Meaning, for Snowden, that his best bet, clearly, is to stay in Russia (or whatever country will take him)† for at least the duration of the coming shitstorm that will be the next administration.† Instead of coming back to the U.S. to face the consequences of his actions (which nearly every reasonable-minded person -- including Snowden himself -- strongly prefers).
Kind of sucks for Snowden, but more to the point, an incredibly stupid position for the U.S. to take.
† EDIT: Given that while his chances in Russia may not be best, for much longer -- his prospects for asylum in many other countries, especially in Europe, will rise quite substantially if he is explicitly threatened with a death sentence.
So my view for Snowden is that this is actually worse than what you're saying.
Snowden should fear for his life at this point. It's not enough to live in Russia with the weird Bro-ness that Putin and Trump have come to have of late [1]. That means chance for extradition goes up.
Let's say Snowden goes into hiding. What does that mean for a Law and Order type to run the CIA with potentially limited government oversight [2]?
Keep in mind the CIA can kill terrorists who are US Citizens abroad and has been given that permission since Bush 43. [3]
The question then just remains is Snowden a terrorist? It's probably not harder to justify than some might think.
Agree with this. Trump has more or less expressed that he wants the US to mend its relationship with Putin. Friends are great for trading favors. I can't imagine what Putin would ask for in exchange for Snowden, but Trump would love to make a deal.
My suspicion is that it would suit Trump and Putin if Snowden were deposited in a neutral country. Like 'Ecuador'.
Putin cannot give him directly to America without the Russian stance losing credibility and they would look mercurial which would deter others using it as a safe haven. They've made plenty of hay out of Snowden's presence and would be loathe to lose possible future haymaking supplies.
Trump wouldn't know what to do with him if he had him. The Dems immediately take to the high horse and he loses the libertarians altogether. That loses him the balance of power with the social conservatives and that would be a problem for him getting re-elected because Sanders could easily turn him into George III.
The alternative is for Russia to get something big like formal recognition of Crimea (flying as Putin the magnificent horsetrader putting Russia first) and Snowden gets a quick trial with relatively short sentence of five-ten years and STFU good behavior policy thereafter.
I think the first scenario is the more likely so I think Snowden may receive an invitation to a nice European country such as Switzerland.
Putin cannot give him directly to America without the Russian stance losing credibility and they would look mercurial which would deter others using it as a safe haven.
It's just a question of what he gets back in return. Snowden handed over on a silver platter in exchange for recognition of the Crimean annexation, along with a lifting of sanctions and a substantial watering-down of pledges to support the Ukraine, George, and the Baltics? You can imagine both camps might already be salivating at the prospect.
Even under Obama, he was looking at life in prison, which is effectively a living death sentence. Personally, I'd rather get the death penalty than spend my remaining years in a federal supermax prison (especially given that Snowden is fairly young).
Putin will give him up in a heartbeat if it curries any favor at all with Trump. Most European governments do not look favorably on what he did either, and wouldn't harbor him anyway - both out of fear of reprisal from the US and fear of encouraging their own Snowden-type incidents. The end of Snowden's freedom is likely near, whether he gets the death penalty or not. It's not the end that many of us would like the see for him, but he did know the penalties well before he did what he did.
Well, I'd like to see him pardoned. I just know it will never happen, and he had to know that as well when he did it. No government can afford to be seen as tolerant of this kind of action from within its own ranks. Perhaps as a result of Snowden there will be better ways for government employees to vent their concerns, but that likely won't help him out.
I'm still surprised Obama seemingly knew about this, yet did nothing. It makes me wonder how many other things he knows about, and how full of it this makes him.
He says a lot of things, but at the end of the day, he seems like a worthless, know-nothing, unconcerned idiot when it comes to things like protecting the people, looking out for them, helping things progress, and you know, everything else the government is supposed to be about.
It's annoying that this outdated, corrupted, worthless system is being strung along, defended, and operated as though it's the norm, the way it should be, and as though it was, at any time, something other than the product/result of self-serving agendas.
There's a lot more data, technological advancement, knowledge, experience, and general intelligence available these days (enough to show how stupid what's being done is), but all they do is try to drag around whatever's more garbage as though it's not just more shit.
I suppose in one way I'm not too surprised, as whether it was an after school club, a mail room, church, college, or a corporate work environment, wherever I was, it would be the same pattern of shit being defended, propped up, and carried on; and of everyone reacting violently to anything else that would appear.
It would also be the same pattern of no one knowing why anything was the way it was and of no one questioning or thinking about anything, yet thinking they knew something and violently defending whatever garbage was in place. What's that? You don't even know what it is, how it got there, why it's there, or anything else, but off you go saying the dumbest things?
Also, most quickly realize that most things in place are either the result of politics, self-serving BS, "just doing something to get it done," and everything else that's a reflection of stupidity repeating again; yet they continue on as though something else is the case.
I think of conservatism (political meaning) to be Conservation (save the whales), but for humans and their institutions.
I think it is part of an algorithm which (when it works) prevents deadlock.
Whenever the (left/right) stakeholders have a balance of power at a stable equilibrium, upsetting the system just leads to a waste of energy, what I called 'trashing'. It's similar to feature creep or faux innovation.
The cost of shooting down net negative moves over and over could sap the strength of the whole system because there is an opportunity cost to ignoring the few possible net positive moves.
So without conservatism, paradoxically, there is no progress.
It does have failure modes though. Peter Thiel points out one of them, which is that in order to produce net positive moves the economy must be healthy (you cannot horsetrade in a zero sum game).
The other failure is that you can get caught in a local minimum.
I believe one or both of these modes are taking over at present.
As Overtonwindow mentioned (in this very thread)¹, it’s probably not in his best interests to do that:
“[That] would likely create a tremendously huge backlash from the intelligence community, and turn them against the Democratic party for a very long time. You think Wikileaks and Hillary's emails were bad? Piss off the intel community and have them turning their mighty tools of deception and surveillance on the entire DNC…”
This is a bit of conspiracy theory, but sometimes I suspect that has already happened. It seemed somewhat coincidental for the intelligence community to time their very public investigation of Clinton the way that they did after largely leaving politicians alone for so long (at least in public).
The conspiracy theorist inside me wonders if part of the reason for the use of a private server went beyond convenience, obliviousness, or active avoidance of FOIA requests which are the common suppositions.
Perhaps she was aware of the surveillance state and tried to circumvent scrutiny from a meddling intelligence community by going private? The implementation was poor, of course, but it would strike me as a reasonable thing for one organization of the government to do if there was some other organization that was overreaching to the point where they were eavesdropping on government communication.
This is definitely all speculation, but given the lack of transparency in government activity at that level, it's hard to come up with something more data-based.
I don't know that this is completely implausible, given a few assumptions:
1. The surveillance state has been making extreme advances with their capabilities.
2. Clinton likely has a greater knowledge of the extent of those advances as part of her role in the executive branch.
2. The various agencies have a history of political engagement behind closed doors.
3. FOIA seems relatively weak, given ability of the government to delay or redact released information. This weakness would seem to reduce the likelihood of FOIA avoidance as a reason for the violation.
4. Clinton _had_ to know the policies that were in place which restricted her use of private email, given her position and history. At the very least, the people performing the implementation knew. This reduces likelihood of convenience as viable causation.
If, for theoretical discussion, we accept the possibility that Clinton was actively attempting to thwart attention of the surveillance apparatus, then the timing and public nature of the investigation (after leaving politicians alone for so long, at least publicly) could be seen as retaliation in the right light. It would certainly send an object lesson to other politicians and government officials that they should avoid treading on the interests of the intelligence community.
As to what those interests are.. well. It depends on your degree of trust, I imagine. Perhaps they have a political agenda, or perhaps this is simply protection of their assets (as it is possible retaliation for lack of security resulting in a breach with material impact that they chose or were not able to disclose). When the leaders of the intelligence community come out to publicly state that political dissidents should be executed, all bets are off when looking at their motivations.
So.. yeah. I'm going to take off my tinfoil hat now.
You seem to think those bridges were open to begin with. I'm saying they're not. Democrats being commie pinkos aligned with Russia and are traitors in sheep's clothing is an old (and given recent events, ironic) meme. See "FBI is Trumpland"
I meant two things: normalizing and expanding the security state to hand it over to Trump, and many of the more positive developments immediately repealed. No, these haven't happened yet, but they're the obvious default course of events now.
Why is there absolutely zero focus on the lack of basic security measures that would prevent a large scale breach like this?
The government still doesn't know exactly what data he walked off with. And while you'd think they'd have stepped up security since then, now Harold T. Martin has again walked off with terabytes of secret data. In both cases, these secrets were stolen by contractors, not even full employees.
I have full admin rights to every server at work, but I can't gain access to customer data without tripping access alarms that notify our security team. How is it possible that the NSA has no similar controls? I realize that such controls can be expensive (in direct costs and ongoing operations), but "with great data comes great responsibility", and if there's any database in the country that needs exceptional controls, it's the NSA's database that is much more valuable than any other corporate database.
How many foreign powers have walked off with even more data undetected because they aren't going to publicize it -- they are likely siphoning off data right now, and the NSA has no idea.
In part, I think you're overestimating how difficult it would be for you to gain access to customer data covertly, given root access to all the servers at your company.
i agree. to some people root still means root which means you can do anything local undetected if you're smart enough (most people aren't). apparently these days it means something else. who knew.
When audit logs go to an audit server, you can't do anything undetected, even as root - the initial login, sudo to root and subsequent activity are logged, so even if I log in and kill the audit daemon, that will be detected and tied back to me.
If I even log on to one of the audit servers without prior approval, it will page the security team. And if they can't validate why I've logged in there, they'll lock out my account.
If I could find a zero day exploit that would give me root, that might get me in, but network accesses are logged too, so even if I found a back door way into the server, I'd still be discovered "Johnny, someone altered binaries on our server yesterday, there were no SSH logins, but your VPN session hit our application server port at the exact time the application daemon crashed. Explain?"
Even though I have server admin rights, I can't touch the network so I can't open an unaudited path to the server.
It's not that the server security will keep me from accessing the data, but it will keep me from accessing it without being discovered.
If you have full root access - then you don't go at the customer data directly, that's amateur hour.
Think about how the data is stored... is it within LVM of some sort(this is likely)? If so, create a new LV mirrored from the volumes containing customer data. Since you're root, make sure this new block device is absent from tools like 'lsblk' or walking through /dev/mapper.
That's just one (poor) suggestion. Never think about bee-lining right towards the valuable data though, that's precisely what every IDS is "best" at detecting. Come at it sideways, so to speak :)
Replying just to add another idea that came to me after hitting submit. Use the network-namespaces feature of linux(assuming this data resides on linux). Then you can create the equivalent of a hidden span-port, letting you inspect all the IP traffic at your leisure - including the traffic that contains customer data.
If someone can snoop traffic and see confidential data, you're not very serious about security - no confidential data is sent off-server without being encrypted. (SSL mostly, with point to point VPN tunnels for a few apps that don't support encryption natively)
That's very true - if data is leaving unencrypted then they have made a mistake. This is an easy mistake to make though if you bank on your LAN being truly private. However, on the other side of the coin...lots of traffic is unencrypted by design(NFS 1x,2x,3x, and 4x unless you use krb5p, and iscsi).
If you have the access to the encrypted volume, then you'll also have access to the key the moment the volume is unlocked and the key is stored in memory.
Because the bureaucracy makes implementing such measures unreasonably difficult. Implementing any kind of new system, even one related to security takes months, even in a simple case and it might takes years for the system to be fully realized. I've worked in federal contracting and have seem stuff like this happen. The whole process is glacial.
They don't seem to have any problem with adding new data sources to their growing pile of data and new data centers to house it, so they can implement proper security controls as well.
The article and in case you didn't read it, title of the article as shown above is about the new CIA Director.
That's Not Trump.
This is Rep. Mike Pompeo.
So whilst your point is that "oh Trump says stuff and doesn't mean it" that does not mean that everyone Trump hires also has the same get out of jail card.
> "I can assure you, that information was a lot more secure in the hands of the secure system that the government has spent hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars setting up, rather than on a private server in the home of Hillary Clinton," he said. "It's not a close call. There's a reason we have it set up that way."
Well...apparently not, right? I mean, wouldn't that be the lesson here? We gave BAH "hundreds of millions of dollars" to setup a server, and the information on that server still was made public. By multiple people. Without hacking required.
I find this strange for a group of people that may also have benefited from certain leaks to get in power. I would expect that they would put whistleblowers on a pedestal.
I must say that I don't envy my American friends with this future administration. They seem to change a lot of tunes and there seem to be a lot of contradictions.
The same kinds of leaks that were problematic for the last administration are problematic for the new administration. There's a small reset of credibility with the new administration - but not much.
The strategy is highly likely to be: magnify the idea that the last administration was corrupt, and suppress the idea that the new administration is corrupt (by suppressing whistleblowing, etc).
You don't enshrine traitors who've helped you to take over. You execute them because they have proven they are ready to betray their masters and they'll do it to you when opportune.
Firstly, the government's systems are wide open, and are hacked/breached all the time. They just cover it up so no one knows. This is mainly as a result of fear of competence and a deference to the lowest bidder (out of habit, stupidity, or legal mandate). That is, the lowest bidder usually builds crap, half-assed products, and there's a lot of that floating around in the almighty Gov't.
Secondly: hey idiot CIA director, did you not notice what was revealed by Snowden's leaks? Isn't there some law or unspoken rule about sitting idly by while the system becomes more corrupted? If it had been accidentally revealed this mass surveillance was happening and the media grabbed onto it, then wouldn't anyone near it occurring, whether innocent or not, be left ass out to take the blame? Wouldn't the idiots at large be saying something like, "and you knew, and sat by doing nothing; you're just as guilty."
If the CIA wants some one dead there are considerably less conspicuous ways to kill some one than a pretty public car crash.
Not to mention there are plenty of journalists that have covered and exposed worse things about the intelligence community that are just fine.
Heck Clinton's bad humor aside Assange is still alive, so is Snowden do you really think they are both out of reach of the US military or any of it's TLA's?
You really think that it's that hard to put a bullet in Assange's head anytime he peaks out of a window at the embassy? Heck I'm surprised an enemy state willing to cause the US irreversible political and PR damage didn't do it as a false flag yet.
IANALE, but I think you can only be pardoned if you've been convicted of something. If you've not even been officially charged (let alone, convicted), what will Obama pardon him for?
IANALE-either but from my understanding the Pardon is so wide (only restriction being preventing from stopping an impeachment) that the President can and has Pardoned people preemptively. There are some other limits on it as well for practical uses.
Most notably, President Ford pardoned President Nixon for basically anything he might have done as opposed to specific charges.
That's baffling. It's happened before multiple times, and Obama really should know that. Anyone have a conjecture as to what's going on there? Does he in fact not know? Is he somehow confused? Is he just lying? Were the previous examples secretly invalid? Is there a meaningful distinction between this case and those?
Preemptive of any investigation/indictment/etc. Not, as I understand it, in advance of the illegal action itself. (Not a distinction relevant here, of course, just clarifying)
Not true. As others have pointed out, Ford gave Nixon a blanket pardon for things he hadn't been charged with.
The only constitutional restrictions on presidential pardon are
1) He can only pardon crimes against the federal government. That means a presidential pardon won't get you out of a state rap, and it also means he can't use the pardon to affect civil cases.
2) His pardons can't affect impeachment cases. Most notably, he can't pardon himself to avoid impeachment.
Most legal scholars say the president also probably couldn't get away with issuing pardons for acts that haven't occurred yet, since that amounts to a change in the law and encroaches on Congress's powers.
The President's power to pardon is almost unlimited. Anyone may be given "a full, free, and absolute pardon for crimes he has committed or may have committed". c.f. Ford/Nixon
Depending on how the pardon was worded, it would probably mean the Trump administration could not take any legal action against Snowden for events covered by the pardon.
As others have alluded to, it wouldn't necessarily preclude illegal actions, though it could certainly change the optics on them.
Yes, but would likely create a tremendously yuge backlash from the intelligence community, and turn them against the Democratic party for a very long time. You think Wikileaks and Hillary's emails were bad? Piss off the intel community and have them turning their mighty tools of deception and surveillance on the entire DNC...
There are lots of people in the intelligence community that are appalled by domestic surveillance efforts as well.
Besides, if your accusation is correct (that they are so mindless and stupid as a group that their reaction to a controversial presidential pardon would be to go after the political party associated with that president), then the US should just fire every single last one of them and start from scratch. Seriously. If that's where things are at, then they're all negative contributors anyway. But I don't think it's that bad, I've got more faith in humanity than you do apparently (for the time being at least :( ).
> There are lots of people in the intelligence community that are appalled by domestic surveillance efforts as well.
[citation needed]. I've never heard anyone from the intel community say anything other than that they need more domestic surveillance powers and that we should shut up and stop complaining about the ones in place already.
We'll then these traitors that are within the US intelligence community who illegally target Americans citizens will reveal themselves and be sent to jail for treason.
The intelligence community that created these illegal programs will be held responsible for their crimes against America.
In your plan, how far do the prosecutions go? Is every last coder to be prosecuted for their crimes? In 60 years will we still be putting former NSA analysts on trial for treason like the Nazis (since treason, like murder, has no statute of limitations)? I'm legitimately asking.
The lightness with which you can say that a branch of the State could just "turn on internal enemies" is something straight out of Soviet Russia and other unsavoury regimes. Is this what the almighty US are now, a bunch of mafia organizations fighting for power with all the dirty tricks they can muster?
Obama should do The Right Thing and screw the intelligence community - what have they done for him in 8 years anyway? Started bad wars and lied under oath.
I think the intelligence community is a bit more rational than that, meaning if it's in their interests to turn their tools of deception and surveillance onto anyone, then they don't need an excuse of anger to do so. Interests are interests.
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. While I think your latter point is a bit ridiculous (but not implausible), I agree that there would be a lot to lose from a pardon and very little to gain.
After all, Snowden gave up his right to autonomy in 2013. His life now is entirely within the hands of history.
I doubt Russia would take kindly the US violating its territorial sovereignty and carrying out a high-profile assassination on a political refugee minutes away from the Kremlin palace. In fact, that is pretty much a sure move for war and an obvious casus belli. If that sounds unlikely to you, please ponder what choices this left the Russian federation with: look weak and feeble, or escalate.
It would also antagonize a lot of countries and almost mechanically create domestic pressure for foreign leaders to take a stand against the US. There is literally no better way to make non-alignment a popular political stance. Not only that, but the second gulf war has already harmed the credibility of the international order that the US and its allies have worked hard to instaurate. The US did not ratify the ICC, ignores UN war laws, operates an alternative detention facility to escape its own domestic civil rights protections, performs extrajudicial killings all around the ME and now take down political opponents abroad. That could very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back. And if it isn't, what comes next should. Not taking a moral stance on either of the things mentioned above, just observing that the increasing dissonance between official US narrative on foreign policy, and its real-world applications can only harm its prestige and credibility.
I can't think of a more terrible move for the USG than murdering Snowden.
tl;dr: The harm has been done already, killing him would only make things worse.
I agree. Though I really doubt we'd get an all out war. Things would just an escalate. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the US that Russia would like to assassinate.
Putin might be mad, but they wouldn't give 2 fucks about Snowden, if Russia got anything in return for granting him asylum they already got it.
That said the US would more likely want to exfiltrate him for this specific reason, they would want to know if and what did Snowden handed over to Russian intelligence.
The Obama administration hasn't exactly shied away from extrajudicial killings of Americans. If that were a practical possibility I suspect it would already have happened.
>"Having put friends of mine, friends of yours who serve in the military today an enormous risk because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers," Pompeo added.
I would like to see a good rebuttal to this which is not "the end justifies the means".
It's not a good argument because none of the Snowden Documents put individuals at risk. What he did do was disclose massive illegal and illegitimate activity, promulgating awareness of a giant surveillance network with built in parallel construction for the purposes of diplomatic and industrial espionage and mass propaganda.
That put our "military in danger" the same way setting innocent victims of military torture free: yeah, now there are people who are pissed off with legitimate gripes.
What information did he release that risked any danger to the public? He released information to the public that made them realize the government has been abusing their freedoms. Any US secret spying programs that were compromised should have been compromised. You're saying peoples' arguments for Snowden say the ends justify the means but that logic is the only reason the programs exist in the first place. Is that an adequate rebuttal?
It's not a rebuttal but if they want to start holding people to that standard perhaps a discussion about the issue of WMD's in a certain middle eastern country circa 2003 would be worth having?
Wikipedia says 4,809 coalition service members have died and 30,000+ have been wounded in that conflict so far.
I still don't understand why Obama isn't held accountable for this? Certainly this started under the Bush administration, but I find it hard to believe he was not complacent in the continuance of spy programs that spied on Americans without warrants.
So who exactly was put at enormous risk? Which specific document put that person/those people at risk? They keep touting this out, but never actually manage to tell us which piece of information caused this to happen. NOTHING I've read so far would actually do what he's claiming has happened.
As long as we're going to talk about the death penalty for people outing spies, I assume he's going to personally see Dick Cheney held accountable for outing Valerie Plame, right?
But I've actually come around to the belief that Snowden has always worked for the CIA. This was a turf war job by the CIA against the NSA that had the bonus effect of striking fear into the world's internet users.
Ed worked for the CIA before NSA and there are some interesting ties between Glen Greenwald and US's sponsored propaganda services.
So in your mind the CIA would implant a mole that would literally steal the NSA's playbook and 100,000's of documents, set of to China, then find and asylum in Russia and keep the most damning documents under a kill switch?
The NSA is already bigger than the CIA, it kinda always was, regardless of what the CIA thinks about it they would not cause irreversible damage to US national security and potentially hand Russia enough material to push their SIGINT and Cyber capabilities forward by at least a decade.
By all accounts Snowden has a considerably higher chance of being a Russian mole than a CIA agent.
Thanks for the reply. I'm new to spy stuff and I'm perhaps to open to kooky theories.
I guess my thinking is that the CIA has generations of international manipulation under it's belt and the NSA has become a rising star in the internet era. It seems to me that the NSA would start stumbling into some pretty shady CIA business, stuff that the CIA would rather keep to itself.
Intelligence agencies might be "shady" but they still tend to work for the interests of the country.
Regardless on what ego trip you think they are on they aren't going to jeopardise US national security to settle a score with an organization which is 10-20 times their size just because the cold war is over.
It's like saying that the CIA doesn't like the fact that most VISINT is now run by the NRO so they'll blow up satellite launches this is pretty absurd.
The funny part is that the CIA has a cyber program also, and it's pretty advanced by all accounts the kinetic payload for Stuxnet and a few other cyber attacks in which the US took part off or lead on it's own came from the CIA not the NSA.
I don't think Snowden should be killed, but I do agree he should be prosecuted and jailed for life. He committed treason. The reason is moot. I know many will disagree, but he should answer for his actions. Let a court - non-military that is - decide.
For it to be treason evidence would have to show that Snowden acted on behalf of a foreign power. Espionage requires that Snowden acted as a spy and gave or sold secrets to another party (presumably not a foreign power or adversary). Snowden gave his vetted information to an American journalist and a British journalist. You would have a hard time making either charge actually stick. But I'm certain the US government would ruin his life thoroughly regardless.
You're providing the definition for espionage, not treason. Snowden is undoubtedly guilty of treason. I think he should be pardoned or given only a light sentence, but it's definitely treason.
If he is to be prosecuted for illegal disclosures of classified documents, let him have temporary immunity, until after the trials of all the people implicated in criminal activities by those documents.
After all, those folks committed their crimes first. He shouldn't get to jump the get-into-prison queue just because he's infamous now.
I reject the notion that someone with as much domestic support as Snowden has (admittedly not as much as he should) can be declared a traitor by some folks with a political agenda that is oppositional and actively harmful to my self and life.
Kind of sucks for Snowden, but more to the point, an incredibly stupid position for the U.S. to take.
† EDIT: Given that while his chances in Russia may not be best, for much longer -- his prospects for asylum in many other countries, especially in Europe, will rise quite substantially if he is explicitly threatened with a death sentence.