NY Times employed Snowden doc "drug mule"... So looking forward

[Luminous Animal]

to Toobin to make this accusation. (And some select DUers, as well!)

http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/09/technology/security/snowden-new-york-times/index.html

Snowden docs had NYTimes exec fearing for his life

It was the IT help request from hell. British newspaper The Guardian provided the Times with top-secret electronic documents exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Pant oversaw the handoff between the Guardian and the New York Times.
At the recent AppSec USA cybersecurity conference, the Times' chief technology officer described those tense initial moments.

The Times had to quietly sneak hard drives containing the top-secret documents back to its New York headquarters. Pant didn't explain how the newspaper did it but said, "We smuggled it into the country, basically."

After the Times set up a special, highly guarded room to isolate the sensitive files, Pant made sure he didn't take a single peek as the PowerPoint slides and files made their way into the newsroom's computers.

"It can get scary. I told myself: 'I don't want to see anything on those drives. I could be putting my life at risk,'" Pant said.

When pressed to further explain his fears, Pant said he's worried about how far the U.S. government will go to hunt down anyone who's seen this batch of classified data without a clearance.

[LAGC]

3. Depends how much data.

If we're talking terabytes of information here, it ain't going to fit very comfortable on a jump drive, that's for sure.

[LAGC]

6. "Central depositories" where? In the cloud?

I don't think Snowden wanted to put all that shit online, except maybe as a "poison pill" should something happen to him.

Somehow the info has got to get from Point A (Moscow) to Point B (New York).

With the high likelihood of the NSA monitoring all communications going into the NY Times, even with encryption there's no telling what the NSA's capabilities are.

[Live and Learn]

2. What makes him think they would believe he didn't peak? nt

[Savannahmann]

4. Perhaps people are waking up to see the threat our Government has become.

One of the saddest days of my experience during this administration is when President Obama signed the reauthorization of the PATRIOT ACT. I have detested that law for a long time, and I had hoped we would be rid of it.

Perhaps now, with the Snowden Docs out there, people will realize the liberties our Government is taking with the Constitution. Perhaps now the people are waking up to realize the danger that our Government is. Perhaps now the pendulum is swinging the other way, back towards the side of Civil Rights and individual freedoms.

Probably not, but I can hope can't I?

[JDPriestly]

7. "Our" government made all this information, all these documents, available to a private

contracting company that hired all kinds, 35,000 has been reported as the number, of private contractor employees. That's a reported 35,000 nobodies with hopefully clean noses and even cleaner hands who were given access to parts or all of that data. But our news media is afraid as they handle it that "our" government will punish them for possessing it.

Now, we can't possibly have that much information that is really top secret. If we do, then maybe we need to think again about how we define "top secret." 35,000 nobodies can rummage in these documents, but a small staff of select reporters cannot?

Something is wrong with this picture.

Granted, our government does have a few legitimate secrets to keep. Sane Americans understand and respect that fact. But the government has just gone way too far in hiding facts from us voters and our press. Something stinks in this situation, and it isn't Snowden or the Guardian or anyone associated with the final release of the documents. It would have been much wiser and better if our government had shared with us the truth about what the NSA was doing and limited the surveillance to really dangerous targets. It would be better if our government used its "secret" and "classified" stamps with more thought and discretion.

Our press must be allowed to report freely on whatever falls into its hands. The government is way out of place with regard to Snowden and the NSA. Reign in the NSA. Limit its activities when it comes to surveillance. Let Snowden alone. He used pretty good judgment in correcting a situation that was and is way out of control.

[randome]

9. No. The private contractor talked his co-workers into giving him their passwords.

That's still a poor security arrangement but a dedicated 'nice guy' like Snowden can sometimes get away with nearly anything.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[JDPriestly]

10. The point is that for a "democracy?" our government has far too many secrets or at least

thinks it does, and because it has more secrets than it can handle, it outsources their handling.

That is a huge mistake. If you want to keep a secret, you don't let 35,000 people know that it exists.

Sooner or later, a lot more, and I mean a lot more of the secrets that our government thinks it is keeping as it hands out keys to its locked "secret" box to thousands of people, will sneak out of the box and into the public domain. I'm not threatening anything. I certainly don't have any of the thousands of keys to that box that our government has thrown out there. I'm just predicting this based on my experience.

If you want to keep a secret, you keep it. You don't share it with 35,000 people. WHAT A JOKE!

As for the "secret" that the NSA has the world under surveillance including the heads of state of countries that are our allies and friends, I do not believe it is a secret being kept (to the extent that it ever was kept a secret) for security reasons but rather it is being (or was supposedly being) kept to avoid embarrassment and to make fools of Americans who have deluded themselves into believing that our government is actually following our Constitution.

The joke is on the American people, and it is a very nasty, dirty joke.

AS FOR SNOWDEN, it is predictable, mathematically predictable that if you tell a secret to a certain number of people, one of them will pass it on. Just a question of mathematics. Once you have told more than a certain number of people, a "secret" is no longer secret. It's just reality.

I realize that right-wingers don't believe in reality, but it is reality.

The NSA program should never have been done in "secret" if it was to be as vast as it is. It is utterly foolish to think that could ever work. The people who set that up never lived in a small midwestern town. There you learn (as I did as a child) that secrets cannot be kept. It's just a matter of time before someone tells.

What in the world is the NSA thinking?

The NSA surveillance is just one sign that we are drifting into a dictatorship. With each presidency, Congress becomes further out of touch with the American people, less willing to take the responsibility it should, under our Constitution, be taking in our government, and more and more power is vested in the executive branch. It is happening mostly because of the inability of Congress to do its job.

I am older, so we could sink into a total dictatorship in my lifetime, but it will probably take a bit longer. I am writing this on DU because I hope to warn some of the younger generation that will have to face this.

We either get a Congress that can focus on more than feuding over the budget and gay marriage and gays in the military and food stamps and ending attempts to improve the health of Americans or we will end up with some kind of dictatorship. And that will not be pretty.

Read the history of the Roman empire. There is something to be learned from that.