Snowden sets OPSEC record straight

[Juan Garofalo]

--On Thursday, October 17, 2013 9:13 PM -0700 coderman <coderman at gmail.com>
wrote:

> it doesn't get much more definitive than this retort.. :
> """
> [Snowden] felt confident that he had kept the documents secure from
> Chinese spies, and that the N.S.A. knew he had done so. His last
> target while working as an agency contractor was China, he said,
> adding that he had had "access to every target, every active
> operation" mounted by the N.S.A. against the Chinese. "Full lists of
> them," he said.
> 
> "If that was compromised," he went on, "N.S.A. would have set the
> table on fire from slamming it so many times in denouncing the damage
> it had caused. Yet N.S.A. has not offered a single example of damage
> from the leaks. They haven't said boo about it except 'we think,'
> 'maybe,' 'have to assume' from anonymous and former officials. Not
> 'China is going dark.' Not 'the Chinese military has shut us
> out.' " """
> 
> 
> there is a clear thoughtfulness, moral reasoning, and
> conscientiousness repeatedly demonstrated by Snowden in these events.
> it is now obvious that history will exonerate him fully.



	He's still loyal to the american nazis. That's praiseworthy? 



> 
> ... the distance between current reactionary retribution and that
> future absolution appears to be a bit of a distance, however...
> hopefully not too long.
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-fi
> les-to-russia.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
> 
> October 17, 2013
> 
> Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia
> 
> By JAMES RISEN
> 
> WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency
> contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not
> take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there
> in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get
> access to them.
> 
> Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had
> obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow,
> and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to
> Russia "because it wouldn't serve the public interest," he said.
> 
> "What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of
> the materials onward?" he added.
> 
> He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from
> China's spies because he was familiar with that nation's intelligence
> abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese
> operations and had taught a course on Chinese
> cybercounterintelligence.
> 
> "There's a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received
> any documents," he said.
> 
> American intelligence officials have expressed grave concern that the
> files might have fallen into the hands of foreign intelligence
> services, but Mr. Snowden said he believed that the N.S.A. knew he had
> not cooperated with the Russians or the Chinese. He said he was
> publicly revealing that he no longer had any agency documents to
> explain why he was confident that Russia had not gained access to
> them. He had been reluctant to disclose that information previously,
> he said, for fear of exposing the journalists to greater scrutiny.
> 
> In a wide-ranging interview over several days in the last week, Mr.
> Snowden offered detailed responses to accusations that have been
> leveled against him by American officials and other critics, provided
> new insights into why he became disillusioned with the N.S.A. and
> decided to disclose the documents, and talked about the international
> debate over surveillance that resulted from the revelations. The
> interview took place through encrypted online communications.
> 
> Mr. Snowden, 30, has been praised by privacy advocates and assailed by
> government officials as a traitor who has caused irreparable harm, and
> he is facing charges under the Espionage Act for leaking the N.S.A.
> documents to the news media. In the interview, he said he believed he
> was a whistle-blower who was acting in the nation's best interests by
> revealing information about the N.S.A.'s surveillance dragnet and huge
> collections of communications data, including that of Americans.
> 
> He argued that he had helped American national security by prompting a
> badly needed public debate about the scope of the intelligence effort.
> "The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater
> danger than their disclosure," he said. He added that he had been more
> concerned that Americans had not been told about the N.S.A.'s reach
> than he was about any specific surveillance operation.
> 
> "So long as there's broad support amongst a people, it can be argued
> there's a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally
> wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision," he said.
> "However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public
> oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that's a problem. It also
> represents a dangerous normalization of 'governing in the dark,' where
> decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input."
> 
> Mr. Snowden said he had never considered defecting while in Hong Kong,
> nor in Russia, where he has been permitted to stay for one year. He
> said he felt confident that he had kept the documents secure from
> Chinese spies, and that the N.S.A. knew he had done so. His last
> target while working as an agency contractor was China, he said,
> adding that he had had "access to every target, every active
> operation" mounted by the N.S.A. against the Chinese. "Full lists of
> them," he said.
> 
> "If that was compromised," he went on, "N.S.A. would have set the
> table on fire from slamming it so many times in denouncing the damage
> it had caused. Yet N.S.A. has not offered a single example of damage
> from the leaks. They haven't said boo about it except 'we think,'
> 'maybe,' 'have to assume' from anonymous and former officials. Not
> 'China is going dark.' Not 'the Chinese military has shut us
> out.' "
> 
> An N.S.A. spokeswoman did not respond Thursday to a request for
> comment on Mr. Snowden's assertions.
> 
> Mr. Snowden said his decision to leak N.S.A. documents developed
> gradually, dating back at least to his time working as a technician in
> the Geneva station of the C.I.A. His experiences there, Mr. Snowden
> said, fed his doubts about the intelligence community, while also
> convincing him that working through the chain of command would only
> lead to retribution.
> 
> He disputed an account in The New York Times last week reporting that
> a derogatory comment placed in his personnel evaluation while he was
> in Geneva was a result of suspicions that he was trying to break in to
> classified files to which he was not authorized to have access. (The
> C.I.A. later took issue with the description of why he had been
> reprimanded.) Mr. Snowden said the comment was placed in his file by a
> senior manager seeking to punish him for trying to warn the C.I.A.
> about a computer vulnerability.
> 
> Mr. Snowden said that in 2008 and 2009, he was working in Geneva as a
> telecommunications information systems officer, handling everything
> from information technology and computer networks to maintenance of
> the heating and air-conditioning systems. He began pushing for a
> promotion, but got into what he termed a "petty e-mail spat" in which
> he questioned a senior manager's judgment.
> 
> Several months later, Mr. Snowden said, he was writing his annual
> self-evaluation when he discovered flaws in the software of the
> C.I.A.'s personnel Web applications that would make them vulnerable to
> hacking. He warned his supervisor, he said, but his boss advised him
> to drop the matter and not rock the boat. After a technical team also
> brushed him off, he said, his boss finally agreed to allow him to test
> the system to prove that it was flawed.
> 
> He did so by adding some code and text "in a nonmalicious manner" to
> his evaluation document that showed that the vulnerability existed, he
> said. His immediate supervisor signed off on it and sent it through
> the system, but a more senior manager — the man Mr. Snowden had
> challenged earlier — was furious and filed a critical comment in Mr.
> Snowden's personnel file, he said.
> 
> He said he had considered filing a complaint with the C.I.A.'s
> inspector general about what he considered to be a reprisal, adding
> that he could not recall whether he had done so or a supervisor had
> talked him out of it. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment on Mr.
> Snowden's account of the episode or whether he had filed a complaint.
> 
> But the incident, Mr. Snowden said, convinced him that trying to work
> through the system would only lead to punishment. He said he knew of
> others who suffered reprisals for what they had exposed, including
> Thomas A. Drake, who was prosecuted for disclosing N.S.A. contracting
> abuses to The Baltimore Sun. (He met with Mr. Snowden in Moscow last
> week to present an award to him for his actions.) And he knew other
> N.S.A. employees who had gotten into trouble for embarrassing a senior
> official in an e-mail chain that included a line, referring to the
> Chinese Army, that said, "Is this the P.L.A. or the N.S.A.?"
> 
> Mr. Snowden added that inside the spy agency "there's a lot of dissent
> — palpable with some, even." But he said that people were kept in line
> through "fear and a false image of patriotism," which he described as
> "obedience to authority."
> 
> He said he believed that if he tried to question the N.S.A.'s
> surveillance operations as an insider, his efforts "would have been
> buried forever," and he would "have been discredited and ruined." He
> said that "the system does not work," adding that "you have to
> report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it."
> 
> Mr. Snowden said he finally decided to act when he discovered a copy
> of a classified 2009 inspector general's report on the N.S.A.'s
> warrantless wiretapping program during the Bush administration. He
> said he found the document through a "dirty word search," which he
> described as an effort by a systems administrator to check a computer
> system for things that should not be there in order to delete them and
> sanitize the system.
> 
> "It was too highly classified to be where it was," he said of the
> report. He opened the document to make certain that it did not belong
> there, and after he saw what it revealed, "curiosity prevailed," he
> said.
> 
> After reading about the program, which skirted the existing
> surveillance laws, he concluded that it had been illegal, he said. "If
> the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing
> punishment or even any repercussions at all," he said, "secret powers
> become tremendously dangerous."
> 
> He would not say exactly when he read the report, or discuss the
> timing of his subsequent actions to collect N.S.A. documents in order
> to leak them. But he said that reading the report helped crystallize
> his decision. "You can't read something like that and not realize what
> it means for all of these systems we have," he said.
> 
> Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose
> information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated.
> He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the
> documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to
> them because he wanted his own bias "divorced from the decision-making
> of publication," and that "technical solutions were in place to ensure
> the work of the journalists couldn't be interfered with."
> 
> Mr. Snowden declined to provide details about his living conditions in
> Moscow, except to say that he was not under Russian government control
> and was free to move around.
> 
>