Edward Snowden, American Hero

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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:45 pm

eventually I will translate this from Der Speigel

Geheimdokumente: NSA horcht EU-Vertretungen mit Wanzen aus

Von Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid und Holger Stark


DPA
NSA-Hauptquartier in Fort Meade: Lauschangriff auf EU-Vertretungen
Der US-Geheimdienst NSA späht offenbar gezielt die Europäische Union aus. Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen installierten die Amerikaner Wanzen in der EU-Vertretung in Washington und infiltrierten das Computernetzwerk. Auch in New York und Brüssel gab es Angriffe.

Hamburg - Die amerikanische National Security Agency (NSA) überwacht nicht nur die Kommunikation europäischer Bürger, sondern späht offenbar auch gezielt Gebäude der EU aus. Das geht aus geheimen Dokumenten hervor, die der Whistleblower Edward Snowden besitzt und die der SPIEGEL in Teilen einsehen konnte. In einem als "streng geheim" eingestuften Papier der NSA vom September 2010 wird beschrieben, wie der Geheimdienst die diplomatische Vertretung der EU in Washington attackiert.

Demnach wurden nicht nur Wanzen in dem Gebäude im Zentrum der US-Hauptstadt installiert, sondern auch das interne Computernetzwerk wurde infiltriert. Auf diese Weise bekommen die Amerikaner nicht nur Zugang zu Besprechungen in den Räumlichkeiten der EU, sondern auch zu E-Mails und internen Dokumenten auf den Computern.
Die Attacke auf Einrichtungen der EU zeigt eine weitere Ebene der Spähaktivitäten der NSA. Seit Wochen tauchen Details über Prism und weitere Überwachungsprogramme auf, die der Whistleblower Snowden zusammengetragen hat. Auch der britische Geheimdienst GCHQ führt demnach ein ähnliches Programm namens Tempora aus, mit dem weltweit Telefon- und Internetverbindungen überwacht werden.

Nach den Unterlagen, die der SPIEGEL einsehen konnte, ist auch die EU-Vertretung bei den Vereinten Nationen auf die ähnliche Weise wie jene in Washington attackiert worden. In dem NSA-Dokument vom September 2010 werden die Europäer ausdrücklich als Angriffsziel benannt.

Lauschangriff auf EU-Telefonanlage in Brüssel

ANZEIGE

Offenbar zeichnet der US-Geheimdienst auch für einen Lauschangriff verantwortlich, der in Brüssel stattgefunden hat. Vor etwas mehr als fünf Jahren fielen EU-Sicherheitsexperten mehrere fehlgeschlagene Anrufe auf, die offenbar einer Fernwartungsanlage im Justus-Lipsius-Gebäude gegolten hatten. Dort sitzen der EU-Ministerrat und der Europäische Rat.
Die Spur des Anrufers, die die Sicherheitsbehörden verfolgten, führte ins Nato-Hauptquartier im Brüsseler Vorort Evere. Eine genaue Analyse zeigte, dass die Attacken auf die Telekommunikationsanlage offenbar aus einem gesondert abgeschirmten Bereich der Nato-Einrichtung stammten, der von Experten der NSA genutzt wird.

Eine Überprüfung der Fernwartungsanlage ergab, dass sie mehrfach aus genau diesem Nato-Komplex angerufen und auch erreicht wurde. Jeder EU-Mitgliedstaat hat im Justus-Lipsius-Gebäude Räume, in die sich Minister zurückziehen können, dort gibt es auch Telefon- und Internetanschlüsse.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 29, 2013 11:23 pm

Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears
Who is planting anti-Snowden attacks with Buzzfeed, and why is the website playing along?
June 28, 2013 |


Since journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of the National Security Agency’s PRISM domestic surveillance program, he and his source, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, have come in for a series of ugly attacks. On June 26, the day that the New York Daily News published a straightforward smear piece on Greenwald, the website Buzzfeed rolled out a remarkably similar article, a lengthy profile that focused on Greenwald’s personal life and supposed eccentricities.

Both outlets attempted to make hay out of Greenwald’s involvement over a decade ago on the business end of a porn distribution company, an arcane detail that had little, if any, bearing on the domestic spying scandal he sparked. The coordinated nature of the smears prompted Reuters media columnist Jack Shafer to ask if an opposition research firm was behind them. “I wonder who commissioned the file,” he mused on Twitter.

A day before the Greenwald attacks appeared, Buzzfeed published an anonymously sourced story about the government of Ecuador, which had reportedly offered asylum to Snowden (Ecuador has just revoked a temporary travel document issued to Snowden). Written by Rosie Gray and Adrian Carasquillo, the article relied on documents marked as “secret” that were passed to Buzzfeed by sources described as “activists who wished to call attention to the [Ecuadorian] government’s spying practices in the context of its new international role” as the possible future sanctuary of Snowden.

Gray and Carasquillo reported that Ecuador’s intelligence service had attempted to procure surveillance technology from two Israeli firms. Without firm proof that the system was ever put into use, the authors claimed the documents “suggest a commitment to domestic surveillance that rivals the practices by the United States’ National Security Agency.” (Buzzfeed has never published a critical report on the $3 billion in aid the US provides to Israel each year, which is used to buy equipment explicitly designed for repressing, spying on and killing occupied Palestinians).

Buzzfeed’s Ecuador expose supported a theme increasingly advanced by Snowden’s critics -- that the hero of civil libertarians and government transparency activists was, in fact, a self-interested hypocrite content to seek sanctuary from undemocratic regimes. Curiously, those who seized on the story had no problem with Buzzfeed’s reporters relying on leaked government documents marked as classified. For some Snowden detractors, the issue was apparently not his leaking, but which government his leaks embarrassed.

Questionable journalism ethics, evidence of smears

At first glance, Buzzfeed's Ecuador expose might have seemed like riveting material. Upon closer examination, however, the story turned out to be anything but the exclusive the website promoted it as. In fact, the news of Ecuador’s possible deal with Israeli surveillance firms was reported hours before Buzzfeed’s piece appeared by Aleksander Boyd, a blogger and activist with close ties to right-wing elements in South America. “Rafael Correa's Ecuadorian regime spies on its citizens in a way strikingly similar to what Snowden accuses the U.S. of doing,” claimed Boyd.

Later in the day, Boyd contacted Buzzfeed’s Gray through Twitter, complimenting her piece before commenting, “Evidently Ecuadorian source leaked same info to you guys, seems I jumped the gun before you…”


Click to enlarge.
Since Boyd contacted Gray, who has not publicly responded, Buzzfeed has not credited him or altered its headline to acknowledge that its story was not an exclusive. Buzzfeed’s refusal to acknowledge Boyd was not only a testament to the kind of questionable practices that have plagued the outlet since its inception, it helped obscure the story’s disturbing origins.

Boyd’s disclosure that a single source shopped opposition research to him and Buzzfeed at the same time confirmed the existence of a coordinated campaign orchestrated by elements exploiting the Snowden drama for political gain. Boyd’s remark that he “jumped the gun” suggests that the source intended for Buzzfeed to be the first to publish the story, and that he inadvertently embarrassed the site by running with it before them. There is also the possibility that Boyd was the source all along, and that his tweet to Gray was designed to establish deniability. Either way, the source seemed to be carefully managing the operation, wielding Snowden as a cudgel against the Ecuadorian government and timing the story for maximum impact.

Soliciting smears, dreaming of headless opponents

Who is Boyd, and how did he appear in the middle of the Snowden saga?

A London-based representative of Venezuela’s political opposition, Boyd solicits his services as an opposition researcher, informing potential clients through his official bio, “Alek can be contracted to do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm.”

As I reported for The Electronic Intifada, Boyd has repeatedly promoted terrorism and assassination against members of the elected government of Venezuela. Back in 2004, Boyd wrote, “I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” A year later, he declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with [Hugo] Chavez.”

In 2008, Boyd’s services were contracted by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an NGO run by a veteran conservative activist named Thor Halvorssen. The son of a Venezuelan oligarch and former CIA asset who funneled money to the Nicaraguan Contras, Halvorssen founded HRF to publicize the human rights abuses of Hugo Chavez’s government. His first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, the son of an oil industry executive, is one of the most visible leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, and as such, has received substantial financial support from the US. In 2002, Lopez was among the politicians who momentarily seized power from Chavez during a failed coup attempt. At the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, a yearly confab Halvorssen promotes as “the Davos of human rights,” Lopez was presented to an audience of foreign correspondents and diplomats as a “human rights leader.”

Boyd claimed that during his year and a half working for Halvorssen, he successfully campaigned for the release of Guadelupe Llori, an Ecuadorian opposition politician jailed by Correa under charges of sabotage and terrorism for her role in leading a crippling oil workers’ strike. (After her release, Llori was junketed to Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum). During this time Boyd visited Llori in prison in Ecuador while meeting opposition activists “to coordinate future projects,” as he told an interviewer. Whether this was how he made initial contact with the source that supplied him and Buzzfeed with the documents on Ecuador’s deal with the Israeli surveillance firms is unknown.

Boyd may have never met Buzzfeed’s Gray, however, each are well acquainted with Halvorssen. This May, Gray was among the select cadre of journalists flown to the Oslo Freedom Forum to provide positive PR for Halvorssen and his global operation. Gray returned with a fawning profile of Halvorssen, portraying him as an iconoclastic activist whose “job of opposing strongmen is arguably more media-friendly than that of anyone doing human rights work today.”

In contrast to Buzzfeed’s profile of Greenwald, Gray cast Halvorssen’s eccentricities as charming quirks that bore little relevance to the larger story. And his intimate ties to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and the oligarchic forces seeking to topple socialist-oriented governments in South America went unmentioned.

Right-wing corporate lobbyists target Correa

Ecuador’s Correa is among the most popular of the Latin American leaders to embrace Hugo Chavez’s socialist economic model. Having defiantly defaulted on $3.2 billion in foreign loans, he has been able to leverage his country’s oil wealth to drastically expand social programs, improving access to education and doubling spending on healthcare while lowering poverty rates by a remarkable five percent since he took office in 2007. Naturally, Correa’s rejection of neoliberal policies has earned him a fair share of enemies, especially among the elites who have traditionally governed Ecuador. In 2010, he resisted a coup attempt led by Lucio Gutierrez, a former president who earned the wrath of Ecuador’s poor by implementing crushing IMF-imposed austerity measures.

Correa’s opponents may have resorted to zero-sum politics, but his response has not always been judicious. He has, for example, advanced criminal libel laws as a means of punishing opposition media and has battled indigenous groups that protested his attempts to open their land up to wide-scale state mining operations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused Correa of leading Ecuador “into a new era of widespread repression.”

Of all the enemies Correa has earned, some of his fiercest reside not in Quito, but in the conservative think tanks of Washington. They include George W. Bush’s former Latin America handlers and a coterie of corporate-bankrolled right-wing radicals determined to unravel the South American socialist bloc.

Ezequiel Vazquez Ger, an Argentina-born economist, is among the most aggressive of Correa’s antagonists. Vazquez Ger works for a DC-based lobbying firm run by Otto Reich, a Cuban exile who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the second Bush administration. In 1987, Reich was singled out during the US Comptroller General’s investigation of Iran-Contra for having “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities” on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. He is also suspected of helping the anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch escape prosecution in Venezuela.

Reich contracted Vazquez Ger in 2011 to help him oversee a portfolio of corporate clients that included Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, and Bacardi International, the rum company whose lawyers drafted much of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act tightening the US embargo of Cuba. Before he partnered with Reich, Vazquez Ger served as a Latin American fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a corporate funded think tank that promotes climate change denialism and sweeping deregulation policies.

To compliment their lobbying operation, Vazquez Ger and Reich have churned out a steady stream of op-eds for publications from Foreign Policy to Fox News to the Miami Herald, demonizing the socialist leaders of South America who have stifled the ambitions of multi-national corporations. During the past year, they homed in on Correa, assailing him for sheltering Assange while he cracked down on opposition media. In a June 2012 op-ed for the right-wing Newsmax website, Reich and Vazquez Ger cited Assange as a key reason why the US should refuse to sign any further trade agreements with Ecuador. “Signing or renewing trade agreements with Ecuador will only allow Rafael Correa to continue undermining US foreign policy,” they wrote, “trading with our enemies, and destroying his country’s democracy.” (Following threats from Congress over its alleged offer to shelter Snowden, Ecuador’s government unilaterally rejected US trade preferences).

When Buzzfeed published its expose on Ecuador, Vazquez Ger was overjoyed. A heavily trafficked US news site had recycled he and Reich’s attacks on Correa’s support for Assange, this time framing Ecuador’s president as a hypocrite for supposedly offering asylum to Snowden. At 7:28 PM on June 25 -- a full 27 minutes after the article appeared -- Vazquez Ger took to Twitter to promote the piece to his Spanish-language followers. Next, he personally thanked Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith “for unmasking [Correa’s] hypocrisy.”

The following day, at a press conference in Ecuador, Interior Minister Jose Serrano was asked to answer for the Buzzfeed report. Buzzfeed’s Gray quickly picked up Serrano’s defensive comments, quoting them in a follow-up story alongside a strident denunciation of Correa’s sheltering of Assange by Cléver Jiménez, a key opposition leader. Meanwhile, Alek Boyd projected the story of Ecuador’s surveillance deal into South American media, publishing it as an “exclusive” in Semana, a leading Colombian daily.

Whoever planted the story with Buzzfeed appeared to have scored a major success, exploiting the Snowden drama to tarnish the image of Ecuador’s government. Though the identity of the source that triggered the operation may never be known, their agenda does not seem to be much of a mystery anymore.



Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 30, 2013 11:33 am


'This Week' Transcript: WikiLeaks' Julian Assange


Now to our exclusive interview with Julian Assange. He's standing by from his safe room at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. First, our chief justice correspondent Pierre Thomas has more on Assange and the assistance WikiLeaks is providing to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Good morning, Pierre.

PIERRE THOMAS, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, George.

WikiLeaks officials were with Snowden when he fled from Hong Kong to Russia, and they have provided him with legal guidance. Assange is said to be pressing Ecuadorian officials to grant Snowden's request for asylum. Some say it's the latest provocation of the U.S.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: He has long been a prickly thorn in the side of the U.S. government. But who is Julian Assange? Hacker? Activist? A journalist? Or a fugitive criminal?

We've exposed the world's secret.

THOMAS: He is the mastermind behind WikiLeaks which has published the secrets of nations, and is now at the heart of a global debate over the public's right to know.

SAWYER: The WikiLeaks organization published hundreds more internal government documents.

THOMAS: Assange has embarrassed the powerful, and revealed top secret information about U.S. and other government activities.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are a bunch of bodies laying there.

THOMAS: But at what cost?

HILLARY CLINTON, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security.


HOMAS: Now the man who has on a crusade to expose what he believes is wrongdoing faces accusations of his own.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have no right to arrest Julian Assange.

THOMAS: For more than a year, he's been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he sought refuge to avoid possible criminal charges.

And today, WikiLeaks and Assange are standing shoulder to shoulder with the perhaps the most damaging leaker of them all, Edward Snowden, the fugitive former government contractor who went public with top secret information about some of the crown jewels of the intelligence community.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

THOMAS: Some U.S. officials say make no mistake, these are -- these leaks have serious consequences that the terrorists are changing the way they communicate, because of these disclosures -- George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, Pierre. Thanks. Let's talk now to Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Joined here in New York by Jesselyn Radack, a former whistle- blower from the Justice Department who disclosed details of post-9/11 interrogation practices, now with the government accountability project. Welcome to you both.

And Mr. Assange, let me begin with you. Thank you for joining us.

What can you tell us about where Edward Snowden is right now and where he's expected to go?

ASSANGE: Thank you, George.

I wish I could answer these questions of yours in more detail.

The situation now with Edward Snowden is very sensitive one. It's a matter of international diplomatic negotiations. So, there's little that I can productively say about what is happening directly.

But look, let's pull back a bit. Why is it that Mr. Snowden is not in the United States? He should feel that he should be afforded justice in the United States. But his situation is very similar to a situation that I face and that my staff face where we have been sucked into a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that's where the charges for Mr. Snowden came from, Alexandria, Virginia.

What do we know about that district? It's six kilometers from the center of Washington, D.C., the jury pool is made up of the CIA, Pentagon, et cetera. In the legal community in the United States, it's known as the rocket docket because of the lack of scrutiny procedures have there. There's a 99 percent chance that -- a 99.97 percent chance that if you're a target of the grand jury you'll be indicted. And a 99 percent that if you're indicted by a grand jury you will be convicted.

So this is not a situation -- ignoring all the political rhetoric which has been terrible over the past two weeks, where Mr. Snowden can feel that he would be afforded justice in the United States.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But is there any country right now that would Mr. Snowden asylum?

ASSANGE: Well, under U.N. conventions, Mr. Snowden has the right to appeal to nearly every country for asylum. Of course, asylum decision is always a mixture of the political and the legal. And I think there are several countries where it is politically possible for Mr. Snowden to receive asylum, and many countries, of course, where he's legally entitled to that kind of protection.

It's -- no one is alleging that any of his acts are anything other than political, that he has acted in a manner to draw attention to a very serious problem in the United States where without the will of congress, without the will of the American population, we now have a state within a state, we have the transnational surveillance apparatus. Glenn Greenwald just last night spoke about the new technology to evolve out of the National Security Agency is going to attempt to intercept 1 billion mobile phone calls a day.

No one signed up for this, Obama does not have a mandate for that. No one has a mandate for that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: With respect, Mr. Assange, many people have said that this...

ASSANGE: ...taken for a ride.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...far more than political, including Secretary of State John Kerry. He spoke out on this earlier this week saying that Snowden's revelations are putting people at risk. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN KERRY, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: People may die as a consequence of what this man did. It is possible the United States will be attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Does that concern you at all?

ASSANGE: Well, look, we have heard this rhetoric. I myself was subject to precisely this rhetoric two, three years ago. And it all proved to be false. We had this terrible discussion about -- which even exists in some of the tabloid press today -- about WikiLeaks causing harm, but not a single U.S. government official, no one from the Pentagon, no one from any government says that any of our revelations in the past six years has caused anyone to come to physical harm.

And the revelations by Snowden, I mean, these are even more abstract than the nature of the war crimes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Have you spoken to Mr. Snowden -- are you confident he is safe right now.

ASSANGE: ...we have been publishing.

Our legal people have been in contact with Mr. Snowden. I can't say anything about the present situation. But, you know, the United States canceled his passport. Joseph Biden, the day before yesterday, personally called the President Correa trying to pressure him. That's not acceptable.

Asylum is a right that we all have. It's an international right. The United States has been founded largely on accepting political refugees from other countries and has prospered by it.

Mr. Snowden has that right. Ideally he should be able to return to the United States. Unfortunately, that's not the world that we live in and hopefully another country will give him the justice that he deserves.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Edward Snowden's father has spoken out. He fears that you and WikiLeaks are manipulating his son. He said that, quote, "I think WikiLeaks, their focus isn't necessarily the constitution of the United States, that's a concern for me." How do you respond to Edward Snowden's father?

ASSANGE: Well, he didn't say that. He said might be. Mr. Snowden's father as a parent, of course he is worried in this situation, every father would be worried in this situation. We have established contact with Mr. Snowden's father's lawyer to put some of his concerns to rest.

But, I mean, this isn't a situation that, you know, WikiLeaks is in charge of, if you like. This is a matter for states at a very serious level to understand and sort out and behave responsibly. Because I've had some experience in the past, with publishing, with attacks and political rhetoric from the United States with asylum and so on.

And I have personal sympathy for Mr. Snowden. We did what we could and we'll continue to do what we can to try and--

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you have put yourself in the middle of it.

ASSANGE: -- and help him through.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And I want to ask a further question on that. Glenn Greenwald has said that no matter what happens to Snowden, his secrets, the secrets that he's taken, will get out. How? And does Wikileaks have possession of those secrets right now?

ASSANGE: Look, there is no stopping the publishing process at this stage. Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden can't be pressured by any state to stop the publication process. I mean, the United States, by canceling his passport, has left him for the moment marooned in Russia. Is that really a great outcome by the State Department? Is that really what it wanted to do? I think that every citizen has the right to their citizenship. To take someone's principal component of citizenship, their passport, away from them is a disgrace. Mr. Snowden has not been convicted of anything. There are no international warrants out for his arrest. To take a passport from a young man in a difficult situation like that is a disgrace.

He is a hero. He has told the people of the world and the United States that there is mass unlawful interception of their communications, far beyond anything that happened under Nixon. Obama can't just turn around like Nixon did and said, it's OK, if the president does it, if the president authorizes it--

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's not what he's saying, sir. He has also broken the law. Let me bring that now to Jesselyn Radack, who is also here with me right now. Julian Assange mentioned Edward Snowden's father, who has also written -- his attorney has written a letter to Eric Holder, the attorney general, saying that he believes that his son would be willing to come back to the United States if he would not be detained or imprisoned prior to trial, if he would not be subject to a gag order, if he would be tried in the venue of his choosing. Do you think it would make sense for Snowden to return under those circumstances?

RADACK: I actually don't. I have represented people like Thomas Drake, who was an NSA whistle-blower, who actually did go through every conceivable internal channel possible, including his boss, the inspector general of his agency, the Defense Department inspector general and two congressional committees, and the U.S. turned around and prosecuted him. And did so for espionage and threatened to tie him up for the rest of his life in jail. I think Snowden's outlook is bleak here, and instead of focusing on Snowden and shooting the messenger, we should really focus on the crimes of the NSA. Because whatever laws Snowden may or may not have broken, they are infinitesimally small compared to the two major surveillance laws and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that the NSA's violated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But these surveillance programs, as the president has pointed out, were passed by the Congress, are overseen by a court.



RADACK: Well, both of those are incorrect. Congress has not been fully informed. Only the--

STEPHANOPOULOS: They passed the laws, there is oversight, or there is (inaudible).

RADACK: OK, but there is a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which nobody knows, except for the Intel Committee of Congress, and even they say that they think most Americans would be appalled by that. And to say that it's been approved by the courts is a misnomer, because it gives the impression that federal courts have approved this, when in reality, it's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has rubber-stamped every single--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Which is a federal court.

RADACK: No, it is a secret court set up at the Justice Department that has federal judges on it. But last year, it approved 2,000 out of 2,000 applications. They hear only the government's side, and they have never -- they have rejected an application one time since 1978.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me bring this back to Julian Assange. Back in 2010, an email that was revealed from you by Bart Gellman in "Time" magazine, said that you hoped the revelations from Wikileaks would bring about, quote, "the total annihilation of the current U.S. regime." Is that still your goal, and what did you mean by that?

ASSANGE: I did not say that and there is no such email. That is simply false.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's quoted in "Time" magazine in December 2010.

ASSANGE: Yes. Well, I mean, "Time" magazine. But this is -- it's very interesting that you raised such a thing like that. We are in a situation where we have these extraordinary revelations that are causing great embarrassment to a new national security state that is arising in the U.S. It's not just the U.S. Similar national security states are rising in other countries, but it is trying to evade democratic will. It's treating Congress like a bunch of fools. And we saw Clapper up there lying, bald-face lying to Congress. We have secret interpretations of the law. What does the law mean if there are secret interpretations in secret courts?

We have Bradley Manning's trial starting -- continuing tomorrow. A young man, a good man, as far as anyone can tell, motivations are entirely political as far as anyone argues. The same with Snowden. Being put through this meat grinder, where a new precedent is trying to be set, which is communicating with the press is committing espionage. And it's not just a precedent that is trying to be set on these whistle-blowers. It's a precedent that's trying to be set on journalists and politicians as well. We saw that in the case of--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Meantime, Mr. Assange, meantime, you're being--

ASSANGE: -- James Rosen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- safe harbored (ph) by the Ecuadorian government. That -- the Correa administration has been admonished by human rights organizations for restricting press freedoms, prosecuting journalists. The Inter American Press Association calls its new media law, quote, "the most serious setback for freedom of the press in the recent history of Latin America." So does it make you uncomfortable to be harbored by a government that goes after journalists, and do you see a double standard there?

ASSANGE: Well, these accusations are largely blown up. There are of course all sorts of problems in any particular country. But why are they even spoken about? What has happened here is a mass revelation of illegal transnational spying by the National Security Agency, the collection of the communications records of every single person in the United States, laying out the entire community structure of the United States. And these sort of attempts are merely a mechanism to try and shift ground. But you know, going to CPJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York, they list the number of journalists in Ecuadorian prisons -- zero. And it has been zero for a very long time. It's 48 in Turkey. So we've got to keep things in some kind of perspective (ph). There is no allegation that Ecuador--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally--

ASSANGE: -- no allegation that Ecuador is involved in a mass transnational surveillance or assassination programs and so on.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Julian Assange, Jesselyn Radack, thanks very much for joining me this morning.

RADACK: Thank you.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Our powerhouse roundtable is coming right up, with historic decisions from the Supreme Court this week and more. Stay with us.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 30, 2013 12:55 pm

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection programPublished: June 6, 2013, Updated June 29, 2013
The top-secret PRISM program allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from nine Internet companies to a wide range of digital information, including e-mails and stored data, on foreign targets operating outside the United States. The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants. Instead, it operates under a broader authorization from federal judges who oversee the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some documents describing the program were first released by The Washington Post on June 6. The newly released documents below give additional details about how the program operates, including the levels of review and supervisory control at the NSA and FBI. The documents also show how the program interacts with the Internet companies. These slides, annotated by The Post, represent a selection from the overall document, and certain portions are redacted. Read related article.

New slides published June 29
Acquiring data from a new target
This slide describes what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new surveillance target. The request to add a new target is passed automatically to a supervisor who reviews the "selectors," or search terms. The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection.

Image

Analyzing information collected from private companies
After communications information is acquired, the data are processed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and "digital network information" that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets.

Image

Each target is assigned a case notation
The PRISM case notation format reflects the availability, confirmed by The Post's reporting, of real-time surveillance as well as stored content.

Image

Searching the PRISM database
On April 5, according to this slide, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database. The slide does not show how many other Internet users, and among them how many Americans, have their communications collected "incidentally" during surveillance of those targets.

Image

Original slides published June 6
Introducing the program
A slide briefing analysts at the National Security Agency about the program touts its effectiveness and features the logos of the companies involved.

Image

Monitoring a target's communication
This diagram shows how the bulk of the world’s electronic communications move through companies based in the United States.
Image

Providers and data
The PRISM program collects a wide range of data from the nine companies, although the details vary by provider.

Image

Participating providers
This slide shows when each company joined the program, with Microsoft being the first, on Sept. 11, 2007, and Apple the most recent, in October 2012.

Image
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jun 30, 2013 12:55 pm

U.S. taps half-billion German phone, internet links in month: report

he United States taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month and has classed its biggest European ally as a target similar to China, according to secret U.S. documents quoted by a German newsmagazine.

The revelations of alleged U.S. surveillance programs based on documents taken by fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have raised a political furor in the United States and abroad over the balance between privacy rights and national security.


Exposing the latest details in a string of reputed spying programs, Der Spiegel quoted from an internal NSA document which it said its reporters had seen.

The document Spiegel cited showed that the United States categorized Germany as a "third-class" partner and that surveillance there was stronger than in any other EU country, similar in extent to China, Iraq or Saudi-Arabia.

<snip>

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/ ... 4B20130630

Germany Compares Reported US Bugging to 'Cold War'

A top German official accused the United States on Sunday of using "Cold War" methods against its allies, after a German magazine cited secret intelligence documents to claim that U.S. spies bugged European Union offices.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was responding to a report by German news weekly Der Spiegel, which claimed that the U.S. National Security Agency eavesdropped on EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels. The magazine cited classified U.S. documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that it said it had partly seen.

"If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to The Associated Press.

"It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies," she said, calling for an "immediate and comprehensive" response from the U.S. government to the claims.

<snip>

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireSt ... dA3Tdisp7k

European officials lash out at new NSA spying report

<snip>

"I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations," European Parliament President Martin Schulz said in a statement, according to CNN. "If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations. On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the U.S. authorities with regard to these allegations."

The revelations come at a particularly sensitive time for U.S.-E.U. relations, as long-awaited talks about a new trade pact are scheduled to begin next week. It is unclear how the latest report on NSA spying are going to affect them, but the trade pact has been a centerpiece of the Obama administrations diplomatic efforts in Europe for some time.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA planted bugs in the EU's diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building's computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU's mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said.

<snip>

During a trip through Europe two weeks ago, President Obama assured an audience in Germany that America is not indiscriminately "rifling" through the emails of ordinary European citizens, describing the National Security Agency's surveillance programs as a "circumscribed" system that has averted threats in America, Germany, and elsewhere.

<snip>'

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-575 ... ng-report/
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 30, 2013 2:00 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 30, 2013 5:02 pm

STEPHANOPOULOS: Our powerhouse roundtable is coming right up



:puke:
:koolaid: :bleh: :burnTV:
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 01, 2013 9:45 am

Misinformation on classified NSA programs includes statements by senior U.S. officials

Image
Susan Walsh/AP - A remark by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., has perhaps drawn the most attention. Asked during a congressional hearing in March whether the NSA collected data on millions of Americans, Clapper replied, “No, sir.”

By Greg Miller, Published: June 30 E-mail the writer
Amid the cascading disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance programs, the top lawyer in the U.S. intelligence community opened his remarks at a rare public appearance last week with a lament about how much of the information being spilled was wrong.

“A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on,” said Robert Litt, citing a line often attributed to Mark Twain. “Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of misinformation that’s come out about these programs.”

Graphic

See the inner workings of the NSA’s PRISM program
Video

Former National Security Agency head Michael Hayden says the Obama administration would be well-served by making the American people "more comfortable" with recently revealed surveillance programs.

The remark by Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was aimed at news organizations. But details that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior U.S. officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false.

The same day Litt spoke, the NSA quietly removed from its Web site a fact sheet about its collection activities because it contained inaccuracies discovered by lawmakers.

A week earlier, President Obama, in a television interview, asserted that oversight of the surveillance programs was “transparent” because of the involvement of a special court, even though that court’s sessions and decisions are sealed from the public. “It is transparent,” Obama said of the oversight process. “That’s why we set up the FISA court.”

A remark by Litt’s boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., has perhaps drawn the most attention. Asked during a congressional hearing in March whether the NSA collected data on millions of Americans, Clapper replied, “No, sir.”

U.S. officials have cited a variety of factors to explain the discrepancies, including the challenge of speaking publicly and definitively about programs that remain classified and involve procedures and technical systems that are highly complex.

Jane Harman, a former ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that speaking about secret programs can be a “minefield” for public officials.

“Are people deliberately misleading other people? I suppose it can happen,” Harman said in an interview. Facts can be obscured through “selective declassification that means you put out some pieces but not others,” she said. “But I assume most people are acting in good faith.”

Acknowledging the “heated controversy” over his remark, Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked.

“I have thought long and hard to re-create what went through my mind at the time,” Clapper said in the previously undisclosed letter. “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”

Beyond inadvertent missteps, however, an examination of public statements over a period of years suggests that officials have often relied on legalistic parsing and carefully hedged characterizations in discussing the NSA’s collection of communications.

Obama’s assurances have hinged, for example, on a term — targeting — that has a specific meaning for U.S. spy agencies that would elude most ordinary citizens.

“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails,” Obama said in his June 17 interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose Show.”

But even if it is not allowed to target U.S. citizens, the NSA has significant latitude to collect and keep the contents of e-mails and other communications of U.S. citizens that are swept up as part of the agency’s court-approved monitoring of a target overseas.

Former National Security Agency head Michael Hayden says the Obama administration would be well-served by making the American people "more comfortable" with recently revealed surveillance programs.

The law allows the NSA to examine such messages and share them with other agencies if it determines that the information contained is evidence of a crime, conveys a serious threat or is necessary to understand foreign intelligence.

The threshold for scrutinizing other data not regarded as content but still potentially revealing is lower than it is for the contents of communications. A 2009 report by the NSA inspector general and obtained by The Washington Post indicates that the agency for years examined metadata on e-mails flowing into and out of the United States, including “the sender and recipient e-mail addresses.”

President George W. Bush at times engaged in similarly careful phrasing to defend surveillance programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2004, while calling for renewal of the Patriot Act, Bush sought to assuage critics by saying “the government can’t move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.”

At the time, it had not yet been publicly disclosed that Bush had secretly authorized NSA surveillance of communications between U.S. residents and contacts overseas while bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

When the wiretapping operation was exposed in the news media two years later, Bush defended it as a program “that listens to a few numbers, called from outside of the United States, and of known al-Qaeda or affiliate people.” Subsequent revelations have made clear that the scope was far greater than his words would suggest.

News accounts of the NSA programs have also contained inaccuracies, in some cases because of the source materials. Classified NSA slides that were published by The Post indicated that the NSA was able to tap directly into the servers of Google, Microsoft, Apple and other technology companies. The companies denied that they allowed direct access to their equipment, although they did not dispute that they cooperated with the NSA.

Current and former U.S. officials have defended the programs, and some have called for greater transparency as a way of allaying concerns.

“I’m convinced, the more the American people know exactly what it is we are doing in this balance between privacy and security — the more they know, the more comfortable they will feel,” Michael V. Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, told “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Frankly, I think we ought to be doing a bit more to explain what it is we’re doing, why, and the very tight safeguards under which we’re operating.”

For now, the crumbling secrecy surrounding the programs has underscored the extent to which obscuring their dimensions had served government interests beyond the importance of the intelligence they produced.

Secret court rulings that allowed the NSA to gather phone records enabled the spy service to assemble a massive database on Americans’ phone records without public debate or the risk of political blowback.

The binding secrecy built into the PRISM program of tracking international e-mail allowed the NSA to compel powerful technology companies to comply with requests for information about their users while keeping them essentially powerless to protest.

Graphic

See the inner workings of the NSA’s PRISM program
Video

Former National Security Agency head Michael Hayden says the Obama administration would be well-served by making the American people "more comfortable" with recently revealed surveillance programs.

The careful depiction of NSA programs also served diplomatic ends. Until recently, the United States had positioned itself as such an innocent victim of cyber intrusions by Russia and China that the State Department issued a secret demarche, or official diplomatic communication, in January scolding Beijing. That posture became more problematic after leaks by the former NSA contractor and acknowledged source of the NSA leaks, Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong and is thought to be stuck at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.

Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March has drawn comparisons to other cases in which U.S. intelligence officials faced, under oath, questions that to answer truthfully would require exposing a classified program.

In 1973, then-CIA Director Richard Helms denied agency involvement in CIA operations in Chile, a falsehood that led to him pleading no contest four years later to misdemeanor charges of misleading Congress.

There is no indication that lawmakers have contemplated pursuing such a course against Clapper, in part because he subsequently corrected his claim, although there is disagreement over how quickly he did so.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who had asked Clapper the question about information collection on Americans, said in a recent statement that the director had failed to clarify the remark promptly despite being asked to do so. Clapper disputed that in his note to the committee, saying his “staff acknowledged the error to Senator Wyden’s staff soon after the hearing.”

In early June, after the NSA leaks had brought renewed attention to Clapper’s “No, sir,” Clapper cited the difficulty of answering a question about a classified program and said in an interview on NBC News that he had responded in the “least most untruthful manner.”

He made a new attempt to explain the exchange in his June 21 correspondence, which included a hand-written note to Wyden saying that an attached letter was addressed to the committee chairman but that he “wanted [Wyden] to see this first.”

Clapper said he thought Wyden was referring to NSA surveillance of e-mail traffic involving overseas targets, not the separate program in which the agency is authorized to collect records of Americans’ phone calls that include the numbers and duration of calls but not individuals’ names or the contents of their calls.

Referring to his appearances before Congress over several decades, Clapper concluded by saying that “mistakes will happen, and when I make one, I correct it.”


Julie Tate contributed to this report.




Job Title Key to Inner Access Held by Snowden
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 30, 2013

WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials refer to Edward J. Snowden’s job as a National Security Agency contractor as “systems administrator” — a bland name for the specialists who keep the computers humming. But his last job before leaking classified documents about N.S.A. surveillance, he told the news organization The Guardian, was actually “infrastructure analyst.”
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Susan Walsh/Associated Press
James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence. Edward J. Snowden’s records forced him to backtrack on testimony.
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Snowden’s Fate Is Up to Russia, Ecuador Says (July 1, 2013)
Europeans Voice Anger Over Reports of Spying by U.S. on Its Allies (July 1, 2013)

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It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency’s aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.

That assignment helps explain how Mr. Snowden got hold of documents laying bare the top-secret capabilities of the nation’s largest intelligence agency, setting off a far-reaching political and diplomatic crisis for the Obama administration.

Even as some members of Congress have challenged the N.S.A.’s collection of logs of nearly every phone call Americans make, European officials furiously protested on Sunday after Mr. Snowden’s disclosure that the N.S.A. has bugged European Union offices in Washington and Brussels and, with its British counterpart, has tapped the Continent’s major fiber-optic communications cables.

On Sunday evening, The Guardian posted an article saying documents leaked by Mr. Snowden show 38 embassies and missions on a list of United States electronic surveillance targets. Some of those offices belong to allies like France, Italy, Japan and Mexico, The Guardian said.

Mr. Snowden, who planned his leaks for at least a year, has said he took the infrastructure analyst position with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii in March, evidently taking a pay cut, to gain access to a fresh supply of documents.

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the N.S.A. hacked,” he told The South China Morning Post before leaving Hong Kong a week ago for Moscow, where he has been in limbo in the transit area of Sheremetyevo airport. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”

A close reading of Mr. Snowden’s documents shows the extent to which the eavesdropping agency now has two new roles: It is a data cruncher, with an appetite to sweep up, and hold for years, a staggering variety of information. And it is an intelligence force armed with cyberweapons, assigned not just to monitor foreign computers but also, if necessary, to attack.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the documents suggest, the N.S.A. decided it was too risky to wait for leads on specific suspects before going after relevant phone and Internet records. So it followed the example of the hoarder who justifies stacks of paper because someday, somehow, a single page could prove vitally important.

The agency began amassing databases of “metadata” — logs of all telephone calls collected from the major carriers and similar data on e-mail traffic. The e-mail program was halted in 2011, though it appears possible that the same data is now gathered in some other way.

The documents show that America’s phone and Internet companies grew leery of N.S.A. demands as the years passed after 9/11, fearing that customers might be angry to find out their records were shared with the government. More and more, the companies’ lawyers insisted on legal orders to compel them to comply.

So the N.S.A. came up with a solution: store the data itself. That is evidently what gave birth to a vast data storage center that the N.S.A. is building in Utah, exploiting the declining cost of storage and the advance of sophisticated search software.

Those huge databases were once called “bit buckets” in the industry — collections of electronic bits waiting to be sifted. “They park stuff in storage in the hopes that they will eventually have time to get to it,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “or that they’ll find something that they need to go back and look for in the masses of data.” But, he added, “most of it sits and is never looked at by anyone.”

Indeed, an obscure passage in one of the Snowden documents — rules for collecting Internet data that the Obama administration wrote in secret in 2009 and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved — suggested that the government was concerned about its ability to process all the data it was collecting. So it got the court to approve an exception allowing the government to hold on to that information if it could not keep up. The rules said that “the communications that may be retained” for up to five years “include electronic communications acquired because of the limitation on the N.S.A.’s ability to filter communications.”

As one private expert who sometimes advises the N.S.A. on this technology put it: “This means that if you can’t desalinate all the seawater at once, you get to hold on to the ocean until you figure it out.”

Collecting that ocean requires the brazen efforts of tens of thousands of technicians like Mr. Snowden. On Thursday, President Obama played down Mr. Snowden’s importance, perhaps concerned that the manhunt was itself damaging the image and diplomatic relations of the United States. “No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” the president said during a stop in Senegal.

Mr. Obama presumably meant the term to be dismissive, suggesting that Mr. Snowden (who turned 30 on June 21) was a young computer delinquent. But as an N.S.A. infrastructure analyst, Mr. Snowden was, in a sense, part of the United States’ biggest and most skilled team of hackers.

The N.S.A., Mr. Snowden’s documents show, has worked with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, to tap into hundreds of fiber-optic cables that cross the Atlantic or go on into Europe, with the N.S.A. helping sort the data. The disclosure revived old concerns that the British might be helping the N.S.A. evade American privacy protections, an accusation that American officials flatly deny.

And a secret presidential directive on cyberactivities unveiled by Mr. Snowden — discussing the primary new task of the N.S.A. and its military counterpart, Cyber Command — makes clear that when the agency’s technicians probe for vulnerabilities to collect intelligence, they also study foreign communications and computer systems to identify potential targets for a future cyberwar.

Infrastructure analysts like Mr. Snowden, in other words, are not just looking for electronic back doors into Chinese computers or Iranian mobile networks to steal secrets. They have a new double purpose: building a target list in case American leaders in a future conflict want to wipe out the computers’ hard drives or shut down the phone system.

Mr. Snowden’s collection of pilfered N.S.A. documents has cast an awkward light on officials’ past assurances to Congress and the public about their concern about Americans’ privacy.

It was only in March that James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told a Senate committee that the N.S.A. did not collect data on millions of Americans. Mr. Snowden’s records forced Mr. Clapper to backtrack, admitting his statement was false.

Last week, two senators challenged even the accuracy of a fact sheet prepared by the N.S.A. to counter Mr. Snowden’s claims about the phone data and Internet collection programs. Agency officials did not defend themselves; the fact sheet simply disappeared, without explanation, from the agency’s Web site.

Newly disclosed slides from an N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation on the agency’s Prism database of Internet data, posted on Saturday by The Washington Post, reveal that the F.B.I. plays a role as middleman between the N.S.A. and Internet companies like Google and Yahoo. The arrangement provides the N.S.A. with a defense, however nominal, against claims that it spies on United States soil.

Even in the unaccustomed spotlight after the N.S.A. revelations, intelligence officials have concealed more than they have revealed in careful comments, fearful of alerting potential eavesdropping targets to agency methods. They invariably discuss the N.S.A.’s role in preventing terrorist attacks, an agency priority that the public can easily grasp.

In fact, as Mr. Snowden’s documents have shown, the omnivorous agency’s operations range far beyond terrorism, targeting foreigners of any conceivable interest. British eavesdroppers working with the N.S.A. penetrated London meetings of the Group of 20 industrialized nations, partly by luring delegates to fake Internet cafes, and the N.S.A. hacked into computers at Chinese universities.

At Fort Meade, on the N.S.A.’s heavily guarded campus off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Maryland, such disclosures are seen as devastating tip-offs to targets. The disclosure in Mr. Snowden’s documents that Skype is cooperating with orders to turn over data to the N.S.A., for example, undermined a widespread myth that the agency could not intercept the voice-over-Internet service. Warned, in effect, by Mr. Snowden, foreign officials, drug cartel leaders and terrorists may become far more careful about how, and how much, they communicate.

“We’re seeing indications that several terrorist groups are changing their communications behavior based on these disclosures,” one intelligence official said last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We’re going to miss tidbits that could be useful in stopping the next plot.”

Mr. Snowden’s breach is an unplanned test of the N.S.A.’s decades-old conviction that it can operate effectively only under absolute secrecy. The agency is conducting a damage assessment — a routine step after major leaks — but the assessment itself is likely to remain classified.

The N.S.A.’s assessment of Mr. Snowden’s case will likely also consider what has become, for intelligence officials, a chilling consideration: there are thousands of people of his generation and computer skills at the agency, hired in recent years to keep up with the communications boom.

The officials fear that some of them, like young computer aficionados outside the agency, might share Mr. Snowden’s professed libertarian streak and skepticism of the government’s secret power. Intelligence bosses are keeping a closer eye on them now, hoping that there is not another self-appointed whistle-blower in their midst.


Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 01, 2013 11:51 am

Russia's Putin tells Snowden to stop US secrets leak

Russian President Vladimir Putin has told fugitive former CIA-analyst Edward Snowden to stop leaking US secrets if he wants to remain in the country.

He said Moscow had never extradited anyone before and "has no intention to do so", adding Mr Snowden was free to go if granted asylum elsewhere.

Edward Snowden, 30, is believed to be holed up in a Moscow airport hotel.

The US wants to prosecute him over the leaking of thousands of classified intelligence documents.

The leaks have led to revelations that the US is systematically seizing vast amounts of phone and web data under an NSA programme known as Prism.

This weekend, Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper and Britain's The Guardian newspaper, publicised allegations that the US has been spying on its EU allies
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby slimmouse » Mon Jul 01, 2013 12:10 pm

From the Slad article and at the link

President Obama: "If I want to know what Chancellor Merkel is thinking, I'll call Chancellor Merkel"


.......reassured by the fact that if she doesnt tell me exactly what she's thinking and doing, and how she's sleeping, and the meds she's on, then I'll get to know about it, providing of course that it is required of me to know"

I think President Obama is also trying to fool people here by attempting to imply that the buck on this issue truly stops with him. I dont think it will have escaped his own attention however that it doesnt.

I wonder how many people are far less fooled by this kinda stuff these days?
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 01, 2013 12:15 pm

slimmouse » Mon Jul 01, 2013 11:10 am wrote:From the Slad article and at the link

President Obama: "If I want to know what Chancellor Merkel is thinking, I'll call Chancellor Merkel"




like he'd have to call her......he just would have to ask the NSA :P
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 01, 2013 9:00 pm

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 8h
NOTE: Snowden's leak is basically done. It's newspapers - not Snowden - deciding what gets disclosed and in what sequence.


Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
1st July 2013 from TwitLonger

I didn't say Snowden couldn't leak more documents if he wanted to. Obviously, he can do so if he's inclined. That's obvious.

What I said is that he's not doling out documents to us in drips & drabs. He gave us all the documents he provided to us weeks ago. That process is done. And we - not he - are the one deciding which of those gets published and which don't, and in what order. That's what this meant: "Snowden's leak is basically done. It's newspapers - not Snowden - deciding what gets disclosed and in what sequence."



Russia says Snowden can stay if he stops leaking intelligence.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier Monday that Snowden would have to stop leaking U.S. secrets if he wanted to be granted asylum in Russia, where Snowden has been hiding out for eight days.

Putin insisted that Russia is not going to extradite Snowden to the USA, refusing a demand from President Obama that he be handed over to the USA to face charges of espionage.

"There is one condition if he wants to remain here: He must stop his work aimed at damaging our American partners. As odd as it may sound coming from me," Putin told a news conference in Moscow.

"Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so," Putin said, adding that Snowden, "should choose his final destination and go there."

Snowden released a statement Monday through the web site Wikileaks critical of Obama for asking Russia to send him back after he said the president vowed not to engage in "wheeling and dealing" over his return.

"This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile," stated Snowden, who U.S. passport has been revoked. "These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me."

Obama said last week that he would not offer special inducements to other nations over a routine matter of law enforcement that should be honored as part of international law. He has said the NSA secret surveillance programs that Snowden made public are legal and proper, aimed only at disrupting terrorist plots.

Snowden insisted Monday he is a whistle-blower who should be allowed to go where he pleases and compared himself to Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is being court-martialed for sending secret diplomatic communications on Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks.

The 30-year-old Snowden still appears to be holed up in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, where he landed after fleeing Hong Kong. Interfax news agency quoted consular desk official Kim Shevchenko as saying that British citizen Sarah Harrison -- an aide to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange -- asked the Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday to grant Snowden political asylum.

The reported request comes after Ecuador hedged on whether it would grant Snowden protection as it has Assange, who is hiding out in Ecuador's embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges. The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that Snowden had given Russian diplomats a list of 15 countries to which he would like to apply for political asylum.

Meanwhile, Germany's federal prosecutor says it is launching a preliminary inquiry into allegations from Snowden that U.S. intelligence agencies tapped European communication channels.

German news weekly Der Spiegel set off a diplomatic row when it reported that the NSA had bugged EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels. The report cited secret U.S. documents allegedly obtained by the Snowden before he fled the United States.

Germany said it planned to call in the U.S. ambassador for an explanation over the "breach in trust."

"We're no longer in the Cold War," government spokesman Steffen Seibert told USA TODAY. "Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable."

Seibert said the government will assess the facts to determine whether there had been a breach of national security. Secretary of State John Kerry said he did know all the particulars about allegations that the U.S. bugged EU offices. But he says many nations engaged in international affairs undertake lots of different kinds of activities to protect their national interests.

"The (German) foreign ministry must be shocked and horrified that it was put in with that company," said Ben Tonra, a professor at the University College Dublin who specializes on European security issues.

Tonra said European leaders are well aware that all governments including their own spy on each other, but the revelations if accurate could force European governments to react publicly in ways that harm relations.

Other European officials reacted angrily to Der Spiegel reports that the NSA was spying on the European Union including the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels -- home to the European Council.

"We still need more information, but If it's true, it's a huge scandal," said Martin Schulz, head of the European Parliament. "It means a huge strain on relations between the EU and the U.S. and we now demand a comprehensive explanation."

Snowden indicated he may reveal more about the NSA programs that he gained access to while working for a private contractor that provided analytical services to the NSA.

"I remain free and able to publish information that serves the public interest," Snowden said in an undated Spanish-language letter sent to President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, seen by Reuters.


Snowden's Russia asylum bid may resolve case: Ecuador
By Alexander Martinez (AFP) – 1 hour ago
QUITO — Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, whose government has mulled an asylum request from US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, said Monday the fugitive's abrupt bid for sanctuary in Russia could resolve his fate.
But the leftist leader said in an interview with AFP that his government would process the former National Security Agency contractor's political asylum request if Snowden manages to enter an Ecuadoran embassy.
Snowden -- whose US passport was revoked after he leaked a vast US Internet and phone surveillance program -- has been holed up and in legal limbo in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport for more than a week.
"My opinion is that the request to the Russian government could definitely resolve Mr. Snowden's situation," Correa told AFP after Moscow announced that it received a political asylum application from Snowden.
"I think that if he is on Russian territory and makes an asylum request in Russia, the situation can be processed and resolved there," he said from the Carondelet presidential palace in Quito.
"Legally, Russia has the case," he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Snowden, who revealed a vast US Internet and phone surveillance program, was welcome to stay as long as he stopped leaking US intelligence reports.
A Russian foreign ministry official said the asylum request was submitted on Sunday by Sarah Harrison, a British citizen who works for the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks and has accompanied Snowden since his June 23 trip from Hong Kong.
Correa disagreed with Putin's assertion that Snowden should cease revealing US secrets.
"I respect Russia and its president a lot, but I don't share this view. It would be good if Mr. Snowden would tell the world everything he knows," he said.
Correa has voiced support for Snowden, saying he would consider his asylum bid, but he indicated in recent days that Quito cannot help him until he sets foot on Ecuadoran soil or a diplomatic mission.
"The moment he arrives at our embassy, we can process it there," said Correa, whose announcement last week that he would study Snowden's asylum request had angered Washington, which has filed espionage charges against the fugitive.
"We will never disassociate ourselves from these issues or those that affect humanity. If Mr. Snowden reaches Ecuadoran territory and confirms his asylum request, we would have to process it and we would do it in sovereignty," he said.
Correa also addressed a report that the United States had bugged European Union officials, saying that it showed "the biggest espionage case in the history of humanity."
He said "an explanation must be given about what happened, measures must be taken so that this never happens again and those responsible must be punished."
Correa meanwhile said he had urged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to stop speaking in Ecuador's name.
"The conduct of Assange has bothered me a little and this morning I spoke with the foreign minister (Ricardo Patino) to tell him not to speak about our country's situations," Correa said.
Ecuador has sheltered Assange at its embassy in London since August 2012 and the Australian's organization has been assisting Snowden in his flight from US justice.
Last week, Assange told reporters that Ecuador had given Snowden, whose passport was revoked by the United States, a refugee travel document, but Correa said Saturday that his London consul had made a decision beyond his rank by issuing the paper.
Correa revealed over the weekend that US Vice President Joe Biden had telephoned him to ask him to reject Snowden's bid, a call that Assange denounced on Sunday as "pressure" on Quito.
Snowden lashed out at the administration of US President Barack Obama in a statement Monday, accusing Washington of leaving him a "stateless person" and pressuring governments not to grant him asylum.
But the Ecuadoran president said Biden had not applied pressure and that the US vice president had been "very friendly, very courteous."
The Snowden case has put Ecuador on a collision course with the United States, with Quito unilaterally withdrawing from a trade pact last week, saying it had become an instrument of blackmail.
Correa, however, said the Snowden affair could actually help to improve bilateral relations.
"Bilateral relations shouldn't be affected," he said.


German Magazine Der Spiegel Lands Latest Edward Snowden NSA Scoop
Posted: 07/01/2013 3:41 pm EDT | Updated: 07/01/2013 4:07 pm EDT

FOLLOW: Der Spiegel Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel Nsa, Der Spiegel Snowden, edward snowden, Edward Snowden Media, German Magazine Snowden, Germany Snowden, Snowden Nsa, Calderone: The Backstory, Media News

Cover of Der Spiegel issue 27/2013 (July 1, 2013).
NEW YORK –- President Obama faced questions Monday in Tanzania about an explosive cover story out of Germany based on documents obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

"With respect to the latest article that in part I gather is prompted by Mr. Snowden's leaks, we're still evaluating the article because the problem is that these things come out in dribs and drabs," Obama said of the new Der Spiegel magazine story revealing U.S. spying on Europeans. While avoiding specific claims, Obama broadly defended U.S. intelligence gathering.

The blockbuster Der Spiegel article widens the small circle of news outlets known to have reviewed documents obtained by Snowden.

Before revealing his identity on June 9, Snowden shared documents with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker well-versed in surveillance issues who has served as an important conduit between Snowden and the press.

Days later in Hong Kong, Snowden gave an interview to the South China Morning Post and shared details about hacking operations aimed at Hong Kong and mainland China. Now, Der Spiegel has gotten the opportunity to review documents of primary interest to Germans and European Union officials, thereby serving as a platform that would give the new revelations maximum exposure there.

“The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of U.S. attacks,” Der Spiegel reported. “Each month, the U.S. intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.”

Der Spiegel also reported that the U.S. has spied on the Washington offices of the European Union. Still, Der Spiegel acknowledged that the publication decided “not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers” or “related internal code words.”

The Der Spiegel cover story, first published online over the weekend, has been the hot topic in the German press and prompted related front-page stories Monday in other European countries, including Austria, Italy and the United Kingdom. The Guardian also ran an exclusive front-page story Monday citing documents obtained by Snowden.

So far it's unclear how Der Spiegel made contact with Snowden, who reportedly remains in limbo at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport and is seeking asylum in Russia.

But it’s notable that Poitras –- who interviewed Snowden with Greenwald in Hong Kong for The Guardian and shared a byline with Gellman on The Washington Post’s Prism story -– is listed as one of the five authors of the Der Spiegel story.

Clemens Hoeges, the senior editor on Der Spiegel’s foreign desk, told HuffPost in an email that “we usually don’t talk about sources for our articles.” Poitras did not respond to a request for comment.

Der Spiegel may be best known in the U.S. as one of the three news outlets that worked on stories related to WikiLeaks' Afghan War logs, along with The Guardian and The New York Times. Two journalists involved with the latest NSA story, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, co-wrote a book on WikiLeaks.

On Monday, Greenwald pushed back on Twitter against any suggestion that Snowden is now leaking one document after another, writing that “Snowden’s leak is basically done” and that “it’s newspapers -– not Snowden –- deciding what gets disclosed and in what sequence.”

“Snowden hasn't been doling out documents one by one,” Greenwald told HuffPost in an email. “He gave a few to the Post, and then a bunch to us -- weeks ago -- and left it to us to decide what should and shouldn't be published and in what order.”

Greenwald said he wasn’t involved in the process by which Der Spiegel reviewed NSA documents, but said he believes the German magazine only looked over one or two specific documents. Greenwald added that he doesn't think any other media outlets have any documents.

The Washington Post is apparently still working on documents it received earlier from Snowden, and just released four previously unpublished leaked PowerPoint slides related to the Prism program over the weekend.

The Washington Post's Gellman, however, declined to comment on the circumstances around publishing the additional slides, or if more documents will be published in the future.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 01, 2013 10:13 pm

from Wikileaks

Edward Snowden submits asylum applications

Tuesday July 2, 01:30 UTC

On 30th June 2013 WikiLeaks’ legal advisor in the Edward Snowden matter, Sarah Harrison, submitted by hand a number of requests for asylum and asylum assistance on behalf of Edward J. Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

The requests were delivered to an official at the Russian consulate at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow late in the evening. The documents outline the risks of persecution Mr Snowden faces in the United States and have started to be delivered by the Russian consulate to the relevant embassies in Moscow.

The requests were made to a number of countries including the Republic of Austria, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Finland, the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of India, the Italian Republic, the Republic of Ireland, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Kingdom of Norway, the Republic of Poland, the Russian Federation, the Kingdom of Spain, the Swiss Confederation and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

The requests join or update others previously made including to the Republic of Ecuador and the Republic of Iceland.



Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow

Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013



Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 02, 2013 7:56 am

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Obama's War on Whistleblowers Finds Another Target

The Obama Administration
by Tom Engelhardt | July 1, 2013 - 7:44am

— from TomDispatch

Sometimes, it’s hard to grasp just how our world has been transformed since September 11, 2001. But here’s a little exchange at NBC Nightly News a few days back -- just part of the humdrum flow of TV news-chat -- that somehow caught my attention. News anchor Brian Williams and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell were discussing how the Obama administration was dealing with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, then reportedly somewhere in the bowels of Moscow’s international airport. Here was the exchange:

“Williams: The U.S. can say whatever it wishes and the press secretary can get angry and so on, what real power does the United States have here?

“Mitchell: It’s got a lot of leverage against Russia and China. They’re working behind the scenes, but short of rendition -- and that’s not going to happen getting him out of Russia -- there’s isn’t anything physical that they can do. So they have to just exert the pressure and hope that diplomacy works, but Vladimir Putin is a tough customer.”

It was that reference to “rendition” -- to, that is, the kidnapping of terror suspects by American forces (usually the CIA) off global streets (or highways or backlands) and their “rendering” to the United States, or to U.S. Navy ships in global waters, or to the prisons of allied regimes willing to torture any “suspect” and share whatever information (or misinformation) might be extracted with Washington. For a while, this practice was called “extraordinary rendition,” but it’s now so deeply embedded in our American world that it’s become highly ordinary rendition. In any case, the implication of Mitchell’s passing comment was that the U.S. wouldn’t “render” someone from an airport in the capital of a major power, but if that wasn’t “going to happen getting him out of Russia,” I think it’s hard not to complete Mitchell’s sentence with something like “it might be a perfectly reasonable option for Washington in, say, Ecuador.”

We are, in other words, in a new world where practices that once would have shocked have become the norm of news and pundit chitchat. TomDispatch, however, refuses to consider any of this “normal.” We have over these last years regularly focused on the way Washington’s most oppressive powers have been wildly enhanced and on people we now know as “whistleblowers,” people like Bradley Manning, who saw something truly, unnervingly different in our American world and decided they just had to do something about it. TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren is one of them and today he considers what Snowden might be going through.

— Tom

* * *

Edward Snowden’s Long Flight: What a Whistleblower Thinks a Fellow Whistleblower Might Have Thought

By Peter Van Buren

As a State Department whistleblower, I think a lot about Edward Snowden. I can’t help myself. My friendships with other whistleblowers like Tom Drake, Jesslyn Radack, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Kiriakou lead me to believe that, however different we may be as individuals, our acts have given us much in common. I suspect that includes Snowden, though I’ve never had the slightest contact with him. Still, as he took his long flight from Hong Kong into the unknown, I couldn’t help feeling that he was thinking some of my thoughts, or I his. Here are five things that I imagine were on his mind (they would have been on mine) as that plane took off.

I Am Afraid

Whistleblowers act on conscience because they encounter something so horrifying, unconstitutional, wasteful, fraudulent, or mismanaged that they are overcome by the need to speak out. There is always a calculus of pain and gain (for others, if not oneself), but first thoughts are about what you’ve uncovered, the information you feel compelled to bring into the light, rather than your own circumstances.

In my case, I was ignorant of what would happen once I blew the whistle. I didn’t expect the Department of State to attack me. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake was similarly unprepared. He initially believed that, when the FBI first came to interview him, they were on his side, eager to learn more about the criminal acts he had uncovered at the NSA. Snowden was different in this. He had the example of Bradley Manning and others to learn from. He clearly never doubted that the full weight of the U.S. government would fall on him.

He knew what to fear. He knew the Obama administration was determined to make any whistleblower pay, likely via yet another prosecution under the Espionage Act (with the potential for the death penalty). He also knew what his government had done since 9/11 without compunction: it had tortured and abused people to crush them; it had forced those it considered enemies into years of indefinite imprisonment, creating isolation cells for suspected terrorists and even a pre-trial whistleblower. It had murdered Americans without due process, and then, of course, there were the extraordinary renditions in which U.S. agents kidnapped perceived enemies and delivered them into the archipelago of post-9/11 horrors.

Sooner or later, if you’re a whistleblower, you get scared. It’s only human. On that flight, I imagine that Edward Snowden, for all his youthful confidence and bravado, was afraid. Would the Russians turn him over to Washington as part of some secret deal, maybe the sort of spy-for-spy trade that would harken back to the Cold War era?

Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn’t have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the U.S. government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the U.S. have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden’s documents.

In such moments, you try to push back the sense of paranoia that creeps into your mind when you realize that you are being monitored, followed, watched. It’s uncomfortable, scary. You have to wonder what your fate will be once the media grows bored with your story, or when whatever government has given you asylum changes its stance vis-a-vis the U.S. When the knock comes at the door, who will protect you? So who can doubt that fear made the journey with him?

Could I Go Back to the U.S.?

Amnesty International was on target when it stated that Snowden “could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the U.S.” As if to prove them right, months, if not years, before any trial, Speaker of the House John Boehner called Snowden a “traitor”; Congressman Peter King called him a “defector”; and others were already demanding his execution. If that wasn’t enough, the abuse Bradley Manning suffered had already convinced Snowden that a fair trial and humane treatment were impossible dreams for a whistleblower of his sort. (He specifically cited Manning in his appeal for asylum to Ecuador.)

So on that flight he knew -- as he had long known -- that the natural desire to go back to the U.S. and make a stand was beyond foolhardy. Yet the urge to return to the country he loves must have been traveling with him, too. Perhaps on that flight he found himself grimly amused that, after years of running roughshod over international standards -- Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “black sites” -- the U.S. had the nerve to chide Hong Kong, China, and Russia for not following the rule of law. He certainly knew that his own revelations about massive NSA cyber-spying on Hong Kong and China had deeply embarrassed the Obama administration. It had, after all, been blistering the Chinese for hacking into U.S. military and corporate computers. He himself had ensured that the Chinese wouldn’t turn him over, in the same way that history -- decades of U.S. bullying in Latin America -- ensured that he had a shot at a future in someplace like in Ecuador.

If he knew his extradition history, Snowden might also have thought about another time when Washington squirmed as a man it wanted left a friendly country for asylum. In 2004, the U.S. had chess great Bobby Fischer detained in Japan on charges that he had attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation of a U.S. trade ban. Others suggested that the real reason Washington was after him may have been Fischer’s post 9/11 statement: "It's time to finish off the U.S. once and for all. This just shows what comes around, goes around."

Fischer’s American passport was revoked just like Snowden’s. In the fashion of Hong Kong more recently, the Japanese released Fischer on an immigration technicality, and he flew to Iceland where he was granted citizenship. I was a diplomat in Japan at the time, and had a ringside seat for the negotiations. They must have paralleled what went on in Hong Kong: the appeals to treaty and international law; U.S. diplomats sounding like so many disappointed parents scolding a child; the pale hopes expressed for future good relations; the search for a sympathetic ear among local law enforcement agencies, immigration, and the foreign ministry -- anybody, in fact -- and finally, the desperate attempt to call in personal favors to buy more time for whatever Plan B might be. As with Snowden, in the end the U.S. stood by helplessly as its prey flew off.

How Will I Live Now?

At some point every whistleblower realizes his life will never be the same. For me, that meant losing my job of 24 years at the State Department. For Tom Drake, it meant financial ruin as the government tried to bankrupt him through endless litigation. For CIA agent John Kiriakou, it might have been the moment when, convicted of disclosing classified information to journalists, he said goodbye to his family and walked into Loretto Federal Correctional Institution.

Snowden could not have avoided anxiety about the future. Wherever he ended up, how would he live? What work would he do? He’s just turned 30 and faces, at best, a lifetime in some foreign country he’s never seen where he might not know the language or much of anything else.

So fear again, in a slightly different form. It never leaves you, not when you take on the world’s most powerful government. Would he ever see his family and friends again? Would they disown him, fearful of retaliation or affected by the smear campaign against him? Would his parents/best friend/girlfriend come to believe he was a traitor, a defector, a dangerous man? All whistleblowers find their personal relationships strained. Marriages are tested or broken, friends lost, children teased or bullied at school. I know from my own whistleblower’s journey that it’s an ugly penalty -- encouraged by a government scorned -- for acting on conscience.

If he had a deeper sense of history, Snowden might have found humor in the way the Obama administration chose to revoke his passport just before he left Hong Kong. After all, in the Cold War years, it was the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union, which was notorious for refusing to grant dissidents passports, while the U.S. regularly waived such requirements when they escaped to the West.

To deepen the irony of the moment, perhaps he was able to Google up the 2009-2011 figures on U.S. grants of asylum: 1,222 Russians, 9,493 Chinese, and 22 Ecuadorians, not including family members. Maybe he learned that, despite the tantrums U.S. officials threw regarding the international obligation of Russia to extradite him, the U.S. has recently refused Russian requests to extradite two of its citizens.

Snowden might have mused over then-candidate Obama's explicit pledge to protect whistleblowers. "Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government," Obama then said, "is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." It might have been Snowden's only laugh of the flight.

I Don’t Hate the U.S., I Love It Deeply, But Believe It Has Strayed

On that flight, Snowden took his love of America with him. It’s what all of us whistleblowers share: a love of country, if not necessarily its government, its military, or its intelligence services. We care what happens to us the people. That may have been his anchor on his unsettling journey. It would have been mine.

Remember, if we were working in the government in the first place, like every federal employee, soldier, and many government contractors, we had taken an oath that stated: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” We didn’t pledge fealty to the government or a president or party, only -- as the Constitution makes clear -- to the ultimate source of legitimacy in our nation, “the people.”

In an interview, Snowden indicated that he held off on making his disclosures for some time, in hopes that Barack Obama might look into the abyss and decide to become the bravest president in our history by reversing the country’s course. Only when Obama’s courage or intelligence failed was it time to become a whistleblower.

Some pundits claim that Snowden deserves nothing, because he didn’t go through “proper channels.” They couldn’t be more wrong and Snowden knows it. As with many of us whistleblowers facing a government acting in opposition to the Constitution, Snowden went through the channels that matter most: he used a free press to speak directly to his real boss, the American people.

In that sense, whatever the fear and anxiety about his life and his future, he must have felt easy with his actions. He had not betrayed his country, he had sought to inform it.

As with Bradley Manning, Obama administration officials are now claiming that Snowden has blood on his hands. Typically, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed: “People may die as a consequence to what this man did. It is possible that the United States would be attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before.” Snowden had heard the same slurs circling around Bradley Manning: that he had put people in danger. After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of the war on terror, there is irony too obvious to dwell upon in such charges.

Flying into the unknown, Snowden had to feel secure in having risked everything to show Americans how their government and the NSA bend or break laws to collect information on us in direct conflict with the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Amnesty International pointed out that blood-on-hands wasn’t at issue. "It appears he is being charged primarily for revealing U.S. and other governments’ unlawful actions that violate human rights.” Those whispers of support are something to take into the dark with you.

I Believe in Things Bigger Than Myself

Some of the charges against Snowden would make anyone pause: that, for instance, he did what he did for the thrill of publicity, out of narcissism, or for his own selfish reasons. To any of the members of the post-9/11 club of whistleblowers, the idea that we acted primarily for our own benefit has a theater of the absurd quality to it. Having been there, the negative sentiments expressed do not read or ring true.

Snowden himself laughed off the notion that he had acted for his own benefit. If he had wanted money, any number of foreign governments would have paid handsomely for the information he handed out to journalists for free and he would never have had to embark on that plane flight from Hong Kong. (No one ever called Aldrich Ames a whistleblower.) If he wanted fame, there were potential book contracts and film deals to be had.

No, it was conscience. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere along the line Snowden had read the Declaration of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

Edward Snowden undoubtedly took comfort knowing that a growing group of Americans are outraged enough to resist a government turning against its own people. His thoughts were mirrored by Julian Assange, who said, “In the Obama administration's attempt to crush these young whistleblowers with espionage charges, the U.S. government is taking on a generation, a young generation of people who find the mass violation of the rights of privacy and open process unacceptable. In taking on the generation, the Obama administration can only lose.” Snowden surely hoped President Obama would ask himself why he has pursued more than double the number of Espionage Act cases of all his presidential predecessors combined, and why almost all of those prosecutions failed.

On that flight, Edward Snowden must have reflected on what he had lost, including the high salary, the sweet life in Hawaii and Switzerland, the personal relationships, and the excitement of being on the inside, as well as the coolness of knowing tomorrow’s news today. He has already lost much that matters in an individual life, but not everything that matters. Sometimes -- and any whistleblower comes to know this in a deep way -- you have to believe that something other, more, deeper, better than yourself matters. You have to believe that one courageous act of conscience might make a difference in an America gone astray or simply that, matter or not, you did the right thing for your country.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. Van Buren’s next book, Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent, is due out in March 2014.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Edward Snowden, American Hero

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 02, 2013 8:08 am

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 7h
According to AP, the US is plotting to render (extradition without process) #Snowden via eastern europe to the US


WikiLeaks: Snowden makes expanded asylum requests

Posted: Jul 01, 2013 3:11 AM CDT
Updated: Jul 01, 2013 11:02 PM CDT
By TOM RAUM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, believed to be in legal limbo in the Moscow airport, is expanding his requests for asylum to another 19 countries, including China, according to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that has adopted Snowden and his cause, on Monday night posted a statement said to be from Snowden that slammed President Barack Obama for "using citizenship as a weapon."

"Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person," Snowden says in the statement. "Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

"Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me."

WikiLeaks legal adviser Sarah Harrison delivered the requests for asylum to an official at the Russian consulate at the Moscow airport on Sunday, according to the website. WikiLeaks says some of the requests have already been delivered to the appropriate embassies.

The WikiLeaks statement said requests were made to China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, India and several European countries. Snowden had planned earlier to seek asylum in Ecuador and has requested asylum in Russia.

The asylum requests reported by WikiLeaks and the Snowden statement could not be independently authenticated.

Snowden, who has been on the run since releasing sensitive NSA documents, is believed to have been in Moscow airport's transit zone since his arrival from Hong Kong on June 23. The U.S. has annulled his passport, and Ecuador, where he had hoped to get asylum, has been giving mixed signals about offering him shelter.

After Snowden applied for political asylum to remain in Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters in Moscow that Snowden would have to stop leaking U.S. secrets if he wanted asylum there - and he added that Snowden seemed unwilling to stop publishing leaks of classified material.

At the same time, Putin said he had no plans to turn over Snowden to the United States.

The expanded requests for asylum come as the Obama administration contends with European allies angry about the release of documents that alleged U.S. eavesdropping on European Union diplomats.

Obama, in an African news conference with Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, said the U.S. would provide allies with information about new reports that the NSA had bugged EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels. But he also suggested such activity by governments would hardly be unusual.

"We should stipulate that every intelligence service -not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there's an intelligence service - here's one thing that they're going to be doing: They're going to be trying to understand the world better, and what's going on in world capitals around the world," he said. "If that weren't the case, then there'd be no use for an intelligence service."

The latest issue concerns allegations, published in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, of U.S. spying on European officials. French President Francois Hollande demanded Monday that the U.S. immediately stop any such eavesdropping and suggested the widening controversy could jeopardize next week's opening of trans-Atlantic trade talks between the United States and Europe.

"We cannot accept this kind of behavior from partners and allies," Hollande said on French television.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin, "Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable." He declared, "We're not in the Cold War anymore."

Even before the latest disclosures, talks at the upcoming free-trade sessions were expected to be fragile, with disagreements surfacing over which items should be covered in or excluded from an agreement. The United States has said there should be no exceptions. But France has called for exempting certain cultural products, and other Europeans do not appear eager to give up longtime agricultural subsidies.

Obama said the Europeans "are some of the closest allies that we have in the world." But he added: "I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That's how intelligence services operate."

Nonetheless, Obama said he'd told his advisers to "evaluate everything that's being claimed" and promised to share the results with allies.

Meanwhile, the Interfax news agency said a Russian consular official has confirmed that Snowden had asked for asylum in Russia.

Interfax cited Kim Shevchenko, the duty officer at the Russian Foreign Ministry's consular office in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, as saying that Snowden's representative, Harrison, handed over his request Sunday.

"If he wants to go somewhere and there are those who would take him, he is welcome to do so," Putin said. "If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must stop his activities aimed at inflicting damage on our American partners, no matter how strange it may sound coming from my lips."

Obama said "there have been high-level discussions with the Russians" about Snowden's situation.

"We don't have an extradition treaty with Russia. On the other hand, you know, Mr. Snowden, we understand, has traveled there without a valid passport, without legal papers. And you know we are hopeful that the Russian government makes decisions based on the normal procedures regarding international travel and the normal procedures regarding international travel and the normal interactions that law enforcement has. So I can confirm that."

Putin didn't mention any Snowden effort to seek asylum in Russia, and spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to say what the Russian response might be. Putin insisted that Snowden wasn't a Russian agent and that Russian security agencies hadn't contacted him.

Three U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to publicly discuss the Snowden case, said Washington's efforts were focused primarily on persuading Russia to deport Snowden either directly to the United States or to a third country, possibly in eastern Europe, that would then hand him over to U.S. authorities.

In a sign of the distrust generated by the Der Spiegel report, the German government said it had launched a review of its secure government communications network and the EU's executive, the European Commission, ordered "a comprehensive ad hoc security sweep."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday he didn't know the details of the allegations, but he still played them down, maintaining that many nations undertake various activities to protect their national interests. Kerry failed to quell the outrage from allies, including France, Germany and Italy.

A spokesman for Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, said, "The European Union has demanded and expects full and urgent clarification by the U.S. regarding the allegations."

According to Der Spiegel's report, which it said was partly based on information leaked by Snowden, NSA planted bugs in the EU's diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building's computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU's mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said.

It also reported that the NSA used secure facilities at NATO headquarters in Brussels to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior officials' calls and Internet traffic at a key EU office nearby.

As for Snowden, White House national security spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the White House won't comment on specific asylum requests but reiterated its message to all countries that he "needs to be expelled back to the U.S. based on the fact that he doesn't have travel documents and the charges pending against him."

Regarding possible effects on U.S. interactions with Russia, she said it remains the case "that we don't want this issue to negatively impact the bilateral relationship."

___

Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, Sarah DiLorenzo in Paris, Frank Jordans and Geir Moulson in Berlin, Elena Becatoros in Athens, Raf Casert in Brussels, Deb Riechmann in Brunei, Nicole Winfield in Rome, Julie Pace in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.



Read more: http://www.myfoxla.com/story/22728569/u ... z2XtBV09em




Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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