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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story
- 2close4comfort 12y agowritten by James Bamford too
- XorNot 12y agoSo there's a bigger story here: good lord is the web-design here irritating. They've overridden scroll events so they at best don't work properly. Scrolling on a laptop gives you a weird non-mapping slide animation. This is seriously one of the most unreadable articles, from a design sense, that I've ever seen.
- god_bless_texas 12y agoI just came here to post the same thing. Can't really read it from ipad.
- khc 12y agoHorrible to scroll on mobile as well. With chrome on android, you first see Snowden's face with a bunch of numbers on the top. If somehow you figure out that you need to scroll (on mobile, the scrollbar is usually not visible until you scroll), you have to go through seemingly pages of nothingness. AND IF SOMEHOW you still don't give up, there, CONTENT! On firefox for android, I actually see "The most wanted man in the world" overlay on top of Snowden's face as I scroll. That somehow was not visible in chrome.
- iak8god 12y ago> Horrible to scroll on mobile as well That's interesting. I came here to say that it looks and works great on mobile, specifically chrome on android. Sounds like it's wildly inconsistent between devices.
- serf 12y agoAgreed. My finger is now broken from the amount of mousewheelin' I had to do to get past Snowden's mug.
- pera 12y agoSome people thinks™ this kind of design is actually good, especially for tablets. For me they look like one of those powerpoint presentations of cute cats that you used to receive from your aunt a couple of years back...
- happyscrappy 12y agoAnd the seriousness is kind of lost with banner ads for Cheetos.
- a3n 12y agoAdBlock Edge. When I first installed it, my motivation was partly to fuck with The Man. But good lord what a great web experience I've had since then. It's almost a completely different web, with a completely different purpose, to inform me rather than to sell me.
- Noctem 12y agoI don't understand Adblock Edge. Why use a fork of an old version of Adblock Plus with "acceptable ads" disabled instead of just disabling them yourself in the original (and continuously updated) product? Are there any changes besides the preconfigured disabling of Adblock's whitelist?
- wldcordeiro 12y agoBecause obviously Adblock Plus sold out and is untrustworthy now. /s I use Adblock Plus, and I have the acceptable ads enabled and have no complaints.
- a3n 12y agoTBH I couldn't figure out which of the variants was the "right" one to use, I'm not part of whatever community might surround those tools. I forget what swayed me to Edge; I might have just flipped the fuckit bit and tried something. Whichever one works is probably good enough.
- mkohlmyr 12y agoYep, I've only scrolled down to the first page and I already know theres no way I'm doing going to read through this. The whole fading / animating images in and out thing is at least as annoying too, it seems to slow the scroll down even further. I also find it hilarious how they've paid so much attention to constructing this look and feel and then it's so severely broken with the way they incorporate the ads.
- dabernathy89 12y agoI actually don't mind this kind of scrolling - I think it can be useful for storytelling. In this example the scrolling over text doesn't seem to be messed with, which is good. I think what's frustrating about this example in particular is that there is no feedback for scrolling when the page 'pauses' on an image. There should at least be an element moving so that the user knows the page isn't freezing.
- EliRivers 12y agoHas it (or the link) been changed? I see just text, beginning "THE MESSAGE ARRIVES" with a thin bar at the top, containing numbers 1 to 7. Scrolling down instantly scrolls the text; there's the occasional thin bar across screen with an advert, and pictures do fade up and down as I scroll, but there is no point at which the text doesn't scroll as expected. Using Opera on Ubuntu.
- mark_l_watson 12y agoI liked the effect. I am on a MBA running Safari and the scrolling with revealed photos worked great. I thought it was a good effect and helped tell a good story. Later, I will try reading the article on my smartphone to see how it is on mobile.
- hughw 12y agoI hated it at first. Then I got used to it, and I liked it.
- tatterdemalion 12y agoMy experience is that the scroll effects do not negatively impact readability and are mostly nice. I like the magazine effect. The intro effect w/ the fade in I don't like so much because it creates a sense that your scroll isn't working. But I like the scrolling effect of section headers a lot. I am using Firefox & Ubuntu on an HP laptop.
- 2close4comfort 12y agoThe TAO killed the internet in Syria not to mention MonsterMind. Just when you thought it was safe to get back on the internet...
- AwesomeTogether 12y ago"Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs?" if the article presents a different answer than what's already known, through snowden statements communicated to laura poitras and greenwald, then they're probably not true, and if it repeats the same stuff, this is obviously a stupid question to ask and the article's just marketing b.s.
- danso 12y agoI, too, have the exact same cynicism as you do (and I haven't yet read the article)...however, seeing James Bamford as the author changes things a bit. Bamford is the independent researcher who, back when the NSA was mostly unheard of and beyond reproach, cracked the organization through classic reporting and research. Of all the investigative reporters, Bamford is one that has my highest respect...he didn't have a news organization behind him, or any institutional privileges...this is not to say that someone like Greenwald is a lesser reporter (IMO, Greenwald worked incredibly hard to be in a position, years later, for someone like Snowden to trust)...but Bamford was really working in the wilderness and is not a lightweight in this field. Some more background here: http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=17031 http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=17031 Anyway, that's just my bias going into this piece.
- igravious 12y agoExactly. Snowden has answered this many times. He has said (and I paraphrase) that the public of the USA needs to know what is being done to them and in their name so that they can get to choose and have a decision on the scope and limits of these programs. In other words Snowden has said effectively that if the public could get a direct vote on these issues and the public chose the status quo then he'd go along with that. I don't doubt that Snowden doesn't want the status quo, he'd like to see the more (in his opinion) egregious civil liberty over-stepping practices rolled back but if his views differed from public majority he'd go along with that. He just wants the public to know and have a say, he's made this point a bunch of times and I'll cite it for you if you really insist :)
- AwesomeTogether 12y agoEd Snowden acting out his WhiteHouse situation room fantasies https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10328969/rolledupsleeves.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10328969/rolledupsleeves...
- Hacker37 12y agoI am not sure what part of the story was not already told.
- toyg 12y agoTAO bricking the Syrian main router and MonsterMind implementing a sort of cyber-MAD system, are explicitly called out as exclusive revelations. They are important because: * Until now, any loss of Internet connectivity in Syria has always been interpreted as "bad dictator censoring people". I'm not saying that's never been the case, but now we know the US can have more control on global internet infrastructure than we knew possible. Next time some "bad" middle-eastern country loses the internet, US propaganda will have a harder time making people believe it's all due to bad actors. * As Snowden eloquently says, an automated response system has very serious ethical challenges. Automation is not flawless, we've learnt it in the '70s and '80s through a number of very close calls with nuclear missiles; and in such an ethereal world as the internet (where bits can be faked almost at will), aggressive response should probably never be automatic. The article also fleshes out Snowden's career in a better way than most similar pieces, and heavily suggests that the "second leaker" theory has some legs (at one point, personally I thought the second leaker was actually a USgov operation to distract reporters from the Snowden trove and/or spend some capital to re-establish relationships with them; but if Poitras really lawyered up when asked, chances are that there's something else as well).
- bausson 12y agoI won't have a problem thinking it's due to a bad actor. I will doubt it's the one the US are pointing at, though.
- cpwright 12y ago> if Poitras really lawyered up when asked, chances are that there's something else as well). Or it is in her (and Snowden's) interest to not say exactly what came from where. If there is a second leaker, confirming it could create or increase the intensity of a witch hunt. If there is not, it would confirm that Snowden may have took more material than he claims. Either way, there is no benefit to her answering either in the affirmative or negative. There is also no benefit to answering herself, as she's likely already retained the lawyer because of handling this sensitive material.
- tokenadult 12y agoI read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken many important stories about NSA in previous years. The writing is worth reading and discussing here, and it's too bad Wired's editors mucked up the reader experience so much with the strange user interface and formatting. "I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries." As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.
- aestetix 12y agoIt's worth noting that in addition to being the author of the Wired story that originally leaked news about the Bluffdale, Utah facility, James Bamford also wrote the Puzzle Palace, which IIRC is the first book ever published about the NSA.
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- normloman 12y agoWhat the hell. I start scrolling with my mouse wheel, but nothing moves. I'm thinking my mouse must be broken, until 30 seconds later, I notice the "cover image" fade in and out. I swear, crappy flash intros are alive and well. They just don't use flash anymore.
- bausson 12y agoUsing page-down instead of scrolling help. Still horriblue UX/design, though.
- borplk 12y agoAt least they all had a "skip intro" that would get rid of it all
- smanuel 12y agoEveryone seems to be trying to reinvent the scrolling these days. Meanwhile the craigslist's designers and UX engineers (if there are any) are having hell of a fun.
- idone6 12y agowhat craiglist has to do anything with this ?
- weavie 12y agoIt is articles like this where Instapaper text comes in very handy. Clear out all the flash, and just show the content.
- joezydeco 12y agoThis was completely unreadble on iOS6. It's amusing to think that some believe Apple is deliberately crippling browsers on older devices. It's sites like Wired that are doing the work for them.
- ghshephard 12y agoI couldn't read it on my MacBook Air 2013 + Chrome. Decided to just come here and read the comments instead.
- adityab 12y agoTwo key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown: 1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great. 2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says. EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.
- glenneroo 12y ago"MonsterMind"
- khc 12y agoThe article says it's called "MonsterMind", not "MasterMind"
- Maxious 12y agoPress coverage of the Syrian internet outage at the time: http://www.cnet.com/news/blackout-syria-vanishes-from-internet/ http://www.cnet.com/news/blackout-syria-vanishes-from-intern... "The Middle Eastern country has been experiencing an Internet outage for several hours, and many people on Twitter are reporting that phone lines are down as well." http://www.renesys.com/2012/11/syria-off-the-air/ http://www.renesys.com/2012/11/syria-off-the-air/ "There was one brief whole-country outage of less than ten minutes on 25 November. By the time that one was confirmed, the outage was over. It would be reaching to call that a “precursor event” or “practice run,” but that’s a possibility." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/anonymous-declares-war-syrian-government-websites_n_2218447.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/anonymous-declares-... "The Syrian government said that terrorists were behind the outages, but CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said it would have been extremely difficult for any type of sabotage to cause such a comprehensive blackout, according to Reuters." http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-internet http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-internet "All the edge routers are controlled by Syrian Telecommunications. The systematic way in which routes were withdrawn suggests that this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut."
- ch4s3 12y ago"Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That's a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”" This piece is pretty interesting.
- purephase 12y agoIt's fucking crazy. It means that the US could instigate either a "cyber-war" or a real war between two separate nations with no one being the wiser. Truly terrifying, and probably the largest revelation in the article. This is was the major news outlets should be covering, right now.
- ch4s3 12y agoYeah, I'm surprised this didn't lead in the article.
- walshemj 12y agopro Wi-Fi gear will do that already out of the box you can set up an AirNet system with spare AP's that act as trackers and aggressor nodes to kill rouge ap's or host's
- Rapzid 12y agoWell.. I knew our(US) government downplaying Snowden's credentials was just propaganda(lies)... But wow, were they ever downplaying his credentials. And our media was mostly content to just spread the propaganda with a smile :|
- toyg 12y agoAs a European, I've always been somewhat aware of a certain degree of internal propaganda going on in US media (things like different magazine covers for international editions were always quite glaring), but since 2001 the situation worsened so much, I do feel for you guys. Lessons from the '00s were not learnt, US newsrooms are full of sycophantic Judith Millers and people like Greenwald are still ostracized. EDIT: not that Europe is much better, eh -- just slightly (or it's just done more subtly over here).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dan_bk 12y ago> a certain degree of internal propaganda going on in US media The movie industry is one of the very powerful tools for shaping the public opinion in the US. This obviously includes TV series ("24" is an example for not-so-subtle manipulative material).
- jsmeaton 12y agoAre the shows made because they are now more relevant, or are they made to influence? shrug
- prostoalex 12y agoNot a month goes by without an article (usually in the op-ed section of a major newspaper) calling him a defector to Russia. People conveniently forget that Russia was his transit country after he left Hong Kong and planned to arrive in another country (presumably Cuba or Venezuela), but it was the United States government that didn't cancel his passport when he was in Hong Kong, didn't cancel his passport when he arrived at his destination country, but cancelled his passport right at the point when he arrived in Russian airport transit zone but before his transfer flight departed.
- gbrindisi 12y agoHe is a fucking legend.
- elwell 12y ago> One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn't know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
- crunchcaptain 12y agoIt's very interesting that TAO attempted to remotely compromise a core router. What happened to diverting Cisco boxes to an "undisclosed location" for installing implants?
- lallysingh 12y agoNobody was ordering replacement routers in the area that they wanted? At least not until their old one magically bricked itself...
- noobface 12y agoIt's illegal for US corporations to do deals directly with several governments. Syria most likely bought the gear used through gray/black market channels.
- tacotime 12y agoWhere can I get me one of those sweet sweet black market routers?
- Kapow2112 12y agoDoes anyone have a link to the text in a more readable format?
- belorn 12y agoA division of NSA hackers attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead, which caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet. So in middle of a war zone, US conducted sabotage to core infrastructure of an other nation, with unknown cost to property or human lives. It really should be seen as the obvious reason why hacking is not an acceptable tool to use in peacetime against other nations. Its not a defensive weapon, it hurt people, and it done with no responsibility what so ever.
- chatmasta 12y ago> In middle of a war zone > In peacetime So which is it? There was (is) a war raging in Syria, the US has interests there -- like it or not -- and the NSA is a US intelligence agency. This story sounds like an example of the NSA just doing its job. I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA for? What I do have a problem with is that the NSA makes apparently zero effort to disambiguate between foreign, and domestic, communications.
- drez 12y ago> I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA for? Really? You don't have an issue with a foreign intelligence agency disrupting core infrastructure for a nation in the midst of a civil war? Especially against a nation we are not even at war with? What if the Chinese (or anyone else) did something similar? Would that not be considered an outright act of war? We are not at war with Syria, we should not be disrupting anything. There could have easily have been numerous deaths directly resulting from that outage.
- tptacek 12y agoDo you really believe that France, China, and Israel haven't owned up US routers? Should we declare war on them?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- archagon 12y agoGreat article. Snowden's closing thoughts make me excited about the idea of mesh networking with all these mobile devices in our pockets. Hopefully Google or Apple will give it the push it deserves. (Apple is already taking baby steps in this direction with its Multipeer Connectivity API.)
- vdm 12y agoJust the copy: https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub
- pflanze 12y agoI've made a reformatted copy for easier reading: https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/master/untold-story.md https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/m... (Plain text version in the history, at https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/c25c669f9c4b6cc57c117500dfe77c1f555c2307/untold-story.txt https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/c...)
- wldcordeiro 12y agoI find that harder to read. It's just one long wall of text.
- pflanze 12y agoThe reason I did it was that (even with JavaScript off, as I always try to do) the layout made it hard to know how far in the text I was, and jumping back and forth was accordingly painful. Also, the huge pictures and "emotional" style of the layout distracted me. The drawback of the Github formatting is that the lines are a bit too long, and narrowing the window size doesn't fix that (there's something in the layout that forces a certain width). I could have put the page on my own server, but I thought it's nicer for people to have direct access to the Github features in case somebody wants to edit or annotate it, also "integrating" it into my own website may violate copyrights, whereas this might not (IANAL).
- ArtDev 12y agoHere is the article on Readability: https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub
- psychboo 12y agoInterestingly that link re-directs me to the original article.
- peterwwillis 12y agoCan someone remind me why Snowden became a public figure in the first place? The second leaker is anonymous and practically invisible, and here Snowden is, constantly getting more press. It's like he wants to be as visible as possible while other leakers want the opposite. Edit: Can somebody tell me what was downvote-worthy about this comment? This is getting ridiculous.
- ARCarr 12y agoEvery movement needs a figurehead. Plus, there's not much more that can happen to him. Others who aren't identified have more to lose.
- peterwwillis 12y agoFirst, the article clearly points out that there is quite a bit more that can happen to him and he's fighting to stay hidden. Second, what movement?
- freyr 12y agoIf he now, as a public figure, disappeared, it would be headline news and people might assume the U.S. government eliminated him, potentially making it look more sinister, validating his claims and turning him into a martyr. So exposure provides some security. Nonetheless, he stays hidden because better safe than dead. But yeah, he also comes off like a grandiose megalomaniac.
- john_b 12y agoHave you considered that other leakers may still be working for their employers? Snowden was willing to leave everything behind and move to another country, but not everyone has that option (family obligations, etc). You're probably getting downvoted because your first question is a matter of public record and your assumption that he wants to be extremely visible is inconsistent with the number of interviews of a biographical nature he has conducted. Almost all of his interviews with the press have focused on the NSA, GCHQ, and the like. He explicitly redirects journalists to the real news when they probe too much into his personal life. In this light, your comment could be interpreted as a poor attempt at character assassination.
- jmscharff2 12y agoI can buy that he saw a lot of things that made him mistrust the government. What I have a problem with is that it seems as though he took jobs and looked for positions that would give him access to even more data. If he was really just working and saw this stuff that is one thing to go in and try and steal it is another, whether or not he did the right thing is up for debate. Selling USA secrets to other governments is espionage no matter how you slice it. If it was just leak it to the USA and the world at the same time then sure I could buy the whistleblower if it is go run and hide in Russia or China and sell information that is a different story. I dont think anyone has all the facts about this though.
- toyg 12y agoHe didn't sell anything to any government. If you can prove otherwise, please do; but I note that not even the almighty US intelligence apparatus going into overdrive like a wounded animal could point to anything indicating any of Snowden's statements were false at any point in time. If you have better sources at your disposal than the US President, by all means feel free to share them with us. He's stuck in Russia because no other government wants to compromise their relationship with the US, to our eternal shame (as in "us citizens of non-US countries"); and because if he had remained in the US, he would have been renditioned in Guantanamo on day 1.
- nadstat 12y agohttp://pastebin.com/Rkf41XCF http://pastebin.com/Rkf41XCF
- CamperBob2 12y agoThanks. If I were James Bamford, I'd be hopping mad at Wired about the stupidity they perpetrated on my article.
- crucini 12y agoWhy should he be mad? Think of it as a simple cryptogram, like ROT13.
- bgentry 12y ago> Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.) FYI, Glenn Greenwald is denying that any of the claims in this paragraph are true, and says that Wired never even contacted him or Miranda about the article: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800
- jwjwtest 12y agowwwwwww
- e0m 12y agoThis mentioned the NSA's "Mission Data Repository" in Bluffdale, Utah. They mentioned it could hold 1 yottabyte of data. Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte: All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) + All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) + All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) + Library of Congress (10-30 PB) + Wikipedia (0.0005 PB) = ~7000 PB = 7 Exabytes. = 0.0007% of 1 Yottabyte!!! 1 Yottabyte = 250 billion 4TB hard drives. A hard drive is about 4" x 1" x 5.75". The Pentagon is a big building (6,636,360 sqft over 5 floors). If you started stacking hard drives inside the Pentagon it would take about 50 pentagons to hold 250 billion hard drives. At scale you might be able to make a 4TB hard drive for somewhere between $10 and $100. 1 Yottabyte would be $2.5 trillion - $25 trillion in hard drives. That's a couple USA GDPs. Okay, I think a yottabyte clearly can't be what they mean because that's just unfathomable. They also mention a 1 million sqft facility. In a 1 million sqft you can probably pack about 250 million 3.5" hard drives. If each drive was 4TB you'd end up with 1 million PB, or 1000 EB, or 1 Zettabyte So by Yottabyte they might (maybe) mean Zettabyte. Only off by a factor of 1,000. Even still, all of the data of Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Library of Congress, etc is still probably only ~10% of this data center. Nuts.
- jerhinesmith 12y agoCould they be using tape drives? This wikipedia entry says limits of 35TB were achieved in 2011 and limits of 185TB were achieved in 2014. The 2011 achievement wasn't expected to be commercially available for 10 years. Would that also preclude industrial/government availability? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#Capacity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#Capacity Edit: Ha, nevermind, even if they had 185TB tape drives, they'd still need 5 billion of them (unless my math is way off).
- adventured 12y agoSome of the older estimates I've found: NPR says zettabytes: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controversy-nsa-builds-its-biggest-data-farm http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controvers... Wired (2012) says yottabytes (maybe where this originally came from): http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/ http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/ From the NPR article: "The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified."
- pdknsk 12y ago> He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle. I hope he has Vitamin D stocked.
- csandreasen 12y agoIf the last straw to leak this information was when Snowden learned about this MonsterMind program, why are we learning about it more than a year later without any prior mention whatsoever? (and without documents to back up the claims) Also, if he learned about it after taking up his job with Booz Allen Hamilton in 2013, why was he contacting Glenn Greenwald in December of 2012?[1] Ditto with the excuse that Clapper's testimony in March 2013 factored into his decision to leak... I'm honestly curious why so many people are willing to take Snowden's claims at face value. The NSA rightly got a lot of flack for the softball interviews on Dateline a few months back, but it feels like the general consensus is that the softball interviews with Snowden are beyond questioning. [1] http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734 http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734
- scintill76 12y agoIt was the "last straw" that broke the camel's back, not necessarily the "heaviest straw" to Snowden, or the one the public most needs/deserves to hear about. Besides, I think I have essentially read about this already (automated cyberdefense with offensive capabilities), minus the codename or apparent connection to the Bluffdale facility. I can understand the timing suspicions. Frankly, I'm in the camp that tends to trust Snowden, but putting that aside, I think some discrepancies could at least be partially explained by one or more factors: a) the journalist is putting some words in Snowden's mouth about "last straw" or "the time had come to act"; b) Snowden was still deciding what actions to take (yeah, he emailed Greenwald back then and was almost certainly going to share something, but may have been on the fence about how far to go); c) Snowden has sort of unconsciously mentally revised the exact timeline -- I think this is not unusual for someone looking back on their "life-changing moments", difficult decisions, months-long transformations etc. Or, the quote about Clapper may have been Snowden using it as a microcosm for everything else that put him down the path he was already on (by contacting Greenwald.) Maybe as it happened he saw it as vindication of the decision he'd already made. Maybe he was going back and forth for months -- although he'd contacted Greenwald and started collecting documents, he had left open the option of turning back, but had his resolve renewed by "the Clapper event." So yeah, it's fishy, but I don't think there are any smoking guns per se. It's not like they quote Snowden as saying, "After Clapper's false testimony, I contacted Greenwald for the first time" while Greenwald says it happened 6 months before. Pro-NSA people say it's not a fair debate because the government isn't allowed to talk about the classified details. That applies to Snowden too, because it's difficult for him to communicate his side to the public, being filtered through journalists (who may be juggling his quotes around and mixing up the timeline for the sake of a better story) and not having many opportunities (or eschewing them, to avoid becoming the center of focus.) I read an interesting and new (to me) statement of intense premeditation in "There was one key area that remained out of his reach: the NSA’s aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen." So he took a job specifically for the access it would afford him, with the specific intent to steal and leak?
- notastartup 12y agoI fear we will never realize the true freedom Snowden sacrificed himself for.
- joeclark77 12y agoI fear we will never get to see Snowden hanged, despite having do endure years of all his internet fanboys swooning over his supposed "sacrifice".
- ibisum 12y agoThis question: "Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs?" .. hasn't it already been answered by now? Snowden did what he did because he feels the American people have been betrayed by their out of control government. He's said it enough times now for it to be perfectly clear. Is this just lazy journalism?
- jeffrey8chang 12y agoIn that article, Snowden said that "We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.” The answer, he says, is robust encryption. And that's exactly what I'm doing through JackPair, a low-cost voice encryption device that empower every citizen to protect their privacy over the phone: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safeguard-your-phone-conversation https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safe... It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and stream cipher with keystream from pseudo random number generator seeded from DH. It's similar to one-time key pad with no key management and zero-configuration. As Snowden mentioned in the article, by adopting end-to-end encryption technologies like this, we can collectively end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.