Did you read today (NYT) that one of the founders of EFF, Mitch Kapor, was a first investor in a leading ubiqutious camera spying venture to put in the hands of everybody what once was used only by spies and cops? Everybody is TLA, TLA is everybody. Snowden, allegedly, gave docs to a world-class braggart, Greenwald, and to two or three much less loud-mouthed but in the professional bragging business, Poitras and Gellman, documentary tout and national security tout, respectively. Thereafter the tout bragging industry kicked into high gear and quickly overwhelmed whatever Snowden might have intended by their own fabricated, doctored, hyperbolied super-touted headlined versions of his intentions, but more so, in their own economic interest, whipping up a frenzy about their noble intentions to rake in the loot after years of nearing bankruptcy (the forlorn solo journo, Greenwald and Poitras profiles too.) Greenwald in particular bellows excessively, as a lawyer must, about his obligation to a pact with Snowden, and lately his much greater jury-pandering about his pact with Omidyar. His recent long bloviation on his blog is purely promotional bragging characteristic of the hustler forever crowing about its prowess, whining about attacks, disdaining critics with puerile condescension. Omidyar and Bezos among others, have been sucked into the ultra-bragging game, large, inebriated with unquenchable wealth accumulation, after years of supporting highly vainglorious and dispensible NGO investments, not a few of which have failed due to exaggerated brochure-toute expectations which could not be met but were invented losers to be run into the ground for the tax benefits of ultra-concentrated wealth. This the exact model of the Firstlook venture, a combo of high-profit media industry and simulated "NGO" journalism to exempt the taxable profits. Would that work here. Youbetcha. The very founding of cypherpunks employed that model and sustains it to solicit and amass data of crypto-freedom-drunk users for marketing peculiarly faulty products across the political spectrum from faux privacy to faux security. Https everywhere, har, Tor, har, WikiLeaks, har, Cryptome, spit, and what have you now, Snowden. Braggarts always have noble purposes, bragging about nobility is what sustains the illusion of superiority. And glosses the nobility of great wealth or depthless desire for it. Significant variations of braggardy, from loud to quiet. overstatement to understatement. Chump version: "needs killing." Chimp version: Snowden is a hero, or traitor. Wimp version: more leaks by others, none by me. Gimp version: this is nothing new. Limp version: don't insult people here, don't discuss politics, message deleted by moderator. Blimp version: this forum is unmoderated. At 09:15 AM 1/8/2014, you wrote:
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.