I'm not going to get my hopes up, as Public Keys can be faked and manipulated for various purposes as I discovered and reported here.
But let's take at face value an intriguing report from Cryptome, a site maintained by John Young, a crypto conspiracy crank who quarreled with Julian Assange and now occasionally publishes exposes of the Snowdenista gangs.
On 14 May, like a lot of us Snowden-watchers, Cryptome noticed the use of this code name "Cincinnatus" first mentioned in relationship to Snowden by Greenwald in this book (that's as far as we can tell).
Greenwald then handily ties Cinncinatus to Verax, the other nym that Snowden used in his communications. Greenwald doesn't say how he knows it's the same person; he says it *is* the same person (and he may come to regret that!). Likely, he validated this in person in a meeting with Laura Poitras.
First, Cryptome searched public key dbases and found that the name Cinncinatus (and there were probably more than one as it is a common one) was tied to lavabit.com -- the service Snowden used for his encrypted email which closed down when the feds came calling with a search warrant.
Young did a simple Google search most likely and tied the name [email protected] to a Crypto Party -- of all things. He is listed as the contact person for registering for a Crypto Party in Honolulu on December 11, 2012.
The Crypto Kids such as this enthusiastic blogger think this is just wonderful, as they see it as endorsement of Snowden of their methods, their tools, and their radical movement for maximum encryption -- which means of course maximum lack of unaccountability and license to organize radical movements without law enforcement being able to monitor them.
Here's what Wireless Fantasy writes about this revelation, first referencing the "PGP for Journalists" tutorial which Snowden made:
Having created this tutorial, whoever planned the event in Oahu fits the profile of Snowden, used Lavabit as he was known to do, and one would be hard-pressed to prove the shared name and location is merely a coincidence. In his new book No Place to Hide, Greenwald produces a paragraph written by Snowden to Laura Poitras, which explains what Conor Friedersdorf has termed his “other motive” for leaking:
The shock of this initial period [after the first revelations] will provide the support needed to build a more equal internet, but this will not work to the advantage of the average person unless science outpaces law. By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win here. We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search through universal laws, but only if the technical community is willing to face the threat and commit to implementing over-engineered solutions. In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man.
Right. We would be hard-pressed to prove this is merely coincidental, right you are!
These movement people are in so deep they don't get that it implicates Snowden and his friends in collusion in ways they'd rather not talk about or have public.
The Crypto Party is a movement organizing tool popularized by people like AsherWolf and other radical hackers which draws from old Marxist-Leninist movement ideals, people and methods; Occupy, of course; and the culture-jamming of the latter-day anarchist hacker movements. The goal is to create play-pretend front activities that look like they are just "helping ordinary people" learn to encrypt their communications better so The Man, or their jealous ex-boyfriend, can't hack them. But of course, it's a way of recruiting and training people for the cadre movement seeking absolute encryption and anarchist goals as well (i.e. overthrowing the state, capitalism, democratic government as we know it, etc.)
Whatever you may think of the Crypto Party -- and you can tell I don't think much, having followed it through its various fake permutations, including when it even attracted grant money in Europe and involved more mainstream groups, as fronts always do -- here's the thing:
THIS particular Crypto Party was in -- of all places -- Honolulu, Hawaii.
At a time when Snowden was in Hawaii, too.
The blogger quoted by the organizer of the Crypto Party -- surprise, surprise, an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist named Parker Higgins is asking frantically:
Wait wait wait wait wait. Is this Snowden quoting my blog for an event in December 2012? http://t.co/Ihg6TJlmw9
— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 15, 2014
Well, you know what my next question is, then:
@xor Is this how Snowden got that EFF sticker for his laptop, at your Crypto Party in December 2012?
— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) May 17, 2014
BTW, it's odd that Parker immediately thinks "Snowden" is blogging -- as a hacker himself, surely he knows Cryptome is John Young.
Remember the Spring Break of Code? We should have kept looking.
Now, there are several possibilities.
1) Snowden himself even came to this Crypto Party in person, incognito, to learn more hacking methods to steal NSA documents.
2) Snowden was already known to some of the people there, who helped him.
3) Cinninatus is another person, likely Jacob Appelbaum of Tor, or some other Torean who wants to be anonymous, who helped Snowden -- maybe in the hacker movement, but maybe even in the NSA himself.
4) Cincinnatus is merely Jason Axelson, the guy who wrote the original notice -- except Jason is at HiCap and Maker Space, and Cincinnatus is described as being at Tor.
5) Cinninatus is operated by multiple people.
Guess who else was at this December 11, 2012 Crypto Party? Runa Sandvik, another Tor developer, who also coincidentally was in Hong Kong three weeks before Snowden arrived with his stolen NSA documents to pass them to journalists.
I suppose only Greenwald knows if the public key he can see now on Cryptome is the same one that was generated for him to read Cinninatus' mail.
(Or was it overwritten with the new key generated the day Greenwald's book came out?)
What does all this mean?
That the Snowdenistas were in touch with Snowden LONG before they admit. And BEFORE he stole some of his most devastating documents.
That implicates them in the theft of the documents -- they could have given him ideas for what to steal (always my theory from the beginning) and also literally helped with the tools.
In December 2012, a number of things happened:
o this Crypto Party was held
o the Foundation for a Free Press was formed by John Perry Barlow, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, close associate and funder of Julian Assange, for the express purpose of funding WikiLeaks and other leak activity. In December 2012, when it was announced, Poitras and Appelbaum were already members; later Appelbaum was added as a consultant or advisor and Snowden was added. It explicitly raises money for Snowden's work now.
o Appelbaum gave his talk at the 29th Chaos Computer Congress recruiting NSA members to leave "the dark side" i.e. the government and come work for the "transparency" and "privacy" movement.
o Snowden first contacted Laura Poitras, and tried to contact Greenwald. Appelbaum, who is Poitras' long-time tech helper and a representative of WikiLeaks, likely helped.
All of the tools listed for discussion and development at the Honolulu Crypto Party were those used by Snowden and his enablers -- the Tor Browser Bundle, Tails (a further encryption before using the encryption of Tor), OTR (off the record, an encrypted chat program), etc.
Yes, you could also say of Snowden that he used "the Internet" and there are any number of Internet related meetings in Hawaii, and it doesn't mean the people at them are in collusion with an anti-state hacker.
Except, an awful lot of the same names and tools come together in this one convergence, so there's likely something going on.
The reason geeks like to meet in person instead of just chatting at the IRC which is their preferred native habitat is to do things like build in-person trust and exchange public keys and other crypto information that they don't want to have available online, in order to create the "air gap" needed off the wire.
To be studied further...
The passage from Greenwald's book:
On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.
The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. ...
The email began: “The security of people’s communications is very important to me,” and its stated purpose was to urge me to begin using PGP encryption so that “Cincinnatus” could communicate things in which, he said, he was certain I would be interested. ...
In this email, “Cincinnatus” said he had searched everywhere for my PGP “public key,” a unique code set that allows people to receive encrypted email, but could not find it. From this, he concluded that I was not using the program and told me, “That puts anyone who communicates with you at risk. I’m not arguing that every communication you are involved in be encrypted, but you should at least provide communicants with that option.” ...
C.’ s email did not move me to action. Because I had become known for covering stories the rest of the media often ignores, I frequently hear from all sorts of people offering me a “huge story,” and it usually turns out to be nothing. And at any given moment I am usually working on more stories than I can handle. So I need something concrete to make me drop what I’m doing in order to pursue a new lead. Despite the vague allusion to “people out there” I “would like to hear from,” there was nothing in C.’ s email that I found sufficiently enticing. I read it but did not reply. ...
After the “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” article was published , Laura and I planned to meet at Snowden’s hotel. But before leaving my room, out of nowhere, as I sat on my hotel bed, I remembered Cincinnatus, my anonymous email correspondent from six months earlier, who had bombarded me with requests to install PGP so that he could provide me with important information. Amid the excitement of everything that was happening, I thought that perhaps he, too, had an important story to give me. Unable to remember his email name, I finally located one of his old messages by searching for keywords.
“Hey: good news,” I wrote to him. “I know it took me a while, but I’m finally using PGP email. So I’m ready to talk any time if you’re still interested.” I hit “send.”
Soon after I arrived at his room, Snowden said, with more than a small trace of mockery, “By the way, that Cincinnatus you just emailed, that’s me.”
It took me a few moments to process this and regain my composure. That person, many months earlier , who desperately tried to get me to use email encryption … was Snowden. My first contact with him hadn’t been in May, just a month earlier, but many months ago. Before contacting Laura about the leaks, before contacting anyone, he had tried to reach me
And there was another passage which explains he got a package May 11 from "a tech helper" (likely Appelbaum) with the tools to make the connection to Snowden securely, but that it was still "six weeks" before he actually met Snowden in person.
UPDATE: Here's Parker Higgins blog about CryptoParty from August 2012, linked in the Cryptome article. Parker, an EFF operative who is active in crypt circles, has spoked at Remember the Forth and at a "privacy" rally in Berlin is already spinning this, denying any involvement -- although of course he is friends with all the players, including the people who organized the Crypto Party -- which he enthusiastically endorsed.
@catfitz sooooo what makes this an EFF CryptoParty? First I'd heard of it was on Cryptome
— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014
@catfitz But also: if I blogged about it I organized it? That makes actually zero sense
— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014
@catfitz Cryptome quoting Cincinnatus, Cincinnatus quoting me. Young alleges C is Snowden; if true, Snowden quoting me.
— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014
@xor So are you confirming for us that Greenwald's Cincinnatus who is Snowden is the same Cincinnatus organizing the Crypto Party? Thanks!
— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) May 17, 2014
@catfitz No idea, and no I was not at this event. They quoted from a blog post I wrote about similar events.
— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014
I think is a case of young Parker first tweeting the "wait wait wait" tweet because he was so excited and thrilled to be one degree of separation from Snowden, and have Snowden quote his blog on the meaning of Crypto Party, that he didn't realize the implications -- this puts Snowdenistas and Snowden together BEFORE he steals and therefore implicates them. Second, even when I challenged him -- because of the implications -- he was still quick to make a link between Cincinnatus mentioned by Cryptome in Greenwald's book (who Greenwald links to Verax and hence equates to Snowden) -- and the organizer of the Crypto Party. He could have immediately begun denying it, as lawyers might have advised.
FURTHER UPDATES:
o This blogger Eugen Kabelmast wrote about the coincidence 2 days ago. He failed to note I was the one who discovered the Rubik's cube tweet. He also immediately makes a Spring Break of Code connection, although there isn't necessarily one, other than that the same crowd may have been involved in both. SBOC was in March/April 2013.
The same announcement for this Crypto Party is mentioned in a Maker Space Google Groups by the same Jason:
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Jason Axelson |
 12/3/12
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Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.
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