Snowden wanted to be identified, so it is alleged, and has been caught as intended.
I think the reasoning with Snowden was not so much to brag as to make himself a hard-to-assassinate public figure. In his case, so few people could have acquired the documents he did, that it was a matter of (little) time before he was noticed to be conveniently absent as the shit hit the fan. If he wasn't in the public eye by that time, he'd have been disappeared and/or shot in short order.
Not to be overlooked: the essence of comsec and crypto is deception. So laugh at the open source ruse on the way to the pokey.
Funny that, I look at closed source as evidence of deception; without deception, there is no reason to hide the source. As long as they keys are secret, the protocol and code can be open, and should be if anyone's to trust that they're A) beneficent and B) competent. In the comparison of Cryptocat, which has tightened up radically because of code audits enabled by Open Sourcing it, to Bittorrent Sync (which used to advertise AES256 which was impossible with the keylength being shared, now advertises AES128, nobody knows how they implement it but a mistake like that screams "badly"), which is still unaudited snakeoil: BTSync boast massive bandwidth usage implying a significant user uptake, and moreso since the Snowden affair because of their snakeoil offering. So the Open Source guy gets all the attention, audits and improvement, while the closed source guys get no attention, no audits, and finally notice internally that they're offering AES256 when they can't physically accomplish it with the keylengths. I'll take Open, thanks. At least I can see what's wrong if it errs. On 08/01/14 12:55, John Young wrote:
James Donald wrote:
And if he had, like Snowden, kept a low profile, instead of flicking a towel in their faces, they never would have detected it.
Swartz bragged to a slew of people and was caught. Manning bragged to Lamo and was caught. Kiriakou bragged to a journalist and was caught. Sabu bragged to cohorts and was caught. Barrett Brown bragged to the world and was caught. Several Anonymouses bragged and were caught. And so on, dozens in just the last decade.
Jim Bell bragged online and went to jail. So did Carl Johnson. Cops love braggarts, brag themselves to braggarts to keep prisons happylands.
How many did not brag and remained uncaught? There are likely thousands of them. Many of those work with or emulate spies who do not brag as rule number 1.
Snowden wanted to be identified, so it is alleged, and has been caught as intended.
Is this nuts or what, vainglorious stupidity, or a commonplace ruse to get the enemy to expose its capabilities, or to flaunt one's own hybrid of authentic and fake to spook the enemy, to seel products, to boost budgets, to manipulate public opinion. The fundamental purpose of leaks.
Keeping a non-existent profile is worth considering, along with a hundred pseudos.
And putting a high-profile out there is what the Internet was intended to do, fake, sock, pseudo, anon, sucker.
Not to be overlooked: the essence of comsec and crypto is deception. So laugh at the open source ruse on the way to the pokey.