6 ms·
> 1) A test to see how the journalist will react and to > flush out more information. I.e. force him to disclose > more information so they know what he has. I
by vabmit 13y ago
> 1) A test to see how the journalist will react and to
> flush out more information. I.e. force him to disclose
> more information so they know what he has.
I think they already know through a post event review of MicroSoft's built in auditing logs. My understanding is that Snowden was a low level Windows admin that copied stuff that was either 1) in transit through a Microsoft Sharepoint server 2) anything he could find by roaming around the intranet. The NSA disclosed that he started grabbing documents when he was working as a contractor under Dell. They said he was aggressively exploring the limits of his network access and announced that 1) documents on their intranet would from now on be encrypted 2) that they would drastically reduce the number of system and network (as in Microsoft misuse of the term) administrators.
Plus, Wikileaks leaked an AES256 encrypted insurance file that presumably is everything that have from Snowden. Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed). So, we know that they probably used openssl for the encryption and that the STK string is probably a sentence, or a few sentences, from a seminal published book about liberty/privacy. The NSA has probably already cracked the insurance file key. So, if they don't have the Manning portfolio from audit logs, they probably have it from Wikileaks.
There's an ex-NSA NWC guy that is putting out a lot of excellent information on this whole thing: 20committee
https://twitter.com/20committee https://twitter.com/20committee
- jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago> 20committee Wow that guy is a dick. Tons of FUD and highly partisan cheerleading, and some pretty sad troll responses (though I'm sure he gets a lot of troll attention, which does wear down a person's reasonableness). I can understand that someone may have a different view on the balance between liberty and security, but his view is hyperbolic, not informative.
- rgrieselhuber 13y agoHe is a dick but he unfortunately has some ammo in the sense that the Guardian appears to have financed the trip. That still doesn't make what happened acceptable but it will assuage those who lean towards sympathizing with the NSA. The fact that Greenwald wasn't more forthcoming about this makes it even more difficult.
- jacquesm 13y agoI don't see how that makes any difference, in fact if it makes a difference it makes it worse. Detaining partner of journalist -> bad. Detaining newspaper employee, possibly journalist -> very bad. Once journalists will feel that they are in danger of no longer being free to do their reporting this story will get a lot more attention than it does at the moment.
- dsuth 13y agoAgree with this. There's a large measure of difference between detaining a private citizen (bad), and detaining somebody under the employ of a journalist organisation (far, far worse). One is harrassment, the other is political intimidation in an attempt to censor.
- Amadou 13y agoIn this day and age of blogging, everyone can be a journalist. Interesting fact - when the US constitution was written, the phrase "free exercise ... of the press" did not refer to news reporting, it referred to literal printing presses. Over time the phrase "freedom of the press" has been reduced to nominal news reporting agencies. But at the time it basically meant anyone mass-producing text.
- subsection1h 13y agohttps://twitter.com/20committee John Schindler is a homophobic and transphobic scumbag who recently joked about Greenwald being trans like Manning.
- rdtsc 13y ago> Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed) I still have some hope that they are at least capable of learning from their mistakes.
- foobarqux 13y ago> Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed). How did the Manning events show that?
- dthunt 13y agoAs I recall it, one of their partner newspapers deliberately misunderstood how encryption worked, leaked their special passcode to one of the document archives, and then pointed at Wikileaks for being shitty after themselves handing the keys to the unredacted documents to the world.
- doktrin 13y ago> https://twitter.com/20committee https://twitter.com/20committee John Schindler is only a source of "excellent information" on this case in the sense that Ann Coulter provides "excellent political commentary". What a total joke.