Could Snowden Have Been Stopped In 2009? 247
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The NYT reports that when Edward Snowden was working as a CIA technician in Geneva in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man's behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion that Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access. But the red flags went unheeded and Snowden left the CIA to become a contractor for the NSA so that four years later he could leak thousands of classified documents. In hindsight, officials say, the report by Snowden's supervisor and the agency's suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Snowden's top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the NSA under much greater scrutiny. Had Booz Allen or the NSA seen Snowden's CIA file before hiring him, it almost certainly would have affected his employment says Dashiell Bennett. 'The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn't passed on,' says a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Snowden's activities. It's difficult to tell what would have happened had NSA supervisors been made aware of the warning the CIA issued Snowden in what is called a 'derog' in federal personnel policy parlance."
Snowden must be preemptively stopped (Score:1, Insightful)
Warm up the time machine, people, because we're the government, we make the laws, we make the money, and we breed the super soldiers. So go home, learn to live with it, pay your taxes and remember, you didn't hear anything about time machines or super soldiers.
Re:Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Latin) (Score:5, Insightful)
creeping on your ex-girlfriends, elected officials, and corporate CEOs.
Never mind "creeping". Booz Allen is a profit oriented consulting and services business. They know the value of information. What if they are tapping into the NSA data for commercial gain? Selling NSA data to other businesses . . . ?
Snowden got "caught" because he outed himself. Someone running a rogue business market for NSA data isn't going to go public about it.
It would be high time that the NSA take a look at the businesses that do their work for them.
Good Thing He Wasn't Stopped (Score:5, Insightful)
Snowden is a hero. It's a damn good thing he wasn't stopped. Else, the American people would have had no chance to stop the fascism that is enacting a slow-mo coup d'etat of our democracy. Time will tell if we can do anything about it now anyway, but at least we have the knowledge if not yet the means.
We will know victory when the Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins of the world and those on Capitol Hill and K Street who enable them are swinging from the trees that line the National Mall.
Way to spin it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me recast this: Sometime in 2009, Edward Snowdon, having been a faithful and perhaps unquestioning CIA employee for some time, began to have pangs of conscience and take some preliminary steps toward what he ended up later doing: revealing what was going on at the highest and most secretive levels of government. His "superior" noticed this and recorded it in Snowdon's her personnel file.
Why does this article – which is cited, of all places, on Slashdot – try so clearly to change the event by relabeling Snowdon a criminal instead of a whistleblower beginning to come to his senses? Answer: to serve the established powers. To rewrite the narrative.
This makes me want to barf because I know so many people will buy into it and, apparently, some of those people are right here on Slashdot. In fact, such a twisting of the narrative has really already succeeded, having been played over and over in the newspapers and on the network news that everybody sets their sights by.
Don't care. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad they didn't stop him. People went from saying shit about tinfoil when you bring up spying. To actually listening.
This is a good thing. Now we just need to put a stop to it.
Let's hope this security hole is not fixed. (Score:5, Insightful)
The American public, and also the rest of the world, need more whistle-blowers to leak illegal activity and overreach by self-serving secret agencies, that refuse to allow themselves to be subjected to proper and transparent oversight.
No law abiding person has any issues with spying on suspected individuals and organisations with just cause and court order. But most people do not want a dictatoral police-state based wholesale surveillance on everyone, as we have now.
How is what the NSA is doing in the USA now any different than what the former East German secret police use to do, with their secret files kept on ever individual, so that they can use any individual's past as a weapon, in case they get out of line?
Nor do we want to see security, such as encryption, weakened, if it makes the public more vulnerable to attack by bad/evil organisations in general, or makes it harder for honest and lawful people to cooperate for the benefit of society, even if it means letting a few bad people get away. Proper security requires risk-benefit analysis for the whole of society, not just selected groups.
Betteridge. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Could Snowden Have Been Stopped In 2009?"
No.
Who cares?
We're glad he wasn't.
The Real Way to Stop Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
The real way to have stopped Snowden would be for the government to not be a privacy-destroying, dossier-collecting, network-infiltrating, security-inhibiting organization that spies on its own people.
Then Snowden wouldn't have had a reason to leak.
Funny (Score:3, Insightful)
They are talking about who Snowden got a hold of the information to leak it when the whole problem has nothing to do with HOW he got a hold of it to leak it and everything to do with the fact they were doing stuff so messed up that it HAD to be leaked for the greater good of the nation and it's people.
Quit asking HOW he got a hold of the information as much and start asking WHY they had done acts such as those to begin with more.
Re:Good Thing He Wasn't Stopped (Score:4, Insightful)
What did he expose that we didn't already suspect?
He made it easier to present this information to the naive, trusting masses who refuse to think for themselves and that's why they think It Can't Happen Here. Like it or not, they are the majority, they have the numbers, they have the votes and the political pressure, and they need these matters spelled out for them. They will not connect such dots on their own. It's the single biggest threat to our representative republic that there is because it was built on the concept of an informed and savvy public. Snowden's work addresses that threat, that ignorance and general unwillingness to touch this topic.
There's hope for us yet.
Re:How many false positive (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says they're false positives?
As many people have pointed out, the difference between Snowden and everyone who came before him is that Snowden had the decency to send the information to the US people, as opposed to some other government. But apparently he's the traitor.
Choices, Priorities, Morality, and Snowden (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's hope this security hole is not fixed. (Score:5, Insightful)
we do have a problem with it, you are very naive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism [wikipedia.org]
your government is mostly comprised of evil and twisted power and money grubbing people in the pockets of large corporations. They are transforming the USA into a corporate fascist police state.
Re:Good Thing He Wasn't Stopped (Score:5, Insightful)
What did he expose that we didn't already suspect?
He exposed that those saying that NSA did all those things weren't crazy tinfoil-hats and that those who said that they were were naive.
Go back to old forum posts, read the discussions. Some people voiced the suspicion, most of them were ridiculed.
Also, regarding the article/summary. It would be interesting to write an article with the headline "Could Martin Luther King Jr. have been stopped 1957?" and see how it would be received.
For some reason some people still thinks that what Snowden did was wrong. In retrospect it's pretty clear that he did exactly what needed to be done.
There were several NSA workers who did it the "right" way and just reported the injustices upward or decided to quit and keep silent, none of it worked.
Re:Other red flags (Score:2, Insightful)
We can say a lot more about the NSA because of the contents of the published documents rather than the events leading to their publication.
I find it disgusting that everybody is still focusing on Snowden rather than the documents. It's almost as though the NSA selected Snowden to bring all the stuff out into the open since they would have gotten shit if they passed all that crap through the official channels supposed to watch over them without having some celebrity distracting from what this is actually about: the NSA establishing a reign of surveillance and terror out of democratic, congressional and presidential oversight and control.
Snowden is a pawn. He's unimportant. The shit he uncovered is important, but nobody can be interested in it.
Re:What is really going on? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you take Snowden at his word?
Snowden produced evidence of his claims, which were then verified by investigative journalists, and in some cases finally admitted to by the US government itself.
I would take him at his word long before I believed anything produced by an agency or politician in the US government.
Perhaps, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen a few examples of this in my past careers. When a boss starts screwing over the company, his employees typically respond in one of several ways: Some try to get their own piece of the action. Some just say 'Screw it' and let their productivity go to hell. Some quit. And some push back and figure that they'll 'get' something on the SOB. Its possible that Snowden fell into the latter category. He either left on his own, figuring the battle wasn't worth fighting. Or he was pushed out in a manner designed not to trigger any further investigations that could blow back in the boss' face. So he takes his clearance and goes to work as a contractor for the NSA. And he sees that the problems are so widespread, they cross organizational boundaries. In the final analysis, it appears he was proved correct.
The CIA/NSA/FBI and other TLAs appear to have such lax ethics, it would not surprise me at all if quite a few employees in these organizations are choosing the first option: Might as well jump in and grab a piece of the action.