what Ed was going busily shoveling files with our nation's secrets into the WikiLeaks vaults.
I just don't believe that Laura's first mention of Snowden to Jake is "mid-May," however. I think the report of the public keys generated in March between Ed and them (possible, if it really is them) lets us know that. But also I think if Snowden really first contacted Laura in December, that of course she'd get Jake, upon whom she relied for setting up crypted comms, to get involved early on.
So....there's the issue of whether Appelbaum was in Hong Kong -- my guess he might well have been, and there are rumours to that effect, because I don't think Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are the people who gave Snowden his Tor and EFF stickers. Both of them are too old and too square to be sticker people. Appelbaum, on the other hand, is very much a sticker kid -- I witnessed this in person after his talk at the Whitney when he descended to the adoring masses and handed out Tor stickers.
What's important, given the current status of this debate, which is bogged down on deciding whether Snowden should be tried or not, or offered clemency or not, or whether can have a day in court or not, is that at least some are impeaching his authority. As well they should, as nobody elected him or even acclaimed him in any kind of valid social movement process.
Here's a post (by Edward Lucas) on The Economist's blog Democracy in America:
The real question in the Snowden affair is indeed authority. But it is not the one that the Snowdenistas like to pose. Who gives Snowden and his media allies the right to decide which secrets to leak, which careers to end, which costly intelligence programmes to ruin, and which clues to give to terrorists, gangsters and foreign spies about the way governments try to monitor them?
It is a useful question to ask what Mr Snowden should have done to have been judged a genuine whistle-blower. One condition is that he should have come across activity that was actually illegal (he didn’t: he saw stuff he didn’t like, and worried about where it was heading). He should have exhausted all available legal and constitutional options (he didn’t). The information he published should have been collected and distributed in a way that did the least damage for the desired effect (it wasn’t; he stole a colossal number of documents, mostly quite unrelated to the points he wanted to make, and their release is accompanied by colossal spin and considerable inaccuracy). His fugitive status in Russia (via Hong Kong) could hardly be designed to cause more alarm among those who care about American and allied secrets.
In short, neither the problems he has uncovered, nor the means he has chosen, give Mr Snowden or his defenders any reason to expect that their law-breaking should be treated mildly.
***
I love the term "Snowdenistas." That really sums it up. Like Sandinistas.
Recent Comments