Snowden's Dead Man's Switch
schneier.com
schneier.com
"I'm not sure he's thought this through, though. I would be more worried that someone would kill me in order to get the documents released than I would be that someone would kill me to prevent the documents from being released. Any real-world situation involves multiple adversaries, and it's important to keep all of them in mind when designing a security system."
Schneier's topic sentence for that paragraph could serve as my one-sentence evaluation of Snowden's deeds so far--he hasn't thought things through sufficiently. A longer commentary on Snowden
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/some-secrets-b...
is an Australian's words voicing some of my misgivings about Snowden's plan for revealing secrets and his aims and his methods.
I wish Snowden a long and healthy life (but I would like him back here in the United States to stand trial). I hope that the most sensitive secrets that he is in a position to disclose stay undisclosed, but I wouldn't bet that that will happen, whether Snowden is alive or dead. There are "multiple adversaries," for sure, and it's not clear that they all have the same incentives in this situation.
When Ellsberg was arrested for leaking the Pentagon papers (to no less than 17 different newspapers), he was released on recognizance and allowed to speak to the media. His charges were eventually dropped because the FBI had used an illegal wiretap on him. Today, the FBI would get a rubber-stamped wiretap, and he would be thrown in a hole forever like Bradley Manning. Ellsberg wrote an editorial in the Washington Post saying that fleeing the country was the right choice.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427...
if snowden_has_not_logged_in_for_7_days():
for doc in documents:
if random.choice([True, False]):
release(doc)
else:
permanently_delete(doc)
In general, as I have said in other recent comments here on Hacker News, I can be appalled by several of the recent allegations about NSA activity without applauding Snowden's actions. I took my wife and my two younger children along with a home-made protest sign ("We support the Bill of Rights") to the lightly attended Restore the Fourth protest in Minneapolis. I did that openly and in full view of law enforcement authorities and news cameras because freedom is precious to me, and I don't think my freedom should be abused on any rationale, even the rationale of fighting terrorist networks. That said, I find that whenever I get out of the Hacker News hivemind, and deal with any of my friends from around the world who have actually lived and worked in multiple countries, and especially those friends who have children of their whose futures the friends are working for, there is remarkably little regard of Snowden as a hero or a freedom-fighter. It's not clear that he really has the technical chops to make a "dead man's switch" work as he intends against all possible attack surfaces, and it's not clear that all of his allegations about United States government activities are factually true, and it's especially clear already that Snowden's recent statements, with the ghost-writing help of Wikileaks, represent a badly unbalanced view of which countries in the world are the greatest enemies of human freedom, which is a cause I cherish all over the world.
I think this needs some further explanation. Without explanation it seems hypocritical to me, since you would not know about those NSA activites without Snowden.
> That said, I find that whenever I get out of the Hacker News hivemind, and deal with any of my friends from around the world who have actually lived and worked in multiple countries, and especially those friends who have children of their whose futures the friends are working for, there is remarkably little regard of Snowden as a hero or a freedom-fighter.
It's obvious that you do not have friends from Germany. Having suffered through multiple surveillance states in the past, Germans are very much aware of the dangers that are caused by massive surveillance. New technologies enable surveillance in an amount that has never been seen in history before. If your friends do not seem to care, they just haven't realised that there is a sword dangling right above their heads. Why do you think that every single constitution of "free countries" (and also the human rights) have passages about the confidelity of spoken words, the confidelity of messages and so on. This is no coincidence. So many people paid with their lives for it. It is the only way of making sure that a democracy stays a democracy. You cannot organize an opposition, if the current rulers know all your moves, all your communications and all your contacts. This has been proven in history again and again, yet this is vital for a healthy democracy. Yet people seem to forget, because they "have nothing to hide" or their "life is not affected". But guess what, once you are affected, it is already too late and nothing can be done anymore. I would not want my children to live in a fascist surveillance state and I am very grateful for Snowden actions. Please talk to your friends and try to raise awareness. It's their children or their children's children who will have to pay the price. I know it's a little abstract, that's exactly why people fall for it again and again.
An era implies a distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic: it has a beginning and an end. As Bruce Fein (of the American Freedom Agenda) noted, "there will be no defined end"... to terrorism, in part due to the expansion of the definition of terrorism itself.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/ten-steps-to-close-...
Looking from high above, spying is an act of distrust. Distrust divides. I believe humanity should seek to unify its nations; we have much untapped potential, and spying will only delay us from reaching the stars.
People seem to forget that at present time humanity has no backup.
It might release the documents to selected people who may be required to use their judgement on what to release. It may require cooperation from several individuals to decrypt. It may be enough of a bluff for someone to think twice
Why? This is like a married person saying "I hope that the affairs my spouse has had stay secret." Which, I suppose, some would agree with...
"But Snowden’s case is actually a kind of reverse dead man’s switch, says John Prados, senior research fellow for the National Security Archive and author of several books on secret wars of the CIA. [...] “In the dead man switch, my positive control is necessary in order to prevent the eventuality [of an explosion],” Prados said. “In Snowden’s information strategy, he distributed sets of the information in such a fashion that if he is taken, then other people will move to release information. In other words, his positive control of the system is not required to make the eventuality happen. In fact, it’s his negative control that applies."
I'm really surprised it was implemented like that, I think using an actual, digital "dead man's switch" would have made more sense. Why not have 100 servers around the world running jobs to email out documents to 100 journalists at all times if an env variable isn't reset every few weeks? Then if he disappears or is killed, a few weeks later the jobs complete and email out the information?
What if Putin decides to cut the wifi at Moscow airport? Is that an 'apocalypse' situation or not?
Therefore the version that he did is safer for him.
I'm thinking something like a python script which is scanning for particular words and phrases on google news, like "Snowden killed", or "Snowden captured"? That seems like something I could build easily -- would a kill switch indeed be something as simple as that?
The only problem is, that complicates the system with a critical point of failure.
It should also be noted that an active dead man's switch opens the possibility that surveillance of Snowden will establish the mechanism of the switch, allowing the CIA to take over the switch and then do away with Snowden with impunity. By contrast the passive distributed key storage he likely has provides no active traffic that current surveillance can trace.
Because people are smarter than computers.
" ‘Snowden won’t disclose more docs, I have thousands’ – Greenwald"
"Edward Snowden is unlikely to make new revelations since “he doesn’t want to end up in a cage like Bradley Manning”, said The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, adding that he himself decides what to publish from the thousands of leaked documents.
...
If he had a way to do one-way broadcasts, like over the radio, where any snoopers could not discover the receivers then it would make more sense to do a positive control system. But there really isn't a mechanism for that on the internet. Even if he posted to usenet, given enough time, a sufficiently motivated nation-state adversary could probably trace through enough usenet servers to figure out what clients were looking for those reset messages.
Maybe a packed Tor client + desktop application that does every action it needs to do for the user, if the master hasn't changed the server variable or if it's not accessible for [insert random number] days, weeks or years.
[edited for clarity]
In other words: If you know how to stop the distribution, wouldn't there be feasible ways to make you stop it?
The unstated assumption is that these documents would be particularly interesting to foreign governments. That's probably wrong.
What we've seen so far is merely evidence of actions that were long assumed to be taking place anyway. Other governments likely have their own evidence already.
These documents are important to the public, but they're of minimal value to an enemy. His intent was never malicious, so it's extremely unlikely that he's carrying the names of agents or other sensitive information of that sort.
>These documents are important to the public, but they're of minimal value to an enemy.
They don't need to be. If they'll hurt the US government then they're of benefit to anyone who opposes that government.
Come to think of it, they'd probably be of political benefit to anyone who opposed the NSA, even within the US.
Maybe there should be two levels of dead man's switching -- incremental leaks if a phrase isn't reported in, say, two weeks and a major release if no phrase reported in three months. This way, he figuratively would have multiple units of currency with which to bargain. Let's say he was thrown in jail. If he only could threaten to release a single, big bundle of secrets via a dead man's switch, all his bargaining power would disappear should a government call his bluff and keep in jail until after the switch fired. However, if he could threaten incremental releases and show that, when given full freedom, the releases stop, he would have power for quite some time.
How would one acquire the use of, say, 50 servers in various datacenters owned by various providers without leaving traces or implicit fingerprints (multi-year prepayment being the big one I am thinking of)?
Also, getting servers isn't very difficult. Buy prepaid credit cards or Bitcoin via cash, leave cards/BTC on account for various VM providers.
Given that the other big story in the media is somehow a slightly-more-than-pedestrian summer heatwave in the US and UK, it seems rather unlikely anyone needs a story as big as Snowden to bury something else.
If anyone needs it, I'll be off in the corner selling tin foil hats. ;-)
I'm sure there is a conspiracy theory that explains both.
I think this dead man's switch is deterrent against being taken into custody. If the US tries to incarcerate him, then the switch will trip and more secret documents will be leaked. Though maybe the US doesn't care.
I wonder how badly the US wants him at this point?
Of course doing it now would be incredibly stupid of the US government, as everyone will point to them, but then again they've already done some incredibly stupid things, so who knows.
Death is an easy out. Become a martyr? Not so bad. Live for the rest of your life, naked, in solitary confinement? I'd rather be dead than lose my grip on sanity in those kinds of conditions.
Quite the contrary, taking him into custody is always in the best interest of the US. Snowden could be targeted with the intention of purposefully triggering the release of the documents, so the US would need to protect him.
However if he remains alive then the threat continues as well, at least until he expresses desire to not release the documents. So since he's alive then the US will want to keep control of him until the threat is neutralized.
Either way the US needs to take control of the situation, unless they can ensure the "dead man's switch" doesn't get triggered after Snowden dies.
Given his previous statement that he "can't be" tortured to give up the information he has, I am assuming he does not himself have direct control of the dead mans switch, but have left information to other parties on when to release, so it might be entirely out of both his hands and the US governments hands whether or not their actions will trigger "the switch".
vladimir • July 18, 2013 8:57 AM If he has a switch like this. That is not only protect him from being killed by US authorities but motivate the same authorities to protect him from all other threats.
This should provide enough incentive for the same spy agencies to make sure nothing happens to him.
What I like about it is that you could build a fairly hermetic system that, once you set it up, is never directly touched by you and just accesses public, high-volume websites. If you can set it up without leaving any fingerprints, that seems like a big plus.
Then all Snowden would need is one or two cloaked servers somewhere that crawl each newspaper's site daily and trip the switch if they find an article containing the phrase.
Complicated technical measures expose the data to risk of decryption prior to possible activation (by the NSA or someone else). Just printing the keys and giving to trusted people would be far less risky.
There were certainly elements of truth to all of these things - there was a document cache, it was encrypted, people did have split keys, it probably did include elements of what was revealed as the robosigning scandal.
But from hearing discussion about it the subject, I think that US Intelligence now more or less holds the opinion that it was a bluff. Nothing of significant harm was included in the unreleased documents, though I think that's informed speculation and not some kind of confirmed fact.
All of a sudden after Snowden was getting helped by wikileaks and he was under a lot of pressure, the revelation of a similar encrypted cache of documents distributed widely was given to a lot of news agencies, and has regularly come up at opportune times in friendly media outlets.
I haven't been told this by anyone, but I'm pretty sure the intelligence community isn't buying it. Reports by greenwald were somewhat inconsistent with idea that there is a large cache of even more damning documents left. He's been travelling internationally, was staying in hong kong where many services operate openly, and presumably under pressure from a variety of security services and states as he tries to escape moscow and secure a safe place to live. It is hard to keep secret keys and documents secure under the best of conditions, and those are about the worst conditions possible.
The only reasonable thing to assume here is that it's all burned - everything snowden walked away with is or will be in the hands of foreign states and anything particularly damning will likely end up in the press sooner or later.
So if you believe that, that there is no way to unring this bell, the last thing you're going to do is spend any time being concerned about a dead man's crypto cache.
If you're willing to do enough horse trading to close the entire european airspace to a single individual, you're pissed and you're gonna do whatever it is you want to do. That's not going to include killing him, simply because the cost is high and the benefit is low. But they are clearly going to exert an inhuman amount of resources into making him regret being born.
And that's absolutely unrelated to Mr. Snowden. That's all for the effect it will have on anyone having similar thoughts. I think he's awesome and did Americans and the world a great favor, and that's he's really brave. And yet after seeing this go down if I was ever in a position to consider doing something like this there is no fucking way I'd ever think I could handle this kind of heat. Not a chance, no question.
Problem solved.
I'm sure nobody doubts there is an encrypted file with unreleased documents and that the key has been split and distributed. The only question is, exactly what is it that is in that cache and how damaging would it be to be released publicly.
The element of the unknown in terms of what precisely stays unreleased is the primary nexus point in US policy here. Even if they believe nothing of considerable value is left, anyone the gambles there and loses no longer has a career in the us government. Providing any specific damaging proof to them alone is only helpful to them - it allows them to confirm how accurate they've been at estimating the leak, and they can preemptively act to diffuse the impact or provide disinformation. And they get a good read on what the higher end of the stuff he has is.
I'm 90% sure this is what the leak of the Brussels/EU tap and intrusion documents were about. They were released soon after the cache was first mentioned, and at a time he was being effectively held captive in an airport as every sympathetic country was suddenly being offered huge incentives to turn their backs.
It certainly served as proof some highly damaging documents still had been held back. It may not have softened US rhetoric much, but it may have been effective in convincing the us to stop applying as much pressure on potential sources of asylum.
The biggest problem is that the NSA really isn't super worried about what the public finds out as much as they are institutionally built to be worried about what other foreign services learn. They have to assume that somebody has or will get the whole cache privately - either covertly or as a trade for passage etc. And while they aren't happy about it becoming public either, it isn't the end of the world. After all, the same year they got caught illegally wiretapping everyone they got the telecoms blanket immunity and were at that very moment developing PRISM. The NSA leaks have been huge, yet there are no serious calls for congressional hearings, the executive isn't disowning it, there is zero risk the public is about to stage a revolution and most significantly - they haven't even said they're going to stop doing any of it.
While Alexander will probably be losing his job, the publicity may even end up as a net positive for surveillance USA. Now that its out in the open and not resulted in any apparent systemic meltdown in sigint - it only makes it easier to start the next even more expansive program. After all, whoever they go to will know that Schmidt and Zuckerberg ended up just fine, and people barely even remember that verizon gave away cdr for every customer call without question. I bet there hasn't even been a blip in verizon subscriber numbers.
They really have carte-blanche now, and tons of people in the community were expecting that these leaks would have a great deal more blowback.
Look at the facts on the ground. The United States government is well-documented for atrocities ranging from torture to extrajudicial killing to political assassinations to mass surveillance, not to mention providing support to private American corporations involved in similarly disgusting behavior.
Has this impacted the power of the United States? Not really. France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy -- countries with tremendous "pride of place" and a sometimes sneering disdain for the US -- denied airspace to a foreign head of state on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden was on board. The US is still, by at least an order of magnitude, the most powerful country in the world.
The only challenge to US hegemony is the declining relevance of the US economy relative to other world economies like China, India, Russia, Brazil, and others. In the end, only money and guns talk. There is no "kill shot" leak as long as Bank of America has the right friends in Washington.
About the only thing that was in the manning cache that probably significantly bruised US operating power was the diplomatic cables. And that was just because the publicity and bluntness undoubtedly lead to some personal grudges that closed some doors for entirely human and entirely undiplomatic reasons.
The only people that didn't know everyone was listening to everyone were members of the public who didn't want to know. Now that they know they just don't care.
Economic power surely is the only killer. Mass espionage programs are probably quite beneficial economically, or at least if you're willing to share state and private intelligence like a large number of countries are. I would be very surprised if the US doesn't adopt that practice more and more over time. It's essentially already begun - if you run large networks data sharing is quid pro quo for heads up on state intrusion activity and reports of data exfiltration. We just don't steal secrets and give them out for favors yet.
Countries do occasionally commit suicide though. While a popular revolution in the US feels inconceivable at any point within our lives, the primary factor behind them is usually way too many pissed off poor people and radical imbalance in wealth and little room for economic advancement. As US economics begin to resemble japan's more and more you might have the potential for a forceful rejection of policy being so captured by wealth and neo-liberal philosophy. Hard to imagine though. Globalization seems to have ended that whole concern.
Snowden noted Russia and China have an "open door" policy. Although they might like the raw data, I don't think that either would want to Snowden expire under their protection. That would make them look quite unappealing to anyone considering being a "walk in" informant in the future.
So for the time being, Snowden is the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs and for everyone involved is worth much more alive. But once he's in a small South American country, things might change.
If he really things this is what's going to keep him safe, he's over playing his hand.
Furthermore, I think he's deluding himself if he thinks he's actually going to be targeted for assassination by the US. I'm no Obama fan, but it's a little far fetched. Shoved in jail, maybe. Killed to silence him? Nah.. that's a strategy ironically more likely to be employed by the countries he's seeking asylum status from.
Here's an alternative story... the 5 'civilians' he was with were his father's old AQ friends.
Comparing these two cases is a joke.
But he wasn't accused of leaking any state secrets either.
Must have been on the moon!
Also, considering the fact that the NSA appears to broadcast such critical data to just about anyone with a clearance, it can be assured that they don't care at all about foreign governments learning about them. They are primarily concerned about their real enemy, US citizens, and tangentially concerned about the non-US public (Manning's revelation that the US would no longer be able to support its oppressive allies lead to the Arab spring).
Not that Schneier's advocating anything....
They would then make the decision to release or not release, either independently or in concert, depending on how he set it up.
It was your decision to hire him, and it was your mistake that you are remedying by firing him. Incompetence is subjective. If your interview process makes it clear that your employees must live in constant fear of termination if they aren't ramping up fast enough for you, on your product with your technical debt and your team's shitty architecture choices ("fire fast" and "with little notice", you wrote), you'll find that your candidate pool vanishes.
> I want a dead man's switch that deletes all my porn.