How Snowden secretly transmitted information

There are several linux operating systems out there that are designed for privacy and secrecy. It's been acknowledged for a long time that one of the best ways to do such is to mount them on read-only media, like a CD or DVD, boot from the media, do what you need to do and shut down. Nothing is written to the local drive, so there's no forensic evidence from local computers to recover. Also, you're immune to malware being installed on your system since nothing can be written to your drive and the hard drive in the system is disconnected.

This is what Snowden did using a distribution called TAILS, it's a product of two anonymous groups working towards the same goal. You can load it on a thumb drive or CD/DVD, boot from it, and it provides you with a browser and Open Office installation and routes everything through TOR. It has other security features to keep you anonymous and encrypted. This, apparently, is how he communicated with the writers that he'd selected to send documents to.

Apparently it is not a casual installation and takes some configuration work to make it function properly. Not for casual players.

I think there are some networks where this wouldn't work, such as at my uni. Before you use a device on their network, you have to sign in to your student account and register the MAC address, then reboot your device. I think they're using a combination of MAC registry at the switch level and also perhaps a persistent cookie, though I haven't checked in to that. I suppose you could use TAILS to register the MAC address, which would be the address of the local computer's ethernet card, but you wouldn't be able to store the cookie, so I don't know how TAILS would work in an environment like that, or even if it could get out to the internet.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tails/

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/04/15/1940240/snowden-used-the-linux-distro-designed-for-internet-anonymity

A ten-point plan to reduce NSA/GCHQ/MOUSE spying

Edward Snowden was a featured speaker last month at both TED and SXSW, he teleconferenced in. From his talks, Wired came up with a list of ten things that can be done to improve security and privacy of our information. It's a pretty good list, but not one that the individual can do much with, it's pretty much entirely dependent on being implemented by ISPs and web sites and engineers. Still, it's not a bad start.

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/wishlist/

The USA is no longer a democracy?!

Interesting, and I think I can agree with the conclusion.

"Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/14

http://classic.slashdot.org/story/14/04/16/0221210