NSA Officials Still Baffled by Extent of Snowden Leak

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/14-1



In attempt to stem the flow of truth, NSA Official suggests 'amnesty' to halt leaks

NSA Officials Still Baffled by Extent of Snowden Leak
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer
Published on Saturday, December 14, 2013 by Common Dreams

Officials have admitted that they may never know the full extent of the information downloaded by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the leak of which has sent the international community into a tailspin over the extent of U.S. government spying.

The NSA facility in Hawaii where Snowden worked "was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time," the New York Times reported Saturday.

The Times continues:

Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” said a senior administration official.

[bemildred]

1. Right, and these nitwits claim to be "protecting" me. They can't even protect themselves.

They live in some cartoon comic book world and are mystified by people like me and Snowden. But they are going to protect us all.

[unhappycamper]

2. When

you have so much stuff on so many people and so many ways to sft thru all that data, it should not be a surprise that they are 'baffled'.

[bemildred]

3. No, it should not. Size does matter. More is not better when it comes to data.

Just exactly what you want just the way you want it at the time is what's better, but it's also much harder to do, and the more random crap you have to sift through, the harder it gets. I am sure that one reason they are unsure what he took is because they don't really know themselves what they have laying around to be taken. One of the things I remember from defense work was the total lack of any digital housecleaning, stuff once there was eternal. Security through obscurity was the rule, the network was treated as secure even though I used FTP to move software updates all the time. And you can see the echoes of that practice in how easily Snowden got what he wanted. I think his only mistake was letting anybody know who he was. He could still be working there.

[unhappycamper]

4. I'll disagree with you on size.

It does matter.

One of my last assignments at Verizon was massaging mass quantities of data to produce reports. Granted NSA data is orders of magnitude greater than telco data but the idea is fundamentally the same. Sift thru your data until you have what you need/want.

Tools are a big part of the sifting exercise - I was using perl to sift and collate thru my files.

From the NSA's view, they need everything about everybody everywhere hence the giant vacuum cleaners for any and all communications everywhere.

[bemildred]

6. Yes, I am familiar with that, Perl is an amazing piece of work.

I've done lots of filtering, like you describe, you're a "wizard" if you can do that. I used to do software ports that way, with scripts to scan and edit on the fly. I did a lot of multi-platform work, so I got into portable code in a big way.I also know how big and slow those programs get, and how they are always full of ad hoc coding and special cases, hacks.

But what are you doing there? Whittling it down to size, right? So the sooner you filter all the crap out, the better off you are right? Grabbing everything is what you do when you don't know any better, when you don't know what you are looking for. And that's where our spooks are, don't know what to look for, so just grab it all. If that is not an admission of not knowing what one is about, I don't know what is.

[Android3.14]

11. This makes sense

Interesting thought.
Is it the case then that, when an incident occurs and the NSA dives into the data with a goal in mind (i.e. consulting the data to find the network on those guys in the Boston Marathon bombing), this justifies the collection of the data?

[bemildred]

18. It's certainly a better argument, if you have some probable cause.

But I don't think that by itself is sufficient to say you can just start pawing through everything about them.

You are also much more likely to find something useful if you have something specific to look for. That by itself, applied at the head end can reduce the heap you have to actually look through a few orders of magnitude, and that is going to help a whole bunch when you start looking for "connections". The connections thing is going to go up exponentially, so it really is going to help to start really, really small.

[Android3.14]

5. Unhappy Camper is right

The more data there is, the more useful information you can tease out of it. Stop spying on us.

[bemildred]

7. Making the haystack bigger helps find the needle? nt

[unhappycamper]

8. If you have the correct tools, yes.

[bemildred]

9. Good luck. nt

[bemildred]

10. Do you think the NSA has ample justification for its activities?

In the form of plots stopped, conspiracies ended, etc? They look to be grabbing at straws to me. All this data grabbing has not resulted in much in the way of terror prevention or foreign policy success. Rather the opposite.

It's a giant fishing expedition, and a very inefficient one too. But it is very handy politically and economically to have an excuse to spy on your "friends" and fellow citizens. They need all the leverage they can get too. It is the policy of a weak government, of politicians beseiged for the transparent folly of their policies, and desperate to find some advantage to exploit.

It is quite true that if you grovel over enough data for long enough, you will find something, "even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then", as the saying goes. But that is not wizardry, that is drudgery.

[Android3.14]

13. "They need all the leverage they can get too."

I agree that this is a reasonable fear. However, have you heard of the national government blackmailing a U.S. citizen in order to advance the government's agenda?

[bemildred]

17. How would I hear of such a thing if it were to occur?

It would be secret and you could be thrown in jail for making it public, right?

[Android3.14]

12. Two things

You are assuming there is only one needle.
The haystack is the same size. What's changed is how much we could know about the straws in the haystack.
But the way you framed the question made me think of something else. I wonder, what would be a structure of checks and balances on the collection of this data that would be trustworthy enough that it would satisfy most of us who fear the current structure?
That's an interesting question.

[bemildred]

16. No, I'm assuming they don't know what they are looking for.

They don't know if there is a needle, that's my point, they assume there must be needles and they must be able to find them, but I find no actual support for either of those assumptions: that groveling over mega-data is bound to lead to something useful and terror-related. That's my point.

The requirement is not a particular structure, but adversarial oversight with the power to expose. If you can't defend what you are doing in public, you ought not be doing it.

[jakeXT]

15. Is "Hackers On A Plane" the sequel to "Snakes On A Plane" ?

Snowden didn't have the highest security clearance, I wonder what could be found there...