Wired State

In Which Jacob Appelbaum Falsely Accuses Edward Lucas and Me of Libel on Twitter

Jacob Appelbaum. Photo by Scott Beale.

@EdwardLucas moo of @ioerror, @moxie, et al plotting Snowden op in Tokyo for RU is pastured paleo-cold-warrior cud. pic.twitter.com/5ENPYyW9Ka

— Cryptome (@Cryptomeorg) February 15, 2014

@Cryptomeorg @edwardlucas Wow, what is this crazy bullshit? If that wasn't such dangerous libel/slander for @moxie and me, I'd laugh.

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) February 15, 2014

@ktetch @The_IPO @edwardlucas I'm sitting with an actual lawyer for dinner right now - they agree, it is probably libel. Oh the irony.

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) February 15, 2014

@ioerror sounds like a clear libel case. @edwardlucas made no reasonable effort to check and published to cause credible harm. Libel!

— Andrew Norton (@ktetch) February 15, 2014

@edwardlucas @auerfeld @catfitz Sure - her conclusions about me and @ggreenwald is incorrect. Most of her blog posts are similarly wrong.

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) February 15, 2014

@auerfeld @edwardlucas Of course I deny it and I have many times. As usual @catfitz is making up nonsense rumors without evidence.

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) February 15, 2014

@auerfeld I have never seen @ioerror forthrightly categorically deny he met Snowden in person in Hawai. Wd he like to do that? @edwardlucas

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) February 15, 2014

@ioerror @auerfeld please justify charge that @catfitz is making "nonsense rumours". I bet you haven't read her book, either.

— Edward Lucas (@edwardlucas) February 15, 2014

As you can see from these tweets today on my Timeline and that of Edward Lucas -- and there are hundreds more in this vain, what I predicted is occurring: The Snowdenistas are out in full force accusing Edward Lucas and me of libel for our legitimate, lawful, necessary and long overdue critical reporting on the hackers who helped Snowden. You can read Edward Lucas' book here and my book here.

No, to those persistent hecklers who keep thinking we write what we do to "sell books," don't be ridiculous. Lucas' book is only 99 cents in the Kindle Singles program. As he has ascerbically pointed out on Twitter, if you have a struggle paying 99 cents, he will send you an Amazon voucher to get it. My book is only $2.99 (which is the lowest price you can physically set it to if you are in the general program I opted for), and honestly, if you can't pay less than a latte for my book, I can't imagine how you pay for your Internet service, even.

So...I knew the attacks would come in this form, because that's all these thugs know how to do -- suddenly invoke courts and law and lawyers even though they shun the rule of law for everything else (starting with the way they hack into systems with impunity and ending with their shunning of the proper channels for whistleblowing). It really is the ultimate irony and the ultimate hypocrisy for this crew.

That this entire story -- trying to bring the Snowdenistas to account -- might end in them even getting their free-speech lawfaring lawyers at Electronic Frontier Foundation or even the American Civil Liberties Union to actually help them in mounting libel lawsuits against a blogger and a journalist would not surprise me one bit. That they will look completely hypocritical doing so and would be utterly in the wrong are probably factors these self-righteous thugs never contemplate -- that's how far gone they are.

And the way that the sinister hacker types can attack their critics best is by setting them against each other and ensnarling them in he-said, she-said sorts of polemics - and that's all part of this story now, too.

You'll notice that the person actually being attacked the most right now is Luke Harding, whose book is number one under the search term "Snowden" on Amazon.com (I'm proud to say Edward Lucas is number 3 and I'm number 6!). Harding has a paperback of his book out now as well, which a lot more people will read because it's still easier for them to read it that way than on Kindle.

Harding is ultimately pro-Snowden, but because he's slightly critical of Snowden or describes him as being a "prisoner of Russia," he's getting it in the neck the worst with everything that the anarcho hackers, skiddies, WikiLeaks creepos and crypto kids can throw at him because such Leninists always hate the people most who are essentially on their side, but just a few degrees "off".

Edward Lucas is under fire because he is far more critical of Snowden but also provides the liberal argument that certain things Snowden discovered are problematic and should be reformed. The Leninists *hate* liberals as much as their fellow leftists -- and in this setting, Lucas is liberal.

I'm more hardline on this, although I position myself firmly in the liberal tradition -- I think hackers are antithetical to human rights and a real threat to democracy, and I refuse to concede any "good" in Snowden's hack in order to return the focus back on what I think is the greater evil now, the encryption movements, not the NSA. No one has persuaded me I need to worry about an agency of a democratically-elected liberal government. And since I'm in a weaker position than well-paid journalists from real media with lawyers, and I'm just a blogger, I'm the one they will feel free to attack most. I'm aware of all that.

So the tactic is obviously going to be to discredit me to Lucas and portray me as a "crazy cat lady" and "infamous Internet troll" and hammer away at his handful of footnotes to me in his book as a way of discrediting me, in the hopes that Lucas will then disavow me. So far, Lucas has said "don't call her a cat lady, she's my friend" and has stood by his footnotes and urged Jacob Appelbaum and his possee to come up with answers to the questions in the material footnoted. Good!

I do think the only way to fight these malevolent and vicious hacker movements and their shadowy backers in the Russian and other governments is through human solidarity and through the human rights method of documenting and reporting. But I do realize that these people might succeed in bullying Lucas enough so that lawyers will tell him to remove footnotes or links in his book. I hope it doesn't come to that and they all put up a fight because I think these cowardly keyboard warriors need to have their bluffs called, hard. Fortunately, his book stands on its own anyway without footnotes to me.

As does mine. I've gone to even greater lengths to document all the open sources and all the contradictory narratives and strange coincidences -- my book is nearly four times as long as Lucas'.

Here's a summary of what is happening on Twitter: Of all people, John Young of Cryptome (@cryptomeorg) came forward with an attack on Lucas' book, even though he himself is critical of WikiLeaks and Snowden and has published criticism of Snowden -- albeit from that weird anarcho/technocommunist/whatever perspective that he holds about all these issues ("All property is theft," is one of his beliefs which says it all.)

Interestingly, the very passage he zoomed in on as "moo" and "Cold War cud" is not from me or Lucas, but Streetwise Professor, or Craig Pirrong, a libertarian finance professor at the University of Houston. I cited him in my book and blog, as did Lucas, for the simple fact that he deserves credit. He was the first blogger to publish the information that Snowden and Appelbaum, the tech helper of Greenwald and Poitras, were in Hawaii at the exact same time.

Let's look at the chain of how this information came to Craig Pirrong -- the professor at University of Houston who is viciously attacking me and accusing me of falsehoods now (more on that in another post), but with whom I used to chat with in a friendly way back at the time a group of us were studying the Snowden affair.

Craig Pirrong got the link to this video of Jacob Appelbaum *himself* doing a pre-emptive and guilty-sounding denial of the strange coincidence of himself and Snowden at the same time in Hawaii.

Without Appelbaum himself making this curious speech -- which was posted to YouTube by his fans -- none of us would likely have ever have noticed any of this! The person who brought this video to the attention of bloggers is a media researcher in the Netherlands. That person gave me permission to use her real name and credit her with this simple research fact (in my latest book update) -- she was the one who noticed it and send the link to others, including to LibertyLynx, a libertarian Twitter account who mainly writes on Russia and hackers (and who is joining Pirrong in outrageous attacks on my in recent weeks, accusing me of being a certain stalker who has in fact harassed me and others viciously.)

LibertyLynx may or may not be Craig's alt, we don't know. He claims not. He claims this is a colleague or assistant or something of his and is infuriated when people don't believe him, but Liberty and her nest of similar Liberty Twitter accounts do sound exactly like him -- although they build a careful legend as a persona.

None of this matters. The fact is, the video is out there, anyone can watch it, they can read Streetwise Professor's blog about it, and then my transcription of the relevant part here, and ask their own questions.

After seeing this video and studying what Jake and his friends had to say on Twitter -- about 20 of them were there --- Pirrong and others came upon the other fact, that Appelbaum was there at the Spring Break of Code, announced in February for March (hastily), all-expenses paid, by the pseudonymous Moxie Marlinspike, about whom he also had lots to say (he has been following the hackers around Tor and other circumvention/encryption programs just as I have.)  He even found an instagram of Appelbaum's close friend Christine Colbert from Hawaii.

I researched further and found this strange tweet from Colbert about Rubik's Cubes on the very day that Glenn Greenwald just told us (changing the date yet again in his multiple narratives) was May 30, 2013. Funny, that. I also found that Colbert was so close to Appelbaum such as to be at Burning Man with him, but more importantly, to be at his side at his father's funeral.

Now maybe she just likes Rubik's Cubes and that tradecraft-looking thing is just a coincidence. And maybe all of these hackers just went on a spring break and never talked about Edward Snowden or anyone like him. But the coincidences are there, and they increase, as I demonstrate in my book.

So I believe all of this deserves a second and third look, and further investigation to see if in fact Appelbaum or any of the others at the Spring Break of Code met with Snowden, or -- another scenario -- *discussed the existence of Snowden under Verax or any other name* such as to help him in any way or to coordinate with him in any way the hack he made of the NSA when he deliberately joined Booz, Allen, Hamilton with that plan in mind, which he told forthrightly to the South China Morning Post as we all know.

Dates matter. Snowden could have met the Spring Breakers or somehow been in communication with them online, or through even other third parties -- and THEN gone for training at Ft. Meade and hacked there and then hacked at the Hawaii facility of the NSA. The dates of Snowden's travel are confirmed by his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, in her blog. Appelbaum claims he only contacted Snowden online in May. That's when he made the detailed vetting of him (which is really what it was) and "journalistic work" (to be able to describe it all as "journalism") for Der Spiegel, ultimately published in July.

Locations matter. Appelbaum is saying that we don't realize Hawaii is made up of islands. Um, is he kidding? Honolulu, where Snowden was, is only about 90 miles from Maui, where the Spring Break of Code was -- a short plane flight. It was possible for Snowden to have made both that short plane flight *and* the long overseas flight to Ft. Meade and the training. It's also possible for Appelbaum or anyone else in the Spring Break of Code to stop in Honolulu on their way to Maui.

Appelbaum says this: "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."

But in her interview with Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, Poitras said she turned to Appelbaum for help with encryption in dealing with Snowden -- from whom she first heard in December 2012. She won't get more specific on her first substantive contacts with Snowden after he approached her after he struck out trying to get Greenwald to use encryption. And that's no accident. She says it is "for legal reasons." I'll say. If she is shown to be in contact with Snowden earlier than she says, i.e. March and April when he was deliberately getting a job in order to hack, and not May, when he was fleeing after hacking, she looks bad in terms of what a prosecutor might do with this, as does Appelbaum. They all know that. That's why they scream at anyone probing at this particular area -- but of course, that's no reason to not probe harder.

That's what my book does.

These people seem to think they are the only ones who can construct narratives and hit hard with them and undermine national security in the process -- and then they seem to think that anyone who criticizes them gets to be batted viciously away with threats of specious libel suits. Despicable!

Then there's the question of the appearance of the public keys where Snowden, Poitras and Appelbaum all appear to be associated in March and April 2013-- i.e. earlier than in May, which is what they said. John Young knows that. That's why he published it. We all get it. But as I've pointed out in connection with the other Snowden keys story, we don't know if this is definitive. Smart hackers don't use this public posting method when exchanging public keys. They do it in person or more securely locally.

Oh, so now we're back at looking whether they did meet in Hawaii directly or through third persons to exchange keys, as hackers often do to stay out of the view.

So far, in this barrage of a discussion on Twitter, Appelbaum has not denied anything specific. He's just thrown up his hands and cried "libel" and "slander" (actually, libel is print and slander is verbal). He makes it appear that he "denies all of it" but when you ask him specific questions, he won't answer them. Perhaps he will deny each and every aspect of this story, in which case, we can print his refutations, but that would hardly close the matter as he is not a reliable source. Having dealt with him on a number of other subjects and debates, I've found him to evade, obfuscate and prevaricate in the manner than culture-jamming anarchist hackers always do. This is an old story for me.

So let's bear down on what John Young actually focused on: Craig Pirrong's conjecture. When I read Lucas' book which I purchased for my Kindle, this didn't stand out for me, because I just saw him merely linking to Pirrong to give him credit, and then putting a particular version of events forward for discussion -- he clearly marks it as a hypothesis and as conjecture. It is Craig's right to publish conjecture, and Lucas' right, too, in good faith -- which is what he does have here-- to try to reconstruct a very murky picture in which both evasive known people and people with pseudonyms will not tell us what they know about the exact dates of when they began working with Snowden, and how -- or when they first heard about the existence of this NSA hacker fugitive called Snowden/Verax.

But even so, I have to say that I don't see that the half of Craig's version that deals with the first contact with Snowden makes sense. I didn't accept this version and didn't reprint this passage in the same way in my book. Pirrong says in "Be There. Aloha. Convergence in Hawaii" the following:

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

Pirrong has the habit of being very definitive and authoritative-sounding when he advances notions (he shares that personality trait with Snowden) and he can be hugely nasty if you don't agree with him, even if you are on the same side of the issue -- as I've found.

Not one to be intimidated by titles, I'd have to question this part of his theory merely because Snowden himself tells it a different way. He says he contacted Poitras after reading about her border travails and seeing her film on the NSA.

Now, when I point this out, naturally -- naturally! -- Pirrong says, well, how can we believe Snowden when he has lied about so many other things, i.e. stealing passwords, which he has been exposed on? Then Pirrong implies that to criticize him, um, I'll do anything, even side with Snowden. (That's how he gets. It's really loony and sick, ultimately).

But I assure everyone that I'm not interested in carrying water for Snowden whatsoever, I just take certain things at face value because I don't see another Occam's Razor answer.

Poitras, don't forget, published not just anything, but a video with the NSA's respected mathematician Binney, who left the agency. Snowden would have been very interested in that, given his views and determination to leak files at that time. The video appeared in August 2012 on the New York Times' website.

Meanwhile, Pirrong's theory of Snowden to Appelbaum to Poitras is only based on "like to like," i.e. that it's more likely for a hacker like Snowden to contact another hacker like Appelbaum.

And one could point out in defense of Pirrong's argument, although he himself doesn't make it, that in December 2012, Appelbaum made an open call on IT workers to leave the government -- the "dark side" and come over to his anarcho-crypto movement. He made this on December 27, 2012 at 29c3 in his speech "Not My Department."

Snowden might have seen that and contacted Appelbaum; but he might have seen Poitras' film first and then been moved to contact her, too -- he said that her arrest 40 times at the border -- and her determination to continue her work -- impressed him.  Since it looks like Snowden contacted Poitras earlier in December AFTER he first tried to get to Greenwald  (and maybe tried to get to Greenwald even in November), Pirrong's theory of his "first contact" with Appelbaum doesn't quite fit.

I don't think it really matters substantively whether Snowden got to Appelbaum first because obviously Poitras brought in Appelbaum as he was her crypto helper, by her own admission. To fuss endlessly on this as "wrong," much less "libelous" is to miss the entire suspect story and its larger contours.

It doesn't matter if Pirrong's version on this isn't right (I don't think it is); it doesn't even matter if they never met in Hawaii (I think something happened there because of his pre-emptive nervousness and the tweet with the Rubik's cube, but maybe it was only talk about Snowden early, not a meeting).

What matters is that there is something up here, or Greenwald wouldn't have so furiously batted away Walter Pincus and Zach Green on this so early on, and try to keep people from looking at this.

Then there's the keys.

I cited the keys first here, and then Streetwise Professor put them in this blog.

And hey, John Young is the one who published the story of the keys first. It's awfully funny for him, of all people, to come forward and start claiming Edward Lucas was chewing a Cold War cud and mooing a "security state" story when in fact John Young himself obviously wondered about this funny coincidence back then.

I also note in my book that the appearance of John Young's publication on Cryptome happens a mere week after the email went out inviting the human rights activists to meet Snowden at the airport (he himself didn't make that connection or tell us what key words he searched with).

My theory explained in my book is that possibly someone leaked this Lavabits email of Ed's (we can find it published on RapGenius, so somebody did that), then someone could use it to search with. They could have used other search terms, but it's this search term of this email, that may not have been known before the Moscow Sheremetyevo meeting that is material to the story of the keys on Cryptome.

That's what it looks like to me, anyway. And as Craig would say, I'm happy to see any other Occam's Razor that shaves as close.

I also want to point out that I've been publishing my concerns about Appelbaum and Snowden for eight months. I've had numerous blogs on this subject, over and over, notably this and this. I publish this to Twitter and speak openly on Twitter constantly.

During this entire time, I never saw Appelbaum come by this blog, or answer me on Twitter. He has me blocked, but obviously he looks up the people who talk about him.

I saw some of Appelbaum's posse -- he prefers to have his fanboyz do his fighting for him -- claim that Edward Lucas is at fault for not sending multiple queries to Appelbaum on Twitter, or sending him queries via email to solicit his refutations.

But honestly, it is not possible to send Appelbaum email, as I myself discovered. If you look at the web address he has on his Twitter account, it's "down," i.e. you can't access it. Down permanently. Yet somehow, he uses that server address to send emails to the list Liberationtech, as I've seen constantly, as I'm a member of that list myself. When debating him before, I've attempted to send things to that email, and it doesn't work. I don't know what's "up" with this, but I've always openly discussed him on open blogs and open Twitter because in my view, you should never, ever enter into private little convos with these people. They only use such contacts to try to manipulate and entrap some more or make deals which they themselves don't keep. The only way to flush these people out is to constantly deal with them in the open and never go into private side conversations and deals.

Supposedly -- we're told by various "Internet lawyers" like Andrew Norton who are fighting for Jake -- under British libel law, a judge could say that if an author didn't approach a subject in good faith for a comment about an allegation, i.e. on email, and only approached with one tweet, why, he's somehow in violation.

Nonsense, even under more strict British libel law. Edward Lucas is in good faith here. He did try to contact the subjects and they don't reply. For Appelbaum to claim that he was "swimming in Thailand" when he went on vacation and didn't see the tweets is patently ridiculous as he was tweeting the whole time he was in Thailand and we all saw it.

I have, too -- for example my email to Christine Colbert got no answer -- the one I used from her blog which she herself provides. She's never commented on multiple tweets, either. Appelbaum has never commented except to make shrill, blanket accusations as he has now. Greenwald has never answered. Ewan MacAskill has never answered. Ben Wizner has never answered.

What do you do with people like this who dissemble and are so unscruplous and won't debate fairly? You can only keep documenting them, keep challenging and hoping for the best.

There is no libelous material here in my book or Lucas' book. These are legitimate efforts to challenge people who themselves have made untenable claims and have mounted an outrageous assault on US and UK national security.

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7524#sthash.AzDo9trm.dpuf

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7524#sthash.AzDo9trm.dpuf

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7524#sthash.AzDo9trm.dpuf

PBS Passes Off Radical Tor Activists as Benign Privacy Advocates

This is unsettling.

A special feature on PBS about seemingly benign activity for "privacy" -- and we see it's all the usual suspects we've seen for years. Those of us who have been watching the hacker movements have seen these radicals for ages, peddling radical ideologies on Twitter of stateless anarchy and here they seem like merely helpful good guys.

Now they are dressed up as merely concerned "privacy advocates" merely having lovely "hack-a-thons" in Washington "to be helpful" and "give back to the community". Retch.

Here's my comment:

Good Lord, the latency on trying to watch this video was as bad as Tor.

Here's the thing -- PBS has COMPLETELY misled the viewer here by selecting these radicals posing as merely "privacy activists" and trying to mainstream them as "helpful" to consumers.

In fact, Tor has been largely used by drug dealers, child pornographers -- and Edward Snowden himself in hacking and moving files out of the NSA. It was used by Assange and Manning and Snowden's helper Appelbaum, the promoter of Tor now refusing to return to the US because he is not only wanted by the WikiLeaks grand jury for questioning, but he admits it looks very suspicious for him to have been in Hawaii at exactly the same time as Edward Snowden deliberately took the job at BAH in order to hack the NSA better.

You aren't telling us the real history of all these people, about their anarchist beliefs, and their participation in radical movements actively trying to overthrow the government. These are not people who advocate electoral democracy and reform; they are extremists who openly call on sysadmins in the government to steal files and sabotage computers:

Jake's call for sabotage at 30c3

Ethical issues when hackers use the journalism cover.

It's only in the hysteria whipped up by these people's radical journalist friends that you can imagine this is only about securing your emails about health or religion. Extremists like Griffin Boyce always deliberately and cunningly pick up seemingly benign use cases to hide what they are really up to. What utter nonsense. These are people encrypting *for anarchy, for takeover by force of the US government*. They are already -- outrageously -- in fact on the US DoD payroll, as counterintuitive as that may sound but that doesn't stop them from inciting hate with comments like "Congress should go die in a fire."

You're also not having the larger debate needed here about encryption, and its evils and weapon-like nature. This is just the lastest round in an arms race we've seen before (with Clipper Chip, with PGP and will see more of now that the uneasy alliance between the NSA and its hackers, and ISPs and their hackers, has now broken down over Snowden (and that's no accident).

26,000 a day! Down from 300,000 only last month as the described user base (by Business Week -- was that the 30-day uniques?)--- and half a million *before the Silk Road drug busts!" Do the math, NPR!

No, we don't need mass consumption of these coercively dangerous and criminalized tools. You can't pretend the tool isn't to blame, or that it's only like a road people use, which is what these duplicitious hackers claim -- when the use cases are all high treason, espionage, and crimes against public safety and morals. The Iranian dissidents and victims of domestic violence are only drawn in as living human shields for cover. That's unethical.

Congress should hold hearings about Tor and accountability is needed for its managers, who up to now have looked the other way while NSA files were stolen and children abused, just for their "scientific" principles and anarchist goals.

My new book on this subject.

 

Related articles

Mighty Spin on "Spoiled Onion" of Tor -- From Several Quarters

Tor: The Government-Backed NSA Antidote

The NSA Hasn't Hacked Tor... Yet

Why Doesn't Joshua Foust Ever Write About Jacob Appelbaum in the WikiLeaks and Snowden Story?

Should the Navy Appear on the Same Platform with WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum in Berlin?

Tor Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

The Revisionist Narrative on Tor

Snowden Shifts the Burden of Possible Law-Breaking to Journalists: What's Up? (ARD Interview)

There is a silly notion being put out by the Snowdenistas that an ARD (German TV) interview with Snowden is "blocked" or "censored" in the US.

Nonsense. TV doesn't work that way. There's been no censorship or blocking. The interview can be readily seen on the Internet, for one.

Perhaps whatever cable TV station -- or even network TV station -- that might have considered this wouldn't have wanted to pay the huge fee no doubt involved.

Or it's just not the kind of programming that can be used. American TV, unlike European or Russian TV, doesn't tend to have long interviews like this with just one person talking for 30 or 60 minutes, and not even a commercial break.

Even alternative TV that might possibly use something like this would more likely report *about* it rather than just run it "as is" because it's just boring, self-absorbed non-news. It's Snowden basically re-hashing the manifesto he's already given in his Christmas message and in his long video interview with Bart Gellman already covered. We already had lots of Snowden in recent weeks, and more of that faux-deep voice and the narcissistic nonchalance and arrogant over-confidence is just too much  more to take.

I had to make several goes at this myself and get past the annoyance of all this megalomania in order to sift out such news as there actually is in this thing.

And now, because I've suffered doing this, you don't have to -- so hit my tip jar. Thank you.

Basically, the "new news" I see here in the scope of the Edward Snowden Narrative as it has evolved since June 9th when his first video was published is that Snowden is bending over backwards to shift the responsibility for the worst, most damaging document publications or claims about documents to the journalists.

This is odd, given everything, and given that he talks to his adversarial journos "daily," but not inconsistent with what he has said from the get-go -- that he was unlike Chelsea Manning, who just dumped a lot of files sullenly and didn't wait to get professional journalists involved. Manning worked through Assange, who tended in fact *not* to redact all names of identifying characteristics -- getting lots of people in trouble -- and who followed a revolutionary scheme for picking out the cables that he felt stuck it the worst to the US.

Snowden said he'd be different. He'd leave the interpretation and vetting and selection to journalists themselves. That would be "better."

Of course, day after day, in his "daily" conversations (as we're told) he must be heavily involved in interpreting and selecting documents. I mean, what else would he be talking about, Russian blini?

One of the reasons this show is so difficult to stomach is that the German journalist interviewing him is totally smitten, totally uncritical, and fields him totally softball questions. If he ever asks anything that actually might yield more information, he lets Snowden cut off the answer abruptly and never pursues it further. Fluff all the way down.

A Fake "Significant Threat"

First, the German clucks and sympathizes over the Buzzfeed story from a reporter who somehow got a few NSA officers into a bar and got them to utter their aggressive feelings about Snowden, i.e. they wanted to shoot him or hunt him down.

This report was completely bogus in every way. It doesn't represent any official policy. I don't know how this journalist set this up, or why these officers were stupid enough to rant about Snowden, but he was able to do a "gotcha" on them.

It occurred to me, in fact, that it might have been a set-up, some kind of "op" on the part of NSA. That it was part of some "psy-war" whereby they are letting him know that there are a lot of angry agents out there (supposedly) and that he had better come back willingly through normal channels or he can expect to be hunted down.

I'm skeptical that this is the case, however; I think it's just opportunistic journalists and men mouthing off while drunk or something.

Snowden blows it up and takes a victim star term and intones that it is a "significant threat". Nonsense. A "significant threat" is if an actual person in authority said something, like they do in Turkmenistan or Russia. This is just a couple of dudes in a bar.

Snowden said he had to get more police protection. Huh? Here's a man already being guarded by the FSB, the SVR, the GRU and probably 10  other agencies (the traffic police). The idea that this incredibly sensitive "whistleblower" who is really a defector would have to have "more police protection" is absurd. He's already guarded out the wazoo.

Notice that once again, he appears in this mansion with the faux paintings and the salmon walls. Either he is brought to this residence for meetings like this, or he lives there (I'm guessing the former, as they wouldn't want even friendly journalists to figure out where he lived.)

Typical of the "privacy for me and not for thee" ideology of the hackers, Snowden whines about these NSA officials, "They gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want."

He intones again -- these are "acting government officials" who would "love to put a bullet in my head." And then implies that it would be fine to harass these men who spouted something privately, and out them, and punish them.

Of course making this kind of statement is  unprofessional, but then, Snowden has committed an outrageous crime against our national security, is charged with three felonies, has caused untold damage, and has to expect some people in the NSA are going to be a little ticked off. To me, the journalist who had the poor judgement to make a story out of a couple guys spouting in a bar is the real problem here, ultimately.

Obama Softens, Ed Gloats

Snowden claims that first there was a "circling of wagons of government around NSA" instead of "protecting the public," and claims "the political class circled around the security state."

This is pure, dumb Internet ideology. It's the kind of low-grade bullshit that losers like him brought up on the Internet ingest and spit out. They imagine there is this conspiracy -- this "political class" which they, even with their $200,000 salaries working for the CIA and NSA (!) aren't part of. They imagine that this class doesn't do their job honestly, but is only protecting of "the security state" -- itself a concept out of science fiction and Russian propaganda. It's so immature and witless.

Worse, Snowden thinks that now he has gamed this whole thing out, and thrown the president. That's among the more disgusting features of his op -- this culture jamming and noise about how he is maneuvering the government to do this or that, and all is going according to plan.

"Since then, we've seen softening from the president," Deep Voiced Ed tells us, and now Obama admits that there are ""thousands of violations." Except...there isn't any proof of this, least of all from Snowden.

He then goes on to talk about how the president has realized we shouldn't "preserve authorities than we don't need." Oh? A thief and a felon and a fugitive is the judge of what authorities are needed or not? And Obama's judgement may not be good here.

Next, Snowden gloats, that even why Obama packed his commission with personal friends, insiders, former deputy of CIA --- people who had every incentive to just go soft on the NSA, instead "they found these programs have no value and " they've never stopped a terrorist attack," and they" have marginal utility."

All of these notions are hugely troubling. For one, these findings haven't really ever been made. The 100-page report from Obama's crony commission doesn't so much make real findings as it re-states the premise the media has already pre-cooked. It's not true these programs have no value. Certain people in that "political class" may have come to believe this, but we don't have solid proof. Congress has not held substantive hearings on this. The courts have ultimately not spoken and resolved the constitutional matters raised. The article on Colombia alone lets us know that the NSA has been useful; articles revealing that Snowden may have exposed intelligence work in Pakistan let us know just how much damage could be done. Claiming these programs don't work and aren't needed is a whole form of damage all its own.

Snowden said that Section 215's permission for bulk collection -- which he claims means "mass surveillance" so far has only turned up "an $8500 wire transfer from a cab driver in California." Well, if that was going to involve attacking our troops or agents abroad and killing them, the program was worth it. And as it happens, there is the Muhtorov case, on just this point. Perhaps his lawyers will succeed in their gambit to nationalize this case and turn it into a referendum on the NSA's program instead of a trial about aiding and abetting terrorist groups abroad. We'll see. In any event, Snowden doesn't seem to even know about the Muhtorov case, although I suppose before long, the fact that Joshua Foust has picked it up (and in blog after blog smeared me in the process) and that the ACLU has it now with Jameel Jaffer's crusading litigation once again, then it won't be long before Ben Wizner or somebody else plants the idea in Snowden's head and he begins spouting about this, too. Perhaps he'll even claim to have documents about it. Watch this space.

Curiously, Snowden says that the "president can end or modify" these 215 programs at any time. I'd like a second opinion on that. And if that's the case and Obama does this, I would find it hugely scary, and evidence yet again that he is trying to break up the state. You may find that an extreme statement. Then you explain why it is being done.

Snowden then falsely compares the old days, when agents would get a warrant to what he claims is their unlawful vacuuming up of data today.

And here is a statement that is key to his whole tendentious and deliberately manipulative ideology:

"They want to apply the totality of their powers in advance prior to the investigation"

Well, no they don't. The NSA is not the Pre-Crime Unit. They dredge data and save it and then tap it when they have suspects. Snowden has always, all through this saga, tried to pretend that capacity is the same thing as action, that hypotheticals are the same thing as action, that "just because we can" means "we do." Over and over again, officials and more responsible journalists have explained that no, it's not the case.

The German journalist asked him what his "breaking point" was, and what made him decide to "whistleblow," i.e. hack. As @Kat_Missouri reminds us, Snowden had an elaborate part to his "legend" that had him waiting for Obama to "do the right thing" after his election. Snowden held off on his leaks, he said, because he thought the new president might bring Hope and Change. Then he didn't, to this  young fugitive's satisfaction.

As @Kat_Missouri points out, TheTrueHOOHAH, as Ed called himself online, only waited a grand total of 4 weeks for Obama to make reforms, and when he didn't, then, she believes, he started copying files to leak. I don't know if this is true, but I simply mention that here. BTW, even if people behave badly, if they've put up interesting research, I will give credit where it is due.

"Clapper Lied"

But now, in the ARD interview, Snowden dropped that hoo-hah (you know, etymologically, that American slang word grew out of the Russian/Slavic word "khui" which means "prick" -- actually, it's probably a Tatar word). Now Snowden says that his turning point was "when Clapper lied, directly under oath to Congress."

Oh, nonsense. Clapper didn't lie. Wyden goaded him, and he made a statement as truthful as he knew in the circumstances, and in fact the essence of it was this: no, the government doesn't keep separate, full dossiers on people. It only keeps them on lawful suspects. In fact, in recent days, we've heard that the NSA program only gets 30% of all phone calls metadata -- which is not content in any event. So much for Ed's claims...

And here's an interesting thing that really everyone should be reporting, and throwing back in Snowden's face and Greenwald and co's face.

"There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie." There is "no going back," he says.

Now that's disconcerting. Before, Ed made it seem like he was for reform. That he was gleeful over the formation of Obama's crony commission, and that while not perfect, it was moving in the direction Snowden approved (yes, I realize it's loathsome to describe this petulant man-child as approving or disapproving matters of state, but there it is, that's what it has come to.)

But wait. Now he says there's no hope for the IC. It can't change. There's no "going back." Therefore it must be...what...removed? Blown up? Maybe it's the NSA that needs some extra police protection now, not Snowden. I found that very awful. It means that his fig leaf of "reform" is really slipping, and we're seeing more what this is about: blackmail and coercion.

Snowden then lies that the American people are "prohibited from knowing and discussing" the NSA program and the FISA court cases. He calls FISA "a rubber stamp." But you know, a secret court regarding sensitive terrorist and criminal cases has to be kept secret. And so far we've seen that if a lawyer disagrees, he can challenge that, and maybe it will stick, but ultimately, I don't hear Snowden's plan for chasing the bad guys.

He's also once again performed this sleight of hand, making it seem like things that in fact were never found unlawful or illegitimate by Congress or the courts are suspect -- just because he, a wanted felon, says so. It's perversion.

Now Snowden switches to more of his familiar megalomania territory. Once again, we are seated with Ed at his desk at the NSA as he bugs the president.

"You realize the power you have," he says. "You can wiretap the president of the US" "You can wiretap a federal judge" and "No one will ever know."

Really, guys? Some dude in the Hawaii station can click through some menus and tap Obama's Blackberry? Truly? I'm finding that hard to believe.

Then Ed says, "The only way NSA discovers abuses is from self-reporting." Again, I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that. At all. There are systems that show files were tampered with -- and hey, that's why Ed went on the lam, and why he seemed to have speeded up his leaks and his outing.

Edward Snowden's Big Lie

The German probes some more on the "five eyes" programs where he thinks he has discovered this wonderful flaw in the system whereby the countries barred from spying on their own citizens can just get the other guy to do the spying. Except, there are checks and bars, and it's not just "anybody," but again -- legitimate suspects.

And here's where Snowden pronounces his Big Lie: "the surveillance and abuse doesn't occur when people look at the data, it occurs when they gather the data."

That is what we must challenge at root. Because it's not true. Abuse doesn't occur from gathering -- especially when human eyes don't see (you know, like Ed's own human eyes couldn't see every page in his 1.7 million files? You know, like that.) Abuse comes IF there is an innocent person's privacy violated wilfully, with human intelligence and will. Ed has never come up with a case like that. So he backdates it with this geeky theory of "capacity=action".

This is where Congress should be fighting back. I fear it won't, because they won't understand how meaning is being perverted here by this geek.

Once again, Snowden falsely declares that the NSA "doesn't answer to the laws of its own country" -- although this has not been found substantively by any body. Snowden defines spying itself as "collection of data" when discussing 5 eyes -- but it would be more accurate to say that collection of data is done as a mechanical aid to spying.

Snowden makes preposterous claims -- "you can read anyone's email in the world, watch traffic to any website" or gain access to any any laptop through the "one-stop shop for access for the NSA" called XKeyScore, the "the front-end engine that enables them to look at everything they collect." Except it doesn't do that. They don't look at "everything"; they look at the cases they are following.

Snowden implies that all sorts of inherently privacy-busting garbage goes into this program -- individuals are "tagged" merely if they are "interesting" or "have access" to networks the NSA needs to trawl.

He believes this system "builds a fingerprint, network activity unique to you," and "anywhere you go, the NSA can find you" 

Snowden Shifts the Burden of Possible Prosecution for Espionage to Journalists

Now pay attention to this section carefully, because this is where Snowden does something...odd.

He tells the ARD man that Germany has access to X Key Score. Naturally, the German asks:

Does the BND deliver data of the Germans to NSA?

The old Snowden would have said "Yes, they collect 'em all, they get everything, be afraid."

The new more cautious, and more lawyered-up, and more...somethinged...Snowden says this:

Whether the BND does this directly or knowingly, the NSA gets German data. Whether it's reported, I can't speak to, because it's classified, and I prefer journalists make distinctions and decision about what is public and what should be published.

"However, it's no secret than every country of the world has the data of their citizens in the NSA." There are millions and millions of data connections, he says, people talking on their cell phones and buying things on line, all of this ends up at the NSA.

"It is reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it in some capacity but whether the BND provides this information I should not say," says Snowden.

Should not.

When was the last time you heard this talkative loud-mouth ever curb himself, and speak of things he "should not" say? When? It just hasn't happened before. He's never self-censored. He's never let you know he was holding back. What's up?

Snowden says he prefers journalists to determine what is in the public interest, whether the NSA filters or ingests or hacks a German router, whether

"What they don't mean is they aren't gathering data, what they mean is that they aren't intentionally searching," he says, reiterating his Big Lie.

"I don't want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but there's no question that the US is engaged in economic spying."

Really? This truly is a lot of emphasis from Snowden on the role of journalists - as distinct from his own role as source.

Is he trying to imply that really spilling the beans -- deciding to say that Germany provides info to the NSA, or the NSA hacks Germany, is in fact something he won't say, but that journalists have to say?

Is he trying to set up these journalists? Is he trying to plea-bargain? Is he angling for a deal, and implying that he really didn't do the worst -- Jacob Appelbaum did?

Then he reiterates this other hugely misleading claim that the US is "like" China in engaging in industrial espionage - and mentions Siemens. There is "no question" the US is engaged in "economic spying" and can't tell national interest versus national security.

Well, gosh. If Siemens didn't prop up the Soviet Union, and then later collude with regimes like Turkmenistan, maybe the US wouldn't have to spy on it, yanno?

Snowden then approvingly quotes Obama: ""just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should" and them mentions Merkel's phone:

This is a particularly difficult question for me to answer because there's information that *I* very strongly is in the public interest, however as I've said before, I prefer *journalists* to make those decisions.

Yes, he's said this in a general sort of way a few times before -- at the beginning. But now? So specifically? When the story out now just recently is that in fact, this "spying on Merkel's phone" was more about spying on Schroeder, and then continuing by default.

Why is Snowden bending over backwards on Germany, on this question, re: the journalists who have reported on Germany? That's not Greenwald. That's Jacob Appelbaum -- and Holger Stark and other Der Spiegel journalists. He's putting them on the hook now.

 

He said that journalists would have to weigh the "reputational costs" to outing the officials who made these decisions.

Wow. Really?

"We know Merkel was monitored," Snowden finally tells the ARD journo with a wink. "It's reasonable to assume she's not the only one."

As for "how he did it," here's something I can agree with Snowden on -- the contracting world. It "highlights the danger of privatizing government functions," he intones. I'll say!

In a kind of advertorial against himself, he complains that "private, for-profit companies doing inherently govenrment work like surveillance" are a bad thing and that they have "very little supervision." Indeed!

At one point, the jolly German tries to get Snowden to lighten up, to talk about himself more personally -- to give some sort of personal details. He joshes that surely Snowden was like one of those nerdy kids whose parents told him to get off the computer and go to bed.

Like a robot -- all throughout this interview you feel he is acting, watching himself, smiling on cue, making deep intonations on cue -- now he says mechanically, "Yes, parents telling me to go to bed is consistent with the truth."

The German asks him why he joined the army. Did he have some beliefs?

Snowden said he wanted to join the special forces because they aren't just grunts shooting people, but help local population to resist themselves by training them. Sort of more refined warfare for the smart set.

But then he says he broke my legs -- and that's it, no more story. No explanation of *how*. No explanation of why he didn't remain.

Snowden then admits because he didn't graduate from high school or college, he had a "deep informal education in computers and electronic technology."

What made you join the CIA?" asks the German reporter.

"I can't answer that one," says Snowden.

Again -- awfully odd, eh? He can't answer that? Really? He's NEVER said that before.

When pressed, he says he was "Trying to do everything I could to prosecute the public good"

Well, says the journalist. They're not exactly a human rights activists at the CIA.

"No matter how deeply embedded, no matter how faithful, no matter how strongly they believe in the causes of their government as I did in the Iraq war, people can learn, people can discover the line between appropriate government behaviour and actual wrong," says Snowden in justification.

He deplores "contracting culture" and he believes while the purpose is limiting government employees, in reality, it's keeping the contracting businesses in business. There are millions taken, "and the government didn't even know they were gone," says Snowden. I'd tend to agree. The contracting world produces people like Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm. They behave terribly to others and don't seem to have any notion of decency. That's because along the way, they are feted and overpaid and underdeployed -- and a lot of other things. The culture is awful.

Snowden then returned to his false claim that he has done no damage.

Here he deliberately obfuscates, and selectively quotes one official who is merely reporting the facts of the moment, not some final word on the case:

The chief of the task force investigating me as recently as December said that their investigation had turned up no evidence of indications at all that I had any outside help or contact or made a deal of any kind.

"I worked along...I don't have any ties to foreign governments," says Snowden.

I don't believe him, really. Certainly not the "worked alone" part -- but maybe the theory of Team Snowden now is to deny and obfuscate and shift and distract?

"Who did I betray?" says Snowden, starting in on his outrageous, self-serving "l'etat, c'est moi" nonsense. "I gave all my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues." This is the "I defected to the American people" nonsense that I wish Jay Carney would sound off on every day.

Jay is often good on the Russians in particular, and he was quite good on Snowden. Remember when he spoke acidly about people who defend human rights from the lounge of the Sheremetyevo Airport? If Obama were sincere about catching Snowden (he's not), he would sound off daily answering all this preposterous propaganda. Then it might sway less people. But the White House is silent. They never rebut Snowden. No one ever does...

"If they see that as treason, they really need to consider who do they think they are working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy."

Um, okay. Well, yes, the public is the boss of public officials. You know, like Edward Snowden. And I, for one, say this public official was way out of line and should be returned by the Russians and tried for his offenses.

Interestingly, Snowden speaks a little on the "sovereign Internet" that is of course is Putin's dream, using him.

But "no walled gardens," says Snowden -- the usual geek credo. "Let's not play 'move the data' which won't fix the problem," he says. "Let's secure it internationally against everyone."

This is really only another version of Russian sovereign Internet -- actually a worse thing because in utopian fashion, it implies that "international authorities," i.e. including Russia, China, Iran can "secure everyone's data." Of course they can't.

As the genius explains -- and hey, Google engineers take note! -- moving data isn't the issue, securing it is the issue. Gosh, glad we got that one sorted out.

"These leaks didn't cause harm."

This, is of course, Snowden's recurring refrain, but fortunately we now have Edward Lucas' book and others will appear outlining the damage done to spying capacity and relations with allies.

"The public agrees it served the public interest," claims Snowden. But that's not true. That is not what polls say. Polls say even young people disagree 42-42 about whether to prosecute him. The public interest faction may be just over the majority, like 56%, but so what? The rest don't believe that. It's like the plurality that Obama himself has. But the reality is, half the country didn't vote for him.

Then we hear from Mr. Nuremberg Principles -- "what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful."

He is charged with 3 felonies, as the journalist even reminds him. But Snowden complains these crimes "don't allow me to make my case" and "convince the jury that what I did was to their benefit.

This is the theme that Electronic Frontier Foundation, @emptywheel, ACLU and others have been hammering on for weeks, Snowden claims he can't return and have a fair trial because in the past, under existing jurisprudence, those tried with espionage were unable to use their trials to bring evidence to exonerate themselves as whistleblowers. I'd like a second opinion on this, but I think basically it's a red herring. Snowden just doesn't want to face jail time without the Internet. The one thing we learn from Luke Harding's book about his greatest fear is that he was worried in Hong Kong the Chinese might arrest him and put him in a box without the Internet.

Snowden complains about the Espionage Act of 1918, implying that it's old date of nearly 100 years ago makes it outdated because of new technology and such.

Actually, the Espionage Act put in place after the Russian Revolution to deter Bolshevik espionage intrigues would be exactly timely today because what we're dealing with in the hackers movement is just like Bolshevism, and arguably more pervasive.

"It was for selling documents in secret to foreign governments," Snowden says about the 1918 Act -- "not people serving public good."

Except, it hasn't been proven satisfactorally that Snowden *has* served the public good. That is not demonstrable, and the evidence of his harm is mounting.

Glenn Greenwald's Narrative on Timeline for Snowden Meeting at Odds with Luke Harding's Timeline

I've just written how yet again, I've had to ask questions about Greenwald's shifting timeline.

I've been writing about his varying narratives throughout the entire Snowden saga.

Now there's YET ANOTHER discrepancy that has surfaced, just this week.

As we know, Greenwald told Salon directly the following:

1) Greenwald and Poitras went to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden and discuss the documents, “for almost two weeks — six days before the first story came out and every day after that until he went into hiding.”

That's a direct quote -- and unless the journalist who interviewed him, Brian Beutler, got this wrong, I'm going to accept it "as is".

Six days before the first story came out is May 30th. The first story came out Wednesday, June 5th, in London.

Even if we allow for things like time differences, or the difference between a date a story is filed, and when it is published, and say "June 6," then we're still only on May 31st.

But now we've got yet another timeline from Luke Harding's book.

He apparently has interviewed Ewan MacAskill for these details -- unlike Greenwald, who is no longer at the Guardian, Ewan is, and a close colleague's of Luke's there who was with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong.

Here's what he says:

Two days later, on Friday 31 May, Greewald flew from Rio's Galeao international airport to JFK, going directly to Guardian US's SoHo HQ. He sat in Gibson's office. He said a trip onwards to Hong Kong would enable the Guardian to find out about the mysterious source."

So on May 31, Greenwald isn't in Hong Kong meeting Snowden at the Hotel Mira -- instead, he's flying from Rio and going to New York city to meet with Gibson.

He then says this:

Gibson and Millar agreed that the only way to establish the source's credentials was to meet him in person. Greenwald would take the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong the next day.

So Glenn leaves on June 1st to take a 16-hour flight which gets him to Hong Kong possibly still on June 1, due to the time difference, but it depends on the flight.

Harding says he took the Cathay Pacific flight. If it still runs on the same schedule, Flight 585 leaves at leaves JFK at 12:49 am and arrives in Hong Kong at 5:45 am, i.e. the same day, even being a 16-hour flight, because of the 13-hour time difference -- Hong Kong is already ahead of is "in tomorrow" when we are still "in today".

From every version of the story we've been given up until now, with Glenn and Laura Poitras meeting Snowden May 30, May 31, or June 1 (what the Guardian itself reported on its timeline back in June 2013), it's always been assumed that they hit the ground running to meet Snowden.

That is, because he had urgently texted them in encrypted chat or email that their destination was Hong Kong and the clock was ticking on him possibly being discovered, they had to immediately hop on a plane and run to meet him as soon as he got off. And that's what it's always seemed like.

But now, Luke Harding portrays it completely differently, from the account Ewan gives:

"On Monday, June 3, he stayed ensconced in the W Hotel in Kowloon while his pair of freelance companions went off to find their alleged intelligence source for the first time."

So that means that either Greenwald took that flight that had him landing June 1, but he waited an entire two days to meet his precious source. OR he took a different flight that got him there June 2, and then rested for a day before he met his source.

Either way, it's odd that Ewan says they meet June 3, an entire two or three or even four days later than other accounts say.

Why is this?

1) Greenwald is just not good with remembering dates -- he's not technically inclined, maybe dates, math, etc. just aren't his strong suit.

2) Greenwald tends to exaggerate or brag about his own role and achievements in every story, so maybe it's important for him to exaggerate and say he worked "almost two weeks" because that makes it seem like he was careful, thorough, vetting things, not hurrying etc. It's very different than saying "I worked only two days with this source before publishing my first article about him, and he outed himself as my source a mere six days after meeting me."

3) Greenwald is lying in order to cover up the presence of other people in this story -- like Jacob Appelbaum being in Hong Kong first, or at the same time, and meeting with Snowden first to "check" him or work with him on the technical aspects of securing/moving/storing his stolen files. Other persons who could have been there -- Sarah Harrison -- or some other unnamed Russian persons or WikiLeaks or Tor operatives. Perhaps Greenwald had to make it seem like he was the only one who met Snowden early, to cover up the role of others who met him earlier.

4) It may mean nothing.

So, decide for yourself.

I'm inclined to believe something is up when the story changes so many times, and that the role of somebody like Appelbaum could be hidden behind these changes. But it's possible that with jet lag, the time difference, excitement, etc. they didn't remember the dates right.

Since Ewan was chosen to be the "grown-up" on this trip -- the seasoned, older journalist who kept his head who wasn't a flighty blogger of alternative film-maker -- I'm expecting that his story of June 3 is probably the correct one.

Given that Ewan is a leftist Scot who worked for the Chinese Communist Party's daily news for some time, and is a supporter of hacking the NSA, I have to take this all with a grain of salt, however. Ewan actually worked in China for the Chinese government -- in the way others I know have done without necessarily being suspicious, simply because they wanted an interesting experience or to learn a language. Even so, we have to ask what Ewan's ongoing relationship with the Chinese government might have been in the Snowden story, in either having him go to Hong Kong in the first place, or getting him to leave Hong Kong.

And I hardly think we can trust Luke Harding to have gotten this story as his book is totally uncritical of Snowden's hack in the first place.

 

 

Reply to @Kat_Missouri on Snowden Findings

@Kat_Missouri who blogs at Beyond Socrates Knee has an interesting post here about the Snowden story with some useful insights and findings.

She is one of those amateur Internet sleuths avidly following the Snowden story -- like me.

In the past, I've found her exasperating because of her anonymity and her law-enforcement like persona. Either she *is* a law-enforcement agent actually thinking and acting like a trained LEO under cover -- or she's a wannabee who watched a lot of detective shows. That's ok, but it can get annoying, either way.

Update: @Kat_Missouri disputes that she does this, and disputes that she is the same person account @AnnWimsatt, also from Missouri, who does delete tweets and says so. Wimsatt swears she is not @Kat_Missouri, and @Kat_Missouri has no comment as to whether she is the same person. I have no idea what to believe here, but I'll leave it at this: these accounts appear to be different people, even though they are interested in a lot of the same topics and tweet about the same things and are both from Missouri.

{In the past, she has had a TERRIBLE practice of deleting tweets -- deleting the process of her work. She deletes them ostensibly because they "no longer serve a purpose" but I believe that to be a TERRIBLE and DISHONEST practice. If you think your tweet trail will betray your real identity, then get out of the business of Tweeting. You are corrupting the environment for open intellectual inquiry when you indulge in bad practices like that. I never delete tweets unless I see a bad typo or broken link, and then I re-tweet the exact same thing over again with corrections.}

For me, this style of "sleuthing" gets especially annoying when somebody puts 30 tweets in your timeline with numerous complicated questions that in fact you've answered in a book that they should just read for the ridiculously low price of $2.99. Less than a latte. It's really, really hard work thinking through, writing, re-writing, correcting, fixing a 250-page book like this for free, and I can only ask people to a) read it and b) hit my tip jar if you appreciate it because it's work.

As it happens, @Kat_Missouri has sent me now offers to send me her real-life name, location and occupation months ago -- she may have forgotten. It's meaningless. I don't know if it's even the truth. And that's not the point. The point isn't for *me* to know something privately. The point is for such Internet sleuths making serious claims about others -- like that they're working for the FSB -- to take the same kind of risks I do when I put up my name, location, and occupation -- which is to suffer endless harassment and intrigues by all kinds of hostile forces, including other Internet sleuths.

Oh, you don't want to do that, and you want to make sure no one associated with your real job ever finds out you are Internet sleuthing so it won't hurt your busines? That's nice. I'm happy for you. That's your right, and I'm not advocating people be *forced* to give up their real identities. What I will point out is that every day you spend lobbing your insights up on  to Twitter in 140 characters without any accountability is another day you destroy solidarity with those like me who *do* take the risks of putting themselves out there.

And by doing that, you destroy good will. You enable the work of people like LibertyLynx, willing to make the most outrageous false claims of other Internet researchers (she claimed falsely that I was the notorious Mr. X who has harassed others) --  just out of spite or jealousy -- or perhaps something worse.

Every day that the community of Twitter researchers in this or that obsessive subject (David Brooks explains how knowledge and journalism really seem to work these days) is tainted by those who are anonymous -- and therefore could be hostile powers' intelligence agents and provocateurs, or even our own intelligence agents not operating in good faith - is a day this community is not trustworthy.

Every day that you remain anonymous because you don't want to harm your employment, or don't want to suffer the FSB's threats to you is a day you make it easier for me to suffer those things.

So, to answer this post.

First of all, I've written a book and so I've thought of some but certainly not all of these angles and my opinion is worth it.

I think there's a number of interesting things here, and it's all worth pursuing further, but so far, we don't have a smoking gun of Russian intelligence using his debts or his vanity or his animosity to recruit him.

I don't know what @Kat_Missouri's point is tying his 2007 request and copying scripts to WikiLeaks in 2007, because the WikiLeaks files about Iraq and Afghanistan were from the Pentagon, not the NSA, unless there's something I don't know. Perhaps the wikification of intelligence and military files has muddled this and made it all terribly vulnerable, but we don't know that, do we?

But yes, connection to WikiLeaks before 2012 is definitely something to look for in the life of Edward Snowden.

It's great that she found this stock market angle and played out the scenarios with it that would put Ed in debt or with a big loss, that might make him a recruiting prospect. It's funny Streetwise Professor didn't spot and work this angle and she did, first. Great! But it would also be worth seeing what he does with this same information -- after all, he's a stock market expert and she's not -- unless there's something she hasn't told us.

Even so, if Snowden didn't have to pay rent or taxes, and he had $40,000 in hand, and he's a young 20-something male, spending $20,000 doesn't seem so horrible nor a loss preventing him from buying groceries. It's especially not horrible if he is an arrogant ass who thinks he'll win it back in a few weeks.

Also, Snowden could have been like scores of other ex-pats living abroad turning a buck by all kinds of things like flipping i-phones or selling duty-free cigarettes, and without any qualm of conscience. Perhaps he lived off the numerous free receptions for diplomats in Geneva and didn't worry about grocery money. Perhaps his mom sent his money or maybe he came in for an inheritance from his great aunt -- we don't know. He could also have had money from past stock winnings or business deals. It's shockingly easy for people in this age bracket with the kind of Randian absence of ethics he has to make money from selling their ADHD drugs or anything of the kind. So in and of itself, a stock market loss isn't proof that he now works for the FSB as a contracted agent.

The reason I'm for playing devil's advocate with every theory, including my own, is because we are in this environment as minorities. The overwhelmingly powerful narrative out there now from the Snowdenistas and their admiring media is that there is "no proof" that Snowden worked for the Russians. Therefore, in trying to show the opposite -- which is very possible, as we Russia watchers in particular know -- we have to try to be convincing in our arguments.

One thing that other commentators have said is that Geneva is a bad place to recruit people -- it's very heavily watched by the CIA itself, obviously, so the Russian recruitment effort in the Serpentine Lounge or wherever will be lit up like Yankee Stadium. Therefore, the need to go to another country arises, which is why he may have gone to India. Yet no Russians have turned up in India.

In my book, I work the Russian angle after his arrival *in Russia* to show the various connections and networks that supported him -- which haven't been covered before, around WikiLeaks and the intelligence veterans' association. But ultimately this is only an area to research, not an area where a definitive link to Snowden is established to prove he is "on the payroll". I believe, as does Edward Lucas, that it is fruitless to look for such a smoking gun, because that's not how Russian intelligence works anymore. They work "hands fee" through cut-outs, front groups, agents of influence, friendlies, likeminded, etc. They turn on RT.com, they celebrate hackers, they mingle with hackers, and they wait for nature to go its course.

I'm not opposed to trying to work all the typical angles of what Edward Lucas explains as MICE -- money, ideology, coercion, ego. But they may not work as they used to, before the Internet, and before the wealth of useful idiots we have today.

Lucas Harding isn't the source to be looking at about the altercation with the CIA manager. If you read my book you will be reminded that there are *three* New York Times articles you have to read in a row, all in context, to understand this story, and the CIA's denial AND James Risen's direct interview with Snowden tell a DIFFERENT story, one which I analyze in my book.

I think @Kat_Missouri's find about Snowden getting the virtual machine program in February 14, 2009 is very important IF it shows that he then began copying for eventual leaking purposes. Perhaps it's the best clue yet! It breaks up his own fake narrative -- which is the purpose of her working these various claims of his.

BUT one has to ask: why would someone trying to be a clever spy, why would this "genius," to hear the Forbes' source tell it, be so stupid as to ask for the information about how to make a VM and copy when it will stand out as a red flag on open chat that he can't erase thoroughly because the mods will have copies on their servers? It doesn't make sense. Maybe he was just making the classic arrogant geek's typical mistakes, or a newbie hacker's mistakes, I don't know, but it's worth asking.

Why is it important to find out if he began stealing before April 2012, which is the earliest that US authorities will admit he began stealing (at Dell in Hawaii)? Because that gives him plenty more time to hook up with WikiLeaks, hackers of various types, free software advocates, etc. etc. much as Aaron Swartz and Chelsea Manning did, and that means recruitment is more "doable." The same could be said for either Russian recruitment and/or "management."

So I'm all for running this to ground to the extent possible.

Finally, we have to ask why the Ars Technica links were shut down *today* as they appeared to show members of that community helping Ed Snowden figure out how to get copying and virtual machine tech that he used in his big hack of the NSA.

I've noticed as I researched that other links were shut down even earlier -- the original finding and its summary on soupsoup.net which doesn't even exist anymore, for example.

And that's because:

1) Real law-enforcement doing their jobs properly with all the necessary access to information and professional skills -- unlike amateur Internet sleuths -- have found that this mucking around in all these links and clues by amateurs is muddying the footprints and making it impossible to follow the case. They've asked Ars Technica to shut it down so that they themselves can properly research it, i.e. one of those anonymous people helping Snowden could be WikiLeaks or a Russian spy -- or be innocent -- and in all those cases, the worst possible way of finding the truth would be to have LibertyLynx start heckling them on Twitter and trying to make them talk in such a crude, stupid way -- like some kind of clumsy COINTELPRO operation. Very counterproductive.

2) Ars Technica itself is circling the wagons to protect its own. The geeks protect geeks above all, and the hell with the public or law-enforcement -- they don't feel they should "do their jobs for them." So they have removed it from the public eye -- and LE's eye -- so they can then be forced to get a warrant.

I'm going to vote for door no. 2 on this one.

We don't have anything more on that Swiss banker. Neither the US or Switzerland has confirmed it. On the face of it, it seems awfully risky and stupid to recruit someone by first getting them drunk, then following them and getting them out of trouble if they are arrested -- hoping they don't first crash and kill themselves. Weird. The reason was said to be due to the fact that the US wanted more transparency in banking -- and very likely this was related to the Russian mafia/Russian state as a lot of the cases the DOJ has to pursue are exactly in this area. But it could be about Iran or something else.

Kat_Missouri has a GREAT find in pointing out the "drunken banker" story is very likely lifted from an Alfred Hitchock film -- North by Northwest. We should have all realized this before. But again -- the guy in the movie nearly drives off a cliff! Works better in the movies...

Even so, she then proceeds to make the unsupported claim that Snowden started stealing documents in 2009 when he had his first run-in at work and got the derogatory remark in his file. He may well have begun stealing or cooperating even with foreign intelligence then, but here's the problem: @Kat_Missouri doesn't seem to have ready either a) the CIA's own denial b) Snowden's own denial and alibi. She's only read Harding's bungled version of this.

And while both the CIA and Snowden or Snowden alone could be lying, we're now confronted with the need to show more proof that he stole documents -- as distinct from just hacking into CIA computers for the sake of changing his own personnel form -- to make a point with his superior.

Kat_Missouri probably hasn't read my blog in ages, or she would have noticed this post about more use of tradecraft re: the Rubik's Cube which is followed up by this post asking more questions.

In the end, I'll have to conclude that the Beyond Socrates' Knees account are all very useful and intriguing, but more homework has to be done by this author to make the points claimed. And if we do prove that Ed began copying and keeping to leak files, then we have to find the person he gave them to. That remains elusive.

 

Ed v. Ed or How to Think About the Snowden Operation

I've just been re-reading Edward Lucas' wonderful book The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster.

As I've noted, Lucas cites me in his footnotes, and what a great thing! And I have my own much longer book on this subject as many know.

You can read my short Amazon review of his book here -- five stars!

Here's the thing -- Lucas' book is short (75 pages) and very well organized to do what it needs to do, which is to influence the debate in Washington. I hope it will have a tremendous impact there.

It's funny to think that in our time, the man who caused the worst intelligence disaster in history -- and yes, I believe it to be exactly that -- has the name "Snowden" that means "cloudiness" or "obfuscation" or "con" and the man exposing this -- Lucas -- has a name that means "shining" or "light" (like luch in Russian or "ray").

That might sound overly dramatic, but don't forget I characterize this situation in the end of my own book as a war in cyberspace, like the war in heaven.

"Ours is a High and Lonely Destiny"

Indeed, getting outside my own book world, in which I've been intensely involved for months, I still feel as if I'm reading liner notes for a kind of later installment of Out of the Silent Planet or That Hideous Strength. And Edward Lucas is just the man to know what I mean -- I think there probably wasn't a soul on Twitter in my follower streams who could instantly respond to a quote I made once discussing these hackers, "Ours is a high and lonely destiny" -- which summed up the arrogance of the scientist in That Hideous Strength. Indeed, he went me one better, recalling (as I had forgotten, despite numerous of re-reads of the book) that Uncle Andrew in the Magician's Nephew also said exactly the same thing. It epitomizes that haughty certitude, that resigned belief in the mission undertaken on behalf of lesser mortals who can't even understand why their "rights" need fighting for (John Perry Barlow invoked that sort of language with me).

It's Edward Snowden all over -- he claims that he is actually NSA Best Worker No. 1 for really embracing what its true meaning should be, and he claims to be doing the job of Congress, the courts, and the president all in one -- because he's that brilliant, and that much of a genius. 

Such a believer in his scientific "high and lonely destiny" -- the logical positivist, against whom C.S. Lewis railed in his day (and it is still relevant today as the computer scientist) believes he is higher than Natural Law. And indeed, that is the quintessential geek of our time -- believing in the autonomous realm of the Internet as a world of code, not law, and a world in which he, as coder, is a superior being not bound by the laws of earth.

Two Cultures

I was glad that Edward Lucas picked up my various finds about the anti-NSA movement long in motion in the anarchist hackers' movement and various "finds" I have made in the Snowden story, but I'm most proud of his picking up on the perversion of language that takes place. He noticed my essay "When Thinking Styles Collide" (about the reversal in our time of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures") which he said exemplified the mindset of the Snowdenistas.

I actually worked very hard on that essay, rewriting in dozens of times, and tried the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic and other outlets to publish it. I was ignored. I never even got a comment. I wrote personally to Leon Wieseltier because I thought surely he, with all his essays on "scientism" might get it. He ignored me. The entire SOPA/PIPA/CISPA thing was ignored by people who should have understand what it meant -- a takeover of this kind of thinking.

Had their been 10 times more pushback against it, we might never had Snowden; Snowden is a direct outcome of the forces against SOPA/CISPA winning; they quite literally recruited and bankrolled a Snowden. While that essay is about copyright and the hypocrisy of geeks who can't abide encrption when it comes as digital rights management to protect intellectual property,  but can insist on the exact same encryption for "privacy"; who can block malware sites, sometimes mistakenly or maliciously (a favourite trick of geeks who hate your website is to get it reported as a malware site) they found it "broke" the Internet to block piracy sites. Sheer double standards.

Lucas quoted my statement about how geeks think with this binary mentality and "don't understand how a bill becomes a law and don't believe in the process".  And he gets it perfectly, writing:

Once a bad law is on the books, they believe, it will operate like bad software: mechanically, like a guillotine. So: 'unless every single edge-case, hypothetical, problem is identified, spelled out, and remedied, nothing can stand."

That is not the way that a modern law-governed society works. Imperfections and hard cases abound. The art of politics and administration is balancing constraints and anomalies...That world is messay and sometimes murky. To the self-righteous and impatient it may seem impossible to change. But for all its faults, it is capable of correction.

Even Evgeny Morozov gets this problem, and that's why he, too, calls for a deliberate imperfectionism in governance because too much correctness could be oppressive.

My hope is that after his baptism by fire on reddit -- where the perversion of meaning and the geek binary thinking are all horridly on display in literalism and idiocy abounding -- that Lucas will write more knowledgeably for his next book which I believe is about cybersecurity. I really hope he will intellectually grapple with the challenge of our time: that it isn't that machines took over, or robots won; it's that men dumbed themselves down and made themselves like machines in their thinking in order to code them -- and we will all suffer for it.

Snowden Debate in Washington

Lucas' book is perfect for Washington and I hope it will get lots of readership there (and I know it is getting some in the right places but whether these messages will hit home, only time will tell).

To get accepted into the establishment debate now, you have to concede three things:

o you have to say that Clapper lied

o you have to say that Snowden started an important national conversation

o you have to show disdain for some of what seems like overreach from the NSA

I won't do any of these things, because I have no wish to be in the establishment conversation. But then...unlike Lucas, I'm not a journalist for one of the most important magazines of Europe, read by most intellectuals in America who want a critical coverage of their country and the world, but one that is not so far afield as to disavow capitalism or demand revolution -- which so many magazines do now. I am just a blogger on this subject, and I think the entire conversation should be about something else. The way the conversation of the political elite is going now, it works something like this:

o this bad thing happened, but it was ultimately really a good thing

o have a commission

o implement various recommendations like curbing or even ending metadata collection

o rein in those sinister intelligence people 

But I think the narrative is completely different:

o this really terrible thing happened because it was planned and executed as part of a far longer and larger war of anarchists who yes, were enlisted or were coopted by Russia

o it really is harmful to us and plays into the hands of evil powers in the world like Russia, China, Iran

o it isn't really about leaking or the substance of the documents, but about who gets to encrypt, and who gets to decrypt

o the arms race is on now by professors, geeks and anarchist hackers to code invincible encryption, outside the reach of law-enforcement, and this will have terrible political and legal consequences

o all kinds of bad forces in the world will also take advantage of this invincibility to cause havoc

o we will be playing catch-up, for ever unless some really powerful forces get together now and stop this latest round of the encryption wars, but even if they do, it will only be temporary.

As you can see, these couldn't be more starkly different scenarios, but let's leave aside my vision, which I think no one seems to share or even understand, and perhaps is too stark and futuristic, and go to the more classic stages of grief that the US Administration is going through, and what Edward Lucas can do to help.

Within the context of Obama's crony commission, and then the forces for greater moderation or even conservative prudence, Lucas' book then has many cautionary tales and warnings and convincing arguments.

Why Didn't Obama Catch Snowden?

Let's start with a phrase that Lucas almost drops in passing, but that goes to the heart of the matter with the Obama Administration: they acted with "deplorable slowness" once Snowden got to Hong Kong, as Lucas narrates.

Nobody has pointed that out. I hadn't even really thought about it until it was pointed out. Indeed, why did Obama wait an entire weeks to do anything about this fugitive? My God, Snowden checked into a hotel under his own name May 20, used his credit card under his own name, and met with journalists and leaked his own name on June 9. Why did it take 11 days to issue the extradition and then another two more to pull the passport?! What the hell is up with that?

There is so much more to be asked there. The answers range from conspiracy theories like "Is Obama breaking up the intelligence community with this kind of sabotage?" to more normal questions like "did the US see that it would actually save them embarassment if Snowden just fled to Russia, rather than having to try to bring him back to try in America, to the uproar engineered by Greenwald and co.?"

But beyond the questions of how the affair was disastrously handled -- starting with the contracting culture that engendered it (1/3 of all the 1.4 million persons with the top secret classification are contract workers, we learn from this book) -- what Lucas is really great at providing is the history of espionage and where Snowden fits in.

Kremlin "Active Measures" and the History of Espionage

This is a great complement for my work, since I included none of this, unless you count the Chaos Computer Club hackers who colluded with the KGB, which is in the context of describing the anti-NSA anarchist movement going on for decades.

It's always funny to me in a way to discover people who are looking at the Soviet Union and its patterns from another end of the telescope, so to speak. Everything I learned about the KGB, tradecraft, methods, I learned in the field as a human rights activist, seeing how these methods were used on people in the dissident movement. Their persecutors' thinking and methods like "active measures" or "agents of influence" were things I could see playing out in front of me as ways and means, even before I knew these things had terms.

It's funny when I come across someone like John Schindler, a man in his 40s, who seems too young to have possibly had any deep understanding of the Soviet Union, since it passed while he was in high school.  Lucas, too, who is 6 years younger than me, is a bit too young to have lived as an adult through the worst of the Andropovshchina. But of course, you don't need to have lived through a historical epoch to understand it, nor to have experienced its actors directly in all their nastiness, to "get it" -- if you are sincere, and intellectually curious.

For me, when I think of the KGB, I think of agents deliberately coming and stepping on the back of my heels as they followed me, as if to vividly illustrate what it means to follow somebody "po pyatkam." I think of the shock of coming into the banya with a colleague, and finding a third towel and robe was laid out for us because the attendant assumes that person following is actually with us. It was that cigarette in the toilet bowl when you return to your hotel room -- and you don't smoke. It's the samizdat book that disappears -- and then returns from your briefcase as you sit in a restaurant. It's the strip-search at the border. It's a policeman demanding your passport and saying KTO VY BUDETE in that weird Russian phrase (literally, who will you be? i.e. who might you be?) It's the vicious nastiness of the Soviet Peace Committee abroad at peace meetings, arguing down the dissident exiles who try to stand up to them. It's KGB psychiatrists trying to talk people out of their concern for psychiatric abuse by telling them that nothing they do will ever matter and they will only hurt the dissident patients whose cases they raise.

It sort of surprises me that someone has studied this as a system, and put names and terms to it, and then taught it as a class in school -- and people have learned it. Great! I was only able to "reverse engineer" it, so to speak. But not enough people are taught or get it, evidently...  Lucas was lucky that he had some early, formative experiences (which we learn from his other book, Deception) such as the horror of discovering that writing to the Yugoslav Embassy might blow back and harm a Yugoslav emigre rooming at his house. Lucas was also out there with the placards protesting martial law in Poland just as I was in New York.

Snowdenistas are like Peaceniks

In his chapter 4, "History Lessons," Lucas makes a brilliant analogy which I'm kicking myself for not thinking up -- the peace movement. I was active in the US and European peace movement, as it happened, and was good friends with Edward Thompson of END -- another Ed. Lucas gets it exactly right in explaining how the Soviets manipulated the Western peace groups -- not always literally with "Moscow Gold." They didn't have to. They could just nudge this one or play to the vanity of the other one or ensure the next one had a platform at this or that world conference -- and the job would get done. CND was a mass movement; END, which I allied with, was like a tiny sect in comparison, even though I think it had an outsize intellectual influence on the movements West and East. It was very, very hard to get people to criticize the Soviets' SS20s too. Very few groups did.  Those were the groups I worked with when I defended the independent peace groups throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR when I worked at Helsinki Watch.

As Lucas writes about that era, "the Soviet KGB were delighted with divisive and distracting effects the 'peace' movement was having in the West."

I recall the "expertise" solicited by the Soviet court in Tomsk in 1983, where Alexander Shatravka (my ex-husband), then an activist in the independent peace movement, was tried for circulating the group's manifesto calling for disarmament East and West. This "expertise" was written by Tomsk University professors (to their shame, surely). They wrote that the Moscow Trust Group's appeal (which Shatravka had participated in) would "damage the reputation of the Soviet Union in the eyes of those forces in the Western peace movements which can be used by us in the struggle for disarmament."

Used. When perestroika and glasnost arrived, and the 20th Century and Peace journal of the old Soviet Peace Committee was taken over by Gleb Pavlovsky (himself a complicated figure who has mainly tended to serve the Kremlin), that Tomsk document was published as an example of proof of how the Soviet government deliberately, methodically tried to control Western movements -- and was even prepared to jail people they thought were going to far with that peace message at home. It was brilliant.

And that's EXACTLY what we're seeing now with the privacy and transparency movement (which is really the anarchy and revolutionary encryption movement). There's a kind of gloss where it's all supposed to be "for peace," but it isn't, really. It's for war.

Lucas writes of those old 1980s movements (Ken Livingston of CND, an avowed communist comes to mind -- and frankly then-CND operative Catherine Ashton who is now in charge of the EU's foreign relations, comrades!) -- that they "see their own countries' flaws with blinding clarity, and ignore those of the repressive regimes elsewhere." They "manifest a corrosive mistrust for their political leaders" explains -- and nothing government says counts anymore. Too true, too true.

Echelon

Then Lucas takes us through something called the Echelon affair which I had only half-known and forgotten -- espionage has just not been my area of study in all these years, although of course I read John Le Carre, and of course I read the memoirs of defectors like Shevchenko and Mitrokhin.

It was John Schindler who said that the leaking of Echelon system of collecting information was an "active measure" by Russian intelligence "aimed at stoking distrust between America and its European allies." It may very well have been. He's in a position to know.

And as Schindler points out, Snowden didn't go to the inspector general, attorney general, or Congressional committees on intelligence -- as Lucas highlights --- begging the question of his insistence on "whistleblower's" status.

Lucas walks through a plausible scenario staged by his other Ed involving first his publication of just the public interest documents, and then his case for possible pardon or public interest defense on that basis -- and then his switch to really damaging documents that he had no business leaking if he were really sincere about being a mere civil rights advocate.

HOW did that happen? Did the Russians demand a quid pro quo?

THAT is where I hope the message will start to sink in for folks in Washington. To give them half a Snowden, if you will, if they simply can't part with Snowden and what he means for them - but then to show where he "went too far" and where they have to stop at the other half of Snowden.

Lucas explains that intelligence operatives follow a formula called Money Ideology Coercion Ego (MICE). Obviously, that last one, "Ego," is where our Ed now in Moscow fits right in. His vanity is a low-hanging fruit for the FSB to stroke and stroke.

Lucas cites Schindler again here, that Snowden was "intelligent, highly naive and totally uninformed." I just don't know. While he may not fully grasp the evils of Russia, he's hardly naive in his very calculated and shrewd play in the crypto wars -- indeed, that's what I keep saying this is really what it's all about.

With his knowledge of how espionage systems work, Lucas also asks a lot of excellent probing questions about why Snowden moved around as he did. Was he afraid of a repeated polygraph tests? "It might reveal that he was hanging out with WikiLeaks sympathisers, for example -- which would mean a speedy end to his carer," says Lucas. Yet here is a guy who was said by a purported co-worker who spoke to Forbes' Andy Greenberg that he wore an EFF hoodie to work and openly critiqued the system. Really? And the superiors let that past?

Lucas outlines a theory of how Russian intelligence could have micro-managed the hackers they also had ties to into dealing with Snowden. As he explains:

The example of the peace movement shows that given the right initial direction and a favourable propaganda environment, political movements in the West can serve the Kremlin's purpose without hands-on control.

Bingo. In much shorter and more concise form, Lucas gets at what I was trying to say in 4 times the number of pages.

Lucas cites Craig Pirrong's blog on Hawaii and the connections there, as I do. But Pirrong has one quite shaky element in his hypothesis that Snowden first contacted Appelbaum before he contacted the others. It's premised merely on the notion that "like attracts to like" - hacker goes to hacker first. But Snowden himself says he first contacted Poitras because he saw her video with Binney -- which I call her "recruitment advertorial". Of course it's possible that Ed is lying, and in fact he and Jake are old pals and met at some geeky meet-up in India or some other country -- and believe me I've looked, and find some intriguing connections.

But they just can't be proven. Appelbaum's pre-emptive video expressing concerns about the discovery of the Hawaii convergence is an indirect admission of sorts, but not the smoking gun needed to clinch the charges. It's an area where journalists and law-enforcement should be looking -- and I'm not sure they are.

On the Russian front, Lucas provides a helpful reminder that Kucherena is among the founders of the Institute of Democracy ande Cooperation, a pro-Kremlin propaganda outfit. Why, that's based right here in New York. Has anyone examined that? I didn't even mention it in my book among the many honorific titles Kucherena has -- but it's worth probing.

Lucas concludes with a message that even those who think Snowden accomplished something can live with:

The recklessness, damage, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp do not invalidate all their aims. A debate on the collection and warehousing of meta-data was overdue.

This data is collected and scrutinised -- metadata can break privacy: if you know who called a suicide prevention helpline, or an HIV testing service, or a phone-sex line, and from where and when, the content of the calls matter less than the circumstances, says Lucas.

Except...I really don't think that's the case. I realize quite a few are claiming it's the case, even some who are critical of Snowden. But no one has found a case of an innocent person who's HIV testing was wrongfully snooped such as to harass them for their views. There might be a terrorist suspect whose HIV testing was looked at, but that would be legitimate -- unless there's a belief that they get to have private lives protected by civil rights forever, and we never get to head off something like the Boston bombing.

Did Clapper Lie?

So, while he may consider himself more of a hawk in his own context, in the US, Lucas fits in to what the liberal consensus is on Snowden now by exonerating Thomas Drake and saying Clapper  "may not have been fully frank" (better than saying he "lied," but still different than saying he was thrown by a cunning rhetorician with a radical agenda, Ron Wyden.)

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of America?" asked Wyden - the same senator who fought SOPA and CISPA (which, in my view, should have been passed and which might have regulated a lot of the problems of Internet companies vacuuming up data which is at the root of the Snowden adventure for the public.)

"The question, was, in a sense, a trap, aimed at bouncing Clappter into revealing more than he wanted," replies Lucas. Indeed.  But then he endorses Clapper's mea culpa -- "As loath as I am to give any credit for what's happened, which is egregious, I think it's clear that some of the conversations that this has generated, some of the debate, actually probably needed to happen."

Well, I don't think so. Conversations that happen due to cunning radical agendas and cloaked anarchist movements seeking maximum encryption shouldn't be dignified with national conversations, they should be called out for the manipulations they are.

The Abominable Snowden

In the end, Lucas comes down close to where I am, however, by saying:

Nothing evinced so far justifies the catastrophic damage that the Snowden leaks have done to national security -- the worst diaster in the history of American and British intelligence.

It looks far more likely that he was trying to cripple the NSA and its allies, and to hurt America's standing in the world. Taking a huge cache of documents, and in a way that largely defies description, analysis or mitigation, is not the action of a patriotic whistleblower. It is the behaviour of a saboteur.

I couldn't agree more. A saboteur. And that is how Congress and the president and the courts need to look at this: deliberate sabotage, in the service of a radical agenda, helped by a radical movement, that has been exploited by Russia. We don't need to prove the hand of Moscow or Moscow gold in this affair to act -- and act cautiously and prudently.

 

Related articles

"Privacy for Me and Not for Thee": My Book on Snowden is Out at Amazon and Scribd

Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

Author Of New Snowden Book Explains How Russia Would Exploit A Disgruntled NSA Employee

Edward Snowden: 'Not Possible' to Return to U.S. Now

US, Russia and World Timeline for WikiLeaks, Hackers, and Edward Snowden

The End of the Snowden Operation

The Countervailing Opinion on Edward Snowden by Author of New Book

Edward Lucas "Snowdenista" piece in the Wall Street Journal is the most dishonest thing you'll read today

Praise for My Book "Privacy for Me and Not for Thee"

Snowden Asked for a Public Key as Proof for "A Foreign Embassy" in May 2013

Going over Snowden's timeline in Hong Kong again and again as I have had to do for my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee (available on Amazon Kindle or Scribd), I have had to keep asking about discrepancies in this narrative.

When I re-read Bart Gellman's piece about his first contacts with Snowden -- which I tracked from Greenwald's tweet complaining about Gellman's reporting on Greenwald's reporting (this show hasn't been without its frictions), something really stood out for me.

This:

In an e-mail on May 24, he dropped a bombshell. Whistleblowers before him, he said, had been destroyed by the experience. Snowden wanted “to embolden others to step forward,” he wrote, by showing that “they can win.” He therefore planned to apply for asylum in Iceland or some other country “with strong internet and press freedoms,” although “the strength of the reaction will determine how choosy I can be.”

He alluded to other options, aware that he had secrets of considerable financial value, but said, “I have no desire to provide raw source material to a foreign government.”

To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source.

Emphasis added. Now, what's up with this?

(As we know, Gellman didn't bite on Snowden's thuggish demand to publish the documents within 72 hours. Even though Gelman waited for "vetting," he still rushed, however, and presented the story in the tendentious way that Snowden wanted it presented -- and then got it wrong and had to walk it back later.)

Did Gellman end up publishing the key?

John Young of Cryptome has done searches here and here and it doesn't show the date of May 24 or around May 24.

Note there's lots of keys from "Verax" from the "Informed Democracy Front" (sigh) on May 20 -- maybe that's Snowden shovelling his stolen NSA files out the door. We know he flew to Hong Kong on May 20.

Note with these search returns that other people who happened to use the nickname Verax for themselves or their company are in these results and unlikely to be related to Snowden.

And note that among the people having fun with this is Kevin Poulsen, surprise, surprise.

But let's focus on what this means.

Snowden had to prove to a foreign embassy that he really was who he said he was -- the guy with those stolen NSA documents. Remember, on May 24, he had not yet revealed his identity, and nothing had been published yet by his adversarial journalist friends. He was only in online contact with Greenwald, Poitras, Gellman and likely Appelbaum.

Had he already hidden all the files and no longer possessed them, just in case? We have gotten used to taking his word -- and the adversarial journalists' word -- that he handed over all his files to them on or before June 10 and then "went into hiding."

But what if it were actually earlier?

Perhaps he was busy contacting other embassies already -- within four days of arrival -- because obviously, the plan to get asylum in China's territory, Hong Kong, was going awry. Likely he had already contacted the Hong Kong lawyers by then, and they were already breaking it down to him.

So he probably started the mad dash to all the other embassies. He claims in his latest interview for ARD that there were so many in this list he can't remember, although France and Germany were among them -- and we know Iceland, too.

What if it were Russia, though? What if either *first* he was going to Russia -- or only Russia after China failed -- or if Russia was in a list like everybody else?

If Snowden got in touch with the Russian embassy *before* he met the journalists in person for the first time, but while he was still planning leaks with them in encrypted chat, that changes the nature of the operation.

This e-mail demand shows us something else, too -- Snowden was willing to have his identity published by May 27 -- days before he was to meet Greenwald and the rest on May 30 (or May 31 or June 1, there are varying dates given, although Greenwald's latest statement puts it on May 30).

So he needed the foreign embassy to have "proof" by seeing the document published and then having encrypted confirmation coming to his account via his public key (which he would then decrypt with his private key and show a foreign embassy).

Except...why couldn't he just take that very document on PRISM that Gellman published and just show the document itself to that foreign embassy?

Why wouldn't he do that?

Because he already didn't have the documents?

Because this has never been about Snowden having the documents but some other unnamed people somewhere?

Because he might be arrested with the documents by the Chinese?

All of this bears investigation.

Gellman hasn't answered my tweet about this and probably never will.

 

Glenn Greenwald Changes His Date Again on First Snowden Meeting

Glenn Greenwald is on a pity tour of the US leftwing media now, trying to make himself out to be a victim of the evil US government which is hounding him and place a chill on his speech, you see -- which is why he goes on talking so much. He claims he can't come home under these circumstances. I will look at this in another post, but for now I want to note something fascinating:

Glenn has changed his dates yet again.

I note in my compendium called Idiot Wind all the important dates in the "Legend of the Phoenix" (as Laura Poitras herself calls it (as we learn From Luke Harding's new book in describing the Snowden caper, from the line in the Daft Punk song "Get Lucky" of last summer).

Greenwald cites at least five different dates for his first connection with Snowden, and then explains this away as being about different phases, if you will, of him first stumbling around with encryption and not being able to insert it, then making contact but not really getting up to scratch for a few months, then really working. Even so, there's some glaring issues in these shifting dates. There's his insistence -- to beat out Bart Gellman -- that he got to Snowden first and began working with him in February, as he tweeted -- which means there are issues at stake as to how much he influenced Snowden's choice of what to hack at the NSA.

Then there's the new shift in dates Glenn has just introduced with this Salon interview.

He told Haaretz that his first actual meeting of Snowden in person was "in May". Then it seemed it was May 31.

Then the Guardian reported it as June 1 on their timeline.

Peter Maass, in his enthusiastist long portrait of Laura Poitras for New York Times Magazine puts the date even later:

In May, he sent encrypted messages telling the two of them to go to Hong Kong. Greenwald flew to New York from Rio, and Poitras joined him for meetings with the editor of The Guardian’s American edition. With the paper’s reputation on the line, the editor asked them to bring along a veteran Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, and on June 1, the trio boarded a 16-hour flight from J.F.K. to Hong Kong.

If you boarded a 16-hour flight to Hong Kong on June 1, New York Time, your arrival in Hong Kong would already be June 2.

This might have been explained away by time differences, or leaving on a plane May 31st and still thinking of it as "the same day," even though it was already the next day in Hong Kong.  (Remember, first he met with Poitras and MacAskill "in a hotel in Yonkers," then they flew off to Hong Kong at the drop of a hat on Ed's say-so.) But I'm telling you how Peter Maass actually reported it; how the Guardian actually reported it; how Haaretz actually reported -- and there are all different days.

So as you can see, there were already several dates floating around.

Now Greenwald says definitely to Salon in an exclusive interview:

1) Greenwald and Poitras went to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden and discuss the documents, “for almost two weeks — six days before the first story came out and every day after that until he went into hiding.

That means May 30.

That's because the first story came out on June 5 (look carefully at the posted date on the Guardian, because the html at the top says June 06, but the story posted says "Wednesday, June 5").

So it's a day earlier than the earliest given and in the muggy May indicated to Haaretz.

Why else is this important?

Because now he's meeting Snowden, along with Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill, on the very day that Christine Corbett's tweet about the Rubik's Cube party was posted. The Rubik's Cube was carried by Snowden and was his "verification signature" if you will.

So if the tweet is on May 30 and the meeting is on May 30, more than ever, it looks like a signal to go ahead with the meeting. Or maybe it's the back-up to make sure a meeting happens, after the first meeting was apparently flubbed. We've never heard why they missed their first meeting, but it could have been due to time difference calculations or something like that.

This is important because Corbett, a close friend of hacker Jacob Appelbaum, was at the Spring Break of Code in Hawaii in late March-early April 2013, at a time when it could have been possible for these geeks to meet Snowden in person there.

Sure, they could have met on the 31st, and Corbett's tweet could have been a signal the day before -- or, of course, unrelated at all (she has never commented).

But now that they're on the same date, it makes it more likely they are connected.

The exact process and timing of when Snowden went into hiding and when and where remains to be clarified, but it seems it was around the 10th of June when he moved out of his hotel, or so we are told.

I'm updating my "Snowden in Hong Kong" table yet again, and added further clarifications -- stay tuned for that plus links in this story.

 

 

The "Revolutionary Story" and the "Democratization of Expertise"

Tom Nichols (War Room), a professor at the Navy War College, had a widely-read and discussed blog post about the Death of Expertise.

In general, I agree, that there isn't enough respect of such experts as he and John Schindler at the Naval College. There's an enormous amount of ill-bred ignorance and nastiness coming particularly from their nasty, pseudonymous challengers (like @Tolstoved, who endlessly heckled both of these professors last summer from behind his nick-name, and who came to attack me when my book on Snowden came out. I discovered is Jesse Stavis, an ABD Russian instructor at the University of Wisconsin.)

I personally lean more toward enabling the amateur to ask a lot of questions of the experts and try to get answers, even allowing respect where it is due.

But I don't give much credence to the endless heckling of fuss-budgets bothered by the "appeal to authority" fallacy. It's not a fallacy, truly, when people do have expertise to which you can indeed appeal. And the Latin rhetorical rules are for deciding who wins debates only in one arcane sense -- they are not supposed to suppress debate or be their center of gravity.

One problem in respecting academia is how goofy it has become. Just absolutely awful. For example, look at these politically-correct panels at Yale Law School -- "movement lawyering," Palestinian justice, "anti-oppression training," animal rights, the extractive industries, etc. -- and naturally a screening of Jeremy Scahill's "Dirty Wars." Not as an alternative, not as just some panels with a different perspectve than the norm, but the new norm itself. (The only reason you don't see any Snowden stuff here is that these kinds of conferences probably have to get approved six months or a year in advance. Wait til you see next year's!).

Rightfully, some people call Yale Law School an NGO now.

So many of the "Centers for Security Studies" are really about challenging the state completely from very radical belief systems. For example, every program that the Center for National Security Studies at Fordham Law has put on recently -- and I've gone to a number of them -- takes the side of Swartz or Manning or Snowden against the government -- their idea of bringing in "opposition" is to have the liberal columnist Jonathan Capeheart from the Washington Post debate Snowdenistas. Ordinarily, the default is to have all anti-state radicals and end the meeting with wild calls to impeact Obama, amid whistles and cheers. Bedlam.

In any event, I just hasten to share this absolute gem of wisdom from David Golumbia, himself a critic of Silicon Valley and the hacker movements with whom I have had many discussions (we don't agree on many things due to his dislike of capitalism but we share concerns about the excesses of Big IT and the criminality of the hackers.)

Here is his comment from Tom's blog:

While, like you, I am sympathetic with the “democratization of knowledge” idea, I think what I imagined that meant, in the early days of, e.g. Wikipedia, was that “anyone could contribute to the discussion,” a notion it’s hard to disagree with. What it has come down to, as you say so ably, though, is an actual aggression toward people with demonstrated expertise, especially when that expertise contradicts the knee-jerk impulses of (particularly young) people, who may have swallowed hook-line-and-sinker a particular “revolutionary” story and think it is world-altering wisdom from on high.

We see this in full flower on Wikipedia now, where it is very difficult to contribute to articles on which one is an actual expert, because a new form of “expert,” a Wikipedia expert, who believes that the “democratization of expertise” has eliminate the claims of (say) physicists to write about Newton’s laws of motion, but *also*–and this is the crucial point–elevated a new kind of “ultra-expert” whose knowledge (of Wikipedia’s rules etc.) trumps the other. You will almost never get Wikipedians to admit they are playing this game–they’ll always claim their kind of expertise is different in kind from, and therefore better than, the other, despite it being on the whole a much less “democratic” and in many ways more hierarchical form of power than the other (the process of and path to becoming a Wikipedia power user is much less transparent than getting a PhD in Physics, for example).

This “hacking of expertise” is visible everywhere in our society, from obnoxious & arrogant “let’s build it all over from scratch because everyone before us was stupid” projects like http://www.lesswrong.org, to “civic hacking” and so on, and all the way up to climate change. It is profoundly undemocratic for many of the reasons you lay out. It gives the lie to the notion that the widely distributed information network itself will allow the best ideas, or opinions, or most accurate information to work itself out in the end–it proves that (very formal, and very knee-jerk) idea of the function of democratized knowledge is plain wrong. How society works to fix it is, to my mind, not at all clear.

Too true, too true. The "civic hacking" nonsense is among the worse of it.

You know, we saw this back in the day with the Bolsheviks -- sorry to say it once again, but there it is. When the Leningrad worker's soviets were established, or whatever other lovely collective that the socialist revolutionaries loved as a form, there was always this recurring problem. Things would be decided not by the majority and not by vote, but by sectarian minorities who forced issues. Or even closed down parliament ("the guard was tired.")

The people who "did everything" -- took notes, followed up, lead sub-committees -- took over. That would be Stalin, who was the note-taker, keeping the minutes, and then made them go his way; Lenin said he was "crude." Indeed.

Always these collectives devolve into fake democracy, and the will of the minority -- "the tyranny of who shows up." Or worse, the cadres, the people trained in secret with a hidden agenda, or who are very motivated and have access to resources others don't -- and take over. "The cadres decide everything," said Stalin, meaning how bureaucracies work, but the same could be said of collectives and committees.

He should know, he was one of them.

What am I going on about? That the "wikification of everything" and the "wiki government" so celebrated by collectivists like Beth Noveck is really a terrible peril to real liberal democratic governance. It means that a few cadres run things unaccountably, much of the time -- and the usual problems crop up the same way every time, just as the have for a 100 years -- discussions closed, votes not taken, hands forced, expedient mesaures taken, etc.

I've been a big critic of Wikipedia, and the arcane writ of how to prepare the entries is only the beginning of the perversion of meaning and language -- it's a lack of due process and built-in unfairness that means an entry like mine can be endlessly griefed and vandalized and tendentiously skewed and I have no recourse.

While some of the viciousness might be abated by requiring the editors to post their real names and biographies, not all of it would disappear -- precisely because of the elevating of a class of random people, driven by various Internet wiki ideologies or just plain spite and spleen -- who have take up this job. Whatever "good" is done in Wikipedia of facts being presented is undone by the culture. And time and again, I find pages about historical events or people from other sites which have been copied wholesale by Wikipedia -- with nothing but a bare foot note to a sentence or two of the large swathes of text as credit. And then there are so many biased pages -- look at the page on Snowden, for example, where Clapper's "perjury" is taken as a fact, rather than an allegation.

Golumbia also hits the nail on the head when he describes how undemocratic these collectives really are -- they actually have a far, far more rigid and hierarchical system than the establishment of encyclopedia editorial boards which they replaced. Anonymous is even worse -- rigid, escheloned, disciplined, with a brutal, Spartan system of testing valour or proving loyalty. And yet symps like Biella Coleman write that this is "democratic."

Then, the bit about the "revolutionary story". Again, too true, too true!  It's why I write posts like this or keep a whole blog like this called Not Killed By American Troops. I didn't have a chance to fill in the *hundreds* killed in Iraq lately by terrorists, with our troops long gone.

Golumbia -- who has to deal with this pervision of meaning and words in academic up close where it is really at its worse -- as well as on the Internet at large -- seems to despair in this comment as to what we can do.

Well, you start by documenting it and countering it. You have to. So much of it is about machine-thinking -- the geeks take pride that they have conformed to machines and made themselves like machines and think like them. It was supposed to be that the programmers made the machines more and more human, so that they became intelligent, sentient beings, but instead, what has happened is that the human is being made dumber. It's like Jaron Lanier declaring "You are not a gadget" and calling on people not to become mere batteries to their machines.

But beyond the machine thinking, there is the problem of people bred on the Internet -- and yes, I say that with exactly the same tone as my mother might ask "were you brought up in a barn?" if my brother and I did something particularly clumsy or uncouth.

And it starts by describing this, and pushing back...

 

Tor Story

An interesting discussion emerged on Twitter about how to understand the stresses and strains and double-crosses and "Who's on First?" of Team Snowden. In one of the last chapters of my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee, in a section called "Team Snowden Breaks Up?" I address what appears to be a falling out between Glenn Greenwald and Jacob Appelbaum about the timing and detail of the publishing process regarding Snowden's documents.

No doubt there were other strains in the relationship, but when the fight erupted into the public, it seemed to indeed be severe. From the looks of the tweets, Appelbaum appeared to be blackmailing Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, and James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer now at the Guardian, by threatening to publish e-mails he had with Ball unless Rusbridger authorized the publishing of a piece on Tor -- Appelbaum's own software project where he is still listed as the main promoter.

The prominent author Louise Mensch made the point that Appelbaum's threat forced the Guardian to publish a piece they were still vetting -- and forced them to truncate the piece.

While that may be the case, I read the material differently -- we're looking at the same set of tweets you can see linked in the text below.  I think Appelbaum strutted around and tried to indicate he could threaten the Guardian, but they one-upped him. For one, they were planning to publish the piece anyway; for two, their publishing of it the very next day indicated that he just wasn't in the loop in their plans. For three, the fact that Bart Gellman published an even more elaborate piece with a 39-page manual on how to crack Tor from the NSA -- sending a snarky little winking Tweet to Appelbaum -- indicates that he, too, already had the documents in the pipeline but just wasn't moving as fast as the more radical hacker throught he should.

Appelbaum only looked bad even with his fellow radical hackers, however. As we can see in this passage, Smari McCarthy even challenges Jake to dump the document -- if he has it. But he clearly doesn't.

Mensch believes that what we see here is a pattern of blackmail -- Greenwald threatened his resignation if his very first story on Snowden wasn't published by 5 pm that day.

An yees, we saw again that with the story involving Greenwald's partner, David Miranda -- a threat on the record which Greenwald tried to dismiss as a translation problem with covering his remarks to the Brazilian press, and a threat that he and his supporters constantly deny. Many in the journalist community, however, saw it as what it was -- a dead man's switch type of threat against the UK government.

And now with the Tor story, there seems to be the same kind of blackmail from Appelbaum -- and the point then seems to be that the Guardian has gotten itself in too deep with its radical journo and hacker friends, and is being whipsawed by them.

I don't think two is enough to make a pattern (re: threats to the Guardian; three if we count the threat to the UK government). Given how strenuously the Greenwald team denies this, we have to make the argument persuasive. I don't think "blackmail" is what Appelbaum is accomplishing here. I think he's merely showing himself to have been sidelined.

If there's an argument to be made to the contrary, then we need to find the tweets of James Ball or various other journalists that seemed to bargain with Appelbaum (if that's the recollection). But what it looks like here is that after Appelbaum spouts, Ball emerges calmly to tell him off, and invoke his closer following of Snowden's wishes, implying -- again -- that Jakes has fallen outside the fold.

In any event, comments and corrections are welcome -- this section is already revised for "Version 3" in adding the tweet threatening to dump Ball's email, and more changes can be made, although I don't want the book to get too out of sync.

3. Team Snowden Breaks Up?

The constantly changing by-lines on the Snowden leaks appearing in various outlets (sometimes Poitras, sometimes Greenwald, sometimes others, like Bart Gellman of the Washington Post); the contradictions increasingly noted in the stories; and growing peer pressure from the coder community indicated cracks were emerging in the original Team Snowden. This raises the question as to whether the uneven cooperation and outright skirmishes between the “Fifth Estate” geeks – radical activists favoring indiscriminate, total dumping of state and corporate files – and the Fourth Estate  –  adversarial journalists sympathetic to them but filtering the raw materials – may ultimately undermine the journalistic cause.

On October 3, 2013, Appelbaum erupted on Twitter with blunt protests against Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian. Appelbaum claimed that the Guardian was cooperating too much with the British government and afraid to publish documents which Snowden had supposedly leaked on Tor. Appelbaum specifically accused Greenwald and James Ball of sitting on the Tor story, then was besieged on Twitter by various hackers who wanted to know what exactly his beef was. He only hinted darkly that the Guardian was now somehow “turned” by UK intelligence and was being overly cautious now about their releases, agreeing that Rusbridger was “the worst face of the anti-surveillance revolution.”

The Twit fight heated up when James Ball appeared and calmly stated that he and the Guardian were not holding backon the material, but following Snowden's wishes and vetting the documents carefully. The dispute attracted the attention of Foreign Policy's Elias Groll and Katelyn Fossett, who ran a blog about it on October 3.

Appelbaum then even threatened to leak his emails with James Ball on the Tor story, but he seemed to relent a bit, commenting, “I'm debating dropping @jamesrbuk's emails related to the topic but that is unkind if they are going to publish soon.

Smári McCarthy, an activist in ThoughtWorks, the Pirate Party and other radical Internet groups, debated Appelbaum in this thread, basically trying to see if Appelbaum had enough knowledge of the Snowden document to leak it himself, pre-emptively. He didn’t.

A memo also appeared October 3 on the alternative news service Cryptome, which as we know has been critical of Assange in the past, notably about his unconscionable exploitation of Tor to start WikiLeaks. It listed the further gripes that some in the hackers’ community had started to assemble about the entire process of journalistic vetting at the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and ProPublica . They saw the mainstream media as gate-keepers and filterers of the raw, organic Snowden leaks.

Then on October 4, a story on revelations about the NSA’s Tor surveillance appeared under a byline by Greenwald, Ball and Bruce Schneier, the prominent cybersecurity expert who had now openly embraced the hacker’s cause and joined the EFF. A source mentioned prominently in the story was Roger Dingledine, Appelbaum's fellow Tor developer.

Was the appearance of the Tor story coerced by Appelbaum’s accusations? It hardly seemed possible to run a story of this complexity on a day's notice.

Or had it been prompted by a series of sensational arrests related to Tor, in a desperate bid to resurrect the reputation of the chief tool used by WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden along with thousands of activists around the world? That seemed to be its chief message.

Maybe the appearance of the story the day after the threatening tweet merely indicated that Appelbaum was out of the loop, now sidelined as Greenwald’s tech guru. Maybe he simply hadn’t known his former colleagues were going to publish the piece anyway – as he seemed to begin to realize even during the Twitter debate when he threatened to leak Ball’s e-mails.

The Guardian piece mentions briefly that Tor was used by a suspected head of a child pornography ring but fails to note the even bigger story of the day, the closing of the black-market drug site Silk Road, also heavily reliant on Tor, when its alleged mastermind, Dread Pirate Robert (Ross Ulbricht) was arrested and also charged with ordering a hit on a federal agent who turned out to be involved in a sting operation. Was this, then an indication that the story was rushed after Appelbaum’s pressure?

Then Barton Gellman of the Washington Post tweeted to Appelbaum a link to his story on Tor with a wink – and a patronizing call for patience. That suggested that both the Guardian and Washington Post were planning on the Tor story all along – but just weren’t consulting with Appelbaum closely on it.

As noted, in the child pornography case, the FBI was said to disable half of Tor’s reported 3200 nodes or computers used as relays and then essentially electronically spill “dye” on many other users to out them, causing mass apprehension among Tor users, some of whom were activists in places like Iran and China trying to avoid government detection and persecution. On social media and discussion lists like Stanford’s LiberationTech, Appelbaum fended off recriminations for days.

The purpose of the story in the Guardian seemed to be about proving the contradictory claims that the NSA has back-doors “everywhere,” but that Tor, created and still funded by the Department of Defense was different, and still good to use for anonymous communications and browsing. Yes, there are complex technical reasons for this having to do with the nature of encryption standards and how they can be undermined, and the nature of Tor’s obfuscation especially if used with PGP encryption.

Even so, Schneier seemed to deliberately avoid discussing (or didn’t know about) any of his own industry’s recent critiques of Tor – especially the scholarly works prepared by its original developers still involved in the project from the Navy.

A few days later, Ken Auleta’s celebratory profile of Rusbridger appeared in the New Yorker.  It was indicative of the liberal tide of support for the Guardian which was not something Appelbaum could stop, even with his insinuations that the British paper “sat on” Snowden revelations.