Edward Snowden: THE INTERNET IS BROKEN
April 24, 2016 4:17 PM   Subscribe

The activist talks to Popular Science about digital naïveté
Security, surveillance, and privacy are not contrary goals. You don’t give up one and get more of the other. If you lose one, you lose the other. If you are always observed and always monitored, you are more vulnerable to abuse than you were before.

References CSAIL's security report, Keys Under Doormats (PDF).
posted by wonton endangerment (62 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have huge respect for what Snowden did but it's odd to see someone so intelligent whose entire life is pretty obviously controlled by KGB at this point be so unaware of the geopolitical situation - he gets to act like a Berkeley freshman with an eff laptop sticker and just assumes that is the famed Russian commitment to free speech and so can talk about US warrant cases while relying on the hospitality of people who torture hundreds every week. I don't blame him for going there as a matter of personal safety but...
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 5:07 PM on April 24, 2016 [9 favorites]


The conclusion's particularly worthwhile; don't miss it.
If you want to call a cab, the cab doesn’t need to know about who you are or your payment details.

You should be able to buy a bottle of Internet like you buy a bottle of water. There is the technical capacity to tokenize and to commoditize access in a way that we can divorce it from identity in such a way that we stop creating these trails. We have been creating these activity records of everything we do as we go about our daily business as a byproduct of living life. This is a form of pollution…
posted by RogerB at 5:15 PM on April 24, 2016 [17 favorites]


Part of me suspects that Snowden's apparent lack of concern about the Russian government's actions may have a fair bit to do with what he found out about the American government's actions
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:24 PM on April 24, 2016 [14 favorites]


Is it just me getting redirected to the home page? And when I search for article, I get "You searched for edward snowden internet broken and found 0 matches."
Edit: it's one of those 'helpful' country site redirects.


I don't blame him for going there...

I was under the impression he was headed to somewhere South America, and the US [deliberately] cancelled his visa while he was stopped over in Russia, so the narrative read like he 'fled to Russia'. Happy to be corrected on that though.
posted by quinndexter at 5:25 PM on April 24, 2016 [11 favorites]


I can never quite get my head around the fact that an American had to take refuge in Russia. If you were to travel back to the 1980s in a time machine and tell everyone there about it, they'd never believe you. Russia's no utopia, of course, but the world does move.
posted by orange swan at 5:28 PM on April 24, 2016 [23 favorites]


I can never quite get my head around the fact that an American had to take refuge in Russia.

Back in the bad old Cold War days, the Soviet Union was more than happy to take in American 'political refugees', just for the propaganda points. It compromised but (IMO) didn't totally invalidate their principals. But the old Kremlin bosses could never get American Media to publish what their 'guests' had to say. Not THAT much has changed... Popular Science is not exactly "the MSM" and if I recall, the last "important American news reporter" to interview Snowden was the since-discredited-and-demoted Brian Williams.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:38 PM on April 24, 2016 [6 favorites]


it's odd to see someone so intelligent whose entire life is pretty obviously controlled by KGB at this point be so unaware of the geopolitical situation - he gets to act like a Berkeley freshman with an eff laptop sticker

This comment is bizarre to me, I might be totally misreading-- is it that you think Snowden is actually ignorant, which flies in the face of everything else we know about him, or do you think that he is morally bankrupt for not attacking his hosts? Or is it that you think he should just shut up about his home country if he's not going to be saying the same stuff about the place which (self-servingly) offered him refuge?

It seems to me that he committed an incredible act, which was at least partially based on being selfless, and now has to act in his own self-interest. Whether that means he should continue to be a public voice is debatable, but I do think the comparison to some mythical ignorant freshman with a laptop sticker is a very uncharitable reading of his current actions.
posted by cell divide at 5:41 PM on April 24, 2016 [66 favorites]


I have huge respect for what Snowden did but it's odd to see someone so intelligent whose entire life is pretty obviously controlled by KGB at this point be so unaware of the geopolitical situation

To nitpick for a moment, there hasn't been a KGB since the fall of the Soviet Union. These says, the Russian agency watching Snowden's every move and making sure he acts in the interests of his hosts would be the FSB.
posted by baf at 5:50 PM on April 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


I can never quite get my head around the fact that an American had to take refuge in Russia. If you were to travel back to the 1980s in a time machine and tell everyone there about it, they'd never believe you.

Just wait until they hear that the United States started off the 21st century by launching a preemptive war and then having to apologize to Germany (and everyone else) for torturing people in secret prisons in Poland.
posted by XMLicious at 5:51 PM on April 24, 2016 [27 favorites]


This comment is bizarre to me

I wish I could say the same; I pretty much assume that any mention of Snowden's name is going to be immediately free-associated into exactly this kind of delusional warmed-over Cold War grousing about hypocrisy (if not treason).
posted by RogerB at 5:56 PM on April 24, 2016 [21 favorites]


The individual should be able to buy a bottle of Internet with cash but the labeling should clearly show that the product was not tampered with or weaponized at each point along the way as the Internet product moved between the source and your hardware. Your identity does not have to be a part of this chain of custody, but that assumes an Internet with clear producers and consumers, and we know that's ambiguous because the Internet democratizes the means of production to the point that everyone is equally a producer and consumer. So where's the trust model here and how do we balance it out. That's the problem I'm trying to solve in my line of work and...it's not simple by any means. IMO IRL analogies are overly reductive and not all that helpful when it comes to illustrating the inherent security problems that face the people trying to secure the broken trust model of the Internet?
posted by Annika Cicada at 5:59 PM on April 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


I have huge respect for what Snowden did but it's odd to see someone so intelligent whose entire life is pretty obviously controlled by KGB at this point be so unaware of the geopolitical situation...
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory


Truth in advertising.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:27 PM on April 24, 2016 [17 favorites]


You realize that Snowden has also criticized Putin as well, right?
posted by I-baLL at 6:34 PM on April 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


Just wait until they hear that the United States started off the 21st century by launching a preemptive war and then having to apologize to Germany

Or is conducting an ongoing bombing campaign specifically targeting civilians in at least 9 countries without a declaration of war.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:08 PM on April 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


Just wait until they hear that the United States started off the 21st century by launching a preemptive war and then having to apologize to Germany

Or is conducting an ongoing bombing campaign specifically targeting civilians in at least 9 countries without a declaration of war.

And unfairly persecutes and imprisons citizens of a certain racial background.
posted by dazed_one at 7:12 PM on April 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


the last "important American news reporter" to interview Snowden was the since-discredited-and-demoted Brian Williams.

John Oliver interviewed him in the first season of Last Week Tonight, I forget if that was before or after Williams', though.
posted by JHarris at 7:24 PM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


So, how do I actually get to this article without a redirect taking me to the Australian home page? I expect opening it in a private tab might work, but what if I want to tweet the link and have my Australian followers succeed at opening it? Is there some clever way to do that?
posted by lollusc at 7:24 PM on April 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


No, private links don't work.

From Popular Science's perspective the reason is easy: they make money by selling their name in each country, and they want page hits. An Australian reading the US magazine wouldn't increase the number of local readers, but redirecting them to the Australian site (that doesn't even carry the same stories) might.

I really wish we could put a moratorium on country-locked sites; they're basically a slap in the face for non-US readers.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:36 PM on April 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


Perhaps try the free version of the proxy service Guardster? You'd want to cut and paste the OP link into the "Address" field and click the button.
posted by XMLicious at 7:43 PM on April 24, 2016


Archive.org cached version, maybe?
posted by RogerB at 7:44 PM on April 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


hide.me offers a US proxy point. I know nothing about the service, just found it with a search.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:46 PM on April 24, 2016


Snowden is the closet thing America has to a genuine hero. Make of that what you will.
posted by Beholder at 8:08 PM on April 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


I imagine you could google "free web proxy," paste the URI into their textbox and boom. Failing that, VPN. You're instantly in the US..or wherever.
posted by ostranenie at 8:11 PM on April 24, 2016


Snowden was interviewed by Brian Lehrer on WNYC a month ago.
posted by monospace at 8:23 PM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


And unfairly persecutes and imprisons citizens of a certain racial background.

No, that wouldn't surprise somebody from the 80's...we've been doing it since forever, and the only surprising thing would be if we stopped.
posted by spacewrench at 8:35 PM on April 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


John Oliver interviewed him in the first season of Last Week Tonight, I forget if that was before or after Williams', though.
It was a few months after, according to my googling, and as much as I am in the camp that the "Comedy Press" (Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Larry Wilmore, formerly-Stewart and still-semi-Colbert) is the best Press we have today, they're, by definition, not the MainStreamMedia.

Snowden was interviewed by Brian Lehrer on WNYC a month ago.
Good for Lehrer and WNYC... maybe the reason I didn't notice was it didn't get much play on NPR.

Snowden is the closet thing America has to a genuine hero.
America has a long, proud history of badly allocating the title of Hero... we're just now realizing that Andrew Jackson may not belong on our currency.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:38 PM on April 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


You should be able to buy a bottle of Internet like you buy a bottle of water. There is the technical capacity to tokenize and to commoditize access in a way that we can divorce it from identity in such a way that we stop creating these trails.

Gamergate would love that capacity. I mean, this is already what the internet is all about- untraceable harassment. So in the future, you could buy a bottle of internet, send out your death and rape threats and doxxing, and then be completely clear of any consequences.

There's nothing here that convinces me that the ideal here is anything other than an internet of anonymous users, where only straight white males get to have any public identity.
posted by happyroach at 8:56 PM on April 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


If privacy is GamerGate, does that make the NSA intersectional feminism? It's so hard to keep up with politics these days.
posted by RogerB at 9:23 PM on April 24, 2016 [14 favorites]


I've always been intrigued by David Brin's notion of transparency. The problem isn't so much that we are being watched; it's that nobody is watching the watchers. It's not about privacy; it's about equality of exposure.
posted by monospace at 9:58 PM on April 24, 2016 [10 favorites]


The archive.org link works, thanks!
posted by lollusc at 11:18 PM on April 24, 2016 [3 favorites]



There's nothing here that convinces me that the ideal here is anything other than an internet of anonymous users, where only straight white males get to have any public identity.


I am entirely comfortable with an anonymous Internet and a non-anonymous Internet co-existing - they are good for different things. I am not comfortable with an anonymous Internet not existing.
posted by atoxyl at 11:48 PM on April 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


There's nothing here that convinces me that the ideal here is anything other than an internet of anonymous users, where only straight white males get to have any public identity.

In practical, concrete terms, how does that relate to the state mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden? Is the NSA going to use its powers to track down Twitter bullies or something? The threat of terrorism doesn't warrant mass surveillance, but online harassment does?
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 12:03 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


he gets to act like a Berkeley freshman with an eff laptop sticker and just assumes that is the famed Russian commitment to free speech and so can talk about US warrant cases while relying on the hospitality of people who torture hundreds every week

I'm sure Snowden would love to come back to the United States, but its government took away his travel documents, its military leaders and legislators went on mass media and repeatedly threatened his life, and its president prosecutes whistleblowers at a rate not even seen under Republican administrations, instead of fixing gross corruption and abuse of office and Constitutional law. Russia is not the damn problem here.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:37 AM on April 25, 2016 [26 favorites]


An internet without anonymity, and machine learning, enables remarkably effective surveillance of personal behaviors, happyroach, which effectively freezes human culture. In particular, only straight rich males would have "any public identity" throughout much of the world.

We have a marijuana legalization movement now only because people could smoke marijuana. We have gay marriage now only because gay people were having relationships. We'd have no marijuana legalization or gay rights movements if we had the internet and machine learning but not encryption in the 1950s.

You imagine Gamer Gaters would somehow be obstructed by this internet without anonymity, but truthfully their project would fly under the radar by being relatively new and different. There is no shortage of straight white males with rigid concepts of gender roles, including many many Mormons, exactly the sort that sympathizes with Gamer Gate. It's far more likely Gamer Gaters would subtly benefit from your anonymity free internet.

Anyone notice that British spies hacked themselves and family members to get personal information to send birthday cards (background)
posted by jeffburdges at 12:52 AM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]


Snowden has criticized Putin's regime plenty. Also :
Stonewalled by NSA, Members of Congress Ask Really Basic Question Again
posted by jeffburdges at 12:52 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Snowden has criticized Putin's regime plenty.

The Atlantic disagrees.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:58 AM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I never understood this need to have a speaker's every view on various topics in life to be perfect before any of his or her arguments can be considered. The arguments Snowden is making regarding the internet are worth discussing, regardless of his patronage of the Russian state (or vice-versa).

There's at least enough ambiguity about Snowden's situation WRT Russia that, barring his being in the room to clarify himself, people of good will can reasonably disagree about what Snowden should be doing or saying with regard to the state he's living in right now. It looks, from my perch, like a pretty precarious situation - Putin to have him repatriated for kicks, or roughed up or or arrested or disappeared just as any number of journalists and other loyal Russian citizens have been.

If you're going to wait for a perfect actor before you listen to arguments about the future of the internet, well, we could be here for a while.
posted by newdaddy at 2:59 AM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]


Snowden has criticized Putin's regime plenty.

The Atlantic disagrees.


yes, i'm positively baffled, baffled, on why snowden doesn't do more to denounce the country that is keeping him from being murdered/imprisoned. i can't possibly understand! it is beyond comprehension! why doesn't he do more to get himself killed so we can stop talking about this unpleasantness?
posted by indubitable at 5:13 AM on April 25, 2016 [16 favorites]


"David J. Frum is a neoconservative Canadian-American political commentator [amd a former] speechwriter for President George W. Bush", PeterMcDermott. Ignoring his election posts, we've recent ones praising Thatcher and demonizing immigrants. lol
posted by jeffburdges at 7:27 AM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]


If you want to call a cab, the cab doesn’t need to know about who you are or your payment details.

That's kind of a ironic statement, since the taxi industry is being replaced (to the fanfare of a lot of happy customers) by phone apps that would require you to provide both identity and payment details.
posted by FJT at 8:08 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


"David J. Frum is a neoconservative Canadian-American political commentator [amd a former] speechwriter for President George W. Bush"

Yeah, it doesn't bother me or surprise me that he has a different political position to mine. Presumably, that's why he cares enough to be bothered to write the article. But that in itself doesn't actually rebut the arguments he's making, which seemed pretty persuasive to me.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:16 AM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I am entirely comfortable with an anonymous Internet and a non-anonymous Internet co-existing - they are good for different things.

If an anonymous and a non-anonymous internet are at all connected, then the non-anonymous internet is essentially at the mercy of the anonymous net. I know a few too many women and trans people who are being attacked by anonymous sources to regard the anonymous internet as something that simply can exist in the same space as a non-anonymous populace.


An internet without anonymity, and machine learning, enables remarkably effective surveillance of personal behaviors, happyroach, which effectively freezes human culture.

At this point, we have a public internet that's essentially of by and for white males, with everyone who doesn't fit into that category being subject to attack. I suppose that if that's the kind of culture one favors, then steps should be taken to preserve the privilege of sending anonymous rape and death threats.
posted by happyroach at 8:49 AM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm always interested in what paleo-conservatives, libertarians, etc. think, but neoconservative means basically "war monger", so no.

About Snowden, there is an interesting perk of expat life where you become aware of but get to ignore the issues with the society around you. It's both extremely liberating because you can finally read about the whole world without being sucked into local stupidity, but also paralyzing because anyone you interact with seems more knowledgeable and articulate about the local situation.

It's clear Snowden became more interested in the U.K., due to their asinine Snooper Charter. Anyone conscious of privacy issues was up in arms about that, but Americans living abroad especially so, due to the discussion being in English.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 AM on April 25, 2016


"At this point, we have a public internet that's essentially of by and for white males,"

Internet Users by Country
posted by I-baLL at 9:09 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


It isn't Snowden's job to fix Russia. Repeated calls for him to fix Russia exist only to divert attention away from the corrupt people and policies he has exposed here in the United States.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:14 AM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]


I think in order to understand "the internet" and attempt to be conversant on how to fix the broken internet that it makes most sense to look to BGP as a possible template for a trust model higher up the OSI stack. BGP is basically a way for two entities to trust each other in the absence of any reason to trust each other, and based on the success of the internet, that protocol seems to do a damn good job of balancing trust at Layer 3. I have been spending a LOT of time thinking about BGP, reading the RFC, looking at how peering agreements are structured, etc, in an attempt to recreate that into a layer-4-7 security protocol that allows multiple parties to interact with data with the same balance of trust that BGP provides at layer 3.

Until we have quantum networking sorted out we will have inherent problems with the integrity and trust of the encapsulated data, but I do believe there are ways that we can mitigate the problems in the 50 years between "what we have today" and "quantum entangled particle switches".

My ideas right now are "what does BGP do well" and then extrapolate an idea out and then shoot a hundred holes in it and start over again, but I think the future has something to do with community strings, data filtering and data routing.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:21 AM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


If we loose all anonymity, then trans-people and women's rights activists loose their anonymity in places like Saudia Arabia too, which means they get killed.

We had decades of minorities trying to raise awareness of police brutality in their communities, happyroach, like say listen to old rap songs. Yet, any public discussion was rampantly censored due to police apologists being offended, including here on metafilter where moderators deleted any police brutality thread as "metafitler does not do this well".

It's partially the pseudononymous aspects of the internet that allowed black people to communicate publicly without police intervention and allowed enough white people to see the brutality as effecting them too. It's exactly movements like BLM that many countries censor their internet to prevent.

Also, there is no anonymity tool that can protect you from your own bad OPSEC. Anyone making online threats tends not to be the sharpest tool in the shed, so even if they're hidden they still leak clues. If those clues were not tracked down, that's really a statement about the priorities of law enforcement and journalists, not tech.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:27 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]


So if we're talking social justice here, most of ya'll know I am a trans woman. I'd like to say +1 to preserving anonymity online. I can't be on facebook anymore because the type of harassment I was open to on their platform.

What I crave is the ability to filter out harassers before they reach me so I don't have to suffer them. Allow me to pick and choose who I share my real identity with based on a flexible trust model that doesn't require me to tinker with security and permission groups. I want a single security protocol at layer 7 that I own that I can share with platform. Essentially, I want an identity peering protocol that allows me to interact with the internet on my own terms.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:34 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


and for the record, facebook doesn't need to build it. We need a UN-sponsored equivalent to ARIN to manage identity and data sharing protocols.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:37 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


Along the lines of Annika Cicada comments on BGP, there is also no good reason for our default communications mechanisms to allow anyone to message anyone, like Email. Almost no newer tools allow this.

Pond has message delivery that's anonymous for the sender, but verified by the server, and crucially not anonymous to the recipient, using a group signature scheme.

A Sphinx based mixnet needs a unique single-use reply block (SURB) for every message, meaning you can only send a handful of messages before the other party must restock your SURBs to send more.

All the strongest anonymity techniques I know necessarily give recipients much more control over their in-boxes and associations. It's actually this social media style "broadcast to everyone I ever met" that's hard or outright impossible to do anonymously.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:42 AM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]


nodding so much at this, jeffburdges. SMTP is so hopelessly bad as a communication protocol. That fruit needs to be allowed to wither on the vine.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:45 AM on April 25, 2016


Interesting article on Angleton's mole hunt : How the CIA Writes History
posted by jeffburdges at 9:46 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Just wait until they hear that the United States started off the 21st century by launching a preemptive war and then having to apologize to Germany (and everyone else) for torturing people in secret prisons in Poland."

Time traveler from 1960's Berkely: Neener neener neener, I told you so.
posted by mule98J at 10:27 AM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]




Heh, "the onset of commercial encryption" is such a funny phrase to me right now because I'm reading Crypto, which is talking about basically the same argument but 30 years ago.
posted by indubitable at 2:01 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm sorry, that Clapper guy - the height of arrogance and zero self-awareness. It's all Snowden's fault. It couldn't possibly be that the level of illegal and indiscriminate surveillance that the NSA insisted on doing for no good reason is what demanded, cried out, for someone take action in bringing attention to it.

And fundamentally, nothing's changed. He's entirely unaffected by years of shaming in the press and arguments by rational American (and other) citizens. We must all be spies, we must all have the interests of terrorists at heart, because he should be allowed to build the modern fascist surveillance state, just because he can, because he's got an apparently inexhaustible well of public money and no one in power is willing to tell him No.
posted by newdaddy at 2:41 AM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Facial recognition service becomes a weapon against Russian porn actresses

Afaik, there is no way to prevent that sort of facial recognition attack except for dumping the "garden fenced" social networks like Facebook and replacing them with more privacy preserving tools.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:17 AM on April 26, 2016 [3 favorites]








Snowden is technically almost certainly not a traitor (the traitors against the British Crown who drafted the US Constitution made sure of this by setting the bar for treason impossibly high). However, neither were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

If/when Snowden ends up in US custody, American justice is likely to take the form of a volley of shots at dawn.
posted by acb at 2:37 PM on April 26, 2016


New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship

Although I suspect that 20% decline could be people realizing that politicians talking about "terrorism" were "wagging the dog" so to speak.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:20 AM on April 29, 2016


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