8 ms·

Why didn't they release these documents a long time ago when everyone was racing to judgement that Google, Yahoo, et al were secretly in cahoots with the NSA he

Why didn't they release these documents a long time ago when everyone was racing to judgement that Google, Yahoo, et al were secretly in cahoots with the NSA helping to build drag-net surveillance extranet stuff for them? These are very important revelations! I mean, when Greenwald/Snowden/Guardian released the original PRISM accusations, these slides would have provided a much much more important set of evidence, instead of months of speculation and parsing of meanings of "backdoor", "frontdoor", "side door", in the corporate communications of the tech companies who were struggling to say "we've never heard of PRISM, da fuq is this shit?" Is the slow dripping out of these slides because they are trying to be responsible in not releasing stuff that is too damaging (e.g. not trying to be a Bradley Manning dump), or is it to preserve traffic by keeping the click-gravy-train going?

selmnoo 13y ago
Probably because there was just too much information to make sense of all at once. So they just let out little at a time of what they understood to be verifiably and properly true. Of course the cynical view that they held on to it to make some ad-money is not altogether wrong either, just unlikely to be accurate.
gfodor 13y ago
We're still talking about Snowden. This is the reason.
- hga 13y ago
  At this point I suspect Snowden has become a bit of an Emmanuel Goldstein. Any leakers who want to get their stuff out with some modicum of safety just need to get it to one of the usual suspects in the media, if the latter are willing to play the game (this does violate normal journalist ethics, then again this is not a normal situation). The leak can then be ascribed to "Snowden".
  - AYBABTME 13y ago
    this is brilliant.
  - erichocean 13y ago
    For those wondering who "Emmanuel Goldstein" is, he's a character in the novel 1984.
    - AYBABTME 13y ago
      And in this novel, Emmanuel Goldstein represents an absolute enemy of the state that doesn't actually live, but only exist to be blamed of all that is bad.
jakewalker 13y ago
Who knows how many thousands of pages they need to read and understand? Also, don't underestimate the difficulty of a reporter understanding these thousands of documents sufficiently to recognize when one is really important.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  If they don't understand what's going on, wouldn't that argue in favor of doing more detailed research and analysis before writing claims? The original assumptions/claims in the Guardian story on PRISM are now shown to be false. This caused a lot of negative blowback on the companies involved. Don't we expect our investigative journalists, to well, actually investigate things, instead of rushing to print?
  - ochs 13y ago
    How where they false? The PRISM program is real. There is a way for the NSA to automatically access Google's databases, with Google's knowledge under secret blanket (not case-by-case) court orders. They where clearly lying when they denied any "direct access".
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      No they weren't lying, as there is no evidence that Google had knowledge that the NSA had been tapping their dark fiber. What everyone assumed after the Guardian story was that Google had built some kind of firehose feed or portal for the NSA to just login and get whatever they wanted, never in any of those stories did they say the NSA was taking data against Google's knowledge or will. For example, there was a famous slide showing when each company "joined the PRISM program", but the actual slide merely says "Dates when PRISM collection started for each provider". The reporter inserted the terminology "joined" which implies a partnership that didn't exist. What these revelations reveal is that the NSA supplemented the data they got on a case-by-case basis through NSLs by outside-the-datacenter fiber taps of traffic, as well as upstream unencrypted HTTP and SMTP/IMAP traffic.
elwin 13y ago
> is it to preserve traffic by keeping the click-gravy-train going? If that were their intent, I would expect them to release slightly faster, at least one significant document per week.
w_t_payne 13y ago
click-gravy-train; almost certainly.
iaskwhy 13y ago
People are probably missing the idea. In the past, like with the WikiLeaks cables, they released all at once and it didn't have that much effect, after one week most countries were already on some other matter. The slow dripping allows this case to continue being discussed after six months. Can't remember this ever happening before with any other subject like the fake article on Saddam's WMD, the CIA flights and torture cases, etc. Given what we currently know about the human mind and how people react to news I expect this to be the future way of releasing highly critical information.
hga 13y ago
It sure looks like it could be strategic. The "taps foreign heads of state" et. al. really due blood, e.g. DiFi shocked the intelligence community for doing a public about face. Presumably because monitoring us proles is just fine with her, but other members of the international elite? That's beyond the pale, and I don't assume her call for a "top-to-bottom review of U.S. spy programs" is to do anything more than find out other such elite embarrassments. BUT, to the extent the above is not true, or is making this Total Surveillance State toxic, now's a good time to drop this tidbit.
mef 13y ago
By releasing the documents in this order, they give government officials just enough rope to hang themselves by prompting them to defend themselves by making statements about what they do and do not do, and then releasing new documents directly contradicting those statements. In a weird way, it actually motivates them to tell the "whole truth" because they don't know what documents will be released later so they don't know what lies to tell.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Yea, but as collateral damage, the rope hung the tech companies and damaged their brands by who knows how much.
  - selmnoo 13y ago
    They deserve to have their brands damaged. They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      Do you also blame your car company when a thief breaks into it? Do you never trust banks again if a bank robbery happens? They were working on it, but full-on encryption everywhere within your internal network is expensive, and one tends to not imagine that buried dark fiber is dug up and tapped by one's own government. Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of one of their network engineers and forced him to turn over some keys. Again, whose brand deserves to be damaged here, the company, or the immoral nation state with vast military industrial resources at its disposal? Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
      - selmnoo 13y ago
        What an unbelievably stupid line of thinking. Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here. Google is a tech company, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that they get the big parts of their security model right. Not encrypting data going through leased (or even their own) fibers? Big, big mistake. NSA and US government aside, Google dropped the ball big-time here. > Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks. Funny you say that. Because I was pretty much a Google fanboy before all of this happened (oh, and their recent changes wrt privacy policies). I am very angry at the government, but that is a separate issue.
orblivion 13y ago
Here's an argument: assuming the worst suspicions, Google and the others are complicit in PRISM, so they deserve our scrutiny here. If this one were dumped at the same time, since Google was blindsided by this, people might forget to scrutinize Google for a while.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  There's a difference between assuming the worst, and having evidence on your desk that refutes your own assumptions.
  - Oculus 13y ago
    Don't forget the difference between possessing mountains of documents and having the right documents on your desk.
  - Bluestrike2 13y ago
    In what way were previous disclosures refuted? PRISM and MUSCULAR aren't mutually exclusive.
brown9-2 13y ago
Imagine you come into possession of tens of thousands of documents covering material and terminology that you barely understand. That is going to take months to work through, even before you consider that you would want to keep access to the documents/information limited to a small group of people that could help you work through it.
shazow 13y ago
I have no internal knowledge about this, but influenced by this Twitter thread[0] I would speculate that Greenwald and friends gave Google (and whoever else) advance notice and the opportunity to react to it before publishing. Responsible disclosure, and all that (not that it really applies in this case, but still). [0] https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/395636984313413632 https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/395636984313413632

selmnoo 13y ago

Probably because there was just too much information to make sense of all at once. So they just let out little at a time of what they understood to be verifiably and properly true. Of course the cynical view that they held on to it to make some ad-money is not altogether wrong either, just unlikely to be accurate.

gfodor 13y ago

We're still talking about Snowden. This is the reason.

hga 13y ago
At this point I suspect Snowden has become a bit of an Emmanuel Goldstein. Any leakers who want to get their stuff out with some modicum of safety just need to get it to one of the usual suspects in the media, if the latter are willing to play the game (this does violate normal journalist ethics, then again this is not a normal situation). The leak can then be ascribed to "Snowden".
- AYBABTME 13y ago
  this is brilliant.
- erichocean 13y ago
  For those wondering who "Emmanuel Goldstein" is, he's a character in the novel 1984.
  - AYBABTME 13y ago
    And in this novel, Emmanuel Goldstein represents an absolute enemy of the state that doesn't actually live, but only exist to be blamed of all that is bad.

jakewalker 13y ago

Who knows how many thousands of pages they need to read and understand? Also, don't underestimate the difficulty of a reporter understanding these thousands of documents sufficiently to recognize when one is really important.

cromwellian 13y ago
If they don't understand what's going on, wouldn't that argue in favor of doing more detailed research and analysis before writing claims? The original assumptions/claims in the Guardian story on PRISM are now shown to be false. This caused a lot of negative blowback on the companies involved. Don't we expect our investigative journalists, to well, actually investigate things, instead of rushing to print?
- ochs 13y ago
  How where they false? The PRISM program is real. There is a way for the NSA to automatically access Google's databases, with Google's knowledge under secret blanket (not case-by-case) court orders. They where clearly lying when they denied any "direct access".
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    No they weren't lying, as there is no evidence that Google had knowledge that the NSA had been tapping their dark fiber. What everyone assumed after the Guardian story was that Google had built some kind of firehose feed or portal for the NSA to just login and get whatever they wanted, never in any of those stories did they say the NSA was taking data against Google's knowledge or will. For example, there was a famous slide showing when each company "joined the PRISM program", but the actual slide merely says "Dates when PRISM collection started for each provider". The reporter inserted the terminology "joined" which implies a partnership that didn't exist. What these revelations reveal is that the NSA supplemented the data they got on a case-by-case basis through NSLs by outside-the-datacenter fiber taps of traffic, as well as upstream unencrypted HTTP and SMTP/IMAP traffic.

elwin 13y ago

> is it to preserve traffic by keeping the click-gravy-train going? If that were their intent, I would expect them to release slightly faster, at least one significant document per week.

w_t_payne 13y ago

click-gravy-train; almost certainly.

iaskwhy 13y ago

People are probably missing the idea. In the past, like with the WikiLeaks cables, they released all at once and it didn't have that much effect, after one week most countries were already on some other matter. The slow dripping allows this case to continue being discussed after six months. Can't remember this ever happening before with any other subject like the fake article on Saddam's WMD, the CIA flights and torture cases, etc. Given what we currently know about the human mind and how people react to news I expect this to be the future way of releasing highly critical information.

hga 13y ago

It sure looks like it could be strategic. The "taps foreign heads of state" et. al. really due blood, e.g. DiFi shocked the intelligence community for doing a public about face. Presumably because monitoring us proles is just fine with her, but other members of the international elite? That's beyond the pale, and I don't assume her call for a "top-to-bottom review of U.S. spy programs" is to do anything more than find out other such elite embarrassments. BUT, to the extent the above is not true, or is making this Total Surveillance State toxic, now's a good time to drop this tidbit.

mef 13y ago

By releasing the documents in this order, they give government officials just enough rope to hang themselves by prompting them to defend themselves by making statements about what they do and do not do, and then releasing new documents directly contradicting those statements. In a weird way, it actually motivates them to tell the "whole truth" because they don't know what documents will be released later so they don't know what lies to tell.

cromwellian 13y ago
Yea, but as collateral damage, the rope hung the tech companies and damaged their brands by who knows how much.
- selmnoo 13y ago
  They deserve to have their brands damaged. They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    Do you also blame your car company when a thief breaks into it? Do you never trust banks again if a bank robbery happens? They were working on it, but full-on encryption everywhere within your internal network is expensive, and one tends to not imagine that buried dark fiber is dug up and tapped by one's own government. Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of one of their network engineers and forced him to turn over some keys. Again, whose brand deserves to be damaged here, the company, or the immoral nation state with vast military industrial resources at its disposal? Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
    - selmnoo 13y ago
      What an unbelievably stupid line of thinking. Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here. Google is a tech company, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that they get the big parts of their security model right. Not encrypting data going through leased (or even their own) fibers? Big, big mistake. NSA and US government aside, Google dropped the ball big-time here. > Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks. Funny you say that. Because I was pretty much a Google fanboy before all of this happened (oh, and their recent changes wrt privacy policies). I am very angry at the government, but that is a separate issue.

orblivion 13y ago

Here's an argument: assuming the worst suspicions, Google and the others are complicit in PRISM, so they deserve our scrutiny here. If this one were dumped at the same time, since Google was blindsided by this, people might forget to scrutinize Google for a while.

cromwellian 13y ago
There's a difference between assuming the worst, and having evidence on your desk that refutes your own assumptions.
- Oculus 13y ago
  Don't forget the difference between possessing mountains of documents and having the right documents on your desk.
- Bluestrike2 13y ago
  In what way were previous disclosures refuted? PRISM and MUSCULAR aren't mutually exclusive.

brown9-2 13y ago

Imagine you come into possession of tens of thousands of documents covering material and terminology that you barely understand. That is going to take months to work through, even before you consider that you would want to keep access to the documents/information limited to a small group of people that could help you work through it.

shazow 13y ago

I have no internal knowledge about this, but influenced by this Twitter thread[0] I would speculate that Greenwald and friends gave Google (and whoever else) advance notice and the opportunity to react to it before publishing. Responsible disclosure, and all that (not that it really applies in this case, but still). [0] https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/395636984313413632 https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/395636984313413632