Info Leak Wars To Get Messier 350
jfruh writes "As we discussed this weekend, David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, was detained while transporting encrypted data on the Snowden affair from Berlin; all his electronics were seized. Over at the Guardian offices, British police destroyed more of the newspaper's hard drives. Privacy blogger Dan Tynan sees where this one is going: reporters like Greenwald are going to stop even bothering to be circumspect with their revelations. Sorting through the contents of such infocaches to redact sensitive information just gives the government time to track you down. Eventually, the information will just be dumped online, warts and all, as soon as someone who wants the information public gets ahold of it."
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
No, why? They're desperate to know what's out there, so it's best to provoke a dump.. You know, adding a little laxative to the mix.
Morons in government don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
They must not understand the concept of a digital backup copy. You can take digital files of even gigantic sizes and copy them within minutes. They'd need to destroy every single copy at the same time before someone made another copy. No intimidation tactic is going to work at this point. There are copies around the world of what Snowden took with him.
You take all of the files and dump them on ThePirateBay, Wikileaks, or wherever, and the government can't stop it. No amount of threats or harassment can prevent people from getting the information once it is out in the open. It would be like trying to return used paint to the bucket or gluing together a smashed window pane. A useless exercise.
The government lost the information war. They are going to need to refocus on something else to win. Martial law. Election stealing. Murdering people. Extortion. At that point you're no longer looking at democracy and civilization but totalitarianism and military rule. We already lock up every marijuana user. Why not start locking up "terror violators" or some other nonsense 'crime'?
This is the breaking point. Will people vote in politicians who will stop the wars (terror, drugs, guns, privacy)? Or are we going to get another Bush/Obama clone?
Re:Small Correction (Score:5, Interesting)
The British police did not destroy the newspaper's hard drives. They just watched and took notes and photos while the paper's people destroyed the hard drives. This in no way justifies the actions of the British government, which are completely reprehensible.
I agree with Dan Tynan. Future leaks will be dumped without regard for how much they might hurt individuals or groups only peripherally involved. In a surveillance culture, that may be the only way whistleblowers can continue to do what is right.
What is the point of that distinction? Does it matter at *all* whether the government agents destroyed the drives themselves, or coerced the owners of the drives to do it?
Re:That (Score:5, Interesting)
Au contraire, my dear Watson. Providing raw material is exactly the service news providers should be doing in the first place. Let other reporters and bloggers sift through this publicly available raw data to point out interesting stuff. There's no reason reporters should be entitled to exclusive access to raw material, and the rest of the world would have to accept what reporters say without a way of controlling that.
That was exactly the problem with Wikileak's initial redacted release of Cablegate. It was only after they've released the whole data unredacted that real reporting could begin (and can still take place).
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
They must have thought Christmas had come early - he was foreign, gay *and* a being labelled as a potential terrorist.
That's not going to help the feds/governments in the long term though. The more they rough up the journalists, treat them like enemies and make their lives generally more difficult - the more they are likely to be treated in the same manner. Why go to all the trouble of being polite, redacting sensetive bits and playing by the book when you know that the next time you go through an airport, your pants are coming down and you better hope you got some lube in...
When one team starts playing hardball, the other team often starts doing the same - and the journalists will probably see these sorts of infractions nothing short of a badge of honour - but on the flipside, the potential trouble/egg-on-face for the governments just went up and up.
Siezed not destroyed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand why they don't take legal action.
Because unfortunately there's no law to say you can't behave like an asswipe. The detention was legal enough within the letter of the law (the less said about the spirit of it, the better), and he was released after the stipulated maximum amount of time. As for destruction of equipment, I'm sure there is some precedent making that legal.
There's only one way to get around a government's thuggery and intimidation, and that is to blow them wide open.
Re:Idiots (Score:2, Interesting)
If push comes to shove, the victors will eventually be Western governments closing the door on journalists. For example, China, and the mention of how many/few prisoners they have for execution is a state secret (as per a previous /. article on them stopping organ harvesting). However, if the US had prisoners slated for execution for organs and hid the numbers as a state secret, the world would be stating it was a Holocast in the making.
Journalists have been allowed free reign, but if governments start actually losing balances of power because of leaks, the journalist is not going to win the battle against a government enforcer (police officer, army soldier, Taliban morals officer) with a high powered firearm. A journalist might win if they get their data to the world, but a government has a lot of opportunity to put a bullet through that person's brainpan from the time they witnessed an event until they get the event uploaded. To boot, a potential "journalist" can be isolated and potentially imprisoned just by the trail they leave on the Internet.
Don't forget the biggest reason why the press is even permitted -- the press lobby is very strong, so as of now, any government official going against it will be voted out of office. However, the military lobby is a lot stronger, and when it comes to a conflict between the two, it will be the guys with guns who win politically.
[1]: It wouldn't take much to pass a law or an ACTA-like treaty to demand that any Internet connected computer to have a DRM stack and pass a healthcheck before it is allowed to connect upstream. Couple to that transparent SSL proxies, and a firewall smart enough to detect attempts at tunneling and stop them. This is common on LANs, and having the tech move to WANs is trivial. ISPs may complain, but ultimately, they would have to comply or else be shut down. This will go a lot to identify would-be leakers, and have them (and their families) arrested for "terrorism".
Re:That (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution here will not be solved with technology. The parlor tricks were fun when the law was unclear; but now that the law is clearly compromised, real action, in the real world, must be taken.
The people have been patient with the courts, with the law in general, as it has sorted through the general maze that is technology, and its effects on society. They need not be patient in areas where the law has already been clearly stated, for over two hundred years, in plain text, and in a copy that many people, even outside this country, own, and can easily reference. "Congress shall make no law..." and here we are, with secret courts, unable to face our accusers, dealing with gerrymandered accusations, and proof positive that the highest laws themselves have been violated. What more, one of our Founding Fathers did say, supposedly, "I prefer a hundred guilty men go free, than one innocent man be imprisoned."
So, what happened to that America? I signed up for that America, not this one. Did someone mislead me? Was I lied to? Was there a bait and switch in the womb of my mother? Having been born in this country, with full citizenship, rights and privileges, why have I been denied, since my birth, these plainly written guarantees? I've been taxed, I know this much...who represents me? What are their names? How have they voted in the last six months, so that I know they are truly representing me, and my closely-held values, as well as this country's written values, in our national capital?
I have two words for you: (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, dream on... (Score:1, Interesting)
The 0.00001% of Americans who are violent nutjobs might stop drinking Coors Lite long enough to shoot a transformer on a pole somewhere. The vast majority will keep on watching TV. Change will happen when the infrastructure crumbles because reality doesn't listen to the media, or corporations, or their purchased governments.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Idiots (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, not quite. They're claiming that GCHQ haven't circumvented or broken the law. That's probably true, because we in the UK have basically no absolute protections against people like GCHQ at all. There's feel-good privacy laws and the like but they all have vague, loose exceptions about "unless properly authorised" or "except in cases of national interest". The loopholes are so big it would be trivial for GCHQ to route the internet through them.