Subject: which side are you on?
"Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and the risk of the low-level,
tech-savvy leaker"
By Greg Miller, Published: June 11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-bradley-manning-and-the-risk-of-the-low-level-tech-savvy-leaker/2013/06/11/f5e3ad72-d2c7-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_print.html
The full text is below following some comments from me. This is a
fair use exception to the copyright law, non-profit and educational.
Are you on the side of the United States Government? Or are you on
the side of America?
That's what it comes down to I think. Or perhaps you don't have to
take sides. Are you going to talk with anyone about this? To me
it's about citizens having serious decision-making power in what is
not a democracy any more but was supposed to be a democracy. One
cannot make reasonable decisions without the relevant knowledge,
obviously. I particularly hate it when I learn that my government
has not just been keeping deep secrets but has been lying to me
outright and not just about little things.
To me these guys, these guys who take personal risks to give us
information that we really do need to know, are true heroes, right
up there with Paul Revere and the midnight ride fer sher. This is a
fascinating article whichever side you're on.
Again, this is about where where you live, and there's a lot in
here. Don't miss the last line.
love,
Larry
---------full text-------------
In the span of three years, the United States has developed two
gaping holes in its national security hull, punctures caused by
leakers who worked at the lowest levels of the nation’s intelligence
ranks but gained access to large caches of classified material.
The parallels between
Edward
Snowden, who has declared himself the source of
leaks
on National Security Agency surveillance programs, and
Bradley
Manning, a U.S. Army private on trial for sending hundreds of
thousands of secret files to the WikiLeaks Web site, go beyond
generational ties.
Both enlisted in the Army during the war in Iraq only to later say
they were disillusioned by that conflict. Neither has a college
degree or extensive academic training in computer science. And yet
both were technically savvy, able to navigate sensitive computer
networks and smuggle classified files.
The back-to-back breaches — seen by many as the most significant in
decades — have forced U.S. intelligence officials to examine whether
the cases are isolated in scope or part of a new category of
exposure emerging at the edges of classified U.S. networks.
U.S. officials said counterintelligence teams are already looking
beyond the details of
the
Snowden case at any vulnerabilities it has exposed.
“At this point, we’re still looking at this as an anomaly,” a senior
U.S. intelligence official said. But he said a damage assessment
ordered by
Director
of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. is broad in
scope, focused largely on the implications of a case in which highly
sensitive materials were somehow within the grasp of a contractor
who moved through a series of low-ranking jobs for the CIA and the
NSA.
Snowden
and Manning both took advantage of access to computer systems that
expanded exponentially in the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, partly in an effort to make critical information available
across agencies.
Since the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010, the Pentagon has taken
steps to better protect its classified networks. It has banned the
use of thumb drives unless special permission is given, mandated
that users have special smart cards that authenticate their
identities and required analysts to review computer logs to identify
suspicious behavior on the network.
Despite such measures, it remains impossible to guarantee security
on any classified network. Since going public,
Snowden
has attributed his extensive access to his role as an ordinary
systems administrator for the NSA, although he offered few specific
details about where he found or how he removed such sensitive files.
In an
e-mail
to a Washington Post reporter last month, he said he wanted
“to embolden others to step forward,” suggesting that he hoped his
leak would trigger follow-up disclosures.
Among the files he obtained were a secret order issued by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and 41 briefing slides on a
highly classified program, called
PRISM,
in which mainstream technology companies including Microsoft, Google
and Facebook have given the NSA extensive access to e-mails, videos
and other content.
The records released by Snowden are fewer in number but more
sensitive and of higher levels of classification than the U.S.
diplomatic cables and military reports Manning sent to WikiLeaks
after he downloaded them while serving in Iraq.
Snowden has praised Manning but also sought to differentiate himself
from his predecessor. In particular, Snowden has indicated that he
sought to be more responsible, withholding records he had that might
put U.S. intelligence operatives in jeopardy, unlike Manning, who is
accused of turning over thousands of pages, some of which contained
the names of informants.
But their motivations and backgrounds have extensive overlaps. Both
entered the military or government jobs during an era of
massive
hiring binges, controversial wars and repeated disclosures of
alleged abuses by the U.S. military, the CIA and the NSA.
Both have said they wanted to call attention to abuses by the U.S.
government, although critics have called them traitors who acted out
of an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
Manning was gifted with computers and had begun learning the C++
programming language by the time he was 8. He never found a path to
college and instead enlisted in the Army, where he was groomed for a
career as an intelligence analyst.
Snowden’s plans to pursue a Special Forces career were derailed, he
said, by leg injuries he sustained during training that ended his
military stint after just three months.
It is less clear how
Snowden
came by his computer skills. But, as with Manning, his
technology savvy appears to have helped him obtain a string of jobs
that enabled him to snoop on and eventually steal sensitive files.
Their actions and motivations bear little resemblance to
high-profile security breaches of the 1980s and ’90s. The best-known
cases involved mid-career officials such as the CIA’s Aldrich Ames
and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, who were convicted of selling secrets
to the Soviet and Russian governments for financial gain.
The closest parallel for Snowden and Manning may be Daniel
Ellsberg, who in 1971 was the New York Times’ and The Washington
Post’s source for the Pentagon Papers, a secret assessment of the
Vietnam War that eroded the credibility of U.S. government’s
more-optimistic public claims about the conflict. Ellsberg in recent
days has praised Snowden and described the material Snowden
disclosed as more significant than the documents he leaked four
decades ago.
There are differences, however. Ellsberg was a senior military
analyst working at the Pentagon who had a direct role in drafting
the Pentagon Papers. The document was largely a record of U.S.
decision-making rather than a blueprint of ongoing operations.
Drafts were undoubtedly stored in safes, not on networks where they
might be read by low-level employees at distant military or
intelligence outposts.
A former senior NSA official recalled procedures in the 1970s that
were archaic but secure. “When hot documents would go around they’d
be in a double-sealed envelope, and some person would wait while you
read it, re-
envelope it and leave,” the former official said. “By contrast, now
you bring it up on your computer screen.”
Some U.S. officials question whether there is a generational gap in
views on privacy and government transparency. Manning and Snowden,
who are in their 20s, grew up with technology and the Internet as
fixtures in their lives.
“We are recruiting Americans from a culture that has a deeper desire
for absolute transparency than any previous cohort of people
entering the service,” said Michael V. Hayden, former CIA and NSA
director. “They are coming from a culture in which, for many,
transparency is an absolute good, and it appears that in these two
cases it influenced these people.”
Snowden appears to have left fewer online footprints than many of
his generation, with no evidence of Facebook or Twitter accounts.
In
his comments to The Post, he indicated that was in part
because of what he had learned.
The Internet “is a TV that watches you,” he said, a technology
“governments are abusing . . . to extend their powers beyond what is
necessary and appropriate.”
Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
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