Guardian, Snowden etc

[synaesthesia]

So, I'm only barely following this, but has anyone else noticed that either the Guardian are fobbing people off saying they've destroyed the machine holding evidence re Snowden, or are they using a really bad picture?

 

NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files | World news | The Guardian

 

That's 2 mac mainboards (neither from the model on the right), a graphics card and a TFT controller. No hard drives, memory, anything. Something afoot?

[pcstru]

Good catch! I thought it was just a stock photo. There's no HD in the picture either (and no reason why they couldn't just trash the HD rather than the whole Mac?). The whole NSA/GCHQ thing is wierd and worrying. Democracy, Freedom, Liberty - I was kind of bought up to believe those were things worth fighting for.

[plexer]

The spooks that oversaw the operation probably took the drive remains?

 

Ben

[ICTDirect_Dave]

It says further down that the Spooks didn't take anything with them but did instruct them in using various drills and angle grinders on the drives.

 

Still not sure why there's two mainboards and a cople of other randoms in the pic though.

[Flatpackhamster]

It says further down that the Spooks didn't take anything with them but did instruct them in using various drills and angle grinders on the drives.

 

Still not sure why there's two mainboards and a cople of other randoms in the pic though.

 

Yes, the inclusion of a VGA card alongside the chassis from a Macbook pro is particularly wierd.

 

The Guardian could be lying, of course, like it was lying when it claimed that the chap stopped at the airport was just the journalist's partner, when he was, in fact, another journalist as well.

[jmak]

The bit that I really don't get is what the Government / spooks thought could be achieved. Whatever your position on whether the story should be published or otherwise, this act won't stop it - if anything, it will draw even more attention to the issue.

 

Either they somehow believe it's the only version - so someone at the Guardian made it up? - or they must understand that if it is an electronic copy of a document, another copy must exist elsewhere. And they call it the intelligence service...

[Arthur]

That's 2 mac mainboards (neither from the model on the right), a graphics card and a TFT controller.

The Guardian's description below the image in the article you linked to is wrong, but the two Mac mainboards are definitely from MacBook Pro's - Mid-2012 15" Retina Display models to be exact.

 

http://i.imgur.com/gh6gYso.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/AOnEz8M.jpg

 

No hard drives, memory, anything. Something afoot?

The original image The Guardian posted is shown below, so it's entirely possible that there is more on the table than what we are seeing. Either that, or the rest of the components just got swept up off the floor because they were in hundreds/thousands of tiny pieces. The platters of the PCs hard drive almost certainly would be.

 

As you will no doubt know, the "Retina Display" MacBook Pro's have RAM that is soldered to the mainboard and PCIe-based solid-state drives so there wouldn't be any hard drives in those.

 

http://i.imgur.com/aTG7Zfe.png

 

no reason why they couldn't just trash the HD rather than the whole Mac?

Residual data left in RAM? Better to be safe than sorry.

 

Still not sure why there's two mainboards and a couple of other randoms in the pic though.

Yes, the inclusion of a VGA card alongside the chassis from a Macbook pro is particularly weird.

http://i.imgur.com/JnJEVra.png

[synaesthesia]

Guh, am I really the only person on the planet that knows exactly what the bottom board is.

This is why information is important. *Everyone* in the public is told "A computer". Not "Computers" or "Multiple data sources"

The mac on the right is not a Mac Pro and it's too old to be one of the SSD models.

 

I've been around this crap too long to be able to tell that

[CAM]

Doesn't matter if the guy stopped was a journalist or not, he still shouldn't have been stopped. The government knew about it and tried fobbing the responsibility for the incident off to the Police. Later the government admit the Miranda detention, alongside the Guardian ransacking, was a show of force and to deter others from reporting on the Snowden case (basically bullying!). Then they confess that it was authorised by higher ups and cross-party squabbling began between Lib Dem and Conservative over who signed the order.

 

Meanwhile the entire country has lost it's credibility and is no longer considered safe from a freedom of speech angle. If you go anywhere near the UK with potential Snowden material you get arrested and bullied by spooks.

[Domino]

They've also mentioned multiple times that they've copies of the same data in other countries.....

 

So, who cares what they did with that HDD?

[sonofsanta]

The government's justification is that they are destroying the information to prevent hackers from breaking into the Guardian's systems and stealing the data to use themselves.

 

They did, however, abuse both the letter and the spirit of the law in detaining David Miranda. Section 7 of the Examining Officers under the Terrorism Act 2000 Code of Practice (PDF) states that the powers granted should be used "solely for the purpose of ascertaining if the person examined is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism" (page 10). Clearly that's not what was happening here.

 

There's a lot of discussion and revelation been taking place about our security services recently, but this flagrant abuse of power has scared me more than anything else recently. It is at the level of a police state, and is everything we supposedly stood against for 40 years of Cold War. It's everything we supposedly stand against when we intervene in Iraq, Libya, or any of the Spring Uprising Arab states. The hypocrisy is galling, the callousness is terrifying.

 

So, I hear South America is pretty warm, any tips on nice cities to live in?

[Arthur]

The mac on the right is not a Mac Pro and it's too old to be one of the SSD models.

No, it's a Mid-2012 15" "Retina Display" MacBook Pro (released on 11/06/2012). Who said it was a Mac Pro? The Guardian article didn't and no one in this thread did. :confused:

[Arthur]

So, I hear South America is pretty warm, any tips on nice cities to live in?

Belize is a nice place.

[synaesthesia]

Referring to the chassis, not the mainboard, mac/macbook, same thing, they're both engineering disasters.

[Arthur]

Referring to the chassis

So was I. It's a MacBook Pro, not a Mac Pro.

[synaesthesia]

Sorry, redacted the comment I originally typed here, clearly not in the best frame of mind this morning. I meant as in macbook, I rarely ever use the term macbook. Sorry, @Arthur Edited August 22, 2013 by synaesthesia

[Sdrawkcab]

I read this this morning on Reddit and it's got me thinking a bit more about this case. If what he's saying about AES-256 in the post I linked is true (and from my understanding of encryption, it is), then the whole edward-snowden-prism-wikileaks-miranda thing is being blown WAY out of proportion in true Guardian style. This then leads to heavy handed responses from the gov/police because they feel they can't be seen to be weak in the public eye, even though they may be well aware of what the actual situation is.

 

Honestly, I am a filthy lefty and so normally like reading the guardian. Stuff like this makes me despair though, it's just Daily Mail quality journalism spun from the left rather than the right.

[seawolf]

So, I'm only barely following this, but has anyone else noticed that either the Guardian are fobbing people off saying they've destroyed the machine holding evidence re Snowden, or are they using a really bad picture?

 

NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files | World news | The Guardian

 

That's 2 mac mainboards (neither from the model on the right), a graphics card and a TFT controller. No hard drives, memory, anything. Something afoot?

 

The something afoot is that much of the events in that article sound entirely fabricated. That is not how the NSA or GCHQ would take care of business. The computer(s) would have been seized and/or the Guardian network hacked without their knowledge and we would have never heard anything about it. Unless this bizarre episode was just a cover for what GCHQ was really doing at the Guardian...

[synaesthesia]

Indeed, much of the point of my post is that something doesn't quite add up, as would often appear to be the case with this sort of happening.

[Flatpackhamster]

Doesn't matter if the guy stopped was a journalist or not, he still shouldn't have been stopped. The government knew about it and tried fobbing the responsibility for the incident off to the Police. Later the government admit the Miranda detention, alongside the Guardian ransacking, was a show of force and to deter others from reporting on the Snowden case (basically bullying!). Then they confess that it was authorised by higher ups and cross-party squabbling began between Lib Dem and Conservative over who signed the order.

 

Meanwhile the entire country has lost it's credibility and is no longer considered safe from a freedom of speech angle. If you go anywhere near the UK with potential Snowden material you get arrested and bullied by spooks.

 

So if intelligence indicates that someone entering the UK is carrying material that could be a credible threat to national security, are you saying that we shouldn't ever stop them?

[sonofsanta]

So if intelligence indicates that someone entering the UK is carrying material that could be a credible threat to national security, are you saying that we shouldn't ever stop them?

 

The problem is that the law is written such that you can only stop someone who is specifically and personally involved in the preparation or undertaking of a terrorism act themselves. This was patently not true in the case of David Miranda - argue all you like about whether the information he carried could be used to do that or not (though given that it was all encrypted I'm going to say "not"), the fact is that he himself was not a terrorist planning to do anything. Therefore the Met/government acted outside of its authority in detaining him.

 

Whether or not we should have a law that allows them to do that is a separate argument. As it stands, they do not have that right, yet they still undertook the action.

[seawolf]

What most people in the world fail to realise about the work done by the NSA and GCHQ is that they tend to deal with potentially volatile situations and dangerous events in the world rather quietly in the interest of protecting peace and order as much as possible. If the general population knew what other supposedly friendly nations were doing to or against them the world would be at war continuously (on a large and violent scale). Mankind is not good at heart or generally charitable towards his neighbour and much of the hospitality between many nations is a complete facade.

 

Snowden is a fool in the sense that he is like a bull in a china shop having no understanding of the true nature and purpose of the intelligence he had access to. He thinks he knows much, but he understands very little because he only has a few pieces to a very large puzzle and no picture to guide him. It's as if a small child stumbled upon a loaded machine gun...

[CAM]

So if intelligence indicates that someone entering the UK is carrying material that could be a credible threat to national security, are you saying that we shouldn't ever stop them?

 

And how do you define credible threat? A man walks through the airport to enter the UK. Intelligence indicates he is a firearms owner, he has a train timetable and has had E-Mails intercepted from abroad about shooting stuff in train stations.

 

Is this man a terrorist intent on causing damage to the transport system? Or is this man merely a farmer on his way home from holiday, pops some rabbits in his field then sits down to a shiny new copy of BF4 that he played abroad at Gamescom and told his mates about online? Should he be subject to 9 hours of detention at the government's whim because someone at the security services is over-paranoid and put 2+2 together to make 100? It does happen...

 

Or in the Miranda case, he has links to someone they don't like. He visited someone else they don't like, so the government decided to use him as a show of force to intimidate not just Miranda but the people he has links to. Security services tread the fine line between safety and intrusion, but participating in state sponsored intimidation and threats against people who have not done anything illegal is overstepping said line by a large margin.

[pcstru]

What most people in the world fail to realise about the work done by the NSA and GCHQ is that they tend to deal with potentially volatile situations and dangerous events in the world rather quietly in the interest of protecting peace and order as much as possible.

That must be the bits we don't see then since the bits we do see more frequently suggest they are barely competent enough to tie their own shoelaces.

If the general population knew what other supposedly friendly nations were doing to or against them the world would be at war continuously (on a large and violent scale). Mankind is not good at heart or generally charitable towards his neighbour and much of the hospitality between many nations is a complete facade.

 

Snowden is a fool in the sense that he is like a bull in a china shop having no understanding of the true nature and purpose of the intelligence he had access to. He thinks he knows much, but he understands very little because he only has a few pieces to a very large puzzle and no picture to guide him. It's as if a small child stumbled upon a loaded machine gun...

I doubt many people in the 'general population' really think other nations are not out to protect their own interests just as much as their own nation is. What I think Snowden was a little miffed about was quite the extent of the states snooping that was operating outside of legal oversight when the snooping is directed at the states own citizens. There are existing laws and procedures on the books for tapping communications of suspects who are entitled to the protection of the law of their own country. Apparently those laws are no longer fashionable and we have moved into a more Big Brother "Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear", mode. I wonder how long it will be before we dispense with trial and all that rather inconvenient pa lava and just pop off a hellfire missle from an unmanned to punish the miscreants in the sink estates.

[Arthur]

Guardian told to destroy NSA files for national security, says Clegg

 

Clegg's spokesman confirms that Sir Jeremy Heywood made request on instructions of David Cameron