Monthly Archives: May 2014

EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Rejects Obama Administration Claim He Was Low-Level Hacker

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Edward Snowden, in an exclusive interview with "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, is fighting back against critics who dismissed him as a low-level hacker saying he was trained as a spy and offered technical expertise to high levels of government.

Snowden defended his expertise in portions of the interview that aired at 6:30 p.m. ET on Nightly News. The extended, wide-ranging interview with Williams, his first with a U.S. television network, airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.

I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas pretending to work in a job that Im not and even being assigned a name that was not mine, Snowden said in the interview.

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Snowden described himself as a technical expert who has worked for the United States at high levels, including as a lecturer in a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and undercover work for the CIA and National Security Agency.

But I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert, he said. I dont work with people. I dont recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And Ive done that at all levels from from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.

Last year, when Snowden began leaking details of NSA spying programs and left the country, administration officials played down his work history, using descriptions such as systems administrator to describe his role at the agency. In June, President Barack Obama himself told reporters: No, Im not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.

Snowden told Williams that those terms were misleading.

In the Defense Intelligence Agency job, Snowden said, he developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world.

So when they say Im a low-level systems administrator, that I dont know what Im talking about, Id say its somewhat misleading, he said.

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EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Rejects Obama Administration Claim He Was Low-Level Hacker

Edward Snowden: ‘I was trained as a spy’

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Behind the mask: Edward Snowden's revelations forced the issue of court authorisation for surveillance into the open. Photo: Reuters

United States intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said in a TV interview he "was trained as a spy" and had worked undercover overseas for US government agencies.

In an advance excerpt of his interview in Moscow with NBC Nightly Newsthat aired on Tuesday in the US, Snowden rejected comments by critics that he was a low-level analyst.

Snowden worked for Dellas a contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA) from 2009 to earlier this year, then as acontractor for management consultancy firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

Previous reports have him working as for the CIAas a security guard from age 19 and as an undercover operator in overseas posts at 23.

"Well, it's no secret that the US tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people," Snowden told NBC news anchor Brian Williams.

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas - pretending to work in a job that I'm not - and even being assigned a name that was not mine."

Describing himself as a "technical expert", Snowden said: "I don't work with people. I don't recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I've done that at all levels from - from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top."

He said he worked undercover overseas for both the CIA and NSA and lectured at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy "where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world."

"So when they (critics) say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading," Snowden added.

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Edward Snowden: 'I was trained as a spy'

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May 28, 2014

US fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden (pic) "trained as a spy" and worked "undercover overseas" for intelligence agencies, he told NBC News in excerpts of an interview aired yesterday.

In his first interview in US media, Snowden hit back at claims that he was merely a low-level contractor, saying he worked "at all levels from from the bottom on the ground, all the way to the top."

Snowden, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, was granted asylum by Russia in August 2013 after shaking the American intelligence establishment to its core with a series of leaks on mass surveillance in the United States and around the world.

In the interview, taped last week and to air in full today, Snowden defended himself against claims minimizing his intelligence experience before he stole and leaked a trove of classified documents revealing the NSA's program of phone and Internet surveillance.

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas pretending to work in a job that I'm not and even being assigned a name that was not mine," he said.

He said he had worked covertly as "a technical expert" for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, as well as as a trainer for the Defence Intelligence Agency.

"I don't work with people. I don't recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I've done that at all levels from from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top," he said.

"So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading."

Snowden, who left high school at 15 without graduating, made his revelations three months into his new job with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton as a systems administrator based at the NSA's threat operations center in Hawaii.

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Edward Snowden Opens Up in New Interview: “I Was Trained As a Spy”

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U.S. National Security Edward Snowden speaks with Brian Williams in an NBC News exclusive interview NBC News

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor behind one of the biggest leaks of classified intelligence in American history, describes his previous job as more Bond-like than reported in the past.

Its no secret that the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people, Snowden said in an excerpt from a new interview with NBC News Brian Williams that will air on Wednesday. I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas pretending to work in a job that Im not and even being assigned a name that was not mine.

The 30-year-old is currently living in Russia and wanted on espionage charges in the U.S. after he helped expose some of the National Security Agencys surveillance programs.

Snowden went on to say the U.S. government has tried to discredit him by downplaying the number of positions he held while working for the CIA and the NSA.

What theyre trying to do is theyre trying to use one position that Ive had in a career here or there to distract from the totality of my experience, said Snowden, who added that he worked at all levels from from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.

So when they say Im a low-level systems administrator, that I dont know what Im talking about, Id say its somewhat misleading.

[NBC News]

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Edward Snowden Opens Up in New Interview: “I Was Trained As a Spy”

Most Shocking for Last? Greenwald Teases NSA Spying "Finale"

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From left: Edward Snowden, David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras. (Image from David Michael Miranda's facebook page)Journalist Glenn Greenwald has repeatedly hinted that the largestand potentially most shockingrevelations about NSA surveillance have yet to come.

And in an interview with The Sunday Times published over the weekend, the award-winning journalist spoke about a coming "finale" that would expose specific individuals who have been targeted by the powerful spy agency.

According to the Times' Toby Harnden, Greenwald explained that the ultimate legacy of his NSA reportingand the decision to leak a trove of secret NSA documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden would be shaped in large part by this finishing piece still to come.

Greenwald said:

One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, Who have been the NSAs specific targets?

Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people wed regard as terrorists?

What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.

Greenwald told Harnden that the story to answer some of these questions will be published at his new website, The Intercerpt, later this year.

As Greenwald told GQ magazine during an in-depth interview earlier this year: "As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last. There's a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I'm saving that."

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Most Shocking for Last? Greenwald Teases NSA Spying "Finale"

County moves to require computer encryption after medical data breach

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Following a break-in at a county health contractor's office that led to the theft of computers containing personal information about more than 342,000 patients, Los Angeles County supervisors moved to tighten protocols for protecting data.

The county already requires that workers' laptops be encrypted. The supervisors voted Tuesday to extend that policy to also encrypt all county departments computer workstation hard drives.

They also asked that county staff members develop a plan to require "all County-contracted agencies that exchange personally identifiable information and protected health information data with the County" to encrypt sensitive information on their computers as a condition of their contracts.

In February, eight computers were taken from the Torrance office ofSutherland Healthcare Solutions, a company that handles medical billing and collections for the county.

Lisa Richardson, spokeswoman for Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who proposed the new security protocols, said the Sutherland incident "alerted us to some necessary security measures."

Torrance police are investigating the break-in, along with theLos Angeles County district attorney's cybercrime team and the U.S. Secret Service, which also investigates computer crimes.

Sutherland has offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the return of the stolen equipment or the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the theft.

The company, via a public relations firm, released images of a suspect captured by cameras. The suspect shown on film appeared to be ablack man of "unknown age and height with a thick build." He was wearing gloves, a dark sweatshirt and dark hat with white insignias, gray or blue jeans and bright blue athletic shoes. He also had an earring in his left ear and a large watch on his left wrist.

At least three lawsuits have been filed against the county and Sutherland over the incident, alleging, among other things, that the company failed to encrypt the data stored on the computers.

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County moves to require computer encryption after medical data breach

Former Sun Micro Execs Recall Trail-Blazing Times

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Sun Microsystems had a knack for getting in early on big trendssometimes crazy early. Consider its embrace of encryption.

Founders of the Silicon Valley computer maker who attended a reunion over the weekend noted that Sun made an unusual bet on the data-scrambling technology in its first products, more than three decades before revelations about National Security Agency data-gathering turned the privacy safeguard into a household word.

Sun, founded in 1982 and sold to Oracle in 2010 after a long slump, made its name with desktop workstations that ran their own software and came with built-in networking capability using the then-nascent technology Ethernet. Networking was a novel addition at a time when most corporate computing was conducted on minicomputers and mainframes, used with simple terminals.

Since users of Sun workstations could exchange data, company engineers worried about protecting it.

I couldnt imagine how you could do networking without encryption, said Vinod Khosla, the Sun co-founder and venture capitalist, in a conversation with reporters during the event in Mountain View, Calif.

And not just any form of encryption. Andy Bechtolsheim, who came up with the early workstation designs as a Stanford University graduate student, said colleagues like programmer Bill Joy argued that using software to scramble data wouldnt offer enough protection.

The only approach that seemed secure enough from tampering would be to use hardware. So Sun put a socket on circuit boards in early machines to accommodate an encryption chip, even though such chips werent readily available at the time.

We put in an empty socket, where we would add the chip if it ever came, Bechtolsheim said.

Chips that could handle the crypto calculations eventually did arrive, but created another problem: U.S. regulations wouldnt let Sun export a machine with built-in encryption, Bechtolsheim says.

Few buyers of Sun workstations used the technology anyway, Khosla added, so it was eventually removed. The episode typifies the repeated tendency of Sun executives to make decisions based on a belief in what made the most sense technologically, not necessarily commercially.

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The Next Open Source Battle Is Being Waged In The 3D Printing Industry

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More than twenty years ago, Linux began wending its way out of the primordial soup that was the early Internet and ensconcing itself in servers and workstations around the world.

After its creation in 1991 it took another eight years or so to be widely recognized, but during that period, arguments arose as to what Linux really was. Could Red Hat, a company founded in 1993, sell services around it? Who made money when you sold a CD containing the latest version of Mandrake Linux? Who owned code written on top of Linux for specific purposes? To the open source community, the answers to all those questions was No one. The community owned Linux.

And the battles began. Richard Stallman, the man behind the GNU operating system, fought for a licensing model that allowed for absolute freedom in software while Linus Torvalds called for a less adamant interpretation of the philosophy. These wars, which were waged on mailing lists and usenet, are now almost forgotten and, thanks to quick and easy donation systems and direct downloads of open source software, it is trivial to support your favorite open source project either through code check-in or actual donations. Its also trivial if not expected to sell services and support on top of open source software. Many services, including WordPress, follow this model.

Now we are entering a different conflict, one whose core question is Who owns 3D printing? The origin of this quandary lies with the creation of the RepRap Project, an open source effort to create a machine that can build itself. Founded in 2005 by Dr. Adrian Bowyer, RepRap printers have existed in a parallel evolutionary course to high-end industrial printers that cost thousands if not millions of dollars. Now those waters are muddied thanks to the big guys, Stratsys and 3D Systems, beginning to actively use their patents to protect their IP. Furthermore, there are examples of designers who offer their 3D objects up in the Creative Commons (here are mine, for example) and are then upset when users with printers offer their designs for sale.

The IP in question is manifold but the battle most recently came to a head in two patents the corporation filed on behalf of its designers. One is a self-leveling bed solution something thats been done before and is currently the Holy Grail of open source printers and another is for a quick-release filament guide which users are claiming is similar to this open source project on MakerBots own Thingiverse. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether either of these cases exhibit enough prior art and borrowing to accurately state that MakerBot stole these ideas from the community. In a nutshell, the outrage is mostly about he act of patenting the ideas rather than the ideas themselves.

The problem with the open source community is that it is, by design, not owed anything for its work, yet expects utmost deference to be paid. To be clear, Linux could have never gotten off the ground without the community that surrounded it. But that does not mean that every business based on open source tools (provided that business returns the various and direct changes to open source code when applicable) must grovel at the feet of a self-designated cabal of protectors.

The same can be said of 3D printing. MakerBot itself was an early proponent of open source hardware and, over the years, has made its money selling products that work better and more stably than most open source and home-brew printers. However, like Red Hat and Ubuntu, at some point equal deference must be paid to the gods of commerce. Those who have printers should be able to sell prints from their machine to those that do not have printers this is the basis for services like MakeXYZ that allow customers to request prints using a streamlined process and there are countless others who will brave the perils of prior patent art to try to build the next great 3D printer. In fact, a quick perusal of Kickstarter shows us a few dozen 3D printers already in their final stages of funding as well as a 3D scanner that looks surprisingly like a MakerBot Digitizer.

The open source community is vociferous and prone to throw victims on the fires of their collective wrath. But this ethos is always tempered by time and the improvement of the OS product in question. When an open source printer and open source 3D software is as solid and usable as offerings from Form 1 and MakerBot, I will most likely switch. Until then, as a weekend tinkerer without the time or the energy to invest hours into maintenance and software tweaks, Ill have to keep investing the so-called mean giants of the industry. I think 3D printing is changing the world and open source printing is at the forefront of this effort. But I dont want either party to enter into the spiral of recrimination and FUD that once characterized the Linux world. The 3D printing evolutionary tree is open to all comers at this point and todays giants might be tomorrows roadkill. As the bard once said, the wheels still in spin.

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The Next Open Source Battle Is Being Waged In The 3D Printing Industry