Schneier on Security

Skeptical • August 14, 2014 8:32 PM

There are some things that are interesting, and some things that are less so.

On the uninteresting side, there are lots of little nuggets of BS sprinkled about. For instance, Snowden claims that he intended the US government to have a good idea of what he took. Really? Why not ask Gellman or The Guardian to give the US government a copy then? In fact, why not have Poitras, and any others, arrange to transfer a copy of what they have to the US government too?

That won’t happen, because Snowden’s claim is almost certainly BS.

More interestingly (aside from what has been noted in the original post):

• Bamford states that he searched “his [Snowden’s] cache” at “various locations” and could not find “some” documents that have been published. He then adroitly pivots to speculation that Snowden was not the source for the Merkel story. Such speculation is highly dubious. Certain other documents though – and I continue to doubt that the TAO catalog is among them, though this is idle speculation on my part – may qualify, particularly those which might be accessed if one had a source of one kind or another inside the German Government.
• He states that Greenwald lost (or perhaps never had) access to a portion of the documents, and that the purpose of Miranda’s courier mission was to restore Greenwald’s access. It’s unclear what Bamford’s source is for this information.
• He states that three groups have copies of the documents Snowden took: First Look Media, which includes Greenwald and Poitras, Gellman & Associates, and the somewhat haphazardly formed Guardian/NYT partnership. Since Poitras has access to documents which Greenwald does not, however, this should likely be split into four groups.
• He speculates that neither Snowden nor the custodians are aware of everything significant in the documents. This may be a plausible claim with respect to Snowden, but it seems less likely with respect to the custodians, who have had over a year to work (more or less) full time on the documents with an unknown number of assistants and outside consultants.

• On the human interest side of things, he notes that Snowden appears thinner and is living on “New York time.” This implies to me that Snowden is spending most of his hours physically alone with a computer and is not eating well. I hope that someone will remind Snowden that, as an aging man in his 30s (no doubt some who read this blog can, however dimly, recall their 30s), he will need to pay more attention to his health than he may have in his 20s. He may wish to consult with local fitness guru Vladimir Putin, though I caution him not to accept any invitations to “friendly sparring judo match”.

I do find it curious, and even now, disappointing, that Snowden continues to reveal what would be, if his claims are true, legitimate foreign intelligence operations.

I have a few other thoughts as well, but will need to let them sit for a while.

As usual, I find much of the comments quite interesting (occasionally exasperating of course, but surely that’s the price of admission).

Skeptical • August 15, 2014 7:47 AM

@Nova: Reverse-engineering failure, then, since I don’t believe Snowden was directed by the Russians. I would guess that he probably understands all of these interviews as part political/PR campaign, part information op, for the cause of liberty. I think he receives substantial advice, and perhaps practice, from various persons, some who may be indirectly associated with the Russian Government, but I also think the decisions he makes are his own.

Other thoughts on Snowden:

Every now and then, between the well polished talking points, one glimpses what I think to be Snowden’s genuine worldview, which is a curious mixture of simplistic understandings about how institutions and people work and much more sophisticated insights.

For example, he seemed to believe that the US Government might have the Triads kill him. To me this indicates a complete lack of understanding of what is required before the US can undertake a covert action, and the circumstances under which it is done. It indicates, to me, that he doesn’t quite understand the rules and norms that actually govern behavior of intelligence officers or other operators.

He also indicated that he believed the US Government would kill a journalist if that journalist were a “single point of failure.” The US has never done so, even when covert actions were much less formally governed than they are today.

Then let’s take his curious interpretation of the email he received back from the NSA’s General Counsel’s Office when he asked a question. The email answered his question, and invited him to call if he wanted to discuss further. He took this to mean “stop asking questions.” Taking him at his word as to his interpretation, that’s a paranoid way to understand the email he received. It’s as though he didn’t quite get the way people were actually interacting with one another. (An alternative view is that he was feeling paranoid because he was essentially acting as a mole of sorts, at that point, and this paranoia simply colored everything he saw – something that’s probably not unusual for persons in those circumstances).

Finally, though I’d hesitate to place too much emphasis on this, there are hints of what psychologists would call splitting. This is a tendency for an individual to view other persons, and perhaps things that are personified to them, as either all good or all bad. Greenwald may have picked up on some this when he described how Snowden perceived himself, though I’m not sure Greenwald was fully aware of what he was sensing.

This all makes me feel a little sorry for him. If my reading of him is correct, then he’s felt somewhat under siege for most of his life. It’s also admirable that he’s battled back in a brave, resilient manner. It says a lot about his underlying character. But his skewed understanding of the world, in my very humble, highly speculative, opinion, unfortunately led him to choose the wrong strategies and tactics.

Skeptical • August 16, 2014 6:56 PM

@JLennox – Of course. That is why I called my ideas highly speculative. I’m not attached to my speculations, and I don’t buy into some of the more hostile theorizing I’ve read about Snowden.

Some of his more obvious lies, though, may be highly revealing. Why, for instance, claim that you really wanted the NSA to know what you took, when it’s quite clear that you didn’t?

One highly speculative hypothesis: his comments on the subject are intended both to elevate a personally important sense of superiority over the NSA while simultaneously continuing a relationship with the NSA. Perhaps he rationalizes such comments by thinking of them as part of a PR strategy, but that may not be the true underlying purpose.

This would be consistent with a theory that he feels, in general, that his world is insecure, a feeling caused by various formative experiences, which he defends against partly by striving to maintain an incredibly high regard for himself (high self regard may allow one to feel less vulnerable to the world). Moreover, driven in part by the need to maintain that defense, and driven in part by a sense that his world is riven with a latent fragility, he seeks to discover that fragility (in whatever close interpersonal network he has made a home in) by probing, peeking, testing. He’d have a need to, almost an obsessive drive to, discover cracks. Doing so would alleviate, to some extent, the underlying anxiety that the cracks are there and must be discovered; doing so would also allow him to distance himself from others whenever he began to feel threatened or vulnerable.

These two cognitive habits of coping with fragility in his world – maintaining an extremely high self regard, and obsessively seeking cracks – likely made him an extremely driven individual, one uneasy in close interpersonal relationships, and one highly vulnerable to any sense of threat to himself, including any sense that he was, or could be, valued at less than he needed to be.

All of us have some of the above characteristics, to varying degrees. In other circumstances, Snowden may have made a highly effective entrepreneur, though likely one with some particular difficulties in his personal life (not so uncommon for persons in any walk of life, and nothing that could not be overcome). Unfortunately, via a combination of professional circumstance, a lack of social and interpersonal “reality checks” on some of the more self-destructive tendencies inherent in those cognitive habits, and perhaps even with some encouragement via new interpersonal relationships he formed, he ended up walking down his current path.

That path has in some ways led him where his old cognitive defense mechanisms are most comfortable: at a distance from those he is now most intimate with, and able to role-play the part of untouchable hero.

Ultimately though, he’ll find this unfulfilling. He’ll need to find his way back, through the halls of introspective mirrors, out of his achieved isolation. That will be difficult. The obvious suggestion – therapy – would, shall we say, be challenging in his present conditions. Perhaps he could do so remotely, if he found a sufficiently trustworthy psychiatrist or psychologist, who followed whatever security precautions he thought necessary. The individual would need to be in a country in which he could not be forced to testify. The US is one such country, and undoubtedly there are many more in the Western world, though he’d want to familiarize himself with the limits of doctor-patient privilege in the relevant jurisdiction.

I don’t think such therapy would lead him to recant, repent, and return to the US. But, it may enable him to better nurture the relationships that he has, to develop new ones, and to free himself of some very hobbling cognitive frameworks and habits. To the extent it does, he may find himself able to find a middle path out of the wilderness.

That was a bit longer and more detailed than I intended. No, I don’t really expect him to begin therapy – but were it technically possible to do so securely, I don’t think it would be a bad idea either. As I said, all highly speculative, and speculation in which I am not invested. But occasionally my speculations are close to the mark, so who knows.