journalist + snowden leaks == keep away forever?

[coderman]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:11 AM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Bart Gellman reveals government officials have warned him he's
> exposing himself to Espionage Act liability by publishing Snowden
> documents"


quote appears to be from this story:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/10/edward-snowden-surveillance-government-nsa-gchq-barton-gellman

"""
Asked whether he has been harassed when writing about Snowden, Gellman said no.

"I have not been harassed. I've had some interesting exchanges with
government reps of various temperatures. But I speak to them before
every story. If they want to demonstrate falsity I want to hear it,
and if they want to tell me about specific damage I would be doing
then it want to hear that too. I get warnings about the espionage act
and I assume that I'm more interesting than I used to be. And Google
has warned me that they believe a state-sponsored hacker is attempting
to compromise my computer... I assume that is more likely to be a
foreign agency."
"""

---

Snowden has shown the 'huge disparity of surveillance and power', says Gellman

Government needs reminding that they work for us, says
Pulitzer-winning reporter Barton Gellman, who describes Edward Snowden
as ending an era of indifference to surveillance

Jemima Kiss
theguardian.com, Monday 10 March 2014 16.45 GMT

Encryptions tools must be simplified and made accessible for the
mainstream, Pulitzer-winning journalist Barton Gellman said on Monday,
calling on the tech industry to have the courage and ingenuity to help
address the disparity of power between the people and their
government.

Addressing the SXSW festival shortly before Edward Snowden's live
speech by video, Gellman said we are a long way off simple,
transparent encryption tools. He cited Pew research which found that
88% of Americans say they have taken steps to protect their privacy in
some form.

"With all the user interface brains out there we could get easier
tools," he said. "But it's not just the ability to encrypt, it's a
frame of mind, a workflow and a discipline that is alien to most
people, and that is the opposite to the open nature of the consumer
internet. You could use Tor to access a site a hundred times, but the
101st time you forget, you may as well not have used Tor."

"There are people at this conference who have taken very considerable
risk to protect the privacy of their customers and have put themselves
at the edge of the door to jail and it will take courage as well as
ingenuity to change the way things work."

Metadata is more powerful than phone tapping

Gellman, who interviewed Snowden in Russia in 2013, said Snowden has
highlighted the peak indifference to security. Metadata is incredibly
potent as a method of surveillance, yet most internet users fail to
understand how powerful it can be in aggregate.

"One of the great gifts of Snowden is that he has shown what
surveillance can do," he said. Gellman told of a colleague who said he
wasn't concerned about metadata and his privacy, a colleague who used
Twitter heavily and with location stamps.

So Gellman downloaded three months worth of Twitter location stamps
and plotted them on a Google map, plotting the times, frequency and
significance of each location. His horrified colleague consequently
changed much of his behaviour online.

"I would rather someone listened in to all my phone calls than
accessed my metadata - you can learn much more about me from that
metadata."

Whistleblowers - traitors or lantern bearers?

Gellman doesn't like the word 'whistleblower'. On one side are many in
government who say he signed an agreement not to disclose information,
and that disclosing specific unlawful behaviour, or waste, should be
dealt with by internal channels. Snowden himself did speak to around
ten supervisors and to colleagues informally with some questions about
their work, and at one point asked if what they were doing would pass
'the front page test'.

"That's a pretty bold thing to do when you're gathering documents and
speaking to three reporters," he said. "But the illegality test is too
narrow.

"If the idea is genuine that the government works for us, and
information is power, we are living inside a one-way mirror because
they know more and more about us and we know less and less about them.
There's a huge disparity of power."

"Do we think it's a good idea to listen to every call, to bust
encryption standards... if it's a big policy question, and stuff is
being done behind our backs that might shock us if we knew about it,
there's pretty good reason to put it out there. Forget whistleblower -
it should be lantern holder."

How has the NSA surveillance story stayed live?

"Snowden paid very careful attention to what had happened to other
whistleblowers that hadn't had a long-term impact, and was careful to
produce the documents... If Snowden had asked me 6-8 months later [if
this story and still been live] but he has got to have exceed every
plausible estimation about impact. It's because he didn't realise the
documents all at once."

That pace was less about Snowden releasing the documents slowly but
about the work journalists need to do to verify and interrogate before
they publish.

Doctorow said he was most concerned by the programmes known as Bullrun
in the US and Edgehill in the UK, which saw the NSA spend $250,000 a
year spend trying to sabotage security standards and have backdoors
built into security products.

"In the second world war, countries had their own encryption tools but
now we share networks and tools, and if you can undermine the random
number generator - if you can make it less random - and that's what
the NSA was doing by trying to trick, buy or persuade companies to
make their encryption more breakable," said Gellman. "They would
create an encryption standard that only they would break - that would
let them be both information assurance and signal intelligence."

Was Prism effectively a front for the more substantial fibre optic and
undersea cable tapping? Interviewing Gellman, Cory Doctorow said: "The
reason for Prism was to give them a plausible reason to know about the
things they knew from the fibre taps and not alerting the companies."
When Prism started Twitter barely existed, Facebook was limited to
college campuses and Google was tiny.

How did Snowden get the documents out?

Asked whether he has been harassed when writing about Snowden, Gellman said no.

"I have not been harassed. I've had some interesting exchanges with
government reps of various temperatures. But I speak to them before
every story. If they want to demonstrate falsity I want to hear it,
and if they want to tell me about specific damage I would be doing
then it want to hear that too. I get warnings about the espionage act
and I assume that I'm more interesting than I used to be. And Google
has warned me that they believe a state-sponsored hacker is attempting
to compromise my computer... I assume that is more likely to be a
foreign agency."

"Do I worry about doing harm and putting lives at risk? Of course I
do. There are things in the documents I don't think should be
published and there are things Snowden doesn't think should be
published...

"He's a very smart guy on a lot of levels, and a very nimble mind.
There lots of boundaries he draws with me, and as a reporter I look
for side-channel attacks... Genghis Khan didn't try to known down the
Great Wall of China - he bribed the guards and put up ladders. But he
Snowden won't tell me how he got the documents out, for example."