I wonder how many newspaper would go as far as the Guardian, battling their government, to protect information. On the other hand, there are not many western democracies would do something so stupid as to force a newspaper to destroy the hard-drives.
We are ruled by idiots at all levels. All management authors I've read so far, were pointing from 2009 that EU is out of real political leaders with any management skill. Watching what is happening to France (SK got ousted by the CIA and France became irrelevant...), the UK (it's hard to even remember Cameron's name without Googling it and it's 4 years since he took office!), Germany has Angela Merkel which is famous for doing nothing, never (Something German voters appreciate apparently, I'm eager to see what will happen in the years to come with German exports decreasing), Italy is non-existent, Spain doesn't matter and Russia is not a democracy anyway... And that's Europe in 2014.
NYT sat on a story for a year because it would anger the state, thus meaning they would be denied access to any gov officials or military so they waited for somebody else to do it. US press is largely neutered. As for Italy their MPs were brawling each other yesterday like drunken yabbos
I agree that the press in the US is neutered. They're petrified of appearing adversarial because they know their access will be cut off.
It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy if they never test the length of their leash-- they could easily make a story out of "we said X and so our access was cut off, this isn't right" but it'd require an ounce of spine.
That's an unfair characterization of NYTimes behavior. They sit on stories when the editors agree that releasing the information would do more harm than good.
> The New York Times has known about the former agent’s C.I.A. ties since late 2007, when a lawyer for the family gave a reporter access to Mr. Levinson’s files and emails. The Times withheld that information to avoid jeopardizing his safety or the efforts to free him. On Thursday, The Associated Press disclosed Mr. Levinson’s role with the intelligence agency. In a statement, the White House said it had urged the wire service not to publish its article “out of concern for Mr. Levinson’s life.” After Thursday’s disclosure, the Levinson family said it had no objection to The Times’s publishing this article.
How can one say the editors did Levinson a favor by holding back the story? Is propagating the idea that Iran or other nation has some innocent civilian when he is really CIA beneficial? Wouldn't that just solidify a potential negative reaction from said government who is apparently rightfully holding a foreign agent who was working on their soil?
In the end your comment seems to support the parent. NYTimes sits on stories at the behest of the US government, only releases it when another agency beats them to the punch.
Censoring stories, partially or entirely, is standard operating procedure.
The most egregious example is when the New York Times delayed publishing revelations of unlawful wiretapping until after the US elections of 2006, on request of the White House. [1] There was no legitimate editorial reason for that decision.
That behaviour has not changed, and the Guardian is no better. According to ACLU attorney Ben Wizner (self-described "chief legal advisor" to Snowden) the New York Times, the Guardian -- and every other publication which got access to the leaked documents -- did not publish a single document without first consulting with the US government. [2,3]
Personally I don't trust any tax-paying organization to publish information the government does not want published.
[2] "The journalists who Snowden gave the information to, have in every single case, gone to the government before they have published something." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs3mFZ4UWME#t=53m (At 53:00.)
[3] "The Guardian has not published a single story that has included NSA classified documents, without consulting with the US government. The same is true for Glenn Greenwald, and the same is true for every foreign journalistic partner. In fact, they put it into their contract, with all of those other publications around the world, that they are not to publish any secret document without giving the US an opportunity to weigh in." http://ww3.tvo.org/video/199289/sentencing-snowden (At 9:40.)
Yet we keep on voting for them. We are the problem,they are just opportunistic b_st_rds. Things will change when everybody acknowledge the fact that we are reponsible for this.
We can only vote for who gets on the ballot. Who gets on the ballot is determined very undemocratically by who has the most money behind him/her. This is so far from one-person-one-vote when 20% have 95% of the financial wealth[1]. Money then skews the final result when millions, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising (propaganda) can destroy the candidate that money doesn't like.
But if all the splinter third party candidates got their act together and mobilized themselves and developed a solid platform, they could certainly make a run themselves.
I hate to use Jesse Ventura as an example, but he really was a true independent candidate, with a solid platform and didn't act like a politician. What he said resonated with the people of Minnesota who were sick of the politicians, sick of the promises and infighting. He did a lot of good when he was in office and fulfilled his campaign promises.
A lot of people look at the light rail in Minnesota as a huge success, but it was Ventura who believed in the project from the beginning and actually got additional funding to keep it going when both Democrats and Republicans were trying to kill the project.
But if all the splinter third party candidates got their
act together and mobilized themselves and developed a
solid platform, they could certainly make a run
themselves.
Not really. For example, the League of Women Voters used to run the US persidential debate. They've stopped, because the Democrats and Republicans demanded such unfair terms that it would have been a farce. So now the Democrats and Republicans together control the debates.
> But if all the splinter third party candidates got their act together and mobilized themselves and developed a solid platform
Yeah, but, see, the Libertarian Party and the Socialist Party (and those aren't even the most divergent among the non-major parties) aren't going to unite around a common policy platform. In fact, each of them is closer to policy commonality with one of the major parties than they are too each other.
America's security clearance program demands that people authorized to handle its most sensitive secrets be held to a certain standard. They cannot be addicts. They must refrain from imprudent sexual relationships. They must pay their taxes. They must obey the laws. They cannot lie to the government, or keep their embarrassing, blackmailworthy secrets from it.
And one of these people has the unmitigated gall to take evidence of unethical government activities which had been clearly classified as SECRET and TOP SECRET and just release it to the American public, along with the rest of the world.
Clearly, if the clearance process worked as intended, every single person authorized to see this stuff should feel a tiny bit queasy after reading it. The problem is that people who try to escalate within the system are denied promotion, are not awarded the contract when it is up for re-compete, or they are simply fired outright and blacklisted from further work. And then nothing else changes. Clearly, if your choice is between losing your livelihood and making no impact whatsoever and losing your livelihood and maybe also your freedom, and possibly changing things for the better, you might take that additional risk.
America, if you don't want your specialist personnel, specifically chosen for high ethical standards, to spill secrets, maybe, just maybe, you should arrange your affairs such that speaking truth to power isn't the stupidest thing someone could possibly do. And it would also be nice if you would stop acting like the sleaziest boss/customer on Earth in front of the people most likely to actually be bothered by that.
They're not chosen for high ethical standards. The things you mentioned are attributes of painfully normal/boring people, not people of high moral standing.
They're chosen for being the best at being square and following orders without dissent. These kinds of people are the least likely to speak out by definition.
The best at being square OR best at following orders. OR, not AND. I think they only tolerate the squares because we^Wthey can actually get the work done.
I've generally given GCHQ an easy ride but this is pretty fuckin dodgy.
When someone burns a book or a flag they're just saying "I really hate this book and the ideas in it" - and it's great that people do this so visibly because it means I know how to talk to them.
But government agents watching while journalists destroy journalistic materials to protect other journalists? That's something that must not happen in Britain again.
Wouldn't it be a lot worse if the government agents had seized the drives, arrested the journalists, and gone on a witchhunt to root out everyone else who was involved? As it was the Guardian journalists stood on principle and said 'we really don't want to hand this over' so the GCHQ chaps helpfully sat around and let them destroy the evidence. This is really quite a reasonable compromise.
A reasonable compromise? Any compromise is reasonable when your starting point is extreme enough. Saying "well it could have been a lot worse" is a cop out. It shouldn't have happened at all.
OK, but what does that have to do with what I posted above?
Also, if you think spooks only come in the front door you don't have any security anyway. More so in the UK, with the extremely stringent Official Secrets Act.
The only thing worse than a clueless thug is a thug who has a clue. The only thing worse than a thug with a clue is a thug who knows that he's right, and is on some kind of holy mission.
In the US they'd just whip an NSL on the paper. I wonder how many times this has happened?
How do you mean? To me, this looks like the paper trying to protect itself, by keeping what exactly they read in those files secret. They weren't cooperating, but they also weren't willing to take the government to court.
Read TFA -- Guardian decided to destroy the materials in order to protect its journalists. They were afraid that recovered computers would contain information about which Guardian staff accessed the machines and when, and that could be used as evidence against them.
The material was destroyed in this way because the alternative was to hand it all over to the UK government agency mentioned.
...what did the security services expect to achieve here?
To stop or severely impair The Guardian's ability to report classified materials.
The usual interpretation has been that UKgov was clueless about technology, refusing to recognize that there were other copies elsewhere. But maybe they knew that it was only "security theatre" and the intent was to only make threatening gestures without really affecting the situation.
It's still a threat of something worse in future, but in comparison with the way things have been going in western/northern countries recently, it was a pulled punch, a kind of ritual or "CYA" move.
I'd see it more like UK gov not caring if people think they're clueless - or even encoraging that opinion - so that people become sloppy with operating procedures or become less paranoid.
Being selective about which laws you enforce is worse than not enforcing any of them. In this case, the Government, through GCHQ is guilty of systematically violating its own draconian law (RIPA) that was designed to legalise all sorts of Orwellian bullshit.
He said he was unimpressed by east London's multiracial neighbourhoods, telling one British user of the forum: "It's where all of your Muslims live. I didn't want to get out of the car."
Is this quote verifiable? If so, it's certainly changed my perception of the guy.
He was 23 at the time. I posted a lot of stupid crap online at 23 too. He posted this at the end of a lengthy screed complaining how racist Europe is.
context:
< User7> we don't have ghettos in the UK
< TheTrueHOOHA> sure you do
< TheTrueHOOHA> i went to london just last yearit's
where all of your muslims live
I didn't want to get out of the car.
< User7> no, that's Bradford
< TheTrueHOOHA> I thought I had gotten off of plane in the wrong country
I don't know where it was, but it was by London City Airport and it was terrifying
< User8> same thing in France
< User7> TheTrueHOOHA: east London
yeah, a lot of ethnic groups have settled there
< TheTrueHOOHA> I guess it's nice that they set up their own community, though
< User7> TheTrueHOOHA: not many people here share your opinion
< TheTrueHOOHA> they just seemed awfully... orthodox
< TheTrueHOOHA> i mean it wasn't like, "hi, we're your friendly neighborhood muslim community. welcome to our main street."
< TheTrueHOOHA> it was more like, "SUBMIT TO THE WILL OF ALLAH. SHARIAH REGULATIONS POSTED AT ALL CORNERS."
Not perfect, but not quite as bad as the original quote. He seems to have matured since then.
This seems more like backstopping his cover as super brainwashed/patriot militaristic tote the party line nonsense while he secretly steals all their dox
I think it's important to maintain perspective about who Edward Snowden is as a person, and what he did in an effort to expose injustice. He might be a raging bigot and a racist. I don't know, but I know that I'm glad he did what he did. That doesn't excuse any alleged racism or bigotry -- not in any way -- but I always try to remember that even the people we choose as heroes are flawed.
My feelings on matters like this were heavily influenced by the graphic novel Watchmen. It's characters are a great mix of comic book hero archetype and real world people with real world problems and hang-ups. I try to look at my heroes through the same lens as Alan Moore.
Parts of East London can be intimidating, with high rates of racist and religious violence.
Here are a couple vigilantes arrested for "harassing, intimidating and assaulting people on the streets of east London while claiming they were enforcing sharia law".
While every community has some violent crime, I wouldn't be too quick to indict Snowden as xenophobic just because he sensed a threat in some neighborhoods.
If you don't feel comfortable, keep moving until you do. You can analyze whether it was racist later, and then feel guilty if you want to.
In retrospect, I was probably safer every time I walked alone through the streets of Chicago's various neighborhoods than that one time I pulled in to an interstate highway rest stop in Florida. A sheriff's deputy had to watch over us and our car from the time we pulled in to the time we rolled out. None of us have ever peed so quickly in our entire lives.
In retrospect, we should have gone straight through and opted for wetting our pants. In that situation, there was no apparent difference in skin colors. Number of shirts owned, yes. Tooth count, definitely.
Had a similar family with different skin color locked all their doors and hastily re-entered traffic, I wouldn't be calling them racist; I'd be calling them wiser than me. So as I do not know much about the neighborhoods and suburbs of London, I think I'll withhold any uninformed judgements on what he said and did as a young man. It may well be that he is both racist and correct. On the whole, I care more about the latter.
As an ex resident of East London (Leyton) he's right about it being a shitty area and having a high muslim population. However these two facts are independent.
I would lock my doors too. Only because I know two people who got carjacked.
They are not entirely independent. They are simply correlated to different links in the causality chain. The Muslims are there because it's a shitty area, not the other way around. If it were a good area, the houses would be too expensive for the latest wave of immigrants to move into.
It was the same way with the era of immigration in America. The first generation off the boat lived in the worst neighborhoods, and then the next generation rose to power and lorded it over the boats that came in on their watch. I imagine (though I don't know) that Hindus and Sikhs are more accepted as British than Muslims are, just because they have been around longer, and that they have long since moved into the better neighborhoods.
I don't know, exactly. I do know that Florida has its own Fark tag. It was northern Florida. The rest stop was curiously crowded for the amount of traffic on the road, compared with every other interstate rest stop I have ever pulled in to. When we parked, a sheriff's deputy--not a state highway patrolman--adopted a position near our car, and he was making eye contact with people near us and shaking his head "no".
I can only assume that we were at risk of involuntarily auditioning for Deliverance 2.
I have absolutely no interest in finding out more about what it was all about.
Judging by the famous "shot in the balls" quote, Snowden has probably changed his outlook a little since then.
Or, of course, he could have been leaving this type of trail of online activity precisely because he knew it could be observed, and wanted to put himself in a particular light for anyone doing so, if he was already intending his exfiltration of data or some such act at that stage.
That's probably just wishful thinking on my part, though :) More likely scenario, quoting from the author of the material linked: "So Snowden was young once, and said anything that occurred to him? Imagine my shock!"
Bear in mind Snowden has proven his commitment to rigorous honesty. Many people you might think of as decent might think these things, but not admit it, even to themselves.
I don't judge Snowden for saying these things, any more than I would judge a person who lives in a rich White/Jewish area and would never dream of living or going to a poor Muslim/South Asian area. That is to say, I don't judge him at all for saying these things.
There are a few advantages to releasing a stream rather than a torrent.
First, it keeps the story going. Had it been a single torrent, there would have been a lot of stories, and then on to the next thing. That this may also be more commercially successful does not escape me.
Second, it give the government a chance to really put their foot in their mouths. With Wikileaks, the US mostly said nothing about the details. With the Snowden documents, government officials respond to one thing, then further documents reveal where they are lying or weaseling.
Third, once the torrent is done, the government can do a whitewash investigation, and then say "all that is behind us. We've fixed the problems and now we're focusing on the future." It's not possible to have a whitewash investigation unless you know all that needs to be covered.
Fourth, this is a complex issue, and the process of reporting lets the reporters have time to get feedback from the analysis of other people, and integrate new information into their reporting.
Of these, I think #3 is the most important advantage to a stream over a torrent.
Great points, but I think #1 is the most important for affecting change (although #2 is the most entertaining). Keeping government shenanigans in the top of the news cycle means that elected officials are constantly under pressure to actually do something about it.
Very good points. A valid option would have been to release a torrent of encrypted files and then slowly release ways to decrypt the files one at a time.
This way the information is out there but only gets revealed a little at a time.
That'd make it much easier to portray them as irresponsible risks to national security. They're trying, but the caution and deliberation being used in these releases counts heavily in the favor of the news orgs.
They didn't just destroy the hard drives, they went the extra mile and grinded away every single chip in the computers. Their reasoning must be that some chips have a little Flash memory for firmware, which might have been used to store a little data; even RAM chips can retain some data after they've been powered off. Of course that's a precaution that doesn't make much sense in the grand scheme of things: storing data in these areas is technically difficult, inconvenient, and low-capacity (for Flash) or unreliable (for RAM). A person smart enough to pull this off would have been much better off keeping a backup off-site.
They ended up destroying every single part of the computer -- perhaps they spared the keyboard or the display, but that's not likely since they could argue that a storage device could be hidden in there.
Wiping drives is one of the weird situations where you can either try to prove a negative ("they cannot recover the information if we do X") or just grind the drives.
Looking just at spining platter drives:
We know that there are no software tos that claim to recover data that has been over written just once.
We know that no companies exist that claim To be able to recover data that has been over written just once.
There are no University projects claiming that either. (There are some obscure projects using onsolete technology that had very low sucess rate for bits).
We don't think any well funded forensic units have had sucess recovering such data.
So, for most people doing a single overwrite of random data is fine.
But some other people need peace of mind, and for those people grinding the drives is easy.
tl;dr: No, not for Top Secret information - one must assume that one's attacker is more capable than one's self, but ruled by the same physics. Therefore, one destroys media utterly (heating to the Curie Point, grinding to dust, etc.) rather than assume that the adversary cannot recover from a degaussed disk. For other levels of information, guidelines vary.
Guidelines for media destruction vary based on sensitivity of the information and the risks associated with its disclosure. There are two basic categories of information, private interest and national interest, and various levels within the categories.
Private interest refers to individuals, businesses, etc., that is, anything that isn't "in the national interest". National interest refers to anything that could seriously impact the country and its interests, its overall security, etc. The classic examples are intelligence and military operations. Others include government plans that have yet to be made public, e.g., cabinet confidences in the UK and Canada, etc. There is a debate as to whether certain types of economic information, even if private, should be considered national interest, because the impact of disclosure could be recession, depression, or complete collapse, which would seriously impact national interest.
Many jurisdictions use the term "Classified" to refer to information related to the national interest; Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, and Cosmic are some common western/NATO terms for various levels of classified information.
Labels for private interests vary; for example, Canada uses "Protected A" for information about an individual that could lead to minor, recoverable harm (think a slap upside the head - it hurts, you might need ice, but it doesn't really impact you), "Protected B" for moderate harm that is difficult to recover from (think a broken arm - you will need medical attention, your life is impacted, possibly seriously, but you will recover), and "Protected C" for serious or grave harm (think being shot - you're done).
Degaussing is often considered sufficient for "Protected A" and "Protected B" type information - but there are debates as to quantity: While aggregating doesn't change the label (10,000 Protected B records are still Protected B), it can increase the harm (compromise of 100,000,000 Protected B records might seriously harm the nation, e.g.).
Degaussing is not considered enough for "Protected C" information and for Classified information: The degaussing may be imperfect, there may "edge effects", etc. We just don't know - and we assume our adversary isn't as ignorant as we.
So we destroy the media, utterly, so that it cannot be recovered.
That's what was happening here. Use of grinders is pretty standard practice.
Yes, this information had all been revealed. As far as we know. Seems pretty pointless, doesn't it?
This is a good summary of the area. In the UK we use the concept of a Business Impact Level, and information is assessed on it's confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Therefore you have to ask:
What happens if someone unauthorised can access it
What happens if someone can make an unauthorised modification
What happens if somebody can deny authorised people access.
Unfortunately, IS5, the document that describes secure sanitisation of sensitive materials is not available to the public, so we don't know what guidelines the officials were working to here.
You can assume that the least risky process for all parties is to be witness to the destruction of the physical media, giving both sides confidence that the materials were actually destroyed.
I'm not sure that's enough for this level of classified. I can imagine fairly large sections of the drive platter surviving more or less intact from that. Theoretically, quite a lot of the data might be recovered.
It is also a bit of a "fuck you" statement as well though.
UK Ministry of Defence as well as the Security Services have a policy of drilling hard drives if a machine is leaving their control.
I heard a story, which I think came from Dell, who had a machine sent to them from the MOD because it had intermittent trouble booting. Standard practice was that the drives were drilled before the server was sent to Dell in Ireland. When the engineers tried to boot the server it of course wouldn't boot. When they pulled out the drives they were drilled. Report was inconclusive.
Thus the Guardian's were quasi-mimicking the MOD. I.e. taking the piss.
I am getting sort of sick of this propaganda scheme that seems to be developing.
I honestly think this entire Snowden fiasco is a lie. Not some conspiracy stuff either. Its just to perfect + out of the 1% of the documents that have been released so far most of it was already public knowledge since the 90s. Now I obviously cannot prove that its all a lie and I sound stupid crazy right now so I am just going to leave this alone and see what happens once Snowden takes the Noble for doing his job.
There were EU parliament reports; the industrial espionage was known; spying on friendly nations was well known.
The slides give more detail, they include names or programmes, and they are about modern abuses. But it is wrong to say that we didn't know that governments surveilled their citizens. Some people might have ignored it.
As the saying goes, the devil was in the details. It's not the existence of spying but the extent that made everyone take notice. "surveilled their citizens" is too general a term;it can include anything from monitoring international communication for a handful of citizens to collecting metadata for every single phone call ever made (as was the case). I never said or implied that there was no proof that governments spied on their citizens so don't represent that as my belief.
Wikileaks and the Guardian are intentionally spacing out their leaks to keep it in the news as much as possible. Wikileaks has put a lot of thought into how to maximize exposure and impact, and the Guardian... is a newspaper :)
We are ruled by idiots at all levels. All management authors I've read so far, were pointing from 2009 that EU is out of real political leaders with any management skill. Watching what is happening to France (SK got ousted by the CIA and France became irrelevant...), the UK (it's hard to even remember Cameron's name without Googling it and it's 4 years since he took office!), Germany has Angela Merkel which is famous for doing nothing, never (Something German voters appreciate apparently, I'm eager to see what will happen in the years to come with German exports decreasing), Italy is non-existent, Spain doesn't matter and Russia is not a democracy anyway... And that's Europe in 2014.