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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story The Most Wanted Man In The World By James Bamford
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/#ch-1...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 GCHQthe British counterpart of the NSAthat 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 dataabout 58,000 pages of documentswas seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Mirandas 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.)
Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatiguethe public becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured to news of battle deaths during a war. One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic, he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. Just as the violation of Angela Merkels rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory.
Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform. In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our faith in technologynot politicians. 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. By basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standardwhere all communications are encrypted by defaultwe can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.
Until then, Snowden says, the revelations will keep coming. We havent seen the end, he says. Indeed, a couple of weeks after our meeting, The Washington Post reported that the NSAs surveillance program had captured much more data on innocent Americans than on its intended foreign targets. There are still hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents out thereto say nothing of the other whistle-blowers he may have already inspired. But Snowden says that information contained in any future leaks is almost beside the point. The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
BEST, MOST COMPREHENSIVE ARTICLE I'VE SEEN ON ED'S CRUSADE--FROM LAST YEAR
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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story The Most Wanted Man In The World By James Bamford (Original Post)
Demeter
Sep 2015
OP
Demeter
(85,373 posts)1. kicking it up for the weekend
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)2. K&R. nt
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)3. rec and kick...this is important info! n/t