How Edward Snowden Sabotaged the War on Terrorism

[Blue_Tires]

The following is excerpted from Edward Jay Epstein’s book, How America Lost Its Secrets: Snowden, the Man and the Theft, to be published this week by Knopf.

The slaughter of civilians by terrorists using guns, bombs and even trucks shows no sign of abating, with deadly attacks in Baghdad, Berlin and Istanbul serving up bloody headlines over the holidays. With ISIS losing its traditional war on the battlefield, it is bringing more mayhem to our cities, which offer a nearly infinite number of soft targets. Police can’t protect them all—their only hope is to sniff out plots before they end in carnage. But these perpetrators are coordinating their assaults using end-to-end encryption on the internet and their mobile devices, which makes it almost impossible for government intelligence services to track them.

The situation was very different three years ago, before Edward Snowden intentionally sabotaged several of America’s best weapons against attacks. The first system he exposed was what the National Security Agency (NSA) called the “215” program because it had been authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. This program compiled the billing records of every phone call made in the United States, including the number called and the duration of the call, but not the name of the caller. This anonymous data was archived into a huge database, and when any foreigner on the FBI’s terrorist watch list called any number in the U.S., the FBI could trace that person’s entire chain of telephone contacts to try to determine if he or she was connected to a known cell.

There was, however, a major flaw in this program: After Osama bin Laden was tracked down at his Pakistan compound and killed in 2011, militant organizations realized how vulnerable overseas calls were, and they moved most of their communication to the internet. In this case, then, Snowden’s revelations did only limited damage.

He did vastly more harm by revealing the reach of the PRISM program, which was extraordinarily effective because militant organizations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan believed the encryption and other safeguards used by internet giants such as Apple, Google, Twitter and WhatsApp protected their communications. They evidently did not know the NSA could intercept data before it was encrypted. Despite metaphors such as the cloud and cyberspace, all data on the internet initially travels through fiber cables, almost all of which run through the United States and the Bahamas. That includes tweets, social media postings, Skype conversations and even Xbox messages.

http://www.newsweek.com/edward-snowden-undermined-war-terrorism-edward-epstein-539066


The butthurt from Snowden and his acolytes on Twitter is thick enough to cut with a knife

[Thinkingabout]

1. They are trying to protect Americans, the story came out they was recording conversations between

Grandmothers and family members, was not true then but they continued with the story. As they say the NBA groups has to get it right every time, the terrorists only have to get it right once.