A new US Intelligence Leak: Details on the Drone Strike Program

It’s been just over two years since Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of NSA documents, and more than five since Chelsea Manning gave WikiLeaks a megacache of military and diplomatic secrets. Now there appears to be a new source on that scale of classified leaks—this time with a focus on drones.

On Thursday the Intercept published a groundbreaking new collection of documents related to America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles to kill foreign targets in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen. The revelations about the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command actions include primary source evidence that as many as 90 percent of US drone killings in one five month period weren’t the intended target, that a former British citizen was killed in a drone strike despite repeated opportunities to capture him instead, and details of the grisly process by which the American government chooses who will die, down to the “baseball cards” of profile information created for individual targets, and the chain of authorization that goes up directly to the president.1

All of this new information, according to the Intercept, appears to have come from a single anonymous whistleblower. A spokesperson for the investigative news site declined to comment on that source. But unlike the leaks of Snowden or Manning, the spilled classified materials are accompanied by statements about the whistleblower’s motivation in his or her own words.

Wired link.

link to Intercept with the drones dox.

Introducing Darkleaks: a Bitcoin Block Chain Derived Distributed Market for Secrets

Whistleblowers and those individuals that are simply out to make a buck out of any confidential and valuable information, can now offer it for sale on Darkleaks, a decentralized, anonymous black market on the Internet.

The Darkleaks project is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, and can be used by downloading this software package (source code is open).

The process of releasing and buying the released information works like this (as explained by Zozan Cudi, a member of the Kurdish People's Defense Units):

"When the leaker selects a document, it is broken up into segments. Each of the segments is hashed, and a Bitcoin address is generated using the hash as the secret key. From this public key, a new key is generated to encrypt the segments. The encrypted segments are released for public download with the list of Bitcoin addresses.

To prove the authenticity of the document, the system uses a trustless provably fair mechanism. When announcing the leak, the leaker chooses a date and number of the chunks to be released. Based on the Bitcoin block hash at that time, some provably fair random numbers are chosen to select segments to be unlocked. This allows the community to verify the veracity of the file and decide whether they want to pay for the remaining encrypted segments.

The buyers then send Bitcoins to these addresses. When the leaker decides to claim the Bitcoins from the private key, due to how Bitcoin is designed he must release the public key which allows the buyers to decrypt the document."

The marketplace is supposed to offer anonymity for both the leaker and the buyer - the two don't interact, and there is no central operator who might somehow discover their identities.

link.

Third Crazy Thought of the Day: Was Snowden a Spy?

I've been trying to figure out the Edward Snowden saga from its get go.  Very little of it makes a lot of sense.  At least in the parts I am able to pay attention to. 

The way the entire adventure (I cannot think of another word, really, which covers this) has been handled has struck me as odd.  He leaks.  Then after he leaks, he unveils himself and wraps himself in the mantle of martyr (prepackaged) and then he bolts to Hong Kong.  (Really, Edward?  Really?)  Then he bolts to Moscow, but can't ind somewhere to go.  Then he starts threatening about what he's carrying.  And the rest of the world suddenly does not want to touch him with a 3m pole.

Noel put up a post about Noel's support of the leak, but a definite lack of support for the man or what he has done since.  It followed a small comment I made myself.  Once his post went up, I thought perhaps I ought to do the same.  I supported the leak of the NSA programs, which are at best borderline illegal and a violation of the Constitution.  However, his behavior since has been anything but high minded and I do not support it.

While I was mulling what exactly I would write for my post, I had a crazy thought.

As a leaker, Snowden makes no sense.  The weird idea came to me...what-if he was never what he said he was.  What-if, Snowden was actually a spy and sensed he was nearing the end of his run and did NOT want to end up like Ames or Pollard.  Being a smart man, he sees packs everything and throws a proverbial grenade at the government by claiming whistleblower status.  He easily ropes in wikileaks: Assange will believe anything anti-US and it gets Assange back in the spot light.  This buys Snowden another source of $ for travel and whatnot until he's in a cozy spot and can sell off what he has.  Then he splits.

And we see a good chunk of the in open saga.

wow.  In a way, it all kinda fits.  Tactically smart guy with a bit more confidence in himself than warranted and has watched enough of others' failures, espionage and leaking, but it all blows up in the end.  A nearly caught spy.  Its an interesting, crazy thought, but I have no support for it other than what my gut is telling me.

I wonder, even with his enormous salary(*), he has been spending beyond his means.  It IS Hawaii and that's not a cheap place to live.  Sooo...investigative journalists!  Here's a chance at a major scoop.  Go dig up what you can on Edward Snowden in Hawaii and find out what his spending patterns were before the leak.  

Betcha something will turn up interesting. 

*.  Which took a hit three months before his leaking.  40% hit even.  That's gotta suck.