6 ms·

Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'

60 points by passepartout 13y ago

serf 13y ago
The paragraph began to self-delete.. BOFH excuse #114: electro-magnetic pulses from French above ground nuke testing. at least it makes as much sense as the 'Russian hacker' assertion they made.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mixmax 13y ago
The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping. To me and Occams razor that sounds more like a stuck key than the NSA openly deleting stuff in a manuscript while you're writing it.
- mpyne 13y ago
  More to the point, "keyboards flashing and beeping" is pretty much the polar opposite of what a professional organization like NSA would do. They would shred/unlink the file after its closed so that you'd never be the wiser. But on the other hand, they wouldn't be in this guy's computer anyways because even if NSA were out to oppress him, he's pretty far back at the end of the ol' pri. queue. "Oh, no, not a manuscript, OMG, get Gen. Alexander on the STE-III!"
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    It actually sounds a lot more like a CIA intimidation tactic.
    - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
      If this were an operation, it'd be more likely to be GCHQ. Keep in mind, GCHQ sent the NSA the Yahoo webcam photos, for use in XKEYSCORE. The two are close allies. The CIA on the other hand, competes with the NSA for resources and jurisdiction. Right now the NSA's budget dwarfs that of the CIA, since data collection and SIGINT have been prioritized over HUMINT. Technology advances and cost reductions might have encouraged this. What types of intelligence and which agencies will be more relevant in the 21st century? The Snowden revelations and ongoing saga will play a large part in affecting future views, and answers to that question. It might be more beneficial for the CIA to actually step back. Plus, a lot of people want to see mass surveillance fail. It's pretty obviously a threat to democracy waiting to happen, and most people in service are dedicating their life to protecting democracy.
      - vinceguidry 13y ago
        Except that the CIA does have an office in Rio, whose station chief is known for these kinds of tactics, as is written in the article. I think also you're overstating how much the CIA might be competing with the NSA. Sure, at the highest levels, this might be true, but in the trenches, operatives share everything. I doubt anyone in the CIA truly resents the NSA and they'd happily help each other out like this.
        ChrisAntaki 13y ago
        He experienced the deletions after returning to his home, in the UK. I certainly might be. It's interesting to consider though.
- ChrisAntaki 13y ago
  The NSA is tasked with collecting information. If there was an operation, as it was described, this would be a PSYOP. Also, while the NSA might help, it'd be another agency with more HUMINT and clandestine experience who designed and executed the operation.
- skwirl 13y ago
  To me it sounds like bullshit being invented by a reporter trying to spice up a story.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    It sounds so crazy, the guy has more to lose by printing it (and having people think he's a loon).
thaumaturgy 13y ago
This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum. 1. Keyboards don't beep. 2. There are lots of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my part), a glitchy keyboard controller -- we've seen all of these in our shop. 3. In Rio, "a tall American" immediately meets a fellow Westerner and "accosts" him -- by suggesting they go out and see the city? He's a spook because he dressed neatly and was in good shape? Hell, that makes me a spook too. 4. Choose one of the two following explanations for the iPhone behavior: one, a well-funded and resourceful state agency is hiring people to track a journalist writing a book about the biggest intelligence leak in recent history, and the people they're hiring are juvenile enough to use methods straight out of Hollywood to play a prank on their target's iPhone when he sends a text with possibly the most milquetoast insult about their methods in the history of ever; or, two, the iPhone crashed. (Your answer might be used to gauge your sanity.) 5. The hotel safe -- if it weren't for everything else he'd written, I might be willing to buy that this was a botched job. But in the context of the rest of the article, I think the more reasonable explanation is that it was a crappy safe, it never did work correctly, and he only noticed that part way through his stay in the room.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- poopsintub 13y ago
  Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys" notification popping up. Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone sit there and delete out the "bad" parts while they know the writer is actually working and typing in the document? This makes absolutely no sense. PR stunt imo.
  - Robelius 13y ago
fallinghawks 13y ago
What he doesn't say is that the keyboard stopped flashing and beeping after he threw a biscuit at his cat. I saw this a couple days ago. I thought it was rather silly.
vfclists 13y ago
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean 'they' are not out to get you!! If the events happened as described 'they' were trying to spook him or 'psych' him out.
vacri 13y ago
Why on earth would a malicious party manually delete characters while the author is watching? If you don't care about being observed - as the author suggests - then in order to destroy his work, you'd just delete the truecrypt partition.
- specialist 13y ago
  We used to do this for giggles. PC-Anywhere era.
superpatosainz 13y ago
This is exactly the time when you'd want to write about such a topic in pen and paper.
lupinglade 13y ago
Wow. Yeah, generally that's the US people's image of the US government in a nutshell. Conspiracy theories are getting old, old, old. Being overly suspicious is not productive in any way. Wake up and help your country be successful.
denova 13y ago
I completely understand all the criticism toward this piece, and I don't think I would ever publish anything like this without at least some hard evidence, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he were completely right about his assumptions. Thinking skeptically about everything is a good habit, but sometimes the consequence of thinking like an intelligent reasonable person is that you forget how bafflingly stupid the world can really be. Are all of the author's suspicions totally unfounded? Yeah, probably, because he has no good evidence to back them up. Do they lead to a narrative that is completely unreasonable and absurd? Absolutely. But it's also possible that the people who are spying on him are behaving in a way that is completely unreasonable and absurd, and are just competent enough to cover their tracks so a layperson won't have any evidence on them. I don't have a ton of confidence in what I'm saying right now, but uh... I just don't blame him too much, is all. I definitely wouldn't dismiss him as a bad journalist or anything.
LVB 13y ago
I smell NSA involvement. They've clearly hacked the site and posted this piece to make Luke Harding and The Guardian look ridiculous.
suprgeek 13y ago
Is it now a sign of times that where previously most ppl (including me) would have dismissed this piece as 1) Does not understand technology so is committing some basic error leading to this 2) Making this sh$t up 3) Has a prankster who is close by. Instead now I am almost betting that it was the NSA/GCHQ/Five Eyes/CIA who is behind these shenanigans? Thank you Edward Snowden (for the hundredth time) for giving us hard evidence of the illegal and ineffective behavior on the Govt's part. You have also (unfortunately) fundamentally raised the bar on tin-foil hat debunking.
Spockulus_Rift 13y ago
What a missed opportunity to not have asked the snooping deleter to write the forward for the book.
siegecraft 13y ago
Let's play "spot the spook" in this thread..
- artichokeheart 13y ago
  That's my favourite game to play on Hacker News. I wish there was a Hacker News Enhancement Suite so I could keep track of them.
atmosx 13y ago
The article is 99% full of BS. I believe that too, however it made an impact: didn't knew there was a book[1]. I will read it and post a review. The amazon reviews look promising... http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-ebook/dp/B00HU8Z3Z2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1393803014&sr=1-1&keywords=the+snowden+files http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-ebo...
dynjo 13y ago
So a 'professional journalist' with an iPhone didn't think to make a video of the self deleting, or take a photo of the tall American? I call BS.

60 points by passepartout 13y ago

serf 13y ago

The paragraph began to self-delete.. BOFH excuse #114: electro-magnetic pulses from French above ground nuke testing. at least it makes as much sense as the 'Russian hacker' assertion they made.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mixmax 13y ago

The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping. To me and Occams razor that sounds more like a stuck key than the NSA openly deleting stuff in a manuscript while you're writing it.

mpyne 13y ago
More to the point, "keyboards flashing and beeping" is pretty much the polar opposite of what a professional organization like NSA would do. They would shred/unlink the file after its closed so that you'd never be the wiser. But on the other hand, they wouldn't be in this guy's computer anyways because even if NSA were out to oppress him, he's pretty far back at the end of the ol' pri. queue. "Oh, no, not a manuscript, OMG, get Gen. Alexander on the STE-III!"
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  It actually sounds a lot more like a CIA intimidation tactic.
  - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
    If this were an operation, it'd be more likely to be GCHQ. Keep in mind, GCHQ sent the NSA the Yahoo webcam photos, for use in XKEYSCORE. The two are close allies. The CIA on the other hand, competes with the NSA for resources and jurisdiction. Right now the NSA's budget dwarfs that of the CIA, since data collection and SIGINT have been prioritized over HUMINT. Technology advances and cost reductions might have encouraged this. What types of intelligence and which agencies will be more relevant in the 21st century? The Snowden revelations and ongoing saga will play a large part in affecting future views, and answers to that question. It might be more beneficial for the CIA to actually step back. Plus, a lot of people want to see mass surveillance fail. It's pretty obviously a threat to democracy waiting to happen, and most people in service are dedicating their life to protecting democracy.
    - vinceguidry 13y ago
      Except that the CIA does have an office in Rio, whose station chief is known for these kinds of tactics, as is written in the article. I think also you're overstating how much the CIA might be competing with the NSA. Sure, at the highest levels, this might be true, but in the trenches, operatives share everything. I doubt anyone in the CIA truly resents the NSA and they'd happily help each other out like this.
      - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
        He experienced the deletions after returning to his home, in the UK. I certainly might be. It's interesting to consider though.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
The NSA is tasked with collecting information. If there was an operation, as it was described, this would be a PSYOP. Also, while the NSA might help, it'd be another agency with more HUMINT and clandestine experience who designed and executed the operation.
skwirl 13y ago
To me it sounds like bullshit being invented by a reporter trying to spice up a story.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  It sounds so crazy, the guy has more to lose by printing it (and having people think he's a loon).

thaumaturgy 13y ago

This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum. 1. Keyboards don't beep. 2. There are lots of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my part), a glitchy keyboard controller -- we've seen all of these in our shop. 3. In Rio, "a tall American" immediately meets a fellow Westerner and "accosts" him -- by suggesting they go out and see the city? He's a spook because he dressed neatly and was in good shape? Hell, that makes me a spook too. 4. Choose one of the two following explanations for the iPhone behavior: one, a well-funded and resourceful state agency is hiring people to track a journalist writing a book about the biggest intelligence leak in recent history, and the people they're hiring are juvenile enough to use methods straight out of Hollywood to play a prank on their target's iPhone when he sends a text with possibly the most milquetoast insult about their methods in the history of ever; or, two, the iPhone crashed. (Your answer might be used to gauge your sanity.) 5. The hotel safe -- if it weren't for everything else he'd written, I might be willing to buy that this was a botched job. But in the context of the rest of the article, I think the more reasonable explanation is that it was a crappy safe, it never did work correctly, and he only noticed that part way through his stay in the room.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
poopsintub 13y ago
Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys" notification popping up. Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone sit there and delete out the "bad" parts while they know the writer is actually working and typing in the document? This makes absolutely no sense. PR stunt imo.
- Robelius 13y ago

fallinghawks 13y ago

What he doesn't say is that the keyboard stopped flashing and beeping after he threw a biscuit at his cat. I saw this a couple days ago. I thought it was rather silly.

vfclists 13y ago

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean 'they' are not out to get you!! If the events happened as described 'they' were trying to spook him or 'psych' him out.

vacri 13y ago

Why on earth would a malicious party manually delete characters while the author is watching? If you don't care about being observed - as the author suggests - then in order to destroy his work, you'd just delete the truecrypt partition.

specialist 13y ago
We used to do this for giggles. PC-Anywhere era.

superpatosainz 13y ago

This is exactly the time when you'd want to write about such a topic in pen and paper.

lupinglade 13y ago

Wow. Yeah, generally that's the US people's image of the US government in a nutshell. Conspiracy theories are getting old, old, old. Being overly suspicious is not productive in any way. Wake up and help your country be successful.

denova 13y ago

I completely understand all the criticism toward this piece, and I don't think I would ever publish anything like this without at least some hard evidence, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he were completely right about his assumptions. Thinking skeptically about everything is a good habit, but sometimes the consequence of thinking like an intelligent reasonable person is that you forget how bafflingly stupid the world can really be. Are all of the author's suspicions totally unfounded? Yeah, probably, because he has no good evidence to back them up. Do they lead to a narrative that is completely unreasonable and absurd? Absolutely. But it's also possible that the people who are spying on him are behaving in a way that is completely unreasonable and absurd, and are just competent enough to cover their tracks so a layperson won't have any evidence on them. I don't have a ton of confidence in what I'm saying right now, but uh... I just don't blame him too much, is all. I definitely wouldn't dismiss him as a bad journalist or anything.

LVB 13y ago

I smell NSA involvement. They've clearly hacked the site and posted this piece to make Luke Harding and The Guardian look ridiculous.

suprgeek 13y ago

Is it now a sign of times that where previously most ppl (including me) would have dismissed this piece as 1) Does not understand technology so is committing some basic error leading to this 2) Making this sh$t up 3) Has a prankster who is close by. Instead now I am almost betting that it was the NSA/GCHQ/Five Eyes/CIA who is behind these shenanigans? Thank you Edward Snowden (for the hundredth time) for giving us hard evidence of the illegal and ineffective behavior on the Govt's part. You have also (unfortunately) fundamentally raised the bar on tin-foil hat debunking.

Spockulus_Rift 13y ago

What a missed opportunity to not have asked the snooping deleter to write the forward for the book.

siegecraft 13y ago

Let's play "spot the spook" in this thread..

artichokeheart 13y ago
That's my favourite game to play on Hacker News. I wish there was a Hacker News Enhancement Suite so I could keep track of them.

atmosx 13y ago

The article is 99% full of BS. I believe that too, however it made an impact: didn't knew there was a book[1]. I will read it and post a review. The amazon reviews look promising... http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-ebook/dp/B00HU8Z3Z2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1393803014&sr=1-1&keywords=the+snowden+files http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-ebo...

dynjo 13y ago

So a 'professional journalist' with an iPhone didn't think to make a video of the self deleting, or take a photo of the tall American? I call BS.