What if my hypothesis regarding Snowden is correct?

Steve Kinney admin at pilobilus.net
Sun Jun 18 12:07:04 PDT 2017


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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