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This play is straight out of the wikileaks playbook that they used almost verbatim when the us was making a lot of noise about assange. It appeared to be effect

by trotsky 13y ago

This play is straight out of the wikileaks playbook that they used almost verbatim when the us was making a lot of noise about assange. It appeared to be effective, in that US intelligence took the threat seriously and were concerned about the ramifications of what might be included. One element of that was the belief that those docs included some kind of "kill shot" class leak that would pretty much sink Bank of America. There were certainly elements of truth to all of these things - there was a document cache, it was encrypted, people did have split keys, it probably did include elements of what was revealed as the robosigning scandal. But from hearing discussion about it the subject, I think that US Intelligence now more or less holds the opinion that it was a bluff. Nothing of significant harm was included in the unreleased documents, though I think that's informed speculation and not some kind of confirmed fact. All of a sudden after Snowden was getting helped by wikileaks and he was under a lot of pressure, the revelation of a similar encrypted cache of documents distributed widely was given to a lot of news agencies, and has regularly come up at opportune times in friendly media outlets. I haven't been told this by anyone, but I'm pretty sure the intelligence community isn't buying it. Reports by greenwald were somewhat inconsistent with idea that there is a large cache of even more damning documents left. He's been travelling internationally, was staying in hong kong where many services operate openly, and presumably under pressure from a variety of security services and states as he tries to escape moscow and secure a safe place to live. It is hard to keep secret keys and documents secure under the best of conditions, and those are about the worst conditions possible. The only reasonable thing to assume here is that it's all burned - everything snowden walked away with is or will be in the hands of foreign states and anything particularly damning will likely end up in the press sooner or later. So if you believe that, that there is no way to unring this bell, the last thing you're going to do is spend any time being concerned about a dead man's crypto cache. If you're willing to do enough horse trading to close the entire european airspace to a single individual, you're pissed and you're gonna do whatever it is you want to do. That's not going to include killing him, simply because the cost is high and the benefit is low. But they are clearly going to exert an inhuman amount of resources into making him regret being born. And that's absolutely unrelated to Mr. Snowden. That's all for the effect it will have on anyone having similar thoughts. I think he's awesome and did Americans and the world a great favor, and that's he's really brave. And yet after seeing this go down if I was ever in a position to consider doing something like this there is no fucking way I'd ever think I could handle this kind of heat. Not a chance, no question. Problem solved.

jlgreco 13y ago
If it's not a bluff, then it would behoove anyone with an insurance file to give the decryption keys for at least some of it to the intelligence agency that they are protecting themselves from to prove that it is not a bluff. If that wasn't done, I would naturally assume a bluff.
- trotsky 13y ago
  The way these things work is no one person actually has the whole key - portions of it are distributed to various people you trust but may otherwise be unlikely to conspire. They might not even know who has the other parts. The idea is it takes an extreme event to bring them together to decide to combine the key. That way no one is in danger of being intimidated etc. into revealing the key by a hostile party. I'm sure nobody doubts there is an encrypted file with unreleased documents and that the key has been split and distributed. The only question is, exactly what is it that is in that cache and how damaging would it be to be released publicly. The element of the unknown in terms of what precisely stays unreleased is the primary nexus point in US policy here. Even if they believe nothing of considerable value is left, anyone the gambles there and loses no longer has a career in the us government. Providing any specific damaging proof to them alone is only helpful to them - it allows them to confirm how accurate they've been at estimating the leak, and they can preemptively act to diffuse the impact or provide disinformation. And they get a good read on what the higher end of the stuff he has is. I'm 90% sure this is what the leak of the Brussels/EU tap and intrusion documents were about. They were released soon after the cache was first mentioned, and at a time he was being effectively held captive in an airport as every sympathetic country was suddenly being offered huge incentives to turn their backs. It certainly served as proof some highly damaging documents still had been held back. It may not have softened US rhetoric much, but it may have been effective in convincing the us to stop applying as much pressure on potential sources of asylum. The biggest problem is that the NSA really isn't super worried about what the public finds out as much as they are institutionally built to be worried about what other foreign services learn. They have to assume that somebody has or will get the whole cache privately - either covertly or as a trade for passage etc. And while they aren't happy about it becoming public either, it isn't the end of the world. After all, the same year they got caught illegally wiretapping everyone they got the telecoms blanket immunity and were at that very moment developing PRISM. The NSA leaks have been huge, yet there are no serious calls for congressional hearings, the executive isn't disowning it, there is zero risk the public is about to stage a revolution and most significantly - they haven't even said they're going to stop doing any of it. While Alexander will probably be losing his job, the publicity may even end up as a net positive for surveillance USA. Now that its out in the open and not resulted in any apparent systemic meltdown in sigint - it only makes it easier to start the next even more expansive program. After all, whoever they go to will know that Schmidt and Zuckerberg ended up just fine, and people barely even remember that verizon gave away cdr for every customer call without question. I bet there hasn't even been a blip in verizon subscriber numbers. They really have carte-blanche now, and tons of people in the community were expecting that these leaks would have a great deal more blowback.

by trotsky 13y ago

jlgreco 13y ago

If it's not a bluff, then it would behoove anyone with an insurance file to give the decryption keys for at least some of it to the intelligence agency that they are protecting themselves from to prove that it is not a bluff. If that wasn't done, I would naturally assume a bluff.

trotsky 13y ago
The way these things work is no one person actually has the whole key - portions of it are distributed to various people you trust but may otherwise be unlikely to conspire. They might not even know who has the other parts. The idea is it takes an extreme event to bring them together to decide to combine the key. That way no one is in danger of being intimidated etc. into revealing the key by a hostile party. I'm sure nobody doubts there is an encrypted file with unreleased documents and that the key has been split and distributed. The only question is, exactly what is it that is in that cache and how damaging would it be to be released publicly. The element of the unknown in terms of what precisely stays unreleased is the primary nexus point in US policy here. Even if they believe nothing of considerable value is left, anyone the gambles there and loses no longer has a career in the us government. Providing any specific damaging proof to them alone is only helpful to them - it allows them to confirm how accurate they've been at estimating the leak, and they can preemptively act to diffuse the impact or provide disinformation. And they get a good read on what the higher end of the stuff he has is. I'm 90% sure this is what the leak of the Brussels/EU tap and intrusion documents were about. They were released soon after the cache was first mentioned, and at a time he was being effectively held captive in an airport as every sympathetic country was suddenly being offered huge incentives to turn their backs. It certainly served as proof some highly damaging documents still had been held back. It may not have softened US rhetoric much, but it may have been effective in convincing the us to stop applying as much pressure on potential sources of asylum. The biggest problem is that the NSA really isn't super worried about what the public finds out as much as they are institutionally built to be worried about what other foreign services learn. They have to assume that somebody has or will get the whole cache privately - either covertly or as a trade for passage etc. And while they aren't happy about it becoming public either, it isn't the end of the world. After all, the same year they got caught illegally wiretapping everyone they got the telecoms blanket immunity and were at that very moment developing PRISM. The NSA leaks have been huge, yet there are no serious calls for congressional hearings, the executive isn't disowning it, there is zero risk the public is about to stage a revolution and most significantly - they haven't even said they're going to stop doing any of it. While Alexander will probably be losing his job, the publicity may even end up as a net positive for surveillance USA. Now that its out in the open and not resulted in any apparent systemic meltdown in sigint - it only makes it easier to start the next even more expansive program. After all, whoever they go to will know that Schmidt and Zuckerberg ended up just fine, and people barely even remember that verizon gave away cdr for every customer call without question. I bet there hasn't even been a blip in verizon subscriber numbers. They really have carte-blanche now, and tons of people in the community were expecting that these leaks would have a great deal more blowback.