Sunday Times reporter on Snowden story: We don’t have a clue!

[marmar]

from the Washington Post:


Stories relating to intelligence are the “toughest nut to crack,” said Tom Harper of the Sunday Times of London in an interview yesterday with CNN’s George Howell. Harper is the lead reporter on a Sunday Times story alleging that Russia and China have “cracked” files that were “stolen” by Edward Snowden, a turn of events that forced MI6 to reassign some agencies in key countries. All that, from “senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services,” reported the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times.

That story has come in for a beating from The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald: “Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this article depends — more on those in a minute — the entire report is a self-negating joke,” writes Greenwald.

If you don’t have time for Greenwald’s merciless condemnation, try the CNN interview. Though CNN’s Howell doesn’t appear to be out to discredit Harper’s work, he accomplishes that end just by asking obvious questions about the story. Mind you — when print reporters get a chance to speak about their work on television, it’s often hard to shut them up. They want to tell a new audience about all the details they couldn’t fit into their story, all the stuff that their stupid editor deleted, all the atmospherics. In this particular iteration, however, Harper has little to offer. .................(more)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/06/15/sunday-times-reporter-on-snowden-story-we-dont-have-a-clue/

[Cryptoad]

1. It hard to believe that in 2015,,,

there are still people out there who think there exist encryption that can not be decrypted ! Even funnier is that they are same bunch who where surprised that their Cell phone calls were being recorded. geeez

[BeanMusical]

8. You obviously don't know much about encryption, now do you?

Now let’s pretend the NSA has a budget of $100 trillion (in reality, they don’t have nearly that much money). Let’s also say that they can buy $50 computers that can test 100,000 keys a second (try making your Raspberry Pi do that, I dare you). Spending the entire $100 trillion at $50 a pop, they can afford two trillion computers. At 100,000 guesses per second, the entire cluster of two trillion computers can make 200,000,000,000,000,000 guesses per second.

So how many seconds will it take to guess all 2^128 possible keys?

1,701,411,834,604,692,317,316 seconds.
Which is 28,356,863,910,078,205,288 minutes.
Which is 472,614,398,501,303,421 hours.
Which is 19,692,266,604,220,975 days.
Which is 53,951,415,354,030 years.
Which is 53,951,415,354 millennia.

That’s a long time to wait to crack the crypto on a single message. And I greatly exaggerated the resources of the NSA. In reality, they’d be waiting a lot longer. Another way to put it is this: If all the combined computing power currently available to the human race were devoted to decrypting this one single message, the sun would die out before it was cracked.

https://micahflee.com/2013/01/no-really-the-nsa-cant-break-your-crypto/

And he's only talking about 128 bits encryption, you can encrypt documents at 256 bits with free open source software.

[Cryptoad]

15. I don't know,,,,,

Have degrees in SE, CS and MS from one the top 40 Universities and I have owned a business that designs encryptions for almost 30 years,,,,and if i say so made a good living at it... but you surely shewed me how much you know...! lol

[BeanMusical]

16. And I'm an astronaut with a PhD in Astrophysics.

[Cryptoad]

17. Well good for you....lol

[Scuba]

2. Hard to believe, in 2015, that there are people on this forum who call Snowden "comrade" and ...

... "traitor" and are willing to use any and every tactic to smear him and anyone who opposes the illegal acts he exposed.

[Enthusiast]

3. +1 a huge bunch!

[marmar]

6. ...............

[L0oniX]

7. ^^^this^^^

[BeanMusical]

9. Yeah, that's childish.

[FlatBaroque]

4. I watched the CNN interview and it was comical.

That was the best propagandist they could push out there?

I love stories like this because it makes it so easy to identify those on DU who are truly enemies of humanity.

[malaise]

5. All one needs to do is read about Thatcher

and Murdoch - Lie Witness News 24/7

[randome]

10. It's too bad that Greenwald doesn't ask similarly obvious questions in his writing.

Such as: "Is there any evidence that this NSA capability is being used against U.S. citizens?" But he will never pose that question because he wants us to think the worst.

So long as Harper identified his sources, I don't see there was any deception going on. As someone points out, he is a poor propagandist. I know some want to believe that the government is still out to control this story and, well, to control us all, but it doesn't seem like they have a very coordinated plan, do they?

And Greenwald has a vested interest in trying to squash any story critical of Snowden so his immediate response -more like a screech- is similarly suspect.

I mean, ask yourselves: why should Greenwald care what some other reporter writes? Why does he react as if he personally is being insulted?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[marmar]

11. It's not just Greenwald calling bullshit on this flimsy story ...........

...... which, miraculously, came out right after

On Thursday, David Anderson, the government’s reviewer of terrorism legislation, condemned snooping laws as “undemocratic, unnecessary and – in the long run – intolerable”, and called for a comprehensive new law incorporating judicial warrants

http://gawker.com/author-of-that-horrible-snowden-article-has-even-worse-1711406342

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150615/11565531344/reporter-who-wrote-sunday-times-snowden-propaganda-admits-that-hes-just-writing-what-uk-govt-told-him.shtml

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/sunday-times-sends-dmca-notice-to-critics-of-snowden-hacking-story/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/14/edward-snowden-hero-government-scare-tactics

http://notes.rjgallagher.co.uk/2015/06/sunday-times-snowden-china-russia-questions.html

[randome]

12. It IS flimsy. So why is Greenwald angry?

Why does he feel the need to control every aspect of anything related to Snowden?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[ProfessorPlum]

13. The real question is why isn't everyone angry

about government/media lies that discredit Snowden.

Shouldn't you be?

[randome]

14. Who is lying here? The reporter? His sources?

He reported something that other reporters said wasn't well-sourced. Doesn't sound like much of a master plan by some secret government cabal to me. Sounds like yet another 'Meh. Snowden' story, which is pretty much America's non-Internet reaction.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[ProfessorPlum]

18. perhaps the media shouldn't be in the business

of smearing people using poorly sourced flights of fancy from the government.

From the article, Harper lays out his role as government stenographer rather plainly.

Asked about the nature of the files, Harper responded, “That’s not something we’re clear on, so we don’t go into that level of detail in the story. We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment.”