Category Archives: Edward Snowden

Colbert turns his funny gun on Snowden in RSA keynote

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No joke: Stephen Colbert's not a fan of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, the political satirist tells a packed house at the closing RSA Conference keynote speech.

Stephen Colbert kept San Francisco's Moscone Center audience of around 6,000 laughing as he mocked the state of computer security and expressed a vote of no-confidence in Edward Snowden on Feb. 28, 2014.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Don't mistake this for something out of the mouth Stephen Colbert's ultra-conservative, Bill O'Reilly-modeled TV persona: The popular funnyman actually believes that former NSA contractor and domestic spying whistleblower Edward Snowden should come back to the US and face trial.

In front of more than 6,000 people at the RSA Conference's closing keynote at the Moscone Center here, Colbert had the audience roaring within minutes over his computer security and encryption jokes.

Colbert described the conference jokingly as a place where the best security experts "gather, talk shop, and breed with each other. That's called exchanging private keys."

He quickly changed the subject to address the petition that demanded that he join the RSA Conference boycott over the conference's parent company colluding with the National Security Agency.

Colbert said that he had signed a contract with RSA that he wasn't going to break, in part because, he was "paid in Bitcoin, from Mt.Gox."

Then he got serious. There was "no evidence in Reuters' story," he said of the original report that broke the news.

"Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products," wrote reporter Joseph Menn in the story.

Menn then cited two anonymous sources who said they were familiar with the $10 million contract between the NSA and the RSA division that promoted the flawed encryption as the default encryption to use in RSA's BSafe encryption tool.

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Colbert turns his funny gun on Snowden in RSA keynote

What James Clapper Doesn’t Understand About Edward Snowden

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The director of national intelligence says he can't understand the leak nor guarantee there won't be another one. So why should we trust the NSA with sensitive data about Americans?

Reuters

If you've been wondering how James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, experienced the Edward Snowden leaks, look no further than Eli Lake's latest. The sympathetic profile, published Sunday atThe Daily Beast,is interesting throughout. Two of its passages struck me as particularly noteworthy.

1) The first passage to consider is alluded to in the headline, "Spy Chief James Clapper: We Cant Stop Another Snowden." The article reports the following:

Clapper also acknowledges that the very human nature of the bureaucracy he controls virtually insures that more mass disclosures are inevitable. In the end, he says, we will never ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.

Consider the implications of that admission.

The NSA has collected information about the communications of millions of Americans. Nefarious actors, given access to metadata from the phone dragnet alone, could blackmail countless citizens and quietly manipulate the political process. The NSA doesn't deny that. They just insist that they're not nefarious actors, that safeguards are in place, and that we should trust them as stewards of this data.

Well, here is Clapper telling the truth: Despite regarding Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as having done grave damage to the United States with their data thefts, he can't guarantee the same thing won't happen again. And if a future whistleblower could gain access to the most sensitive data, so could a blackmailer.

So could a foreign spy.

Data retention of this sort, whether carried out by the NSA or telecoms, poses a grave threat to privacy, in part because neither the NSA nor the telecoms can guarantee that the highly sensitive information they collect on us won't be stolen. "To this day," Lake writes, "the U.S. governmentdoesnt knowthe full extent of what Snowden revealed or whether more documents that have yet to be published in the press have made their way into the hands of Russian or Chinese intelligence."

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What James Clapper Doesn't Understand About Edward Snowden

EDWARD SNOWDEN: A Manufactured Avatar of the US Intelligence Community- SteveTalks tv – Video

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EDWARD SNOWDEN: A Manufactured Avatar of the US Intelligence Community- SteveTalks tv
Is Edward Snowden a spy or a whistleblower? Neither! He is a manufactured avatar of the American intelligence community! Dr. Steve Pieczenik, former US Deput...

By: Steve Pieczenik

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EDWARD SNOWDEN: A Manufactured Avatar of the US Intelligence Community- SteveTalks tv - Video