New revelations from the Snowden archive surface | Computer Weekly
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He risked his neck. When Edward Snowden chose to expose the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)'s mass surveillance Leviathan, and that of its British counterpart, GCHQ, 10 years ago, he put his life on the line. And he has always declared he has never regretted it. But years after his act of extraordinary courage, the Snowden archive remains largely unpublished.  He trusted in journalists to decide what to publish. In an article published in June 2023, by Guardian Pulitzer prize winner Ewen MacAskill - who flew to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to meet Edward Snowden - McAskill confirmed that most of the archive has not been made public. "In the end, we published only about 1 percent of the document,” he wrote. What does the 99 percent of the Snowden archive contain? A decade on, it remains shrouded in secrecy. A doctoral thesis by American investigative journalist and post-doctoral researcher Jacob Appelbaum has now revealed unpublished information from the Snowden archive. These revelations go back to a decade but they remain of indisputable public interest: the NSA listed Cavium, an American semiconductor company marketing Central Processing Units (CPUs) - the main processor in a computer which runs the operating system and applications - as a successful example of a "SIGINT enabled" CPU vendor. Cavium, now owned by Marvell said it does not implement back doors for any government. · the NSA compromised lawful Russian interception infrastructure, SORM. The NSA archive contains slides showing two Russian officers wearing jackets with a slogan written in Cyrillic: "you talk, we listen". The NSA  and/or GCHQ has also compromised "Key European LI [lawful interception] systems. · among example targets of its mass surveillance program, PRISM, the NSA listed the Tibetan government in exile.

A decade after Snowden exposed NSA’s mass surveillance in cooperation with the British GCHQ, only about 1 percent of the documents have been published, but three major facts can finally be revealed thanks to a doctoral thesis in applied cryptography by Jacob Appelbaum.

  • livus@kbin.social
    1051·
    1 year ago

    The most disturbing part of this for me is how:

    • 99% of Snowden’s revelations have never been published

    • several of the existing copies of Snowden’s documents have subsequently been destroyed

    I also find it depressing that people like Appelbaum are routinely criminalized:

    Public speeches made by Appelbaum taking a humorous and provocative tone and with titles like “Sysadmins of the World, Unite!” were interpreted as an attempt to recruit sources and as incitement to steal classified documents. To this day, however, there are no publicly-known charges against Appelbaum or Harrison.

          • explodicle@local106.comEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            So what? Once it went to a few news organizations, the Russians probably already had it by the time he arrived.

            • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
              15·
              1 year ago

              But then they couldn’t ask him questions about it before he arrived…but maybe they did and his sell out happened way up the line. In any case, if you think what Trump did was wrong this was the same crime.

      • livus@kbin.social
        172·
        1 year ago

        @Rapidcreek

        I would bet the Russians know 100%

        Their surveillance people do, sure - just like all the 5-Eyes governments obviously know 100% and so do any spooks from anywhere else with competent spy networks, including the Chinese, Israelis, etc etc.

        That’s not really my point though. It’s ordinary people that need to know about it.

      • Arghblarg@lemmy.ca
        1·
        1 year ago

        Snowden asserted and still does that he deleted his own copies once Greenwald et al. got their copies, well before he had to flee Hong Kong and ended up trapped in Russia.

        Remember, it was the US who trapped him in Russia by revoking his passport – an international crime in and of itself, rendering him stateless which no country should do to its citizens, no matter what crimes they have allegedly commited – and he had no intention of ending up there; he was trying to get to Chile I believe, and the EU did the unprecedented step of force-grounding their equivalent of Air Force One, with their president on board, thinking Snowden was a passenger.

        Imagine if the POTUS had his plane accompanied by fighter jets to force-land in any other nation. The response would have been explosive, literally. Such hypocrisy that they just wave off other nations’ sovereignty and diplomatic norms on the treatment of foreign leaders so easily.

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    35·
    1 year ago

    According to Jacob Appelbaum, The Intercept - the media outlet co-founded by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to publish the Snowden files - is no longer in possession of the documents. “I was informed that they destroyed their copy of the archive”, Appelbaum tells us.

    I thought this was an interesting tidbit. It’s been a minute since I heard anything about Appelbaum. A while back he had some metoo type allegations, but I never really paid attention to what became of that or him afterward.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20895270/jacob-appelbaum-peter-todd-rape-allegations-defamation-bitcoin-tor

    This is the most recent news that pops up about that controversy.

    I don’t disagree with Appelbaum, however, that it’s a little bit unconscionable that those files were destroyed. There’s a lot of valid criticism in the way Wikileaks does things, with a large data-dump, but it never really felt like we actually got the full picture of what was happening with the Snowden files, with so much of it never actually being published or written about.

    I do wonder if Laura Poitras still has a copy, but as a filmmaker who works less in information security, it seems more doubtful.

  • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
    321·
    1 year ago

    The compromised Lawful Interception infrastructure is a pretty big deal. It shows the risks of having that sort of backdoor and makes it harder to argue for them. (Unless you’re the UK or Australia, then lol what privacy).

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
    29·
    1 year ago

    A timely reminder that none of this shit was rolled-back and in fact in some countries *cough* UK *cough* it was simply made legal with new laws.

    • NaN@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      A discrete TPM has a separate manufacturer. The AMD fTPM is made by AMD, and they have already explained the issue.

      • culpritus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor

        The PSP itself represents an ARM core (ARM Cortex A5[6][circular reference]) with the TrustZone extension which is inserted into the main CPU die as a coprocessor. The PSP contains on-chip firmware which is responsible for verifying the SPI ROM and loading off-chip firmware from it.

        Critics worry it can be used as a backdoor and is a security concern.[3][4][5] AMD has denied requests to open source the code that runs on the PSP.

        The PSP also provides a random number generator for the RDRAND instruction[10] and provides TPM services.

        • NaN@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Yes, exactly. It has similar concerns to Intel ME (and its fTPM). “I wonder who the fTPM manufacturer is” makes no sense.

          • culpritus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Then who makes the coprocessor that is inserted into the die?

            Looking into more details of the boot process, it seems like the UEFI manufacturers such as AMI or Phoenix might be the best place to insert a pre-OS boot back door. The PSP (CCP) is just what is used to bootstrap before this step in the process.

            https://www.igorslab.de/en/inside-amd-bios-what-is-really-hidden-behind-agesa-the-psp-platform-security-processor-and-the-numbers-of-combo-pi/

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
              4·
              1 year ago

              Then who makes the coprocessor that is inserted into the die?

              AMD, obviously, they’re not going to let anyone mess with their lithography masks. With IP bought from ARM, to wit: It’s a Cortex A5, which is a bog-standard block of IP if you need something better than a microcontroller but not really beefy either. Or you could say that TSMC makes them, just as the rest of the silicon.

              (AMD also has an ARM architecture license and thus the right to design its own ARM cores but a) those were designed to be in a completely different performance class (application server) and b) they never made it to market. They’re now probably tinkering on RISC-V in the background in their eternal quest to not have Intel fused to their hip by x86).

  • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
    1319·
    1 year ago

    Oh, so you’re saying the NSA was collecting signals intelligence from foreign countries? I’m shocked. Anyway…