Permanent Record - Edward Snowden

How many of you will actually read it?
How many of you actually care?

Or will you go back into the cave to argue amongst shadows, to buy your chinkshit and talk crap about the trivial differences in consumer tech?

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Other urls found in this thread:

economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/09/13/edward-snowdens-memoir-reveals-some-but-not-all
fas.org/sgp/othergov/intel/sigint-raw.pdf
fr.de/hessen/hessen-beamte-missbrauchen-polizeisystem-infos-ueber-helene-fischer-kommen-zr-12875917.amp.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Global_surveillance_disclosures
nsa.gov/about/faqs/sigint-faqs/#sigint5
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Give me the summary first

Shoot me a quick rundown, stat.

economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/09/13/edward-snowdens-memoir-reveals-some-but-not-all

SPIES DO NOT usually want to be famous. But in 2013 Edward Snowden, then 30 years old, briefly became one of the best-known people in the world. Living in a hotel room in Hong Kong, working with journalists and armed with reams of documents belonging to the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s main electronic-spying organisation, he laid bare that agency's efforts to build a system of enormous, indiscriminate, global surveillance.

Now living in exile in Russia, Mr Snowden’s autobiography is an account of how he became the world’s most famous secret agent. It is well-written, frequently funny, and suffers from one glaring omission. Even so, in a world much more attuned to the downsides of digitisation than it was in 2013, it offers a useful reminder of the god-like omniscience that digital data can bestow on those with the power to collect it all.

Mr Snowden was one of the facilitators of that omniscience. An ordinary childhood was marked by two things. One was the arrival of the internet in its original, pre-corporate form, the version which inspired the utopian dreaming that surrounded technology in the 1990s. The other was his family’s long tradition of government civil service. His father was in the Coast Guard; his mother worked for a time as an NSA administrator.

The September 11th attacks inspired Mr Snowden to join up, he writes. But his brief stint in the army was ended by a training injury. While he was convalescing, he decided to put his technical abilities in service of an American intelligence community traumatised by its inability to prevent the attacks. As part of the merry-go-round of private contractors to whom much of America’s electronic intelligence work has been farmed out, Mr Snowden's role as a systems administrator and computing whizz let him see virtually everything the spy agencies were doing.

1/

The more he learned, the more uncomfortable he became. Mr Snowden does not spend many pages describing the various surveillance systems he disclosed—which, after all, were widely reported at the time. But his descriptions of the real impact of those systems—stripped of abstract concepts and technical jargon—are some of the most disturbing parts of the book.

He describes XKEYSCORE, a sort of private search engine fuelled by the NSA’s spying efforts. It allows analysts, operating with little oversight, to view at will the private emails, chats, images, and files of almost anyone with an internet connection, up to and including Supreme Court justices and the president himself. He describes watching an Indonesian engineer through the webcam of his computer, as the man’s infant son sat on his lap and batted at the keyboard. Mr Snowden calls XKEYSCORE as “the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen”. Employees of the NSA, he says, saw it in less elevated terms: one popular pastime was to use it for “LOVEINT”, rifling through the online lives of former or potential lovers—cyber-stalking backed by the full power of a modern intelligence agency. Intercepted nudes, he says, were an office currency.

2/

The press, he notes, mostly missed a story that was squatting right out in the open. Why else would the NSA build what was originally called the Massive Data Repository, a colossal data-storage facility in the Utah desert? He cites an unclassified presentation given by Ira Hunt, then the chief technologist at the CIA, in which he blithely told a crowd of conference attendees and journalists that “it is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human-generated information”, and that the spooks could eavesdrop on every one of their communications and track their smartphones even when they were switched off. Appalled by the power and intrusiveness of a mass-surveillance system that had been developed without public consent, Mr Snowden says, he began organising one of the largest leaks in the history of American spying.

This is Mr Snowden’s account of an episode that still provokes powerful emotions. He says mass surveillance directly contradicts both the spirit and letter of America's constitution, which is designed to protect its citizens from an over-mighty government. His former employers decry him as a traitor. Western officials have alleged that China and Russia have managed to decrypt some of the cache of documents he took, something that, on Mr Snowden's telling, should be impossible. For now at least, the truth remains unknowable.

3/

His detractors’ most powerful weapon is the fact that Mr Snowden has ended up living in Russia. He argues that this is America's fault: the State Department cancelled Mr Snowden's passport while he was in the air, en route from Hong Kong to Ecuador, where he planned to apply for asylum. When he landed in Moscow to change planes, that left him unable to move on. Unwilling to return to America, because its espionage laws prevent public interest being used as a defence in court, he applied for asylum to dozens of countries. But, he says, all were too worried about American reprisals to grant the request, especially after an extraordinary incident in which a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales, that country's president, was forced to land in Austria and searched in case Mr Snowden was on board.

He recounts being met by the FSB—Russia’s main intelligence agency—and claims he refused to cooperate with them. But little more is said of the events of the past six years. The book ends in 2013, with Mr Snowden leaving a Moscow airport after weeks in limbo, eventually accepting an offer of asylum in Russia because, he claims, of a lack of any alternative. What role, if any, his Russian handlers had in the emergence of his memoir is not specified.

Mr Snowden’s critique of government overreach is powerful. But whether through his own fault or otherwise, it is one made from a compromising location. Whatever his relationship with the Russian authorities, and whenever it began, everything he says in “Permanent Record”—about himself, and about America—must be seen through the prism of his dependence on the Kremlin. As he admits thinking before he ignited the scandal, were he to end up in Russia, the American government “wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at a map”.

end/

Nice I'll have aread

What’s the point in reading in when the content can be summed up with “glow niggas be watching you and it’s legal because you voted for it”?

Since it stopped to be a conspiracy theory and was proven years ago, nothing changed and most people didn’t bother to vote for anyone respecting their freedoms. It’s a world the majority is cool with and trying too hard to stay private will only draw more attention to you.

>What's the point in reading
t. clown

That wasn’t what I said, faggot. Just in this specific case the important information fits into one sentence, you’re unlikely to gain much more if new knowledge about the stuff is your priority.

The book has bits from his waifus diary and generally his life, so if that’s what you’re after it’s another story.

>and trying too hard to stay private will only draw more attention to you.
this isn't actually true. Staying private keeps you out of the databases that are monitored and you turn invisible. The more they rely on these automated systems the easier it will be to disappear.

>you voted for ir
Nah I voted for the libertatian chick that had a photo of her with ron in the campaign site.
I think I'm done voting, also don't want to get called into jury duty again.

If they start combining all the data, it’s going to draw attention to the people who barely have any.

Unless you’re talking about overly elaborate stuff to stay off the grid by not living in a permanent location, not getting any contracts, lack of bank account and the likes.

>trying too hard to stay private will only draw more attention to you.
If everyone tried hard to stay private then everyone would have attention drawn to them which would mean no one would have attention drawn to them.

But go back to your den of cynicism and be made about how the world is fucked up and wallow in your impotence. It's the easy way out, that's what you need to realize. Cynicism is the easiest option in a battle where personal responsibility is the hardest but ethical course of action.

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>t. never took statistics classes

Should be a societal responsibility to raze all the three letters to the ground.

Fucking traitor

This all or nothing garbage betrays your inability to think in subtler and nuanced terms.

The best privacy minded people compartmentalize. You have a facebook or instagram, maybe you even use it. You have a bank, a phone, a public record. But you develop a set of practices, a regimen if you will, for privacy oriented activities. Expose patterns that do not matter, hide patterns that do. It can be trivial.

You never need to do a single illegal thing. It's about exercising your right to slip through the cracks to the best of your ability.

Use cash despite its inconvenience. Use train tickets or anonymous passes and ditch them when need be. Hell, shitpost on tor. Contribute to projects that protect privacy. Have a normie laptop and one with a desodered webcam. Have routines to go unnoticed for the sake of going unnoticed.

Citizens having to organise and try hard to stay private from their fucking government sounds hardly any better than everyone accepting the lack of it. The problem of unchecked government remains and the half assed approach can only work for so long.

Also where did you get the idea that I’m cynical about it? It’s suboptimal but a lack of privacy would offer benefits when it came to dealing with tax evasion and the likes, minimize the harm from awkward leaks (your dick pic just isn’t a big deal if there is a dick pic of everyone else in the leak) and eventually the security issues might force a rethink one hackers steal the data one too many times.

based

You’re talking about the now while the problem will only be serious in the future, when a lot of the methods are unlikely to work.

Besides it’s approaching the problem from the wrong fucking angle. You shouldn’t have to do any of the shit in a non dystopian society.

Three letter organizations represent a family of ideologies that can have varying degrees of issues. But it's people who mindlessly take on these ideologies and subject themselves to it. To liberate ourselves, we don't need to destroy three letters, we need to break our ideological and unconscious biases.

It's amazing to me that everyday people will spontaneously assert that tech ceos have changed the world but no one will ever talk about the actions of other programmers that just weren't on the side of surveillance and consumer capitalism. No one in the mainstream ever speaks of Ulbricht as another tech entrepreneur or Satoshi Nakamoto as a scientist that made actual world changing technology, or the tor network devs as champions of free speech.

What instead enters the public are claims of people like Jordan Peterson being champions of free speech, Jack Dorsey as a tech entrepreneur or Zuck as having changed the world.

That title is reserved only for people who reproduce the status quo and walk within its guidelines. They may have made their contributions but the contradiction is in who is omitted not who is included

>swear an oath to protect the constitution
>violate it every single day
>lie to congress under oath

Treason comes in many forms.

You make reference to the future so you can hedge your responsibility today. It's all so self-serving. It's like a child who refuses to make his bed in the morning because it will be undone that night.

And this "I shouldn't have to do any of that shit" mentality is just as superficial as a neckbeard who refuses to groom himself because "women should just see him for who he truly is rather than pay attention to what he looks like."

Both standpoints are superficial because they fail to see the actual complexity of the world, instead opting for a depthless utopian fantasy where no causal connections or explanations can be made about how the world could arrive at such an outcome because it fails to understand how the actually world works.

>What role, if any, his Russian handlers had in the emergence of his memoir is not specified.
>Mr Snowden’s critique of government overreach is powerful. But whether through his own fault or otherwise, it is one made from a compromising location. Whatever his relationship with the Russian authorities, and whenever it began, everything he says in “Permanent Record”—about himself, and about America—must be seen through the prism of his dependence on the Kremlin.
>MUH RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA RUSSIANS DID 9/11 DAE LE RUSSIANS ARE ALL EVIL
Damn, the review was pretty good until this point.
The book sounds good though.

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>No std:: endl;

I'll read it.

Yea that last part is so vague and unnecessary. They're basically saying that he totally had to trade information in order to get into Russia. Of course he did, who the fuck wouldn't? Why do you need to point it out in such a vague way? If they say he likely did, they don't make a big point. If they leave it ambiguous, they can play the issue up as if it's a bigger problem than it is.

The Economist does this quite a bit, but in spite of their shortcomings and cut and dry neo liberalism they're the best outline for basic news for non-brainlets.

but using namespace std; is for brainlets ain't it

It is indeed, and makes things less organized at the end.

Shut the fuck up. Actual idiots like you would be hung from the neck and tared/feathered if the founders were around. Literally every politician would be executed for treason and all the alphabet agencies would be purged.

tarring and feathering people for posting the wrong opinion on a filipino picturebook forum and executing democratically elected representatives sure sounds like freedom

The neckbeard example would make sense if he lived in a place with free pussy as a right.

Privacy is still nominally a right in most of the first world, it’s pure insanity to organise to defend yours against the people you pay to keep you safe when you can as well organise to keep them in check.

The future bit is crucial because it’s fucking trivial to stay a e-ghost in >current year, even in shitholes like Russia or China. Once the tech advances none of the methods are going to work; and we’re going with the assumption that the laws don’t change to the worse.

But go on, tell me more about the complexity of the world, ideally in lesd vague terms.

that's why we libertarianism like ayn rand said

People who share his opinion are the criminals that fill the government and both political parties today

Ayn Rand is a sad joke that got so buttblasted by commies taking her inheritance that she wrote a novel to try and bash them but as a typical woman she got sidetracked halfway there and ended up writing 50 shades of train tracks

There is no such thing as a permanent record. All records are subject to falsification.

Edward Snowden may have been invented the day before the first version of him was released to the media, or he may be more real than the person you bought your computer from.

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how curious is it that in this completely undoctored photo which is definitely real and not at all digitally manipulated by facebook enterprises appear 2 men which are essentially clones of each other in the background as if they were pasted in by a gan??

truly thank you facebook and mark zuckerberg

>that's why we libertarianism like ayn rand said

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>He describes XKEYSCORE, a sort of private search engine fuelled by the NSA’s spying efforts. It allows analysts, operating with little oversight, to view at will the private emails, chats, images, and files of almost anyone with an internet connection, up to and including Supreme Court justices and the president himself

All I can say is that there is a lot more oversight that goes on in the NSA than this would have you believe.
You 100% cannot start digging through domestic data, that will set all kinds of alarm bells off.

Yea same at facebook. The minute you snoop in an ex's profile for non-business reasons you get canned.

However, I don't think this was the case at the time or at least not for some contractors.

spell SCORE backwards and it's Ero Computer Science.

EROC-SYEKX
"E-Roc sex", j-rock's brother.

XKEYSCORE

XK EY SC OR EX
X KE YS CO RE X
X EK SY OC ER X
X ES OE X
X EO SE X
CAPT

RC YK
CERO

fas.org/sgp/othergov/intel/sigint-raw.pdf

Here's a sanitized and released version of SIGINT collection rules as pertaining to collection of domestic people's data.
I've seen people get in trouble just for work-related oopsies, I imagine that if you were caught looking for an ex's info or something you would be fucking roasted.

XEROCS KEY

0REC

OKEYBORE

>OKEYBORE

FKEYMORE
WKEYLORE

pro tip: this is how you end any ed snowden or nsa thread on the internet

Go to bed, user.

>Go to bed, user.

>X KE Y
>X EK S
>X ES O
>X EO S

Y SOS?

CS Y EE?

>expecting the government to follow their own rules

Is there any proof at all these "rules" existed at all before Snowden's leaks? If so, where are the previous versions? Making up some shit after the fact sounds exactly like the damage control they would do. It's not that hard to add the line "don't stalk your ex, m'kay" after the fact.

>Proof
Are you retarded? You can just google the laws and when they were made.

Internal agency regulations are not laws, shill. Besides what good is a law text that is sanitized?

>Are you retarded?

Are you? Why the fuck would a law be classified? Even the off-topic shit that gets tacked to bills as part of congressional dealings is public: how do you think the news finds out to report on them?

fr.de/hessen/hessen-beamte-missbrauchen-polizeisystem-infos-ueber-helene-fischer-kommen-zr-12875917.amp.html

Some famous German singer was in Frankfurt and her personal information was accessed by the police 83 times. Now you tell me how often the police access their databases for personal interest.

Snowden is a traitor who deserves death

It's worse than personal interest. Imagine if the police "leaked" the info to a 3rd party, like a tabloid in her case. Or blackmail which could be applicable to the rest of us.

Let's be clear that the weaselface stole millions(!!!) of super secret documents belonging to the US and allies (AKA the West) and gave them to Russia and China.
And only 3(!) documents were about >muh surveillance aka metadata collection.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Global_surveillance_disclosures

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who is the legal owner of the documents from a copyright standpoint?

It doesn't appear to reveal any information of interest to me that I do not already know.I already know that literally every action on the internet since ~2005 has been documented and tied to someone's real name until the universe ends.

>Let's be clear that the weaselface stole millions(!!!) of super secret documents

so it's bad to take things illegally

>surveillance aka metadata collection

so it's good to take things illegally

care to continue?

no.
fuck that guy.

Lol, fuck founders, fucking freemason clique, they would've done anything necessary to secure their power just like our gov does now because this is just how it works, you obey the authority or you are a traitor.

The state has a monopoly on policing eg Muslim terrorist networks. It's necessary to log people's communications at least on metadata level to round up their networks quickly.
It's also good and necessary to hang traitors.
Are you a Russkie or a child or a fucking retard?

define trait

I already know about all of the war crimes of this spineless fame-seeking traitor. Hell no I'm not going to read his memoirs.

The United States Government.
It is against the law to disclose classified information to unauthorized recipients. That's because it's deemed to be in the best interest of the nation (and everyone in it) that some information is not public.

EO 12333 (which is from the 80s, not "after the fact") is what governs the activities of the US intelligence agencies as regards to collection of American's information.
The agency policy is that, translated into whatever activity is performed. It doesn't need to be public, because it's just that, an internal policy. I posted it as a glimpse into what actually goes on inside of the agency.

nsa.gov/about/faqs/sigint-faqs/#sigint5

He's saying you either comply with whatever power is in place, or you get labeled a traitor and disposed of.
That's how it's always worked in literally every single human society.

> It's necessary to log people's communications

"counterintelligence's pomposity's cosmos a a"

those are your words, not mine

Again, you actually expect the agency to follow its own rules?

Basically if Snowden was concerned about the mass domestic surveillance, why didn't he responsibly disclose the evidence about just that?
Instead he leaked a buttload of crap, much of which is just normal spy shit and did nothing but put the US intel collection at a disadvantage.

If a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, no document or law can undo that human right. This is a birthright.

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Snowden is a hero, and I would pardon him if I were president (only after I vet him).

Yes? The expectation that everyone follows the law is what underpins our society. If rule of law ceases to be a thing, we've got problems much deeper than someone tracking your web history.
There are oversight organizations set up to handle that because the nature of the work doesn't allow for public transparency. If you want, you can apply for a job with them.

The EO literally lays out how the NSA is NOT supposed to collect data on its own citizens.

That doesn't matter, the fact is that privacy is a birthright that can't be infringed if there is a reasonable expectation of it.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Intelligence agencies shouldn't exist?

I'm not sure how you came to that conculusion. Are you?

Where are you from? How old were you in 2001?
I'm not sure you're from this universe even. You write gibberish instead of English.

I'm from the United States of America.

I don't think the NSA works the way it did before the leaks. The NSA used to take anyone with a pulse and a STEM degree; now they have higher standards than any other intelligence agency. They turn down more security clearances than anyone else.

That governments are pulling all kinds of sleazy stints in the shadows is a given.
It's just retards who think otherwise.
The truth is that people just don't want to know.

Security clearance is a red herring. (OPM)

Doubt.

Is that a request?

You just sold me on this book user

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ZKEYBRA
AKEYBRZ

>If rule of law ceases to be a thing, we've got problems much deeper than someone tracking your web history.
Well shit, that's like everything that has happened since 9/11. It's almost like people saw this and didn't want to give the abusers more tools, like say our web history.

Thanks but I'm not trying to sell anything. Pirate it off libgen if you will. I'm trying to shift the discussion away from mindless making apple memes and endless consumer product discussions. Technology is more than buying technology. It's more than apps. It's more than social media. It's politics too.

if alphabet niggers want to save what I shitpost on a ukranian sausage making board for future keks they can go right ahead and do so idgaf

I've been trying to read and learn more about politics, governments, economy and the world in general, sometimes it's hard to understand or remember everything. I try to learn and stack up information in my head but I'll probably never make any use of it, it feels almost useless. Maybe I just have the wrong mindset but I don't feel much different from people who don't even bother to read about those things.

>why didn't he responsibly disclose the evidence about just that?
Except he did? What other documents do you mean?

Use anki. It is the easiest and most effective way to remember information. I use it for Spanish and general knowledge and it's great.

I'll check it out, thanks user

np, but as a recommendation, make the cards yourself instead of downloading them. Studies show you remember shit more when you write it down yourself.

I would recommend reading the economist. I read it every week. When I started I tried to pick out articles that first interested me. Now I read almost the whole thing cover to cover. If you pay for a online subscription, you can get access to their app where they have someone read each article to you. I listen every day during my walk to work.

I dont agree with all their views, but they're very good at explaining things and over time they repeat common explanations and so you learn by repetition in new contexts.

Can't find on libgen