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The AP kerfuffle

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Nick Thompson

The AP kerfuffle

Everybody,

To prevent myself from bending a perfectly good thread on Wedtech, I am migrating it to FRIAM and putting my own spin on it.

My mind is a fact-free zone on this issue, but here is my believed-in-imagining concerning how AP got the story. Somebody at CIA was enormously proud of what “his team” had accomplished and could not bear the idea that that such achievements would never be known. “What’s the harm?”he thought. The whole operation is over!” But, of course, the harm was potentially enormous. (I assume you don’t need me to spell that out.)

Now, stipulating …..STIPULATING …. That these facts are as I have imagined them, would you all agree that that person is dangerous and needs to be relieved of his/her duties … at least until s/he can be retrained?

And having agreed to that, what powers would you grant to the Government in their search for whoever that person is.

Just asking.

Nick

From: Wedtech [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 11:27 AM
To: WedTech
Subject: Re: [WedTech] Blind drop box server?

Funny you should ask, this just popped on my twitter feed:

http://inagist.com/all/334673594560946176/?utm_source=inagist&utm_medium=rss

It's a blind drop coded by Aaron Swartz for the New Yorker, of all the publications that needs secure anonymous tips to survive.

-- rec --

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

OK, so here's a project -- or at least a discussion topic -- for Wedtech:

Given the Dept.. of Justice "spying" on AP reporters, and no doubt others, how could we construct a web site drop box that would allow anyone to submit tips and documents in a manner that would not be traceable?

-tom johnson (in Uzbekistan)

--

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:505.577.6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c) <a href="tel:505.473.9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
==========================================

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Steve Smith

Re: The AP kerfuffle

Nobody (or NLT at least) -

Everybody,

To prevent myself from bending a perfectly good thread on Wedtech, I am migrating it to FRIAM and putting my own spin on it.

I'm glad to hear that WedTech is a "Silly Talk" free zone. I'm doing my part by not being on the list (to the logical conclusion of not hearing about the talks when they happen!).

My mind is a fact-free zone on this issue, but here is my believed-in-imagining concerning how AP got the story. Somebody at CIA was enormously proud of what “his team” had accomplished and could not bear the idea that that such achievements would never be known. “What’s the harm?”he thought. The whole operation is over!” But, of course, the harm was potentially enormous. (I assume you don’t need me to spell that out.)

Now, stipulating …..STIPULATING …. That these facts are as I have imagined them, would you all agree that that person is dangerous and needs to be relieved of his/her duties … at least until s/he can be retrained?

And having agreed to that, what powers would you grant to the Government in their search for whoever that person is.

I think this is an academic (not in the to-be-dismissed-by-Doug-who-is-absent way) question since I think we have plenty of evidence that the US Government (and myriad other governments, large US corps and large multinational corps) does not wait to be granted *any* powers to do this kind of search (and destroy?) mission.

The only thing keeping Julian Assange (not a US Citizen, not acting on US soil) from being lynched *inside* the US is the capricious aid and protection he has received by a small but sovereign nation which has tasted the fruits of our "help" in the past.   And the only thing keeping Bradley Manning (who patently IS a US Citizen, etc.) from being rendered (drawn and quartered?) to GitMo (or worse) is the publicity surrounding the whole situation.   I'm conflicted on my support of these two characters, but I think if not for the high profile they attained domestic and international, they would be nothing but charred bodies hanging from a bridge somewhere friendly to our Black Ops friends.

And then we have Plaim and Wilson as poster children of "good intentions" vs "abuse of power" living in our midst.

Hmmm.... "relieved of duties" and "retrained"... I need to get my NewSpeak dictionary to look up the actual contemporary meaning of those words... I think they don't mean what you think they mean? <grin>

That off my chest, I think I appreciate your implied point, and I don't know the answer...   which makes me think that *somehow* we are asking the wrong question(s)?

Just mumbling,

- Steve
(How many Megapixels can you fit on the head of a pin, I mean golfball?)

Just asking.

Nick

From: Wedtech [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 11:27 AM
To: WedTech
Subject: Re: [WedTech] Blind drop box server?

Funny you should ask, this just popped on my twitter feed:

http://inagist.com/all/334673594560946176/?utm_source=inagist&utm_medium=rss

It's a blind drop coded by Aaron Swartz for the New Yorker, of all the publications that needs secure anonymous tips to survive.

-- rec --

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

OK, so here's a project -- or at least a discussion topic -- for Wedtech:

Given the Dept.. of Justice "spying" on AP reporters, and no doubt others, how could we construct a web site drop box that would allow anyone to submit tips and documents in a manner that would not be traceable?

-tom johnson (in Uzbekistan)

--

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:505.577.6482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c) <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:505.473.9646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
==========================================

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Nick Thompson

Re: The AP kerfuffle

Come on, Steve, try!

Just being grumbly about that mean old government won’t hack it. They did, after all, save some people from being drenched in blood and exploded genitalia before falling into the north atlantic like a stone, never to be heard from again.

The thing about cynicism is that it gestures toward an ideal that it does not explicitly commit itself to. It wallows in disappointment.

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 1:25 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The AP kerfuffle

Nobody (or NLT at least) -

Everybody,

To prevent myself from bending a perfectly good thread on Wedtech, I am migrating it to FRIAM and putting my own spin on it.

I'm glad to hear that WedTech is a "Silly Talk" free zone. I'm doing my part by not being on the list (to the logical conclusion of not hearing about the talks when they happen!).

And having agreed to that, what powers would you grant to the Government in their search for whoever that person is.

Just asking.

Nick

From: Wedtech [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 11:27 AM
To: WedTech
Subject: Re: [WedTech] Blind drop box server?

Funny you should ask, this just popped on my twitter feed:

http://inagist.com/all/334673594560946176/?utm_source=inagist&utm_medium=rss

It's a blind drop coded by Aaron Swartz for the New Yorker, of all the publications that needs secure anonymous tips to survive.

-- rec --

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
==========================================

_______________________________________________
Wedtech mailing list
[hidden email]
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.com

============================================================

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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glen ropella

Re: The AP kerfuffle

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nicholas Thompson wrote at 05/15/2013 11:58 AM:

> My mind is a fact-free zone on this issue, but here is my
> believed-in-imagining concerning how AP got the story. Somebody at CIA
> was enormously proud of what “his team” had accomplished and could not
> bear the idea that that such achievements would never be known.
> “What’s the harm?”he thought. The whole operation is over!” But, of
> course, the harm was potentially enormous. (I assume you don’t need me
> to spell that out.)
>
> Now, stipulating …..STIPULATING …. That these facts are as I have
> imagined them, would you all agree that that person is dangerous and
> needs to be relieved of his/her duties … at least until s/he can be
> retrained?

No, I would disagree, at least up to the interpretation of the word
"dangerous". They certainly don't need to be relieved of their duties.
And _everyone_ needs continual retraining. So, that's a no brainer.

I feel the same way about whistle blowers. They are a necessary
check/balance, not so much a danger. If it happened this way, the
disincentivized CIA person is merely expressing the inadequacy of the
reward system set up at all layers: 1) her/his home life (e.g. not being
appreciated for mowing the lawn or doing the dishes), 2) peer group, 3)
social life, 4) job, 5) public service.

That last one, (5), is where Assange, Manning, Wounded Warriors,
narcissist politicians, and John Galts (Johns Galt?) all come into play.
The issue is less about danger to any given group and more about the
confusion between motivation and incentive. Do our soldiers enlist and
do what they do because of the response of the civilians? No. Do the
inventors, movers, and shakers of society do what they do because they
want to get rich and make lots of money? No. Would that putative CIA
employee do what they would because of the artificial incentive
scaffolding nearby? No.

The real danger is conflating incentive with motive.

> And having agreed to that, what powers would */_you_/* grant to the
> Government in their search for whoever that person is.

The primary power I would grant is the ability to grant immunity to
prosecution in the hopes that the person will turn themselves in. But
secondarily, I would grant the government the _budget_ to study and
facilitate the system of feedback loops that bring about a cohesive, yet
agile/adaptive, intelligence organization.

--
=><= glen e. p. ropella
There are ?? coming on now

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glen ropella

Re: The AP kerfuffle

I had to go back and reexamine my analysis for the AP leak versus the
PRISM leak, just to see if my attitude has changed. It hasn't. Delete
now or forever hold your peace. ;-)

To be clear upfront, from the video I watched of Snowden talking about
why he leaked, my "bullsh!t" detectors were dinging like mad. Snowden
seems disingenuous in a way I can't put my finger on. But, then again,
reading the "violate a sacred trust" response by Clapper was worse than
disingenuous. Clapper's response is, to use his own words, profoundly
offensive. Rather than consider _why_ someone would violate such a
sacred trust, Clapper just assumes the sanctity of secrecy and
immediately moves to condemn.

In any case, the problem still seems to be one of motivation and
incentive. The people I've known who were poised to climb the
government secrecy ladder all wore their patriotism and "duty, honor,
respect" badges on their sleeves. OTOH, most of the sysadmins and many
of the systems engineers I've known, perhaps by virtue of their need to
wear many hats, tended to be more libertarian and/or anarchist. You
would think the white hat hackers in our government would have found
methodology for dovetailing these cultures, particularly by ensuring
that employee's motivations lined up with the objectives of any given
project, if not the agencies' missions.

I know we had such policies at lockheed when I worked there. One of my
mentors had made it quite clear to his bosses that he would only work on
defensive weapons systems. And, believe it or not, they honored his
ethic, though without making promises that they wouldn't lay him off
when/if they ran out of FTEs in defensive weapons jobs.

But, perhaps Snowden's position as a _contractor_ is relevant? Our
recent acceleration in the amount of responsibility we (particularly the
military, but I'm sure intelligence has the same problem) we take out of
employees' hands and put into contractors' hands is great for those of
us convinced of the power of decentralized systems. But, you have to
admit that it's more difficult to verify or ensure a stable, coherent,
common purpose to the members of a decentralized collective. I suppose
documented evidence of which hierarchies through which Snowden _tried_
to express his concerns would shed some light on whether his status as a
contractor, rather than an employee, had a significant impact on the
conflict between his motivation and the objectives of his client.

glen wrote at 05/15/2013 01:49 PM:
> The issue is less about danger to any given group and more about the
> confusion between motivation and incentive. Do our soldiers enlist and
> do what they do because of the response of the civilians? No. Do the
> inventors, movers, and shakers of society do what they do because they
> want to get rich and make lots of money? No. Would that putative CIA
> employee do what they would because of the artificial incentive
> scaffolding nearby? No.
>
> The real danger is conflating incentive with motive.

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
Gather all around the young ones

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: The AP kerfuffle

On 6/10/13 1:36 PM, glen wrote:
> But, perhaps Snowden's position as a _contractor_ is relevant?
There's a point of view that says that a business relationship is what
secures information. Which is to say that it is expected by this sort
of person, a person sometimes handing out the public money, that the
people earning this money will behave contrary to the public good, or
even against the law or national security otherwise. I don't think that
is representative of how most people who do this kind of work actually
think or are motivated. And while it is reasonable this matching of
motives and incentives, I don't see how the right ethic can evolve in a
management consultant type setting. It seems to me this was a bad
situation.

Marcus

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glen ropella

Re: The AP kerfuffle

On Mon, 2013-06-10 at 19:17 -0600, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> I don't think that
> is representative of how most people who do this kind of work actually
> think or are motivated.

I agree completely, though most simply because any generalization will
fail to apply to most people. The real trick is the extent to which the
distribution of motivations of a decentralized collection of contractors
can be estimated and controlled to satisfy a mission's requirements.
And I'm saying this as a contractor myself. Which types of problems are
appropriate for contractors and which types are appropriate for
employees? (That's been a burning question of mine ever since I was
audited and accused by the local government of mislabeling employees as
contractors. They later apologized and _noticed_ that most of my
contractors were actually contractors. [sigh])

> And while it is reasonable this matching of
> motives and incentives, I don't see how the right ethic can evolve in a
> management consultant type setting. It seems to me this was a bad
> situation.

While I don't think it's quite fair to describe Booz Allen solely as
management consultancy, I still agree. Sysadmins are given a surprising
amount of power, often extremely asymmetric against the relatively few
skills they need to do their jobs. [*] I think this is the very heart of
the many caricatures of "the IT guy" in Dilbert-style cube-space jokes.

[*] That's the nature of our modern computing architecture. I had such
high hopes for Plan 9! ;-)

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
Pink rays from the ancient satellite

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Steve Smith

PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

In reply to this post by glen ropella

*sigh*
so much to say on the general subject of gov't secrecy and it's abuses... perhaps *everyone* except maybe Nick and Glen can just hit delete and save themselves the aggravation.

I'm clearly from a different planet...

Nick's earlier (circa 5/15/2013) admonition:

Come on, Steve, try!

Just being grumbly about that mean old government won’t hack it. They did, after all, save some people from being drenched in blood and exploded genitalia before falling into the north atlantic like a stone, never to be heard from again.

The thing about cynicism is that it gestures toward an ideal that it does not explicitly commit itself to. It wallows in disappointment.

Nick

This is well motivated (I agree with everything you say here Nick, I just don't think it applies to me nor to what I said which elicited it from you?). I can't meet the Red Queen's high mark of believing 6 impossible things before breakfast but I have long since given over to "tentatively believing mutually contradictory points of view", at least long enough to mull them over thoroughly.

In this case: "A secret is a secret is a SECRET" and "A promise is a promise is a PROMISE" vs "but my conscience does not allow me to leave these secrets in the hands of people who have demonstrated to me that they are abusing this status to the harm of those who empowered them to hold said secrets".

I am very sympathetic with both positions and the likes of Bradley Manning and now Edward Snowden help to bring this contradiction into more clear focus for me.

On 6/10/13 1:36 PM, glen wrote:

I had to go back and reexamine my analysis for the AP leak versus the
PRISM leak, just to see if my attitude has changed.  It hasn't. Delete
now or forever hold your peace. ;-)

To be clear upfront, from the video I watched of Snowden talking about
why he leaked, my "bullsh!t" detectors were dinging like mad.  Snowden
seems disingenuous in a way I can't put my finger on.  But, then again,
reading the "violate a sacred trust" response by Clapper was worse than
disingenuous.  Clapper's response is, to use his own words, profoundly
offensive. Rather than consider _why_ someone would violate such a
sacred trust, Clapper just assumes the sanctity of secrecy and
immediately moves to condemn.

Glen might have watched a *different* interview with Snowden than the one I watched . I have my own "bs detectors" and a natural suspicion of those who might tell stories where they are the natural victim/hero. In this case, he seemed not only articulate and insightful but relatively straightforward about what/why was up in this case. Julian Assange was much less convincing to me in his early communications (he came off to me as an egotistical twerp), but time in the public eye seems to have supported most of his claims.

In any case, the problem still seems to be one of motivation and
incentive.  The people I've known who were poised to climb the
government secrecy ladder all wore their patriotism and "duty, honor,
respect" badges on their sleeves.  OTOH, most of the sysadmins and many
of the systems engineers I've known, perhaps by virtue of their need to
wear many hats, tended to be more libertarian and/or anarchist.  You
would think the white hat hackers in our government would have found
methodology for dovetailing these cultures, particularly by ensuring
that employee's motivations lined up with the objectives of any given
project, if not the agencies' missions.

I know we had such policies at lockheed when I worked there.  One of my
mentors had made it quite clear to his bosses that he would only work on
defensive weapons systems.  And, believe it or not, they honored his
ethic, though without making promises that they wouldn't lay him off
when/if they ran out of FTEs in defensive weapons jobs.

I signed papers and swore oaths to protect secrets for over 30 years and in fact, I held true to that, but I also *quaked* at times as I came close to learning things that I *feared* would turn out to be beyond what my conscience could bear. I did, in fact, learn plenty of things which would probably serve the world/country/humanity better if they were to be exposed, but for the most part they were pretty mundane and really just evidence of incompetence and petty abuse of power or position... no specific lives at stake but perhaps some general ones and certainly many livelihoods. I chose to honor my word of honor about not disclosing secrets I would not have had access to without that word rather than (re)acting on relatively minor abuses by relatively petty and stupid functionaries and grabbing at the whistle in the dark. Had I encountered something bigger, it is possible it would be I who was sequestered in the Columbian Embassy in London or locations unknown in Hong Kong (or more likely in a shallow grave, the bottom of a large body of water or the ash-bed of an incinerator somewhere).

Fortunately I entered the game of secrets fairly ideologically, a pacifist who believed in MAD (believing this before, during and after breakfast). By the time I had moved on to a more critical perspective on the US nuclear policy, I understood enough about the complexity of our situation to still agree/understand that "pulling one's hand out of the pool is harder than putting it in without causing destructive ripples". Whether I *liked* MAD or not, it was the game we were in, and I didn't see us getting out of it easily. The fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain might be seen as a success of the game of MAD, outspending the opposition, validating the value of a (claimed to be) free market system and a (claimed to be) democratic and representational form of government. Whatever to myriad causes of the end of an obvious "opposite" in the "Mutual" of "Assured Destruction", it left me to more clearly ponder: "if MAD is no longer viable, perhaps it never was?" Nevertheless, the point is that Nuclear Secrets were easy for me to keep. I accepted that if *anybody* had the big stick it should be "us", and giving it away would not be prudent in any case. The petty incompetence and abuse of position aside, it was not hard to keep these secrets.

As I *left* the game, however I had graduated to the world(s) of Military and Civilian Intelligence and found the assumptions of National Security founded in some very questionable models of society, governance, and foreign relations. It didn't help that it was in the era of War on Drugs, War on Terror, and War on other Inanimate Objects and Adjectives, and the anything BUT petty incompetence and abuses of Bush II . I found myself still avoiding learning more than I absolutely had to, to do my job effectively. I *was* drawn to the challenges of puzzle solving in a time of accelerating technological support. The tools that I had dreamed of 30 years before as a small-town PI were at my fingertips and I had the skills (more importantly) to build yet more tools, etc. It was a heady time, but fortunately I had the perspective to know that the kind of power that amassed, indexed and correlated information (think Big Data, Network/Graph Analysis, High Dimensional analysis, etc.) could bring was not only a petri dish for potential abuse, but for sure in the wrong-minded hands of our generation.

This is perhaps one of the stronger reasons for my leaving the game at an otherwise *very* inopportune time. Had I left 5 years later (like today) I could probably have "retired early" with a livable if not extravagant lifestyle. Had I left (to start my own business) any time other than just as the market fell out, I might be living high on the hog instead of eating the squirrels that I can plink from the back porch of my Appalachia-inspired Adobe Homestead.

So I watch the Bradley Mannings and the Edward Snowden's of the world with a different eye than many here might. "But for the grace of some damn thing, there might go I"?


But, perhaps Snowden's position as a _contractor_ is relevant?  Our
recent acceleration in the amount of responsibility we (particularly the
military, but I'm sure intelligence has the same problem) we take out of
employees' hands and put into contractors' hands is great for those of
us convinced of the power of decentralized systems.  But, you have to
admit that it's more difficult to verify or ensure a stable, coherent,
common purpose to the members of a decentralized collective.  I suppose
documented evidence of which hierarchies through which Snowden _tried_
to express his concerns would shed some light on whether his status as a
contractor, rather than an employee, had a significant impact on the
conflict between his motivation and the objectives of his client.

Since leaving the direct employ of a direct contractor the US government (I don't find the distinction between contractors and employees all that meaningful here?), I have worked on (unclassified) projects to develop tools that might be helpful to Big Brother with (classified) data. In other words, I may have contributed to the utility of the kind of data that Snowden just identified as being collected (probably, apparently, surely) against the rule of law. I imagined that I *might* be able to beat those swords into plowshares (or at least use my metaphorical knowledge of metaphorical metallurgy to do the metaphorical same)... Put the same tools into the hands of the average person, or perhaps more apropos to investigative journalists and activists of all stripes seeking to expose corruption and abuses of power. So far, I'd say that has borne little if any fruit.

glen wrote at 05/15/2013 01:49 PM:

 The issue is less about danger to any given group and more about the
confusion between motivation and incentive.  Do our soldiers enlist and
do what they do because of the response of the civilians?  No.  Do the
inventors, movers, and shakers of society do what they do because they
want to get rich and make lots of money?  No.  Would that putative CIA
employee do what they would because of the artificial incentive
scaffolding nearby?  No.

The real danger is conflating incentive with motive.

I think I agree with this line of reasoning but feel the need to explore it further. I agree that incentive and motive (and many many other "duals" in our language) are often conflated and if I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that the "bad behaviours" we see in our culture align with imagined motives which very likely do not exist or did not exist when the game started, yet somehow became part of the motivational milieu anyway?

I know I often cringe when I hear people dismiss various other (groups of?) people's motives in some obvious way. For example, Snowden *might* just be a glory hound, or *might* be (cleverly?) setting himself up for a cushy life under the care of one of our nations "enemies" or perhaps just be self-deluded and self-aggrandizing. Or, he might be what he appears (to me) to be which is an individual who found himself in a crisis of conscience which he believes he has found a way to relieve.

The crux to me seems to be "what is the difference between a whistleblower and a snitch" or "a whistleblower and a treasonous bastard"? And how can we sort this out (especially when most people align on one side of the tug-of-war pit or the other without much thought)?

- Steve

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

On 6/12/13 3:42 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

The crux to me seems to be "what is the difference between a whistleblower and a snitch" or "a whistleblower and a treasonous bastard"? And how can we sort this out (especially when most people align on one side of the tug-of-war pit or the other without much thought)?

I think the terms you mention above only have meaning in the space of a group and the power structures and rules or conventions prevailing in the group. At best it is a legal question. At worst it is a question of who has or can gain influence to advocate the preferred term for a particular situation to their particular constituency. Few care to think that dangerous or unjust events are an unavoidable part of life.

Marcus

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Steve Smith

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

Marcus -
>> The crux to me seems to be "what is the difference between a
>> whistleblower and a snitch" or "a whistleblower and a treasonous
>> bastard"? And how can we sort this out (especially when most people
>> align on one side of the tug-of-war pit or the other without much
>> thought)?
> I think the terms you mention above only have meaning in the space of
> a group and the power structures and rules or conventions prevailing
> in the group.
Naturally these are terms related to social constructs...
> At best it is a legal question. At worst it is a question of who has
> or can gain influence to advocate the preferred term for a particular
> situation to their particular constituency.
At it's best I think it is an "ethical" question. I think there are
three categories in this general domain... those who *know* they are
doing something wrong and do it anyway, those who know they are doing
the right thing for the right reasons, and those who *think* they are
doing something right but in fact are doing something quite wrong.

I think that legally one can have broken the letter of the law while
upholding the spirit of our presumed nature (constitution, founding
fathers, ladeeda). I see no room for doubt that both Manning and
Snowden broke the letter of the law... what is in question (for me) is
whether they acted out of pure motives and whether the results of their
actions support the greater good. I'm not sure how that plays out
legally... convictions with pardons, dropping of charges based on
"extenuating circumstances", sentences reduced to time served or waived?
> Few care to think that dangerous or unjust events are an unavoidable
> part of life.
Yes we do seem to like to ignore that as much as possible. I found
holding a security clearance to increase the likelihood that I would
find myself participating in dangerous and/or unjust activities. Not as
obviously as hoining the military would have, but probably yet more
inevitably.

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

On 6/13/13 1:10 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> Few care to think that dangerous or unjust events are an unavoidable
>> part of life.
> Yes we do seem to like to ignore that as much as possible. I found
> holding a security clearance to increase the likelihood that I would
> find myself participating in dangerous and/or unjust activities.
I was trying to look at from Snowden's perspective. He had some
awareness of how his action was dangerous to him. But did he think
through how dangerous it was for the country and his colleagues? Did he
recognize the extent of his own ignorance and consequences of `acting
out of his pay scale'? What kind of activities did he _expect_ his
company would be tasked with by the NSA? What would have been
`reasonable' activities for BAH to be doing in his mind? It seems to me
he opt-ed in, and apparently had not thought-through how his life might
be after opting in; he was just naive. It's like someone that signs up
for a marathon and says at the 5 mile mark "This is really hard!"

Marcus

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Steve Smith

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

Marcus -

As someone who has almost" been there, I agree... and THIS is the
challenge, such a disclosure *could* be an over-reaction based on
naivette. The point of "above my pay grade" is a sticky one, however
and it gets stickier the more experience you have. While you may hit
one glass ceiling of pay grade or another, you don't necessarily quit
gaining perspective.

There have been things I discovered myself which deserved not to be
secrets... it was somewhat obvious to me when I was young and naive and
it became even more obvious over the course of a lifetime/career... but
they were small and somewhat ideosyncratic and the import of them did
not justify the breaking of my sworn trust and the implications (not
only to myself) that went with it. And, as you point out, there was
always the doubt that if I was at a higher "pay grade" I would
understand why these things were being done and support them myself?
But with each such discovery, I lost a bit of naivete and trust of my
government and it's representatives one small bit at a time.

But had I discovered, for example, that someone within the apparatus of
our government and it's huge machine of employees, programs,
contractors, etc. was acting against the interests of the people of, by,
and for which said government was created and maintained, it might have
been different. Or if something fundamentally inhumane was being
executed in the name of my government/nation/people.

Everyone has different sensitivities and limits for moral outrage and
one person's offense might be nothing more than anothers' minor
irritation. Putting mascara in puppies eyes to make sure it isn't "too
toxic" to put "near" women's eyes seems a bit off to me, but probably
not enough to lead me to betray a national trust. Leaving men with
syphilis to suffer the course of it's infection whilst pretending to
treat it is a bit harder to look away from. Starting a war in the
middle east based on made up evidence (say... the existence of WMD in
Iraq) has an even higher profile (if only because of the magnitude of
the potential suffering) on my moral radar.

I have, for example, been in a position to know (almost directly) that
the highest levels of our executive branch set domestic policy around
the threat of bioterrorism that contradicted very well thought through,
sound advice solicited from and developed by DOE labs... that was a
shock but not a surprise. I think their policies were patently based
on political rather than practical considerations. But as you say, this
is "above my pay grade" and who am I to say that it isn't better to
pretend to have a better solution to a threat than you in fact possibly
(by any stretch of reality) could?

I'm sure that when the scientists recruited to work on the Manhattan
project discovered that they were being asked to help build a 'super
bomb' that could annihilate entire cities with a single delivery that
many quailed at the implications. But they were working in the context
of the second worldwide war in the century where fleets of bombers using
conventional and incendiary weapons were leveling entire cities
already. While doing the same with a single Bomb was clearly a big
leap in quantity and ease of destruction, it was not a "new thing"
(wholesale destruction of entire cities). Had it been a program to
develop a virus which selectively killed only Asians (or more to the
times, Semitcs), I think many if not all would have refused and some
might have even chosen to "tell on us".

In the case of Snowden, we don't know yet what all he has compromised
but I don't think any lives are being threatened directly because of his
disclosures. Similar with the Manning material. In the Snowden case,
all I've seen so far is "some" evidence that what we suspected and
feared was true about the NSA surviellance is true. Admittedly the
news has spun and twisted and conflated things in ways that make it a
little hard to tell exactly what is what. In both cases, the
information was put in the hands of existing journalists with a
motivation to help avoid causing direct harm to our interests.
Something of a neutral party with some level of responsibility. Nobody
"blurted out" secrets to the world, they put it through a process which
has some chance of mitigating truly harsh real-world consequences.

As I understand it (and I'm not in a position to know any of this for
sure, so it is laced with speculation and opinion as I think *most*
people's position is as well), the key point is that the NSA has been
collecting data on US Citizens in a manner which is outside of their
charter and the existing rules about "spying on US Citizens" and due
process. To the extent that this is what it is about, even if Snowden
is guilty of treason or similar for the disclosures he made, the result
is a public awareness of fundamental wrongdoing in our intelligence
apparatus. I would say that if this is the case he is making a
significant sacrifice... which might or might not warrant forgiving him
his trespass but trespass or not, the cat is out of the bag and we need
to deal with it, no matter how we deal with the person who loosened the
strings.

We may personally choose to say "this is a necessary evil" but I don't
think in a democratic and representative government such as the one our
forefathers created and we continue to maintain that such a decision
gets to be made in private, by those in power, without engaging the
public in a debate (and vote) over whether this level of "slippage" in a
fundamental right to privacy and due process is acceptable. The
outrage we are seeing now suggests that it is not.

Autocrats and hawks and right wingnuts seem to think that the ends can
justify the means, if torturing everyone swept up as suspects after 9/11
yielded a single actionable bit of intelligence then the damage to our
public image and more importantly our collective soul from torturing at
all and especially innocents was justified? Similarly those who think
that the material exposed by Manning and Snowden, if found worthy of
exposure (ends) justifies the manner in which they were exposed?

So I think there are two distinct issues. How should Snowden (or
Manning) be treated for what they have done; AND now that the cat is
out of the bag, how do we followup and handle the implications of what
we have discovered as a result? There is a reason for holding
law-enforcement accountable for proper procedure and dismissing
improperly obtained evidence, but that does not apply to public
disclosure and this type of situation. No matter how wrong Manning or
Snowden might be for what they have done by some measure, what they have
exposed still holds the same weight.

Manning and Snowden *patently* broke the letter of the law through
breaking their agreements to protect the secrets. The question is
whether we are glad they did, if we are, what implications does that
have on how they are subsequently treated, and how do we change our laws
(and policies, procedures, etc.) so that possibly this is less commonly
necessary? And what do we do about what we have learned? Burn the
energy of our righteous indignation lynching the messengers?

I say not.

- Steve

> On 6/13/13 1:10 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>> Few care to think that dangerous or unjust events are an unavoidable
>>> part of life.
>> Yes we do seem to like to ignore that as much as possible. I found
>> holding a security clearance to increase the likelihood that I would
>> find myself participating in dangerous and/or unjust activities.
> I was trying to look at from Snowden's perspective. He had some
> awareness of how his action was dangerous to him. But did he think
> through how dangerous it was for the country and his colleagues? Did
> he recognize the extent of his own ignorance and consequences of
> `acting out of his pay scale'? What kind of activities did he
> _expect_ his company would be tasked with by the NSA? What would
> have been `reasonable' activities for BAH to be doing in his mind? It
> seems to me he opt-ed in, and apparently had not thought-through how
> his life might be after opting in; he was just naive. It's like
> someone that signs up for a marathon and says at the 5 mile mark "This
> is really hard!"
>
> Marcus
>
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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve writes:

"How should Snowden (or
Manning) be treated for what they have done; AND now that the cat is
out of the bag, how do we followup and handle the implications of what
we have discovered as a result?"

I think if people are really so upset about potential for domestic
surveillance -- even though it's basically impossible to do foreign
surveillance with out looking at U.S. networks and servers too -- then
there is no choice but to demand he be pardoned, and then seek legislation
to enable dealing with this kind of situation in some systematic fashion.
It's a democracy.

However, I think many people do have impossible and unrealistic security
expectations, and if you ask a lot of them (including me) on 9/12/2001 what
would be appropriate, systematic cloud server intercepts and data mining
wouldn't have even made a ripple in the water for me. So there's a
alternative line of argumentation too that just isn't from today's batch of
news.

Independent of how a particular government works, of course people can act
on their own moral views and create consequences. Sometimes they just need
to be prepared to accept them and recognize that no one will come to the
rescue. If Snowden is proven to be right (like you I have no idea) and the
abuses by BAH and NSA are beyond the pale, then he may have a future.

Marcus

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glen ropella

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 17:09 -0400, [hidden email] wrote:
> However, I think many people do have impossible and unrealistic security
> expectations, and if you ask a lot of them (including me) on 9/12/2001 what
> would be appropriate, systematic cloud server intercepts and data mining
> wouldn't have even made a ripple in the water for me. So there's a
> alternative line of argumentation too that just isn't from today's batch of
> news.

And it's not _merely_ the "we live in a post-911" world rhetoric,
either. There's a deeper argument that we really _do_ want the NSA to
stay ahead of the best state-funded and independent hackers all over the
universe. Even those of us who claim to dislike being spied upon by our
own government tend to ooh and aah when they see hints of the fantastic
technologies developed by agencies like the NSA. Anyone who likes James
Bond, Mission Impossible, GI Joe, CSI, Person of Interest, etc. should
admit that up front.

The fact that the NSA is building entire data centers devoted to
exploring more occult network patterns is fscking fantastic. And, to an
extent, they'd be stupid to "show their hand" every time they came up
with a new algorithm that worked ... and we vassals would be stupid to
_want_ them to do so.

But the real mistake is the loss of the mystique. Secret work used to,
and still should, carry that "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill
you" romanticism. In our new age of "lie like you mean it", with no
hint-hint nudge-nudge know-what-I-mean know-what-I-mean, we've lost the
deep, rich, language that allows us to know they're spying on us without
knowing all the details.

I'm a big fan of open-* (open source, open data, open access, etc). But
there is a forcing toward banality that comes with it ... a dumbing down
to a least common denominator. We've become so literal, it's kinda sad.
We can't all be the "cool kids". Some of us have to be left out,
bullied and victimized by them. Some of us have to be the pretenders
who claim to know things they don't actually know. Etc. And some of us
have to bear the burden of being the dork trapped in the cool kid clique
(as Snowden wants us to believe he was). Without such a class
hierarchy, our language becomes robotic and lifeless.

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
I have come undone

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Owen Densmore

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

Administrator

More grist for this mill:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-17/apple-joins-facebook-microsoft-in-outlining-data-requests.html

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:48 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 17:09 -0400, [hidden email] wrote:
> However, I think many people do have impossible and unrealistic security
> expectations, and if you ask a lot of them (including me) on 9/12/2001 what
> would be appropriate, systematic cloud server intercepts and data mining
> wouldn't have even made a ripple in the water for me. So there's a
> alternative line of argumentation too that just isn't from today's batch of
> news.

And it's not _merely_ the "we live in a post-911" world rhetoric,
either. There's a deeper argument that we really _do_ want the NSA to
stay ahead of the best state-funded and independent hackers all over the
universe. Even those of us who claim to dislike being spied upon by our
own government tend to ooh and aah when they see hints of the fantastic
technologies developed by agencies like the NSA. Anyone who likes James
Bond, Mission Impossible, GI Joe, CSI, Person of Interest, etc. should
admit that up front.

The fact that the NSA is building entire data centers devoted to
exploring more occult network patterns is fscking fantastic. And, to an
extent, they'd be stupid to "show their hand" every time they came up
with a new algorithm that worked ... and we vassals would be stupid to
_want_ them to do so.

But the real mistake is the loss of the mystique. Secret work used to,
and still should, carry that "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill
you" romanticism. In our new age of "lie like you mean it", with no
hint-hint nudge-nudge know-what-I-mean know-what-I-mean, we've lost the
deep, rich, language that allows us to know they're spying on us without
knowing all the details.

I'm a big fan of open-* (open source, open data, open access, etc). But
there is a forcing toward banality that comes with it ... a dumbing down
to a least common denominator. We've become so literal, it's kinda sad.
We can't all be the "cool kids". Some of us have to be left out,
bullied and victimized by them. Some of us have to be the pretenders
who claim to know things they don't actually know. Etc. And some of us
have to bear the burden of being the dork trapped in the cool kid clique
(as Snowden wants us to believe he was). Without such a class
hierarchy, our language becomes robotic and lifeless.

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
I have come undone

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Owen Densmore

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

Administrator

I've started following the Snowden/PRISM thing a bit more, and came across this via twitter:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all

Regardless of opinions on the ethics/legal side, the "collect it all" approach seems just impossible for me to grok. Lets suppose you *did* have all the data generated on the internet every day for the last 20 years. What could you do with it?

I presume they are using specialized hardware, possibly openCL sort of processing via GPU farms. Fine. How would you turn this into a usable tool?

Color me naive, but isn't this a self generated DOS on themselves?

-- Owen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

``Regardless of opinions on the ethics/legal side, the "collect it all"
approach seems just impossible for me to grok.''

Sounds like the UK is more aggressive in this regard: `full take' for 3
days.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edwar
d-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html

Marcus

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

"How would you turn this into a usable tool?"

If one knew all communication events between all possible hosts over time,
then that organization could identify the likely relevant endpoint security
to attack (e.g. using a library of purchased zero-day exploits) on, say,
the likely paths of Tor connection. If they could compromise all of those
hosts, they could get behind the encryption when the next conversation
occurred.

Marcus

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glen ep ropella

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

Owen Densmore wrote at 07/15/2013 08:47 AM:
> Regardless of opinions on the ethics/legal side, the "collect it all"
> approach seems just impossible for me to grok. Lets suppose you *did* have
> all the data generated on the internet every day for the last 20 years.
> What could you do with it?

I think they're taking the usual approach to large data sets, save it all (or as
much as you can) just in case you find an anomaly you want to study. The point
of having the raw data available is to allow you to engage in hindsight. What
interests me most is not what they _intend_ to do with it, but what they end up
doing with it.

For example, I used to keep every single e-mail I ever received. I started
doing that way before I learned about Eddington typewriters. On several
occasions, I've had reason to go back and mine that data for various things,
including building various bots that could spit out text similar to various
people and spam sources. An interesting tangent is that encryption was a
significant irritant ... even where e-mails were encrypted with my public key. ;-)

The more important question, I think, is how these agencies are organizing the
long-term storage. What schema are they using? How is it indexed? What
storage media do they use? These are the questions that make me want to apply
for a job with the NSA. (BTW, I _did_ apply for a job there as I was finishing
college. I didn't pursue it because I had a good offer from somewhere else. ...
Plus, one of my roommates landed a job there. And he was so perky, sunny, and
patriotic, he creeped me out. He asked why I liked the work of H.R. Giger,
claiming it was too dark and depressing. He actually asked me to take down my
prints ... which I did. [sigh])

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and
attempting to make them equal. -- F.A. Hayek

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Owen Densmore

Re: PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc

Administrator

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Very useful, thanks!

So the current approach is a blend of full-take for 3+ days, with much larger time for meta-data. "Targeted" people are basically pwned, with full-take for as long as they'd like, default "for ever". Unlikely the full-take is useful for analysis without auxiliary field input to narrow searches. Airline examples were interesting.

I'm now officially freaked. And I really do believe there are serious legal/constitutional issues here.

NSA and the gvt itself no longer represent and protect us, the citizens of the USA. We're trapped by international intrigue and interests that simply do not matter to us as a country, a citizenry.

Indeed, they harm us. All our wars from Korea to the present have been insane hubris and the begin of the fall of our Empire. And the sum is that the distrust for us is placing us at unparalleled risk. Voting hasn't worked and the real issues are not discussed and debated.

Damn.

-- Owen

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 10:04 AM, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote:

``Regardless of opinions on the ethics/legal side, the "collect it all"
approach seems just impossible for me to grok.''

Sounds like the UK is more aggressive in this regard: `full take' for 3
days.

<a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edwar d-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html" target="_blank">http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edwar
d-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html

Marcus

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