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It's probably too late now, but I feel like it was a mistake not to release a public encryption key along with his initial effluence of records. I for one belie
by eblume 13y ago
It's probably too late now, but I feel like it was a mistake not to release a public encryption key along with his initial effluence of records. I for one believe that this was written by Snowden, but it seems like an obvious use of some basic form of identity signing.
Edit: It now seems like there is some reasonable doubt that this notice was forged. I still remain confident this is no forgery, but the point I'd like to make is that there may in fact be an identity question -- and that is a problem with a technical solution that unfortunately seems not to have been leveraged.
- marshray 13y agoThis is a serious question: How could we trust that his private key had not been compromised at this point?
- joonix 13y ago>Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. This is British writing style. Brits leave off the preposition "from" in these types of sentences; Americans put it in. American English: "Administration now seeks to stop me from exercising a basic right." British English: "Administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right." I'm not a linguistics or grammar expert so I can't name the proper terms for all this. I've just observed in the past that this is a "Britishism" that differs from American style. It's interesting to see it here. Snowden wouldn't write like that. IMO, he needs to ditch Wikileaks because they've done nothing but harm him and seem to only be interested in advancing their agenda.
- thorum 13y agoI think all this really says is he's working with a European editor. Which you'd kind of expect since Snowden is an IT guy, not a writer.
- adamconroy 13y agoNice work Sherlock. Except I must say as a counter example that I am British and I flip-flop between using 'from' and not using 'from' in such sentences.
- vinceguidry 13y agoYou might, but I've yet to read American writing that leaves out the 'from'. It certainly wouldn't ever occur to me to do that.
- mbillie1 13y agoAs an American who often adopts idioms and sentence structures from various things he reads, I will say (for me at least) that it depends entirely on how much, and what, you read :)
- bobwaycott 13y agoHardly convincing. I am American, and frequently edit my writing to remove extraneous "from"s and "that"s which make it into my sentences as a product of spoken habit. I usually try to make my writing habits a bit tighter than my speaking habits.
- smoyer 13y agoHe could have created the private key with a really strong pass-phrase.
- jlgreco 13y ago[insert obligatory xkcd about rubber hose crypto-analysis here...] Pass-phrases help mitigate the concerns for stolen private keys, but they do not provide assurances that things will not be signed or encrypted under duress. The best you can really do there is throw in more human element to increase the number of rubber hoses your enemy will need.
- paulhodge 13y agoWe probably couldn't, but I don't think there is any way to be 100% sure of the authorship of something, unless you are physically sitting next to the author. So, trusting the authenticity of a document is a probability game. If he had signed it with a public key, then the probability of a fake would be less.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y agoHe used 'have' after United States of America, which is a Britishism. To Americans, 'United States of America' is singular and would use "has" in this particular sentence: For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Maybe I'm overanalyzing but I don't think this is a verbatim statement from Snowden.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- il 13y agoSarah Harrison, the Wikileaks advisor accompanying Snowden, is a UK citizen. It's likely she had a hand in drafting this statement.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bcn 13y agoMaybe it was changed since you saw it, but the statement now reads: "...the United States of America has been..." Edit to add: The statement as quoted at http://boingboing.net/2013/07/01/snowden-asks-russia-for-asylum.html http://boingboing.net/2013/07/01/snowden-asks-russia-for-asy... has the original version with "have" still in there. Here's a screenshot from twitter of the original - https://twitter.com/ClaraJeffery/status/351833289000112128 https://twitter.com/ClaraJeffery/status/351833289000112128
- tlrobinson 13y agoWell that's interesting...
- mpyne 13y agoSo it was changed, and not flagged as being changed. Interesting...
- 13y ago
- PhearTheCeal 13y agoMaybe we should ask for a photo of him holding a hand-written time-stamp.
- josscrowcroft 13y agoI've never heard anybody in the UK say "have" when referring to USA. Looks like a standard typo.
- krapp 13y agoI was actually just about to ask... how do we know Snowden had anything to do with this statement at all? It's not as if he's likely to publically challenge Wikileaks if they decide to make a sockpuppet out of him for their own ends.