Re: <nettime> All Snowden Papers?

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

A stimulating prolegomena (if that is till in use), Patrice.

Whither the documents, actual or mythical? Outside NSA,
allegedly, but who knows for sure. A safe place to store them
would be on a NSA server, hidden by Snowden with commonplace
hiding techniques, or on another cloud-like or commodious network
of servers of which the USG is the premier possessor. Perhaps
at the Utah Data Center or one of the dot-nsa or dot-intel server
farms-clouds, to which Snowden had, has, access to, with allegedly
full administrator privileges supplemented by social engineering
of fellow sysadmins. Hiding in plain sight is a specialty of sysadmins
to bollix superiors and one another.

Claiming to have given the whole collection to relatively inexperienced
outlets who could barely understand what was given, mesmerized by
classification headings, genuine or forged, would be consistent
with superior technical prowess at bamboozling high intellects
armed only with rhetoric, performance, words and literary
cryptanalysis and cryptography.

What has happened so far is a huge campaign of valorizing and
prizing the press's role in parceling out what amounts to stripteasing
revelations. Capsuled as "the Snowden and Post-Snowden era."
These terms are press conceits to excuse incomprehension of
the technical material, the profuse redactions and excisions,
the selectivity, the hedgy speculation, the mountain-making of
molehills of sparse documentation.

Your proposed broader and deeper consideration of ways official
secrecy manipulates the commonweal is on target, as is the suggestion
of to publish or not the full Snowden collection as a diversion. Virtually
all discussion has been about the press's production of the Snowden
material, with only a small amount about the material itself, no doubt
due the limited amount releasd.

Would this change with full release? Or would the discussion drift
further from technical reality if most of the material is incomprehensible
to literary practitioners who in turn will rise to the occasion to fabricate
a literary cryptographic reality comforting to technical secretkeepers
highly adept at fomenting literary conceits via leaks, press releases,
DC briefings, national security coaching, peace and war studies,
the gamut of never quite post-war anywhere.

Releasing all of the Snowden documents, fully releasing to the public,
not stashing in the closets of a few arrogant, mercenary outlets, nor
in searchable archives restricted to "responsible" parties, would be
saluatory for cracking the mirror glass of official secrecy where officials
and their journalist and legal cohorts can see us but we cannot see them.


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