New revelations from the Snowden archive surface | Computer Weekly
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He risked his neck. When Edward Snowden chose to expose the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)'s mass surveillance Leviathan, and that of its British counterpart, GCHQ, 10 years ago, he put his life on the line. And he has always declared he has never regretted it. But years after his act of extraordinary courage, the Snowden archive remains largely unpublished.  He trusted in journalists to decide what to publish. In an article published in June 2023, by Guardian Pulitzer prize winner Ewen MacAskill - who flew to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to meet Edward Snowden - McAskill confirmed that most of the archive has not been made public. "In the end, we published only about 1 percent of the document,” he wrote. What does the 99 percent of the Snowden archive contain? A decade on, it remains shrouded in secrecy. A doctoral thesis by American investigative journalist and post-doctoral researcher Jacob Appelbaum has now revealed unpublished information from the Snowden archive. These revelations go back to a decade but they remain of indisputable public interest: the NSA listed Cavium, an American semiconductor company marketing Central Processing Units (CPUs) - the main processor in a computer which runs the operating system and applications - as a successful example of a "SIGINT enabled" CPU vendor. Cavium, now owned by Marvell said it does not implement back doors for any government. · the NSA compromised lawful Russian interception infrastructure, SORM. The NSA archive contains slides showing two Russian officers wearing jackets with a slogan written in Cyrillic: "you talk, we listen". The NSA  and/or GCHQ has also compromised "Key European LI [lawful interception] systems. · among example targets of its mass surveillance program, PRISM, the NSA listed the Tibetan government in exile.

A decade after Snowden exposed NSA’s mass surveillance in cooperation with the British GCHQ, only about 1 percent of the documents have been published, but three major facts can finally be revealed thanks to a doctoral thesis in applied cryptography by Jacob Appelbaum.

  • livus@kbin.social
    971·
    10 months ago

    The most disturbing part of this for me is how:

    • 99% of Snowden’s revelations have never been published

    • several of the existing copies of Snowden’s documents have subsequently been destroyed

    I also find it depressing that people like Appelbaum are routinely criminalized:

    Public speeches made by Appelbaum taking a humorous and provocative tone and with titles like “Sysadmins of the World, Unite!” were interpreted as an attempt to recruit sources and as incitement to steal classified documents. To this day, however, there are no publicly-known charges against Appelbaum or Harrison.

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    30·
    10 months ago

    According to Jacob Appelbaum, The Intercept - the media outlet co-founded by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to publish the Snowden files - is no longer in possession of the documents. “I was informed that they destroyed their copy of the archive”, Appelbaum tells us.

    I thought this was an interesting tidbit. It’s been a minute since I heard anything about Appelbaum. A while back he had some metoo type allegations, but I never really paid attention to what became of that or him afterward.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20895270/jacob-appelbaum-peter-todd-rape-allegations-defamation-bitcoin-tor

    This is the most recent news that pops up about that controversy.

    I don’t disagree with Appelbaum, however, that it’s a little bit unconscionable that those files were destroyed. There’s a lot of valid criticism in the way Wikileaks does things, with a large data-dump, but it never really felt like we actually got the full picture of what was happening with the Snowden files, with so much of it never actually being published or written about.

    I do wonder if Laura Poitras still has a copy, but as a filmmaker who works less in information security, it seems more doubtful.

  • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
    291·
    10 months ago

    The compromised Lawful Interception infrastructure is a pretty big deal. It shows the risks of having that sort of backdoor and makes it harder to argue for them. (Unless you’re the UK or Australia, then lol what privacy).

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
    27·
    9 months ago

    A timely reminder that none of this shit was rolled-back and in fact in some countries *cough* UK *cough* it was simply made legal with new laws.

  • freagle
    45·
    10 months ago

    What an authoritarian hellhole!