Home » Snowden’s story: how much veracity is there in “Verax”?

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Snowden’s story: how much veracity is there in “Verax”? — 13 Comments

  1. The amount of damage an IT person can do is largely dependent on the policies of an organization. As a low ranking IT guy I earn considerably less that Snowden. And in the long term there is little I could do that couldn’t be repaired, replaced, restored from backup, or recreated.

    However in the short term, (a period of several days to a few weeks), I could do considerable damage to my employer in a relatively short time. And I have access to tons of privileged data should I desire to view it.

    My employer is much too lax in my opinion. But having worked in crypto related fields I would be very surprised if the NSA weren’t much more restrictive in what they’d permit individual employees to do.

  2. All very good questions about Snowden and the veracity of his story, neo. Will we learn the answers? Unless the Obama government faces this straight on, I doubt that we will. Since the Obamaites don’t face anything straight on, I guess “Verax” will remain almost as mysterious as Obama himself. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Where are the code-breakers for our side? They certainly will not be found in the MSM.

  3. why would Snowden think the US is alone in having that capacity?

    Because the US has the opportunity to do it, while most of the other countries don’t. Most of the major internet players are US companies. The NSA can legally compel them in ways the other countries cannot.

    In fact, in 2010, Google pulled out of China. It’s entirely possible they were being pressured by the Chinese gov to do something similar. But they chose to pull out instead. In contrast, Google cannot pull out of the US.

    This entire scandal isn’t the NSA working on it’s own. It’s the NSA forcing companies to provide them with data. No other government has the same leverage.

  4. Egomaniacs like Snowden are really easy to play. Snowden said he had tried to tell co-workers about the problems with massive data collection but was ignored. Just imagine how he would respond if a foreign operative started paying attention to him and fed his ego. Now we know that Russia says he should apply for asylum. China has a weapon to use if we push back on their hacking empire. America suffers from this leak because it is likely to make policy changes based on panic reactions or base political motives, not on a thoughtful assessment of any abuses and effective means to combat them. It also diverts attention away from another big problem, namely how political correctness and overconfidence in massive data collection turn our attention from possibly more effective means of fighting terrorism.

    I don’t trust the Obama administration because everything is weighed through political lenses. I suspect we will have more damage control than problem solving, much to the detriment of both our liberty and our security.

  5. One of my on-line hangouts is Rantburg, where a fair number of commenters and contributers have a background in all kinds of arcane arts – like IT, the military, intelligence analysis, and the people with big brains there are kind of wary about Snowdon. There are things that in their experience, just don’t add up. He’s fairly young, and a contract employee, who he went to in order to break his ‘big scoop’ is … curious. (Glenn Greenwald, and the Guardian – the Guardian, whose detestation of all things establishment American is notorious…) The timing is also convenient. I hate to sound so paranoid – but things are getting wierd. I would have put a lot more credit in Snowdon as a whistle-blower if he had been a career intelligence-IT guy with a long career in the intelligence agencies, a fifty-ish bureaucrat finally and absolutely outraged by the perversion that a perfectly viable intelligence-gathering technique has been put to by the current administration.
    My daughter (thirty-something two-hitch Marine) is wondering exactly who in higher echelons of power benefits from the news of these revelations, long-term. I wonder – if he wasn’t a plant to begin with,

  6. If you paid Snowden 200k and his associates 122k, that’s the number you’d say you paid him, just to keep peace in the labor force.
    Snowden might have claimed 200k just to stir it up, also.

  7. Hawaii is expensive, I would not be surprised if he got a COLA stipend on top of his 122K base salary, quite plausible. Civil servants get one based on location, I would think the contractors do it also.

  8. Great comment, expat. Your input on this issue has, IMO, been very much on point.

  9. “a fifty-ish bureaucrat finally and absolutely outraged by the perversion that a perfectly viable intelligence-gathering technique has been put to by the current administration.”

    Older people are more likely to toe the status quo line. If they did not, the NSA would destroy them. Like they did that other guy who talked (but never presented evidence) about NSA surveillance methods.

  10. There are a lot of evidence about Leftist operations which people don’t know about it.

    I find it amusing that people are speculating more about Leftist hit jobs now a days, when there is thin to non existent evidence suggesting it, than they were in the past when such things were already history and de-classified.

    I wonder if people’s paranoia results from their unsure uncertainty with Leftist methods. They didn’t see it with the Left 1 year or 10 years ago, so they wonder if they are getting set up now by whatever.

    That’s not a particularly good strategic position to be in. Always reacting to Leftist antics, real or imagined, while ignoring what else is going on.

    If everything is a Leftist or Communist or Chinese or Russian plot, then what was going on in the US 10-30 years ago? 30-60 years ago?

    Do people think such things were non existent and did little to no damage to the US?

  11. just to be clear: The “right to privacy” protects the taking of human life through abortion, but not the phone call of the mother who sets the appointment.

    thanks Blackmun

  12. “Investigate journalism is worse than dead, it’s a travesty of its former self.”

    It’s always been this bad. It was just not that easy to tell because the sources were open and the internet wasn’t around to use data mining or open crowd source analysis.

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