Edward Snowden and his allegedly drained laptops

[morningfog]

* * *

There’s a semi-technical dimension to the laptop frenzy. It appears to assume that Snowden would, like, keep his best stuff on his hard drives. Greenwald on that topic: “The media obsession with how many laptops he has – as though there’s a correlation between number of laptops and quantity of documents he’s carrying – is grounded in staggering ignorance. It’s not 1986. Not only have floppy disks been invented, but so have CD-ROMs and now USB sticks. The number of laptops has to do with security measures for communicating. Nobody minimally sophisticated carries around sensitive documents on laptops. And Snowden is nothing if not extremely sophisticated in such matters.”

We’ll surely hear more about these machines and how foreign officials pounced upon them. Mitchell’s remarks, guarded though they were, prove that once speculation surfaces in a prominent outlet and takes a spin around the Internet, it’s virtually impossible to sweep up its residue.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/07/30/edward-snowden-and-his-allegedly-drained-laptops/

[Kolesar]

1. So, little Edward is the "Rainman" of file encryption...eom

[morningfog]

2. That's not what was suggested.

[Kolesar]

11. Greenwald on that topic:

“The media obsession with how many laptops he has – as though there’s a correlation between number of laptops and quantity of documents he’s carrying – is grounded in staggering ignorance. It’s not 1986. Not only have floppy disks been invented, but so have CD-ROMs and now USB sticks. The number of laptops has to do with security measures for communicating. Nobody minimally sophisticated carries around sensitive documents on laptops. And Snowden is nothing if not extremely sophisticated in such matters.”

[frylock]

42. still not getting the rainman reference..

did rainman carry jump drives? better luck tomorrow.

[kentuck]

3. Rainman? What does that mean?

Did you read the article?

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. It means Kolesar is part of the juvenile name-calling brigade

If they've got nothing else to say, they'll make up some childish name for Snowden, or a stupid photoshop. Or for Greenwald. Or for Morales.

[think]

9. yup

[backscatter712]

33. Way to belittle autistic people! You're a real class act! n/t

[Kolesar]

45. You're a fun guy

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=508782

[backscatter712]

47. That's not a denial. n/t

[djean111]

4. Yes, every time my hard drive fills up, I buy another computer.

Those thumb drives are sooooo expensive.
That part - the four laptops!!!!!??!!???!!! - always made me laugh.
Well, so did the moving boxes.

[think]

14. I never understood the fixation on 4 laptops either.

That is until this thread. I now realize that people who don't use computers for the bulk of their work may not understand that some folks routinely use multiple computers while working.

[randome]

15. Oh, that's understandable, all right.

It's also clear Snowden had stopped working for the NSA once he stole all those documents and went on the lam.

Maybe he wanted to get in some overtime while in Hong Kong?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Don't ever underestimate the long-term effects of a good night's sleep.[/center][/font][hr]

[think]

18. He's a fucking geek spy who lives online. Good grief.

I've got 3 laptops running right now. Granted one I'm just looking up recipes on one for dinner but I like working on multiple projects.


Apparently you aren't a fan of multitasking...

[djean111]

27. I just use dual monitors and Firefox on one computer. Multi-tasking easy!

Started doing that when I had an online research job. Spoiled me, really. I don't even like having to use just a laptop screen and keyboard any more.
I can see where people would use multiple laptops, but the way Snowden's laptops were sensationalized seemed to imply that he just had so much information it would not fit on just one laptop.

[think]

28. That works but my computers are older and tend to crash

when I get too much going on. And I'm lazy.....

[think]

30. Got my old laptop hooked up to an old 42inch flat screen for surfing

Another laptop for work stuff sitting by my side. And my Dell tablet with keyboard looking for recipes.

I plan to put a monitor and Google TV in the kitchen soon so I don't have to take my tablet downstairs with my recipes.

Still learning to file share over the network between all my devices but loving the freedom....

[nadinbrzezinski]

41. What? When did that happen?

The phone is a computer, my IPad is a computer and so is the MacBook.

[reformist2]

5. Maybe those boxes in his garage were full of laptops???

The mystery deepens...

[djean111]

6. Bwah! I was just thinking that, myself!

Maybe the CIA really just needs to have their agents carry really big magnets around!

[Downwinder]

7. How do you walk through the airport with four laptops

without attracting the interest of TSA?

[think]

12. It is not uncommon for a business person to travel with mutliple laptops

Last time I checked it was legal to own 4 laptops and take them with you.

I routinely travel with 2 laptops with no nefarious intent. It's just part of my job. And my job is not very sophisticated.

As anyone remotely computer savvy knows 64 gig usb flash drives to 256 gigs in size are easy to purchase fairly inexpensively.

http://www.amazon.com/electronics/dp/B0039PBFNE

256 gigs is a huge amount of data space. Perhaps even overkill for the needs of storage of simple documents.

http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx1TENXFLW6TAJT

[hootinholler]

24. Why would the TSA have any interest?

All they care about is are the laptops bombs. It's none of their fucking business why anyone has anything that's not on a prohibited list.

[telclaven]

37. Multi-laptops = no big deal

Last time I came back from Korea, I had a rolling case with 8 laptops, a shoulder bag with a laptop and a Xoom. The only thing I had to do was demonstrate that I hadn't bought the computers in Korea and was attempting to bring them in for resale.

[randome]

10. So why did he have 4 laptops, then? Anybody?

Or was that original report in error?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Don't ever underestimate the long-term effects of a good night's sleep.[/center][/font][hr]

[think]

13. I use 2 or 3 computers routinely when working.

It just allows me to multitask more efficiently and work on different projects at the same time.

[KurtNYC]

23. From the quoted article: "The number of laptops has to do with security measures for communicating."

[KharmaTrain]

16. Laptops...Oh How So early 2000s...

...I know a lot of people who do a lot of their work now on their tablets. They either use portable storage devices or "cloud" their data. The era of the laptop is coming to a close and technology moves on...

[Revanchist]

19. I think it would be foolish to put the sort of info Snowden had...

I think it would be foolish to put the sort of info Snowden has on a cloud server where it could "disappear", but a couple of thumb drives or a portable hard drive would do the trick.

[KharmaTrain]

20. Yep...

...you can store up to 1 terra on a portable drive you can carry in your pocket rather than having to drag around a bunch of machines that probably hold half to a third of that amount of data.

I agree about the cloud...just mentioning it as to how many people I know are using them. They're willing to take the chance of having someone hack their account for not having their important data get glitched or lost in their own machine.

Cheers...

[davidpdx]

21. I've seen drives now with more than 1 terra

You can easily find 2-3 terra drives now.

[RC]

26. And besides that, clouds are in trouble because to the NSA spying.

People are waking up and not trusting them so much anymore.
Also, laptops are much more powerful and versatile computers than tablets. Real keyboards, usb ports, more memory, all around faster. More storage. Try doing a spreadsheet on a tablet sometime. Laptops and desktops, real keyboards and mice are going to be around for a long time yet.

[MrScorpio]

17. "Drained" laptops? Is that like how Dracula drained virgins of blood?

Unless there's been a change in how cleared for classified data devices are being used, I have no idea what he's talking about.

[Violet_Crumble]

22. I was thinking more like draining oil from yr car...

Y'know, undo the plug thingy at the bottom and let all the stuff drain out. I've been looking at the bottom of my laptop for some way to drain it, but so far no luck!

[frylock]

43. you have to pull the hard drive..

depending on the manufacturer, the drain plug is usually on the bottom. I believe that Seagate positions there drain plug on the side. of course, this doesn't apply to SSD. in that case, you need a special device to siphon the data from the HDD.

[PowerToThePeople]

25. oh please

I probably have 20 or so fully functioning systems in my house.

Many more if you include parts machines.

[LanternWaste]

29. what then is the precise amount of laptops a person may own before they are considered suspect?

It does seem to beg the question to the less sharp, what then is the precise amount of laptops a person may own before they are considered suspect? Two, three, four?

Additionally, on what objective number is that based on?

[whttevrr]

31. 4 Laptops :: Security?

Perhaps he uses the laptops to network his initial insertion point into the interwebs.

He might use one laptop to offload some of the encryption tasks. Even the most robust single laptop might have issues with processing real time encryption, video processing, and other related communication tasks.

Or... it may involve separate computers for creating virtual machines. He might be running different OS's to thwart detection and trying to run several virtual machines on one laptop could bog the processor down.

Just spitballing some ideas.

But I also kind of chuckled about the 'remote draining of laptops'. It seems silly that anyone who was getting paid as a systems administrator would not know enough to protect his own computer. You really can't magic wand into a computer and drain it of its information.

[bemildred]

32. One machine, three TOR routers.

Make packet assembly a problem, esp. in the bulk collection arrangement on the trunk lines.

Edit: other things of that nature one could do at the hardware level to further mung things up: packet size, sequence numbers, etc. And datagrams. Datagrams are open, but also have little info in the "wrapper", and you can lie.

And you could probably do some interesting things with old neglected TCP/IP protocols too.

[whttevrr]

34. How anonymous is TOR?

If the NSA controlled multiple high bandwidth nodes within the TOR network, couldn't they intercept communications from within TOR itself?

[bemildred]

35. IP traffic is fragmented in transit, broken into small pieces of a specified maximum size.

The pieces need not follow the same path to the destination, in fact there may be multiple copies of the same data following different paths.

TOR routers were invented to see that they don't follow the same path, and to otherwise thwart sniffers that try to collect and reassamble traffic in transit, which is easy in vanilla TCP/IP. TOR spreads the pieces around and masks the true destinations in transit, and I would presume obfuscates things in other ways. I am no expert on TOR, but I know what it's for.

The destination eventually gets all the pieces and gets correct info to reassemble them, in transit the info is not available, so it becomes a very large and intractable computing problem to figure out how to match them up.

Edit: watchers will know you used your TOR router(s), and at the other end they will see the traffic go from TOR routers to your destination, but they won't know where it came from or how it got there otherwise, or generally be able to re-assemble the content (though they might get lucky with small stuff).

[whttevrr]

36. I get the frame dispersion thing...

But...

When logging into TOR you pick a node to transverse the inner network. So if I offer a high bandwidth node, can't I intercept that traffic before it gets dispersed within the TOR network?

[bemildred]

38. TOR networks are dynamic. You can have your own router, not proprietary.

Thus your traffic is NEVER exposed on the open net, even the TOR routers in transit don't know how to assemble it, they only have pieces. YOU own the router, if you want. All the other routers are just passive transport to the destination, in pieces.

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are secure too, port-to-port encryption on the Internet. Even if someone can reassemble it, they cant decrypt it.

But TOR is to make the metadata (for IP traffic) useless too.

[whttevrr]

39. Well...

My knowledge of TOR is limited... almost nil. I did once set it up on a virtual machine, but I just wanted to test it out. Most of what I do on the internet is read the news and watch Netflix. I occasionally try to find TV episodes that I've missed... but nothing that needs TOR. And, I would hate to use up bandwidth that others might need elsewhere.

But I would like to know how Snowden is using multiple laptops to secure his communications...

[bemildred]

40. Good luck. nt

[frylock]

44. well, maybe YOU can't, but the Chinese?

they have special remote draining utilities.

[Logical]

46. Interesting! n-t