So this seems to be the "Dr Strangelove" scenario playing out, but with (fortunately) exploits rather than nuclear weapons. It sounds like many countries have other significant exploits into other countries, but this isn't "admitted"; it's not an unignorable public fact (+). The Russian destabilisation plan is to get Western countries to see NSA attacks on them and lose trust in the US - plus an attack on the concept of democracy by getting enough people to lose faith in the US election.
(+) "unignorable public fact" is a clunky way of expressing it, but I mean something that you can bring up in a news report and politicians discuss what the appropriate reaction is, rather than challenging the fact itself. This is getting increasingly rare.
It takes Russia pointing this out to make us lose trust in the U.S.? I think the U.S. has done this all on their own. Snowden was just the latest whistleblower showing the world they can't be trusted. There were others before him, but it got swept under the rug.
We all know the U.S. election system is flawed to a point of being broken and thus democracy as we like to believe it's supposed to work doesn't even exist. But everyone just accepts that's the way it is and carries on with life because "at least it's not North Korea." If you hadn't already lost faith in the U.S. election system years ago, then you've got your head in the sand.
It might be a hard pill to swallow, but I think if Russia's plan is to make the U.S. wake up and smell the coffee, they're actually doing the U.S. people a huge favour.
"The Puzzle Palace" was written in 1982. It's by an insider, James Bamford, and about his discovering by happenstance that people at the NSA listening post he was stationed at were listening in on american conversations illegally.
He also discovered that the Carter administration's justice department had opened a criminal investigation on the NSA, and through FOIA managed to get a copy of the file. It was pretty damning stuff.
That was the point I was trying to make with "unignorable public fact" - "we" don't "all" "know" that, for various values of those words. Would you expect TV anchors to say things like "Well, I'm standing outside this polling place, but I'm not really sure what the point is because elections are broken"? Millions of people get involved in fighting elections like they mean it.
Consensus about this kind of thing is a real problem, because the landscape is polluted with lies and delusions.
Edit: I specifically said "lose faith in the US election", not "lose faith in the US [generally]"; it's one thing if the bad policy is the result of legitimate elections, it's quite another if either the vote is widely rigged (hacking voting machines), subject to intimidation. People ending up believing it's rigged when it actually wasn't is just as bad, it's the kind of thing that leads to political violence.
Oh, I don't mean it's rigged or hacked or subject to intimidation. I feel like it's legitimately hamstrung/broken.
Equally I haven't lost faith in the U.S. - there are millions of amazing Americans. I've just lost faith in the U.S.'s a). ability to elect the person they really want in charge because the voting system is broken and b). the person they _do_ elect doesn't have any meaningful power anyway because the senate is purposely designed to restrict any meaningful power.
The US political climate is most certainly not in a great place, but I wouldn't blame our system of checks and balances. In fact, I'd say that it's working as intended. It would be a horrible scenario if a president could easily override the will of Congress or the Supreme Court.
Why do people insist on calling the US a democracy ?
It is a Constitutional Republic with the only democratic process being the representatives you elect .... represent you ... sometimes... if they feel like it.... unless they have been bribe^H^H^H^H lobbied to do otherwise.
It is a democracy. A Constitutional Republic is just one way of implementing a democracy, similar to how a constitutional monarchy is just one way of implementing a monarchy. Mob rule everyone votes on everything and even a majority by one decides everything is another (poor) way of implementing democracy.
Sorry... your logic is flawed at least semantically. If a "constitutional monarchy is just one way of implementing a monarchy," then presumably a "Constitutional Republic is just one way of implementing a" republic.
The only nexus between republic and democracy in this case would be the Constitutional Republican Guarantee clause. Since that has essentially never been adjudicated we can't know for certain whether - at least in Constitutional terms - a Republic does convey democratic rights.
A republic is a land where political authority isn't formally heritable personal property (e.g., basically a not-monarchy), a republic can also (like the US) be a representative democracy. It can also be an authoritarian dictatorship. It can also be a direct democracy.
> A republic bound by a constitution cannot be a democracy of any sort.
You clearly are using "democracy" in a very peculiar sense. If you narrowly define "democracy" as "lawless mob rule", then your statement is true, but that's not what the word democracy is generally used to mean when discussing political systems.
Even accepting your personal definition of "democracy" to mean "pure majority rule", constitutions typically have provisions for modifications by majority vote. So a being "bound by a constitution" does not eliminate majority rule.
That definition is anything but personal and carries the history of the democratic system prevalent at the time the term was coined. Just because you decide to use the same term for everything now doesn't mean that the original definition is "personal".
Democracy never meant "mob rule". Even in Athenian democracy, few things were decided by actual majority rule. Never in history has there been a democracy where pure majority rule was the typical case.
So yes, it is a personal definition. Scholars don't use this definition. Pundits don't use this definition. The common man doesn't use this definition. It's a BS definition, and if it weren't, it would be pointless and redundant because "majority rule" captures this already.
That's where you're wrong. A democracy is a state where people have (or nominally should have) equal power to affect society's collective decisions. Not all implementations of "majority rule" meet this criterion.
Political decisions affect everyone, thus everyone should have an equal share in determining which ones we take - at least a priori.
We can cede some power if we decide that a certain class of questions are none of our business (for instance, delegate some decisions to a local level, or give Sharia courts jurisdiction over their adherents to take an uglier example). Or declare that some questions are non-political in nature, and should be decided by some sort of experts. But the decision about what is our own business must always be our own business.
Another way of saying the same is that all legitimate government comes from the people - as opposed to e.g. the divine right of kings, or a "natural" aristocracy.
How can you have that without at least a one line constitution that says, more or less, "The majority rules"? You beg the question, sir.
You very narrow definition of "democracy", majority rule without a constitution, isn't possible. Thus your definition is useless and therefor meaningless.
You don't get to narrowly define democracy to mean "mob rule" and expect people to use your meaningless definition. This is not the original nor the currently accepted definition and pretending that everyone should use your personal definition will not make it true.
It doesn't matter what the founders wanted, they're dead and buried. Their whims and dreams codified in this Constitution that everyone lives and dies by.
What matters is what the people want now and for the future of their United States... are you going to live forever more adhering to the rules of dead people? Seems er... pointless.
Doesn't that depend what the representatives then do? Also, what about federal judges? None of those are democratically elected, and they get to interpret all the laws in ways that have great consequence. Hence, America's government is a little more complicated than "democracy", although some parts of it are surely "democratic" (e.g. the house of reps).
> Doesn't that depend what the representatives then do?
No. If you democratically elect terrible representatives who eat puppies, it's still democratic.
> Also, what about federal judges? None of those are democratically elected, and they get to interpret all the laws in ways that have great consequence.
You don't have to elect every government official for it to be a representative democracy. Democracy means that the ultimate power is vested in the people. If you elect representatives who appoint judges, the judges are still appointed by the power of the people.
> Hence, America's government is a little more complicated than "democracy", although some parts of it are surely "democratic" (e.g. the house of reps).
No government is simple. America is very clearly not a direct democracy, nor are all officials elected, but it is still a democracy.
While I see what you are saying, the OP to your post has it correct. You can say a republic is a bastardized form of democracy, but the reverse is not true. You can look at one of the few true democracies that has ever existed as an example - ancient Greece. Every citizen[1] could vote and put forward changes to laws or even create new laws (obviously with a majority vote).
[1] A citizen was considered to be any person born of Greece, white and male.
I doubt that the Athenians had the present-day concept of "white people". Wikipedia says that citizens "had to be descended from citizens", so maybe at least in a certain era nobody known to be descended from people coming from outside of Athens could be a citizen.
Edit: looking at one of the references, it seems that there was a year when explicit citizenship lists were drawn up based on all free men who lived in Athens (maybe with some kind of ethnic exclusion at that time too?). From then on until Pericles, children could be added to the list if their fathers were on the list. After Pericles, children could be added to the list if their mothers and fathers were on the list.
First, it was Athens, not Greece as a whole. It was free, male descendants of Athenians who were allowed to participate - their degree of whiteness was not an issue independent of that. They had a large class of immigrants and descendants of immigrants who were not allowed to participate.
Most importantly, while there were a few questions settled by referendum where all citizens could vote, most were settled by randomly allotted juries. This meant there was little advantage to forming political parties around popular demagogues, or run well-funded propaganda campaigns.
Athenian democracy got knocked down many times and came back every time, except the last. The second-to-last time, a bunch of immigrants had fought for the liberation and restoration of democracy, and some leaders argued forcefully that they should be awarded citizenship for this. But they didn't get it, the existing citizens voted against.
The reason democracy finally failed was probably this. The Athenians knew (especially the poor) just how unusual and lucky they were to have political freedom, so they were fiercely protective of it - and didn't want to dilute it by sharing it. Eventually a large part of their society had so little stake in democracy that they didn't bother to restore it.
> Why do people insist on calling the US a democracy ?
Because it is designed as a (representative) democracy. Its also a federal republic whose constituent units are mostly-representative [but some with significant aspects of direct] democracies.
What do you think the representatives doing when they're trying to fuel up the corporations in your district? They're representing your interests by making sure that the jobs stay where they are, just not the interest of the American people.
The senators represent the state's interest, the representatives represent the district's interest.
off topic, but I keep seeing things in the format of "word^^^^^" and "bribe^H^H^H^H" things like that. In your case it seems to indicate sarcasm, but that doesn't always seem to be the case.
>> If you hadn't already lost faith in the U.S. election system years ago, then you've got your head in the sand.
The only check on this is the separation of powers, and even then, career politicians, special interests, and tons of money have way too much influence. Add in the fact that the press were supposed to be the check on government and now they're firmly in bed with the political parties. All you get is the incredibly slanted, biased, and spun stories to influence you so all you get is their viewpoint. I can't imagine how I would see the world if I only read the New York Times and only watched MSNBC.
If some of the fringe third parties would all come together and find a common platform, it would certainly replace my faith in the current system.
Career politicians, special interests and tons of money got comprehensively spanked in the Republic Primary process. Trump is an even worse choice - but he demonstrated that it is possible to beat the machine. Sanders came very close to doing exactly the same thing. The US system is significantly more favourable to insurgents than many.
It was interesting to see how the "establishment" Republicans tried at every turn to thwart and remove Trump from the process, but in the end relented (however much it pained them) because that's what the voters said they wanted.
The "establishment" Democrats were the same except they succeeded in placing their candidate ahead of what many believe their base really wanted.
> But everyone just accepts that's the way it is and carries on with life because "at least it's not North Korea."
They aren't Brazil either, or even most places in Europe.
Were I an US citizen, I'd be very wary of people trying to fix Democracy¹. They have a pretty good quality of life, and any attempted change can go very badly very easily - the more "let's fix things" is the change, the easier it could go badly.
1 - Hell, I'm wary of them here at Brazil! Because, you know, we aren't North Korea either, nor Venezuela. That said, we recently got a very good and very safe fix applied - the trick is that nobody was claiming it was a fix for Democracy, it was some people "just doing their work" on unforeseen ways.
Part of the question is the basic mechanics of democracy: does everyone actually get a vote, and does the count accurately reflect votes cast? "Fixing" that should be less controversial than it is.
Far too many voting machines are still insecure, and one of the candidates is pre-accusing the other of fixing the election.
But it is not whether it should be fixed that is controversial. It is how you fix it. And there's plenty of danger with most fixing procedures.
And yes, there's also some propaganda for not fixing it at all. That's what support voting machines (at least here). But, again, how do you fix the problem that makes propaganda viable?
For the specific problem of voting machines, candidates accusing others may be the best avenue for moving people in the correct direction.
Look, even if you believe that dark, unseen forces control the world using the US as a conduit - it would appear that the world has been the better for it. Given a choice of world management between Russian and US in this regard, the choice is pretty straightforward.
People who complain about Europe, the US and the general Western alliances management of the world are selling a pretty ugly alternative.
I think many people of vietnam, cambodia, laos, indonesia, angola, nicaragua, grenada, most of the middle east, afghanistan, pakistan [1] and so on would strongly disagree. Potentially lesser evil out of 2 evils ain't no good choice.
Most of these countries (or regions) never took up capitalism, free markets, and liberalism. Being partners on either side of a proxy war obviously didn't help.
So they deserved it then? Please keep in mind you're talking about many innocent bystanders being killed as an outcome of US foreign policy.
I don't think it's entirely black and white in the other direction either but your comment strikes me as crass and indifferent towards human life, dehumanizing, confusing people with their larger society and government.
The classic example of a generally stable and democratic country being overthrown into illiberalism and mass murder by the US is Chile, which was missing from that list.
If, you believe what you say. If you believe Russia releasing hacks and influencing US elections -- how is that any different than what the US does?
If you believe all that, you have to consider the results of Putin's Russia: Oligarchy & Nationalization, direct imperialism (Ukraine), the support of extremists/facists in foreign countries...
Yes, Putin's Russia is terrible, and exporting problems. They're a contributor to the Syrian mess as well.
That doesn't make it OK for the US to do it as well! This is what I meant by "false dichotomy". If anything, the US (and especially UK) use of domestic surveillance and extraterritorial interference makes it harder for us to argue that Russia should not do those things either.
#1, Yes, I specifically called out his argument as being hollow, and supported only by an appeal to "everyone knows" - he's self selecting his audience.
Even within that audience which implicitly accepts the government is more directly engaged in protection of sovereignty via clandestine means against it's own citizens -- that audience should probably consider the goals of the sources.
>> The Russian destabilisation plan is to get Western countries to see NSA attacks on them and lose trust ...
That assumes that we 'the people' are part of the equation. We aren't. This looks like standard gamesmanship between intelligence agencies. They operate in a world above the cares and needs of the common people. Such messages normally pass quietly through known channels (servers known by both sides). The going public says to me that the message wasn't getting through, or wasn't being taken seriously by the right people. This is about communicating intention to someone who, perhaps, needed to be publicly shamed in order that they take the situation seriously. That would fit the pattern of many 'cold war' spy games.
Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any insightful commentary that is on the longer side.
if we're lucky, twitter will do what they did with the hashtag and other things when they realised their users needs were 'inventing' new features.
The 1/n 2/n n/n tweets is a huge indicator of a feature need. Of course, that's going to dilute their original value proposition of short direct messages.
Let's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters.
(Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)
That's not relevant to the OPs point. The point is that even SMS clients were capable of merging multiple messages together, yet Twitter has still failed to do so. So whether or not they were SMS doesn't matter.
edit: well, not everyone knows what an Oh By Code is yet, so for now I suppose the link format is best, but eventually, just the code itself will suffice ...
I agree, but twitter does simplify the spread of certain "quotes". I doubt the same amount of people would take to social media to share a blog entry as opposed to tweets.
If HN and Reddit are any indication, if you post a link to a blog post, people will respond without reading it. People don't like switching domains, especially if they are browsing from an app. (Myself included)
Sure but that's not just being lazy, its also a learned habit. There's a great deal of blog posts (like most writing in general) that is 5% information and 95% fluff. Sometimes you want the art, sometimes (esp. the engineering mindset) you just want the information. Skipping to comments frequently yields this, often with bonus comments like "I'm an actual expert and that post is very innaccurate".
This. I frequently find myself skimming over HN comments on a submission before reading the article, because it provides a hint at whether reading the submission is actually worth my time.
In my experience, twitter is one of the worst offenders here, with an exorbitant amount of HTML, Javascript and pop-ups just to prevent me from reading 140 characters.
Ironically, I find Facebook's webpage way better on mobile than their actual app. I believe their app may originally have been designed for cellphone battery endurance testing. After a bit of hacking, someone figured out it could access Facebook and they decided to release it as an app.
True, but there are ways you can do something similar on a blog. If you link to the blog post from Twitter, I think that becomes a simple confirmation that the person wrote it.
Or, given this is Snowden, he could GPG sign his blog posts and post his fingerprint to Twitter or something to verify identity.
Given the way that people like to pull quotes out of context, writing something as a series of tweets forces you to look at each piece and see if it can stand alone.
There is an interesting story and for some reason HN's top comments have to do with people being annoyed he tweeted rather than blogged. Let's hope some additional voting improves the s/n ratio of this thread, and the useless comments (including this one) disappear.
> 5) Knowing this, NSA's hackers (TAO) are told not to leave their hack tools ("binaries") on the server after an op. But people get lazy.
I know enough to say that this sentence reveals a lot about what snowden knows, and what he doesn't. Mostly the latter. He doesn't seem to understand the context and meaning of acronyms he uses.
I know enough to say that an anonymous comment on the internet pretending to know about NSA procedures & jargon is not worth much especially when said comment is attacking someone we know for sure had access to the NSA.
Alright bud. I don't have a facebook, twitter, instagram, or any of that other stuff, so I'm not sure how to refute your claim of anonymous. I can say that anonymous hostile replies sure don't do much to further the conversation. What do they say, something about pots and kettles?
Are you seriously expecting us to believe that your friend is telling you how the NSA is internally structured and how sensitive foreign operation intelligence programs work?
Plus in another comment of yours you claimed to know how General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle worked behind the scenes but when asked to post more info you never did.
So you're seemingly a Linux admin, but know tons about the inner workings of both military contractors, the DoD, and NSA from your single friend? Seems uhh a stretch, let's just say that.
To use an analogy this is like someone saying the "US Army" in reference to infantrymen specifically and then someone, such as yourself, coming along throwing their hands up and saying "The US Army is composed of much more than just 'infantrymen,' this comment shows willful ignorance of that fact."
We can all read the Wikipedia article on the TAO[0]. You aren't fooling anyone by acting like you know more than is publically available, and trying to correct someone who provably worked for the NSA seems at best arrogant, at worst ridiculous.
C'mon, it's Twitter, where you only have 140 characters. He's not going to type out "NSA's hackers (generally part of the group known as Tailored Access Operations, but there are some in other groups)" just so you can't be pedantic.
Yes, TAO is more than hackers. NSA isn't the only organization in possession of SigInt groups which operate like this, hell, its a pretty long list of groups.
However, you may want to consider Snowden isn't hostile enough to go through and list ever group in the US that maintains an arsenal of malware for operations in public. That doesn't necessarily mean ignorance, a more generous interpretation is everyone knows about TAO so he calls it TAO.
I realize you probably don't like the guy, but would you really preferred he list off every SigInt group in the US with a malware arsenal just to cover all his bases and all of their component groups that operate in relation to it?
Idk about you, but I don't need him to post org charts of all of that to get the gist.
Seems like it would a be a fun multidisciplinary place to work, but wouldn't wanna jump through all the hoops and tend to weight any quest for "secret" knowledge with such that the limit approaches zero.
> it would a be a fun multidisciplinary place to work
They apparently don't shy from morally questionable ways to accomplish their goals. So if you are into it.. Snowden actually wasn't and that was one of the reasons why he decided to quit CIA and eventually become a whistleblower.
> but wouldn't wanna jump through all the hoops and tend to weight any quest for "secret" knowledge with such that the limit approaches zero.
There was this part, i also tend to think there are more technically interesting problems than circle jerking over the latest js framework for engaging with skinner boxes that more people get the so wonderful opportunity to make decent money for.
>* Snowden actually wasn't and that was one of the reasons why he decided to quit CIA and eventually become a whistleblower.*
I also dont see snowden as a hero like most paint him to be, binney, drake et al. and many others came before (whose opinions get often ignored compared to the latest lord savior). The fact that he tends to get the most paid press offerings and stamp of approval from the media™ tends to make me think lower of him, as with his dubious "service" in the first place… shrugs… his life, not mine.
The hack of an NSA malware staging server is not unprecedented, but the publication of the take is. Here's what you need to know: (1/x)
1) NSA traces and targets malware C2 servers in a practice called Counter Computer Network Exploitation, or CCNE. So do our rivals.
2) NSA is often lurking undetected for years on the C2 and ORBs (proxy hops) of state hackers. This is how we follow their operations.
3) This is how we steal their rivals' hacking tools and reverse-engineer them to create "fingerprints" to help us detect them in the future.
4) Here's where it gets interesting: the NSA is not made of magic. Our rivals do the same thing to us -- and occasionally succeed.
5) Knowing this, NSA's hackers (TAO) are told not to leave their hack tools ("binaries") on the server after an op. But people get lazy.
6) What's new? NSA malware staging servers getting hacked by a rival is not new. A rival publicly demonstrating they have done so is.
7) Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the DNC hack.
8) Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility. Here's why that is significant:
9) This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove US responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server.
10) That could have significant foreign policy consequences. Particularly if any of those operations targeted US allies.
11) Particularly if any of those operations targeted elections.
12) Accordingly, this may be an effort to influence the calculus of decision-makers wondering how sharply to respond to the DNC hacks.
13) TL;DR: This leak looks like a somebody sending a message that an escalation in the attribution game could get messy fast.
Bonus: When I came forward, NSA would have migrated offensive operations to new servers as a precaution - it's cheap and easy. So? So...
The undetected hacker squatting on this NSA server lost access in June 2013. Rare public data point on the positive results of the leak.
You're welcome, @NSAGov. Lots of love.