The message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ¶ ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him — traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.I am staying at the Hotel Metropol, a whimsical sand-colored monument to pre-revolutionary art nouveau. Built during the time of Czar Nicholas II, it later became the Second House of the Soviets after the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. In the restaurant, Lenin would harangue his followers in a greatcoat and Kirza high boots. Now his image adorns a large plaque on the exterior of the hotel, appropriately facing away from the symbols of the new Russia on the next block — Bentley and Ferrari dealerships and luxury jewelers like Harry Winston and Chopard.
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/Also see:Planned U.S. cyber warfare program could hurt innocent countries – Snowden
A developing U.S. cyber security program would not only hunt down and halt potential computer attacks but also strike back without staff oversight, according to former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden.In an interview with WIRED magazine made public Wednesday, Snowden said the program – MonsterMind – could hurt countries caught in the middle as hackers could disguise the origin of their attacks by routing them through computers in other nations.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/08/13/us-cybersecurity-snowden-idINKBN0GD1JM20140813Edward Snowden’s latest secrets: U.S. was responsible for an entire country’s Internet outage
This week Wired published a comprehensive profile of “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” Edward Snowden. The seven digital pages of James Bamford’s three days with the National Security Agency whistle-blower give a glance at Snowden’s back story, and then follow his career trajectory from the Army Special Ops — where he broke both legs and was discharged — to the CIA, and then his final stints with NSA contractors Dell and Booz Allen.Sprinkled into the profile are revelations — some brand-new, others previously reported — of our government’s abuse of power, mass surveillance and the blasé attitude of fellow workers. Below are the most interesting granules taken from the profile.
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/13/edward_snowdens_latest_secrets_u_s_was_responsible_for_an_entire_countrys_internet_outage/Snowden claims you should blame the NSA for a 2012 Syrian Internet outage, not Assad
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden says the NSA was responsible for a 2012 Syrian Internet outage, in a new profile published Wednesday by Wired: One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO — a division of NSA hackers — had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead — rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet — although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible.The claim here seems pretty thinly sourced, relying on the hearsay of another member of the intelligence community. Snowden does not claim to have documents to back up the story, although in the same article implies he hadn’t read through all of the information he secreted out of government computer systems — so it’s always possible more substantial evidence to back up the story might emerge. The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/13/snowden-claims-you-should-blame-the-nsa-for-a-2012-syrian-internet-outage-not-assad/Why the U.S. Can’t Automatically Retaliate in Cyberspace, Yet
To hear Edward Snowden tell it, the secret program that finally drove the former National Security Agency contractor to leak sensitive documents would have allowed the U.S. to retaliate automatically against foreign cyberattacks.But MonsterMind, as Snowden says the project was called, would face one big hurdle: The White House and Pentagon are not believed to have decided when the U.S. can strike back in cyberspace.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/13/why-the-u-s-cant-automatically-retaliate-in-cyberspace-yet/?mod=ST1