Some guy named Edward Snowden claims he’s the one who leaked the news of NSA’s surveillance operations to The Guardian. Well, maybe. Were I he I’d have gone somewhere without an extradition treaty with the United States, not Hong Kong, which has one.
There are questions about whether he had the opportunity to do it, though.
For instance, Snowden said he did not have a high school diploma. One former CIA official said that it was extremely unusual for the agency to have hired someone with such thin academic credentials
[snip]
A former senior U.S. intelligence official cited other puzzling aspects of Snowden’s account, questioning why a contractor for Booz Allen at an NSA facility in Hawaii would have access to something as sensitive as a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
As someone who lives in Hawai’i, I can tell you that we don’t have access to lots of stuff very quickly. My poor local Safeway can’t even order its inventory itself; all of that purchasing is done at Safeway HQ in California.
All right, that’s frivolous. But the question is a good one: why would FISA court orders be distributed so widely as to be available to a contractor’s employee 5,000-plus miles from DC?
In The Guardian Glenn Greenwald writes that Snowden is indeed the guy who leaked the program to him. I remain slightly skeptical.
It does sound dodgy. BUT… the whole computer security industry is a bit dodgy.
The difference between a genius hacker and a skilled security expert is probably just a matter of a paycheck and from whom that paycheck comes.
It’s not hard for me to imagine a clever hacker without formal schooling, making his way into some kind of government employment – particularly some kind of secret shadowy area of government employment.
It’s also not hard to imagine someone like that being willing to be a whistle-blower more than someone who has had a ‘normal’ lifestyle & background, and formally pursued ambitions in an intelligence career.
It’s also not hard for me to imagine someone low level or new being given the keys to the castle, or seemingly odd amounts of responsibility and access for their position.
This only seems dodgy to those of us who might tend to assume (or hope) that the government offices, law enforcement agencies, banks, and businesses small and particularly large, are actually staffed and managed (at various levels) by competent, logical, rational, ethical, level-headed, sensible people with a firm understanding and concern for a bigger picture.
While all of those places probably have such people on staff, or in management… I think it’s far more likely, particularly in this day & age, and most particularly in this economy, that a great many people staffing any type of organization care about just one thing – collecting their paychecks & covering their asses to make sure they can continue doing that. And being sensible, caring about the organization as a whole, or anything else, would come second to that, if considered at all by some.
I think having a shadowy security entity operating completely sheltered from the scrutiny of the public, probably allows for more incompetent management at the top, allowing for more systemic incompetence throughout.
Frankly, personally, I don’t really have a problem with the government collecting my general cell phone (or internet) data of the calls I make & aggregating it into some kind of anonymous database tracking patterns.
I’m not crazy about it, and would prefer it wouldn’t happen. But I also don’t see a great harm, and think it’s plausible that the benefits of it outweigh the unpleasantness of such tracking.
Unless I truly felt someone at some point in the future was going to be allowed by law to persecute me for who I call on the phone, I just wouldn’t be too concerned about it.
I can’t imagine why this sort of name-absent tracking of patterns needs to be secret. To be honest, I assumed it’s been happening for over a decade now. I’m surprised that anyone is actually surprised about this revelation.
My issue with this is that it was secret that it was happening. Or that someone will be prosecuted & sent to jail for outing the issue. Or that someone involved in this would be prosecuted & sent to jail for having been involved in this data collection.
I think trying to make it out to be some kind of national security breach, in either way, would seem very over the top.
I don’t think our nation’s security is at risk for the public having been informed about this data collection.
And I think the people who were doing this were simply following orders of the laws that were passed after September 11th, which lots of people (not including me) were really supportive of when there was a White Guy at The White House.
That they have continued working within those directives & rules, should not be surprising!
You can’t sit down to play a game of poker with some pals, agree that deuces are wild, and then complain when someone gets a straight flush with 3 deuces.
It’s all about my standard belief that most people hate corruption when they think someone else is benefiting… but many people tend to like corruption when they believe they’re getting something out of it.
I believe we’ve now entered an era now where it’s becoming clear that favouritism might be just as insidiously frightening as discrimination.
My reaction was certainly not one of surprise. Like you, I thought that this had been going on since the Congress acted in terror and passed the Patriot Act and then renewed and refined it four or five years later.
I’m not happy about it (I wasn’t at its origins, either), but it seems to be something we have to live with. I do think our brave politicians screeching for this guy’s head are mostly hypocrites (again). They voted for it, so why are they surprised, and why did they think knowledge of it would never get out into the wild?