I would have thought the NSA would have decrypted it by now too, but I guess not.

was monitoring electronic communications of non-government employees for the most part as I understand it, get documents showing where members of British intelligence were stationed.

Seems to me that if this report is to be believed, the US government entrusted files to a private contractor that belonged to the British and should not have been given to that private contractor.

This story does not make sense to me.

Snowden's files were about the surveillance via the internet and electronic media on US citizens and foreign governments. Why did the US government give files concerning the locations of British intelligence agents to a private contractor of the US who happened to be Snowden's employer.

I have difficulty believing that is true.

Rather, I think that the Chinese and Russians have been hacking American intelligence agencies' electronic files for years.

In fact, when the Snowden story first emerged and I argued that our country should not be snooping on people's private electronic communications, I was told that everybody was snooping including Russia and China so I should not be so outraged.

But now that people want to blame Snowden for intelligence breaches that have occurred years later in the US and apparently also in the UK, we are to believe that Russia and China only got the capacity to crack our codes, breach our security and decipher our encrypted files because of Snowden.

That may be true, but it may be false. I'd need more credible evidence than articles on Reuters and in the Guardian.

That is why they have to take these guys out. Might as well blame Snowden, right?

The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie.

1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names or a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation.

3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/06/five-reasons-the-mi6-story-is-a-lie/

The last two points that you couldn't quote let us know precisely why this crazy, nonsensical story has been released at this time.

And the author at the link here

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/06/five-reasons-the-mi6-story-is-a-lie/

claims this story originated with a Murdoch publication.

Enough said.

March 2013, he joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and worked as an infrastructure analyst at the NSA center in Hawaii.[4]

So while he was working for a private firm, that firm was tasked with infrastructer analysys.

As far as his files pertaining to survielance. Those so far are the only ones GG and company have released but not the only ones he took.

Last edited Sun Jun 14, 2015, 05:58 AM - Edit history (2)

revelations about spying on US citizens.

I was okay with that as we don't need our own government spying on us. If he had actually read the files and released only those dealing with domestic spying issues he would have been the hero he wanted to be so bad.

But he took so much stuff that he didn't even know what was in them — that's reckless and irresponsible to the extreme. A then 29-year-old low level IT guy is not the one I want making that kind of decision.

Then flees to China then Russia. How naive does Snowden and Greenwald think people are? Of course the Chinese and Russians extracted a price for giving him asylum. We're supposed to believe that they didn't copy the files.

people are quite willing to overlook the fact that Snowden doeosn't even know what he took. You can see it in this thread.

Outside of Halliburton's/KBR massive labor exploitation and abuse they could conveniently subcontract to a Kuwaiti or Saudi contractor to do most of the work, construction (how the largest US embassy was built), serving food they weren't authorized to eat because they weren't "coalition forces, US or Government contractor&quot I did a detail at the Zone 2 DFAC in Camp Arif Jan, Kuwait), all base security -- the checkpoints, all of it the contractors were in charge of. I think it was Blackwater Private Security Forces (or something similar). I know for sure when it came to BIAP they handed the responsibilty to Ugandan third-country nationals (they were paid more than the other third country nationals which the average was about $5,000+ per year or a little less than $2 per hour -- though the semi supply convoy drivers worked long hours got paid about $300 per month though the head guy to relay convoy mission briefs to the rest of the 25 or so drivers (in a 30 vehicle military convoy), the one that understood & spoke the most English, got paid $600 per month in addition to the worst conditions, no armor or weapon, and no respect.

Back to important security stuff given to contractors

Ex-Blackwater Guards Given Long Terms for Killing Iraqis

WASHINGTON — One by one, four former Blackwater security contractors wearing blue jumpsuits and leg irons stood before a federal judge on Monday and spoke publicly for the first time since a deadly 2007 shooting in Iraq.

The men had been among several private American security guards who fired into Baghdad’s crowded Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007, and last October they were convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity. Yet on Monday, as they awaited sentences that they knew would send them to prison for most if not all of their lives, they defiantly asserted their innocence

<snip>

The ruling ended a long investigation into the Nisour Square shooting, a signature, gruesome moment in the Iraq war that highlighted America’s reliance on private contractors to maintain security in combat zones.

No such company was more powerful than Blackwater, which won more than $1 billion in government contracts. Its employees, most of them military veterans, protected American diplomats overseas and became enmeshed in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine counterterrorism operations. Its founder, Erik Prince, was a major donor to the Republican Party.

In Iraq, Blackwater was perceived as so powerful that its employees could kill anyone and get away with it, said Mohammed Hafedh Abdulrazzaq Kinani, whose 9-year-old son, Ali, was killed in Nisour Square.

“Blackwater had power like Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Kinani said in a long, emotional appeal to the judge on Monday. “The power comes from the United States.” He added later: “Today we see who will win. The law? Or Blackwater?”

<snip>

“There was a lady. She was screaming and weeping about her son and asking for help,” Sarhan Deab Abdul Moniem, an Iraqi traffic officer, testified. He showed jurors how she had cradled her dead son’s head on her shoulder. “I asked her to open up the door so I could help her. But she was paying attention only to her son.”

Other witnesses described a mother who pushed her daughter to safety, only to be killed herself. One man was pounded with bullets while he lay dying, unarmed, in the street. Another was shot while he had his hands up.

“I saw people huddled down in their cars, trying to shield their children with their bodies,” Adam Frost, a former Blackwater contractor, said in key testimony against his one-time colleagues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/us/ex-blackwater-guards-sentenced-to-prison-in-2007-killings-of-iraqi-civilians.html

The article doesn't mention it but it was a high level detail to escort some high level people. On Snowden.

He was employed with Booze Allen at the time which is a firm under The Carlyle Group

Carlyle Group

Carlyle initially developed a reputation for acquiring businesses related to the defense industry. In 1992, Carlyle completed the acquisition of the Electronics division of General Dynamics Corporation, renamed GDE Systems, a producer of military electronics systems.[11] Carlyle would later sell the business to Tracor in October 1994.[12] Carlyle acquired Magnavox Electronic Systems, the military communications and electronic-warfare systems segment of Magnavox, from Philips Electronics in 1993.[13] Carlyle sold Magnavox for approximately $370 million to Hughes Aircraft Company in 1995. Carlyle also invested in Vought Aircraft through a partnership with Northrop Grumman.[14] Carlyle's most notable defense industry investment came in October 1997 with its acquisition of United Defense Industries. The $850 million acquisition of United Defense represented Carlyle's largest investment to that point.[10][15] Carlyle was able to complete an IPO of United Defense on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2001 selling a significant portion of its interest in the company. Carlyle completed a sale of its remaining United Defense stock and exited the investment in April 2004.[16] In more recent years, Carlyle has deemphasized its focus on defense industry investments.[17]

Carlyle's 2001 investor conference took place on September 11, 2001. In the weeks following the meeting, it was reported that Shafiq bin Laden, a member of the Bin Laden family, had been the "guest of honor", and that they were investors in Carlyle managed funds.[18][19][20][21][22] Later reports confirmed that the Bin Laden family had invested $2 million into Carlyle's $1.3 billion Carlyle Partners II Fund in 1995, making the family relatively small investors with the firm. However, their overall investment might have been considerably larger, with the $2 million committed in 1995 only being an initial contribution that grew over time.[23] These connections would later be profiled in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. The Bin Laden family liquidated its holdings in Carlyle's funds in October 2001.[24]

<snip>

Carlyle also announced the $1.6 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Telcom from Verizon in May 2004.[28] Carlyle's investment was immediately challenged when Hawaii regulators delayed the closing of the buyout. The company also suffered billing and customer-service issues as it had to recreate its back-office systems. Hawaiian Telcom ultimately filed for bankruptcy in December 2008, costing Carlyle the $425 million it had invested in the company.[29]

<snip>

On May 16, 2008, Booz Allen Hamilton announced that it would sell a majority stake in the US government business to The Carlyle Group for $2.54 billion. The transaction was expected to be complete July 31, 2008.[43]

<snip>

On November 30, 2009, David Rosendall, a Synagro executive was sentenced for conspiring to commit bribery, in the corruption scandal which eventually brought down the mayor City of Detroit.[49] The executive for the Carlyle subsidiary was caught giving cash to Detroit city leadership.[50]

<snip>

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore makes nine allegations concerning the Carlyle Group.[85] Moore focused on Carlyle's connections with George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State James A. Baker III, both of whom had at times served as advisers to the firm. The movie quotes author Dan Briody, who claimed that the Carlyle Group "gained" from the September 11 attacks because it owned United Defense, a military contractor, although the firm’s $11 billion Crusader artillery rocket system developed for the U.S. Army is one of the few weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration.[17] A Carlyle spokesman noted in 2003 that its 7% interest in defense industries was far less than several other Private equity firms.[86] Carlyle also has provided detail on its links with the Bin Laden family, specifically the relatively minor investments by an estranged half brother.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carlyle_Group

I hope that answers the why question.

2011 Anonymous hack

On July 11, 2011[27][28] the group Anonymous, as part of its Operation AntiSec,[29] hacked into Booz Allen servers, extracting e-mails and non-salted passwords from the U.S. military. This information and a complete dump of the database were placed in a file shared on The Pirate Bay.[30] Despite Anonymous' claims that 90,000 emails were released, the Associated Press counted only 67,000 unique emails, of which only 53,000 were military addresses. The remainder of the addresses came from educational institutions and defense contractors.[31] Anonymous also said that it accessed four gigabytes of Booz Allen source code and deleted those four gigabytes. According to a statement by the group, "We infiltrated a server on their network that basically had no security measures in place."[32][33]

Anonymous accused Booz Allen of working with HB Gary Federal by creating a project for the manipulation of social media. Anonymous also accused Booz Allen of participating in intelligence-gathering and surveillance programs of the U.S. federal government and, as stated by Kukil Bora of the International Business Times, "possible illegal activities."[29] Booz Allen confirmed the intrusion on 13 July, but contradicted Anonymous' claims in saying that the attack never got past their own systems, meaning that information from the military should be secure.[34] In August of that year, during a conference call with analysts, Ralph Shrader, the chairman and CEO, stated that "the cost of remediation and other activities directly associated with the attack" were not expected to have a "material effect on our financial results."[35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton

I like how the AP says only 53,000 were military addresses as if this is WWII where the military does everything when a relatively lot but not as much as the TCNs nor the responsibilities and tasks given to the contractors.

By Ellen Nakashima June 12 Follow @nakashimae

The Chinese breach of the Office of Personnel Management network was wider than first acknowledged, and officials said Friday that a database holding sensitive security clearance information on millions of federal employees and contractors also was compromised.

In an announcement, OPM said that investigators concluded this week with “a high degree of confidence” that the agency’s systems containing information related to the background investigations of “current, former and prospective” federal employees, and others for whom a background check was conducted, were breached.

OPM is assessing how many people were affected, spokesman Samuel Schumach said. “Once we have conclusive information about the breach, we will announce a notification plan for individuals whose information is determined to have been compromised,” he said.

The announcement of the hack of the security-clearance database comes a week after OPM disclosed that another personnel system had been compromised. The discovery of the first breach led investigators to find the second — all part of one campaign by the Chinese, U.S. officials say, evidently to obtain information valuable to counter­espionage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chinese-hack-of-government-network-compromises-security-clearance-files/2015/06/12/9f91f146-1135-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html

in a post above you say the report is a lie because agents names are never writen down and in this one the agents name were part of the database that was stolen...

It cant be both.

But you'd have to take it up with the respective authors.

As what I assume to be some sort of rebutal to the OP.

pieces someone else wrote about different database hacks in different countries for different media outlets.

No.

received security clearances. That could explain why agents' names were hacked. I also heard something about IRS records. Don't ask me where I heard it. It just kind of was something I heard while I was cooking or talking to someone. Not very reliable I know but watch for a confirmation of what I am saying. If you don't hear it forget my comment. I could be wrong, but this is what I heard.

A December breach of government systems containing personal information of millions of federal employees was worse than originally thought.

A union of federal workers said Thursday that the attack, announced last week, had stolen confidential information of every single federal employee, past or present -- far more than was previously revealed. The government disputes those claims.

It's the latest in a spree of damaging hacks against the government, including an attack in March 2014 that also involved federal employee records.

Hackers acting in the name of a political agenda, and those paid by other countries, have stepped up their efforts to breach U.S. government systems for a variety of reasons. In some cases, they've hoped to embarrass President Barack Obama's administration, and in others they've made statements about the US military. Successful attacks include a group that breached the CIA's public website, another that took control of the US military's Twitter feed, and a group that successfully intercepted the president's emails.

http://www.cnet.com/news/hack-affected-every-single-federal-employee-union-says/

relate to the hacking. It has been my understanding from things I have read here on DU that the Chinese have worked hard to hack our government systems for a long time. I don't see how this really relates to Snowden's revelations. As I said, Snowden and his employer should not have been linked to the US encryption system or the British intelligence information so as to permit someone from his company to be a resource for any foreign intelligence service that wanted to hack into our government's records.

The breach in this case, the sloppiness, the lack of foresight in protecting personal information and intelligence information was in our government and perhaps that of the UK.

The Russians were always likely to want to hack our systems. Same for the Chinese. Yet we allowed the Chinese to make some of our computers?????? How stupid are we????

Perhaps the employer didn't count on a low-level, naive 29-year-old stealing hundreds of thousands of files (one who had said before we had a black president that "leakers should be shot in the balls&quot .

I'm not blaming Snowden for the latest hacking scandal though. There's enough blame to levy on him for stealing so many files he didn't have anywhere near the time to find out what was in them.

That didn't stop him though. And he and Greenwald expect us to believe that China and Russia gave him asylum without copying the files?

Most of us are not that naive.

He should have made sure he only leaked revelations on domestic spying on American citizens since that was his big issue. I have no problem with that but he didn't.

He irresponsibly stole so much stuff that he couldn't possibly know what was in it, and who knows what the Chinese and Russian will find out. They'll be studying that stuff for years.

Russia gave him a temporary stay or something like that but he met a diplomat who wasn't aware of precedents that applied to his situation, went to make the asylum claim, I think Iceland was the first request. No one wanted to get involved with a dispute with the US considering they want him bad so he left from Hong Kong to the only country willing to take the heat. Someone is expecting you to believe Greenwald is reporting that China or anybody gave him asylum but given that we definitely hacked & spied on them maybe they were inclined to be helpful but it wasn't that kind of situation, in China anyway.

Snowden said they were going to say I put people at risk before they said he did (which was like right away).

And China would not extradite him at US request, claiming there was some sort of error in the paper work.

Maybe that wasn't "officially" asylum but they wouldn't hand him over and he eventually ended up in Russia where he still is.

Attribution is very difficult so try to see what the evidence is as far as who did the hack. Sony Shamon malware hack was blamed on North Korea with the message left GOP (Guardians of Peace) US government went with North Korea is to blame (though the text appeared to inserted through a text translator because it was off, plus the differences in the Korean dialect from North to South showed it was the South Korean according to an expert, anyway. I do know the are differences in Korean from North to South (the ones that flee from the North experience discrimination in the South and the Korean spoken is a dead giveaway).

The claim was it was similar to the hacks on South Korean banks which I dug there the finger was pointed North and it was a Shamon style attack as well but there were differences on how the access was gained (can't remember what exactly but something to do with Banks network security which a defense was a flaw to be exploited) and the Sony one was building a map of the system by unlocking more parts of it -- it was very slow exfiltrating a massive amount of data so the hack done inside North Korea was ruled out since a third party could easily shut down their whole shoddy internet just by putting too much into the servers.


On South Korea however, as far as no one has been identified as responsible. They didn't even give themselves a name (a difference than the GOP signature) so the media gave them one "Dark Seoul".

Iran's, I think maybe oil or the nuclear energy or something was hacked. Can't remember what but that it wasn't a Shamon hack, fairly basic one IIRC

"A previously unknown group called Cutting Sword of Justice claimed responsibility for the attack, which affected three in four of the estimated 40,000 workstations used by the oil giant. The group said that it had hacked Saudi Aramco in retaliation against the Al-Saud regime for the "crimes and atrocities taking place in various countries around the world, especially in the neighboring countries such as Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon [and] Egypt"."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/29/saudi_aramco_malware_attack_analysis/

Often a professional hacker will use misdirection, red herrings, covering their tracks which they make a point of doing leaving attribution to be nearly impossible unless there was a mistake made or an informant. People upset over Saudi Arabia's human rights violations would qualify as an easy target but so would Iran but whoever is certainly informed on Saudi Arabia but this was a clue it possibly isn't Iran -- my comment

<snip>

Neither victim nor perpetrator named the malware that featured in the attack but security researchers implicated the Shamoon malware in the security breach (analysis by Seculert here). Shamoon, which emerged days before the assault, has both the capability to over-write data on infected machines and to destroy Master Boot Record files, thus making infected Windows machines impossible to boot.

<snip>

It seems wise to view claims that the Saudi Aramco assault was a case of politically motivated hacktivism with some skepticism, at least until a clearer picture of the previously unknown Cutting Sword of Justice group emerges. It could be the group is solely motivated at hitting back at Saudi's ruling royal family for the country's support in putting down Arab Spring-style revolts in other nations, such as Bahrain, but other motives are also possible.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/29/saudi_aramco_malware_attack_analysis/

If the group is upset over Saudi Arabia's brutal crackdown (with the help of hired thugs from the Pakistan ISI) on the brutal uprisings probably makes them "hacktivists" or "Iran" since the majority of the Bahrain population is Shia but that wasn't the article I was looking for. The US said Iran invented the Shamon style hack and somehow the hack on Iran uncovered their plans to hack us. The big clue that it wasn't Iran was the use of Arabian gulf instead of Persian gulf which is a very big deal as far as Iran is concerned ruling out (to me) that it was state sponsored but the US not only blamed them but said they created the Shamon malware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_naming_dispute

The hack recently wasn't Shamon but I guess they were tricked into downloading Malware (phishing) so far I haven't seen any proof China did it or state-sponsored China did it. Someone hacking from inside China is very different than China hacking. NSA even hacked a China university like WTF? If they did hack, probably want to find out what else we are planning to blame on them but China isn't going to attack us invade us but for they are being hyped as an enemy (TPP & recent NSA regulations are my best guesses behind it)

All in all, for me the Sunday Times story raises more questions than it answers, and more importantly it contains some pretty dubious claims, contradictions, and inaccuracies.

The most astonishing thing about it is the total lack of scepticism about these grand government assertions, made behind a veil of anonymity. This sort of credulous regurgitation of government statements is antithetical to good journalism.

The government has an obvious vested interest in portraying Snowden as a terrible person who's helped "the enemy" -- it has been badly stung by his surveillance revelations and the political fallout that has ensued as a result of them. For that reason alone its claims should be treated with caution and not repeated unchallenged.

Evidence should be necessary for allegations of this magnitude, which have such big ramifications. The Sunday Times has a long and commendable history of holding the government to account with great investigative journalism. But in this case, sadly, it has allowed itself to be used by faceless officials as a mouthpiece.


http://notes.rjgallagher.co.uk/2015/06/sunday-times-snowden-china-russia-questions.html


http://www.rjgallagher.co.uk/p/about.html


In the first part of his piece that I did not print he gives the inconsistency of the news story

But I don't think the U.S. government considers Snowden anything but an annoyance. The idea that they want to 'get' him somehow -beyond wanting a thief to stand trial- is, I think, ludicrous.

Even that whole 'dust up' between Angela Merkel and Obama seems to have evaporated.

Snowden will never be anything other than what he is now -a hero to certain contingents on the Internet and a disaffected low-level ex-employee who dreamed of being a hero.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers, it's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

MAD magazine nailed this years ago - it's Spy versus Spy - they all do it.

Anonymous was the signature (though there are often copycats) so figure out a way to blame that unrelated hack on Greenwald.

Perhaps they should have taken their jobs seriously instead of building "command centers" that look like fictional starship bridges complete with whooshing doors.

The OMB hack is the last straw. What *IDIOT* puts all the SF-86's on a non-airgapped system in one place?

Watching the spooks for several years now has shown that why they are idiots about their jobs, they're VERY good at PR. This article seems to be nothing more than a new round of preemptive excuse making.

Oop!