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Hacktivist | 57
ment. Snowden next introduced Sandvik, who took the podium and
discussed the work of the Tor Project, stressing the importance of
expanding the Tor network. Following their presentations, Snowden
and Sandvik took questions from the audience.
The Oahu CryptoParty, according to Sandvik, ended about
to:00 p.m. No one objected to Mills’s making a video of the meet-
ing, even though it was dedicated to the idea of protecting personal
privacy. The video was not posted on the Internet, so presumably
Snowden wanted it for his own purposes. Afterward, Sandvik went
to a local diner called Zippy’s for a late dinner. She left Hawaii two
days later.
Not all the hacktivists that Snowden invited were able to attend.
Parker Higgins, for example, a prime mover in the Electronic Fron-
tier Foundation and founder of the San Francisco CryptoParty, wrote
back to him that he was unable to attend the December CryptoParty
because of the high price of the airfare that month between San Fran-
cisco and Honolulu. He added that he would try to attend Snowden’s
next CryptoParty, which was scheduled for February 23, 2013. (Hig-
® gins would make headlines in 2013 by flying a chartered blimp over ®
the NSA’s secret facility in Utah and photographing it from the air.)
Snowden’s double duty continued: downloading secret docu-
ments while remaining in touch with some of the leading figures
in the Tor Project under his various aliases. He also continued to
invite activists to his CryptoParties, and he openly advertised them
on the Internet until 2013. The CIA’s former deputy director Morell,
who reviewed the security situation at the NSA in 2014 as a mem-
ber of President Obama’s NSA Review Committee, found that the
NSA in the post-Cold War age had encouraged its technical workers
to freely discuss challenges that arose in its computer operations.
“The idea was to spread knowledge and learn from the successes
of others,” Morell wrote, “but it created enormous security vulner-
ability, given the always-existent risk of an insider committed to
stealing secrets.” According to a former intelligence executive, this
new “open culture,” exemplified by largely unrestricted entry to the
NSANet by civilian contractors, fit the culture of the young civilians
on the “geek squads” who now ran the NSA’s computer networks.
It was remarkable that even in such an “open culture,” Snowden’s
| | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 57 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | |
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019545
Extracted Information
Dates
Document Details
| Filename | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019545.jpg |
| File Size | 0.0 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 85.0% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,492 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-04T16:38:36.784060 |