7 ms·

I am so tired of people abusing the phrase ad hominem -- it is not a fallacy to bring in personal details which raise legitimate questions about the credibility

I am so tired of people abusing the phrase ad hominem -- it is not a fallacy to bring in personal details which raise legitimate questions about the credibility of what's being said. Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. I mean, ffs he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. Elsewhere he talks about every machine being bugged and things like that. And the tapping he claims to have intimate knowledge of -- that kind of stuff would be happening inside of some kind of data store, maybe like Apache Accumulo which the NSA also developed. Let alone the implications of what he's saying on the security of all crypto systems everywhere -- how many uneducated sys admins do you know who can inspect a data store and actually understand what they're looking at, and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works. And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this. My verdict is that all he had was some slideshow that he turned over to the Guardian, the rest is a bullshit story.

sillysaurus 13y ago
I am so tired of people abusing the phrase ad hominem -- it is not a fallacy to bring in personal details which raise legitimate questions about the credibility of what's being said. Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. You've just committed an ad hominem. As if having a piece of paper from a college would make his claims more informed.
mindcrime 13y ago
And how do most of these "personal details" actually have anything to do with his credibility? Considering that we know almost nothing about how the NSA/CIA and their ilk actually work internally, the high-school diploma bit may or may not factor into this at all. At any rate, we know the basic details of his story are true, as BAH confirmed that he worked there, and the government has not denied that the PRISM slides and the FISA court order are real. Given what he has shown us so far seems to stand up to scrutiny, I'd say his credibility is fine. A few random people on HN speculating about what the NSA would or wouldn't do, versus now well confirmed knowledge that he did work for the CIA, and for the NSA as a BAH contractor? I'll take the latter as having more weight. And if he didn't have some fairly serious access, how did he get the PRISM slides and the court order in the first place? Anyway... not saying every detail of his story is true, but all things told, I don't see how carping about his high-school education is relevant here. In fact, I don't see how talking about Snowden much at all is relevant here. The story isn't Snowden, the story is PRISM, rubber-stamping by the FISA courts, tech companies possibly in collusion with the NSA to make our nominally "private" data widely available, etc.
- advice4u 13y ago
  >And how do most of these "personal details" actually have anything to do with his credibility? The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable. >rubber-stamping by the FISA courts Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)
  - gergles 13y ago
    >Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot) http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin... There have been nearly 34K requests to the FISA court. It has rejected 11.
    - kvb 13y ago
      How many should have been rejected, given proper scrutiny?
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable. How would that be any different, even if he had, say, a Ph.D. from Harvard? "Paper" credentials and knowledge/talent/wisdom hardly have a guaranteed correlation. Anybody can misinterpret or misunderstand things. Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot) Well, I'd take it as suggestive that they only deny .03% of the requests they receive[1]. Also, there's a fair amount of additional information on FISA/FISC here: http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html [1]: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin...
pfortuny 13y ago
Well, you know, the military let other individual with probably much less technical abilities to get hundreds of thousands of classified material? Man, and that is the MILITARY, don't you know? They risk their lives and perform covert operations day in day out! And so an argument disappears. Do you think the NSA has made no mistakes whatsoever?
MarkHarmon 13y ago
"it is not a fallacy to bring in personal details which raise legitimate questions about the credibility of what's being said. Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education." Having worked decades in the IT industry, my experience shows that formal education rarely makes a positive contribution to a person's skills or credibility. I could be biased though, I'm self taught.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Having a degree I can attest that formal education contributes very little if the student is unmotivated.
- Nursie 13y ago
  I've always felt my degree gave me a good grounding over a wide area. I've worked with people with and without degrees. Some of the best had no degree, some had PhDs, some had a standard BSc. Some of the worst were in all three categories too. But I have found my degree useful, and not just for opening doors.
  - MarkHarmon 13y ago
    That makes sense. Hopefully my comment doesn't sound like I think people with degrees are worse. My point was that I feel it comes down to the person and not the source of their education.
    - Nursie 13y ago
      Heh. I get a bit defensive at times, probably unnecessarily, but there seems to be a "formal education is a waste of time" meme about the place. Agreed, a lazy or incompetent software/IT worker is lazy and/or incompetent regardless of past educational achievement!
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- 13y ago
eksith 13y ago
And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this. I have two words for you: Bradley Manning. It only takes a single bottleneck, a console, a server, a VNC login or what have you where a sufficient stream of classified data to pass through and someone with enough motivation to get at it. You're giving the NSA an awful lot of credit, but in the end these are people who do the same dumb things other intel folks do. E.G. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/693011.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/693011.stm
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  Manning was an intelligence analyst, not a sys admin. He leaked materials which were given to him. Under what scenario is it imaginable that someone like Snowden could actually access the things he's mentioned?
  - eksith 13y ago
    A scenario beyond your imagination has no less of a probability of occurring than one within it. You don't know (and neither do I) what system(s) he had access to and what type of data he acquired. You're assuming the NSA actually uses certain technologies it has at its disposal and it does so appropriately with no means of proving that assertion. You're also ignoring that the NSA isn't a single "entity". It's instead a very large bureaucracy with countless independent workers, contractors, sub-contractors, assistants, analysts and, yes, even sys-admins. Some level of the compartmentalization within this mess has clearly failed. His background is irrelevant to that fact. The point is, he was in a position to have this information regardless and leaked it. That's the story. Your insinuation that his background has some bearing on the information he has already leaked, the parts those within and without the intelligence community has been able to independently verify and the parts that have been confirmed by the WH is completely speculative.
    - jessedhillon 13y ago
      What he leaked is a slideshow. The rest of what he said has been received by many here as gospel, when in fact, there are legitimate questions about his truthfulness. So if you want to stick to primary sources, we have a PPT wit some logos thrown about in a tacky way.
guelo 13y ago
He also had access to the FISA court order. And Greenwald says he has been given "thousands" of documents.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
wisty 13y ago
Maintenance people (whether it's janitors or sysadmins) need more access than the average staff member. There's probably a lot that he didn't really understand in any great detail, but I can certainly imagining him being in a position where he saw a huge amount. Sysadmins know a lot. They run the email servers. They configure hardware for a number of projects. They set up the databases. They see everything that breaks (and in software, that's everything). There's probably a lot of control over the actual data, but the basic workflow is something that would be very hard to hide from the people who are keeping the systems running.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
> how many uneducated sys admins do you know who can inspect a data store and actually understand what they're looking at Sysadmin here. Most of the guys I've worked who lacked a proper CS education but were crackerjack IT folk. IT exists a bit between a trade and a profession and you'll get guys like me with a formal education and guys like Snowden without. For some guys, IT is their lives, its their only hobby and their only profession. Turns out you can learn a lot via practice. >and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works. You'd be a pretty lousy sysadmin for a NSA contractor if you didn't understand crypto on an fairly intimate level. That said, yes, I'm sure there's some blustering here, but honestly, you don't need to be a master of everything to understand what is being stored, where, and how its being done. What the hell does Julian Assange know about fighting a war? Can he shoot a target from 1,000 meters? Does he know how to deploy an anti-tank weapon? Sorry, but you really don't need to be the lead dev on PRISM to understand enough of it to make valid claims about it. Lets not be quite so elitist. Heck, 90% of startup culture is knocking the elites around with cheap disruptive tech.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
EthanHeilman 13y ago
>he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. You realize that the CIA accidentally sent North Korea a list of all it's covert operatives real names and in a separate incident sent all their deep cover operatives the CIA's new diversity policy using letters that had the return address as CIA (citation p. 178 The Human Factor http://books.google.com/books?id=cVt9yg52bhoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=from+The+Human+Factor+Ishmael+Jones&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NF23UY-xO4LR0wHOs4HgCA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=diversity&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=cVt9yg52bhoC&printsec=front...)? Intelligence agencies tend to be total crap at protecting that information. The reason that for 20 years HUMINT sources lasted a week or two in the soviet union before being arrested was lots of people had access to that information and at least two of them, but probably many more, gave the Soviet Union real time updates on all active HUMINT sources. I find it completely believable that many IT workers at the NSA have access to that sort of information. The people the KGB loved to recruit employees that worked in the copyroom or the mailroom because they had the most complete access to intelligent with little to no oversight. Additionally information exists at the edge or leaf nodes in most organistions as you increase in position, rank or grade you lose access and get siloed. Highly skilled low level workers have all your secrets, some of them are not trustworthy and work for foreign governments.
- gwern 13y ago
  pg178 > Like most organizations, the CIA had its own stationery. Its official enveloeps had "Central Intelligence Agency" written on the return address. The Agency mistakenly used this stationery for a mailing on its new diversity policy - a mailing sent to officers, including Dave, who were working under deep cover in foreign countries. We hoped that no one had seen the return address on the envelopes. In any event, according to a friend at HQs, this incident led the Agency to destroy its entire stock of stationery.
  - EthanHeilman 13y ago
    That book documents so much eye opening failure. Google book search for the phrase "ultra-discreet surveillance".
incision 13y ago
>Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. I mean, ffs he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. I don't follow your reasoning at all. I can name a handful of people, myself included who have or do fit this description and situation.
astine 13y ago
I once took a job as a low-level sysadmin contractor at a government office. The first task I was assigned was to create my user account on the various Unix machines I would be working with. To accomplish this task, I was given the root password to a lot of machines. I had no formal IT credentials either. I find Snowden's position quite believable.
- jstedfast 13y ago
  I had the same experience.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
... and from everything you mentioned, the fact the man has no HS/CS diploma has exactly zero relevance. There are many great employees and talented hackers without a diploma.

sillysaurus 13y ago

mindcrime 13y ago

And how do most of these "personal details" actually have anything to do with his credibility? Considering that we know almost nothing about how the NSA/CIA and their ilk actually work internally, the high-school diploma bit may or may not factor into this at all. At any rate, we know the basic details of his story are true, as BAH confirmed that he worked there, and the government has not denied that the PRISM slides and the FISA court order are real. Given what he has shown us so far seems to stand up to scrutiny, I'd say his credibility is fine. A few random people on HN speculating about what the NSA would or wouldn't do, versus now well confirmed knowledge that he did work for the CIA, and for the NSA as a BAH contractor? I'll take the latter as having more weight. And if he didn't have some fairly serious access, how did he get the PRISM slides and the court order in the first place? Anyway... not saying every detail of his story is true, but all things told, I don't see how carping about his high-school education is relevant here. In fact, I don't see how talking about Snowden much at all is relevant here. The story isn't Snowden, the story is PRISM, rubber-stamping by the FISA courts, tech companies possibly in collusion with the NSA to make our nominally "private" data widely available, etc.

advice4u 13y ago
>And how do most of these "personal details" actually have anything to do with his credibility? The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable. >rubber-stamping by the FISA courts Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)
- gergles 13y ago
  >Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot) http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin... There have been nearly 34K requests to the FISA court. It has rejected 11.
  - kvb 13y ago
    How many should have been rejected, given proper scrutiny?
- mindcrime 13y ago
  The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable. How would that be any different, even if he had, say, a Ph.D. from Harvard? "Paper" credentials and knowledge/talent/wisdom hardly have a guaranteed correlation. Anybody can misinterpret or misunderstand things. Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot) Well, I'd take it as suggestive that they only deny .03% of the requests they receive[1]. Also, there's a fair amount of additional information on FISA/FISC here: http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html [1]: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin...

pfortuny 13y ago

Well, you know, the military let other individual with probably much less technical abilities to get hundreds of thousands of classified material? Man, and that is the MILITARY, don't you know? They risk their lives and perform covert operations day in day out! And so an argument disappears. Do you think the NSA has made no mistakes whatsoever?

MarkHarmon 13y ago

"it is not a fallacy to bring in personal details which raise legitimate questions about the credibility of what's being said. Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education." Having worked decades in the IT industry, my experience shows that formal education rarely makes a positive contribution to a person's skills or credibility. I could be biased though, I'm self taught.

Ygg2 13y ago
Having a degree I can attest that formal education contributes very little if the student is unmotivated.
Nursie 13y ago
I've always felt my degree gave me a good grounding over a wide area. I've worked with people with and without degrees. Some of the best had no degree, some had PhDs, some had a standard BSc. Some of the worst were in all three categories too. But I have found my degree useful, and not just for opening doors.
- MarkHarmon 13y ago
  That makes sense. Hopefully my comment doesn't sound like I think people with degrees are worse. My point was that I feel it comes down to the person and not the source of their education.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    Heh. I get a bit defensive at times, probably unnecessarily, but there seems to be a "formal education is a waste of time" meme about the place. Agreed, a lazy or incompetent software/IT worker is lazy and/or incompetent regardless of past educational achievement!
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
13y ago

eksith 13y ago

And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this. I have two words for you: Bradley Manning. It only takes a single bottleneck, a console, a server, a VNC login or what have you where a sufficient stream of classified data to pass through and someone with enough motivation to get at it. You're giving the NSA an awful lot of credit, but in the end these are people who do the same dumb things other intel folks do. E.G. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/693011.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/693011.stm

jessedhillon 13y ago
Manning was an intelligence analyst, not a sys admin. He leaked materials which were given to him. Under what scenario is it imaginable that someone like Snowden could actually access the things he's mentioned?
- eksith 13y ago
  A scenario beyond your imagination has no less of a probability of occurring than one within it. You don't know (and neither do I) what system(s) he had access to and what type of data he acquired. You're assuming the NSA actually uses certain technologies it has at its disposal and it does so appropriately with no means of proving that assertion. You're also ignoring that the NSA isn't a single "entity". It's instead a very large bureaucracy with countless independent workers, contractors, sub-contractors, assistants, analysts and, yes, even sys-admins. Some level of the compartmentalization within this mess has clearly failed. His background is irrelevant to that fact. The point is, he was in a position to have this information regardless and leaked it. That's the story. Your insinuation that his background has some bearing on the information he has already leaked, the parts those within and without the intelligence community has been able to independently verify and the parts that have been confirmed by the WH is completely speculative.
  - jessedhillon 13y ago
    What he leaked is a slideshow. The rest of what he said has been received by many here as gospel, when in fact, there are legitimate questions about his truthfulness. So if you want to stick to primary sources, we have a PPT wit some logos thrown about in a tacky way.

guelo 13y ago

He also had access to the FISA court order. And Greenwald says he has been given "thousands" of documents.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

wisty 13y ago

Maintenance people (whether it's janitors or sysadmins) need more access than the average staff member. There's probably a lot that he didn't really understand in any great detail, but I can certainly imagining him being in a position where he saw a huge amount. Sysadmins know a lot. They run the email servers. They configure hardware for a number of projects. They set up the databases. They see everything that breaks (and in software, that's everything). There's probably a lot of control over the actual data, but the basic workflow is something that would be very hard to hide from the people who are keeping the systems running.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

> how many uneducated sys admins do you know who can inspect a data store and actually understand what they're looking at Sysadmin here. Most of the guys I've worked who lacked a proper CS education but were crackerjack IT folk. IT exists a bit between a trade and a profession and you'll get guys like me with a formal education and guys like Snowden without. For some guys, IT is their lives, its their only hobby and their only profession. Turns out you can learn a lot via practice. >and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works. You'd be a pretty lousy sysadmin for a NSA contractor if you didn't understand crypto on an fairly intimate level. That said, yes, I'm sure there's some blustering here, but honestly, you don't need to be a master of everything to understand what is being stored, where, and how its being done. What the hell does Julian Assange know about fighting a war? Can he shoot a target from 1,000 meters? Does he know how to deploy an anti-tank weapon? Sorry, but you really don't need to be the lead dev on PRISM to understand enough of it to make valid claims about it. Lets not be quite so elitist. Heck, 90% of startup culture is knocking the elites around with cheap disruptive tech.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

EthanHeilman 13y ago

>he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. You realize that the CIA accidentally sent North Korea a list of all it's covert operatives real names and in a separate incident sent all their deep cover operatives the CIA's new diversity policy using letters that had the return address as CIA (citation p. 178 The Human Factor http://books.google.com/books?id=cVt9yg52bhoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=from+The+Human+Factor+Ishmael+Jones&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NF23UY-xO4LR0wHOs4HgCA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=diversity&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=cVt9yg52bhoC&printsec=front...)? Intelligence agencies tend to be total crap at protecting that information. The reason that for 20 years HUMINT sources lasted a week or two in the soviet union before being arrested was lots of people had access to that information and at least two of them, but probably many more, gave the Soviet Union real time updates on all active HUMINT sources. I find it completely believable that many IT workers at the NSA have access to that sort of information. The people the KGB loved to recruit employees that worked in the copyroom or the mailroom because they had the most complete access to intelligent with little to no oversight. Additionally information exists at the edge or leaf nodes in most organistions as you increase in position, rank or grade you lose access and get siloed. Highly skilled low level workers have all your secrets, some of them are not trustworthy and work for foreign governments.

gwern 13y ago
pg178 > Like most organizations, the CIA had its own stationery. Its official enveloeps had "Central Intelligence Agency" written on the return address. The Agency mistakenly used this stationery for a mailing on its new diversity policy - a mailing sent to officers, including Dave, who were working under deep cover in foreign countries. We hoped that no one had seen the return address on the envelopes. In any event, according to a friend at HQs, this incident led the Agency to destroy its entire stock of stationery.
- EthanHeilman 13y ago
  That book documents so much eye opening failure. Google book search for the phrase "ultra-discreet surveillance".

incision 13y ago

>Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. I mean, ffs he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. I don't follow your reasoning at all. I can name a handful of people, myself included who have or do fit this description and situation.

astine 13y ago

I once took a job as a low-level sysadmin contractor at a government office. The first task I was assigned was to create my user account on the various Unix machines I would be working with. To accomplish this task, I was given the root password to a lot of machines. I had no formal IT credentials either. I find Snowden's position quite believable.

jstedfast 13y ago
I had the same experience.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

... and from everything you mentioned, the fact the man has no HS/CS diploma has exactly zero relevance. There are many great employees and talented hackers without a diploma.