I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken many important stories about NSA in previous years. The writing is worth reading and discussing here, and it's too bad Wired's editors mucked up the reader experience so much with the strange user interface and formatting.<p>"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries."<p>As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.
Two key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown:<p>1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great.<p>2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.<p>EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.
This mentioned the NSA's "Mission Data Repository" in Bluffdale, Utah. They mentioned it could hold 1 yottabyte of data.<p>Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte:<p>All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) +
All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) +
All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) +
Library of Congress (10-30 PB) +
Wikipedia (0.0005 PB)<p>= ~7000 PB
= 7 Exabytes.
= 0.0007% of 1 Yottabyte!!!<p>1 Yottabyte = 250 billion 4TB hard drives.<p>A hard drive is about 4" x 1" x 5.75".<p>The Pentagon is a big building (6,636,360 sqft over 5 floors). If you started stacking hard drives inside the Pentagon it would take about 50 pentagons to hold 250 billion hard drives.<p>At scale you might be able to make a 4TB hard drive for somewhere between $10 and $100.<p>1 Yottabyte would be $2.5 trillion - $25 trillion in hard drives. That's a couple USA GDPs.<p>Okay, I think a yottabyte clearly can't be what they mean because that's just unfathomable.<p>They also mention a 1 million sqft facility.<p>In a 1 million sqft you can probably pack about 250 million 3.5" hard drives. If each drive was 4TB you'd end up with 1 million PB, or 1000 EB, or 1 Zettabyte<p>So by Yottabyte they might (maybe) mean Zettabyte. Only off by a factor of 1,000.<p>Even still, all of the data of Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Library of Congress, etc is still probably only ~10% of this data center.<p>Nuts.
> One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn't know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
"Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That's a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”"<p>This piece is pretty interesting.
What the hell. I start scrolling with my mouse wheel, but nothing moves. I'm thinking my mouse must be broken, until 30 seconds later, I notice the "cover image" fade in and out. I swear, crappy flash intros are alive and well. They just don't use flash anymore.
I've made a reformatted copy for easier reading:<p><a href="https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/master/untold-story.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/m...</a><p>(Plain text version in the history, at <a href="https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/c25c669f9c4b6cc57c117500dfe77c1f555c2307/untold-story.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold-story/blob/c...</a>)
<i>> Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)</i><p>FYI, Glenn Greenwald is denying that any of the claims in this paragraph are true, and says that Wired never even contacted him or Miranda about the article:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800</a>
Well.. I knew our(US) government downplaying Snowden's credentials was just propaganda(lies)... But wow, were they ever downplaying his credentials. And our media was mostly content to just spread the propaganda with a smile :|
A division of NSA hackers attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead, which caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet.<p>So in middle of a war zone, US conducted sabotage to core infrastructure of an other nation, with unknown cost to property or human lives.<p>It really should be seen as the obvious reason why hacking is not an acceptable tool to use in peacetime against other nations. Its not a defensive weapon, it hurt people, and it done with no responsibility what so ever.
If the last straw to leak this information was when Snowden learned about this MonsterMind program, why are we learning about it more than a year later without any prior mention whatsoever? (and without documents to back up the claims) Also, if he learned about it after taking up his job with Booz Allen Hamilton in 2013, why was he contacting Glenn Greenwald in December of 2012?[1] Ditto with the excuse that Clapper's testimony in March 2013 factored into his decision to leak...<p>I'm honestly curious why so many people are willing to take Snowden's claims at face value. The NSA rightly got a lot of flack for the softball interviews on Dateline a few months back, but it feels like the general consensus is that the softball interviews with Snowden are beyond questioning.<p>[1] <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734" rel="nofollow">http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734</a>
Here is the article on Readability: <a href="https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub" rel="nofollow">https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub</a>
Just the copy: <a href="https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub" rel="nofollow">https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub</a>
This question: "Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs?" .. hasn't it already been answered by now? Snowden did what he did because he feels the American people have been betrayed by their out of control government. He's said it enough times now for it to be perfectly clear.<p>Is this just lazy journalism?
In that article, Snowden said that "We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.” The answer, he says, is robust encryption.<p>And that's exactly what I'm doing through JackPair, a low-cost voice encryption device that empower every citizen to protect their privacy over the phone:<p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safeguard-your-phone-conversation" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safe...</a><p>It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and stream cipher with keystream from pseudo random number generator seeded from DH. It's similar to one-time key pad with no key management and zero-configuration.<p>As Snowden mentioned in the article, by adopting end-to-end encryption technologies like this, we can collectively end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.
Great article. Snowden's closing thoughts make me excited about the idea of mesh networking with all these mobile devices in our pockets. Hopefully Google or Apple will give it the push it deserves. (Apple is already taking baby steps in this direction with its Multipeer Connectivity API.)
I can buy that he saw a lot of things that made him mistrust the government. What I have a problem with is that it seems as though he took jobs and looked for positions that would give him access to even more data. If he was really just working and saw this stuff that is one thing to go in and try and steal it is another, whether or not he did the right thing is up for debate. Selling USA secrets to other governments is espionage no matter how you slice it. If it was just leak it to the USA and the world at the same time then sure I could buy the whistleblower if it is go run and hide in Russia or China and sell information that is a different story. I dont think anyone has all the facts about this though.
> He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle.<p>I hope he has Vitamin D stocked.
So there's a bigger story here: good lord is the web-design here irritating.<p>They've overridden scroll events so they at best don't work properly. Scrolling on a laptop gives you a weird non-mapping slide animation.<p>This is seriously one of the most unreadable articles, from a design sense, that I've ever seen.
"Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs?"<p>if the article presents a different answer than what's already known, through snowden statements communicated to laura poitras and greenwald, then they're probably not true, and if it repeats the same stuff, this is obviously a stupid question to ask and the article's just marketing b.s.
Can someone remind me why Snowden became a public figure in the first place? The second leaker is anonymous and practically invisible, and here Snowden is, constantly getting more press. It's like he wants to be as visible as possible while other leakers want the opposite.<p>Edit: Can somebody tell me what was downvote-worthy about this comment? This is getting ridiculous.
Ed Snowden acting out his WhiteHouse situation room fantasies<p><a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10328969/rolledupsleeves.png" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10328969/rolledupsleeves...</a>