Cryptome’s critique of Snowden Inc. | Hacker News Reader

Cryptome’s critique of Snowden Inc.

timshorrock.com

63 pointscmsefton57 comments

Genuine question: Do people take Cryptome seriously?

I tried reading one of their publications [1] and found the writing absurd. Phrases like "few observers were aware that the re-territorialization of detainees would be undergirded by the courthouse’s archeology of evocative discursive foundations" or "recisions may condemn immigrant sites as exilic borderlands of unlitigatable extraterritoriality, a condition of spatial quarantine that transforms them into the new lazarettos of the metropolitan system".

I don't want to come off as anti-intellectual, and maybe that all makes perfect sense to other people, but for me whatever point they were trying to make was lost in the verbiage.

[1] https://cryptome.org/cartome/Natsios-Voir-Dire.pdf

John and Deborah exaggerate sometimes and do sound like "conspiracy theorists" but before Snowden, how much of what he documented would be considered such? So their claims should be taken with a reasonable grain of salt, but the facts they mention are apparently facts and deserve to be discussed, like, who finances Tor is apparently clearly visible in the tax reports? Or what are the intersts of Omidyar.

And if they claim something that's not true, it should be provable that they are wrong.

That is not what the GP post is taking issue with. They are saying that it looks like someone got a new Thesaurus for their birthday and went wild trying to sound smarter than they were.

FWIW I agree with the GP- there's no reason for anyone to talk this way.

> That is not what the GP post is taking issue with

Well, "that" is the answer to GP's:

> Do people take Cryptome seriously?

And I consider it much more important than which specific words were used. Don't shoot the messenger, let's talk about the substance or the truthness of the message.

Fair point

The claim is that "massive funding from the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the national security state."

The first part is based on the fact that University of Minnesota, Georgia Tech and Princeton University, and Georgetown are funding the tor project. The argument is that all of them are receiving their money from the U.S. Government, and even if they claim that they are independent organization they are just fronts used by the government when it comes to funding the tor project. One could also get the impression that the U.S. Government are the only source of funding for those universities, and that the universities gets no research funding elsewhere, demand no tuition from students, and so on.

The Pentagon claim is likely derived from statements that SRI international is a sponsor of the tor project, and they receive funds from US Department of Defense. Again, one must assume that SRI international only gets fund from a single source.

I can only guess that the national security state is a reference to either the U.S. (ie, the above), or the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, or US Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

The cited Guardian source is based on 2013 financial report, and the list of sponsor today is naturally quite different, but I guess thats not an issue.

And Radio Free Asia as the financier, mentioned even by the interviewer? Open technology fund? What's the story?

Specifically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

> RFA is funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent agency of the United States government responsible for all non-military, international broadcasting sponsored by the U.S government (such as Radio Free Europe), which appoints the board of RFA.

https://www.opentech.fund/project/tor-project

   @torproject Funding to date:
   2013 $600,000
   2014 $900,000

Snowden can just as easily be a pressure value, to allow this sort of things to normalize in the public consciousness in a certain way with a certain narrative. And it has normalized perfectly. Stuff that would make everything seem scary and relatively totalitarian is now normal day to day mater of fact sort of thing.

I agree that the verbiage in that post is very absurd. When I visit Cryptome I generally go and look at the pdf files of either leaks / interesting publicly available information than the things that they write.

The people at GCHQ do take Cryptome seriously: https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20... (KARMA POLICE)

The writing could be one (or many) of many things: Leveling, acting, craziness, fooling, making an obscure point, fnords, trolling, an in-joke, a nod to author identification or woolly self-aggrandizing media reporting, being brash and adversarial for the hell of it, attention whoring, readership selection etc.

I don't think it is supposed to make sense, except maybe for a select few of insiders. We had Cryptome vs. Wikileaks, Cryptome vs. Appelbaum and now Cryptome vs. Snowden. Something-something about letting the leaks do the talking, not the money and spin doctors.

It is about information needing to be free. That is the point not racking up speaking fees or self promotion.

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." -Stewart Brand

The full quote is much more nuanced than just 'Info want be free!'

Yes you are right, but you still have to pick a side and I know that I what information to be free. All of it. So you can fight to keep it hidden or you can fight for it to be free. But by trying to hide it you have to know that by its nature it wants to be free and shared. the government relies on the levers influence over the individual be it financial, physical or other means to keep that info out of common knowledge. So you can decide to be part of the solution or part of the problem . The biggest problem people have with Cryptome is they see this in very black and white terms.

snowden doesn't seem like he's very employable at the moment. if he doesn't take speaking fees, what's he going to live on? alms?

Well I think Cryptome is taking more issue with who has the info than with Snowden his only role was in taking it and whom he chose to give it to.

Or, given that it's Cryptome, it could be a an attempt to foil stylometry.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/why-hackers-should...

>The people at GCHQ do take Cryptome seriously: https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20.... (KARMA POLICE)

I don't think that image signifies that they take cryptome seriously but think that some of the users could be interesting.

I'm sure the people at GCHQ, NSA familiar with cryptome know just as well as anyone else (familiar with cryptome) knows that it's a bit of a joke.

I believe they are both architects which might explain a bit about their verbose language. I've known a LOT of architects who talk in this manner and to them it's perfectly acceptable.

Going by the name of the PDF, the author was likely francophone.

She may or may not be Francophone, but "Voir Dire" is actually an American legal term for the jury selection process (and is probably also used in other Anglophone countries).

I stopped taking cryptome seriously after their response to thecthulu hosting a mirror. https://www.thecthulhu.com/a-response-to-cryptome/

That wording is worse than absurd. It's comical. Their ability to use a thesaurus does not make them intellectuals, in fact the exact opposite.

The same criticism was leveled against Hegel.

This comment is brilliant. To those who consider Hegel important it says one thing. To those who can't stomach him it says another. Those who have never heard of Hegel will also be partitioned, into those who go to wikipedia and get confused, and those who take it as more support for their feeling that big words aren't so bad.

Based on your comment, I went to the Simple English wikipedia page for Hegel just for laughs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel

"Hegel's principal achievement is his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism sometimes termed "absolute idealism,"[8] in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome. His philosophy of spirit conceptually integrates psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy..."

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_He...

"He started Hegelianism and is a part of German Idealism. He influenced many writers and philosophers, including those who agreed with him (Bradley, Sartre, Küng, Bauer, Stirner, Marx), and those who did not agree with him (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling). Hegel's books are difficult to read and deal with many different ideas at the same time. He has written about history, politics, religion, art, logic and metaphysics."

Nobody familiar with cryptome takes it seriously. While some of the data they host is incredibly useful, original content tends to be a joke.

Just read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptome#History 2015 section (especially the archived sources) and draw your own conclusions.

IMO these guys are far beyond Alex Jones level.

> Cryptome was created by John Young and Deborah Natsios, both highly successful architects.

Regarding their Cryptome's style: it's my understanding that architecture was one of the first disciplines to heavily take up postmodernist philosophy, and postmodernists are known for their ponderous and impenetrable writing style. So Cryptome's writing may just be postmodernist.

I'm moderately familiar and comfortable with postmodernism, and Cryptome still seems bizarre to me. It's not word salad, like some people in this thread imply, but it's not clear to me that we're supposed to take it as serious analysis either. Part of Cryptome's game seems to be riding the border between insight and absurdity.

EDIT: It's definitely a postmodernist writing style, though. You're right about that.

You're not being anti-intellectual, but you're overlooking the fact that it's a precise, technical language, used in post-structuralist philosophy to describe and analyze social reality (e.g. by Deleuze, Foucault et al.), and is very rigorously formulated in the relevant texts. I guess any academic jargon would look "absurd" by a(n in regard to this domain) layperson.

Generally anything not put together by John's wife is pretty good. John's wife is a little out there

The founder of Cryptome was educated as an architect (as were some other interesting figures in near-history..). If you read any architecture theory, a lot of it uses this sort of language.

Agreed. As a former architecture student, the field is right up there with critical gender theory for amount of simply-explained ideas transmuted into new, overly-complicated words.

Personal opinion: that language is then used as a litmus test to reject ideas from people without formal education in the field thereby centralizing control of the discourse and perpetuating group-think, but that's neither here nor there.

> Young: Snowden says he gave them to the public; no, he didn’t. He gave them to a bunch of self-interested journalists who decided to run a certain story with it, i.e., to explain it to people. And their fucking explainers really have a problem.

> Natsios: It’s a serious conflict of interest. They’ve written themselves into the story as heroes, co-heroes of the story. It’s a conflict of interest. They’re not at a distance from their source. They’ve embedded themselves in the narrative, and therefore all decisions are highly suspect because they benefit from the outcome of the narrative in every sense.

As far as I'm concerned, "We the People" need heroes. The fact is that the vast majority of the public grows up looking up to them, whether via History class or movies. But The Left keeps tearing its own heroes up (usually for righteous reasons- they're dangerous etc), while The Right is much more likely to prop theirs up.

So, without going into the rest of the piece, I do kinda like styling people like Snowden and Manning as heroes. I'm okay with some self-promotion and so on.

To myself, and I imagine many others with the same views of self sacrifice and patriotic comittment, there was no need for the reporters to make Snowden out to be a hero.

Simply the act of putting oneself in such a dangerous situation, risking ones entire life and livelihood and ability to be with the ones they love to try and make their nation a better place, is one key part of what it means to be heroic (As long as the actions themselves do not cross certain lines.) And as per my initial paragraph, this is speaking as someone who sees this disclosure as very fair, those lines were not crossed, he truly is a hero on his own merit to a level of which we have had very few since the founding of this country.

There is a stark difference between contextless, abject whistleblowing and marketed whistleblowing. The latter, which they argue against, is unfortunately required to reach the masses. They mention that Snowden should not have gone to a [semi] major media outlet but instead to others who have exposed similar issues. Doesn't the fact that most don't know who those others are refute their exact point?

More importantly, does the benefit of mass consumption of the narrative outweigh the cost of not releasing everything and financially incentivizing the releasers? I say yes.

" financially incentivizing the releasers " I like that plus given the evidence so far it does show what their motivation really is...

All the government anti-whistleblower types are financially incentivized to hold their opinions.

I think the government counts on this to dissuade most from whistle-blowing. That is why it takes someone who is willing to take that risk.

The problem is that if you're a rational thinker you have to make sure you're able to make a living after doing something that is likely to ruin your career. For example, how many companies would hire Snowden to do the same type of IT work he was doing before? I wonder how many incredibly important leaks never happened because there wasn't enough "financial incentive."

My 2¢.

1) "Reaching the masses" is patronizing. "The masses" don't really care that they are being spied upon. Patronizing them will not change that.

2) The real change comes from hackers, companies, and activists' direct action. These shakers don't act based on major media, but on real people digging up actionable shit. Actionable shit has been dug up by lots of people who are otherwise unknown.

3) Motive is always clouded by capitalism. Financially incentivizing releasers directly calls motive into question.

Whenever I hear of Cryptome complaining, semi-regularly, about the cache of Snowden documents being trickled into public existence, all I can think of is how they published a ripped copy of Citizenfour because of the stupid lawsuit a former naval officer brought against Snowden which put the DVD in evidence, of which they thought that it was now "public" material.

I'm fine with Cryptome wanting the full cache, but I'm not fine with anyone wanting to blindly publish the entire archive without vetting any of it. Cryptome doesn't seem to have the history of wanting to vet and possibly redact information, which will do nothing except provide fodder for those who argue against the idea of the leaked documents without providing critique against the contents of the documents.

Snowden was clear in his instructions that he didn't want a data dump as some of the info was legitimately secret.

Cryptome don't seem to accept this position. The question is do we say to whistleblowers 'it's all or nothing'. Would that really encourage more people to leak? Or do we work within these parameters?

Of course there are conflicts of interest and mistakes when only a few can access the material, but I'd much rather have a partial leak than no leak.

It is hardly a leak of Glenn/Intercept keep them forever. That would go directly against what Cryptome has always believed. I would like to know how Snowden was connected to the people he eventually gave that information to, that in itself might prove interesting. It was not for their technical ability which does lead to the question how are they able to judge the suitability of what they release.

> I would like to know how Snowden was connected to the people he eventually gave that information to

Snowden selected Greenwald and Poitras and reached out to them via email:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Contact_with_E...

Do you think these were his 1st choices?

I have no idea, but the question was about "how he was connected" to the people he released the info to. The answer was: he wasn't until he made contact himself.

He must've made a list of journalists he knew of who he thought would be sympathetic to the message he wanted to send. Maybe Greenwald/Poitras weren't at the top of the list, but some quick Googling doesn't reveal anything about anyone else he may have tried to contact before them.

Yes. Snowden is an American patriot. Cryptome are extreme information-freedom fundamentalists. WikiLeaks is moderate by comparison, and vets stuff before publishing. But Snowden wanted vetting by professional journalists. So we have what we have. Bottom line, though: he got the stuff, so it's totally his call on how it gets released.

This is just it. People seem to forget that Snowden is best viewed as an establishment figure who is trying to correct it's direction, not destroy it. Snowden's actions were a call to stop a surveillance state before the surveillance state stops everything.

Or he's CIA and this is all agency drama... Haven't decided yet.

Down at the moment, here's the Google cached copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:N8pEP7...

And the interview, around 21st minute is the claim by John that the tax reports of Tor clearly show who finances it. Do listen:

https://soundcloud.com/rebootfm/interview-with-cryptome-2016...

Greenwald got the scoop and he should not benefit from it?

Those documents are released slowly so that journalists who have them can write stories and put the released information into context. It also serves the purpose of keeping the government surveillance in the mind of public longer.

Putting them all just out there would make news for few months but then it would be all forgotten. People care surprisingly little. Greenwad & Co. control the media exposure and maximize the impact. Just like Snowden wanted.

> Let me name some names. ACLU, one of the most corrupt organizations in New York City and around the world.

Okay.

Also, this way lets the journalists react to the government's story and make it clear that they keep lying.

If the leak happened all at once the government would get its story straight.

in some obviously 'deeply cynical' meta criticism: that, or they are just jealous of their competition.

the IMO only strong case that cryptome makes is that sites like the Intercept get the success and are able to ride the wave as long as possible and hence it is therefore in their interest to keep the leaks trickling in rather than releasing the cache like a flash-flood.

While I understand that this creates a conflict of interest consider the benefits: if all would have been leaked all cards would be on the table. And Snowden would have been out of the news by autumn 2013. This selective publishing (in the name of keeping innocent people out of harms way) ensures the discussion is ongoing. I can live with that as long as what gets published doesn't get published out of context.

Also Cryptome confuses the Intercept with Wikileaks / Assange when they say that the Intercept receives massive salaries yet those who do the work go to jail (I believe this was a jib at how Assange handled the Manning leaks).

The interview audio linked to from the article since the site appears to be down: https://soundcloud.com/rebootfm/interview-with-cryptome-2016...

the aforementioned lingo/patois was the de facto verbiage of the early days of the movement, and some don't graduate away from it.

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