What if my hypothesis regarding Snowden is correct?
The hypothesis being that Snowden is at least a triple agent. Ali Mohammed provided material support to Al Qaeda, but that was because he betrayed both the Army and Al Qaeda for the CIA. His sentencing has been on hold for a long time, and it is interesting no one asks questions about it. If one was to look for information about my hypothesis, what would one find? https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/ The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains. Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is located at a commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. The public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a 'Blot' server that handles actual connection requests from clients. It is setup for optional SSL client authentication: if a client sends a valid client certificate (only implants can do that), the connection is forwarded to the 'Honeycomb' toolserver that communicates with the implant; if a valid certificate is missing (which is the case if someone tries to open the cover domain website by accident), the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that delivers an unsuspicious looking website. --- Snowden's revelations increased the amount of encryption. However the NSA already collects a great amount of information through other means. For reasons unknown, much of the Snowden documents are classified at Talent Keyhole, which is explained at ( http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-us-classification-system.html ). Although overclassification is typical, afterall, many of the "secret" paragraphs are really FOUO because they are used in the private sector already ( https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3546567-10th-Anniversary-Edition-EP-... ), the thing is that this implies the NSA collects data through means unhindered by encryption. Which makes "Practical-Titled Attack on AES-128 Using Chosen-Text Relations" all the more concerning. Why mock side channel cryptanalysis? Furthermore, Github has made accidentally publishing your shared secret very easy. https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=remove+password&type=Commits&ref=searchresults Many cases where AWS refunds thousands of dollars of fraud because someone accidentally publishes a Github key. To think that could be millions of dollars a week. Just refunding fraud. Naturally official CIA documentation would not suggest committing a crime, that would be like putting login settings to the production database into the tutorial ( https://np.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/accidentally_destr... ). Interestingly, insecure defaults imperil national security: https://theintercept.com/2017/05/11/nyu-accidentally-exposed-military-code-b... . Regardless, you can still troll the NSA. They couldn't even design the Clipper chip correctly. Anyway, this modified limited hangout phrase is some really high level linguistics. Really complex, seems to intentionally prevent the reader from seeing patterns.
On 06/18/2017 02:24 AM, Ryan Carboni wrote:
The hypothesis being that Snowden is at least a triple agent. Ali Mohammed provided material support to Al Qaeda, but that was because he betrayed both the Army and Al Qaeda for the CIA. His sentencing has been on hold for a long time, and it is interesting no one asks questions about it.
My guess is that Snowden was an unwitting agent, spotted early by the insider threat program and selected for use in a limited hangout. If so, he was exposed to scripted events in the workplace to draw his attention to specific programs, and given e-z access to selected documents related to those programs. In the network age, censorship ranges from difficult to impossible depending on the context; getting ahead of an adversary and dominating the messaging on a given topic has gained a new importance. I think the Snowden Affair may be an example. Glenn Greenwald's behavior, selecting a few of Snowden's documents to publish and burying the rest, is consistent with this model. So too is his initiative in pushing the publication date of the (partially falsified) PRISM pages back to coincide with the first day of the Manning trial, knocking it all the way out of the news. The huge controversy following the release of the first few Snowden documents produced what results? It seems that the intel guys won every engagement, even setting a precedent that senior U.S. intelligence officials are allowed to lie to Congressional committees under oath with no penalty of any kind. The way it all went down suggests to me that the intel guise had a long lead time to select and prepare for specific challenges.
Snowden's revelations increased the amount of encryption.
The only place I saw that happen was a significant bump in the use of SSL by a wider range of website operators. Given that the SSL key signing protocol is deeply flawed and the NSA is uniquely well positioned to conduct MITM attacks negating that particular form of encryption, no harm done. The result is an increase in end users' "false sense of" security - and a small net gain in "national security" in the sense of making access to network traffic a little harder for foreign intel and private sector criminal enterprises. A casual observer might believe that the Snowden docs caused significant harm to U.S. interests, most notably when it was revealed the Angela Merkel's phones were tapped - but those particular documents came from an as yet unknown source, probably located in Germany. I don't "believe" a word of the above analysis. But I do consider it more likely than the alternatives I have seen.
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Ryan Carboni -
Steve Kinney