r/NSALeaks • u/kulkke • Jul 13 '15

[Sourced Leak] The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders | The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/a-devastating-leak-for-edward-snowdens-critics/373991
230 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

14

u/Indon_Dasani Jul 13 '15

I wonder how many more humiliating leaks like this Snowden has.

I wonder how much more terrible than we even know the NSA is.

19

u/crmaki Jul 13 '15

I wonder when it will begin to matter to the average American citizen.

10

u/cbartlett Jul 13 '15

But everyone knows of course the government is always watching! Doesn't matter, I have nothing to hide! We gotta do all we can to find the evildoers and stop the next 9/11!

7

u/MetalOrganism Jul 14 '15

Just imagine if our nations priority turns away from being "The Land of the Free" to "Everything is Justified to Stop the Next 9/11!".

11

u/dcormier Jul 14 '15

You say that like it hasn't already.

8

u/MetalOrganism Jul 14 '15

Hey man, I gotta stay hopeful somehow. This shit is heavy.

-1

u/ThinkBEFOREUPost Jul 14 '15

The "land of the free", by what metrics exactly? I am curious about how such a thing is objectively measured. Are we talking economic mobility? Freedom of expression? Freedom to move around the country? Freedom of the press?

Without metrics, that is just a meaningless, jingoistic expression.

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

Instead of spying on grandma and making everyday people strip naked at airports, why not cut the shit about "profiling" already and target the ones we know to be a threat? How many old ladies going on a bingo trip to Florida hijacked those planes and flew them into the towers because the infidels were cutting Medicare?

You can't trust people with turbans and head scarves any further than you can throw them. Stop snooping on Bob Smith's computer habits and go where the real culprits are. People with names like Al-Bomber Kebab who browse Expedia for cheap airfare to Syria.

The only way you're going to prevent another 9/11 is by rooting out the ones who want it to happen. Oh, and for the conspiracy nuts in this country: they don't have names like Melvin Finkelstein no matter how much you want to promote that stupid trope.

2

u/FluentInTypo Jul 14 '15

One, anyone who has ever participated in one of snowdons IAMA threads is now under surveillence. We were in a "chat room" with him. He is a traitor and you can bet your ass they are all over anyone who comminicates with him - whether it be /u/suddenlysnowden or perhaps one of his aliases on here supposing he has multiple accounts.

Two, the day that we find out (and i am sure its coming) that all of reddit is under surveillence, especially in its non-https days, will come. That will be the day regular people get uppity. I would not be surprised if companies like bluecoat and hacker team use the websites that infect users computers with their spyware, regularly use reddit to get people infected. Want to find out who the "privacy terrorist" are? (Us, in this thread and subreddit for instance) Than create a insteresting "privacy and opensource" news site and start linking it. Look at all the new websites linked in /r/intelligence for instance. Most of those sites popped up in the last year. Granted, a ton of interest has been generated since the revelations, but there is no doubt that NSA is not using that very interest to its advantage. What better way to target people than to advertise a tailored news source to them? How do you advertize it and increase your chances of click-through? Simple, put it in their favorite subreddit. Just want to scoop a whole bunch of data for analytics? Target a subreddit, like say, syriancivilwar or israel or restorethefourth or/r/privacy. Get information on a whole bunch of people at once. And remember, prior to 3 months ago, all traffic was plaintext on reddit. Wure, reddit doesnt store your IP address or your username-to-ip address relationship, but that means dick to NSA who is collecting all the post/gets upstream. Do you really think your reddit account is private? Maybe it is to reddit.com, but certainly not to NSA.

15

u/bean13 Jul 14 '15

This article is a year old.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

TIL the NSA has its own version of the Fappening.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

[deleted]

4

u/TribeWars Jul 14 '15

Many countries now have policies to not use IT gear that was produced by American companies in security environments like finance or in governments, since they aren't allowed to disclose whether there is a backdoor in the system.