Not likely you will see the list if it exists. Magical lists are as venerable as religion, as new as Snowden's teams' hyperbole, as duplictious as Joe McCarthy's, as puerile as IRS's -- the USA's premier social media spy agency to which we annually confess and conceal our paltry lies with tax-advisories which covertly supply our cheating metadata right into the IRS's and treaty members' big data global catchall far more capacious than Utah Data Center, feared as much by individual spies as other panopticked extortion victims. This sidebar to remind NSA secrecy is hardly the great threat to "personally identifiable information" (PII). There is a practice of government agencies and some others to not publish (PII) of individuals. So email addresses, homes, phone and SSNs are usually redacted. Except when used to coerce obedience, inform on targets, shame in public. The Washington Post said it searched 200,000 pages of Snowden material in search of a bit of data which it reported. Why brag of the number? That's hyperbole. This number of pages seems to be far more than the 59,000 or so files asserted by The Guardian, but that is unclear due the lack of number of pages in the 59,000 "files" or "documents." We have tallied a few under 3,000 pages released by the various Snowden outlets. Promis is a controversial program and is slathered with myths and disinfo, as camouflage and propaganda for and against its use and capabilities, as customary for villainous operations. There is a continuing lucrative industry to chill democratic transparency with layers of braggadacio, denial, lying and pretense of threat and counterthreat. Uncertainty about who is spying on you is the purpose, and to stigmatize you if you inquire too persistently. Out comes the bellows of "conspiracy theory," "tin-hats," paranoids, weirdos and such. Public deception is a perdurable feature of spying and power concentration. Shallow layers of expose, fed to media with the understanding it will flatter itself by behaving "responsibly" in order to assure future feedings, is part of that. That is part of the Snowden methodology and is a highly favored journalistic practice to melodramatically claim to know more than can be revealed while exaggerating the courage to reveal what it does while protecting the public interest (thus emulating government and other authoritarian practice). Reviews of Citizenfour are cautious, not sure what to make of the careful editing and omissions. They sense, and say so, there is much still missing. Poitras is saying just that: this is "not the full story" by "any stretch of the imagination." This is a Hollywood technique likely imposed on her by the film's backers. Which will economically segue nicely into the Oliver Stone's and whatitsname's makeover in the works. You can get your appeal to First Look and/or Greenwald by linking to their Twitter accounts your message in the cpunks archive. We use that SM hyperbole occasionally and they use it voluminously. At 05:18 PM 10/25/2014, you wrote:
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At the risk of being repetitive, I simply wish to ask the following to whoever is reading this thread, be it random cypherpunks list subscribers that are just trying to clear out their e-mail on the weekend, John Young, Glenn Greenwald, or anyone who knows something that I do not (and that's quite a lot):
1) Who might have access to a list known as Main Core? This is such an old story that it would seem that some kind of list would now be available, but I haven't found it. Has it ever been leaked, FOIA'd, successfully released in partially redacted form in some other mechanism, or made searchable somewhere?
[[ Main Core notes / background: Salon reported on Main Core in July of 2008 with an article by Tim Shorrock. Apparently, William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, had heard of Main Core at some point in 1992, according to the Salon article. Hamilton, who (was then, and still is) president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm that includes clients in government, indicated that the Bush administrations domestic surveillance operations used Main Core - it is not known if it is still used today in 2014. Main Core was first widely reported on in May 2008 by Christopher Ketcham and in July 2008 by Tim Shorrock, which included in July of 2008 an interview by Amy Goodman of Tim Shorrock. However, I am unaware of any release of names, e-mails, etc. which might be on this list, and it seemed kind of obvious that those who were reporting on it probably had never seen the Main Core list. This may involve use of PROMIS software, and according to Adm. Dan Murphy (a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA, who 'died' shortly after his meeting in 2001 with William Hamilton), did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSAs use of PROMIS involved something so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem. ]]
2) What kind of process (if any) exists for myself or anyone else to get access to this 'list of targets' which Greenwald referred to some long time ago? [[ For clarification, I think that this 'list of targets' which I referred to in my prior message on this thread, and the list of targets which I am inquiring about now, is the FISA recap spreadsheet containing email addresses, with a Collection Status column and Case Notation codes beginning with the prefix XX.SQF directly followed by a number ]] A redacted version is shown here (which is not searchable): https://edwardsnowden.com/2014/07/09/fisa-recap/
3) Are there any indications that Main Core list might have just been merged into another list (such as the 'FISA Recap' or some other such thing)? Any news story which provided some kind of statements about merging of lists, lists being glommed together and used by DHS, etc.?
4) Would it be necessary for me to peruse the entire (in the case of the FISA Recap / list of targets) source document of over 7,000 names or e-mail addresses? I hope not. I am interested in some kind of item that would allow me to search to find out if my name and / or the names or e-mail addresses of those I am familiar with is in lists such as MainCore and the FISA Recap (which by now is undoubtedly rather dated, but I would like to find out anyway). By the way, I am not the only one interested in being able to search that list: https://twitter.com/StanleyCohenLaw/status/472823508008177664
5) For reference: When vulnerabilities come out that affect millions of people in the internet world, and when those turn into situations that result in people's e-mails being divulged somehow, usually there is someone who is quick to provide a website to make this whole process searchable by e-mail address so you can find out if you are affected -- like this excellent site: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Just by way of suggestion, I know haveibeenpwned is actually for the purposes of checking if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach in the past (and yes I've used it to check all my e-mail addresses, and I took appropriate action to protect myself after the Forbes hack/breach...), but I see no reason why that same site (or another site using the same searchable model) should not present the e-mail addresses of who ended up on Main Core and / or the 'FISA Recap' and reveal if your e-mail address is on there, So That You Know. If you know your e-mail address, you can check, and if you are one of the over 7,000 individuals in the FISA Recap list, a little thing should notify you of that when you use a search page, just like it does in haveibeenpwned. This should have already been made available long ago (seriously, I hope someone from First Look is reading this).
Also, if I am being really foolish and if such a page already exists that would allow me to search for my e-mail address to find if it is in a FISA Recap, please by all means enlighten me as to the URL (with protocol identifier as http or https please!) of that page, so I can go search.
Respect,
- -Odinn
John Young wrote:
This John Young corrects a data point: 97% of some 59,000 Snowden documents have not been released or even less percentage if the DoD count of 1.7 million is used. This confirms that those documents which have been released are misleading by omission, so cherry-picked and dramatized that understanding of them is most likely false, biased, distorted, more like narrative fiction (spy stories, breaking news) than credible evidence. It certainly confirms that media-legal fiction is the intention of the distributors, publicity and legal teams rather than allow full access for widely-based, for ordinary and specialized readers to assay the collection through a free public access methodology. (Greenwald's book states that at one point he and Poitras considered setting up a public web for that purpose, maybe apochryphal to gloss the slow drip method adopted.)
Perhaps the full access will come about after sacred cow of profitability and celebrity has been milked, or it may be that full access has been granted in confidence to skilled readers in the black arts of comsec, infosec and natsec.
To date, there has been slim pickings of technologically useful material short-shrifted in favor of lurid civil liberties scandals which the spies can easily massage into messages of of course we do that. Except for a tranche of techno material covered by Jacob Appelbaum at 30C3, nearly all the rest is simple-minded promotional material with dollops of legal shenanigans of the sort Greenwald and journalists can handle comfortably.
A few days ago Bruce Schneier blogged that he had been cut off from access to the Snowden material and Matthew Green said he had been shown only a few documents for comment. WaPo has had a techie advising Barton Gellman. That's pretty much it for coverage of technical material needed to devise countermeasures, that is, virtually none at all.
Hoopla has prevailed in news coverage and books, mostly of it valorizing journalists and even Snowden in stock journalist source noble cariacture, and it looks as though Poitras and Hollywood will continue the practice. What an ethical shame, what criminality of monetization ($250M and rising) placed above public protection. Snowden is being degraded as a poster child for this venality and ambition. Trapped in a bubble of media, legal and diplomatic fanfare. A fate suffered by Assange, Manning and a slew of others some paraded from forum to forum as entourage for the Snowden-streaming video circus acts like that hosted by The New Yorker at the NY Film Festival and now Poitras melodramatic confabulation positioning Greenwald as Machiavelli to the Prince Edward of Snowden.
At 07:27 PM 10/24/2014, you wrote: Hello,
John, for some reason your name reminds me of someone who I think was the ninth person to walk on the moon? Same John Young? (long shot I know) Just kidding though - you are the founder of Cryptome, right?
Anyway, It's not my intent here to ruffle any feathers (on this thread), but I did want to suggest (and I'm sure someone has already thought of this) that people be able to search for their names or IDs in (searchable) databases of leaked info.
I think this came up in a thread on twitter some while back actually... https://twitter.com/AnonyOdinn/status/344585372216487937
(That twitter thread was from a discussion in mid-2013[!] which referenced MainCore and also (different than MainCore) a 'list of targets' that Greenwald had mentioned, but regardless of if it's MainCore or Greenwald's 'list of targets' or other such thing, I think searchability is really important, which of course implies that really all the data should be made available in some kind of format to allow keyword searches.)
-Odinn
John Young wrote:
Thanks for the comments.
Screenshots most welcome. cryptome[at]earthlink.net or pointers.
Greenwald's mercenary greed is why only 97% of Snowden docs have been released. His and cohorts criminal behavior puts citizens in harms way to protect the natsec apparatus including natsec media.
At 02:58 PM 10/24/2014, you wrote:
Saw this last night - an obvious must-watch for all CPunks. I think it was probably the most important documentary film of all time. As Roger Ebert said, "itâs as if Daniel Ellsberg had a friend with a movie camera who filmed his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers every step of the way. Or if the Watergate burglars had taken along a filmmaker who shot their crimes and the cover-up that followed. Except that the issues âCitizenfourâ deals with are, arguably, a thousand times more potent than Vietnam or Watergate." Truly, this is the Snowden story we have been waiting for since 2013.
The main revelation of the film, however, is what an incredible boob Glenn Greenwald is. I had some idea of this after seeing him give an extremely disappointing talk earlier this year, but I don't think I quite understood how useless this guy really is. He's constantly asking the wrong questions, displays a technical ineptness (to the point of deliberate ignorance) that obviously hampers the journalism, and at very step shows a very clear desire to keep the document cache to himself for careerist purposes. At one point Ewen MacAskill brings up the idea of there being a Wikileaks-esque document explorer, and Ed says that this would be the best outcome for the documents, and Greenwald quickly dismisses the idea to talk about his publishing schedule. I still have immense respect for him, but I found it very frustrating and quite cringey to watch him treat the whole event in news-cycle terms, while everybody around him is obviously thinking in historical context. For instance, there is a moment when they are prepping for Ed's first on-camera interview and he asks the reporters how much background he should give about himself, and they give different answers. Poitras asks for as much detail as possible, and Greenwald basically says that isn't important, just be short so we get a good soundbite.
More importantly, I think the film also misses an opportunity to talk about power. This is something Edward himself has addressed, but it isn't really covered in Greenwald's reporting or books, and the only time it's mentioned in the film is when Jacob Appelbaum, while speaking before a European council of some sort, quite astutely comments that surveillance and control are one and the same. I think the film should probably have spent another hour or so investigating, naming and confronting those who profit from that control. Other than a few choice C-SPAN snippets, the enemy is completely faceless, which plays well for the pervading sense paranoia which envelops the film, but also leaves many questions unasked. Perhaps that's left as an exercise for the viewer, but I think the general take-away message from both the reporting and to a slightly lesser extent the film is that any "solution" will be token reform of policy and not dismantlement of power structures.
Also, very nice of the Russian government to let Ed have his girlfriend back. I didn't know that had happened, and it gives a rather unexpected happy ending to a film which otherwise made me want to cry desperately.
Anyway, I'd be very interested to hear what you lot thought of it. (JY, you should throw a torrent up ASAP! I'm sure people will be screenshotting and analyzing all of the new document shots the film contains.)
R
- -- http://abis.io ~ "a protocol concept to enable decentralization and expansion of a giving economy, and a new social good" https://keybase.io/odinn -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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