Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.
So Cryptome has come up with another page of intriguing PGP key stuff related to Edward Snowden.
This follows up on earlier revelations said to be related to Snowden's PGP keys.
I haven't used PGP in years because it's clunky and frankly didn't always work with every country you need it to work with, and I don't accept the whole premise, really. But I think I understand the basic idea, and it seems to me that it's a system that can be gamed by the malevolent.
That is, precisely because it's a trust system, and run by geeks who sort of trust each other in a clan-like way but are horribly nasty to each other when they get suspicious and hound dissidents in their ranks, it probably works with a small enough user base (given that nasty peer-pressure brow-beating factor they need it to work) but as it gets larger maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong.
It strikes me that there is little to stop just anybody from coming along and saying "I'm Edward Snowden" and even putting Edward Snowden's email addresses known to the public, like his old lavabits email address (see on his supposed public key of March 2013) and an address like "[email protected]" that seems about authentic as [email protected] -- and saying "here I am, crypto kids, talk to me, I'm Edward Snowden" on the public PGP system. Yes, it seems nuts. But that's how it seems to work.
So as a result of this Cryptome publication, widely reposted, people started doing more searches and came up with more. That got them to thinking that @cryptoron on Twitter must be Edward Snowden then, but the guy using that handle now, Ron Prins, is Dutch, runs Dutch tweets, and that seems a bridge too far for our young globe-trotter who was only yesterday bitching that the rest of the world uses the metric system unlike what we call the "right way" in America (I've even seen references to Snowden speaking Chinese, but I really think that is urban legend.)
I think rather than just re-tweet these things, it's good to ask. So I asked Ron on Twitter, linking to the story (the link provided in a comment on @20committee's blog), is this you? He answered fairly quickly, "It is."
@cryptoron Hi, is this you? http://t.co/O56yqgQAzG
— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) January 7, 2014
@catfitz it is
— Ronald Prins (@cryptoron) January 7, 2014
He might as well have answered, "Yes, I am coterminous with myself." But Edward Snowden...Hmm, really? Edward Snowden would do that? I tested [email protected] to see if it immediately bounced, i.e. was obviously fake, and it didn't, but these things can take time.
Meanwhile, when I said, hmm, I think Cryptoron is toying with us, and another twitter person said it seemed too obvious, he favourited her tweet. I think we can conclude that this is that usual Dutch humour taking advantage of the credulousness of gullible Americans. Especially as he joined the gloaters when Anonymous DDoS'd the NSA website. Or maybe it's something more, to be continued.
So I began to check the other leads, and I didn't really bother with the two Booz, Allen employees who made public keys 12 years ago. They seem irrelevant -- it seems like BHA employees could make public keys all the time in the course of their work, much of it would be legitimate and dull and not involve, oh, drone targetting, which is what people like Marcy Wheeler thinks it does, or helping Snowy get his stash out.
But the person of interest on this page is named Mark Eckert, and he made his public keys right at the same time as Snowden did, in March 2013, when Snowden wanted to communicate with Poitras and Greenwald -- that's the claim of the previous Cryptome revelation anyway. (There's the Michael Vario name, of course, and that could be a distraction, a red herring, really him, who knows, but I think it's not yielded much of interest except a constant stream of tweets about weather reports and movie titles watched that sound for all the world like a DEW line for Snowden leaks. You decide. It just doesn't completely track, however.)
There's lots of people in the world named Mark Eckert and we can't be sure which one is the same one that once worked or still works at BHA, in Hawaii. This Eckert seems to have the job of helping enterprises secure their computer systems from hackers. I wrote to that address, too, and it didn't bounce, at least not yet. No answer.
Meanwhile, I found a person by that same name who on several occasions "liked" things that were supportive of Snowden, including indignation at the fact that some vandal was traced to a Congressional address messing with Snowden's Wikipedia page, and an ACLU fan page on Facebook with an article about Judge William Pauley's decision that the NSA metadata collection program is legal, rejecting the arguments of the ACLU that it was unconstitutional. That decision infuriated the ACLU, of course, and they are appealing it.
That Mark Eckert on the ACLU page earned 117 likes with his comment raising an eyebrow about "efficiency" -- since when is efficiency a criteria? He got the predictable Godwinisms of this crowd who -- just to cut a long story short, are a bunch of idiots who can't seem to grasp even the basics of what is legitimate national security for a liberal democratic state. Here they all are:
I've dropped my ACLU card and donations long ago when the ACLU stopped being able to distinguish between jihad and human rights. All of these people have a right to their views; I also have a right to object to them, too.
So I checked out that Eckert on his part-public Facebook page and found he tracked the Snowden type profile -- snarky posters on his TL against the NSA, Rand Paul fanboy love (i.e. extreme libertarianism) including attending a Rand Paul rally, tons of comments hating on any goverment intrusion of any type, whether standard testing or banning of Guy Fawkes masks in demonstrations -- the typical "Don't Tread on Me" nerd, complete with that dumb-ass Ben Franklin quote on liberty and security that these nerds always self-importantly and somberly invoke as if they're the first one to discover it.
This is the kind of person I find insufferable and impossible -- and there are hordes of them on the Internet. But so what? He gets to have those views, even if he is a government employee, or working for something like BHA or another firm doing NSA or any kind of government contracting. I sure wouldn't call for anyone who supported Snowden or Ron Paul in the government to be fired -- that's why people rightly criticized McCarthy or Fr. Coughlin. If you fired all those people, I suspect you'd leave a big dent, too, which is a big problem, but a discussion for another day. And what if he was just one of those co-workers whose password was stolen and misused by Snowden?
But I don't think that we must frog-march ourselves into rigid analogies with McCarthyism that suppress our own critical speech about bad ideas antithetical to all our human rights. After all, if someone was a communist, they supported oppression and mass crimes against humanity and likely lied. Later, the VENONA files showed that some of those people who indignantly insisted that they were First Amendment cases turned out to be Soviet spies. And hey, it's okay to oppose the Soviet Union, it's ideology, and the act of spying for it. That really seems to be entirely lost in the frenzy whipped up by the media around things like this NYT piece today which utterly fails to note that hey, the Black Panther ideology was violent and extreme and Black Panthers committed robbery, rape and even murder as well as other crimes. Why can't we condemn FBI overreach and violation of civil rights AND condemn the thing that made them justify that overreach, these bad, violent ideologies? It's always like we can't do part two in these debates.
So I wish the NSA would exercise more judgement in their hiring and weed out people like this, because I frankly don't think Ron and Rand Paul make for good liberal democratic governance in this country. Of course, they are a legal and lawful political group and run legitimate candidates, so that's their right. And possibly the government can't discriminate in hiring people in this fashion, but I think it's an open question: why should we have people who think Snowden is a hero and the NSA stinks and government is intrusive like the Nazis running our national security operations? I'm sorry, but I just don't think that's on. Keep in mind also that we don't know if this is the same guy who worked with Snowden or is just some other nerd somewhere else!
And I think I get to say so, and challenge it, and people like this who show up on public fora with their comments and their 117 likes get to have a pushback from me -- they have a right to their views and so do I.
So just because this guy seems like he MIGHT BE (we have not verified this, because he's not in Hawaii but a different state) a former co-worker of Snowden who is rooting for him there's no need to heckle him, just as I'd expect him and his friends not to heckle me. We disagree.
It's also useful just to ask and check facts in these cases, because remember the Reddit story and those suspects in the Boston bombing? I think Reddit has the right to discuss public figures, including missing people who have been made very public by their families -- they must have the right to be wrong in a free society -- as long as they have the ethics to then correct the record and say they were wrong if proven so. There are a lot of people who want to take their right to be wrong away.
So mindful of all this, I simply asked a question. Did you work with Edward Snowden?
But here's the thing. I checked on that thread today and...it was gone. Deleted. Trashed. Mark and his 117 likes are gone; the Hitler comments are gone; I'm gone with my simple question. There's a gap, showing the posts that were before and after it, but it is down the memory hole. It's only in Google cache still.
Now, anyone who has followed "progressive" social media manipulators on Facebook like former Reuters social media chief Anthony de Rosa knows that they can hide your comment and get rid of you from the view or block you.
But I haven't been blocked, I can still see that page. That means the administrators likely just deleted or hid the comment or Eckert blocked me. But he didn't block me; I can still see his page.
So that means the ACLU administrator, wanting to keep people from researching Snowden critically who won't accept that it is a "civil rights" and "whistleblower" case, simply removed it. Unless I'm mistaken and somebody can see it. But...I don't.
Hmm.
Okay, well following up on this is beyond my pay grade and I hope others will.
Recent Comments