Meeting Snowden in Princeton

Seth list at sysfu.com
Sun May 3 23:00:02 PDT 2015


On Sun, 03 May 2015 20:52:17 -0700, Mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:
> Well, if I were running the fucking NSA, I'd make sure that all staff
> and consultants were on high-priority watch lists. Snowden wasn't the
> first, you know. He was one of few idealists, though. Most of the rest
> were just in it for the money.
>
>>> We know that they focus on encrypted
>>> stuff, and one would hope that they monitor their staff and
>>> consultants.
>>
>> 	I don't think so. Snowden was 'one of them'.
>
> From what I've read in Bamford's books, it doesn't work like that. Being
> "one of them" puts you under more scrutiny, not less.

I posted about this exact issue back in December, mostly to the sound of  
crickets.

To recap the timeline:

Sometime late 2012 - Snowden emails Runa Sandvik and provides his real  
name and address in order to obtain some Tor stickers. *** Link between  
his legal identity and the cincinnatus at lavabit.com email appears to have  
been established at this point to anyone monitoring his communications ***  
Discussion leads to the idea to host a Cryptoparty. [1]

December 1, 2012: Snowden emails Greenwald for the first time via  
cincinnatus at lavabit.com address [1]

December 11, 2012: Snowden hosts the Cryptoparty in Hawaii while waiting  
for Greenwald to reply. Party is organized USING THE SAME  
cincinnatus at lavabit.com address as a point of contact on the public  
cryptoparty web site. [2]

Jan. 2013: Snowden reaches out to Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker.  
[3]

February 2013: Edward Snowden contacts Greenwald himself. (which Greenwald  
later retracts, as some claim he realized he himself could also face  
criminal charges for having advance knowledge of Snowden's plans to join  
Booz Allen Hamilton with the express intent of obtaining more documents to  
leak) [4]

March 2013: Snowden seeks a new contractor job with Booz Allen Hamilton at  
the same NSA facility in Hawaii. He later tells the South China Morning  
Post that he did so to get additional access to classified documents he  
intends to leak. [3]

May 20, 2013: Snowden arrives in Hong Kong from Hawaii. [3]

June 7, 2013: Greenwald publishes story in The Guardian. [3]

So the takeaway is that the NSA had almost six months to investigate or  
nab Snowden from the time of his first attempt to contact Greenwald on Dec  
1st 2012 until he was on a plane to Hong Kong on May 19th 2013.

Meanwhile he's running a large Tor exit node and organizing CryptoParties.

This is not exactly what you would call keeping a low profile or 'good  
OPSEC' for a person actively planning to drop the biggest Intel leak in  
history.

I find this unbelievable.

[1]  
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140521/07124327303/snowden-ran-major-tor-exit-relay-hosted-cryptoparty-hawaii-while-waiting-greenwald-to-reply.shtml

[2]  
https://web.archive.org/web/20130327000851/https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/Oahu

[3]  
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/edward-snowden-timeline-n114871

[4] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/statuses/344040301972815872



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