Wired State

Could There Be An Alternative to Google?

A storm trooper and a little robot guarding Google servers. Are the script kiddies going to have that on the darknets? Here's the tour.

So here's the latest boy wonder making "a Google alternative".

He's now building an operating system that anyone can use to replace all of the services that Google provides — or any other cloud company, for that matter. Email, chat, file sharing, web hosting: With Cook’s arkOS, you’ll be able to run all of those essential services on a secure, private server in your own home that’s about the size of a credit card.

“Google, while it is a great service that has done wonderful things for the Web, is showing some troubling signs,” Cook told me. “Their shutdown of Google Reader earlier this year means that none of the services [we] rely upon are sacrosanct if they are not profitable enough for them.”

I couldn't complain, at one level, because we all need Google alternatives.

It's creepy the way you now go to google.com and it has this giant big log-in interface with ONE in big letters that lets you know that you are now logging into ALL Google services AT ONCE.

There's something unsettling about all their services now in that funny block that looks like an I Ching up on the right-hand corner. You go to your email, or your Google Docs, or G+ or some other G thing, and you feel that all around you is the heavy breath of Google scanning you for ads to pitch and things you've said that it will crib for those ads.

I guess my theory about Google lately, now that we have not only Team Snowden but also the beginnings of the Wired State shaping up (and those last two go together, but are in tension and even at odds, i.e. Jacob Appelbaum stops any association with the Guardian) that eventually, Google might turn into a normal company. You know, as normal as IBM or Xerox, which isn't saying a HUGE amount, as they will still be venal Big IT, but Google might become more accountable to customers and the general public as IBM and Xerox have over the years.  And that's all a good thing. I guess my end game for Google is that it breaks up like Ma Bell, and is forced to calf off those hardware things like driverless cars and that it is forced to do more for privacy like get out of our email. But that's a long ways off...

I could see signs of normalcy straining to break through the geek weirdness when Google made a Halloween Doodle that was actually nice, instead of one of those things that look like it came from the Soviet Academy of Science's pick of the week, like the 108th anniversary of some obscure scientist. And it started doing that when it realized it needed to sell tablets, phones, normal things that people will buy who don't want all the geek culture crap to come with the product, they want normalcy.

To be sure, we've got alternatives. Bing is one, of course; Yahoo, if it is scanning my email, is sure doing a lousy job of it because all it pitches to me is car insurance (I don't own a car) and stuff about moms going back to school on Obama loans (sorry, I wish I had the time but I don't). That's a good thing, if it "doesn't know". Meanwhile, I write an article for naturalgaseurope.com, and go to that page quite a bit, and then every other page I visit thinks I'm a corporation and tries to sell me natural gas stuff. Facebook is still trying to give me attractive men in my region, Ugh boots, Ellen de Generes' TV show, Joe Biden, and furniture stores. None of them are relevant, but I leave them all alone or it could get worse...

But...despite needing alternatives, there are only new sets of challenges and problems that come with making a scrappy one.

Here's what I had to say about this:

Hmmm. Ordinary people won't be able to use it because it's Linux and open source nerdy stuff.

And instead of losing things we like such as Google Reader because of Google's business reasons (not enough people in fact did like it for them to bother and it competed with their drive to socialize people's reading on G+ to pitch ads through that system) -- now, we'll be dependent on the open source cult. Will they come to work, or will they be busy at a WoW raid? or they don't feel like it or ran out of Red Bull? Or they committed suicide? (Diaspora). Or they have to go get a real job because Kickstart didn't raise enough?

It's no better, truly.

Of course, I really don't have anything technically relevant to say here, so listen to a guy who seems to know what he's talking about, elforesto:

And let's be honest: if the feds want your data, they will get your data. It does not matter if the data is hosted with Google, with Bob's Web Hosting, or on your Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/Time Warner/etc home connection. The only way to safeguard said data is to encrypt it in transit (which pretty much everyone already does) or at rest (which almost nobody does). Cook is freely admitting that he doesn't know much about crypto and it kind of shows. So what if you control the SSL certs if the receiving mail server has an NSA tap and you didn't use GPG to encrypt it? This doesn't actually improve the security of your data at all.

Look, good for you for thinking about these things, but a lot of us with a LOT more experience doing this are going to give you the best advice you're going to get: go back to the drawing board. You're trying to fix a human problem with software and that simply will not and does not work. Want people to take owning their data seriously? Do workshops to help people setup their own hosting account. Want to help people secure their communications? Guide them through setting up GPG and give them a thumb drive with Tails. Asking them to install a Linux distribution on hobbyist hardware may be an effective use of buzzword marketing, but it will not solve the problem in any kind of meaningful way.

Cook then answers him by basically demanding more user education. That's what the geeks always do, and that's always a fail in my book.

Naturally, the idea of having some little jet pack that holds "your very own server" that enables you to have a kind of walkie-talkie with all the other kids in the neighbourhood outside the bad "Internet" that is now all "militarized" seems awfully cool. I bet this will really sell, at least, as he says, to "hobbyists" lol. In fact, local intranets and Open Garden and all that kind of stuff is very attractive to people who want to go out of the commercial Internet into the darknets, which are likely to be random patches loosely knitted together, or they'd merely replicate the original problem. I can't help thinking this is all like reverse-engineering of Second Life and the making of Open Sim and Kitely. Anything that is made outside of Google will perforce have to rely on Google products, capacity, hardware items, etc. etc. Imagine, having to Google to find the free nodes, and so on.

As for Google Reader, well, I don't miss it, to be honest. And to be even more honest, I had ceased to go to it every day after making it and filling it up with customized stuff. I rapidly developed blog bankruptcy with hundreds of people's blogs sitting there unread. I got the Google alerts on news topics in my mail box and stopped "going there" to look for stuff -- and those still work.

No, I don't "go there" to G+ as a replacement for Google Reader (their idea) because:

o too busy -- too many pictures, too many gifs, too much

o too many strangers, too many Google engineers without social graces

o too harsh rules, i.e. you get ban warnings over nothing, worse than Facebook

o too high risk of losing your content over a speech offense, i.e. some thin-skin geek decides to punish you for your legitimate criticism, and now you can't access your Google docs or email -- they're all related.

So as I've always said, spread your privacy erosion over diverse platforms.

In fact, the hilarious thing is that Yahoo now has a clone of Google Reader on its new Yahoo email interface. It does all the same thing, the weather, horoscope, the news you can pick, etc. And it's purple.

Also Windows 8 has a thingie where you can make a reader based on Bing which is perfectly fine and just as customizeable as Google Reader was.

But as I keep saying, Twitter is my magazine and newspaper now, I read that. I unsubscribed from the Times around the time that Risen ran the interview with Snowden so uncritically but I also just got tired of it billing every month when my own reading of it waxed and waned. I am waiting for the Internet people to come up with wallets to pay for individual articles much more easily and cheaply, and also tip bloggers easily.

 

 

Related articles

In Which I Confront Bart Gellman at WashPo on the Snowden Claim of NSA Tap Into Google

The Dog That Hasn't Barked Yet About Snowden: Google

This 23-year-old's open-source project, a server running on Raspberry Pi, gives the middle finger to Google

Alternatives to Google Reader

Mikko: "I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother"

When the Guardian claimed, based on the stolen Snowden files, that the NSA was tampering with the very standards of encryption, they won over many more conservative geeks who weren't wild-eyed and rabid like Jacob Appelbaum and those in the hacker set. They tapped into a sense of both superiority and paranoia that all geeks have about themselves and code -- it was a brilliant social hack (I continue to maintain that most of what Snowden has produced is a giant social hack, from the con of 25 of his fellow employees to give him their passwords (!) to providing single slides or partial documents or plumbing sketches or outlines in lieu of hard, solid content deliberately, so as to incite hysteria that is hard to then shut up while the facts are parsed.

They claimed that through secret partnerships with commercial firms like Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Intel, the NSA was exploiting vulnerabilities or getting themselves private keys to decode texts:

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. "Cryptography forms the basis for trust online," said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet." Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at "defeating network security and privacy".

Once again, it's only Bruce Schneier -- the cybersecurity expert who always leaned toward defense of hacker culture and objectives and who has now fully embraced them by joining the board of Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The long Guardian article never supplies anything like proof -- and hasn't learned -- like the Washinton Post's Bart Gellman and his geek sidekick Ashkan Soltari -- to make impressive, complicated geeky diagrams. They do claim there was something in...2006:

Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.

"Eventually, NSA became the sole editor," the document states

That was when the New York Times published their famous article after waiting on it for some time.

Yet we're not told what it was, exactly. What kind of weakness? Where?

Something like that TLS handshake issue with the mobile app data heading first before the handshake? (No doubt that was devised to reduce latency -- after all, it's only communicating information about the phone and the app, and most users aren't going to find that a big deal -- so the handshake to validate the ID and the server comes later, so what? Only a geek could care if the lag meant the NSA could jump in the middle, because most people don't think they'll be bothered by the NSA.)

Despite the absence of any real proof, or any explicit walk-through of any actual case of weakening, this is now taken as an article of faith.

In a talk for the Silicon Valley cult agitprop factory TED, the famous Mikko Hyponnen, the Finnish cybersecuity dude, claims that the NSA has deliberately sabotaged encryption algorithms, in order to weaken them.

He postures on stage that he is angry, or rather, tells people they should be angry, and that the NSA is "wrong" and "rude" (like...a schoolboy who has been caught at a prank?). @TedChris is thrilled to pieces and tries to amplify the "anger" motif.

But Mikko cites no proof of this claim that NSA tampered with the algorithms. (He also fails to mention the hacking of his own country by Russia -- his reply to me about this -- that the news story I cited from November 8 came after the taping of his TED talk -- is singularly lame, given that a guru like him should have known of such a huge hack of his country ages before the news came out.)

Again: I haven't seen a single second source (outside the Snowden Brotherhoold) validate this claim of tampering. I totally get that it is possible, and a concern. What I don't see is replication of the claim. A couple of slides and a few Googlers do not constitute validation -- that's partial and speculative, like Greenwald's initial story.

The reason I don't buy it is simple: I see that Matthew Green is still not conceding it. All the Snowden geeks can do then is call him names; Greenwald implies he's a pussy because he then won't take the same set of Snowden materials they are all looking at and comment on them. But you know, that's because he isn't a journalist, and couldn't hide behind journalism, doing that...

Mikko spouts the theory that the USG deliberately spread malware to undermine Microsoft -- a country hacking itself, he says. Oh, come now. You're not worried about the Chinese and Russians?!

Mikko makes the outrageous claim that Skype was secure before it was sold to Microsoft, that it had end-to-end encryption and was safe. But that's ridiculous. One of the top cybersecurity gurus in NYC whom I happened to discover used to be horrified years ago, long before the sale to Microsoft, that I let Skype on my system because he found it full of flaws and vulnerabilities -- everyone knew about its backdoors. The Belarusian secret police had Skype conversations before the Microsoft sale. Please. Let's not be children here.

It's really annoying when people like him who are technical experts then spout political nonsense wrapped around it and think that their scientific knowledge is enough to validate their political views and manipulations. For example, his silly notions of the "existential" problem of the war on terrorism as being fake. He needs to check in with Madrid, or London or Moscow just on his continent if he doesn't want to contemplate our 9/11.

Then he says this -- which is very appealing to the countries of Europe: "I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother" -- i.e. the US, running the cloud industry or search, via Google.

It's actualy especially appealing to countries with big powerful neighbours like, oh, even Russia, but not only Russia -- under the pretext of saying they need to hide from the Great Satan America, they can actually do the hiding from the places they really need to hide from -- Russia and China. Say, if that's how they have to sell it to domestic audiences, let them.

Despite Eric Schmidt's touching faux belief in old-fashioned borders remaining after he gets done Internetizing things, and even land valuation, the reality is that there aren't borders as there once were, that lots of artificial distinctions get made, and in fact, there's a very real question of whether absolute encryption by each individual government will become a demand that countries of the world will get met, on their own, if international bodies won't accept this.

That is, international standards may remain, but there will be encryption with locally-devised algorithms that keep out others like barbed-wire fences and mined fields. Will this be possible?

I'm not sure it's the worst idea at all --- and at this point, if we're talking Big Brothers, I'd rather have EU countries that are individual Big Brothers than a global Big Brother that Russia and China invade, and I'd rather have individual EU Big Brothers than groups like Anonymous or WikiLeaks or Occupy become the absolute-encrypted Big Brothers (they call themselves Little Brothers; they'll be big in a heart-beat with that unaccountable power -- and in fact already are.)

Obviously, if the global contenders for Big Brother role are China or Russia or America, I'd pick America because I think it will have far more freedom and accountability (as it already has running the Internet; one could argue, if you accept Snowden (and I don't), that the free American system produced a Snowden which then remedied the unfree aspects of the system -- no Snowden would appear in China or Russia. So there.)

Really, it's a war about encryption. Would you rather have script kiddies encrypting, or the EU? I'll pick door no. 2.

Mikko makes a nod to the rights of law-enforcement to pursue crime. But he think this is wildly exaggerated, and he thinks that a) NSA is dredging ALL communications of everybody everywhere and therefore b) this harms privacy and doesn't.

There's no concept of the combing of selected streams as being "not intrusive."

"You show me your search history, and I will find something incriminating in five minutes," he says, and yet doesn't take his laser-stare off the NSA for all that, and put it on Google, which is of course, at fault for retaining these searches -- something that the EU privacy tsars are always fighting Google about in lawsuits and deals.

So, what to do about this awful thing with this big Orwellian over-reaching monster called the NSA which has done these terrible things? Why, Snowden isn't to blame for harming the US cloud industry (which we don't know is ruined yet, actually) any more than Al Gore is to blame for global warming. (He like those cheering in the audience obviously think not only is there nothing to debate about global warming, even if everyone agrees, that there's nothing to debate about what the response should be.)

"The solution is open source," he says. Ahh, there we go. The cult of open source. And let me remind you of the distinctly authoritarian culture that comes with that cult, even if you are forced to use open source on this very Internet, just like you can't get away from American-manufactured cloud stuff -- although Mikko urges everyone to try.

Except...the standards of encryption of NIST are open and any eyes can see and complain about them. So have they looked and found then those evil back doors and weakenings they think exist? Well?

NIST noted that it has worked closely with the NSA to help develop encryption standards, due to the NSA's expertise in this area. NIST is also required to consult with the NSA by U.S. legal statute. But the agency noted that its process for vetting encryption algorithms is an open one, in which anyone can review and comment on the work being done.

"If vulnerabilities are found in these or any other NIST standards, we will work with the cryptographic community to address them as quickly as possible," the statement read.

And the geeks are still debating about what this really all involves and really, there isn't proof from Snowden and Greenwald. All there is, is a lot of advocacy group hysteria, not facts.

Even in making their hysterical pleas, Global Voices is forced to say they don't know:

These revelations imply that the NSA has pursued an aggressive program of obtaining private encryption keys for commercial products—allowing the agency to decrypt vast amounts of Internet traffic sent by users of these products. They also suggest that the agency has attempted to put backdoors (well-hidden ways to access data) into cryptographic standards designed to secure users’ communications. Additionally, the leaked documents make clear that companies that manufacture these products have been complicit in allowing this unprecedented spying to take place, though the identities of cooperating companies remain unknown.

Many important details about this program, codenamed Bullrun, are still unclear. What communications are targeted? What service providers or software developers are cooperating with the NSA? What percentage of private encryption keys of targeted commercial products are successfully obtained? Does this store of private encryption keys (presumably procured through theft or company cooperation) contain those of popular web-based communication providers like Facebook and Google?

I really do highly recommend reading the geek Twitter interchanges with Matthew Green et. al. closely to see the dynamics involved. Note: Appelbaum is no longer working with the Guardian (small wonder there, as he accused them of sitting on Snowden stories). We don't know if that means if he is still working with Greenwald (seems not) or if Snowden has ditched him (I'll bet he has.)

Some are using the argument now -- trying to appeal to what they think are "a state's best interests," that you can't allow the NSA to introduce back doors, and industry should resist this, because otherwise terrorists and criminals exploit them.

Well, sure, every day, spammers and virus-spreaders exploit software and make everyone's life miserable, even outside the dynamics of Snowden/NSA and the US cloud industry versus people like Mikkol and his consulting clients in the EU.

I'm not buying this argument now because:

o you haven't proved that the NSA did this tampering

o you haven't proved that non-state actors have this capacity

o you haven't indicated any other way for law enforcement to do its legitimate duty.

It's that last part that troubles me more than anything -- Mikko like so many is far too casual about how exactly the police can track hackers like Snowden if the Lavabits of the world deny even federal agents with warrants, and even judge's orders. What is the plan now?

We're supposed to let the Lavabits of the world decide who they think are criminals and who aren't? Really, guys? Again, door no. 2.

 

Are There Cracks in the Snowden Facade Starting to Appear in the Media?

March on Oct. 28, 2013 in Washington, DC organized by Stop Watching Us coalition was sparsely attended, but got saturation RT.com and other adversarial media coverage that tried to keep the momentum of outrage advocacy going. Photo by asterix611.

It's easy to feel as if there is a windstorm of positive, even hero-worshipping media coverage of Edward Snowden, the hacker and fugitive former NSA contractor who fled to Russia.

Given that the adversarial hero-journalists covering Snowden's actual leaks have a tremendous amount of social media mindshare -- Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras of course, Bart Gellman, James Risen and others (although curiously Ewan MacCaskill has dropped out completely) -- it's hard to peer past the scrim.

But four stories that have come out in the last week begin (at last) to ask real questions about the Swowden narrative that a few of us mainly in the Russian field simply haven't bought from the very beginning.

1. The first story was by Steven Lee Meyers of the New York Times, In Shadows, Hint of a Life and Even a Job for Snowden. Meyers carves out his own coverage despite the magnetic force of James Risen personal interview with Snowden -- Risen, himself fighting off a government lawsuit for refusing to confirm a source in a case involving government leaks about Iran, has totally bought the Snowden line.

Meyers went to work as a real reporter should -- as I've been suggesting they all do -- and asked questions and established a narrative outside the Snowden Brotherhood's magic circle.

He pointed out that Snowden has to move around at night, and under close guard. This is "for his own good," as we've been told elsewhere, but so often, those adoring Snowden fail to point out the obvious -- that Snowden is guarded and watched, which means that he is not free and that he's under surveillance.

Meyers doesn't speculate about Snowden's "daily" chats with Greenwald may be bugged or intercepted, but Greenwald, Gellman and others making the claim that there is "zero" chance the Russians have intel from Snowden have to consider that. It's not only about whether he has files or they've seized them.

o Meyers also is a rare journalist to speak critically of Sarah Harrison -- most either ignore her, or you get credulous dupes like Jessylyn Radaceck saying that she is by Snowden's side to ensure that nothing he has or knows is leaked so that we can "be sure" that the Russians don't have anything.

Accompanying him is Sarah Harrison, a British activist working with WikiLeaks. With far less attention, she appears to have found herself trapped in the same furtive limbo of temporary asylum that the Russian government granted Mr. Snowden three months ago: safe from prosecution, perhaps, but far from living freely, or at least openly.

Meyers could have gotten bonus points from me if he had simply asked -- or even reported unanswered! -- the question of WHAT KIND of visa Harrison has based on an invitation FROM WHOM which is central to understanding this story. Sadly, he didn't, but maybe he'll pick up on that.

Meyers has also gone to the trouble to ask a *Russian* expert about the KGB's heirs, the FSB and other intelligence agencies, instead of asking, oh, a disgruntled ex-NSA official and 9/11 truther to comment on the veracity of Verax's claims.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has written extensively about the security services, said that the F.S.B., the domestic successor to the Soviet-era intelligence service, clearly controlled the circumstances of Mr. Snowden’s life now, protecting him and also circumscribing his activities, even if not directly controlling him.

“He’s actually surrounded by these people,” said Mr. Soldatov, who, with Irina Borogan, wrote a history of the new Russian security services, “The New Nobility.”

I'll bet. And Soldatov should know. Not because he has seen Snowden, but because he knows how the system works based on many other cases. He thinks the two pictures released by Life News are are propaganda efforts to make it seem like Snowden is leading a normal, happy life in exile.

But speaking of truthers, Meyers does in fact interview Ray McGovern, the ex official, and here's what he gets:

“He’s free, but he’s not completely free,” said Ray McGovern, a former C.I.A. official and a member of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, which met with Mr. Snowden three weeks ago in his only verified public appearance since he received asylum on July 31. Even those who attended were not exactly sure where the meeting took place, having been driven in a van with darkened windows.

When you've lost the Treason Convention (as the four ex officials call themselves), I guess you have to say the facade is crumbling. McGovern has to admit he's not completely free and he's evidently the source for the information that they don't even know where they met him, because they were taken in a KGB or mafia style ride with tinted windows -- like abducted journalists. Awful.

Meyers tried to confirm where Snowden could be working -- he is said to be starting a job this week -- and Yandex and mail.ru said it was not at their businesses, and Vkontakte refused to comment. Earlier Pavel Durov had offered Snowden a job. It might make sense to get Snowden deeper into Russia and out of Moscow where there are a lot of foreigners and move him to St. Petersburg, where Durov has his headquarters in the Dom Knigi building.

Meyers also went to the trouble to confirm WikiLeaks remaining key role in the Snowden affair:

It was through Ms. Harrison and WikiLeaks that the members of the Sam Adams Associates organized their meeting with Mr. Snowden — possibly, though not certainly, here in Moscow — to present an award to him for his leaks.

Bet all their ways were paid, too, along with the banquet hall -- unless some fancy Russian official or oligarch or somebody supplied that.

Meyers also asked about Internet connections -- good eye! -- so that we can come out of the Greenwald haze around this:

It seems clear that he has access to the Internet, said Mr. McGovern, the former C.I.A. official, because Mr. Snowden was “thoroughly informed” about the debate he had started, including testimony by officials on Capitol Hill trying to explain the operations that his disclosures have unveiled. “He’s in touch with folks through Sarah Harrison,” Mr. McGovern said.

I'll bet he is.

2. The second piece is yet another piece by Michael Kelly, who has been one of the few reporters in fact outside the Greenwald haze from the beginning, even if he has been too reliant on Joshua Foust.

Kelly's latest says It's Now Clear Snowden's Life is Dictated by Russian Intelligence. The only thing marring this story is the claim that Kucherena is employed on the staff of the FSB. He seems to have gotten this from Foust or the two are tag-teaming this, but actually we only know that Kucherena is on the public council of the FSB which is an unpaid volunteer position that is part of Putin's simulation of civil society.

I've brought this to his attention a number of times and received no answer so I'm going to conclude that either he didn't see it or doesn't care OR that either he or Foust obtained some inside intel on this from US officials, who may have discovered in their own sleuthing that Kucherena has a rank in the FSB or really is on the staff or who knows. Just not seeing it, however.

Kelly also goes through the story of the seeming contradictions in Greenwald's and Snowden's stories:

In October he told the Times  that "a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents," referring to the stolen trove of classified NSA documents that he took from Hawaii to Hong Kong.

The information includes not only the "blueprints of the NSA" but also  30,000 documents that do "not deal with NSA surveillance but primarily with standard intelligence about other countries’ military capabilities, including weapons systems,"  according to a report in the Washington Post.

Snowden claimed to the Times that he gave all of the classified documents to journalists he met in Hong Kong, but there are several holes in that assertion.  One of those journalists, Glenn Greenwald, has said that he believes Snowden held back some documents, saying Snowden " was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published ."

And following Snowden outing himself on June 9 and subsequently parting with the journalists, he leaked  specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA was hacking to the South China Morning Post. He also told SCMP: " If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment."

He also points out that Snowden obviously has a lot of information in his head, even if he doesn't have files on him. I personally don't think the "contradictions" here are substantiated enough to constitute a smoking gun, but I'm all for pushing them, just as I push my leads which are more about the hackers and their past and present agenda.

3. But the story that really makes new arguments and puts quite a crack in the marble is this one by Kurt Eichenwald, How Snowden Escalated Cyber War.

Central to the Greenwald contrived fable around Snowden is that he "did no damage" and was only attempting to gain privacy for the American people. Yet the troubling persistence of leaks that only serve to undermine the US relations with its allies, and help Russia gain more traction in the world, tend to undercut that claim.

Eichenwald reminds us of the story of how Snowden leaked the IP addresses that the US hacked in retaliation against China's own hacks against us -- which of course objectively aids the enemy and can't be said to be in any "public interest."

But bluntly he spells out that Snowden "may have killed the only shot" after reining in Chinese hacking which causes us enormous business losses.

The administration's attempt to curb China's assault on American business and government was crippled - perhaps forever, experts say - by a then-unknown National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden.

Snowden's clandestine efforts to disclose thousands of classified documents about NSA surveillance emerged as the push against Chinese hacking intensified. He reached out to reporters after the public revelations about China's surveillance of the Times's computers and the years of hacking by Unit 61398 into networks used by American businesses and government agencies. On May 24, in an email from Hong Kong, Snowden informed a Washington Post reporter to whom he had given documents that the paper had 72 hours to publish them or he would take them elsewhere; had the Post complied, its story about American computer spying would have run on the day Donilon landed in Beijing to push for Chinese hacking to be on the agenda for the presidential summit.

Interesting, that -- and it gets worse:

The first report based on Snowden's documents finally appeared in The Guardian on June 5, two days before the Obama-Xi meeting, revealing the existence of a top-secret NSA program that swept up untold amounts of data on phone calls and Internet activity. When Obama raised the topic of hacking, administration officials say, Xi again denied that China engaged in such actions, then cited The Guardian report as proof that America should not be lecturing Beijing about abusive surveillance.

And for all those moral equivicators out there, starting with Snowden himself who doesn't think Chinese is an enemy despite what they do to us:

The activities of the two sides, however, are vastly different in scope and intent. The United States engages in widespread electronic espionage, but that classified information cannot legally be handed over to private industry. China is using its surveillance to steal trade secrets, harm international competitors and undermine American businesses

He reports on some frank pessimism about ever fixing this -- or other problems from Snowden -- even trying to persuade Europeans of the Chinese hacking danger:

"I don't think that point is going to win the day with Angela Merkel anymore,'' says Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a national security think tank in Washington. "Certainly no one cares anymore about our whining about Chinese espionage. The time we had for making the case on that is long gone. Internationally, I don't see how we recover.''

Then there was this odd bit:

Some security industry and former intelligence officials say they originally believed Snowden's apparent outrage at espionage by governments might lead him to expose activities by the Chinese, who use their hacking skills not only for economic competition but to track and damage dissidents overseas and monitor their citizens. There was good reason to believe Snowden had plenty of details about Beijing's activities - he has publicly stated that as an NSA contractor he targeted Chinese operations and taught a course on Chinese cyber counterintelligence. And while he says he turned over his computerized files of NSA documents to journalists in Hong Kong, he boasts that he is so familiar with Chinese hacking techniques that there is no chance the government there can gain access to his classified material.

Narcissist extraordinaire -- you see that in the Poitras film where the slender and slight Snowden, with his voice deepened to impress girls, tells us with hearty knowier-than-thou certitude that the American and Chinese peoples aren't enemies because we trade. Well, sure, but not without a lot of qualms about everything to food safety and Chinese labor conditions not to mention the debt.

The piece is grim, as it spells out a sense of futility and despair in businesses coping with these hacks:

"I don't know what the tipping point is, but a parasite can always kill the host,'' says Jeffrey Caton, president of Kepler Strategies, a consulting firm on aerospace, cyberspace, and national security issues. "The long-term effects could be stagnation in research and development, or eventually companies going out of business in the U.S."

Now, though, with the world raging about the NSA secrets exposed by Snowden, the threat to American companies by Chinese hacking is being ignored once again, opening up the possibility that the threat that for so many years raised so much concern behind closed doors in Washington could now grow more destructive than ever.

"It certainly seems that China is in a position to act with far more impunity because the United States and other nations are distracted by the NSA spying scandal,'' Healey says. "The American private sector was already having it bad before. Now it is only going to get worse."

4. Then there's this odd piece in which for the first time, Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, makes it seem as if they can't predict what Snowden may do, and that they don't control him. That's likely at odds with the actual situation of control they do have, but the heightened activity around getting Snowden to Germany, including with the Red Army Faction lawyer from Germany, Greenwald's pleas, and other German appeals -- not to mention Snowden's own request -- seems to indicate that the Russians may be "done" with him.

Peskov says Snowden is "free to meet with anyone" -- to open up the channel for him to cooperate with certain Germans.

But he said "Snowden is not allowed to damage US interests" -- a reference to that weird condition Putin put on Snowden went he accepted asylum -- "as strange as it may sound coming from my lips," as he put it. Yeah. It does.

The European media reported late last week about the US special services’ large-scale tapping of telephone numbers and email surveillance of both rank-and-file Europeans and the key EU leaders. The reporters quoted classified information that they had allegedly got from Snowden. The German publications Der Spiegel and Die Welt specifically said that the US intelligence services had hacked the German Chancellor’s mobile phone.

It was not from Russia that the German media received that information, the Russian President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told the Kommersantdaily. Snowden is not allowed to violate the Russian President’s condition. But Edward Snowden has been officially granted temporary asylum in Russia, so he is free to meet anyone, Peskov added.

That's an interesting pre-emptive statement.  The information on the hacking of Merkel's phone was indeed thin. What did she talk about? We never learn. Which phone was it, her party phone or work phone? When did this start?

It indicates that either Peskov wants to keep the West guessing that Russia might be mixing in its own leaks and making them appear as Snowden's, or else afraid of the blowblack that they themselves could get from their desired interlocutors and gas purchasers in Europe if they feel that Russia is helping to cause all the damage now not only to the US, but the EU.

It's got that "you've gone too far" feeling to it. It's not the NSA that has "gone too far," as Kerry says, but Russia, in exploiting this entire situation.

At this point, there are wheels within wheels -- we can't tell if any of the parties are exploiting Snowden to make strategic leaks under cover of his original leak -- leaks and counter-leaks and counter-counter-leaks.

In any event, the good news is that more media is appearing to question the Snowden hero saga. That's all a good thing.

 

 

 

 

 

The Crypto Kids and the Rubik's Party: Signal to Snowden?

Screenshot of a tweet about a Rubik's cube party from Christine Corbett, close friend of Jacob Appelbaum

 

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.

 

"Am totally throwing Rubik's cube party," tweets Christine Corbett, close friend of Jacob Appelbaum, just a day or two before Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras met with fugitive former NSA contractor and hacker Edward Snowden -- and recognized him by the pre-arranged sign that he was carrying a Rubik's cube.

If you've been following the story of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and Edward Snowden, this tweet will need to explanation and you will gasp in astonishment.

But if you haven't been following it, let me back up and explain.

First, there have always been a lot of discrepancies in the story of how these adversarial journalists met Snowden, the accounts of the first time they heard from him online and made contact with him via encrypted email, and the dates of when they met him in person. (Edward Jay Epstein is among those who have asked a lot of questions about how much help Snowden had in arranging and paying for this complicated venture.)

The story is now iconic about how the journalists arranged a signal with Snowden through their encrypted chat that would enable them to recognize him when they met him in person - it was how they would know it was really him. Poitras mentions it in her interview with Peter Maass; it's also in Greenwald's interview with Haaretz.

Snowden said he would be carrying a Rubik's cube, and they should ask loudly whether a restaurant at his hotel in Hong Kong was open, and Snowden would reply that the food was lousy.

And on the actual day -- the date of which seems difficult to pin down from the public sources -- they were too early, as Snowden later complained in an interview, and it was frustrating. But eventually they got the signals matched and went to his hotel room, where Poitras got out her camera, and Greenwald began taking his deposition like a lawyer, as he described it.

Greenwald told Haaretz that it was "a muggy day in May" in Hong Kong that he first met Snowden, who was carrying a Rubik's cube, outside a restaurant in Hong Kong.

The Guardian says that Greenwald only flew to Hong Kong in June 1st. (It's not clear whether he left on May 31st and arrived the next day, due to the time difference or what the reason is for this discrepancy).

What if the sure-fire way they decided to make the meet-up was not by risking even crypted email or chat, but by having a cutout? Someone whose Twitter stream they could all tune into if they already followed her or even just by using search and thus not leave a trace as they picked up the cue, and then knew that it was time to put the plan in action. Or another variation -- someone whose Twitter timeline could be referenced as a back-up if there was a screw-up, to make the plan still work if it failed the first time (which apparently it did).

Christine Corbett would be a plausible person for such a cutaway role, as she is good friends with Jacob Appelbaum and had just attended the Spring Break of Code with him in Hawaii. She took a picture of him in Hawaii that is in her Instagram stream dated April 6, 2013.

Could Appelbaum have asked her to arrange the signal? Was he the one communicating with Snowden directly because he found it easy to use the tools, and Glenn didn't? Originally, they all worked together, even if this relationship was very frayed by the time Appelbaum began accusing Greenwald and others of "sitting on" the Snowden documents for fear of government reprisals.

Much has been discussed about the hackers' convergence in Hawaii among the bloggers following this closely, although it has been ignored by the mainstream or even alternative media. The Spring Break of Code organized by Moxie Marlinspike took place at exactly the same time as Edward Snowden was still in Hawaii, and making the transition to work for Booz, Hamilton Allen -- a job he took, as he later explained, to have more access to NSA documents to steal.

Appelbaum was so concerned about the eyebrows that would be raised about this obvious coincidence -- especially given questions people began to ask early about whether the journalists had guided Snowden's hacks - that in a videotaped keynote speech at a conference in Berlin, he pre-emptively made an alibi about celebrating his birthday in Hawaii in April, a long time dream. This was noticed and blogged by @LibertyLynx on Twitter and @StreetwiseProf.

Except, his alibi speech only raised more questions than it answered, because he didn't mention the Spring Break of Code at all at the same time, even though he was obviously socializing with its participants as Corbett's picture illustrates.

Even so, Glen Greenwald and his supporters have scornfully dismissed any connecting of the dots between Snowden and the journalists and hackers in Hawaii earlier than they claim.

When the convergence in Hawaii is noted, they ridicule it gleefully as wild conspiracy thinking. (Joshua Foust, who has written repeatedly about Snowden without crediting the bloggers he has swiped from, cites LibertyLynx's comment about Pierre Omidyar spending some of his time in Hawaii as another suspicious coincidence, but that's probably a bridge too far).

When another coincidence is discussed -- a tweet from Xeni Jardin in late February that she was swimming with sea turtles (she uses the same Twitter background design as Corbett) and a picture of Snowden's girlfriend posted to her blog showing her hugging a stuffed turtle and missing E as he departs forever -- this, too is laughed off as conspiracy mongering, even though Xeni was at the Spring Break of Code. But sometimes a turtle is only a turtle.

When it was noted that Snowden has Electronic Frontier Foundation stickers on his laptop -- and another sticker from Tor, even geekier -- this coincidence, too, is explained away and questioners ridiculed. John Perry Barlow, founder of both EFF and the Foundation for a Free Press, which has been funding WikiLeaks and Snowden, was among the first to tweet about he picture in the Guardian taken by Poitras with the stickers. EFF made several nervous pre-emptive interviews about this coincidence as well. Although they didn't concede it, it's more than likely that Greenwald or Poitras gave the stickers to him -- or perhaps he even did get them at a meeting with hackers before his officially-acknowledged first meting in Hong Kong.

But the Rubik's cube tweet is harder to explain away.

To be sure, geeks like Rubik cubes and maybe a geek girl's idea of a party is a Rubik cube theme.

I've sent a query to Corbett but I haven't heard back.

Perhaps proof of its innocence is the fact that it wasn't deleted immediately after the meeting with Snowden -- or perhaps the way to ensure it would always remain ambiguous would be not to delete it so it would never look like anything but a party theme.

 

 

 

In Which I Confront Bart Gellman at WashPo on the Snowden Claim of NSA Tap Into Google

Washington Post comments: In this slide from a National Security Agency presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where user data resides. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.

1. ashkan soltani ‏@ashk4n 31 Oct

   My Halloween costume… #google #backdoors #too_soon pic.twitter.com/zwxaL8ahOQ

   Details
2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @ashk4n @bartongellman Did you actually prove there are these back doors or is the sketch just aspirational, i.e. a pitch from a consultant?

   Details

Barton GellmanVerified account ‏@bartongellman

@catfitz Respectively suggest you read the story more closely.

8:19 PM - 31 Oct 13

1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman I did read the story very carefully, multiple times. Can't you answer yes or no, regarding possibility this is a wish sketch

   Details
2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman your point amounts to claiming that once again that mere collection of metadata is intrusive. I disagree. No new news here.

   Details
3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman It's not like Google holds files in clear text in the cloud, NSA can just tap into *content* at will. Surely you don't say.

   Details
4. Barton Gellman ‏@bartongellman 31 Oct

   @catfitz No, it’s not a possibility. Stay tuned.

   Details
5. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman The lede says "secretly taps into" as fact; but the graphic says "may have," "may have" - there's the hole in your story.

   Details
6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman I've been tuned. And I see that a) you don't have any individual cases b) no geeks external to your brotherhood confirming

   Details
7. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman Oh, so now you're saying the problem isn't "reading comprehension" but that you haven't told us yet, it's in next episode.

   Details
8. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman Well, aren't you the Tom Terrific!

   Details

So as I pointed out, I've been unimpressed with the coverage of the "anger" that supposedly Google and other platform providers like Facebook are reputedly displaying over the NSA allegedly tapping into their servers without their consent. I'm not seeing it.

Remember Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman got this story all wrong when they first began talking about PRISM, claiming there was a direct tap when there wasn't -- there were merely servers made available to sequester data and hand it over to law enforcement when they had already made legitimate requests. It's not like the NSA tapped into Google or Facebook, oh, you know, the way Aaron Swartz tapped directly into MIT's servers through jacking right into their LAN network in the server closet with a laptop. You know, that kind of thing.

Except, now the story is that no, they did have access.

This funny little drawing above supposedly shows the NSA grinning and winking and sneaking in to strip away the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) of communications behind Google's back (I'm copying it here because it began as a government document which was not supposed to be in the public domain, but now is, i.e. it's not proprietary to the Washington Post).

I really had to wonder about this. I am not a techie but I do know a little bit about servers. Google has stuff encrypted. What are they saying, that in between servers when the data is piped around, in the cloud, Google is vulnerable, or that in the cloud, Google keeps things in clear text? That's ridiculous.

What this sketch looked to me was a lot like the slides in the PRISM stories -- or for that matter, the slides contemplated for the HPGary work that never came to pass.

Snowden was a contractor at Booz, Allen Hamilton. Could these slides be merely contractors' pitches to the NSA? Aspirational? Trying to find ways to serve their customer? Would that be all that Snowden really had here?

Er, wouldn't the real NSA -- the heart of the NSA -- be a little bit more sophisticated in how they work up sketches for such a dramatic thing as tapping surreptiously into the Google line? My God, this looks like the back of a paper napkin at cocktail hour -- even if it is is on a slide titled "Current Efforts."

There's something that just doesn't add up here.

And here's the thing I noticed. In the sketches accompanying the article, the lede says "The NSA, working with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), secretly taps into the internal networks of Yahoo and Google." But in the text to the sketch, the phrase is "may have" several times: 

The NSA may have figured out ways to tap directly into Google's privately owned and managed Internet links.

The NSA's British counterpart, the CGHQ, may have induced or compelled a third party -- such as the operator of a cable landing station, a major Internet exchange or a data center that Google shares with other companies -- to install surveillance equipment on Google's private cables.

So in fact it's just not definitive.

So I asked Bart Gellman directly, as you can see.

In a total putdown (with that faux politeness always implied when people say "respectively"), he told me I hadn't read the article. Of course I read the article, multiple times. Why do these adversarial journalists always think reading comprehension is an issue and they can merely insult the reader instead of answering the question? Could that be because Gellman himself said he didn't understand "half the documents" when he first got them?

Sure, they're complicated, and for technical insiders to decipher. But it doesn't add up. So I ask questions about it.

I asked multiple questions. I asked him to answer yes or no, whether this was a sketch that was only a consulting company's aspirations of what they could offer their client or think their client wanted, and not the actual practice. Could he answer that without calling names and implying I was illiterate?

So he finally replied "no" i.e. it is not a wish sketch but an actuality (despite the "may" in the diagrams) and said "stay tuned."

Well, as I said, this sounded like another episode of Tom Terrific.

I can't imagine why they'd drib and drab a thing like that out, and if they had proof, why it wouldn't have gone not only in this month's story, but the very first one in June. I bet they don't have anything to back this up.

As we can see in recent weeks, with much flourish, Bart added a geek to his byline -- Ashkan Soltani. Soltani is an activist with an agenda, not merely some technologist. He is author of KnowPrivacy and has a demand to strip away all the web bugs or make them visible at least in the name of privacy. BTW, Bob Cesca is the guy who really popularized web bugs by outing them on the Guardian every time they do a Snowden story demanding privacy -- LOL.

But lost in Ashkan's indignation and zeal to encrypt absolutely is a recognition that commerce is required for people's livelihoods on the Internet and commerce is a good thing and that ads are a good thing. If my local drug store web page puts bugs or cookies and follows me around to see what I'm interested in to pitch me, oh, cold medicine or a flu shot -- who cares? I like coupons. Who doesn't?  (BTW, cookies and bugs are different, and they've deliberately made the bugs more scary by calling them "bugs" instead of trackers -- they aren't actual malware or malfunctions in code, just code these socialist Puritans don't like).

In other words, before there is a transition to that "getting another business model" that people like this always haughtily demand of Silicon Valley businesses, they are for stripping away the modes of making money. I'm simply not for doing that. If you are so private and can't bear the world to know something about you, stay off the Internet. 

I sometimes pause to think that the half dozen or so people closest to me, with whom I talk every day and visit and spend time with every week are the ones least on the Internet, or barely on it at all, and who are face-to-face people, not people I "share" things with on Facebook or Twitter. While Twitter or Facebook "friends" might get a minute or five minutes of exchange a day, and a Second Life friend might get a 10 or even 20 minute conversation, the real friends of real life are for those conversations that go on for hours, usuall over a meal or on the telephone. Funny, isn't it? Because private life is private. It can be done. And what Snowden says at his Sam Adams awards ceremony is a lie:

People all over the world are realizing that these programs don’t make us more safe, they hurt our economy, they hurt our country, they limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely.

Baloney. I haven't felt the slightest constraint on my ability to speak and think and associate freely since Snowden violated our country's privacy by hacking its intelligence files. It's just not true. I've had more exposure of privacy from Anonymous doxing me than anything the government ever does, even if Snowden's claims are true.  And I think most people, if they are sincere with themselves, would have to concede this. If anything, his hacking has limited the ability of the US to associate freely because it has undermined the trust of allies like Germany.

Bart Gellman said that he didn't understand half of the documents he got from Snowden because they contained so many complexities and technical jargon only an insider could understand. Eventually he recruited Solani to work with him to avoid the kind of mistakes made in the initial reports.

But these people are now dependent on the Brotherhood just like clueless parents who can't program their blinking VCR used to become dependent on the nine-year-old boy in the family to fix it for them.

I was struck again by this VCR-type phenomenon when Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian referenced his ignorance in the way of technology in his piece in The New York Review of Books of just how dependent these adversarial journalists have become on the tech Brotherhood around Snowden:

A recent Economist editorial also saw the alarming significance of NSA policies weakening the integrity of the Internet itself:

Any deliberate subversion of cryptographic systems by the NSA is simply a bad idea, and should stop. That would make life harder for the [official government] spooks, true, but there are plenty of other more targeted techniques they can use that do not reduce the security of the internet for all of its users, damage the reputation of America’s technology industry and leave its government looking untrustworthy and hypocritical.

I have a confession to make: I did not myself spot that story—of how law enforcement agencies are trying to undermine private encryption capacities—that was nested in the GCHQ/NSA documents; and even when it was explained to me by the young specialist technology reporters who did grasp its significance, I did not immediately understand it. Embarrassingly, I had to sketch a childlike drawing to confirm what I thought Jeff Larson, a Web developer and reporter at ProPublica, and James Ball, our own twenty-seven-year-old reporter and technical whiz kid, were telling me.

Leave aside the fact that Wired and other tech publications have questioned whether these standards are really undermined -- again, we don't have proof and we only have Greenwald's name-calling. But more to the point, the technicians supposedly impartially helping these adversarial journalists are themselves even more biased!

James Ball was a former staff person at WikiLeaks -- a consummate "hacktivist" if not anarchist. Jeff Larson formerly ran the Red diaper-baby Nation's online work during the 2008 campaign (Obama) and now is at Propublica. He  is obviously a "progressive" -- he wouldn't work there if he weren't. Now mind you, ProPublica does solid work, but it definitely tilts to the left. And even when it appears to be unbiased -- as Larson's story about Democrats re-districting in California -- there's an even deeper agenda at work. The story exposes "powerful interests" that "draw you out of a vote" -- but what's the moral? Better not to have districting. Better not to have redrawing by anybody -- by established parties. Let radical hackers make "a Better World" for you beyond parties (remember, that's what Google's Sergei Brin openly calls for.) Better not to have the organic nature of politics and instead, turn it into a machine that expertly culls opinion and drills down demographics like Obama for America did.

Ultimately, this is how democracy gets undermined -- when technicians who expose the foibles of human nature think they can do a better mechanical job of it. If the authors had focused on Republican gerrymandering, people would go on thinking that just fairness would fix it. By focusing on more beloved Democratic gerrymandering, the authorts do one of those Cass Sunstein "nudges" and force you to the conclusion that it is better not to have this kind of democracy at all. Well, no thank you, the geeks are the problem. 

This is one area where I agree with Evgeny Morozov, who has written about the need to have things less than perfect, or they are not free.

Even if Gellman comes up with the goods and demonstrates that in fact the NSA really did find a way to jack into Google somehow unknown to the best Internet engineers in the world, it doesn't matter, as Loren Feldman would say. There are remedies for this, and the FISC and Congress can address it. Meanwhile, the problem remains that Google has scraped up all the data in the first place so as to become, so to speak, an attractive nuisance. And it did that largely in the name of the click-ad model. Fixing the failure to enable secure commodifying of digital items is vital to the entire prospect of a secure Internet with privacy of communications with law-enforcement still able to access for legitimate purposes.

 

 

 

 

The Dog That Hasn't Barked Yet About Snowden: Google

Cooling pipes and servers at Google Data Center in Dallas. Photo by Burning7 Chrome.

You know who has barely complained about Snowden or said a thing about Snowden?

Google.

The New York times did a story "Angry Over US Surveillance, Tech Giants Bolster Defenses" but it had no substance.  The story has basically only two sources. One is part of the Snowden Brotherhood:

“The companies, some more than others, are taking steps to make sure that surveillance without their consent is difficult,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But what they can’t do is design services that truly keep the government out because of their ad-supported business model, and they’re not willing to give up that business model.”

Soghoian is a former Soros fellow and now at the ACLU, he's the most quoted "progressive" "privacy expert" in all these stories, and only represents one school of thought -- absolute encryption for the hackers, maximum transparency for the government. Oh, and hatred of capitalism -- as you can see from the sneer at the business model.

Oh, I complain about this business model, too, but it exists not because of techno-libertarians and techno-neo-liberalism of the sort Evgeny Morozov loathes. It exists because of technocommunism, and the unwillingness of people like Soghoian to couple private property and privacy -- and indeed the entire hackers' support movement spawned by John Perry Barlow and Electronic Frontier Foundation, which mainly disavows intellectual property and commerce online.

The other source is:

A tech industry executive who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities around the surveillance, said, “Just based on the revelations yesterday, it’s outright theft,” adding, “These are discussions the tech companies are not even aware of, and we find out from a newspaper.”

Oh, and there's this PR flog:

Even before June, Google executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirming that their suspicions were not just paranoia.

In response, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, issued a statement that went further than any tech company had publicly gone in condemning government spying. “We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping,” he said. “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone.”

That doesn't count. (Because it's just transcribing a press release, not really scouting out real Googlers to get the story.)

The reality is, Google started hiding key word information long before Snowden. I've been noticing for ages that on my blog's list of the referring addresses, there is only "google.com" and no key words when you hover over the URL -- there's only the blog's URL itself. It used to be that I could tell that when somebody typed "Jacob Appelbaum" and "unaccountable" -- that's what brought them to my blog -- many of my hits were precisely from that combination and I presume still are because those stories are among the most popular on this site. But like other bloggers, I can't tell what the key words are anymore. I don't care, because I can more or less figure the subject matter, and I'm uninterested in tying any writing to what those key words are, I write simply what concerns me at the time.

But there is a whole science of search-engine optimization where people try to divine what those key word searches mean, and then fashion blog posts to fit them and get more traffic. These are empty calories to me. I know if I post to Reddit there will be gadzillion hits. And certain subjects get huge hits. But those aren't people to talk to and think along with -- they are drive-bys, gawkers, and they don't interact on Twitter or leave comments. What's the point?  Even so, I think Google shouldn't have hidden those key words. I can't possibly see how this relates to privacy because when we saw those referring addresses and words, we didn't see WHO was making those searches. Some URL addresses will refer back to some specific blogger or news article that linked you, but Google searches don't show you anything but the country of search.  Why can't they show those words? Isn't more information better?

Perhaps the mechanics of it are that when people's search terms become known even in aggregate or even disconnected to their identity, there's still some kind of leakage that eventually does trace back to them -- well, at least Google knows! And it's not as if Google is stopping itself from knowing this!

There can only be one reason really behind this, and that's the desire of Google to sell this information that before came free. So if I want to be an SEO guru, I have to pay. Little blogs like mine then wouldn't pay, but some giant site with lots of traffic would, as they would for the ads themselves. I feel Google is lying about this, and using Snowden as a cover. Maybe they had to invent Snowden...

Seriously..There's this entirely false impression that Google is "angry" or "has spoken out repeatedly" -- but that's not true. They aren't. The Washington Post reported that two Google engineers contacted informally by a reporter swore when they saw a drawing of the NSA stripping away the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) of their server traffic. But that's not Google being angry. I asked a Google engineer what was up and got...silence (that's Brian Fitzpatrick, no relation, on G+, who posted the Washington Post story without comment -- he's someone who works on the soi-disant "transparency report".) Shouldn't the real response be laughter?  Because the real question is "how". The little smiley face doesn't say.

Trust me, when Google is mad, it can do a lot more than amount to a couple of swearing engineers. When it wants to, it knocks laws out of Congress completely -- like SOPA, and CISPA. With a single post on its big front page under "take action," it can produce 7 million petition-signers and more. Google has paid for a lot of Congressional campaigns.

So for Google and the other Big IT folks to write  this ridiculously wimpy letter, you have to wonder what's up.

I mean, look how short that thing is, and how lame:

Recent disclosures regarding surveillance activity raise important concerns both in the UnitedStates and abroad. The volume and complexity of the information that has been disclosed inrecent months has created significant confusion here and around the world, making it moredifficult to identify appropriatepolicy prescriptions.

Before you snooze, ask yourself...does this sound like an angry letter to you?

This sounds like a fluffy kitty cat. Not even a Grumpy Cat.

Google et. al. are asking for...something they already do:

Our companies have consistently madeclear that we only respond to legal demands for customer and userinformation that are targeted and specific. Allowing companies to be transparent about the number and nature of requests will help the public better understand the facts about the government’s authority to compel technology companies to disclose user data and how technology companies respond to the targeted legal demands we receive.

I mean, this sounds like one of those big magazine ads or video ads on the side of a web page that blink and have smart looking people giving earnest-sounding talks:

We look forward to working with you, the co-sponsors of your bills, and other members on legislation that takes into account the need of governments to keep individuals around the worlds afe as well as the legitimate privacy interests of our users around the world.

You almost get the feeling that journalists WISH Google were more mad, and is trying to desperately hype the little it has to make it come true.

To be sure, Politico called the letter "vague," but the fact that they even wrote a news story about it and pretended in the first sentence that "Silicon Valley has stood firm" lets you know what a con this is...

This is all so fake.

See, what's happening is that lobbying groups are speaking as if they are the tech industry and are getting mad on their behalf, but they are REALLY unconvincing because we know what the big dogs can do when they are really mad -- or even just see an opportunity, and that's NOT happening. Here's the usual suspect barking:

“The NSA has finally done something so egregious that the U.S. Internet industry can do nothing but respond with demands for reform of the law to protect their systems and their users,” said Kevin Bankston, who’s helped spearhead the Valley’s message to D.C. while at the Center for Democracy and Technology and is now headed to the New America Foundation.

Well, yeah, where else.

Supposedly, the tech titans should be worried because Snowden is hurting business. Supposedly. But I never hear any real tech people actually saying this (like Robert Scoble, whose company, Rackspace, endorsed the Stop Watching Us fizzled demonstrations last weekend).

And here we get a government guy talking again -- speculating that there is loss to the cloud industry, and yet...he's not actually from that industry any more and not actually giving us any numbers:

The disclosure of U.S. spying on allies may temporarily undercut efforts by American companies to sell technology overseas, according to a former official with the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are going to go through a period of substantial skepticism abroad about any technology we’re selling people,” Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who headed the department’s policy directorate, said today at a forum on cybersecurity hosted by Bloomberg Government and Symantec Corp. (SYMC)

Then there's Gen. Alexander:

Alexander said government must work with private industry to find ways to improve cybersecurity. President Barack Obama met with chief executives of consumer, utility and defense companies yesterday to discuss proposed voluntary security standards for computer networks.

But you know, we had this in CISPA, and the geek goons inside and outside of government lobbied the president to veto CISPA -- and he did. In fact, I always argue that they should have passed CISPA which would have put those dinner relations under the rule of law.

Look, guys. Who forced the click-ad model on us? Tim Berners-Lee and his architecture choices. That Internet he made which is anti-privacy (to be "collaborative") and resists intellectual property and commerce online as counter to such collaboration. He did not want the commodification of information or knowledge -- which means any form of code to these people - and here we are all with digital goods having a tough time getting paid.

Still, the human marketplace routes around the Cathedral -- to borrow a set of metaphors that the open source cult wanted to be about something else entirely LOL. So a lot of buying and selling does get done on the Internet.

I'd like to think we will move out of the click age, and DRM in HTML5 is maybe one sign of that, but there will have to be a complete rethinking. Or rather, a concerted battle because it is a war -- and it means a war against Bruce Schneier.

Basically, Google already encrypts stuff on their servers, but if this is true, then the NSA just got at the pipes between where vast amounts of data is routed. So, it's like the way Turkmen shepherds who are dirt poor in gas-rich Turkmenistan poke holes in pipelines to get some for free because only a certain amount is rationed by the state.

There's a lot of this story we are just not getting and what is being passed off as barking is not that at all. Stay tuned to the next post.

P.S.

Here's an interesting statement from a Googler posted on G+. Hat tip Nuno Maia.

Oct 31, 2013

 

"I can categorically state that nothing resembling the mass surveillance of individuals by governments within our systems has ever crossed my plate. 

If it had, even if I couldn't talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google.

Whatever the NSA was doing involving the mass harvesting of information, it did not involve being on the inside of Google. And I, personally, am by now disgusted with their conduct: the national security apparatus has convinced itself and the rest of the government that the only way it can do its job is to know everything about everyone. That's not how you protect a country. We didn't fight the Cold War just so we could rebuild the Stasi ourselves." -- +Yonatan Zunger 

 

My comment:

+Nuno Maia Thanks. But then the question is, if he didn't see anything like that, why is he disgusted with a government that wasn't doing that, as far as he knows? See, that's what's so weird about all this. Either he's right and the government didn't do this, in which case he should join the effort to expose Greenwald and Snowden as manipulating perceptions for their own agenda. Or he should find proof of what he know believes the government is doing. But he's trying to have it both ways.

 

Snowden: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."

RT @kurtopsahl Picture of Edward Snowden with @EFF sticker on his laptop. pic.twitter.com/ldR8kHt4TS

— John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) June 9, 2013

 

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Much pouncing is being done now on Twitter as various Snowden-watchers decide that he has contradicted himself and they can make much of this.

I'm as critical of Snowden as the next person -- indeed, likely more critical, because I see him not just as a fugitive and a felon and a traitor; I think he represents a virulent strain of a class of hackers really destructive to liberal democracy and antithetical to human rights who have shockingly come to power without much resistance.

And I think his entire story about "zero" chance that his files -- or any intelligence -- were  taken by the Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies simply isn't credible. Obviously you don't ask a thief whether a crime was committed, nor do you take a thief's assessment for how much damage was done.

It reminds me of what Philip Shishkin said about Mao: "if you commit mass murder, your thoughts on education become irrelevant."

The entire laptop fandango -- complete with their provocative stickers from Electronic Frontier Foundation and Tor Project and the tap-dancing that EFF did around this in June and again in October --  strikes me as disingenuous and duplicitious.

I was reminded of all this anew when dealing with a scammer in in Second Life yesterday who put invisiprims around my rental boxes so that either unwitting customers or his friends would pay into that prim and not me. When I caught him, he said the usual angry denunciations that these types always do -- it was all my fault, who dare I, etc. etc. Then when I pointed out the prim, he began strenuously objecting. Why, all I knew was that one prim owned by him was on the parcel, I didn't know what it did. When I showed the screenshot, then he kept bluffing, but that object doesn't even have a script - as if you need a script to pay into a prim set to "buy," duh. And so on -- obfuscation, denial, distraction, counter-charges --- the works. I am SOOOO familiar with this geeky gambit not only from SL, but from every other platform I've been involved with from Twitter to Scoop.it. Literalisms. Defensive dodges. Irrelevancies.

So I'm quite sure that what we're getting from Snowden -- who has very compelling manufactured his own virtual world and lives in it -- is just this kind of dodgy, literalist, geeky prevarication.

Yes, literally, those files may not have been on the laptops -- I have always said they could be decoys (based on my own experience greeting several defectors from the Soviet Union at the airport) or three-card monte sorts of devices to juggle comms, some of them the "innocent" layers of the "rubber hose" or Tor program or who-knows-what.

The laptops likely contain the path to the files, but not the files themselves. We are told by Greenwald at least in one interview (in another, it's not so clear) that he speaks to Snowden "every day". So that means from Russia, Snowden is communicating -- and I'm betting he isn't in an Internet cafe. And we're supposed to believe that no intelligence agency anywhere hasn't gotten in the middle of such regular chats?!

But there are other options:

o He may have memorized certain files or blue prints.

o He may have palmed them off on Sarah Harrison so that he can genuinely claim he doesn't have them.

o He may have actually handed them to the Russians in Hong Kong in their consulate when he spent two days there, or they may have gotten them then. Notice he never talks about that or explains where his laptops were during those crucial hours. If in his hotel room, they were vulnerable to the Chinese. If with him, they were vulnerable to the Russians, especially if they gave him one of those drugs where you are in a twilight state and don't remember what happened to you.

o Maybe the Russians didn't literally copy the files -- so they all could keep that alibi going! -- but just swapped out the laptop and gave him an identical empty one -- complete with an EFF sticker, har har!

o He may have sent them all to some vault somewhere, maybe with WikiLeaks help.

o He may have given all of them to journalists who kept one "clean" set of files in an archive they all could touch, but read-only, and the rest in the possession of journalists encrypted that he couldn't touch.

Any and all of these variants are possible. It's both possible to take Snowden literally -- and realize then that he's not telling you everything behind the literalism -- or take him literally and realize simply he's lying.

Streetwise Professor was struck by the contradiction in James Risen's piece that makes it seem as if on the one hand, Snowden claimed to vet all documents but on the other hand, claimed to leave it to the judgement of journalists because he thought that would be more impartial or something. This is based on a Q&A with Edward largely involving the Guardian's own journalists, and a situation where once again, we don't know if we have "the True HOOHAH" -- as Snowden grandly called his online persona -- or an FSB agent at the other end of the line (or Sarah or who-knows-what).

Streetwise quotes this telling paragraph, where Snowden grandiosely tells us how he is better than Manning:

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.

But you have to go to the next paragraph in the very same Guardian piece to see how he squares this circle with his other claim to have given journalists discretion:

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

So that's entirely in keeping with what he says to Risen:

Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated. He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to them because he wanted his own bias “divorced from the decision-making of publication,” and that “technical solutions were in place to ensure the work of the journalists couldn’t be interfered with

I really don't see a successful "gotcha" here although I'm happy to see more evidence. Streetwise tweeted that I merely suffer from "Not Invented Here" syndrome, i.e. I'm picking the notion apart because I didn't think of it. But I didn't discover the Hawaiian hacker convergence, either, but once it was presented, I could find it plausible and even dig up my own set of facts that added to the hypothesis.

Another contradiction we're seeing now discussed on Twitter now was discovered by Jeremy Duns.  And this has to due with Duns' theory, which others have found compelling, that in fact Greenwald claimed Snowden had "the NSA blueprint" with him (read here), and that seemingly flies in the face of his statement elsewhere backing up of Snowden's insistence that he has no files, and therefore Russian intelligence has "zero" from him.

I think here, too, there isn't much of a contradiction. Greenwald was obviously talking in a general kind of way about what Snowden "had" -- which doesn't mean literally with him in his possession as it has likely been spirited away.

There's also the question of the "dead man's switch" and how that works -- which Greenwald won't divulge details about.

I have to say that the fact that Greenwald not only invokes the dead man's switch, but knows its mechanism and won't tell you adds to the strikes against his claims to be an ethical journalist. Instead, he's a political blackmailer.

We saw this when he threatened to report more leaks about the UK after his husband David Miranda was arrested at the airport with files. He then did make good on those threats later and report even more on the GCH!, but not before first claiming  that Reuters got the "threat" story all wrong, and didn't understand the Portugese, and blah blah blah. Sorry, but when you say "you'll be sorry" in any language - or anything of the sort -- that's a threat; this was a threat. He keeps insisting on special dispensations and readings of context -- he wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

And it's in keeping with the entire tenor of Greenwald on this story. Take a look at what he said to Ken Auleta in the puff piece in the New Yorker about the Guardian:

The Guardian did seek comment from government officials about the revelations. But Greenwald, outraged by the content of the material, pushed to publish quickly. “I was getting really frustrated,” he told me. “I was putting a lot of pressure on them and insinuating that I was going to go publish elsewhere.” He helped produce five stories that ran on five consecutive days in June. “I wanted people in Washington to have fear in their hearts over how this journalism was going to be done, over the unpredictability of it,” he said. “Of the fact that we were going to be completely unrestrained by the unwritten rules of American journalism. The only reason we stopped after five days was that even our allies were saying, ‘Look, this is too much information. We can’t keep up with what you’re publishing.’ ”

Really, Glenn? Fear in their hearts? That's journalism? And not revenge?

Now Greenwald is using the term "adversarial journalism" -- notably in his recent interview with Anderson Cooper. But is journalism like democracy -- when you have to put an adjective in front of it, it already isn't what it is?

There's another contradiction I'm finding her. Snowden was a systems analyst, and an infrastructure analyst. So I presume that this job description means dealing with assessment of the system from the top down (which is regrettably gave him so much access) and doing pen testing (which gave him the plausible deniability that he wasn't hacking but testing). But that's checking the system for vulnerability to hostile attacks. I don't know that this was his job description, and maybe the NSA won't say because it would divulge too much about how they do things.

Here are the job titles he himself gives in his interview with Greenwald and Poitras:

o infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii for BHA
o systems engineer
o systems administrator
o senior advisor for the CIA
o solutions consultant
o telecommunications informations systems officer

But I think we can agree that his job was about the internal workings of the NSA. It wasn't about making attacks on the enemy, i.e. China. These are very different roles -- offense and defense. That's not to say that both might not be combined in one job, but I think that when Snowden says in his interview with Poitras that China isn't really the enemy, he's speaking from a place of profound geekky arrogance based on his own thinking, not from seeing the real damage the Chinese were doing, and how to fight them. That he could casually leak stuff in China that would help them technically AND politically on the eve of Obama's summit with the Chinese lets us know that he has geopolitical motives, not motives only related to Americans' privacy, and that he is hardly the best judge of what is damaging!

Yet Greenwald tells Anderson Cooper now that Snowden is "highly credible" about what is or isn't damaging to the US and what the Chinese may or may not be able to steal or decrypt from him because he was "a highly sophisticated cyber operative trained to penetrate" their defenses.

Oh? He was? How do we know that? That is, Snowden may have told Glenn, but we haven't had this before, AFAIK. I'd like a second opinion on all this. Can one geek make that determination anyway?

Let's say that the Chinese offered to, oh, drop a percentage of our debt, if we gave them X or Y files. Wouldn't you want different departments in the NSA, offense and defense, so to speak, to be assessing this? Wouldn't you want an issue like "this information, if given to the Chinese, won't harm our country" to be decided even at the level of Gen. Alexander? Wouldn't you want the Senate Foreign Intelligence people to approve? Maybe the POTUS? I'm just not accepting on the face of it that one felonious hacker and his adversarial journalist friend can decide this for all of us.

 

Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated. He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to them because he wanted his own bias “divorced from the decision-making of publication,” and that “technical solutions were in place to ensure the work of the journalists couldn’t be interfered with.” - See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpufv

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf

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No, Bart Gellman, I Still Don't Think the NSA is Spying on My E-Mail or Most Other People's

Bart, I know you're trying to find something -- anything -- that will get the American people mad enough to care.

Here we're told the NSA collects millions of email address books globally -- as if this is some horrible intrusion of our privacy or even those of people in Europe or Asia or anywhere.  But these are the addresses that come with legitimate, lawful surveillance of intelligence targets.

My comment:

Nothing the Washington Post or Guardian comes up with from the Snowden's stolen files is ever going to bother me until you come up with an actual individual case, of an actual human being with a name and address, who you can prove was harmed by wrongful surveillance or even arrest. You have not done this. Not here. Not anywhere.

That the NSA gathers hundreds of thousands of email lists a day is nothing. It is not significant. It is not "all the people on the Internet" or "all the people in America" but only a tiny fraction of them.

There is nothing to prove that the daily totals then multiple by the number of days in the year to millions as you have done here without basis. That's because you don't know what the daily *uniques* are that *repeat* every day.

The NSA has pointed out repeatedly that it tracks legitimate intelligence targets. That's fine with me. That is legitimate activity in a liberal democratic society. Trying to play the numbers game with yet another machine capacity of NSA collections still doesn't work to make your case.

Instead, you only once again make the case of Edward Snowden having committed treason and espionage, by exposing his country's secrets to the enemy and undermining faith in the US by its people and the world through the purveying of hysterical hypotheticals.

Snowdens' Ideas Are Really Terrible

I hope snowden sleeps well tonight in Moscow after compromising all possibilities of intercepting intel on those retards inside #Westgate

— Kenfrey Kiberenge (@KenKiberenge) September 22, 2013

 

Let's just pause and consider that, shall we? There is so much hype around Snowden and his excellent adventure to Hong Kong and Moscow, that I feel as if there has to be some pushback.

In the videos released by WikiLeaks from his "Sam Adams Award" ceremony given by the four ex-intelligence whistleblowers, you can hear him eerily still using the term "we" and talking about reform of the NSA as if he is still in the US and is still part of the society there -- which of course, he is not.

In fact, even when he was in the employ of the US government, and nattering away on Ars Technica, he didn't speak for everyone and only spoke for the arrogant geek elite  -- the shifting tribe of gold bugs and technolibertarians or technocommunists and Ron Paulians or Assangist anarchists who think they run everything now because everything is wired and coded.

Yet that royal "we" persists. That may take awhile to dawn  on him, it always does with refugees. I've noticed for many refugees and defectors I've dealt with that it can take 2-3 years for the break to occur in one's psychology, and then be devastating. Until then, he may continue talking in a bubble as if he is on a telephone not hooked up to anything. Notice that while more pale and thin than he was in well-fed Hong Kong eating at the $300-a-day Mira Hotel, he still comes across as over-confident and absolutely arrogantly sure that his theory of the world is right.

What galls me is the persistence that he has done the world a favour, and that if it weren't for him, we "wouldn't know what is being done in our name". Um, we have people to work in our name. They are called "our elected and appointed representatives". They did have oversight and did exercise checks and balances on the NSA. And the hacking and exposure of our nation's secrets haven't been shown to serve the purpose of enhancing privacy rights or forcing "reform" that I'm not sure is needed, instead, they've handed more help to the enemy, including Russia.

I was quite struck reading the tweet of a Kenyan journalist the other day who said bitterly, thanks, Snowden for giving us Westgate by making it much harder to track terrorists and stop them. That's what I wondered myself.

So from the snippets of the speech we get from Snowden, we see he hasn't the slightest remorse, the slightest doubt, the slightest hesitation that he is right, and on the right course. That techie self-assurance and that deep voice that goes with it coming out of a slender frame is oh-so-familiar to anyone who has followed the geeks in the software autocracy movements. I think probably nothing short of our planet's heat-death from the sun would shake them from that certitude, and even then they might object, as according to their calculations, it shouldn't be happening yet.

Says Snowden:

This is not about any sort of particular program. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in America which is increasingly coming into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic people. If we can't understand the policies and programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating it. As someone very clever said recently we don't have an oversight problem, we have an undersight problem.

Oh, it's not about a particular program? Then why all this endless leakage about specific programs from Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman and company?!

The thing is, we do have understanding of policies and programs more than Snowden is willing to admit. And in fact when this was put to the test, and came to a vote in Congress regarding the "need" to "reform" the NSA, those who thought it needed reforming due to Snowden, goaded by Wydell and a few others who have long been assaulting cybersecurity, well, lost -- even if the vote was close.

Snowden gabbles that the USG is unwilling to prosecute high officials who "lied to Congress" but willing to persecute people "who tell the truth". I will repeat what I always say about this: Clapper doesn't strike me as lying so much as having to apologize for misleading people who made assumptions about things, given that his initial effort was to protect secrecy. I don't see Clapper has done anything at all that he has to be prosecuted for, that's absurd -- Snowden artificially contrived this situation and the gotcha-gang have been making hay of it ever since. I also don't view somebody who can't tell me what he was really doing from March to May 2013 and before that, and who ends up hiding in Moscow as "telling the truth." Sorry, I'm conditioned that way.

He goes on with other false theses: "These programs don't make us safer.  They limit our ability to think and live and be creative and to have relationships to associate freely." Really, Edward? I don't feel a single thing stopping me from thinking and being creative and associating freely whatsoever since your hacks. Grow up.

"And they don't make us more safe," he whines, "they make us less safe and put us into conflict with our own government."

Well, no. They do that *for you and your gang* but not a lot of other people. Truly, you aren't interested in a debate, but just your own sect.

I really question the idea that these programs a) haven't in fact protected us from terrorism -- a claim Snowden and Greenwald and company don't accept and b) we aren't suffering harm from Snowden's hacks and their coverage of them -- and will continue to do so.

And speaking of heat-deaths from the sun, I suspect that unless announced in advance that he was commiting terrorism due to NSA files Snowden leaked, and emailed this around to every journalist, and then blew himself and others up somewhere, they won't believe that harm has been done -- and frankly, maybe not even then. I'd love for someone to have a debate with these freaks about what they think constitutes proof of harm, and whether they think we should all sit back and let it materialize to prove their point. Would 3,000 more people being killed with buildings toppling do it for them, or maybe a subway exploding?

He continues, to imply -- unlike Jacob Appelbaum and some of the other crypto kids and cypherpunks -- that he is for "legitimate" espionage and law-enforcement. But this is "a far cry" from what we have now; instead, it should be "targeted" and "based on reasonable suspicion, individualized suspicion and warranted action," and not this "dragnet surveillance" by this big eye that sees everything "even when it is not needed".

 But wait a minute, Snowy. That's exactly what the NSA and its works *are about already*. They are individualized and they do have warrants. The "dragnet" you hype so hysterically is a comb through files that are not individualized encroachment with human awareness to penetrate privacy; instead, they are matching metadata to existing intelligence targets. I just can't get exercised about this, truly. It is necessary.

Then Snowden winds up for the punch and says as a "very smart person" said "we don't have an oversight problem, we have an undersight problem." That's meant to imply that the oversight we think we have in Congress and various secret courts and committees monitoring intelligence is "undersight," i.e. insufficient. I tend to disagree about this because I've never seen a single case come out of this or a single really troubling fact.

So who was that bright person who said that quote?

Well, Tom Engelhardt of the Nation Institute and Truth-out has this concept in his "dictionary of the global war on you". Isn't it typical that these lefties imagine the "surveillance states" are watching only them, and are heedless of terrorists in Kenya or Iraq or Pakistan slaughtering thousands?

To be sure, the concept of sousveillance has been around the tech set for ages, in discussion of wearables, Google Glass type of contraptions and such, I remember hearing about it years ago at virtual worlds and augmented reality conferences.

But there's someone else, closer to home who is using this term, and that's Kevin Gosztola, the Firedog/The Dissenter blogger who has avidly supported Manning, Occupy and of course Snowden, too, as one of the anti-government radicals who wants to entirely re-cast the world. Here he is on Twitter using the term. And he also covered Jesselyn Radack reading the statement from Edward Snowden to European parliamentary committee.

But there's someone else I think said this in chat to Edward Snowden, whom he wouldn't want to mention for "security reasons," and that's likely Jacob Appelbaum. Gosztola covered his famous "Not My Department" speech to 29CCC I should listen to it again and see if he uses the term there.

EVEN IF you agree that "we" need to have more oversight, surely you could concede that the way to get it is not to first hack and slash at secret files, then dump them into the enemies' view, then flee first to China, then to Russia. Seriously. No one can ever prove to me that this is a legitimate way to "start a national conversation" and any "national conversation" begun that way is suspect unless and until Edward Snowden is prosecuted for espionage.

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

Jacob Appelbaum at a fund-raiser. Photo by Scott Beale.

That's the question I have when I see a geek conference coming up in Germany, and note that three Navy officials who are long-time developers of Tor, the encryption software. As we know, Tor got its start in the US military, like the Internet itself did in DARPA, but there's a particularly nihilist geeky notion behind Tor about using innocent human shields and cultivating indifference to criminality -- a flaw to which both military and anarchists are vulnerable  -- that have made me critical of Tor. (Here's what I wrote in April 2012 about the Navy, Tor and Appelbaum long before Snowden.)

The 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security will take place in Berlin from November 4-8 -- be there, if you have a thousand plus dollars for the entry fee.

The conference brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers, and users from all over the world to explore cutting-edge ideas and results. It provides an environment to conduct intellectual discussions. From its inception, CCS has established itself as a high standard research conference in its area.

No doubt!

And one of the cutting-edge ideas the conference-goers will hear is that roughly 100% of Tor's users in a single location basically yield up their anonymity within 3 months to adversaries.

So in the interests of public safety, it's probably better that this important news get to the community of geeks most likely to get maximum use of it -- those helping others to use Tor -- than not.  And "because -- science."

Even so, I think the Obama Administration has to think more coherently about why they are allowing Tor constantly to run out ahead of them so destructively, and what it means for the military to appear on the same platform -- the same venue, the same conference even if not literally the same panel discussion -- and mingle in the same crowd as a helper of Edward Snowden (and there will undoubtedly be many more helpers and enablers of Snowden in the German audience).

I'm not sure of the politics and procedures for how the inequities and bad faith involved in "normalizing" Appelbaum get raised in this case -- but maybe somebody should have a talk with Martin Shallbruch, depending on where his sympathies lie, as I shall explain...

Why should Appelbaum, funded by the US government, developing for Tor, which is still 60% funded by the Department of Defense, be a problem for the original Tor developers from the Navy in terms of conference appearances?

Because Appelbaum as readers of this blog know is not only involved in WikiLeaks and is under investigation by the WikiLeaks grand jury in the US, he was intimately involved in the Snowden defection from the NSA and helped with encryption of his communications. Appelbaum has joined with Snowden, under cover of the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, to cause enormous and irreparable harm to the United States government and people.  Hello!

Oh, I realize these Navy geeks can't possibly see it this way "because -- science." The nerd tribe cuts right across institutional  boundaries and imperatives, whether of the military's discipline and ranks or the horrid hazing rituals of anarchist coders, and one thing that either group insists on is code trumping all -- code-as-law -- as "objective" and "the truth".

If you criticize anything morally wrong about Tor and its uses and misuses, and the huge collection of unsavoury characters and despicable doings that have sprung up about Tor, you are told blandly that it's just software that like a hammer to a nail has no moral inherency.

I always point out that Tor has brought us the two defining disasters of our nation's foreign policy and intelligence security in our time -- WikiLeaks and Snowden -- and it needs to be taken down and they need to start over. Tor isn't just software; it's a community of  practice, a network of people, some of them very ill-intentioned to the US.

But those engrossed in Tor and the nerdy ethics-free approach to software and its cults that always invade every discussion about it think it's "just software" or "the good outweighs the bad".

That's why you get what I view as an entirely false narrative first from Greenwald in the Guardian, then from Shane Harris and John Hudson in Foreign Policy that pits the NSA against the State Department, bad spy guys invading privacy versus good activists and freedom-fighters protecting privacy.

That along the way  you have not only child pornographers and drug dealers -- which is bad enough! -- doesn't bother them terribly, much less radical anarchists like Assange who want to destroy the US government, civic institutions and even the Internet itself as we know it (they hate businesses and multistakeholders with power other than themselves).  And THAT is something that the Navy -- which is supposed to protect our seas and I guess by metaphorical extension our Internet waves from hostile forces -- really should get more serious about understanding.

Usually, what's been happening with these nerd conferences like DEFCON since Snowden is that the nerds themselves posture and swagger and tell General Alexander and other NSA ilk to stay out because now they're compromised and they've "broken trust". That hackers like Snowden and Appelbaum have first broken trust is of no matter to these arrogant types; they need to show their "independence."

But the conference in Berlin  apparently isn't so allergic to the US government that it won't feature the Navy on the agenda:

Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries
Aaron Johnson (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory), Chris Wacek (Georgetown University), Rob Jansen (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory), Micah Sherr (Georgetown University), Paul Syverson (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)

Oh, and US Big IT corporations such as SAP, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Google, IBM Research etc. are the contributing sponsors for this event. German academic geekdom is never too proud to take money from US corporations that are whipped in Der Spiegel for being handmaidens (whores) of the NSA.

Oh, and Army Research Office - although the logo produced on the website from this institution is so blurry that unless you already knew it or verified it in Google images, you might not notice it -- it's reminiscent of the Lavabit owner who turned over numerous pages of bits in 4-pt type to frustrate the FBI...

The keynote speakers featured are Martin Schallbruch Chief Information Officer at the Federal Ministry of the Interior (Germany) -- and perhaps someone can explain to me what his politics are, I suspect they are probably leftist like most geeks; the famous Mikko Hypponen Chief Research Officer of F-Secure (Finland) and Prof. Ravi Sandhu Executive Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio (USA) -- another rock star in his field.

BTW, to get a sense of Mikko's influence and reach -- one RT of a post I did on Snowden's online footprint by him on Twitter brought thousands of viewers to my blog instantly.

"Invited" speaker for this conference -- which doesn't come cheap as even the student fee is around 750 euros going up to 990 euros for the earlybird non-member -- is Jacob Appelbaum. Jake hasn't gotten his homework done yet, so you don't see his paper posted yet, but here's the abstract:

The recent leaks of information by Edward Snowden teach us about the behaviors, specific goals, various techniques, as well as the overall motivations behind certain well funded attackers. The information presented by journalists raise extremely serious questions about the trade-offs being made by these attackers. The subverting of academics, industry and scientific standardization bodies is not only concerning, it threatens to undermine analysis performed on the basis of certain ground truths. How does this impact society? How does it impact industry? What empowers these attackers and how is it that it does not empower other attackers? What problems and threat models need to be considered? What are the key problems that we must consider with regard to security, privacy, anonymity and society?

Translation -- he doesn't mean Snowden is the attacker, although apparently through the kind ministrations of John Perry Barlow and the Fund for Free Press, he is likely well-funded, too.  No, he means the NSA as attacker on all of the crypto kids. BTW, the "subversion of standards" hasn't been proven by a long shot.

Note the assistance in the mythmaking of "hacker-as-journalist" in the bio -- "Jacob Appelbaum works as a journalist, a photographer, and as a software developer and researcher with The Tor Project" -- and indulges his interests in things like "consensus-based government" -- a horrid little sect growing out of the open software cult which I'm reminded I need to write about separately as it, too, is escaping from its lab to harm the general public.

But let's look at what this paper that our brave Navy researchers in blue are bringing to the table, because it's interesting.

It also goes quite far to debunk a narrative that Greenwald is now crafting, and which I see the Foreign Policy writers Shane and Hudson have unfortunately picked up, which is that Tor is unbeatable by NSA hackers. Nonsense.

As I've blogged before, Paul Syverson is at the Center for High Assurance Computer Systems
US Naval Research Laboratory. A past paper Practical Vulnerabilities of the Tor Anonymity Network lets us know that Tor isn't so unbeatable -- hostile forces can just watch the nodes and what packets enter and exit and get at the content of your communications.

Indeed, that's what their friend Julian Assange did and that's how he got his sordid start as a hacker pretending to be a publisher -- sniffing other people's packets and grabbing other people's stuff to make his WikiLeaks stash.

In the precis of the paper to be given next month, the authors write:

Onion routing is a technology designed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to protect the security and privacy of network communications. In particular, Tor, the current widely-used onion routing system, was originally designed to protect intelligence gathering from open sources and to otherwise protect military communicatoins over insecure or public networks, but it is also used by human rights workers, law enforcement offiers, abuse victims, ordinary citizens, corporations, journalists, and others.

The paper then goes on to say that "what Tor currently does for its various users and more on what it does not do".

Grandly, the Navy men tell us: "We have designed and built the Tor anonymous network to secure cyberspace and empower cybercitizens."

Beware of people who tell you that they are "empowering" you. Indeed, I despise the very notion of "empowering" -- often used especially about women and minorities by various institutions and usually by men. Anybody who tells you that they are "empowering" you in fact is retaining power that they are giving out to you on sufferance -- and they could retract it at any time.  Notice they aren't saying "share power with cybercitizens" or "recognizing the inherent power that cybercitizens have and our conditionality as government employees on that power" but "empowering" that they dispense -- with budgets -- on a whim.

The essentially nihilist and cynical theory at the center of Tor -- that authors actually do us a favour by telling us there is "effectively nothing at the center" of Tor -- is this:  anonymity as a tactic for movements good and bad alike is whitewashed by saying law-enforcement itself needs unmarked cars, plainclothesmen, etc. to function again crime.

This strikes me as fundamentally bad faith. The law-enforcer undertakes his mission in his unmarked car with supervisors, rules, oversight -- law. If he uses his unmarked car to do bad things, I as a citizen have all sorts of ways of controlling him with lawsuits, civilian review boards, the media, the ACLU. Not so the citizen in the unmarked car over whom I have no control except by law-enforcers -- who themselves are now undermined by those unmarked crypto kids insisting on absolute encryption. No thank you.

As the Navy guys say about Tor, "this only works because all other cars are also unmarked," i.e. ordinary civilian cars are not marked with police insignia. And this is what I mean by the taking of human shields that Tor engages in -- it's a theory that relies on grabbing as hostage people who are innocent, unmarked, going about their business, and exploiting their normal stripes to hide the zebra, who sometimes is just a zebra but sometimes is is a horse in pajamas and sometimes a jailbird.

The paper talks of "thousands" of relays and we never hear how many nodes there are in Tor exactly -- it is estimated as having gone from 33 to 2000 to even double that, i.e. 4000, but the FBI took down "half" in the child pornography ring bust in Ireland -- and we can imagine seized more with the Silk Road bust. Tor may be in tatters, even with its "400,000 users".

But it gets worse, so pay attention:

In this paper, Syverson et all explain the vulnerability to Tor:

If an adversary can see both ends of a Tor circuit, he can trivially correlate who is talking to whom over that circut. This is thus generally known as an end-to-end correlation attack.

Through various tactics -- tagging bits, delaying bits -- the adversaries can follow what's happening in the system.

Debate on Tor is inhibited by the Torians themselves imagining that only technologists are allowed to talk about it or can even understand it -- and they like keeping it that way because they can gain more impunity.

But it really is not that big a deal.  The Navy people aren't crack leet coders, but mathematicians who don't even program. This is about game theory and analyzing predictability and exploitation of rules in systems. Example: if law enforcement can watch criminals, or seed the system with groups of themselves so they can follow the behaviour of one group of anonymous people very reliably, well, so can criminals especially those with botnets and of course nation states with hostile intents and the resources of a state

"Fortunately Tor is good enough for many of us," concludes Syverson in that paper.

But now take a look at what he and his comrades are presenting in Berlin with new research.

Our results show that Tor users are far more susceptible to compromise than indicated by prior work.

Tor is known to be insecure against an adversary that can observe a user’s traffic entering and exiting the anonymity network.

Our analysis shows that 80% of all types of users may be de-anonymized by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months. Our results also show that against a single AS adversary roughly 100% of users in some common locations are deanonymized within three months (95% in three months for a single IXP)

Note again what a shift from past research with Roger Dingeldine, who left the Navy and now hangs out at the Chaos Computer Club and other geek watering holes on panels with Appelbaum.  Back in 2004, Feamster and Dingeldine wrote that the "probability that a single AS could observe both sides of the connection was over 50%. The man overall probability was about 38%."

Now it's "roughly 100%" in one location, i.e. in a place like China or Iran or Russia where the state is really motivated to watch you, or hey, in the US.

Uh-oh.

BTW, as they explain:

The Internet is composed of thousands of independent networks of arious sizes called Autonomous systems. (ASes). As traffic moves between a Tor client and a relay in the Tor network, it typically traverses multiple ASers. We have known for years that if the same AS appears on the path from the client to the anonymity network and from the anonymity network to the client's destination, such as a website, then an observer located at that AS can preform a correlation attack to identity the client and her destination. So it is possible to do a correlation attack from one location rathan than requiring two.

I would think that this would be the cue to pull the budgets, roll up the networks, and do an after-action study of why this horrid mess not only harmed our country with WikiLeaks and Snowden, but harmed many individuals with child pornography and drugs, and let a bunch of swaggering geeks pretend that they could justify all this and their own sabotage by the fact that a few Iranians or Chinese dissidents got to evade their government's hammerlock over the Internet. I'm sorry, the trade-off just wasn't worth it -- and we as a nation never got to debate this in Congress.

Internet Freedom hearings have never really debated the ideology and methodology and even the efficacy of circumvention and encryption in the struggle for democracy and is not likely to do so given the liberal media narrative still celebrating this as an achievement of the Obama Administration. I support the Administration's Internet Freedoms overall -- unlike Evgeny Morozov -- but I think they need more debate and scrutiny and actually more resources.

The conference is filled with exotic nerd stuff like "Relational Abstract Interpretation for the Verification of 2-Hypersafety Properties" which are probably room-clearers even for some of the geeks that come to these things who are, um, "largely self-taught" like Appelbaum.

But there are important philosophical debates to be had with talks such as that by Felix "FX" Lindner, Resistance is Not Futile – Fighting Nation-State Actors and the Borg as the geeks particularly at the Chaos Computer Club arm themselves for further struggle against their favourite enemy, the US.