Re: "SIGINT tradecraft…is very hands-on (literally!)"

[coderman]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:00 AM, John Young <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:
> We've seen the Greenwald book No Place to Hide, where are the
> promised gush of Snowden documents available? His publisher
> doesn't show a source. Surely not another marketing tease.

great question; let us know if you find them!



> Surely not snatched by the TLAs, tampered with, doctored,
> MTM'd, redacted, censored, cherry-picked, highlighted for
> dummies and fans, surely not handled like a disinfo spy
> op, heavy on narrative, suggestions of much more unreleasable,
> need for classified briefings and diligent vetting, that what
> we documents censors know we can't dare tell the public
> due to the public dupery by enemies of our interests.

my favorite slides from the book are the ones that are nearly all
redacted except for one sentence at the end. lulz!



> Dropboxes are honey pots, media is just that, governments
> are just that, opsec and comsec are just that.

poor pooh bear, what a confusing world to live in...


> And do tell, what is this SIGINT forum psyoping?

NO SPOILERS!


----

my take on the interesting bits:

regarding the phones in the fridge, this was done to muffle sound, not
provide EMSEC protection. a fridge is not a faraday cage! (there has
been some speculation, now definitively squashed.)

regarding the scope of surveillance and exploitation, it is
interesting to see how far Alexander really pushed things beyond
normative for the agency.  i knew he was a "spy cowboy", yet this book
presents a clearer picture of how significant Alexander escalated
Hayden's already aggressive agenda.

regarding the intimidation and maligning of leak reporters, it was
interesting to see how egregious some of the efforts to thwart and
discredit reporting on this story were.

last but not least, i learned that Snowden tried but failed to obtain
a copy of the legend mapping CODENAMES with their corporate partners
(the telecoms, not the Internet companies which they don't give two
shits about naming publicly as collaborators.)  i'm looking at you,
level3!