As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden [View all]

[MohRokTah]

This is from Stewart Baker, so take with appropriate quantities of salt (the infographic is large, so I gave a link):

As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden

The evidence is mounting that Edward Snowden and his journalist allies have helped al Qaeda improve their security against NSA surveillance. In May, Recorded Future, a [-]predictive analytics[/-] web intelligence firm, published a persuasive timeline showing that Snowden’s revelations about NSA’s capabilities were followed quickly by a burst of new, robust encryption tools from al-Qaeda and its affiliates:

http://www.skatingonstilts.com/.a/6a011570268f42970c01a511ef8bd5970c-pi
http://www.skatingonstilts.com/.a/6a011570268f42970c01a511ef8bd5970c-pi]

This is hardly a surprise for those who live in the real world. But it was an affront to Snowden’s defenders, who’ve long insisted that journalists handled the NSA leaks so responsibly that no one can identify any damage that they have caused.

In damage control mode, Snowden’s defenders first responded to the Recorded Future analysis by pooh-poohing the terrorists’ push for new encryption tools. Bruce Schneier declared that the change might actually hurt al Qaeda: “I think this will help US intelligence efforts. Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight.”

Schneier is usually smarter than this. In fact, the product al Qaeda had been recommending until the leaks, Mujahidin Secrets, probably did qualify as “home-brew encryption.” Indeed, Bruce Schneier dissed Mujahidin Secrets in 2008 on precisely that ground, saying “No one has explained why a terrorist would use this instead of PGP.”

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