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The BBC article has a few more details: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33125068 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33125068 I'm British, and it seems to me that if Bri

The BBC article has a few more details: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33125068 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33125068 I'm British, and it seems to me that if British Intelligence need to move spies as a result of what an unprivileged contractor like Snowden could find out, they've done a really poor job of ensuring that critical information was only available to people who needed to know. Maybe Snowden has done them a favour by revealing how poor their internal security is, without (as the BBC article says) harming anyone. Now the real question the media should be asking is who at MI6 should take responsibility for their poor internal security?

TwoBit 11y ago
And what kind of crappy security were they encoding those files with that the foreigners could crack? Maybe it was encryption that the NSA put a back door into, which means they are now getting their just desserts. It sucks to be back doored, NSA, doesn't it?
- gleenn 11y ago
  Given enough cpu time, and knowing you'll find the identity of spies, I think China and Russia would be more than capable to crack quite a bit of encryption even with brute force.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    Yeah... That's not how encryption works. If I use AES-256 to encrypt "I'll be late for dinner" padded with a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum, even the US/Russia/China are incapable of breaking that even in a hundred years of supercomputer crunching. Unless they have a backdoor of course.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - Radim 11y ago
        Well if you start out by assuming you know the secret message already, then there is exactly 1 possibility and "cracking it" takes exactly 0 seconds.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - vidarh 11y ago
        That's just not how it works. To confirm you have the right message, you will need to guess the key and confirm it results in the same encrypted message. Note that he said (and I misread this too) to pad the message with lorem ipsum, not to use lorem ipsum as the key. If you want to go the other way, and guess the plaintext and then confirm it, you've now made what was an "impossible" problem massively more difficult.
- mozumder 11y ago
  They could be encrypting everything with one-time passwords but it still wouldn't matter if the journalists decide to send emails containing open text passwords...
cnvogel 11y ago
Also note the absence of even a single concrete example where actual harm for the security and safety of a western countrie's citizens was caused. One would assume, given all the propaganda, that it should be easy to document a dozen impressive cases (of the hundreds allegedly existing) in a convincing way...
- foxhedgehog 11y ago
  Of course, this information, if it existed, would be classified highly. Greenwald's rhetoric has had a declension from "nobody can prove that harm came from any leaks" down to "there was no harm that came from leaks." If known harm did come from leaks, that would (obviously) be valuable information for the people doing the harming. Disseminating it would be highly irresponsible.
  - cnvogel 11y ago
    In general surely that will be valuable information. But we currently have a high lack of confidence in the truthfulness of what secret agencies claim, and the only thing being constantly spread out to the media is fear mongering about how terrible we all suffer, may it be because of Snowden's revelations or slight restriction on bulk data collections. In the end it should be the voting public that gives authority to these dubious agencies, and all over the place it seems that the classification/secrecy preserving methods of control of spies have utterly failed (the U.S. FISA court, or the parlamentary control commission we have in Germany[1] to supervise our secret services). So, in my oppinion it should become common practice to "sacrifice" one or a few operations (which anyhow are said to have failed and had to be abandoned because of Snowden leaks) to perform an as-public-as-feasible post-mortem analysis on how efficient, corresponding to regulations and laws, intrusive to constitutional rights... they have been pursued. [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlamentarisches_Kontrollgremium http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlamentarisches_Kontrollgremi...
    - foxhedgehog 11y ago
      I'm not sure that I follow. I was providing a reason why this information might be classified, and therefore never eligible for publication. You seem to be arguing a separate point: that, if it was published, it could not be taken seriously. The way that the present system is supposed to work is that there is oversight from Congress over the agencies, oftentimes in public, and that the President disseminates authority to all elements of the federal government. Last I checked, the President and Congress were supposed to be elected by the U.S. voting public. Are you arguing that government should be disintermediated entirely in this case? Aside from various interesting constitutional implications, this also would seem to be an argument against the existence of classified information at all. As for the question of "sacrificing" operations, who gets to make the decision of what to sacrifice?
gleenn 11y ago
Snowden wasn't "unprivileged", I think he had relatively high clearance. Also, I'd say they did a pretty good job if the government protected their spies' identities for a couple years after the documents were released. I'd think that would be plenty of time to close up shop and gtfo.
akira2501 11y ago
> unprivileged contractor like Snowden could find out It was my understanding that he was employed as a system administrator and had nearly unlimited access to NSA files. This is according to an unnamed NSA source in this piece: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-coworker-remembers-the-real-edward-snowden-a-genius-among-geniuses/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-...
felipeerias 11y ago
The really scary thing is: they only knew about what Snowden had done because he told the press. How many more in the NSA are also stockpiling secrets, not moved by high ideals but by other motivations?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  The ones with functioning brains?

TwoBit 11y ago

And what kind of crappy security were they encoding those files with that the foreigners could crack? Maybe it was encryption that the NSA put a back door into, which means they are now getting their just desserts. It sucks to be back doored, NSA, doesn't it?

gleenn 11y ago
Given enough cpu time, and knowing you'll find the identity of spies, I think China and Russia would be more than capable to crack quite a bit of encryption even with brute force.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Yeah... That's not how encryption works. If I use AES-256 to encrypt "I'll be late for dinner" padded with a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum, even the US/Russia/China are incapable of breaking that even in a hundred years of supercomputer crunching. Unless they have a backdoor of course.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - Radim 11y ago
      Well if you start out by assuming you know the secret message already, then there is exactly 1 possibility and "cracking it" takes exactly 0 seconds.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - vidarh 11y ago
      That's just not how it works. To confirm you have the right message, you will need to guess the key and confirm it results in the same encrypted message. Note that he said (and I misread this too) to pad the message with lorem ipsum, not to use lorem ipsum as the key. If you want to go the other way, and guess the plaintext and then confirm it, you've now made what was an "impossible" problem massively more difficult.
mozumder 11y ago
They could be encrypting everything with one-time passwords but it still wouldn't matter if the journalists decide to send emails containing open text passwords...

cnvogel 11y ago

Also note the absence of even a single concrete example where actual harm for the security and safety of a western countrie's citizens was caused. One would assume, given all the propaganda, that it should be easy to document a dozen impressive cases (of the hundreds allegedly existing) in a convincing way...

foxhedgehog 11y ago
Of course, this information, if it existed, would be classified highly. Greenwald's rhetoric has had a declension from "nobody can prove that harm came from any leaks" down to "there was no harm that came from leaks." If known harm did come from leaks, that would (obviously) be valuable information for the people doing the harming. Disseminating it would be highly irresponsible.
- cnvogel 11y ago
  In general surely that will be valuable information. But we currently have a high lack of confidence in the truthfulness of what secret agencies claim, and the only thing being constantly spread out to the media is fear mongering about how terrible we all suffer, may it be because of Snowden's revelations or slight restriction on bulk data collections. In the end it should be the voting public that gives authority to these dubious agencies, and all over the place it seems that the classification/secrecy preserving methods of control of spies have utterly failed (the U.S. FISA court, or the parlamentary control commission we have in Germany[1] to supervise our secret services). So, in my oppinion it should become common practice to "sacrifice" one or a few operations (which anyhow are said to have failed and had to be abandoned because of Snowden leaks) to perform an as-public-as-feasible post-mortem analysis on how efficient, corresponding to regulations and laws, intrusive to constitutional rights... they have been pursued. [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlamentarisches_Kontrollgremium http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlamentarisches_Kontrollgremi...
  - foxhedgehog 11y ago
    I'm not sure that I follow. I was providing a reason why this information might be classified, and therefore never eligible for publication. You seem to be arguing a separate point: that, if it was published, it could not be taken seriously. The way that the present system is supposed to work is that there is oversight from Congress over the agencies, oftentimes in public, and that the President disseminates authority to all elements of the federal government. Last I checked, the President and Congress were supposed to be elected by the U.S. voting public. Are you arguing that government should be disintermediated entirely in this case? Aside from various interesting constitutional implications, this also would seem to be an argument against the existence of classified information at all. As for the question of "sacrificing" operations, who gets to make the decision of what to sacrifice?

gleenn 11y ago

Snowden wasn't "unprivileged", I think he had relatively high clearance. Also, I'd say they did a pretty good job if the government protected their spies' identities for a couple years after the documents were released. I'd think that would be plenty of time to close up shop and gtfo.

akira2501 11y ago

> unprivileged contractor like Snowden could find out It was my understanding that he was employed as a system administrator and had nearly unlimited access to NSA files. This is according to an unnamed NSA source in this piece: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-coworker-remembers-the-real-edward-snowden-a-genius-among-geniuses/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-...

felipeerias 11y ago

The really scary thing is: they only knew about what Snowden had done because he told the press. How many more in the NSA are also stockpiling secrets, not moved by high ideals but by other motivations?

venomsnake 11y ago
The ones with functioning brains?