Edward Snowden and the tall tales: Information has no EZ-Pass
First, I am not against whistle blowing. It is our ONLY tool we as citizens and consumers have to keep both our government and corporations in check. I loved Matt Damon in The Informant.
Seriously though, I am a Systems Administrator/Systems Engineer (same as Edward Snowden); I have been doing this for a government agency for 2 years now. I did it in the private sector for 4-5 years before that. I consider myself decent at what I do and fairly well informed.
DO NOT BE FOOLED! While I am sure that Edward Snowden is doing us a service by revealing some of the questionable policies that the NSA take, I am fairly surprised that the media hasn't given his statements a little more scrutiny (maybe they have been and I haven't noticed). What I am saying has nothing to do with Snowden being a hero or villain, a traitor or liberator. It has to do with honesty, and exaggeration. (Upon proof reading, no I am not surprised the media gives these statements little scrutiny. To do so would rob them of their precious revenue from such stories)
"You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."
All this is true WITHIN MY CORPORATE NETWORK, where I have GOD powers. I have access to everything, though that doesn't mean I HAVE to access it. Outside of my network, I have no more powers than what I'm granted to by others. There is no magic wand, no program I can run to easily get access. There are ways of hacking, but they would be too intrusive and would be very difficult to be done in masse; they would be discovered by someone externally. As a full access systems administrator, Snowden will have had access to everything in his own network and maybe even some of people he worked with could request information from other companies.
"Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."
I am a spy? Honestly. I could look at things I'm not supposed to and call myself a spy. I've had a few friends, co-workers, family members who gotta make every story they tell the most grand one you'd ever hear. I'm sure we all have. When I hear statements like this, I tend to gloss over a bit from disbelief.
"The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards."
This is a true of any hacker really, I doubt their systems are as advanced as he makes it sound. Secure communication is just that. If I use https:// when logging onto any website the data I use it secured. It isn't the hardest thing to hack in terms of hack-ability, but it is still fairly difficult. To add to this, you really have to have targets in order to do so; it is not something that anyone would be able to do concurrently to all data-traffic that goes through our country's main hubs.
Additionally, e-mails and phones are two separate things. Yes, the NSA can get the records from the phone company, but this is going to leave a paper trail. Look at the blowback from the Verizon phone records thing. In order for the NSA to have these records for me, they'd need it from Sprint. There's no master key for these things. I suppose they could have each of the 20-30 phone companies hacked and be gathering information that way or each company could have some weird NSA backdoor into their networks but again, I'm sure this would have been leaked sooner if that was the case.
Don't let your tendency toward paranoia get the best of you. YES, our government is being too invasive. Just because that is the case doesn't mean that all of your worst fears are true about a surveillance state. Our government can't even do the simple things right, do you really think they'd be able to do something as complex as this for as long as they have without something getting out?
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why
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