The most disturbing part of this for me is how:

• 99% of Snowden's revelations have never been published

• several of the existing copies of Snowden's documents have subsequently been destroyed

I also find it depressing that people like Appelbaum are routinely criminalized:

Public speeches made by Appelbaum taking a humorous and provocative tone and with titles like “Sysadmins of the World, Unite!” were interpreted as an attempt to recruit sources and as incitement to steal classified documents. To this day, however, there are no publicly-known charges against Appelbaum or Harrison.

According to Jacob Appelbaum, The Intercept - the media outlet co-founded by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to publish the Snowden files - is no longer in possession of the documents. "I was informed that they destroyed their copy of the archive", Appelbaum tells us.

I thought this was an interesting tidbit. It's been a minute since I heard anything about Appelbaum. A while back he had some metoo type allegations, but I never really paid attention to what became of that or him afterward.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20895270/jacob-appelbaum-peter-todd-rape-allegations-defamation-bitcoin-tor

This is the most recent news that pops up about that controversy.

I don't disagree with Appelbaum, however, that it's a little bit unconscionable that those files were destroyed. There's a lot of valid criticism in the way Wikileaks does things, with a large data-dump, but it never really felt like we actually got the full picture of what was happening with the Snowden files, with so much of it never actually being published or written about.

I do wonder if Laura Poitras still has a copy, but as a filmmaker who works less in information security, it seems more doubtful.

The compromised Lawful Interception infrastructure is a pretty big deal. It shows the risks of having that sort of backdoor and makes it harder to argue for them. (Unless you're the UK or Australia, then lol what privacy).

A timely reminder that none of this shit was rolled-back and in fact in some countries *cough* UK *cough* it was simply made legal with new laws.

We're screwed, and have been for decades...

The Cavium stuff mentioning RNGs being compromised reminded me about this recent headline about fTPM RNG being wonky on some AMD motherboards.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/linus_torvalds_ftpm/

Probably not related, right? I wonder who the fTPM manufacture is for these boards.

What an authoritarian hellhole!