53 ms·
Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey
- vijayboyapati 13y agoThis young man is an American hero
- pvnick 13y ago"Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China). You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture." I am very interested to hear some of his anti-intelligence efforts. I assume he's either talking about the Defense Intelligence Agency [1], or that this is a typo for CIA? Also, everytime I hear from Snowden, I can't help but "fist pump" and cheer for the guy. [1] http://www.dia.mil/ http://www.dia.mil/
- eli 13y agoI think he comes off as naive and more than a little pompous, but I guess it's in the eye of the beholder. Either way, if he really wants the focus back on the documents, he should probably write fewer letters about his beliefs, his security, and his personal situation.
- rocky1138 13y agoActually, how he is treated in this situation is of direct importance to the matter at hand. If the USA does not follow the rule of law regarding his case, it only fans the flames.
- inzax 13y agoI totally disagree on slowing down his writing. think about the federalist papers for a second. Someone needed to wrote them to convince a nation about our beloved constitution. Since all eyes are on Snowden, he has the best ability to sway many minds about what he believes and what I believe to be right.
- bobo1357 13y agoShouldn't the interpretation of our Constitution be left to the Supreme Court? I mean, the Constitution explicitly grants the Court those powers.
- inzax 13y agoDo you really trust the supreme court these days? 7 men and women designed to decide the fate of our country? also, the supreme court has no say in this. Its the fisa court....
- bobo1357 13y agoIf we're not following the rule of law, what laws should we follow? Who should interpret our laws? The Supreme Court has the power to issue an order called a “writ of mandamus” to deal with lower courts that overstep their legal authority.
- capnrefsmmat 13y agoThe most interesting part of this is the following paragraphs from Snowden: Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China). You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture. While he may be overconfident (it's easy to say you can resist torture, at least until you're tortured), this shoots down the unverified claims that the Chinese or Russians could easily already have copies of his data. Not unless he's willingly handed it over or he's much less competent than his data theft would suggest.
- ianterrell 13y ago> it's easy to say you can resist torture, at least until you're tortured I interpret this as it's protected in such a way that any information he can give is not sufficient to access the documents.
- mrt0mat0 13y agoi interpreted it the same way. Saying, even if he was tortured, he wouldn't be able to give up access to documentation. I think it's funny that we don't even second thought about the concept of torture. It has become too common.
- koa 13y agoI read this to mean that he has taken steps to limit the specific data he knows. So even if he has or had access to documents, he hasnt tried to memorize anything that could be damaging. Meaning they cant force him to reveal information he "doesn't know"
- laxk 13y agoCan we assume that if he is the part of the secret key then if somebody does something bad with him we will lose all the secret docs?
- mrt0mat0 13y agoEdward Snowden makes me proud of my country, and the people that fight for it. But he also makes me ashamed of my Government and the people that hide behind it.
- inzax 13y agoThis.
- staunch 13y agoPlease no This'ing on HN. Write something or just upvote.
- gcb0 13y agoThis raise an interesting point. The guy is risking his life, and no one even wonder who is the branch/person in government that should be responsible for what he says is going on. Who should be taken accountable for this? why people is not on the streets? ...well people are on the streets, but for the wrong reasons. media is transforming a, sadly, commonplace killing in hate/race crime. Any conspiracy theorist already linked the time they scheduled the trial with the snowden thing? didn't another army whistle blower was on trial on the very same day as the zimmerman one?
- cheald 13y ago> Who should be taken accountable for this? Anyone and everyone with knowledge of it who didn't do what he did, IMO. I realize that's a wide net.
- btbuildem 13y ago"identify, remove from office and bring to justice those officials who have abused power" This, here, is the crux of the matter. Drag into the light the parasites that consume the living flesh of this society.
- igravious 13y ago"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." Could this be a website/forum? Wherein we compile the evidence on the people in abstentia because the regular system aint doing it. I'm not saying mob rule. I'm just kind of saying let's identify the really bad apples and kind of do what Groklaw did for IBM v. SCO - except this would be global citizen's privacy expectations versus spooks. Edit: or this: http://www.securityweek.com/19-groups-sue-nsa-over-data-collection http://www.securityweek.com/19-groups-sue-nsa-over-data-coll... (But it needs to be global - as in, massive and mass surveillance by any state or non-state actor though now feasibly possibly must be well outside international norms and laws)
- SolarNet 13y agoI hope people, and indeed the senator, realizes that the people he is talking about are senators and congressmen, not the president who did his duty and executed the 20 million dollar PRISM budget forced on him by congress.
- twoodfin 13y agoHuh? There's no law or budget that requires PRISM. Any of these programs could be shut down with one phone call from the Oval Office, and Congress couldn't say boo. That's sort of the reason they're Constitutional in the first place: The executive has broad national security powers.
- SolarNet 13y agoNot since nixon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoundment_Control_Act_of_1974#Impoundment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoun... Also, he must execute the law faithfully, if the Congress gives him the power to use secret courts to wire-tap people he is expected to use it to it's fullest extent, to do otherwise would be illegal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Clause_5:_Caring_for_the_faithful_execution_of_the_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_State... PRISM is the president faithfully executing the laws set by congress, between the 8 billion dollar NSA budget and the Patriot Act, they are responsible.
- Osmium 13y agoCompletely off-topic, but oh-my-god if the Guardian mobile website doesn't look so much better on a desktop browser than their non-mobile website... I thought they'd had a redesign for a moment.
- marshray 13y agoWeb site design is always on topic on HN. You are safe here.
- dmiladinov 13y agoThis! A thousand times, this!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sbjustin 13y agoWow. Yes! I will be adding the m from here on out.
- Demiurge 13y agoWow, it's night and day. One is a clean usable site where I can clearly read a column of text for which this page exists. The other is a junked up ad/link/box mess and I have no idea what I'm looking at.
- untog 13y agoAnd one makes the Guardian considerably more money than the other. It's not a mystery.
- scrumper 13y agoWhile we're off topic, let's run with that thought. What does that mean for the mobile web when the majority of their page views come from mobile? HTML ad overlays on the m site? The same descent into usability hell that the desktop has suffered, only without the possibility of ad-blocking plugins for mobile browsers? Or maybe it's 10 views a month, then you must use their dedicated app? Perhaps it'll be subscription only, through walled gardens like Newsstand? (Maybe that's even a good thing: we'll be paying directly for the content, instead of having our eyeballs sold to advertisers). People on this site are thinking about this stuff. Working on it. Some for evil, some for good. I'm curious what this'll all look like in a few years.
- 2na 13y agoThis is like a dialogue from a spy movie, the good guy is on the run trying to save his country, while this very nation is hunting him down. I think Wesley Snipes plays the good guy! :-) Jokes aside I salute Snowden, he's doing a very very brave thing. We should come up with a hacker salute for his cause.
- logicallee 13y agoActually it's a bit over the top for a Senator to write a man on the run. Luckily, unlike fiction, this stuff doesn't have to be believable!
- rodolphoarruda 13y ago"...one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China)." Interesting. Is it from a technical/IT standpoint or more of a "social engineering" one? Or a bit of both? That's a genuine question because I really don't know how feasible this type of work could be when done from within the US.
- mtrimpe 13y agoThere are ways to store a password in your subconscious [1] but they are relatively gimmicky. The more logical interpretation is that he doesn't have the decryption keys and has given partial keys to multiple people, thus making his secrets safe from torturing just him.
- brown9-2 13y agoAs Joshua Foust points out, Snowden gave some info to Der Spiegel that they chose not to publish which seems to conflict with some of the "no harm" statements here: SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing the related internal code words. However, this does not apply to information about the general surveillance of communications. They don’t endanger any human lives — they simply describe a system whose dimensions go beyond the imaginable. http://joshuafoust.com/dangerously-naive-or-a-liar/ http://joshuafoust.com/dangerously-naive-or-a-liar/ The Guardian and Washington Post also decided to not publish the majority of the Prism slides for similar national security reasons, even though Snowden's initial push was to have them all published (and almost immediately after receipt by the Guardian and WaPo).
- DigitalJack 13y agoHe has asked the journalists to be rigorous in weighing the decision to publish what he gives them. I don't have a citation but it's in some of greenwalds recent posts.
- brown9-2 13y agoThat would seem to conflict with his statement that I have not provided any information that would harm our people - agent or not - and I have no intention to do so. If Der Spiegel (or the Guardian, or the Washington Post) was less rigorous, then information could have been published that harmed "our people" or intelligence agents. He is positioning himself as having carefully reviewed everything he has given out, but if he has given info to some media sources who themselves have been "rigorous" enough and realized the danger of publishing some of it, then the statement in this letter cannot also be true.
- pbreit 13y agoCan anyone provide some concrete examples about how the NSA, using the tools that many of us would rather they not, "keeps us safe"? Are there specific incidents that have been avoided (that wouldn't have otherwise)? Is it just that we are generally "safer"?
- DanBC 13y ago> Can anyone provide some concrete examples about how the NSA In the UK GCHQ provides intel to the Ministry of Defence. MoD then uses that intel. The intel is secret, and thus we don't know if it has helped or not. The intel is also misused (see, for example, the "sexing up" of documents) or ignored. But in general you don't know what the spies are doing. It's the nature of spies. You could ask your representative politician to ask some of the oversight politicians, but the answer you'll get back is going to be on the same lines. "The provide valuable intel, and we use it, and we are safer because of it".
- pbreit 13y agoI just wonder how true that is or is it mostly just legacy behavior (we're a country so we gotta have spies, right?).
- diminoten 13y agoEveryone's focusing on the fact that Snowden claims he is torture-proof, when in reality he never said that. He said that he "cannot" be tortured into revealing information he is protecting. For example, Glenn Greenwald may hold a private key which must be used IN CONJUNCTION with Snowden's key to decrypt the information Snowden has. It's possible/probable that Snowden does not have access to the secrets he protects without Greenwald's key, as well as possibly many other keys. He may have a network of people he's made part of the group such that any two of them plus Snowden can decrypt the information, but Snowden himself can't without two keys plus his own, and he could make it such that his key is required in the group of three to decrypt. Hopefully someone else here can provide the name for this kind of encryption (something like n-key encryption, it's escaping me currently) and a link to how it works, but this is all very sound and entirely doable from a math standpoint. So no, Snowden himself isn't torture proof, but his security is, if he's doing something like what I outlined above. They'd have to go after Glenn Greenwald too, or whoever else is involved, before gaining access to the intel. Edit: This link[3] might explain it slightly better, but I once read a great primer on the topic, filled with examples and was pretty simple to understand (the layman could grasp at least the concept). I'll add more links as I find more info. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation [2] http://www.iacr.org/archive/eurocrypt2001/20450279.pdf http://www.iacr.org/archive/eurocrypt2001/20450279.pdf [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem [4] http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Studies/T-79.159/2004/slides/L9.pdf http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Studies/T-79.159/2004/slides/L9.pdf [5] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/CS5430/2013sp/L.SecretSharing.html https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/CS5430/2013sp/L.SecretSha... (thanks ##crypto for the help!)
- tokenadult 13y agoIt's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and a lot of callow bravado in much of what he is saying. I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence. Some aspects of Snowden's story do NOT look like a thoughtful plan to defend freedom and fair play around the world, but rather a haphazard rash move by Snowden to see what he can get away with. The high degree of cooperation many countries appear to be giving the United States so far in efforts to have Snowden return to the United States for legal proceedings suggests that quite a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose than in his standing trial to weigh his claims against United States law. P.S. Remember, I was one of the rather few HN members to go out in public to protest the NSA on Restore the Fourth evening here in the United States. I can be appalled by some of what I read about the NSA without agreeing that Snowden is taking the best approach to doing something about that.
- pvnick 13y agoI have nothing to add, just wanted to thank you for joining in on the Restore the Fourth protests. We all had a lot of fun that day!
- stephengillie 13y agoI wish Seattle's Restore the 4th rally had: 1. Been on 7/4 instead of 7/6 2. Not held at (confined to) Westlake Park, which has ultra-liberal activist hippies and homeless protesting every day.
- BWStearns 13y ago" I can be appalled by some of what I read about the NSA without agreeing that Snowden is taking the best approach to doing something about that" This. Most of the people I have discussed this issue with have failed to separate the data that was revealed with the manner in which it was. Thank you for doing so.
- grey-area 13y agoWhat I find interesting here is that a former Senator is commending a dissident from the United States and wishing him good luck in evading the government and seeking asylum from the US. Lots of respect for Senator Gordon Humphrey for speaking out with what will be a very unpopular opinion in Washington. I'd like to hear the same from UK politicians past or present on Tempora, but have heard nothing of consequence from any of them.
- scorpionian 13y agoI thought he said in the conference with WikiLeake staffer that he has shared everything he knows. Now in the email he is talking about protecting more information. Now I am confuse.
- antocv 13y agoI will just leave this here as an encouragement for anyone to write to their representatives, media, journalists and mention this in debates about this issue. > remove from office and bring to justice those officials who have abused power, seriously and repeatedly violating the Constitution of the United States and the rights of millions of unsuspecting citizens. This is what we should be focusing on and now Snowdens character, his this and that, I and many with me are tired of celebrity-culture and gossip around him. Lets talk about the US officials, NSA higher-ups who must be removed from office, put on trail or investigation and lets get those companies Google, Facebook accountable. Anyone know who the NSA high-ups are, names? We know companies CEOs, lets put them under the spotlight instead of Snowden, what did they know? When, how come they did not know, where they coerced or fooled into it? Do they deserve to continue being CEO when such grave mistakes happen under their watch?
- outworlder 13y ago> " While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China)." Mr. Snowden has come a long way from "just a sysadmin". It appears people were trying to downplay the role he had in his line of duty.
- mathattack 13y agoI just wish this wouldn't be such a politically partisan issue.
- MikeCapone 13y agoSometimes I wonder if the intelligence community doesn't have people who's sole job is to write comments on websites/forums to help shape public opinion. It would be something fairly trivial for them to do and help further their interests...
- ianterrell 13y agoWell, the Air Force has already been caught doing it. Why wouldn't everyone else? http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ordered-software-to-manage-army-of-fake-virtual-people/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ord...
- e3pi 13y ago>I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence. >... an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence, Not. "Normally ciphertexts decrypt to a single plaintext and hence once decrypted, the encryption user cannot claim that he encrypted a different message. Deniable encryption allows its users to decrypt the ciphertext to produce a different (innocuous but plausible) plaintext(s) and insist that it is what they encrypted. The holder of the ciphertext will not have the means to differentiate between the true plaintext, and the bogus-claim plaintext(s)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption with: "Secret sharing (also called secret splitting) refers to methods for distributing a secret amongst a group of participants, each of whom is allocated a share of the secret. The secret can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number, of possibly different types, of shares are combined together; individual shares are of no use on their own." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing Let the shared secret be deniable-crypto plaintexts. Threshold T sharers may release plaintext_1 while ignorant of a different sharer subset intersection may release a different plaintext_n, benign or otherwise, for example. At another level of deniability, Snowden may also not even know the current identities or nos of secret sharers participating.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago"Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect." I currently suspect this to be false or a straight up lie: ================= http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-s... "Snowden, a former systems administrator for the National Security Agency in Hawaii, took thousands of documents from the agency’s networks before fleeing to Hong Kong in late May, where he passed them to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. The journalists have handled them with great caution. A story in the German publication Der Spiegal, co-bylined by Poitras, claims the documents include information “that could endanger the lives of NSA workers,” and an Associated Press interview with Greenwald this last weekend asserts that they include blueprints for the NSA’s surveillance systems that “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.” But Snowden also reportedly passed encrypted copies of his cache to a number of third parties who have a non-journalistic mission: If Snowden should suffer a mysterious, fatal accident, these parties will find themselves in possession of the decryption key, and they can publish the documents to the world." ================= From the sound of it, you can compromise him by expedient of killing him.