Difference between revisions of "Edward Snowden"
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Sometime before its first known publication in 2004, a possible kleptographic [[backdoor (computing)|backdoor]] was discovered with the Dual_EC_DRBG's design, with the design of Dual_EC_DRBG having the unusual property that it was theoretically impossible for anyone but Dual_EC_DRBG's designers (NSA) to confirm the [[backdoor]]'s existence. [[Bruce Schneier]] concluded shortly after standardization that the "rather obvious" [[backdoor]] (along with other deficiencies) would mean that nobody would use Dual_EC_DRBG.<ref name="wired-schneier">{{cite news | url=http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115 | title=Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? | work=[[Wired News]] | date=2007-11-15 | author=[[Bruce Schneier]] | archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20140621062515/http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115 | archivedate=2014-06-21 | deadurl=no}}</ref> The [[backdoor]] would allow NSA to decrypt for example [[Transport Layer Security|SSL/TLS]] encryption which used Dual_EC_DRBG as a CSPRNG.<ref name="green_flaws">{{cite web|url=http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/the-many-flaws-of-dualecdrbg.html|title=The Many Flaws of Dual_EC_DRBG|author=Matthew Green}}</ref> | Sometime before its first known publication in 2004, a possible kleptographic [[backdoor (computing)|backdoor]] was discovered with the Dual_EC_DRBG's design, with the design of Dual_EC_DRBG having the unusual property that it was theoretically impossible for anyone but Dual_EC_DRBG's designers (NSA) to confirm the [[backdoor]]'s existence. [[Bruce Schneier]] concluded shortly after standardization that the "rather obvious" [[backdoor]] (along with other deficiencies) would mean that nobody would use Dual_EC_DRBG.<ref name="wired-schneier">{{cite news | url=http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115 | title=Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? | work=[[Wired News]] | date=2007-11-15 | author=[[Bruce Schneier]] | archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20140621062515/http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115 | archivedate=2014-06-21 | deadurl=no}}</ref> The [[backdoor]] would allow NSA to decrypt for example [[Transport Layer Security|SSL/TLS]] encryption which used Dual_EC_DRBG as a CSPRNG.<ref name="green_flaws">{{cite web|url=http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/the-many-flaws-of-dualecdrbg.html|title=The Many Flaws of Dual_EC_DRBG|author=Matthew Green}}</ref> | ||
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| + | ===Architecture of Oppression=== | ||
| + | {{YouTubeVideo | ||
| + | |code=k5OAjnveyJo | ||
| + | |align=right | ||
| + | |width=300px | ||
| + | |caption=[[COVID-19]] and the [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/14/edward_snowden_goverments_are_using_coronavirus_to_build_global_architecture_of_oppression.html Architecture of Oppression] | ||
| + | }} | ||
| + | In an interview with [[VICE]] co-founder [[Shane Smith]] on 9 April 2020, Edward Snowden warned that governments are using the [[COVID-19/Pandemic|coronavirus pandemic]] as a pretext for building the [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/14/edward_snowden_goverments_are_using_coronavirus_to_build_global_architecture_of_oppression.html Architecture of Oppression.] The future may be unpredictable, but global pandemics aren’t. There isn’t a single government on the planet that hasn’t been warned, repeatedly, that at some point a viral pandemic will sweep the globe, causing untold death and economic disruption. And yet most failed to prepare for the [[COVID-19|novel coronavirus]]. Snowden said: “Every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. Yet when we needed it, the system has now failed us, and it has failed us comprehensively.” | ||
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| + | '''Smith''': Why does it seem like we're so ill-prepared? | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Snowden''': There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you first hand, because I used to read the reports they had been planning for pandemics. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Q.''' Are autocratic regimes better at dealing with things like this than democratic ones? | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''A.''' I don't think so. I mean, there are arguments being made that [[China]] can do things that the [[United States]] can't. That doesn't mean that what these autocratic countries are doing is actually more effective. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Q.''' If you're looking at countries like [[China]], where cases seem to have levelled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true? | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''A.''' I don't think we can. Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in this region. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Q.''' It seems that [coronavirus] may be the greatest question of the modern era around civil liberties, around the right to privacy. Yet no one's asking this question. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''A.''' As [[authoritarianism]] spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? Will those capabilities begin to be applied to small-time criminality, for political analysis, for doing things like performing a census, political polling? | ||
| + | |||
| + | No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/14/edward_snowden_goverments_are_using_coronavirus_to_build_global_architecture_of_oppression.html Architecture of Oppression.] And you might trust who is dealing with it today. You might trust who runs it. You don't care about [[Mark Zuckerberg]]. But someone else will have this data eventually, some other country. In your country, a different president will have this data eventually. And someone will abuse it.<ref>''[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvge5q/snowden-warns-governments-are-using-coronavirus-to-build-the-architecture-of-oppression Snowden Warns Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build the 'Architecture of Oppression’"]''</ref> | ||
{{SMWDocs}} | {{SMWDocs}} | ||
==References== | ==References== | ||
Revision as of 10:27, 28 April 2020
"whistleblower" Edward Snowden      (spook, computer expert) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Edward Joseph Snowden 1983-06-21 Elizabeth City, North Carolina, United States |
| Residence | Russia |
| Nationality | American |
Criminal charge | Theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, willful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorized person (June 2013). |
| Exposed | • NSA/PRISM • NSA/Bullrun • NSA/Boundless Informant • NSA/Tempora |
| Member of | Belmarsh Tribunal |
IT specialist and former contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden's 2013 leaks about their mass surveillance programs were widely reported by the corporate media, an interesting contrast to the leaks of earlier whistleblowers that were roundly ignored. | |
Edward Snowden is an American computer specialist, former CIA employee and NSA contractor who in 2013 disclosed classified details of top-secret US mass surveillance programmes to the press.
Snowden's identity was made public by The Guardian at his request on June 9, 2013. He explained:
- "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."
Contents
Background
Snowden lived for some time in Switzerland. Ars Technica report that Snowden used the handle "TheTrueHOOHA" for some years there, noting that he opined that people who leak information should "be shot in the balls".[1]
The Breaking Point
In a 2014 interview, Snowden was asked "What was the decisive moment or was there a long period of time or something happening, why did you do this?"
I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.
Activities
A key developer of the anonymous surfing tool, Tor, whom Snowden had invited to a crypto-party in Hawaii stated in 2014 "There was nothing about Tor that he didn’t already know." Snowden ran more than one Tor exit nodes. While at the NSA in Hawaii, Snowden organised a crypto-party on December 11, 2012.[2]
The Leak
- Full article: Edward Snowden Affair
- Full article: Edward Snowden Affair
Revelations
Snowden has revealed a lots of names of information gathering programs and technologies, including PRISM, NSA call database, and Boundless Informant. He also revealed details of Tempora, a British black-ops surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ.
Undermining of Cryptography
Snowden revealed a classified decryption program code named Bullrun, which according to a New York Times story, costs the NSA around $250 million per year to insert backdoors in cryptographic software and hardware.[3] A Presidential advisory committee subsequently set up to examine NSA's conduct recommended among other things that the US government "fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards".[4] In April 21, 2014, NIST withdrew Dual_EC_DRBG from its draft guidance on random number generators recommending "current users of Dual_EC_DRBG transition to one of the three remaining approved algorithms as quickly as possible."[5] Weaknesses in the cryptographic security of the algorithm were known and publicly criticised well before the algorithm became part of a formal standard endorsed by the ANSI, ISO, and formerly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). One of the weaknesses publicly identified was the potential of the algorithm to harbour a kleptographic backdoor advantageous to the algorithm's designers—the United States government's National Security Agency (NSA)—and no-one else. In 2013, The New York Times reported that documents in their possession but never released to the public "appear to confirm" that the backdoor was real, and had been deliberately inserted by the NSA as part of the NSA's Bullrun decryption program. In December 2013, a Reuters news article alleged that in 2004, before NIST standardized Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA paid RSA Security $10 million in a secret deal to use Dual_EC_DRBG as the default in the RSA BSAFE cryptography library, which resulted in RSA Security becoming the most important distributor of the insecure algorithm.[6] RSA responded that they "categorically deny" that they had ever knowingly colluded with the NSA to adopt an algorithm that was known to be flawed, saying "we have never kept [our] relationship [with the NSA] a secret".[7]
Sometime before its first known publication in 2004, a possible kleptographic backdoor was discovered with the Dual_EC_DRBG's design, with the design of Dual_EC_DRBG having the unusual property that it was theoretically impossible for anyone but Dual_EC_DRBG's designers (NSA) to confirm the backdoor's existence. Bruce Schneier concluded shortly after standardization that the "rather obvious" backdoor (along with other deficiencies) would mean that nobody would use Dual_EC_DRBG.[8] The backdoor would allow NSA to decrypt for example SSL/TLS encryption which used Dual_EC_DRBG as a CSPRNG.[9]
Architecture of Oppression
| COVID-19 and the Architecture of Oppression |
In an interview with VICE co-founder Shane Smith on 9 April 2020, Edward Snowden warned that governments are using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for building the Architecture of Oppression. The future may be unpredictable, but global pandemics aren’t. There isn’t a single government on the planet that hasn’t been warned, repeatedly, that at some point a viral pandemic will sweep the globe, causing untold death and economic disruption. And yet most failed to prepare for the novel coronavirus. Snowden said: “Every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. Yet when we needed it, the system has now failed us, and it has failed us comprehensively.”
Smith: Why does it seem like we're so ill-prepared?
Snowden: There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you first hand, because I used to read the reports they had been planning for pandemics.
Q. Are autocratic regimes better at dealing with things like this than democratic ones?
A. I don't think so. I mean, there are arguments being made that China can do things that the United States can't. That doesn't mean that what these autocratic countries are doing is actually more effective.
Q. If you're looking at countries like China, where cases seem to have levelled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true?
A. I don't think we can. Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in this region.
Q. It seems that [coronavirus] may be the greatest question of the modern era around civil liberties, around the right to privacy. Yet no one's asking this question.
A. As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? Will those capabilities begin to be applied to small-time criminality, for political analysis, for doing things like performing a census, political polling?
No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the Architecture of Oppression. And you might trust who is dealing with it today. You might trust who runs it. You don't care about Mark Zuckerberg. But someone else will have this data eventually, some other country. In your country, a different president will have this data eventually. And someone will abuse it.[10]
Quotes by Edward Snowden
| Page | Quote | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Nieuwsuur | “The AIVD and MIVD are subordinates of the Americans. The Dutch work for the Americans. They do what we tell them to do. They aren't valued because of their capacity, but just because they give us a free passage, that's what the NSA uses them for. (...) Look what France is doing and even they couldn't stop all those terror attacks” | Nieuwsuur |
| Privacy | “Privacy is the right from which all others are derived. Without privacy there is only society, only the collective, which makes them all be and think alike. You can’t have anything yourself, you can’t have your own opinions, unless you have a space that belongs only to you. Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say...” | Medium |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ron Johnson | “We met delegation after delegation of European representatives. Basically the entire conversation was about Edward Snowden, about tapping Angela Merkel's phone. But then Charlie Hebdo happened. I haven't heard a word about Edward Snowden or what the American security services were trying to do. What I'm hearing now is 'Where's America?'” | Ron Johnson | 2017 |
| Nieuwsuur | “The AIVD and MIVD are subordinates of the Americans. The Dutch work for the Americans. They do what we tell them to do. They aren't valued because of their capacity, but just because they give us a free passage, that's what the NSA uses them for. (...) Look what France is doing and even they couldn't stop all those terror attacks” | Edward Snowden Nieuwsuur | |
| UFO | “So, are Unacknowledged Special Access Programs out of control in the United States? Good question. The term "Special Access Program", let alone "Unacknowledged Special Access Program", is only very seldom mentioned in the media. For example, these terms have not been mentioned at all in relation to the NSA spy revelations in recent years of William Binney and Edward Snowden, even though one would expect that many of the NSA spy programs as PRISM, Stellar Wind, Boundless Informant and JTRIG fell into this category. The term "Special Access Program" did recently surface with regard to the Hillary Clinton email scandals. As Obama's secretary of state, Clinton, against protocol, maintained a private mailbox full of information on all kinds of Special Access Programs. No details on these programs have been provided.” | Joël van der Reijden |
Related Documents
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:Checkbook Journalism & Leaking to the Highest Bidders | article | 8 December 2013 | Sibel Edmonds | A hard-hitting article on the Edward Snowden affair. Its author speaks with considerable authority on matters concerning intel/security whistle-blowing matters in the USA |
| Document:Cryptome’s searing critique of Snowden Inc | article | 13 February 2016 | Tim Shorrock | Commentary on an interview with John Young and his wife Deborah Natsios by Pit Schultz of reboot.fm at the 'Transmedia 2016' event in Berlin on 6 February 2016 |
| Document:GCHQ and Me: My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers | Article | 3 August 2015 | Duncan Campbell | No one at the May 2015 conference on intelligence, security and privacy argued against greater openness. Thanks to Edward Snowden and those who courageously came before, the need for public accountability and review has become unassailable. |
| Document:Greenwald-Omidyar Joint Venture: The Blurring Lines Between Being A Source & Being A Journalist | article | 13 December 2013 | Sibel Edmonds | |
| Document:Mr Snowden, It’s Time to Come Out and Take a Stand Publicly as to Your Intentions | article | 15 December 2013 | Sibel Edmonds | |
| Document:Omidyar’s PayPal Corporation Said To Be Implicated in Withheld NSA Documents | article | 11 December 2013 | Sibel Edmonds | |
| Document:Saving Agent Snowden From His Handlers Greenwald & Omidyar | article | 24 October 2013 | Yoichi Shimatsu | A long article on the Edward Sowden affair and the proposed 'alternative news' and whistleblowing-transparency initiative recently announced by Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks revelations fame. It also contains plausible information about SIS involvement during the flight of Edward Snowden to Moscow via Hong Kong. |
| Document:Selling Secrets? | article | 1 December 2013 | Glenn Greenwald | Glenn Greenwald's personal apologia - cum - mia-culpa. Written in response to devastating criticism of his motives and actions in the Edward Snowden affair to date. |
| Document:The Doomsday Insurance Cache That Was, and Then Never Was | article | 3 January 2014 | Sibel Edmonds | Part 1 of a promised series of articles dissecting the published statements of the principal characters in what has become known as the Edward Snowden Affair. It highlights some glaring inconsistencies between those of Greenwald and Snowden and puts a shrewd question-mark over corporate media coverage of them. |
| Document:Vladimir Putin Interview | interview | 5 September 2013 | Vladimir Putin | Press interview with Vladimir Putin ahead of the September 2013 G20 meeting in St Petersburg |
References
- ↑ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-said-leakers-should-be-shot-then-he-became-one/
- ↑ http://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-cryptoparty/
- ↑
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- ↑
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{{URL|example.com|optional display text}} - ↑ The Security Division of EMC, RSA,. "RSA Response to Media Claims Regarding NSA Relationship". RSA. Retrieved 22 December 2013.CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑
{{URL|example.com|optional display text}} - ↑ Matthew Green. "The Many Flaws of Dual_EC_DRBG".Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑ Snowden Warns Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build the 'Architecture of Oppression’"
