Snowden Ten Years Later - Schneier on Security:
Snowden Ten Years Later
In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. But I had a more personal involvement as well.
I wrote the essay below in September 2013. The New Yorker agreed to publish it, but the Guardian asked me not to. It was scared of UK law enforcement, and worried that this essay would reflect badly on it. And given that the UK police would raid its offices in July 2014, it had legitimate cause to be worried.
Now, ten years later, I offer this as a time capsule of what those early months of Snowden were like.
It’s a surreal experience, paging through hundreds of top-secret NSA documents. You’re peering into a forbidden world: strange, confusing, and fascinating all at the same time.
I had flown down to Rio de Janeiro in late August at the request of Glenn Greenwald. He had been working on the Edward Snowden archive for a couple of months, and had a pile of more technical documents that he wanted help interpreting. According to Greenwald, Snowden also thought that bringing me down was a good idea.
It made sense. I didn’t know either of them, but I have been writing about cryptography, security, and privacy for decades. I could decipher some of the technical language that Greenwald had difficulty with, and understand the context and importance of various document. And I have long been publicly critical of the NSA’s eavesdropping capabilities. My knowledge and expertise could help figure out which stories needed to be reported.
I thought about it a lot before agreeing. This was before David Miranda, Greenwald’s partner, was detained at Heathrow airport by the UK authorities; but even without that, I knew there was a risk. I fly a lot—a quarter of a million miles per year—and being put on a TSA list, or being detained at the US border and having my electronics confiscated, would be a major problem. So would the FBI breaking into my home and seizing my personal electronics. But in the end, that made me more determined to do it.
I did spend some time on the phone with the attorneys recommended to me by the ACLU and the EFF. And I talked about it with my partner, especially when Miranda was detained three days before my departure. Both Greenwald and his employer, the Guardian, are careful about whom they show the documents to. They publish only those portions essential to getting the story out. It was important to them that I be a co-author, not a source. I didn’t follow the legal reasoning, but the point is that the Guardian doesn’t want to leak the documents to random people. It will, however, write stories in the public interest, and I would be allowed to review the documents as part of that process. So after a Skype conversation with someone at the Guardian, I signed a letter of engagement.
And then I flew to Brazil.
The story concludes:
[...] But now it’s been a decade. Everything he knows is old and out of date. Everything we know is old and out of date. The NSA suffered an even worse leak of its secrets by the Russians, under the guise of the Shadow Brokers, in 2016 and 2017. The NSA has rebuilt. It again has capabilities we can only surmise.
This essay previously appeared in an IETF publication, as part of an Edward Snowden ten-year retrospective.
EDITED TO ADD (6/7): Conversation between Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday June 09 2023, @12:09AM (2 children)
FISA 702 is getting reauthorized, Snowden is stuck in Moscow and Assange is facing extradition to the US.
That's about everything you need to know about "Snowden Ten Year Later".
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday June 09 2023, @11:42AM (1 child)
I would not say Snowden is stuck. He has a wife, a progeny, a Russian passport and a job. He has life.
Poor Assange has none of these, for he could not even utilize his late wife properly.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday June 09 2023, @02:12PM
While you're right there's no comparison between how bad things are for Snowden versus Assange, Snowden does have an open extradition order preventing him from leaving Russia so he's quite literally stuck in Moscow.
Also, on the risk of sounding pedantic, "late wife" is a euphemism suggesting his wife died.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Informative) by mechanicjay on Friday June 09 2023, @02:13AM (3 children)
...is just super interesting. I highly recommend you go read TFA, and anything else Bruce has ever written.
Sorry for the low value comment
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday June 09 2023, @08:19AM (2 children)
This whole thing was also about the last time that Bruce Schneier was actually active and outspoken. He's been rather quiet since then. Because he was one of the insiders in this event, relatively speaking, his post about is is the best. It was otherwise only covered by a tiny portion of sites, not even a handful. Here are the only others which I could find so far:
He shed light on illegal actions and, perhaps, unconstitutional crimes. However, since he was a contractor, whistleblower protections for government workers do not apply. That has allowed the perpetrators to muddy the waters and prevent proper public discourse. Now the papers were all rounded up by The Intercept which then put them on ice, but not before using the move to attract further similar whistleblowers -- and then hanging them out to dry. Consistently missing from nearly any discussion is the point that neither crimes nor evidence of crimes are eligible for "classified" status.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2023, @03:55PM
One more. Breyer is one of few really the good politicians out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2023, @01:50PM
And an older one.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2023, @05:43AM
I didn't learn anything much from Snowden's disclosures - most people paying attention to the crypto scene and related would have known about the Five Eyes stuff and similar long ago ( e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Reporting_and_disclosures [wikipedia.org] ).
What I did learn was Uncle Sam was actually willing and able to tell some European countries how high to jump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident [wikipedia.org]
(and also that the USA showed that much power but still didn't know he wasn't there...)
To me that was the most interesting thing.
Do they even do that "close airspace" thing for murderers or child rapists?
(Score: 5, Touché) by Opportunist on Friday June 09 2023, @10:06AM (1 child)
To keep my mouth shut.
The public doesn't give a rat's ass about its own privacy or general wellbeing and all I would accomplish is to make my life miserable and be detrimental to my wellbeing.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2023, @07:34PM
Wise decision, citizen. This attitude will carry you far.
(Score: 2, Troll) by ledow on Friday June 09 2023, @12:15PM (2 children)
Snowden Ten Years Later:
Nothing changed.
With one exception: Whistleblowers now know that they won't get to decide whether to spend their life in exile in Russia, or in a UK/US prison, by "whistleblowing".
Same with Assange and Manning. If anything, they've done whistleblowing a disservice by doing it SO BADLY, and for things that never really had any significant impact on the world at large.
By contrast Katharine Gun - whistleblew, did it properly, had her day in court, got a movie made about her... still walking around free but obviously lost her job.
Assange, Manning and Snowden didn't do that. In fact, two of them still haven't, and they've probably ruined their entire lives by doing so.
I don't get why anybody holds them up as martyrs. All they did was show a generation of people that they shouldn't whistleblow if they want to live. Because they whistleblew SO BADLY.
They've damaged whistleblowing, and achieved basically nothing with all their media releases. People, like Schneier, say as much - the content in there wasn't unexpected, they didn't publish anything that people might actually be genuinely shocked by (if they're naive and unaware how intelligence services have always operated), and all that happened was that even dealing with the material put him in fear or arrest, detention, his freedoms being curtailed, privacy invaded, etc.
To hyperbolise: There were no UFOs. There was no ritual torture taking place (Guantanamo would be a far better treasure trove for information if it were - and... again... WE ALL KNOW what's happened and is happening there still, but nobody seems to actually care!). There's no secret genocide. No Nazi war machine.
Spies spied, and nothing changed.
Except the whistleblowing sources ending up with their freedom removed, and the journalists who helped them largely unaffected (because they did things properly!).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2023, @09:42AM (1 child)
While I may agree that nothing has changed (which IMO is mainly due to the general public not caring in the slightest about privacy and not thinking long-term about government violations thereof in the present), I don’t understand your example of Katharine Gun. I just read her Wikipedia article, and it seems what she did was reckless. She simply printed an email and gave it to a friend. In contrast, Snowden directly contacted journalists to present the information the right way to the public.
The only difference between her and Snowden is that Gun only leaked one piece of information (without far-reaching consequences) vs the huge amount of data (compromising many countries and agencies) by Snowden. So UK prosecutors dropped the case for Gun, whereas US prosecutors would never let go off Snowden.
"Proper" whistleblowing is always internal, as per internal procedures, so nobody outside the organisation learns about any of it. And as a result, even less changes compared to "improper" whistleblowing (leaking to the press and general public).
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday June 10 2023, @12:22PM
"Proper" whistleblowing is always internal, as per internal procedures, so nobody outside the organisation learns about any of it. And as a result, even less changes compared to "improper" whistleblowing (leaking to the press and general public).
You're unfamiliar with the Snowden case then. He did research the official channels as well as the fates of the various whistleblowers which had preceded him, such as William Binney. The only option remaining available by the time Snowden made his realization was to shop the files around to respected journalists at established publications.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.