[HN Gopher] Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1
___________________________________________________________________
Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1
Author : libroot
Score : 158 points
Date : 2025-12-11 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (libroot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (libroot.org)
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Some what (vaguely) related to this topic About surveillance.
|
| I recall a local political and business figure making statements
| you and/or I are being surveilled by the government. Everyone
| thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit
| imbalanced..
|
| After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was
| shown to be possible Things like, if its even possible , it could
| plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite
| resources.
|
| The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow.
| Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
| wood_spirit wrote:
| The Soviets planted listening devices in American embassy
| typewriters between October 1976 and January 1984 - by
| intercepting them in the mail!
|
| Really sophisticated devices:
| https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
| zewper wrote:
| I love the internet. For all its drawbacks lately, deep down
| at its core, there are still hidden gems out there like this
| website. There goes my afternoon.
| aschla wrote:
| Wow, back in the 70s the bugs were only detectable by x-ray
| scan. Makes you wonder what kinds of things can be hidden in
| the ICs of today.
| ginush wrote:
| We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk
| as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate
| to everyone being surveilled by the government.
|
| What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the
| capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and
| to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded.
| Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate
| investigations, where the target of interest and their
| identifying markers may not yet be known.
| ok123456 wrote:
| >We know now that communications are being intercepted in
| bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not
| equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
|
| Yes it does.
| ginush wrote:
| No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that
| is involved in bulk interception happens to record your
| browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at
| various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-
| one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes
| a query for the dataset that returns these connection
| records. These connection records are automatically deleted
| after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not
| being surveilled.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Analytics are mining the data on here every second.
| Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in
| major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and
| publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's
| government (or even a minor country like Israel or
| Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen
| before start defending and attacking.
|
| Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at
| this point on every major website even if you don't
| believe it's negatively affecting you yet
| nhhvhy wrote:
| I thought about it, and now I'm even more convinced we
| are being surveilled.
| timschmidt wrote:
| William Binney, former technical director of NSA disagrees:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
|
| I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance
| data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why
| they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage
| and compute.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is the correct point of reference, but you are
| misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again.
| All of the government's facilities put together amount to
| almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it
| should be quite obvious that they certainly are not
| equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search
| "everything".
| timschmidt wrote:
| "A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described
| Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single
| needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect
| the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ...
| And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appo
| int...
| jeffbee wrote:
| What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago
| design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic
| region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed
| Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense
| that the people in this discussion meant by blanket
| surveillance. They are talking about broad interception
| of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking
| that it should be obvious to you if you are in this
| industry would be economically if not thermodynamically
| impossible.
| timschmidt wrote:
| "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or
| the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on
| everybody in this country. That was a program I created
| called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented
| from the regular activity which was ongoing because it
| was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming
| in, I knew something was happening but then when the
| contractors I had hired came and told me what they were
| doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and
| what they were using it to do. It was simply a different
| input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." -
| William Binney
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
| jeffbee wrote:
| Civilian information systems have radically expanded in
| size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement
| at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe
| that every newspaper is shouting that civilian
| information systems are destabilizing the national power
| grid and drying up the water table, but the government
| possesses a larger, far more capable information system
| that paradoxically has no observable physical presence.
| timschmidt wrote:
| "The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the
| Intelligence Community Comprehensive National
| Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage
| facility for the United States Intelligence Community
| that is designed to store data estimated to be on the
| order of exabytes or larger."
|
| "The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to
| 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center
| space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of
| technical support and administrative space."
|
| "The completed facility is expected to require 65
| megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per
| year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system,
| the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400
| m3) of water per day.
|
| An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as
| between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis
| of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law,
| meaning that advances in technology could be expected to
| increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the
| coming years."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
| ginush wrote:
| Yes, and this is the only feasible approach given the
| huge technical advances in communications over the past
| few decades.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| It'd be nice if someone released the 99% of Snowden documents
| that remain unreleased
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| It's weird how the journalists who have access to these files
| basically stopped reporting on them and joined or started
| "independent" outfits with massive salaries (500k+ USD)
|
| https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/layoffs-the-intercept.p...
| jjordan wrote:
| If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came
| out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie
| thinking anything other than someone in that script writing
| pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So
| many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by
| the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.
|
| Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have
| no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd
| like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic
| right it should be again.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| :)
|
| I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to
| weave real operations into fictional films, such that if
| someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the
| response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die
| Hard 4!"
|
| Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks
| with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as
| Hollywood script writers
| Terr_ wrote:
| > that's the plot of Die Hard 4
|
| I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government
| officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal
| bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18
| years later.
|
| Not just due to the _dramatis personae_ in charge, or the
| existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world
| overlap of the two.
| hopelite wrote:
| That is largely correct, even if not for that specific
| purpose/reason. Those people are largely self-discrediting,
| among other things.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon
| presentation was about government attempts at management of
| conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the
| technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd
| spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive
| government agencies.
|
| During both his speech and in the introduction to his book
| Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff
| or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship,
| even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to
| reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that
| contain _less than 90% truth_. The secret, he maintains, is
| to not distinguish between truths and embellishments.
|
| ----
|
| I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years
| ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head ( _yeah...
| sure... okay..._ ). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship,
| primarily working inside large data centers during the
| Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies
| narrating our headlines.
|
| Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere;
| use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books
| purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for _just one more
| minute_.
|
| [*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme,
| but cannot locate his book at the moment -- he was an
| absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven
| truthful to-date.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > government attempts at management of conspiracy
| theorists.
|
| The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version
| of this.
|
| In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's
| magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was
| used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Here's the book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Richard-
| Thieme/dp/09383262...
| pstuart wrote:
| That's a sly workaround, but as it is delivered as fiction
| imagine that for him it must be a Cassandra-like
| experience.
| squigz wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy - this is why Stargate exists!
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of
| Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand
| Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by
| 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But
| compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty
| unhinged and with little basis in reality.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Imagine actually believing all this in 2025.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that
| the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the
| conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State
| or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two
| people outside the US were discussing US politics and they
| mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted
| because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal
| info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very
| long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination
| of US persons that was depicted in those films.
| text0404 wrote:
| That is absolutely not what the Snowden docs showed.
| Would highly recommend familiarizing yourself at least a
| little bit with a major part of history: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
|
| > Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who
| led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's
| disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
|
| > Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a
| global surveillance system that cast off many of its
| historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11,
| 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep
| in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole
| populations.
|
| It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance.
| This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale
| that it didn't?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| The 1982 book "The Puzzle Palace" from James Bamford covered
| NSA capabilities (and was sanctioned, nonetheless), etc..
|
| There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford
| lisbbb wrote:
| I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003.
| Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government
| propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time
| thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to
| deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| i.e. The movie "The lives of others." :|
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| If they remade that movie with a modern spin, it would be
| an AI model deciding who is loyal and who isn't.
| sdoering wrote:
| The most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an
| X-Files spinoff [1].
|
| The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by
| the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC.
| And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often
| helped Mulder trying to stop that.
|
| I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely
| was an experience I will never forget.
|
| Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining
| historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the
| timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl
| disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
|
| Edit:
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Tom Clancy also had a similar plot in the Jack Ryan series
| timschmidt wrote:
| Don't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper
| published by Project for the New American Century, a think
| tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by
| 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George
| W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl
| Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > you have no privacy, get over it.
|
| > privacy as the basic right it should be again.
|
| See, this isn't complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting
| Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in
| the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing
| Personal Information.
|
| The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation
| you're talking about. It isn't even true. People are resigned
| that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of
| embarrassing information (some people would call that "growing
| up" ha ha). They're not "resigned" that government overreach is
| inevitable.
|
| The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach,
| as long as they perceive that it's against the Other. That's
| the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the
| two issues, they make no headway.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State",
|
| any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over
| shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket"
| nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be
| just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
| wood_spirit wrote:
| How can Snowdon possibly feel as the international situation
| changes so totally since he fled? It boggles the mind.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Probably, that he did the right thing at the right time.
| ginush wrote:
| I hope he's still not deluding himself into thinking he did
| anything positive.
| hopelite wrote:
| That's rather harsh. Exposing illegal, objectively
| treasonous activities by the government is not exactly not
| something positive, regardless of whether the regime has
| only gotten worse and more totalitarian and tightened its
| noose even more around the neck of humanity.
|
| By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what
| he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his
| understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality
| of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking
| the Kool-Aid too.
|
| Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still
| depends on the very kind of belief in the system that
| Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and
| actually took it serious.
| ginush wrote:
| He sought revenge after not getting a desired job
| promotion. There was nothing noble about his intentions,
| just narcissistic fury with what he, in his narrow world
| view, saw as unfairness towards himself.
|
| I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by
| the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights
| and privacy. So gullible.
|
| He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even
| went to live under the protection of one of them. Some
| patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > even went to live under the protection of one of them.
| Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
|
| You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled
| while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him,
| and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia
| offered asylum.
|
| The US effectively sent him to Russia.
| lateralux wrote:
| account created 2 hours ago pathetic
| sunaookami wrote:
| Account created 40 minutes ago, are you sure you are not an
| NSA employee?
| psunavy03 wrote:
| No, he violated a trust given to him, he deserves to be in
| jail, and if he had an ounce of moral character he'd come
| back and face trial like a man.
|
| Unlike the movies there aren't secret death squads out to get
| him, just a courtroom where he can face the consequences of
| his actions like an adult.
|
| Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country
| that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond
| anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be
| accused of.
|
| Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the
| balls to go to jail for what he believed.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| lololol sure
|
| more seriously, the difference is he's not doing protest
| via civil disobedience like MLK Jr, he's a whistleblower
|
| working for an organization like the NSA, the only moral
| thing you can do is realize your error and bail tf out
| alex1138 wrote:
| You forget the security-state apparatus has secret courts
| and secret laws
|
| It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his
| willingness to undergo a fair one
| psunavy03 wrote:
| That's not how any of that works. Criminal trials are
| public record and there are no such things as secret
| laws.
| timschmidt wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intel
| lig...
| SamDc73 wrote:
| He violated the trust of whom? The government who was
| violating the trust of the American People?
|
| And as for Russia, he didn't flee there by choice; he got
| stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport
| mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final
| destination was Ecuador ...
| Larrikin wrote:
| Who actually cares if the government can't perform a show
| trial? He did his duty by getting the information out there
|
| The current administration is actively engaged in
| corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had
| the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's
| too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the
| world is still better off with him there and alive than
| being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be
| a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.
| reorder9695 wrote:
| Would you not also say that the US government violated a
| trust given to them at the time? The government has such an
| imbalance of power compared to one person that it's only
| fair to hold them to a higher and much more stringent
| standard. Except wait no, they're often held to a much
| lower standard compared to the average Joe.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Why isn't Russia torturing him to get all the secrets out of
| him?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| There already did? And or little to get since he didn't
| memorize secrets and most--if not all--his digital copies
| were given to the press?
| dmix wrote:
| That sort of thing doesn't stay hidden these days.
| Especially someone like Snowden who has a hundred friends
| who are human rights lawyers.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Because they already had everything he could provide and the
| embarrassment weights far more then some tiny details they
| could get by torturing him.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| Because real life is not a Bond movie where the first thing
| that happens is a British actor with a bad Russian accent
| starts torturing you like in Goldfinger.
|
| Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad
| way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people
| will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even
| if they're innocent and have no valuable information.
| alex1138 wrote:
| John Kiriakou talked about just this on JRE. Everyone
| should watch it; be warned, you'll be absolutely furious by
| the end of it
| stefan_ wrote:
| He's much more useful being the ultimate tankie online
| tolerance wrote:
| I can't tell if it's the author(s) or the content of the actual
| report but I found this to be underwhelming.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Is there a mirror for this? my library has FortNight blocking it.
| ( bad certificate, leads them to believe its a spam site...).
| lucb1e wrote:
| What's FortNight? I tried looking it up but got fortnite as the
| top result, and forcing a literal search with quotes just
| brings up the dictionary definition. Sadly I don't know of a
| way to do a case-sensitive web search
| pseudalopex wrote:
| They meant Fortinet possibly.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Oh, _that_ garbage. Should have known it would be a
| corporate firewall
| libroot wrote:
| Weird, the certificate should be fine. Here's a link for Web
| Archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251211220119/https://libroot.o...
|
| We also have Tor onion site:
| http://librootfuuucybrkpvarmpswsxnbsakf2oqqzxncvsqrvc2j73kuu...
|
| And I2P:
| http://xvqmnhevx32br7m4e7g3yoxfirizo4m3uktym3wnuntbgbr5bvna....
| sunaookami wrote:
| This comment section is strange, a lot of people trying to
| discredit Snowden, saying he shouldn't have released the files,
| should be in prison, etc. 12 years ago this was HUGE news and had
| a major impact on the internet and everyone thanked Snowden for
| these documents! I certainly am thankful. Disappointed in my
| country that they literally said that "spying between friends is
| a no-go" but then did nothing and intimidated journalists and
| legalized it instead. And thanks to the author for giving the
| documents another look, found it very interesting. There is also
| part 2: https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-
| documents-pa...
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-
| Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have
| thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle
| blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately
| have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were
| exposed.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types
| of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for
| the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how
| many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his
| identity was revealed:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590
| alphazard wrote:
| "User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN
| included. Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be
| believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content
| that they read somewhere else.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| The Wyden-Daines Amendment in 2020: a huge privacy amendment that
| would've limited surveillance missed the Senate by literally one
| vote. It would've stopped the government from getting American's
| web browsing and search history without a warrant. And honestly,
| I still have zero respect for anyone who voted against it. If you
| need a warrant to walk into my house, you should need a warrant
| to walk into my digital life too.
|
| What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was
| addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
| yogurtboy wrote:
| Agreed. Here's the result of the vote, in case anyone notices
| these representatives running for reelection:
|
| https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
| hypeatei wrote:
| It's quite surprising that Bernie didn't vote on that bill
| considering he was vehemently against the Patriot Act.
| Disappointing.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| We're so fucking apathetic. Organizations that wish to strip your
| privacy should be treated the same as organizations who commit
| atrocities towards the planet or their fellow inhabitants. Expose
| them all. Shame them. Vote against them. Pass laws to weekend
| their power, etc. We've totally been down this road before with
| alcohol, cigarettes, climate control, pollution, trans fats, guns
| (in some countries), etc. It's completely possible to do it again
| for online privacy. Use your voice now, before you find you are
| unable to do so at all.
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(page generated 2025-12-11 23:00 UTC)