Glenn Greenwald’s “No Place to Hide”

L 114: Greenwald worries about governments subverting the web. I agree but I worry almost as much about others subverting the web as well.

L 260: Deduction: Snowden thought then that Greenwald’s computer was safe.

L 384: Deduction: Perhaps undo previous deduction.

L 727: Culture: the loyal college graduate vs. the counter culture skeptical geek.

L 1818: Unfortunately Greenwald does not describe whether SkyDrive (MS Clout storage) or Skype do end-to-end crypto. Are the cloud bits encrypted and if so where is the key? Where are the keys to the Skype ciphertext traffic?

L 3352: Greenwald characterizes current American journalists primarily as insiders. I agree. I had not explicitly realized this, but I don’t dislike that fact as much as he does. I also agree that there is no neutral journalism. I am glad that Greenwald is a journalist. Snowden judged correctly that Greenwald would go the distance and if not Greenwald then someone else. The fourth estate has been mostly coöpted.

L 3540: The reactions of the governments of the US and UK convince me that they did not know what Snowden had delivered and were truly terrified. Snowden had very atypical access to data which normal logs would not reveal. I wonder whether Snowden delivered all that he could have.

• Did Snowden deliver everything he had access to, or did he hold some back for various reasons?
• What fraction has the press revealed?
• For what sorts of reasons does the press hold back? That is answered in part at L 920.
• Does NSA know what Snowden delivered?

These Powerpoint Slides indicate that what can be broken is at a yet higher classification level.

I see two instances of the same pattern. The pattern is a collection of people and institutions with shared goals who trust each other to varying degrees. Two instances are:

• Western state institutions,
• Cryptographers outside governments and their clients.

My Take