At any rate, we know the basic details of his story are true, as BAH confirmed that he worked there, and the government has not denied that the PRISM slides and the FISA court order are real. Given what he has shown us so far seems to stand up to scrutiny, I'd say his credibility is fine. A few random people on HN speculating about what the NSA would or wouldn't do, versus now well confirmed knowledge that he did work for the CIA, and for the NSA as a BAH contractor? I'll take the latter as having more weight.
And if he didn't have some fairly serious access, how did he get the PRISM slides and the court order in the first place?
Anyway... not saying every detail of his story is true, but all things told, I don't see how carping about his high-school education is relevant here. In fact, I don't see how talking about Snowden much at all is relevant here. The story isn't Snowden, the story is PRISM, rubber-stamping by the FISA courts, tech companies possibly in collusion with the NSA to make our nominally "private" data widely available, etc.
They have said there are inaccuracies in the PRISM report. As have all the companies allegedly involved. It doesn't take a CS expert to look at PRISM with some skepticism. All we have is a powerpoint and a guy who claims to know stuff.
Anyway... not saying every detail of his story is true, but all things told, I don't see how carping about his high-school education is relevant here.
As for the PRISM slides... I haven't seen a single story stating that anybody from the NSA claims that the slides aren't legitimate. Inaccuracies in the reporting? Maybe so. But the simple fact that he produced the (real) slides, says something, no?
For God's sake, Facebook was spelled wrong, or rather, whoever put the slides together didn't even take the time to properly word-wrap things. So is it really beyond the realm of speculation that some of the key phrasing was off-the-cuff, in the way that PP slides often are because the presenter plans to elaborate during the actual presentation?
And if you're thinking: well, this is the NSA, surely an organization of their import would have a crack team of slide preparers who are at the top of their game in communication...well, as Edward Tufte would kindly point out, the top people in an organization can't be counted on to prepare accurate PowerPoint slides after a fucking space shuttle blows up: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
edit: made it clear that the language and assertions of the slides were in question, not the slides authenticity.
And we don't know those slides are legit. I could make that powerpoint in an afternoon. Hell, I make powerpoints all the time with proposals, examples, etc that I would never consider to be reference documents.
That's my point. The assumption. The gaps we fill in for all the information we're missing. The fact that we have to assume means that questioning everything, from the slides authenticity to the leakers credibility is our duty as citizens.
The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable.
>rubber-stamping by the FISA courts
Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin...
There have been nearly 34K requests to the FISA court. It has rejected 11.
How would that be any different, even if he had, say, a Ph.D. from Harvard? "Paper" credentials and knowledge/talent/wisdom hardly have a guaranteed correlation. Anybody can misinterpret or misunderstand things.
Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)
Well, I'd take it as suggestive that they only deny .03% of the requests they receive[1].
Also, there's a fair amount of additional information on FISA/FISC here:
http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html
[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin...
What, like 'cat /home/dirnsa/undercover_agents.txt'?
As for the question of how did he get a slideshow? I don't know, but it's not difficult to imagine that an attachment on an email is easier to access than a wiretapping database.
His lack of education is relevant because when you have at least some understanding of the depth of complex systems, it becomes very hard to imagine that a self-taught person has enough knowledge to speak competently about multiple such systems.
EDIT: let me amend this last statement, since so many people seem to want to focus on an extreme interpretation of it. Yes, very brilliant people do sometimes have no papers or letters backing up their knowledge. I think you have to admit, if you've dealt with enough such people, that they are the exception -- the mean and floor of that population's technical capacity is lower than of the educated population, in my experience.
Now your argument has to be that Snowden was exceptional -- where is the evidence for that? His pay? Who honestly believes salary is highly correlated with ability?
No it isn't. I know plenty of self-taught people who are highly skilled and understand very complex systems. In this field more than probably any other, there's less reliance on "paper" credentials and formal education and people routinely achieve high knowledge/skill levels without all the formality.
As far as I'm concerned, his high-school education, or lack thereof, is a total red herring.
His lack of education is relevant because when you have at least some understanding of the depth of complex systems, it becomes very hard to imagine that a self-taught person has enough knowledge to speak competently about multiple such systems.
Not really. I'm just saying that some of the things that some people interpret as damaging his credibility, don't. At least in my opinion. His education, for example.
We also know about the NSA's operations from their open source projects like selinux and Accumulo. And given that context, it absolutely damaged his credibility when he suggests that there is some list of assets that he could read.
I'm fairly familiar with both SELinux and Accumulo, and I'm failing to see the connection. Keep in mind, an organization like the NSA is (presumably) fairly large, and probably very bureaucratic and probably had a hodge-podge of different rules, processes, procedures, etc. spread around. That the NSA can produce high-quality software products like SELinux or Accumulo, and still make a mistake in terms of how they grant security access (if there even was a mistake) seem like orthogonal issues to me.
I think you have to admit, if you've dealt with enough such people, that they are the exception -- the mean and floor of that population's technical capacity is lower than of the educated population, in my experience.
This is not my experience, and let me tell you why I think it's so.
First up - I was self-taught up to the time I went to (a humble) college, and proceeded to learn little, and instead wrote compilers and won programming competitions in my spare time; college was just a means to a piece of paper. I ended up working on the Delphi compiler at Borland before the tools division got sold; and am currently working for a financial software startup. Why did I go to a humble college? Because I had difficulties in what you might call high school, because all I was interested in was CS, and that was not a subject available to study.
Second, my experience is that all the best developers I've worked with got started in programming outside an academic context.
Thirdly, a hypothesis about selection; all the developers I've worked with who didn't have a formal CS education were very good, and one in particular was outstanding. I believe that having succeeded despite the lack of a certificate from an authority, they must have been better than the average drone. And they often had soft skills that made them yet more effective that semi-autistic logicians.
Now, I don't know where you're coming from, but the gist I'm getting from what you write is that you have a lot of ego wrapped up in credentials, for some reason. Maybe you were a grad student, maybe you still are. My industry experience is in contradiction to your own.
His education is completely irrelevant. His body odour (if he has it) is irrelevant. The size of his nose is irrelevant. if he was an axe murderer is irrelevant.
What is relevant is are those documents real. Since the government is not saying they are fake, clearly they are real.
That is what you should be talking about.
While I'm behind whistleblowers in general, and I agree with the linked article that completely irrelevant information is being used to smear Snowden, I do find a number of things suspicious. We know practically nothing about this guy, and it's not so easy to tease out true facts from what's currently available.
He comes across as a person who asks questions, a person with genuine curiosity. In fact, I'd say that his lack of high school diploma is actually a positive attribute in light of the fact that he was able to do his job enough to get paid $200k, i.e., the skills to perform his job came out of somewhere, didn't they? Without formal education, it shows that he picked them up himself. (On the other hand, the most robotic, unquestioning, confirming do-anything-for-social-glory types are almost always the "well-educated"; they perceive that they have a lot to lose by asking questions and have excelled at playing the hierarchical authority structure game, i.e., doing what pleases parents, teachers, professors, etc; in return for good grades and appreciation, which ultimately builds up to being the boss' pet in return for a good bonus).
Do we know what clearance he had?
Yes, he was a sysadmin. But, at what level?
And again, the fact that he did not have an "education" but was granted a $180K job speaks for itself on his professional capabilities.
So, balance is needed. Yes, on the two plates of the scale.
You are making my point -- we know nothing, very little, and what is known has numerous large red flags. Those flags would be obvious to most HN readers in another context, but emotions are high on this one -- it presses all of this crowd's persecution triggers.
You're painting the people involved as dishonest, which may or may not be true. But to assess that, the source of alternative information to be considered. And "elsewhere" is not a good source.
I didn't really expect to see such a statement about the necessity of community education and the impossibility of self-education on HN. You don't need to learn in a formal group setting in order to understand complex systems.
I don't think it serves anyone to think the worst of Snowden while at the same time thinking the best of the NSA. In both cases the reality is likely more towards the middle.
Sysadmin here. Most of the guys I've worked who lacked a proper CS education but were crackerjack IT folk. IT exists a bit between a trade and a profession and you'll get guys like me with a formal education and guys like Snowden without. For some guys, IT is their lives, its their only hobby and their only profession. Turns out you can learn a lot via practice.
>and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works.
You'd be a pretty lousy sysadmin for a NSA contractor if you didn't understand crypto on an fairly intimate level.
That said, yes, I'm sure there's some blustering here, but honestly, you don't need to be a master of everything to understand what is being stored, where, and how its being done. What the hell does Julian Assange know about fighting a war? Can he shoot a target from 1,000 meters? Does he know how to deploy an anti-tank weapon?
Sorry, but you really don't need to be the lead dev on PRISM to understand enough of it to make valid claims about it. Lets not be quite so elitist. Heck, 90% of startup culture is knocking the elites around with cheap disruptive tech.
And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this.
It only takes a single bottleneck, a console, a server, a VNC login or what have you where a sufficient stream of classified data to pass through and someone with enough motivation to get at it. You're giving the NSA an awful lot of credit, but in the end these are people who do the same dumb things other intel folks do.
Some level of the compartmentalization within this mess has clearly failed. His background is irrelevant to that fact.
The point is, he was in a position to have this information regardless and leaked it. That's the story. Your insinuation that his background has some bearing on the information he has already leaked, the parts those within and without the intelligence community has been able to independently verify and the parts that have been confirmed by the WH is completely speculative.
So if you want to stick to primary sources, we have a PPT wit some logos thrown about in a tacky way.
If he's a Chinese mole, or in cahoots with enemies of the state, it doesn't seem like leaking some slides to the guardian and then filming a confession would be the way to go about it. Is the argument just that he's incompetent/confused, or am I missing something? Genuine question.
Another profession with a bit smaller but much alike level of access is called "janitor".
You realize that the CIA accidentally sent North Korea a list of all it's covert operatives real names and in a separate incident sent all their deep cover operatives the CIA's new diversity policy using letters that had the return address as CIA (citation p. 178 The Human Factor http://books.google.com/books?id=cVt9yg52bhoC&printsec=front...)? Intelligence agencies tend to be total crap at protecting that information.
The reason that for 20 years HUMINT sources lasted a week or two in the soviet union before being arrested was lots of people had access to that information and at least two of them, but probably many more, gave the Soviet Union real time updates on all active HUMINT sources. I find it completely believable that many IT workers at the NSA have access to that sort of information. The people the KGB loved to recruit employees that worked in the copyroom or the mailroom because they had the most complete access to intelligent with little to no oversight.
Additionally information exists at the edge or leaf nodes in most organistions as you increase in position, rank or grade you lose access and get siloed. Highly skilled low level workers have all your secrets, some of them are not trustworthy and work for foreign governments.
> Like most organizations, the CIA had its own stationery. Its official enveloeps had "Central Intelligence Agency" written on the return address. The Agency mistakenly used this stationery for a mailing on its new diversity policy - a mailing sent to officers, including Dave, who were working under deep cover in foreign countries. We hoped that no one had seen the return address on the envelopes. In any event, according to a friend at HQs, this incident led the Agency to destroy its entire stock of stationery.
Having worked decades in the IT industry, my experience shows that formal education rarely makes a positive contribution to a person's skills or credibility. I could be biased though, I'm self taught.
I've worked with people with and without degrees. Some of the best had no degree, some had PhDs, some had a standard BSc. Some of the worst were in all three categories too.
But I have found my degree useful, and not just for opening doors.
Agreed, a lazy or incompetent software/IT worker is lazy and/or incompetent regardless of past educational achievement!
Self-taught people, misfits (regardless of how that sounds like), etc. tend to think for themselves, be more creative and more critical.
Obviously,someone who's willing to risk his and his family life to testify against what he believe is wrong as such a high level is predisposed to have at least some similar past.
but then again, we do derive from the point, thus, yes,smearing works.
You've just committed an ad hominem. As if having a piece of paper from a college would make his claims more informed.
I find Snowden's position quite believable.
Sysadmins know a lot. They run the email servers. They configure hardware for a number of projects. They set up the databases. They see everything that breaks (and in software, that's everything). There's probably a lot of control over the actual data, but the basic workflow is something that would be very hard to hide from the people who are keeping the systems running.
Man, and that is the MILITARY, don't you know? They risk their lives and perform covert operations day in day out!
And so an argument disappears.
Do you think the NSA has made no mistakes whatsoever?
I don't follow your reasoning at all.
I can name a handful of people, myself included who have or do fit this description and situation.
There are many great employees and talented hackers without a diploma.
Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. I mean, ffs he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at.
Elsewhere he talks about every machine being bugged and things like that. And the tapping he claims to have intimate knowledge of -- that kind of stuff would be happening inside of some kind of data store, maybe like Apache Accumulo which the NSA also developed. Let alone the implications of what he's saying on the security of all crypto systems everywhere -- how many uneducated sys admins do you know who can inspect a data store and actually understand what they're looking at, and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works.
And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this. My verdict is that all he had was some slideshow that he turned over to the Guardian, the rest is a bullshit story.