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Britain Detains the Partner of a Reporter Tied to Leaks
- fiatmoney 13y agoI assume they were encrypted. All the same, it seems like it would've been far easier & less risky to mail them. Postal service is pretty near anonymous & tamper-evident with a minimum of effort.
- alan_cx 13y agoIt says encrypted thumb drives.
- srhngpr 13y agoOr send it with someone who is NOT the partner of the journalist who's been credited with the Snowden leaks.
- fixxer 13y agoI'm very confused: they're already encrypted... why not email?
- burke 13y agoAs a hypothetical, imagine the NSA has unlimited ability to spy on the entire internet, and has cracked every crypto algorithm known to man, and that these documents shouldn't be known to the NSA. Sneakernet becomes the only viable option. I'm not saying this is the case, but some less drastic version of it may be a partial reason.
- joe_the_user 13y agoIt is somewhat hard to imagine the documents of people in the lime light having any chance of remaining secure under those circumstances. Also, I'd imagine that if the NSA could just decrypt anything, they would have quietly secured the materials, copied the data and returned the devices in as unobtrusive manner as possible. Seizing and keeping the materials seems more like an effort to keep Greenwald from having the documents.
- fixxer 13y agoThen why not stop the source? Seems like petty bullshit to me; the work of a bureaucrat.
- joe_the_user 13y agoIt could be as simple as the documents being too large.
- Nrsolis 13y agoWould you insert a USB drive into your "secure" non-Internet connected machine if it came via the mail? I wouldn't. Part of the security is trusting the chain-of-possession. Once you no longer have that, you have lost the trust.
- tlrobinson 13y agoWhat are you running, Windows XP? If you're paranoid, use a "burner" computer to copy the file to your "secure" machine, then verify a signature and decrypt. A Raspberry Pi would probably be suitable.
- Nrsolis 13y agoUh huh. You gonna trust that setup with your life? Why not just continue to trust the one person you're SURE can tip you to compromise? If Miranda ever gets his laptop/phone/drives back, they're as good as useless. Straight to the trash heap.
- malandrew 13y agoA micro-sim card is extremely easy to hide somewhere and you can guarantee some chain of possession by wrapping the card in some way that would indicate tampering. On top of that, you don't need to send things from person of interest A to person of interest B. Instead person of interest A can mail the tamper proof sim to non-person of interest C who is friends with person of interest B. In addition, it can be mailed with the return address and name of trust friend of person A that is not a person of interest him or herself. The chances of such a package being intercepted is slim to none.
- Nrsolis 13y agoUh, if you KNOW you're on their radar, you can't trust the mail. And you're mailing a letter which involves a whole lot of people carrying it and handling it. You've got a whole alphabet of persons. Remember that this is a state level adversary. You're not going to get one past them. They know ALL the tricks. ALL of them. Please don't talk tradecraft to me. You are doing it way wrong. There is a way to use the mail, but not the way you are describing it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ninjin 13y agoThis is the headline that I am getting, "Britain Detains the Partner of a Reporter Tied to Leaks", and I can't say that I can see any "suggestive" wording. Edit: Since the parent was deleted (sigh), it essentially called the New York Times a source of propaganda and stated that the article headline suggested that the US was somehow involved in the detention. I failed to see this, thus my response. Also, about deleting your own statements. Do think before you type and quite frankly, show some good character and have the balls to comment further below and retract your statements when you are proven wrong.
- ninjin 13y agoI am not sure how often Greenwald himself and the likes of the Wikileaks team travel. But if this is the first time any of them is grabbed and have data taken from them under this given law. Then I think the most interesting question will be how did the authorities know that they should grab Miranda in particular and on this particular day?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoPoitras in particular has complained about border searches of her person and her belongings, well prior to the Snowden leaks.
- joe_the_user 13y agoWell, One assumes that the parties involved would always encrypt their documents. Quite possibly the aim was not so much to gain access to the documents but to keep Greenwald from having access. Anyway, regardless of other motives, this denial would be effective harassment on top of the harassment of seizing Greenwald's partner. It's the old "you're under suspicion, right, so we had to break every thing you in your apartment, right, looking for hidden documents, see. We'll tell you in court if there's something we can use, see" approach.
- alan_cx 13y agoHas the Guardian reported that Snowden docs were taken?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kaonashi 13y agoWas the article changed, because it doesn't seem to mention anything about transporting documents.
- pain_perdu 13y agoIt does mention exactly this. "Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said."
- panarky 13y agoIs it just a coincidence that Miranda transported documents the same week that Wikileaks released 400GB of new insurance files? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6228750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6228750