I am having a contrary reaction to the recent revelations that we might live in a pervasive, invasive surveillance state. My first reaction was: Why is anyone surprised? What did you think the Patriot Act meant? It legalized activities that the government actively pursued covertly since WWII at the latest. Spying on US citizens is nothing new. And why be outraged about it? What did you expect the N.S.A. to do? To look for terrorists, they MUST look at EVERYONE. And really, didn’t you KNOW your phone calls were being scanned for keyword clusters? Didn’t you realize you were putting your life on display for retailers on the Web? Haven’t you noticed how Google Ads respond to keywords in your emails? Or watched the ads on the right side of your Facebook News Feed reflect your demographic data? If Amazon & Netflix tracking cookies can follow your browsing, why shouldn’t the government have the same access? I heard the argument that we didn’t click “I agree” on the TOS agreement w/ the N.S.A. Perhaps not personally, but a majority of voters re-elected G. W. Bush and the Congress Critters who made us give up our 4th Amendment rights at airports. We have COMPLIED implicitly if not explicitly. I say we KNEW we gave away our privacy & shouldn’t boohoo too loudly. We darn well know there are men being held in Gitmo indefinitely w/o due process. Oh but that’s THEM, not us, you say. Well, we’re not STARTING to slide down a slippery slope. We’re snowballing downhill ALREADY.
My second reaction was: They aren’t doing a very good job of compiling & sorting all that data. Those two losers still blew up people at the Boston Marathon AFTER they reportedly looked up bomb making instructions ONLINE… along w/ at least half a million other idle slackers that week alone I would guess. I’m not sure I would mind if they had the ability to intercept those boys BEFORE they set off their bombs. It would have been nice if the movie theater mass murderer had been arrested in the parking lot & taken off for a psyche eval. One of those mass murder TERRORISTS exercising his 2nd Amendment rights–I forget which one–made a number of suspicious ONLINE purchases of ammo. Why didn’t that throw up a red flag? So there’s that. Big Brother appears to be incompetent. His all-seeing eye blinks.
My third reaction was: Why is this big news NOW? WHY is this shiny bauble of outrage being dangled? WHERE are we being lead? All over the Web, people were saying how this was a non-partisan issue. Left & right should unite to roll back this gross invasion of our privacy. Then the leaker was revealed & my mind reeled over his totally unbelievable life story. While others were hailing him as a courageous hero, I was saying to myself this dude is NOT REAL. I saw contradictions in his narrative. You cannot BE epileptic AND accepted into Army Special Forces Training. After breaking BOTH legs in a training exercise & taking a couple of computer classes at a community college to get his GED, how in hell does someone end up being a C.I.A. employee in Switzerland? To then be transferred to the N.S.A. & spend the last four years working for subcontractors tasked w/ super-duper top-secret operations… This is the stuff of wild fiction! And you cannot BE PATRIOTIC & tell the Guardian–a news outlet that is notoriously anti-American–you melodramatically fear for your life while you sit in gawd-damn evil CHINA!
PLUS, Big Brother is beyond incompetent & well into negligence IF this “sys admin ASSISTANT” was given access to their powerfully pervasive, invasive PRISM. I considered the only way ANY part of Snowden’s tale could be true is if he had a connection that pulled strings to put him where he was. Many unqualified people were given overpaid do-nothing admin jobs related to Iraq because they had connections. It was part of a Republican patronage system that rewarded young people related to contributors or who had done grunt campaign work. The only part of Snowden’s past that has been confirmed is that he worked the last 3 months for a subcontractor in Hawaii. SERIOUSLY! He wasn’t even out of a probationary period of employment before they handed him the keys to unlock damaging documents! THIS is MORE outrageous to me than the SPYING! I DON’T BELIEVE IT!
I thought to myself it was far more likely someone handed him whatever evidence he claims to have. He’s a photogenic geek type & draws out sympathy w/ his romantic idealism. I devoured the continuing interviews w/ him and THERE IT WAS! The creep VOTED for RON PAUL! He’s “disappointed” that Obama has not changed the course of the massive ship of the surveillance state. Pah-lease! Obama can’t even get his judicial appointments or cabinet positions approved & he’s to blame for operations that were started before he was elected and continue to be funded by Congressional subcommittees!
I smell A RAT! If Breitbart were still alive, I would suspect him of this trickery. It has been suggested this will be an issue for Rand Paul to fly if he seeks the presidency in the next election. Indeed, many of my liberal friends are finding themselves in common cause with reactionary retards. How many Democratic votes might be peeled away by this overblown issue? Could it be enough to tip the balance & put a mad dog Republican in the White House? Are you willing to trade away the New Deal for the promise of private emails? I know the adage about trading liberty for security and having neither. But we can’t have ANY liberties WITHOUT security and a functioning central government.
I don’t care if the ominous They ARE scanning my phone calls or emails. The government started spying on me in 1964. I know this for A FACT & the Thought Police haven’t shown up yet. I DO care VERY MUCH that the N.S.A. is INCOMPETENT! We seem to be wasting billions of dollars on a system that doesn’t protect us from outbursts of semi-automatic gunfire almost every frigging week! Do their defining parameters on what constitutes terrorism need to be adjusted? Should they hire Google to tweak their algorithms to better anticipate when nut jobs are about to go postal & kill innocent children? AND WTF! HOW did a dweeb like Edward Snowden get hired & handed access in under 3 months? There’s THE scandal!
Also, anyone who voted for Ron Paul or encourages voting for Rand Paul needs to WAKE THE FUCK UP!
great diary. thanks!
Thank YOU.
Another binary choice for folks that seem unable to deal with complexity. That even today are unable to wrap their brains around the fact that Mark Felt was a nasty piece of work and not a man to celebrate as a hero, but nevertheless, one still appreciate his “Watergate” releases and don’t much care that his reasons for doing were unlikely to have had anything to do with patriotism.
Before it was: “CT; so STFU without tangible and irrefutable evidence.
Now it’s: “Old News; so STFU” and “They’re too competent to foil the Boston Bomber; so, they have have all my junk.”
And: “The releases must be some sort of libertarian/ rightwing plot.” Maybe it was. But Rand Paul is still creepy — and if the public can’t get that, well, democracy…
diary is not about it being a libertarian plot. the question is how did this loser kid (and liar? broke 2 legs? is epileptic yet got into special forces training?) have access to this info. liklihood of connections to get where he got, and liklihood he is just a vehicle for leaking this info – see comment on other thread about BAH being a Carlyle group outfit (read Bush Sr.) with penchant for causing trouble for dem administrations.
Prefer to wait a few days when more can be known before calling Snowden a “loser kid” and “liar”.” Not that either of those two conditions would negate the value of the information released unless that information can be proven to be fraudulent.
As for speculations about a BAH/Carlye/Bush-family plot to discredit a DEM administration, you seem not to understand how those folks operate. They didn’t go after Clinton for supporting NAFTA, capital gains tax reduction, repeal of Glass-Steagall.
but they did go after Clinton for …
Not sure what I think about why this is timed now, but possible that it’s to undercut dems in 2014 or [Hillary?] in 2016. depress dem turnout? another possibility – is it connected with how Obama is approaching the Guantanamo/ Patriot Act morass? In a certain sense dealing with Republicans is like taking candy from a baby; as the joke goes, waiting for the day Obama tells the Republicans he’s in favor of breathing air.
They went after Clinton twice — healthcare (which everyone seems to forget was his signature issue when he entered the race for POTUS) and his personal sexual activities. The GOP wanted nothing to do with any healthcare reform (unless at some point their guy is doing the proposing). On the second, they believed their own moral superiority BS that going after Clinton was a win for them, and were likely surprised at all the collateral damage to the GOP. But it still worked out well for GWB in 2000.
didn’t finish high school, worked as a security guard at an NSA facility at Maryland University – yes, that happens all the time
Has Booz Allen Hamilton denied Snowden’s employment? (Dell currently refusing to comment.)
Booz Allen Hamilton says he was hired 3 months ago as a system administrative ASSISTANT. This is usually a guy who gets sent running down the hall to the server room to punch a button to manually reboot. It’s a specialized but not highly skilled tech position.
It doesn’t matter what his formal job title was, he seemingly had educated himself in sysadmin functions enough to get into servers that he was unauthorized to access (or that’s the story that BAH is putting out). More likely, tight security was such a hassle to work through that the sysadmin functions minimized as much of it as possible to get the work done.
So far, what he has delivered are documents plucked from a document file system somewhere.
What you should listen to is his charges that things were so loose there that rogue analysts or sysadmins could access almost anything.
He’s young enough to still be idealistic; his statement of shock that the CIA would get someone drunk and blackmail him into to becoming an agent represents that youthful attitude. But he was 11 years out of high school and highly motivated to get into computer science work. But likely not proficient enough in coding to be a hacker. Which is why the damage that NSA suffered is likely more reputational than technical.
He was with Booz-Allen-Hamilton for only 3 months, but he had been at NSA for four years on other contracts. It is highly possible that he was working at his current position before Booz-Allen-Hamilton got the contract, and he was grandfathered in with a lot of the existing staff who knew the systems.
The push should be to find out what NSA has been up to; there are minimal ways of doing what they do–just not requiring as much data and certainly not as lucrative for the contractor. William Binney and Thomas Drake exposed two prior boondoggles.
And not try so much to knock down the messenger. NSA and BAH will be working overtime to do that on their own.
I always appreciate your point of view. I wasn’t aware of BAH’s more detailed explanation of how he got what he got when I wrote this diary. Snowden comes across as very attractive and sympathetic. I get that. I was young, idealistic AND a Libertarian until Newt Gingrich showed up & was accepted as one of us in my state’s Party. But I couldn’t help reacting to Snowden’s life history w/ disbelief. There is no confirmation that he worked for other contractors… yet.
His job title DOES matter because it indicates the expertise BAH thought he had & the level of access he should have been DENIED. It struck me that he was saying HE could pull up anyone’s personal data & I doubted he was in a position to do so. I would expect that process to require more than a few keystrokes & password authorization screens. But details emerge…
Imagining a workplace so slack that anyone could dart in while someone else stepped out for a coffee refill & quickly gather enough data to be an identity thief… in a company dedicated to national security… Oh my. I’d like more details on how he committed his crime which I doubt will be published. Did he use a thumb drive to copy the files? Didn’t employees pass thru TSA-type screening coming & going? Did he forward file copies to himself via email? Both options require time. And such actions leave a trail on a network’s activity log. Did he grab & dash to the airport?
Network security is NOT a hassle. The hardest part is remembering your current pass codes. Logging in only takes a few moments & logging out is nearly instantaneous.
Security protocols would seem to be tougher at my local library, for goodness sake. For example, the librarians are told to never leave admin access open on their terminal if they go AFK. The access codes are personalized & if you loan one to someone you will be the one in trouble for an unauthorized download, app installation, or any other modifications to the system. Repeat offenders get fired.
On networks like hospitals with sensitive personal data like SS#’s & birth dates, inserting an external drive or copying files WITHOUT the proper codes can be set to automatically shut the system down. It appears BAH needs a new executive network system administrator familiar w/ basic security protocols.
There was a scandal during the Bush administration at NSA; I don’t think it was something that either William Binney or Thomas Drake mentioned. The gist of it was that analysts were indeed making unauthorized searches of information. There might be an ingrained cultural problem in the workplace.
It would be interesting to know when BAH got the contract. They could have walked into existing issues that hadn’t been completely dealt with.
The whole contracting environment in government contracts is loony (if you take the point of view of a taxpayer instead of a contracting firm executive). Periodically–two years, five years, a change of administration–the prime contractor on a contract will change and hundreds of people will be let go or rebranded as employees of the new contractor.
It is possible that Snowden either knew or hacked the proper codes to allow the copying of files; it is also possible that BAH built strong perimeter security and weak within-the-wall security as a convenience to administrators. It has happened that way when a clueless customer to the contract nods and says, “I don’t want to spend that kind of money, and yes I will take the risk.”
I didn’t tell anyone to STFU. Please say more. Give me a good counter argument. Show me some supporting evidence Snowden was actually in the military or ever worked for the C.I.A. Explain how someone w/ only a couple of computer classes gets a tech position and top security clearance with a billion dollar tech subcontractor. I am open to whatever insights or info you find to support his legitimacy or the reality of his claims regarding Internet providers. And I didn’t say it MUST BE a plot. It just struck me that way as I looked for an explanation on how this guy got to be where he was & rolled out his drama performance.
The government spying on U.S. citizens IS “Old News”. Sorry but I got outraged & over it years ago. Old age makes people accept the shit they can’t change. Acceptance is quite different from denial. I doubt the man’s sincere concern for our liberty BECAUSE he ran to hide w/ our primary enemy in a currently ongoing cyber war. Every low-level tech knows that but he apparently doesn’t…
China is not our enemy. (This is not to say that opening our markets to it has not deindustrialized the nation, but that was our politicians’ fault, not China’s.)
Our “primary enemy” are the people who have hijacked all three branches of the federal government for the benefit of the top 1%.
Hong Kong was a reasonable place for Snowden to go.
As for Snowden getting the high paying jobs he got without a high school degree, as you yourself suggested, that was probably thanks to connections. From reading about this story, I got the impression that he has family members who work in the same racket. (That good post-WW II word needs to be brought back into current usage. National security, like war, is a racket. It would be interesting to learn when, and why, this word dropped out of usage in the first place. I believe it was still used in the 1960s.)
Totally agree w/ you about who the enemies of we, the people, are. And like the word “racket” as appropriate.
What I said was: China is our primary enemy in an ongoing CYBER WAR. That is my husband’s opinion. He is a highly skilled, experienced and certified IT wizard. Part of his job is fighting cyber attacks & restoring the hijacked, paralyzed systems that operate police departments, hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, etc. He says these attacks originate in China.
Fair enough. From what I’ve read, China’s “cyberwarfare” involves trying to steal industrial secrets rather than sabotage, but that’s neither here nor there.
I didn’t realize that the computers of “police departments, hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, etc.” in America are getting hijacked and paralyzed. Can you give any links to news stories about that? The only instance of such cyberterrorism that I’m aware of is what the US and Israel did to Iran.
I haven’t looked for any news stories on the subject. I’m a camp follower, so to speak, reporting from the front lines. Hubby comes home from a day of “combat” and says, “The damned Chinese” then lapses into technical jargon that makes my mind haze over. I’ll try to force him to speak to me in layman’s terms & perhaps it will result in a diary that explains the basis for his opinion.
.
Identifying the source of attack is almost impossible, limiting the chance of catching the cyber terrorists and criminals.
Cyber warfare, attacks originate by all our real-life enemies: China, North Korea, Russia and Iran. Likely, Assad is now in his bunker attacking a police department somewhere in the US. đŸ˜‰
Tracing the source of an attack or disruption in a network is NOT impossible. People DO get arrested for hijacking the computers of the unsuspecting & using them to launch spam emails or DOS assaults. Many identity thieves are also caught. These stories don’t get hugely promoted news-wise & specific details are not given to avoid both inspiring & warning others. Counterfeiting currency & checks, for instance, is also under-reported news for the same reason.
I have asked him WHY. What is the point of these disruptions to local systems? He can only speculate: There is probably international trading of personal data for the purpose of digital theft. Debit & credit card companies usually suffer the costs when your bank account is compromised. Generally, having a network go down brews discontent because of the inconvenience & distrust in the reliability of computerized systems. Maybe they just mess with stuff to show they can…
The weakest link is the human interface. Bad things don’t USUALLY happen w/o someone leaving a figurative door unlocked or heedlessly inviting a remote access app inside because they download something “free” or visit a site where they shouldn’t go. Employees w/ idle time have difficulty distinguishing their computers at work from the ones they have at home. On their PC, they only compromise themselves. At an workplace like a hospital…
Then there is highly sophisticated hacking evolving that doesn’t require human screw-ups to do damage. It’s an on-going problem & when the source is traced back to a foreign government… Well, what can be done?
Did Steve Jobs take even one computer class?
At the moment, all we have is the journalistic integrity of Glen Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, and The Guardian to go with. Pardon me if “your doubts” don’t weigh much in comparison with the professional reputations of Greenwald, etc. (Reputations that would be destroyed if critical elements of the story are false.)
Bloomberg story on Snowden
In other words, the combination of coming from a background that makes it easy for you to get a security clearance and having some computing experience is a gateway to big bucks.
I watched the Guardian interview. The guy comes across as smarter and more articulate than lots of people who went to college. We should be pleased that smart people like him can still get good jobs without a high school degree (not to mention college degree), something that was routine after the War. (But as the quote above suggests, that was probably enabled by the out of control expansion of the national security state.)
He has that Ryan Gosling link going for him. Agree that he’s highly articulate — few college grads can speak that fluidly. There was was the MBA former POTUS — sheesh!
Deference to the young wrt to computers and systems is practically in the DNA of Americans. Not difficult for me to see that Snowden would have garnered even more than average trust.
Back when Steve Jobs was making personal computers in a garage. There were no classes in the subject. I also built computers at the time and wrote code. He was a genius at it. I wasn’t.
At this point, the Washington Post is backpedaling on their original story, changing sentences & phrases to “clarify”. Somewhere today I stumbled across screen capture comparisons of how rapidly they have retracted the claim that Internet providers were allowing “direct access” to the N.S.A. That was the only new charge being made, by the way.
Greenwald has been wrong before and it didn’t affect his reputation. He is a peddler of outrage because it generates page views for him. He is not a reliable reporter of reality IMHO. Perhaps he didn’t have doubts about Snowden’s veracity because the story served his agenda. Whereas I gain no personal benefit from doubting the young man.
Computer programming predated the PC. (Have a friend that obtained his Phd in 1964.) Whatever Jobs coding skills, he wasn’t a genius in that area.
Can you cite those instances when he was wrong or are you simply repeating what someone else asserted? If he hadn’t essentially been apolitical back in 2002-2003 when he bought GWB’s Iraq war, that would have been a bigger black mark on his reputation. And his reasoning on that was similar to John Dean’s who also got it wrong and wasn’t a political neophyte. Then there’s the long list of politicians and political journalists that bought the WMD.
Greenwald is first a lawyer and a highly skilled one — his writings are precise (one reason why they are often long).
Golly, Marie, you certainly are being nit-picky. OF COURSE there were computers & codes BEFORE the PC. Where do you think I learned how to code the first personal computer I built? But there were no classes on that new animal. Their operating systems were just being developed. Gee-whiz, let me be more specific. Jobs was a genius at marketing. There, are you satisfied?
I offered my humble opinion of Greenwald. I don’t have to go to the effort of defending it with citations. You are entitled to your apparent devotion & I’m not going to demand that you justify it.
Didn’t read as if it were “my humble opinion of Greenwald.” I was merely inquiring if your highly negative assessment of Greenwald was informed by more than repeating what others have said. Or if it was as kneejerk as your assertion that I have some devotion to Greenwald. (FWIW, not putting anyone on a pedestal for adoration is one of my quirks.) BTW, attacking me with a baseless charge instead of answering my question is more telling than if you hadn’t responded at all.
Rich that you accuse me of nitpicking in this of all diaries.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/08/1192256/-The-Final-Word-on-Glenn-Greenwald
This is a rather exhaustive tackling of potential Greenwald errors. Personally? I don’t really care. The dude is hysterical and definitely assumes bad faith for people who disagrees with him. That doesn’t obviate his making good points.
So far the story he published basically checks out and that’s what matters to me.
Surprisingly thin case even given the degree of parsing to make it. At least the diarist made a concession:
I was going to agree with the diarist that this one was a lie:
Then read more carefully: Senate Democrats did “help” to pass that bill.
Not sure I agree with you that Greenwald is hysterical but have no quarrel with your observation that “he assumes bad faith for people who disagree with him.” However, that seems to be endemic on blogs regardless of political orientation and more often than not a demonstration of political immaturity – the inability to remove oneself from the equation and consider larger wholes. (A continuing shortcoming of the US Constitution as well.) I appreciate Greenwald’s writing on civil liberties and welcome his criticism of rigid political partisans that can’t see their own hypocrisy. However, also remain mindful of his Libertarian orientation which may mean that he has more in common with LCR Republicans than he has with social democrats, feminists, or me.
Well, nothing to say except I like your attitude on the topic.
Seems to me the whole controversy about Snowden rather misses the point. For all we know he was an unwitting actor in an otherwise intentional leak; from the reaction Stateside it seems the intelligence community would have been correct in assuming strategically they had nothing to lose by the revelation.
That we’ve closed the “authority gap” on China and are now better prepared to repel cyber-security boarders in the ongoing engagements which already trample personal and corporate privacy, for example.
Hero, fraud, or convenient patsy?
We’re All disappointed that the people in our government are hopelessly incompetent and corrupt. I guess it takes years for the idealism of youth to fade away. The show must go on.
Where’ve ya been, sjct? It’s good to hear from you.
Hi, Alice. Good to see your user name, too.
Mainly I’ve been off in a world of my own to avoid harsh realities, writing pulp fiction for my own amusement. I do cruise the news & lurk at the Pond more than once a day. This news story snagged me because I’ve been wrestling w/ a novel & keep re-writing it because I think my characters & plot are too far-fetched. There’s a beautiful woman in advertising who loves ballroom dancing. She falls in love w/ a handsome mild-mannered guy because he can dance the Tango… and there’s great sex. On the surface he looks like a college drop-out & she thinks she is more successful than he is. It won’t work out between them. He reveals that he makes more money than she does, working in IT for C.I.A. covert operations. Tension rises as she presses him to decide if he’s a true patriot or a criminal. To prove his love, he comes out of the shadows. That puts him in danger & on the run. She saves him by using her job skills to make him famous. Ridiculous story, right?
Then this. Har! The similarities to my fiction made me scream THIS CAN’T BE REAL.
Oh well, we all love a good story.
Who cares – fact or fiction?
Whatever gets you through the night.
Just because you dream something up, doesn’t mean nobody else can do the same. But then there often are suspicious similarities.
.
Hehe, you suspect Republicans of running Snowden, but an ex-CIA officer thinks its China:
Spy vs Spy in the cyber age
An ex-CIA guy would suspect another country. That’s why they missed non-state actors for so long apparently.
However, the timing relative to the summit between the new Chinese leader and President Obama was a little cute.
But anyone aware of international politics could have scheduled that or it could just be a coincidence–an irony.
China is my husband’s prime suspect, too. Tee hee. I guess if Obama accuses Xi Jinping of running a totalitarian state he can reply w/ the school yard taunt, “I know you are, but what are we?” There’s no comparison really.
Blocking Facebook, YouTube or parts of Google doesn’t protect Chinese citizens a bit… from their own government’s surveillance. I don’t believe the Chinese people have any expectation of privacy or personal liberty. They have strictly enforced laws about when pregnancy is allowed, for goodness sake. That’s pretty darn invasive, forced abortions & all. Mirror images in a way: They want to limit their population growth while Reactionaries would like to force U.S. women to have more babies.
Nor does it keep our cyber spies from finding out about Chinese citizens the same way they find out about us–by hacking into hospital, school, police & military databases. With Snowden’s help, maybe they can bypass all the penny-ante effort & tap straight into the NSA… If he’s not in Quantico already.
I agree with you about China (other than that, being an only child, I am more concerned with overpopulation than with people being able to have as many children as they want), but I really don’t think that Snowden would sell his country out.
Also, I don’t think he could compromise US cyberintelligence significantly, even if he told the Chinese everything he knows. (I do wish that Glenn Greenwald would publish the whole PowerPoint presentation that Snowden gave him, however.) I imagine that specialists in most major countries understand the techniques that the NSA uses in its operations; the crucial thing is being able to penetrate networks, having useful passwords and codes, and having the requisite software.
Yeah, something about this whole story stinks to high heaven. That’s my impression, any way, although admittedly more of a gut reaction than anything else. As an o/t aside: good to see you around.
.
Don’t stare yourselves blind on the information by Greenwald and Snowden, most information was out in the open due to earlier whistleblowers. Everytime the media gets up in a frenzy, the wagons are circled. Must be an old habit coming from fear of them savages.
See also my recent comment How We Became Israel.
.
Best answer so far: