Comment by cromwellian
12 years ago
Why didn't they release these documents a long time ago when everyone was racing to judgement that Google, Yahoo, et al were secretly in cahoots with the NSA helping to build drag-net surveillance extranet stuff for them? These are very important revelations!
I mean, when Greenwald/Snowden/Guardian released the original PRISM accusations, these slides would have provided a much much more important set of evidence, instead of months of speculation and parsing of meanings of "backdoor", "frontdoor", "side door", in the corporate communications of the tech companies who were struggling to say "we've never heard of PRISM, da fuq is this shit?"
Is the slow dripping out of these slides because they are trying to be responsible in not releasing stuff that is too damaging (e.g. not trying to be a Bradley Manning dump), or is it to preserve traffic by keeping the click-gravy-train going?
By releasing the documents in this order, they give government officials just enough rope to hang themselves by prompting them to defend themselves by making statements about what they do and do not do, and then releasing new documents directly contradicting those statements.
In a weird way, it actually motivates them to tell the "whole truth" because they don't know what documents will be released later so they don't know what lies to tell.
Yea, but as collateral damage, the rope hung the tech companies and damaged their brands by who knows how much.
They deserve to have their brands damaged.
They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
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It may be the case that the tech companies need to have their brands damaged for the greater good, at this point. If it turns out that G and Y are operating in an environment (USA) where a rogue government endangers consumers and prevents legit business from being done, G and Y need to either remove themselves from that environment or fall.
People are probably missing the idea. In the past, like with the WikiLeaks cables, they released all at once and it didn't have that much effect, after one week most countries were already on some other matter. The slow dripping allows this case to continue being discussed after six months. Can't remember this ever happening before with any other subject like the fake article on Saddam's WMD, the CIA flights and torture cases, etc.
Given what we currently know about the human mind and how people react to news I expect this to be the future way of releasing highly critical information.
Who knows how many thousands of pages they need to read and understand? Also, don't underestimate the difficulty of a reporter understanding these thousands of documents sufficiently to recognize when one is really important.
If they don't understand what's going on, wouldn't that argue in favor of doing more detailed research and analysis before writing claims? The original assumptions/claims in the Guardian story on PRISM are now shown to be false. This caused a lot of negative blowback on the companies involved.
Don't we expect our investigative journalists, to well, actually investigate things, instead of rushing to print?
As I understand it, there is nothing in this latest release which contradicts the previous PRISM stories. They are two separate programs.
In other words, NSA used court orders to access data with the knowledge (but gagging) of the companies (PRISM), while at the same time also hacking into the companies to access data without their knowledge (MUSCULAR). These things were both true.
How where they false? The PRISM program is real. There is a way for the NSA to automatically access Google's databases, with Google's knowledge under secret blanket (not case-by-case) court orders. They where clearly lying when they denied any "direct access".
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What claims in the Guardian PRISM story have been shown to be false?
I have no internal knowledge about this, but influenced by this Twitter thread[0] I would speculate that Greenwald and friends gave Google (and whoever else) advance notice and the opportunity to react to it before publishing. Responsible disclosure, and all that (not that it really applies in this case, but still).
[0] https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/395636984313413632
It sure looks like it could be strategic.
The "taps foreign heads of state" et. al. really due blood, e.g. DiFi shocked the intelligence community for doing a public about face.
Presumably because monitoring us proles is just fine with her, but other members of the international elite? That's beyond the pale, and I don't assume her call for a "top-to-bottom review of U.S. spy programs" is to do anything more than find out other such elite embarrassments.
BUT, to the extent the above is not true, or is making this Total Surveillance State toxic, now's a good time to drop this tidbit.
We're still talking about Snowden. This is the reason.
At this point I suspect Snowden has become a bit of an Emmanuel Goldstein. Any leakers who want to get their stuff out with some modicum of safety just need to get it to one of the usual suspects in the media, if the latter are willing to play the game (this does violate normal journalist ethics, then again this is not a normal situation). The leak can then be ascribed to "Snowden".
For those wondering who "Emmanuel Goldstein" is, he's a character in the novel 1984.
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this is brilliant.
Imagine you come into possession of tens of thousands of documents covering material and terminology that you barely understand. That is going to take months to work through, even before you consider that you would want to keep access to the documents/information limited to a small group of people that could help you work through it.
Here's an argument: assuming the worst suspicions, Google and the others are complicit in PRISM, so they deserve our scrutiny here. If this one were dumped at the same time, since Google was blindsided by this, people might forget to scrutinize Google for a while.
There's a difference between assuming the worst, and having evidence on your desk that refutes your own assumptions.
Don't forget the difference between possessing mountains of documents and having the right documents on your desk.
In what way were previous disclosures refuted? PRISM and MUSCULAR aren't mutually exclusive.
Probably because there was just too much information to make sense of all at once. So they just let out little at a time of what they understood to be verifiably and properly true.
Of course the cynical view that they held on to it to make some ad-money is not altogether wrong either, just unlikely to be accurate.
> is it to preserve traffic by keeping the click-gravy-train going?
If that were their intent, I would expect them to release slightly faster, at least one significant document per week.
click-gravy-train; almost certainly.