Was he brilliant? Or is that just a story -- "nobody else out of NSA's 20,000 employees is spying on people they shouldn't because they're just "great" not "brilliant", so don't worry!"
I know the article is only to report what is said and it might be taken out of context. However, I am disturbed by the kind of mentality around hiring "great" and "brilliant" employee's. I see no future with that kind of organizational thinking.
If the NSA didn't guard against him using accounts with more clearance to download documents he wasn't supposed to have access to, I don't think Snowden's intelligence is what we should be worried about.
Which I don't understand... they're claiming that we should trust them but they aren't (or shouldn't be [hiring]) the most brilliant people. So, how many other holes exist in their systems and oversight that are unknown because there aren't brilliant people finding them?
What are you referencing? The quote (from an NBC story):
> “Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”
Not only that, but isn't the NSA required to have a sufficient level of auditing to detect (or at least record) those accesses before the systems are even fired up?
I think it might be a little more complex than that, but in essence, yes. In these types of environments you will have certificates (browser based or otherwise), he could have fabricated digital keys or stolen these from some type of key store, and then used them on his behalf.
> NSA Director Keith Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Snowden fabricated digital keys that gave him access to areas way above his clearance as a low-level contractor and systems administrator. [1]
IMO the solution is not keeping the top cryptographers, security experts, et al. out of the agency that is supposed to protect the country from the top cryptographers and security experts from other countries. Seems like a flawed idea right from the start. You just need to make sure the people you hire are actually on your side.
I disagree, the solution is more likely not doing anything morally questionable because the pool of talented people without morals is significantly shallower than the pool with, in my experience.
That may work in theory, but it's not always possible to know who's on your side. For an especially control-obsessed agency like the NSA that wants to know everything, this approach is completely unpalatable. Large institutions with sensitive information, whether public or private, generally don't know or trust their lower level employees (and a sysadmin is "lower level" in this context). They want solutions that prevent access by default. The NSA seems to have figured out that relying on sysadmins as a trusted party (a contracted trusted party, specifically) exposed a big hole in their ability to control things. It should have been obvious that contracting out a role that requires an extreme amount of trust was a bad idea, but large institutions often don't learn obvious lessons until someone makes them pay for their mistake.
That is the issue with technology and those in power who don't know how to use it. If a General or higher up is having an issue with classified data, it's not like he can just look at the error message and then go home for the day, he requires an IT team to help and maintain the systems.
A DBA can't do their job if they can't access the databases they manage/design/maintain.
I'm highly skeptical of the reporting. He may have impersonated other accounts to cover his tracks but if he had physical access to a system or the user database of a system then he was "authorized" to see all of the data on that system. Or they are doing IT security worse in that office than it is usually done.
No he wasn't. Security is a "need to know". Just because you have a TS clearance for example doesn't mean you have access to all TS information out there. If you step over that then you get slapped down.
I see two possibilities, though I am not that well-versed in the software used at the NSA:
1. Administrator accounts were not confined (in the SELinux sense), so he was able to transition to whatever security context he needed/wanted.
2. He was able to set up the login credentials for other users. He could have created his own accounts with higher-level clearances, or set up his own smartcard for logging in to some other person's account, etc.
It may seem like poor design, but it is understandable why things might have been set up like that. In the first case, it is because the admins need to be able to solve problems that happen in a variety of security contexts / levels, and the overhead of defining a second set of policies governing the admins was just too high. In the second, it would be because someone has to be able to set up credentials and that there are a lot of systems for which credentials must be set up, making it hard to impose restrictions. There is also the matter of audit logs -- it might not be so bad to allow an admin to transition to whatever security level if each transition is logged.
I suspect that much of the NSA's computer security is devoted to ensuring that people do not accidentally leak classified information, and that preventing insider attacks is done at a higher level (the clearance process, random audits, etc.).
> preventing insider attacks is done at a higher level (the clearance process, random audits, etc.)
So long as "preventing insider attacks is done at a higher level" isn't synonymous with: "once you're hired as sysadmin, you have the unsupervised keys to the kingdom!"
Wasn't the original story that he was a high school dropout, glorified keyboard jockey who was way overpaid for what his job entailed? These guys need to get the message straight.
Brilliant people see through the propaganda that the government needs to feed its own employees. Brilliant people are harder to train to be a cog in the machine. The NSA needs people who are just intelligent enough to solve infrastructure / software / etc. problems, but not so smart that they start questioning the broader goals of the organization.
The army breaks down a soldier's individuality as part of a soldier's training. The NSA does not have that luxury (as far as I know), and Booz Allen Hamilton certainly does not.
The use of the word "impersonated" stinks to high heaven. There is a big difference between an admin logging in as someone else and someone "impersonating" someone on TV or over the phone.
That would be like having secret documents in a drawer marked "John Smith," then saying that someone who opened that drawer and took some documents was "impersonating" John Smith.
Then there's the bit about "hiring brilliant people." What's so brilliant about someone with root access having access to everything? Nothing. That's what root access enables. It's not a case of Snowden's brilliance. It's a case of the NSA's administrative incompetence: there should be auditing in place.
EDIT: So there was RBAC in place. Evidently, the implementation was botched. Amounts to the same thing: "security theater." This actually bolsters Snowden's case that whistleblowing was justified.
It looks like the NSA is using RBAC in some form, but with a big gaping hole that Snowden just walked right through. Log in as a user and you get "Hotel California" security -- you cannot escape your role. Log in as an administrator and you are not confined to any role and can just walk all over everything.
Another possibility is that Snowden had the ability to create login credentials and just gave himself the ability to log in as another user.
deception is what Snowden used to gain roles he couldn't have otherwise. It perfectly fits the definition of impersonation. By using someone else's credentials he broke the separation of duty enforcement of the RBAC model, thus he could probably escalate his privileges once he had that access. The superior who gave out his credentials probably didn't comprehend RBAC and thought he was just cutting out some red tape to chase down terrorists.
I thought that Snowden's whole point was that, "cutting out some red tape to chase down terrorists" could also enable bad actors in the agency to do bad things.
If RBAC is supposed to guard against abuses, even by sysadmins, but was implemented in a way that sysadmins could get around it, and there were no effective mechanisms to prevent that, then it's all just "security theater."
If Snowden pointed this out to his bosses and was ignored, then he had a legitimate reason to blow the whistle.
It is not really security theater if you consider all the other systems they have in place: the clearance process, auditing, etc.
What I see is a use of RBAC that is not all that stupid, and that I happen to use on my own systems. RBAC is being used not to guard against abuse but to guard against mistakes. I use the SELinux sandbox to run my web browser, because it is easy to make a mistake like this:
Ah, not so fast, the sandbox keeps that mistake from spreading all over my home directory. Now, the NSA has people who deal with important national security matters (or whatever), but they might make mistakes too. So the NSA uses RBAC to ensure that an analyst cannot accidentally copy and paste some intelligence secrets into a document that will be sent to people without clearance. Remember that the NSA does not just hire random people off the street; there is some amount of filtering meant to reduce the number of insider threats, but that process alone does not necessarily protect against honest mistakes (hence RBAC).
It may also be the case that the NSA is not trying to guard against abuses by sysadmins, but by the tens of thousands of non-sysadmins they employ. In theory this is silly because it just means that your enemies will try to get their agents to work as sysadmins, but in practice it is likely to be a cost-effective solution that greatly reduces the number of people you need to worry about.
Finally there is the matter of auditing. It is OK to have a sysadmin who can transition to an unauthorized security level if the audit logs record it and if you frequently inspect those logs. Again, if sysadmins are the only employees who can make such transitions, you have far fewer people you need to watch -- a net win.
(EDIT: > It is not really security theater if you consider all the other systems
If it's ineffective and just serves as bureaucratic window-dressing, then it is security theater.)
> What I see is a use of RBAC that is not all that stupid, and that I happen to use on my own systems. RBAC is being used not to guard against abuse but to guard against mistakes.
What specific information are you using to come to this conclusion?
Also, if you put this in the context of the OP, then RBAC is immaterial to the Snowden case. That makes the article smell even more like deliberate spin-doctoring.
> Again, if sysadmins are the only employees who can make such transitions, you have far fewer people you need to watch -- a net win.
Then the question is, "Were they watching admins like Snowden well enough?"
I know I'll get downvoted for this. Please be a contributing community member of HN and state why.
Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know? Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything? I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power. The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses. Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.
I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves? Such rumor spinning gets us nowhere as a society. Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.
Look at the scope of these systems. The fact that no abuses have come up (locally) is quite telling, imho. When this same type of hardware is in the hands of countries like China, we see these abuses. Is China seeing something we don't and just not telling us? I highly doubt it.
>Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know? Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything?
Are the two mutually incompatible?
>The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses.
The love interest thing wasn't part of a leak, was it? I thought they just voluntarily disclosed it, probably to distract from thoughts of domestic spying on e.g. politcal views, rather than petty tabloid personal stuff.
"Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know?"
Anything we i.e. the readership of HN / Slashdot / Reddit / etc. do not know? Of course not. That accounts for about 2% of the population of the United States. The rest of America is still trying to get past the "but I am not even interesting, why would the NSA spy on me?" stage of life.
"Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything?"
How is that coherent with your first sentence? If the leaks did not tell us anything we do not already know, surely they are not telling our enemies anything they do not already know.
The reality is that foreign governments already know that the US is trying to spy on them. Terrorists know that too. That is why foreign governments use cryptography and other information security techniques. That is why terrorists deliver notes by courier.
"what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed"
...this is a story about a low-level sysadmin who walked out of the very same organization with an untold number of classified documents. What checks do you think are built in, exactly?
"they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests"
I think your question has been settled: no, effective checks on the NSA's power are not in place. Obama could not care less about some low level guy's love interests. Of course, those pesky journalists pointing out the ways he has lied, abused Presidential authority, etc., that's another story...
I have yet to see evidence that he has lied. Keep in mind that the personal data being mined by these systems was already recorded, legally and gathered legally with the contracts you agreed to with these companies. I've read the EULA and every single one of them states they will cooperate with authorities for data requests. Without evidence of abuse, there is no lie here.
>How is that coherent with your first sentence?
you can't have it both ways. People who live in USA and are technical would know about these systems. People external and non-technical would not necessarily. Is that so hard to understand?
>What checks do you think are built in, exactly?
Read the article, please, before commenting.
>effective checks on the NSA's power are not in place.
There is still no evidence that your statement is true. The article shows that effective checks are there, but like all defenses, they can be flanked. Thus Snowden had to abuse his trust to get around them. This is just reality. There will never be a defense that can't be flanked.
You can say that this article is proof that there is ineffective checks, but then you have to admit that this article proves that Snowden had a ulterior motive when he accepted his contract with NSA. You must accept that if the goverment broke some rules to do their job (which so far I have not seen any evidence for) then you must also accept that Snowden broke some rules to steal these documents.
The LOVEINT revelations only showed up when the officers volunteered the information pre-polygraph test, which are more of a fear instrument than verifiably accurate. That's not a check or balance. More to the point the relevant facts emerged after Alexander categorically denied that abuses take place.
Parallel construction is legal because the source of the data is legal, They need to do parallel construction to hide the source of intelligence for tactical reasons. i.e. when it was revealed that NSA had power to tap cell phones with a warrant, criminals stopped using cell phones or used 'burners'.
The emails being grabbed beyond the warrant NSA had was a result of encryption being used by GMail, so they had to grab emails by screenshot and keyword only, which caused collateral collection, but the amount of collection here is trivial.
I already addressed LOVEINT, and you're arguing against yourself. LOVEINT is a perfect example of NSA cracking down on abuses then addressing them in open court so that they can legally take action, or if they can't take action, that it's known about so that bigger reforms can be made.
I just gathered these facts by reading your article. It's clear that there are always two sides of the story, but nowhere here do I see NSA doing anything it didn't have permission to do.
Parallel construction is being investigated because it's probably not legal.[1]
In the NSA's own words "If the intelligence community collects information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking that is recognised as being evidence of a crime, [it] can disseminate that information to law enforcement, as appropriate." [1]
There's two modes of operation, you seem to have the second in mind, and I am thinking of the first:
1:
a. NSA collects American national's "information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking". (this may be illegal, violation of fourth amendment rights, no supreme court decision)
b. NSA tip SOD (if 1. is illegal, then it follows it's illegal to pass on)
c. SOD instruct police force to stop and search for 'traffic violation' at time and place, obscure evidence trail. (DOJ investigating if this is illegal)
d. d:a) no evidence is found.
d:b) evidence is found, parallel construction begins.
2:
a. law enforcement agency DEA/IRS/SOD asks NSA to get foreign intelligence, because of investigation already underway.
other steps as above.
I take issue with this: "the goverment broke some rules to do their job (which so far I have not seen any evidence for)"
The FISC found NSA overstepped their remit, broke the fourth amendment, announced that the FISC did not have sufficient oversight, and said that the NSA misrepresented facts repeatedly. The NSA initiate programs and depending how they feel about it present them to the FISC after the fact. In addition this contradicts what Obama said about there being no abuses. The only way that Obama could not be a liar here is if he did not know about it. Is Obama misinformed?
In your own words: "the amount of collection here is trivial.", the government broke the law however 'trivially'. This is an admission on your part there is evidence and that you have seen it.
You have not addressed LOVEINT. You seem to be missing how the LOVEINT stuff came to light, it was self reported by staffers, not uncovered by the NSA. Voluntary handover of information is not a check or a balance. Would you think the police were doing a good job if they only dealt with cases where the perpetrator made a statement on their own actions and turned themselves in without an investigation? Would you consider such behaviour a crackdown by the police? If there were sufficient checks, the NSA would know well before the culprit volunteered the information. In addition this contradicts what Alexander said about there being no abuses.
You're right. It was a base ad hominem, and I probably deserve to be banned for my behavior (if I haven't been already - there are so many bizarre punishment methods on this site that it's hard to tell).
Yet, reading what you actually have to say, I strongly feel compelled not to waste my time arguing you literally. I attacked you, because I tire of silly accounts with keyboard-warrior usernames showing up and spewing garbage defending the government with little-to-no rationality. It also makes me angry that someone is being paid with tax-payer dollars to post complete crap.
However, in the interest of the general populace, I'll be happy to point out why I disagree:
Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know?
Yes. The NSA very strongly painted (in what little time they spent talking about their programs) the picture that the program was used mostly for foreign surveillance, and that blanket domestic spying was absurd, paranoid and not of interest to them. The leaks contradict this. (source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/nsa-chief-denies-do...)
Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything?
No. The "bad guys" with half a brain were savvy to techniques for avoiding government surveillance before the leaks (source: http://www.hstoday.us/industry-news/general/single-article/n...). That is, al-Qaeda, who aren't exactly the most hi-tech organization in existence (to my understanding - please educate me if I am misinformed), are smart enough to realize that encrypting their traffic is a good idea; more organized groups caught on long ago (source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/110841/article.html).
I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power.
Since you like name-dropping fallacies: "no true Scotsman fallacy." What constitutes a 'serious' abuse of power is subjective, but my ethical reasoning says that vacuuming up most Americans communications online without explicit knowledge or consent is abuse in and of itself. Further, we've already seen the love interest scandal, which clearly constitutes abuse (by my reasoning).
The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses.
And yet, the fact still stands that they used taxpayer money to fund a system that stored all of that information on people they were supposed to be serving, misled them about how much of it they had, and then abused it. Whether or not they caught it later is irrelevant.
Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.
Moronic, illogical nonsense.
I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves?
So what? Does that justify having the information in the first place? I think not; I do not care that the state has the right to cut off my left arm to make cat food, if and only if a supervisory committee agrees that doing so is reasonable. The basic violation of a perceived right is the issue.
Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.
I see the issue here. You think your rights extend outside of your body and your property. Not sure where you got that idea, but insisting so does not make it true.
What a vast oversimplification of my post, and also, a strawman. I never made that claim, nor did I insist anywhere that I thought so. However, notice how when mentioning the debate of "rights" (namely, my right to submit information to a company or service without fear that the business is being quietly extorted to dump said information to the government without speaking about it under threat of prosecution), I said it was a "perceived" right. I used that adjective for a reason. However, your faux-argument is a convenient excuse to ignore my rebuttal to your points.
But to address your point directly, about how I only have rights to my body and property, your statement is meaningless without defining "property." Did you even know what you meant when you wrote that? Would you care to elaborate?
However, if we define a right as something legally-sanctioned, I actually have a lot of rights that aren't strictly body or property related. Further, any government that fails to enforce or violates these rights is in the wrong. Check this out: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/billofrights
If you mean in an absolutist, natural sense, nobody has any goddamned rights, because a right is a man-made concept. Which system are we arguing within?
Your attempt at forming a foundation for a creepy, fascist ideology is very illuminating, though.
>Your attempt at forming a foundation for a creepy, fascist ideology is very illuminating, though.
the only "foundation" I'm forming is that you need to be aware of who you trust your data to, that you can't assert rights to data which you willingly handed over to third parties with a licence to use that data.
>quietly extorted
No business, that I've seen, has ever been "quietly extorted" I would love to see you prove me wrong.
a) The cases where there are NDAs to be signed, then the data gathering is constrained to one user. The purpose of such NDAs is obviously needed in such cases. And I'm sure that if the business in question was cooperating with criminals willingly, they'll break their NDA to let their buddies know that The Man is on to them. Even in the case of Lavabit, they've never stated otherwise and are transparently using the event for personal publicity.
b) In the cases where metadata is gathered such as business records, the businesses say this in their EULA where they say "we cooperate with government requests for data" along with "we respect your data privacy"
I don't want to play games with you anymore, Mr. Government Troll. The moving goalpost you keep presenting is quite annoying. If you wanted to find the information you request, you could open your mind and do a Google search.
But you're here to mitigate and marginalize thought. You don't care about facts or logic. You can cynically muse about the populace at large, but you help foster the stupidity you decry.
> Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know?
Yes. Due to the fourth amendment (I'd recommend reading it), I'm definitely surprised at the scope of what has come to light. These actions directly contradict it, both in letter and spirit.
> I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power.
Please make a modest effort before making such statements.
1. The fact that the blanket spying exists at all is an abuse. It is a DUI checkpoint on every single road, every day, instead of pulling over swerving drivers.
2. Secret laws, courts = abuse. In America?
3. No oversight, congress un/misinformed = abuse!
4. The sympathetic fisc court itself has ruled many actions have been unconstitutional. Abuse!
5. That the leak we're talking about exists is an abuse!
6. If there have been admitted abuses, the number of non-disclosed must be far larger. Due to #5 we know they are quite possible.
7. Harassment of journalists, families, abuse.
In short, it is abusive from macro to micro. Betterunix's reply points out your multiple-contradictory statements.
> Due to the fourth amendment (I'd recommend reading it), I'm definitely surprised at the scope of what has come to light. These actions directly contradict it, both in letter and spirit.
I'd bother replying to the rest of your ill-informed statements, but it's clear that you don't understand the systems involved. Read up on it before making such false statements. I really don't need to address your circular logic, that's just sad.
There is no "blanket spying" any more than a police watching traffic go by for speeders is "blanket spying". There's your car analogy.
The NSA take a leak from a height on fourth amendment protections and "produce" falsified evidence trails. They do so at times when they have no right to. They have no mandate for domestic crime and yet as the quote and documents below reveal, they snoop for it and set up arrests. After that, the instruction is to cover up the evidence trail. This is what has come to light, I doubt it would have without Snowden. [0]
"If the intelligence community collects information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking that is recognised as being evidence of a crime, [it] can disseminate that information to law enforcement, as appropriate." [1]
EDIT: where I have written "produce" above I had initially written set up, the course of action is as follows.
NSA tip off SOA/DICE re: domestic crime, SOA/DICE instruct DEA/IRS to have police stop suspect at location for e.g. "traffic violation" and create a parallel evidence chain - so that source of information cannot be determined.
Congrats on the most obtuse post of the day... content-free.
So, you support the power of the state over the idea of the fourth amendment (warrant process)? Ok, stating that fact would be more effective than this "that's just sad" tripe.
It's not my job to help you reason with logic. If you can't appreciate that circular reasoning is a distraction, then what is my explaining going to do other than waste my time? I'll just have repeat myself as you spout more and more meme-like troupes and purposeful misunderstandings. I'm not hear to proselytize or market. I'm hear to figure out the truth for myself, if others happen to be convinced in the process, that's just a happy side-effect.
Aren't these stories sort of the very definition of spin propaganda?
At least Snowden hasn't been locked away in a hole for three years only to be brought out into the public to tell everyone he's really thinks his a woman.
Well, thank goodness only one "brilliant" person has ever snuck past the NSA's defenses. If two or more ever got in, they'd establish themselves as our hereditary emperors in no time.
77 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread> “Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”
> NSA Director Keith Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Snowden fabricated digital keys that gave him access to areas way above his clearance as a low-level contractor and systems administrator. [1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-copied-a-lot-o...
http://linux.die.net/man/1/runcon
A DBA can't do their job if they can't access the databases they manage/design/maintain.
Two things that are undeniable:
1) They were doing IT security worse than the level which was actually needed
2) All the while, they were telling the world that effective mechanisms were in place which would prevent abuses.
So they weren't doing what they were supposed to and they were deceiving the public about it. Whether or not this was intentional is just secondary.
1. Administrator accounts were not confined (in the SELinux sense), so he was able to transition to whatever security context he needed/wanted.
2. He was able to set up the login credentials for other users. He could have created his own accounts with higher-level clearances, or set up his own smartcard for logging in to some other person's account, etc.
It may seem like poor design, but it is understandable why things might have been set up like that. In the first case, it is because the admins need to be able to solve problems that happen in a variety of security contexts / levels, and the overhead of defining a second set of policies governing the admins was just too high. In the second, it would be because someone has to be able to set up credentials and that there are a lot of systems for which credentials must be set up, making it hard to impose restrictions. There is also the matter of audit logs -- it might not be so bad to allow an admin to transition to whatever security level if each transition is logged.
I suspect that much of the NSA's computer security is devoted to ensuring that people do not accidentally leak classified information, and that preventing insider attacks is done at a higher level (the clearance process, random audits, etc.).
So long as "preventing insider attacks is done at a higher level" isn't synonymous with: "once you're hired as sysadmin, you have the unsupervised keys to the kingdom!"
>> "You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”
What does that even mean?
The army breaks down a soldier's individuality as part of a soldier's training. The NSA does not have that luxury (as far as I know), and Booz Allen Hamilton certainly does not.
That would be like having secret documents in a drawer marked "John Smith," then saying that someone who opened that drawer and took some documents was "impersonating" John Smith.
Then there's the bit about "hiring brilliant people." What's so brilliant about someone with root access having access to everything? Nothing. That's what root access enables. It's not a case of Snowden's brilliance. It's a case of the NSA's administrative incompetence: there should be auditing in place.
EDIT: So there was RBAC in place. Evidently, the implementation was botched. Amounts to the same thing: "security theater." This actually bolsters Snowden's case that whistleblowing was justified.
Another possibility is that Snowden had the ability to create login credentials and just gave himself the ability to log in as another user.
Presenting that as "impersonation" to the general public is deceptive, regardless of whether it is intended to be or not.
This is called "seperation of duties" and it's covered in the RBAC security model.
If Snowden pointed this out to his bosses and was ignored, then he had a legitimate reason to blow the whistle.
What I see is a use of RBAC that is not all that stupid, and that I happen to use on my own systems. RBAC is being used not to guard against abuse but to guard against mistakes. I use the SELinux sandbox to run my web browser, because it is easy to make a mistake like this:
http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste
Ah, not so fast, the sandbox keeps that mistake from spreading all over my home directory. Now, the NSA has people who deal with important national security matters (or whatever), but they might make mistakes too. So the NSA uses RBAC to ensure that an analyst cannot accidentally copy and paste some intelligence secrets into a document that will be sent to people without clearance. Remember that the NSA does not just hire random people off the street; there is some amount of filtering meant to reduce the number of insider threats, but that process alone does not necessarily protect against honest mistakes (hence RBAC).
It may also be the case that the NSA is not trying to guard against abuses by sysadmins, but by the tens of thousands of non-sysadmins they employ. In theory this is silly because it just means that your enemies will try to get their agents to work as sysadmins, but in practice it is likely to be a cost-effective solution that greatly reduces the number of people you need to worry about.
Finally there is the matter of auditing. It is OK to have a sysadmin who can transition to an unauthorized security level if the audit logs record it and if you frequently inspect those logs. Again, if sysadmins are the only employees who can make such transitions, you have far fewer people you need to watch -- a net win.
If it's ineffective and just serves as bureaucratic window-dressing, then it is security theater.)
> What I see is a use of RBAC that is not all that stupid, and that I happen to use on my own systems. RBAC is being used not to guard against abuse but to guard against mistakes.
What specific information are you using to come to this conclusion?
Also, if you put this in the context of the OP, then RBAC is immaterial to the Snowden case. That makes the article smell even more like deliberate spin-doctoring.
> Again, if sysadmins are the only employees who can make such transitions, you have far fewer people you need to watch -- a net win.
Then the question is, "Were they watching admins like Snowden well enough?"
This has been a buried lede since the beginning: under the Common Criteria, what EAL was supposed to be in place for his role?
Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know? Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything? I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power. The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses. Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.
I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves? Such rumor spinning gets us nowhere as a society. Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosu...
Look at the scope of these systems. The fact that no abuses have come up (locally) is quite telling, imho. When this same type of hardware is in the hands of countries like China, we see these abuses. Is China seeing something we don't and just not telling us? I highly doubt it.
Are the two mutually incompatible?
>The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses.
The love interest thing wasn't part of a leak, was it? I thought they just voluntarily disclosed it, probably to distract from thoughts of domestic spying on e.g. politcal views, rather than petty tabloid personal stuff.
Anything we i.e. the readership of HN / Slashdot / Reddit / etc. do not know? Of course not. That accounts for about 2% of the population of the United States. The rest of America is still trying to get past the "but I am not even interesting, why would the NSA spy on me?" stage of life.
"Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything?"
How is that coherent with your first sentence? If the leaks did not tell us anything we do not already know, surely they are not telling our enemies anything they do not already know.
The reality is that foreign governments already know that the US is trying to spy on them. Terrorists know that too. That is why foreign governments use cryptography and other information security techniques. That is why terrorists deliver notes by courier.
"what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed"
...this is a story about a low-level sysadmin who walked out of the very same organization with an untold number of classified documents. What checks do you think are built in, exactly?
"they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests"
I think your question has been settled: no, effective checks on the NSA's power are not in place. Obama could not care less about some low level guy's love interests. Of course, those pesky journalists pointing out the ways he has lied, abused Presidential authority, etc., that's another story...
>How is that coherent with your first sentence?
you can't have it both ways. People who live in USA and are technical would know about these systems. People external and non-technical would not necessarily. Is that so hard to understand?
>What checks do you think are built in, exactly?
Read the article, please, before commenting.
>effective checks on the NSA's power are not in place.
There is still no evidence that your statement is true. The article shows that effective checks are there, but like all defenses, they can be flanked. Thus Snowden had to abuse his trust to get around them. This is just reality. There will never be a defense that can't be flanked.
You can say that this article is proof that there is ineffective checks, but then you have to admit that this article proves that Snowden had a ulterior motive when he accepted his contract with NSA. You must accept that if the goverment broke some rules to do their job (which so far I have not seen any evidence for) then you must also accept that Snowden broke some rules to steal these documents.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
The question you have to ask yourself, whether you think that would have come out without the Snowden revelations.
Evidence that the govt. broke rules to do their job (after Obama explicitly denied the powers are abused):
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/nsa-illegally-c...
Evidence that checks are not in place:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/24...
The LOVEINT revelations only showed up when the officers volunteered the information pre-polygraph test, which are more of a fear instrument than verifiably accurate. That's not a check or balance. More to the point the relevant facts emerged after Alexander categorically denied that abuses take place.
The emails being grabbed beyond the warrant NSA had was a result of encryption being used by GMail, so they had to grab emails by screenshot and keyword only, which caused collateral collection, but the amount of collection here is trivial.
I already addressed LOVEINT, and you're arguing against yourself. LOVEINT is a perfect example of NSA cracking down on abuses then addressing them in open court so that they can legally take action, or if they can't take action, that it's known about so that bigger reforms can be made.
I just gathered these facts by reading your article. It's clear that there are always two sides of the story, but nowhere here do I see NSA doing anything it didn't have permission to do.
In the NSA's own words "If the intelligence community collects information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking that is recognised as being evidence of a crime, [it] can disseminate that information to law enforcement, as appropriate." [1]
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/06/justice-departm...
There's two modes of operation, you seem to have the second in mind, and I am thinking of the first:
1:
a. NSA collects American national's "information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking". (this may be illegal, violation of fourth amendment rights, no supreme court decision)
b. NSA tip SOD (if 1. is illegal, then it follows it's illegal to pass on)
c. SOD instruct police force to stop and search for 'traffic violation' at time and place, obscure evidence trail. (DOJ investigating if this is illegal)
d. d:a) no evidence is found.
2:a. law enforcement agency DEA/IRS/SOD asks NSA to get foreign intelligence, because of investigation already underway.
other steps as above.
I take issue with this: "the goverment broke some rules to do their job (which so far I have not seen any evidence for)"
The FISC found NSA overstepped their remit, broke the fourth amendment, announced that the FISC did not have sufficient oversight, and said that the NSA misrepresented facts repeatedly. The NSA initiate programs and depending how they feel about it present them to the FISC after the fact. In addition this contradicts what Obama said about there being no abuses. The only way that Obama could not be a liar here is if he did not know about it. Is Obama misinformed?
In your own words: "the amount of collection here is trivial.", the government broke the law however 'trivially'. This is an admission on your part there is evidence and that you have seen it.
You have not addressed LOVEINT. You seem to be missing how the LOVEINT stuff came to light, it was self reported by staffers, not uncovered by the NSA. Voluntary handover of information is not a check or a balance. Would you think the police were doing a good job if they only dealt with cases where the perpetrator made a statement on their own actions and turned themselves in without an investigation? Would you consider such behaviour a crackdown by the police? If there were sufficient checks, the NSA would know well before the culprit volunteered the information. In addition this contradicts what Alexander said about there being no abuses.
Also, it's spelled "asymmetric", Che.
Yet, reading what you actually have to say, I strongly feel compelled not to waste my time arguing you literally. I attacked you, because I tire of silly accounts with keyboard-warrior usernames showing up and spewing garbage defending the government with little-to-no rationality. It also makes me angry that someone is being paid with tax-payer dollars to post complete crap.
However, in the interest of the general populace, I'll be happy to point out why I disagree:
Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know?
Yes. The NSA very strongly painted (in what little time they spent talking about their programs) the picture that the program was used mostly for foreign surveillance, and that blanket domestic spying was absurd, paranoid and not of interest to them. The leaks contradict this. (source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/nsa-chief-denies-do...)
Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything?
No. The "bad guys" with half a brain were savvy to techniques for avoiding government surveillance before the leaks (source: http://www.hstoday.us/industry-news/general/single-article/n...). That is, al-Qaeda, who aren't exactly the most hi-tech organization in existence (to my understanding - please educate me if I am misinformed), are smart enough to realize that encrypting their traffic is a good idea; more organized groups caught on long ago (source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/110841/article.html).
I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power.
Since you like name-dropping fallacies: "no true Scotsman fallacy." What constitutes a 'serious' abuse of power is subjective, but my ethical reasoning says that vacuuming up most Americans communications online without explicit knowledge or consent is abuse in and of itself. Further, we've already seen the love interest scandal, which clearly constitutes abuse (by my reasoning).
The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses.
And yet, the fact still stands that they used taxpayer money to fund a system that stored all of that information on people they were supposed to be serving, misled them about how much of it they had, and then abused it. Whether or not they caught it later is irrelevant.
Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.
Moronic, illogical nonsense.
I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves?
So what? Does that justify having the information in the first place? I think not; I do not care that the state has the right to cut off my left arm to make cat food, if and only if a supervisory committee agrees that doing so is reasonable. The basic violation of a perceived right is the issue.
Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.
Yes, perhaps he is. The thing is, ...
But to address your point directly, about how I only have rights to my body and property, your statement is meaningless without defining "property." Did you even know what you meant when you wrote that? Would you care to elaborate?
However, if we define a right as something legally-sanctioned, I actually have a lot of rights that aren't strictly body or property related. Further, any government that fails to enforce or violates these rights is in the wrong. Check this out: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/billofrights
If you mean in an absolutist, natural sense, nobody has any goddamned rights, because a right is a man-made concept. Which system are we arguing within?
Your attempt at forming a foundation for a creepy, fascist ideology is very illuminating, though.
the only "foundation" I'm forming is that you need to be aware of who you trust your data to, that you can't assert rights to data which you willingly handed over to third parties with a licence to use that data.
>quietly extorted
No business, that I've seen, has ever been "quietly extorted" I would love to see you prove me wrong.
a) The cases where there are NDAs to be signed, then the data gathering is constrained to one user. The purpose of such NDAs is obviously needed in such cases. And I'm sure that if the business in question was cooperating with criminals willingly, they'll break their NDA to let their buddies know that The Man is on to them. Even in the case of Lavabit, they've never stated otherwise and are transparently using the event for personal publicity.
b) In the cases where metadata is gathered such as business records, the businesses say this in their EULA where they say "we cooperate with government requests for data" along with "we respect your data privacy"
But you're here to mitigate and marginalize thought. You don't care about facts or logic. You can cynically muse about the populace at large, but you help foster the stupidity you decry.
Have a nice day.
Yes. Due to the fourth amendment (I'd recommend reading it), I'm definitely surprised at the scope of what has come to light. These actions directly contradict it, both in letter and spirit.
> I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power.
Please make a modest effort before making such statements.
1. The fact that the blanket spying exists at all is an abuse. It is a DUI checkpoint on every single road, every day, instead of pulling over swerving drivers.
2. Secret laws, courts = abuse. In America?
3. No oversight, congress un/misinformed = abuse!
4. The sympathetic fisc court itself has ruled many actions have been unconstitutional. Abuse!
5. That the leak we're talking about exists is an abuse!
6. If there have been admitted abuses, the number of non-disclosed must be far larger. Due to #5 we know they are quite possible.
7. Harassment of journalists, families, abuse.
In short, it is abusive from macro to micro. Betterunix's reply points out your multiple-contradictory statements.
I'd bother replying to the rest of your ill-informed statements, but it's clear that you don't understand the systems involved. Read up on it before making such false statements. I really don't need to address your circular logic, that's just sad.
There is no "blanket spying" any more than a police watching traffic go by for speeders is "blanket spying". There's your car analogy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
"If the intelligence community collects information pursuant to a valid foreign intelligence tasking that is recognised as being evidence of a crime, [it] can disseminate that information to law enforcement, as appropriate." [1]
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/06/justice-departm...
EDIT: where I have written "produce" above I had initially written set up, the course of action is as follows. NSA tip off SOA/DICE re: domestic crime, SOA/DICE instruct DEA/IRS to have police stop suspect at location for e.g. "traffic violation" and create a parallel evidence chain - so that source of information cannot be determined.
So, you support the power of the state over the idea of the fourth amendment (warrant process)? Ok, stating that fact would be more effective than this "that's just sad" tripe.
That those protections were developed over centuries of experience is no matter... founders must be rolling over in their graves (again?).
At least Snowden hasn't been locked away in a hole for three years only to be brought out into the public to tell everyone he's really thinks his a woman.