How do we know it's Snowden?
So are more documents going to drop?
If yes the the former, why can't The Guardian do an all-out dump instead of piecemealing it?
So are more documents going to drop?
If yes the the former, why can't The Guardian do an all-out dump instead of piecemealing it?
Because if it was found out that it wasn't, the Guardian would be finished. Faking this would be a scandal on a level with journalists "phone tapping". Literally, the news paper would be shut down. Not by some judge or government evil, it would become a laughing stock and its readers would abandon it.
"If yes the the former, why can't The Guardian do an all-out dump instead of piecemealing it?"
You publish a small amount. Let the accused say what they want to say. As they have done, they seek to minimize everything and covering their backs. Then you hit them with more, hopefully the next set of information will contradict what they have already said. Potentially they get caught lying "directly" in public.
So, simply: (Leak 1)I saw you at the pub. You deny it. (Leak 2)I offer the evidence of a witness. You claim the witness is wrong. (Leak 3)I produce CCTV footage. I prove my case (assuming in this example we accept the CCTV as "fact"), and you lied twice instead of telling the truth at the first opportunity. You are then well and truly fecked.
The same way you attribute credibility to any story you read (on the Internet or anywhere else), the reliability of its source.
The Guardian says it's Snowden, confidently enough to make it public. It boils down to how much you trust them as a reliable news source.
If they weren't sure, I believe they'd evaluate the possible backlash to their credibility and not run the story at all.
If they dumped everything at once, a lot of it would get drowned out by a small number of the most interesting revelations.
We were complaining for ages that nobody covers and addresses privacy related issues. Thanks to Greenwald's and Sowden's media strategy it finally becomes frontpage news. Plus, with a little bit of luck we see the US government getting a few more times caught lying to the public in very clear terms.
In my opinion this is going to be a case study on how to masterfully orchestrate a press campaign. Just look at this week, Sunday: Release of the G20 spying story, Monday: Live Q&A, Tuesday: Most likely discussion of something he revealed in the Q&A, etc. Wouldn't be surprised if they had scheduled out a few weeks ahead. I'm sure there is at least a prime-time TV interview with Snowden still to come.
Maybe they have one really big scoop that must be released at the right time and the rest of their hand is just bad PRISM powerpoints and warrants. Yay speculation
By controlling the flow, they can make sure that each important revelation is allowed some time in the spotlight. The issues gets a lot more attention that way.
And the dumbest of all ironies, which I'm sure is lost on all of you, is that you are employing utilitarian ethics to defend it. That is exactly how a spy program is considered ethical.
God. The humanities really are dead if this kind of clueless doublethinking represents the future thought leadership of our world.
You seem to disagree, but don't make any convincing arguments that dumping all the information immediately is better for the public good. Probably because it's a very hard task.
The story doesn't even pass the simplest of tests for self-consistency. An NSA contractor claims that the government is listening to all digital communications, but is somehow able to transfer classified files, taken from the NSA, to a journalist in the UK. If we believe the first part, how could the second part happen? If the agency had such a capability, I would assume that a call between low-level NSA employees and journalists (foreign ones especially) would trigger all sorts of alarms.
I disagree, there have been significant leaks - confirmation of the NSA collecting every phone record in the US on a daily basis, confirmation that the DNI lies to his oversight committee, confirmation that the NSA has collected almost 3 billion records on the US in march 2013, allegations that the NSA is attempting to collect all internet traffic, both outside and inside its borders, in the broadest possible sweeps. If it was such a non-story, I don't think Obama would have done a press conference about it, would he? That's a lot of 'there' for a non-story if you ask me, and sounds like the NSA has significantly expanded its mandate without proper authorisation or oversight.
An NSA contractor claims that the government is listening to all digital communications, but is somehow able to transfer classified files, taken from the NSA, to a journalist in the UK. If we believe the first part, how could the second part happen?
Just because lots of data is collected, that doesn't mean they can find what they want from it, except in retrospect, so I'm not sure where the contradiction lies there for you - I think his communications with Greenwald were encrypted (according to the film-maker he contacted first) after first contact.
Also, I don't remember him saying specifically that they are listening to all digital communications, just that they can if they want to listen in to any communications, did he allege that somewhere?
Do you think he used his work phone to call Glenn Greenwald's personal phone or something? I think it can be rationally assumed that he used the best anonymizing techniques and encryption he's aware of to transmit the information.
I suspect they're laying a trap for the gov't; hoping to catch them in a big irrefutable lie.
The real question is why Snowden needs a secure internet connection, seeing as how everyone knows (1) who he is (2) where he is and (3) it's a public Q&A so the idea is for everyone to hear what he says.
Were he really concerned about tampering, the more important issue would be distributing an authenticated public key to prove his responses weren't being quickly edited in flight. Which popping on and offline...doesn't really assure anyone about.
We, the public, have no way of knowing if indeed its Snowden answering. It could be any number of persons, we just know that The Guardian says it's Snowden (probably). I'm all for calling the USG out on this matter, but I'd like if we could get some public verification of who is answering.
Requiring not only a named source, but a way of verifying that statements / correspondence were provably from that source, seems an impossibly high standard to meet (eg., he could sign each comment with a PGP key. But then, "How do we know it's his PGP key?". Etcetera etcetera, ad infinitum)
Except this isn't the WSJ reporting on a new iPhone "rumor", this is a very public release of important information. He's already outed himself, so this isn't about protection of anonymity.
It really isn't hard for the Guardian and Snowden to setup a CoT including PGP. They can verify it using a key pair they have ultimate trust in and then include that verification in their posts. It isn't asking a whole lot for them to say why or how they have trust in the responses they're getting. I trust the Guardian, what I don't trust is whether or not we're actually getting answers from Snowden that aren't being manipulated en route or otherwise not "live" and intact.
I mean, pretty much every photo and video I've seen of the guy comes from the guardian - they could easily just be of a Guardian intern. So a photo of him holding a sign is out. A GPG key which is reputedly his is of extremely questionable provenance so a signature from that would be meaningless. He could leak some new top secret data to establish that he has access to it - but we know guardian journalists have had access to such data already and surely they have some stuff on file for future reports.
I'm curious as to what sort of proof you'd like?
Kinda has 'allies' such as myself in Australia wondering about the extent and the utility of the dragnet.
But, by all means, continue to ignore what I'm talking about and interject your own sputum.