Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked data about government surveillance programs,has been far from quiet during his Russian exile.

In an interview with James Bamfordpublished Thursday by NOVA, Snowden said that when it came to cyber warfare, the United States has "more to lose than any other nation on earth." And he's not just talking about attacks on systems with obvious effects on the physical world, but the potential fallout of attacks aimed atcrippling the Internet itself.

When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as theyre network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection.

However, what we overlook and has a much greater value to us as a nation is the internet itself. The internet is critical infrastructure to the United States. We use the internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day. If an adversary didnt target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. They could be shunted offline, and we would go dark in terms of our economy and our business for minutes, hours, days. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.

The United States is among the most digitally reliant nations out there, which opens up more avenues for cyberattacks. Having almost zero digital infrastructureturns out to be a pretty solid defense from this particular brand of assault -- it's hard to disrupt things that aren't connected to the Internet from the Internet. But it also means that what few digital connections an isolated nation might have likely lack resilience, as North Korea learned last month when its Internet access was disrupted.

Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government.

Originally posted here:
This is the cyberattack that keeps Edward Snowden up at night

Edward Snowden says in a new interview with NOVA Next that the U.S. governmentwronglypromotescyberoffense strategies at the expense of weakening the system and leaving it open to cyber attacks from the black market.

Were creating a class of Internet security researchers who research vulnerabilities, but then instead of disclosing them to the device manufacturers to get them fixed and to make us more secure, they sell them to secret agencies, Snowdensays. They sell them on the black market to criminal groups to be able to exploit these to attack targets. And that leaves us much less secure, not just on an individual level, but on a broad social level; on a broad economic level. And beyond that, it creates a new black market for computer weapons, basically digital weapons.

Snowden points out that the White Houses own independent review panels have shownthat not a single program has stoppedan imminent terrorist attack on the United States. He does not believe the public is aware of just how disastrous these policies could backfire and questions the value of such programs that leave our own information vulnerable.

Snowden alsopoints out that other countries such as Iran are ahead of us in realizing the problem:

But it is important to highlight that we really started this trend in many ways when we launched the Stuxnet campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. It actually kicked off a response, sort of retaliatory action from Iran, where they realized they had been caught unprepared. They were far behind the technological curve as compared to the United States and most other countries. And this is happening across the world nowadays, where they realize that theyre caught out. Theyre vulnerable. They have no capacity to retaliate to any sort of cyber campaign brought against them.

Wespend much more onresearch and development, compared to the rest of the world. Sowhen it comes to ourcyber security says Snowden, We have more to lose than any other nation on Earth.

Snowden said he didntwant to overhype the problem, Nobodys going to press a key on their keyboard and bring down the government. But he did emphasize that the threats from foreign governments were real and that we should be focusing more on the defense of our own information than focusing on others.

Snowden was interviewed forNOVA Next fromRussia, where he has lived since releasing documents showing the U.S. had been spying on citizens through several technology companies. He is wanted in the U.S. on criminal charges for theft and misuse of classified information. Snowdendismissed former CIA director Michael Haydens predictions that he would wind up a sad and miserable drunk in Russia. Snowden said he only drinks waterand that the country was actually great. Yeah, I know. Its crazy, he told interviewer James Bamford.

Click to read a full transcript of the interview here.

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Snowden Claims U.S. Policy Is Creating A Black Market For Digital Weapons

We're all sick of used to hearing Edward Snowden talk about NSA surveillance by now. We get it: The government's watching us, and there's basically nothing we can do about it. But PBS just published the transcript of an interview with Snowden that doesn't really talk about surveillance much at all. It's all about cyberwar, and it's fascinating.

In the midst of comprehending Snowden-as-celebrity-whistleblower, it's easy to forget that he's actually a very experienced cybersecurity expert. This young man spent years on the frontlines of America's silent but fierce battle to protect our internet infrastructure. But as Snowden points out in his interview with James Bamford from PBS's tech show NOVA Next, agencies like the NSA actually devote more resources towards launching cyberattacks. In other words, the folks that should be focused on defending our nation in an imminent cyberwar are too busy focusing on the offense.

Though the interview was filmed last June, PBS just released the unedited transcript and a brief video. The transcript is very long but full of goodies, if you're curious about how cybersecurity actually works at the national defense level. After the Sony hack, we all know that it's a glaringly important topic. But Snowden actually does a great job of breaking the nuances of cyberwar down into some easily digestible nuggets.

We don't get to hear Edward Snowden talk about aspects of cybersecurity beyond being a spyhe should do it more often. [PBS]

Originally posted here:
Edward Snowden Should Talk About Cyberwar More Often

Its a safe bet the U.S. government isnt taking advice from Edward Snowden these days, but the infamous leaker offered the Obama administration a warning as it mulls a further response to North Koreas alleged hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment: dont hack back.

In an interview with PBS Nova Next released Thursday, Snowden offered thoughts on cyberwar that are newly relevant after high-profile cyberattacks at J.P. Morgan Chase , Sony and elsewhere. James Bamford conducted the June 30 interview in Moscow; it features some of the same material as Bamfords August cover story in Wired.

When it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth, Snowden said, according to a transcript. The technical sector is the backbone of the American economy, and if we start engaging in these kind of behaviors, in these kind of attacks, were setting a standard, were creating a new international norm of behavior that says this is what nations do.

Many current and former U.S. security officials agree. If the Internet becomes a battlefield, they say, the U.S. is so well wired that it would be relatively easy to inflict damage. But theres less to attack in a country like North Korea.

The U.S. last week announced sanctions against North Korea as the first step of retaliation for the Sony hack. Several people involved in the deliberations are opposed to launching a digital counterstrike against Pyongyang.

In the PBS interview, Snowden alluded to a previously reported anecdote that the National Security Agency accidentally knocked Syria offline in 2012 when it hacked into its Internet gear for spying purposes.

A former U.S. official familiar wouldnt discuss Syria specifically but said, Hypothetically, when youre doing those kinds of things, something like that is not beyond the realm of the possible.

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Snowden: Don’t Hack Back

As part of an upcoming PBS documentary about cyber war, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave an interview about cyber terrorism for the first time, PBS announced Thursday.

In the interview, filmed in June 2014 in a Moscow hotel, Snowden sheds light on the surprising frequency with which cyber attacks occur, their potential for destruction, and what, exactly, he believes is at stake as governments and rogue elements rush to exploit weaknesses found on the internet, one of the most complex systems ever built by humans, PBS said in a statement.

PBS released a four-minute video excerpt of the interview, seen below, as well as a 25-page transcript of the interview.

"When it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on Earth," Snowden said in the interview, referencing the United States. Ithink the public still isnt aware of the frequency with which these cyber-attacks, as theyre being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world, not just the U.S.

The upcoming documentary that includes Snowdens comments is the result of an investigation by PBS digital science series NOVA and author and journalist James Bamford, who gained unrestricted access to the entire archive Edward Snowden took from the NSA, including hundreds of thousands of documents not yet released, said PBS.

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Edward Snowden discusses cyber terrorism for first time for PBS documentary

January 8, 2015 - 12:20 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour dominated Wednesday, Jan 7 night's 8th annual Cinema Eye Honors, devoted to recognizing the best in nonfiction film, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The Laura Poitras-directed film about the NSA leaker, which is a frontrunner for a best documentary Oscar nomination, took home four awards, including best nonfiction feature and best direction, making Poitras the first person in Cinema Eye history to win the award for best direction twice, taking home the prize in 2011 for The Oath. In total, Poitras took home three awards, tying the record set by Lixin Fan in 2011 for Last Train Home. Citizenfour also won the outstanding achievement in editing and production prizes, becoming the second film in Cinema Eye history to capture that many awards in one year and win the best nonfiction feature and direction prizes. Going into the show, the documentary was up for six awards.

Fellow Oscar documentary frontrunner Keep On Keepin' On won the audience choice prize, determined by votes on the Cinema Eye website.

There were two ties at this year's awards, a Cinema Eye first. Syd Garon of Jodorowskys Dune and Heather Brantman and Tim Fisher of Particle Fever shared the award for outstanding achievement in graphic design or animation. 20,000 Days on Earth's Erik Wilson and Virunga's Franklin Dow and Orlando von Einsiedel shared the best cinematography prizes.

Oscar-nominated director Sam Green hosted this year's event, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, and Serial podcast host Sarah Koenig served as the announcer for the awards show.

Cinema Eye was founded in 2007 to recognize excellence in artistry and craft in nonfiction filmmaking and remains the only international nonfiction award to recognize a film's entire creative team. The film nominees are determined by top documentary programmers from festivals all over the world. The television award nominees were selected by a nominations committee of film critics and writers.

Originally posted here:
Edward Snowden doc “Citizenfour” dominates Cinema Eye Honors

Edward Snowden, in his interview with James Bamford for PBS' NOVA.

NOVA/ PBS

In an on-camera interview with James Bamford for an upcoming episode of PBS' NOVA, Edward Snowden warned that the US Department of Defense and National Security Agency have over-emphasized the development of offensive network capabilities, placing the US' own systems at greater risk. With other countries now developing offensive capabilities that approach those of the NSA and the US Cyber Command, Snowden believes the US has much more at stake.

The raw transcript of the NOVAinterview showed Snowden in full control, to the point of giving direction on questions and even suggesting how to organize the report and its visual elements. Snowden frequently steered questions away from areas that might have revealed more about NSA operations, or he went into areas such as White House policy that he considered "land mines." But the whistleblowereloquently discussed the hazards of cyber warfare and the precariousness of the approach that the NSA and Cyber Command had taken in terms of seeking to find and exploit holes in the software of adversaries. In fact, he says the same vulnerabilities are in systems in the US. "The same router thats deployed in the United States is deployed in China," Snowden explained. "The same software package that controls the dam floodgates in the United States is the same as in Russia. The same hospital software is there in Syria and the United States."

Video from the NOVA interview.

Some of the interview, which took place last June in Russia, possibly foreshadowed the cyber attack on Sony Pictures. Snowden said that the capabilities for cyber attacks such as the "Shamoon" malware attack in 2012 and other "wiper" attacks similar to what happened toSony Pictures were "sort of a Fisher Price, babys first hack kind of a cyber campaign," capable of disruption but not really of creating long-term damage. But he said more sophisticated organizations, including nation-state actors, are "increasingly pursuing the capability to launch destructive cyber attacks as opposed to the disruptive kinds that you normally see online...and this is a pivot that is going to be very difficult for us to navigate."

"I dont want to hype the threat," Snowden told Bamford. "Nobodys going to press a key on their keyboard and bring down the government. Nobodys going to press a key on their keyboard and wipe a nation off the face of the earth." But Snowden emphasized that the US should be focusing more on defending against adversaries than trying to penetrate their networks to collect information and do damage.

"When you look at the problem of the US prioritizing offense over defense, imagine you have two bank vaults, the United States bank vault and the Bank of China," Snowden explained. "The US bank vault is completely full. It goes all the way up to the sky. And the Chinese bank vault or the Russian bank vault or the African bank vault or whoever the adversary of the day is, theirs is only half full or a quarter full or a tenth full." But because the US has focused on being able to break into other networks, he said, it has made its own technology vulnerableand other countries can use the same vulnerabilities to attack the US' networks.

"Were opening ourselves up to attack," Snowden said. "Were lowering our shields to allow us to have an advantage when we attack other countries overseas, but the reality is when you compare one of our victories to one of their victories, the value of the data, the knowledge, the information gained from those attacks is far greater to them than it is to us because we are already on top. Its much easier to drag us down than it is to grab some incremental knowledge from them and build ourselves up."

The most valuable piece of infrastructure for the US that is at risk, Snowden said, is the Internet itself. "We use the Internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day," he explained. "If an adversary didn't target our power plants but they did target the core routers, entire parts of the United States could be cut off... and we would go dark in terms of our economy and our business for minutes, hours, days. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash."

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Snowden: US has put too much emphasis on cyber-offense, needs defense

Documentary Roundtable: Roger Ebert #39;s Final Days, Secret Edward Snowden Meetings
When it comes to real onscreen drama and emotion, most Hollywood movies pale next to this year #39;s documentary features. Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras, 52, captures the moment in a Hong...

By: John Woods

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Documentary Roundtable: Roger Ebert's Final Days, Secret Edward Snowden Meetings - Video

Although NSA officials were not sure about what all documents Edward Snowden took with him, they've changed their tune a few times after some new leak proves their previous proclamations to be false...like when former NSA Chief Keith Alexander admitted to lying about phone surveillance stopping 54 terror plots. Despite a year of NSA officials claiming that Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, but no access to actual surveillance intercepts, that ends up being lie too.

Snowden gave the Washington Post a sampling of actual intercepted communications; after months of reviewing about 160,000 intercepted emails and instant messages and 7,900 documents taken from over 11,000 online accounts, the Post said nine out of 10 account holders in the large cache of intercepted communications were not even surveillance targets. In fact, the collateral damage is astounding. The Post reported:

Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimized," more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents.

The intercepted communications were collected from 2009 to 2012, during President Obama's first term; under the President, formerly a "constitutional law professor," the Post noted that the NSA's domestic collection program underwent a "period of exponential growth." Interestingly, a research paper released last week explained how the government can exploit legal and technical loopholes in order to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans. One way is through Executive Order 12333, which would allow Americans' communications to be sucked up when their network traffic is routed overseas or their data is stored abroad.

So what might put Americans in the NSA's collection crosshairs? People on the chat "buddy list" of a foreign national are considered foreigners as well as people who write emails in a foreign language. Then there's the use of a proxy, which might be an IP address from a different country.

If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply 'lurked,' reading passively what other people wrote.

One analyst reported wrote, "1 target, 38 others on there," but she collected data on them all. Others made notes that the surveillance was not relevant, yet the NSA sometimes designates as "its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people."

The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers.

Of these 160,000 intercepted messages, only 10% were official targets. The Post added:

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

Read more:
9 of 10 online accounts intercepted by NSA are not intended surveillance target

New Edward Snowden video WikiLeaks release rare footage of Snowden in Russia collecting award

By: Debra Ford

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New Edward Snowden video WikiLeaks release rare footage of Snowden in Russia collecting award - Video