.
Nordic pretty much echoed my thoughts on this.
[edited to remove nonsense].
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Oct 17, 2013 6:08 pm
by cptmarginal » Thu Oct 31, 2013 5:13 pm
We’re very excited to announce two new members joining our team: Dan Froomkin and Liliana Segura. Dan and Liliana will work alongside Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and me as we develop our new venture with Pierre Omidyar.
Dan Froomkin is a veteran journalist who has received national acclaim for his writing about U.S. politics and media coverage. He’s been particularly focused on the issue of journalistic accountability – i.e. correcting misinformation, asking critical questions, and holding those in power accountable to their actions.
He was preparing to launch a website called FearlessMedia.org when we approached him about working with us. Before that, he was senior Washington correspondent and Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post. During 12 years working for The Washington Post, he spent three as editor and six as the writer of the popular and controversial White House Watch column. Dan has also worked since 2004 for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, most of that time as deputy editor of the NiemanWatchdog.org website.
Liliana Segura is journalist and editor with a longtime focus on prisons, prisoners, and the failings and excesses of the U.S. criminal justice system–from wrongful convictions to the death penalty. She covered these and other issues most recently as an editor at The Nation Magazine, where she edited a number of award-winning stories. Previously she was a senior editor at AlterNet, where she was in charge of civil liberties coverage during the early days of Obama’s presidency. She is on the board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Applied Research Center, a U.S. racial justice think tank.
Both embody the core attributes of our new venture. We are looking very forward to working with them in building our team further.
by cptmarginal » Sun Nov 17, 2013 4:59 pm
A Hard Look At the Non-Profit Behind Glenn Greenwald’s New Publication
by Klint Finley November 16, 2013
Unfortunately this will go behind a paywall in about 15 hours, read it while you can:The world knows very little about the political motivations of Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire who is founding (and funding) a quarter-billion-dollar journalism venture with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. What we do know is this: Pierre Omidyar is a very special kind of technology billionaire.
We know this because America’s sharpest journalism critics have told us.
In a piece headlined “The Extraordinary Promise of the New Greenwald-Omidyar Venture”, The Columbia Journalism Review gushed over the announcement of Omidyar’s project. And just in case their point wasn’t clear, they added the amazing subhead, “Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world.
The authors then launch into an examination of what hte Omidyar Network has funded, which includes:
-SKS Microfinance, the microlending company that terrorized its debtors into committing suicide in India
-DonorsChoose, a fundraising site for public schools that was aligned with the makers of the anti-teacher union propaganda film Waiting for Superman
-Hernando de Soto, the “Hayek of Latin America” who was once drug czar for Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru now in prison for crimes against humanity.
Not mentioned is Change.org, the fake non-profit accused of exploiting people’s anger under the guise of being a non-profit.
They conclude:And the reason that matters, of course, is because Pierre Omidyar’s dystopian vision is merging with Glenn Greenwald’s and Laura Poitras’ monopoly on the crown jewels of the National Security Agency — the world’s secrets, our secrets — and using the value of those secrets as the capital for what’s being billed as an entirely new, idealistic media project, an idealism that the CJR and others promise will not shy away from taking on power.
The question, however, is what defines power to a neoliberal mind? We’re going to take a wild guess here and say: The State.
So brace yourself, you’re about to get something you’ve never seen before: billionaire-backed journalism taking on the power of the state. How radical is that?
Full Story: NSFW (Don’t worry, this site actually is safe for work)
It reminds me of this bit from Mark Fisher:The autonomist critique of authoritarianism and Stalinist bureaucracy is something that we shouldn’t forget. Any credible leftist politics now has to take the problem of anti-authoritarianism very seriously. At the same time, however, we have to recognise that the situation is very different from the context in which autonomist ideas first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, the Communist Party and the trade unions were very powerful; Stalinism was still an oppressive presence.
None of these things are true today. Whatever the merits of autonomist anti-statism, it has to be acknowledged that anti-statism is now hegemonic. There’s a congruence between the language of neo-anarchism and David Cameron’s Big Society, which is not to say that the discourses are identical. But one problem with anti-statism — particularly when coupled with localism, as it often is — is that it makes any defence of institutions like the NHS very difficult. The drive of the original autonomists was to escape existing institutions, whereas I think our aim today should be to produce new institutions.
by RocketMan » Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:08 am
First Look, the news company created by former PayPal employee Pierre Omidyar, announced Wednesday that they had added irreverent journalist Matt Taibbi to their stable of prominent reporters.
Taibbi will lead a second newsmagazine for First Look. The First, Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, launched earlier this month.
Greenwald is known for his reporting on the NSA wiretapping scandal, having received a trove of documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden; Taibbi is known for his reporting on Wall Street.
“Taibbi will bring his trademark combination of reporting, analysis, humor and outrage to the ongoing financial crisis – and to the political machinery that makes it possible” to a new First Look publication, according to a company release. The magazine will launch later this year.
Prior to the jump, Taibbi served at Rolling Stone as contributing editor for ten years, where he was known for his scathing reporting on Wall Street and, in particular, Goldman Sachs.
His most famous quote is his probably his comparison of Goldman Sachs to a vampire squid in a column published in 2009.
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere,” he said. “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 14, 2014 12:31 pm
Glenn Greenwald to Stephen Colbert: NSA ‘Story That Will Make the Biggest Impact’ Is Yet to Come
Posted on May 13, 2014
The “Colbert Report” host finally gets his hands on the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who brought us the Edward Snowden leaks on the National Security Agency. There to discuss his book, “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald comes under attack by Colbert, who is determined to believe Snowden is a traitor rather than a whistle-blower. Greenwald sets him straight, but the comedian does win one part of the argument on a technicality. The journalist also revealed that a story on whom the NSA has specially been targeting will be published in the next couple of months and will “shape how the events of the last 10 months are viewed by history.”
by Wombaticus Rex » Wed May 14, 2014 12:38 pm
by bks » Wed May 14, 2014 5:54 pm
I'm guessing the "Big Story" has already been out for quite some time, just not plainly stated by anyone who matters.
by JackRiddler » Wed May 14, 2014 6:06 pm
bks » Wed May 14, 2014 4:54 pm wrote:I'm guessing the "Big Story" has already been out for quite some time, just not plainly stated by anyone who matters.
Could well be. But if it's actually news, in a way it's worse, since how is what he's doing any better than the NYT sitting on the warrantless wiretapping story for 14 months? They did it on the pretext of national security; Greenwald, the new embodiment of responsible journalism, admits he's doing it for effect!
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 14, 2014 6:34 pm
"The Stuff I Saw Really Began to Disturb Me": How the U.S. Drone War Pushed Snowden to Leak NSA Docs
In his new book, "No Place to Hide," journalist Glenn Greenwald provides new details on Edward Snowden’s personal story and his motivation to expose the U.S. surveillance state. "The stuff I saw really began to disturb me. I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill," Snowden told Greenwald about his time as a National Security Agency contractor. "You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening."
Greenwald joins us in studio to describe the inside story of the man behind the NSA leaks. "The fact that this individual with no power was knowingly risking everything in his life for a political cause, and really ended up changing the world, I think is a remarkable lesson for everybody," Greenwald says. "It’s certainly something that’s inspired me and has shaped how I think about things — and probably will for the rest of my life."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose new book, just out today, is titled No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. This is a clip of Edward Snowden during his recent TED Talk, when he was asked by Chris Anderson about the risks he took in exposing the NSA’s surveillance programs.
CHRIS ANDERSON: Most people would find the situation you’re in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously—you know, you heard what happened—what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is. And there was a story in BuzzFeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. How—how are you coping with this? Are you—how are you coping with the fear?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: You know, it’s—it’s no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I’ve made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what can I do for the American people. I don’t want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they’re willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, "Hey, this is not appropriate."
AMY GOODMAN: Now, let’s be clear: That’s Edward Snowden giving a TED Talk, not in person, because he has political asylum in Russia right now, very concerned that if he came to the United States—well, as you say in your book, Edward Snowden was inconceivably calm in Hong Kong and felt profoundly at peace with what he had done. You write, "He once joked, 'I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo.'" Talk about who Edward Snowden was and is. What is his background? You reveal things in this book that most people haven’t talked about before.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, to me, this is, you know, from my own personal experience, probably the most stunning part of the story, is—and it’s what I spent a long time in Hong Kong trying to figure out and investigate, through asking him questions and then thinking about, as well—and I still think about it—which is: What would lead a seemingly ordinary 29-year-old, with his entire life ahead of him, someone very well adjusted, by all appearances, with a good job and a very good income and a great career and a girlfriend who he loves and a family who’s supportive, to give up his entire life to literally risk decades, if not the rest of his life, in prison, not to enrich himself or to extract vengeance on somebody, but in pursuit of a political ideal, to confront an injustice that he believes is taking place? What actually takes place in someone’s mind and in their spirit and in their soul that leads them to engage in such an obviously self-sacrificing act? I mean, that’s a really hard, but important question to think about. And what really struck me most about him was that he grew up as a son of, essentially, family—a family that worked for the federal government. His father was in the Coast Guard for 30 years. I think you could describe him as lower middle class. He grew up in a very kind of ordinary home. He actually didn’t even finish high school, because he never was fulfilled by high school, despite how obviously intelligent he is. But he’s somebody who is just very ordinary. I mean, he didn’t have family wealth or family connections or any prestige or position or power.
AMY GOODMAN: And he grew up where?
GLENN GREENWALD: He grew up in Virginia, essentially. And he was born in North Carolina and then grew up in Virginia. And, you know, he was somebody who was instilled with the sort of traditional conceptions of patriotism, as well. I mean, after he didn’t finish high school, the first thing he did was enlist in the U.S. Army, because he wanted to go fight in the Iraq War, which he thought was a noble endeavor. He had believed the propaganda that the war was about liberating the Iraqi people. And he got to basic training and was disillusioned when, he said, the officers training them were talking a lot about killing Arabs and very little about liberating anybody. But even then, he devoted himself to working at NSA and CIA and—
AMY GOODMAN: But wait, in this—
GLENN GREENWALD: —working for the U.S. government.
AMY GOODMAN: In this training, he broke his legs.
GLENN GREENWALD: He broke both of his legs, which is the reason why he ended up not going to the Iraq War. He very easily could have. But even back then, you know, it’s interesting. You can look at that, in one sense, as well—he had this incredible journey where he did this amazing reversal, because he was so patriotic, in that traditional sense of how it’s conceived of, that he was ready to go fight in the Iraq War, and then, 10 years later, he becomes this major whistleblower. To me, they’re really the same kind of act. They grow out of the same sort of way of thinking about the world. And that is that he was willing to sacrifice his own life in 2003 to enlist to go fight in the Iraq War, because he felt it was his moral duty to help people who were being oppressed, and 10 years later, that’s essentially the same thing that he did: He sacrificed his liberty and his life in order to help people who he thought were being oppressed. It really comes out of the same moral code. And the fact that this individual with no power was knowingly risking everything in his life for a political cause, and really ended up changing the world, I think is a remarkable lesson for everybody. It’s certainly something that’s certainly inspired me and has shaped how I think about things, and probably will for the rest of my life.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, so he worked for—well, he was—he went into the military. And then, talk about how he ends up being an NSA contractor, how he ends up working for Booz Allen Hamilton.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there’s this fascinating dilemma in the American national security state, which is that they’ve built this enormous apparatus. And in order to have it function, you need huge numbers of people. And, unfortunately for the NSA, the only kinds of people who are really capable of thriving in this environment, which requires, you know, very advanced and detailed knowledge of how the Internet works, are people who have grown up in the Internet culture, who tend to be quite young and often very anti-authoritarian. And so, they’re essentially recruiting from people who are kind of inclined to become hackers, rather than officials in the national security state apparatus. And they try and recruit these people and convert them to think the way they need them to think. And obviously it’s not always successful, which is why you’ve had this kind of series of whistleblowers, often very young, these people who end up being quite rebellious.
But, you know, Snowden was sort of poorly adjusted. I mean, he hadn’t found his place in the world as a young man. I mean, he didn’t finish high school, which was a disappointment to his parents and to himself. And right away in this environment, he thrived, because he has an incredible facility with programming and cryptography and the Internet, and so he was promoted very rapidly. His skills were very quickly recognized. And he—even though he had no high school degree, he went from working as a security guard at the NSA, which was his first job, at a—literally, an NSA building, some random building at the University of Maryland—to being vested with increasing levels of responsibility and access.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. You said at an NSA building at the University of Maryland.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, there’s a covert facility at the University of Maryland that looks, to all appearances, on purpose, to be a University of Maryland office or—
AMY GOODMAN: In College Park?
GLENN GREENWALD: In College Park—that in fact is covertly an NSA facility. And it has the cooperation of administration officials, which are obviously government employees, because it’s a public school. And that was the first facility at which he worked.
AMY GOODMAN: Can students freely go in and out?
GLENN GREENWALD: I don’t know the details. I just know that it’s a secure building, which is why he was hired as a security guard to work there.
AMY GOODMAN: So Edward Snowden was there as a guard.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, literally a security guard wearing a uniform and a little makeshift badge. I don’t think he had a gun, but he had, you know, the rest of the kind of indicia of being a security guard.
AMY GOODMAN: How does he end up working at Dell?
GLENN GREENWALD: He, you know, advanced through the national security state. He actually got clearance. And once you get security clearance, it means that there’s all kinds of job openings available for you. He spent three years working directly for the CIA in Geneva, became disillusioned with the CIA, and then decided to shift to the NSA. And because so much of our national security state is now privatized and outsourced, what it means to go work for the NSA usually means that you’re going to work for some huge corporation, like Booz Allen or Dell, General Dynamics, all sorts of other corporations that have contracts with the NSA. And so, he ended up at Dell working actually for the CIA. By this point, he had pretty much—
AMY GOODMAN: But how does that work? Dell is a private corporation, most people think, so how, if you’re working at Dell, are you working for the CIA?
GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, this is—you know, it’s the same way that if you want to go fight in the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, or go be part of the drone program in Yemen or Somalia, you can go and work for the U.S. government and be a government employee, but the more—the easier and certainly the more lucrative way is to go to work for Blackwater or for corporations that have contracts. And this is a vital point of the story, is that so much of what we consider to be the U.S. government and military and intelligence functions are now in the hands of the private sector. The private sector does most of the work. I think it’s something like 75 percent of the $75-billion-a-year NSA budget is actually money that goes directly into the coffers of private corporations. And we hear all this stuff about how everything is so well controlled, there’s transparency, there’s oversight. None of these mechanisms and controls apply to the private sector that really is running the vast bulk of the national security state, which is why Edward Snowden, despite being a private employee of a private corporation, had access to all these vast NSA systems, because there’s no division anymore between what we think of as the public realm, which is the government, and the private corporations that own it and that run it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Glenn Greenwald, talk about why Edward Snowden leaves Dell, what he feels he can’t do there, and ends up at Booz Allen.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it was really, I think, at Dell when he first decided that he was willing to kind of cross this line and become a whistleblower. He had thought about it back in Geneva, when he was at the CIA, and for a variety of reasons, including his belief that the election of Obama would result in the curbing of some of these abuses, he thought it wouldn’t be necessary to do. And then, once he saw that Obama was actually not just continuing, but in some cases escalating a lot of these policies, he said he kind of realized that leadership is about acting as an example to others, rather than waiting for others to act. And so, he pretty much committed mentally while at Dell to becoming a whistleblower, and so he started thinking about what documents do I need to tell the story that need to be told. And he was able to access a lot of them there. He had accessed some of them previously at NSA positions and then decided there were some documents that he could access only by getting this particular job at Booz Allen that was part of a facility where these documents existed in Hawaii. And so he purposely sought out that job to kind of complete the picture that he thought the world should see.
AMY GOODMAN: And why was this so important to him? What was he coming to realize working at Dell with the CIA?
GLENN GREENWALD: One of the things that he told me was like a turning point for him was he had an NSA job in Japan, where—and this was the job right before Dell—that he said he was able to watch the real-time surveillance being fed by drones, in which you could see an entire village in a place where America is not at war, like Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan. And you could see literally little dots of people and what they were doing, and then you would have intelligence about who they were and who they were calling and this vast picture that was able to be created of them by not even physically being in the country. And the invasiveness and the extent of that surveillance, he said, was something even he, working inside this community, had no idea even existed. And—
AMY GOODMAN: He was watching a village before it was struck by a drone?
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, these were surveillance drones, typically. And so, it wasn’t even necessarily that the drones were killing people, though a lot of times they did. That was the reason for putting these villages under surveillance, was to decide who to kill. But he could watch just how much the U.S. government covertly could put entire populations under a microscope. And the fact that this had been done without any democratic debate or without his fellow citizens knowing about it was extremely alarming to him. And the more he came to see just how ubiquitous this system of suspicionless surveillance was, the more compelled he felt not to keep it a secret.
AMY GOODMAN: And not only the drone surveillance, but watching people type every letter—explain what that was.
GLENN GREENWALD: There is a certain kind of what the NSA calls "malware," which is essentially a virus that enters your computer. And there’s all kinds of ways they can get that virus onto your computer. They can induce you to click on a link by sending it to your email, that once you click on it will inject that virus into your system. They can send you a file that, once you open, by calling it "urgent banking notice," you open—or "tax notice," you open the file, and the opening of that file injects this virus. Or they can physically access your computer and put it in that way. And once that virus is there, they, as they call it, own your computer, which means that they can literally see every keystroke that you enter. And one of the documents we published said that they had done this to 50,000 machines. The New York Times thereafter reported that it was 100,000. And then we, just about a month and a half ago, at The Intercept reported that it was millions of machines they’re preparing to do this to. And so, he would be able to watch the outcome of this malware, where people, without any idea that their machines had been infected, were having every keystroke that they entered, every Google search, every website they clicked on, every email they sent or opened or read, every chat in which they engaged, read by an analyst thousands of miles away. And he found that deeply disturbing.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to that place in the videotape that you first posted at The Guardian, that Laura filmed, where he talks about the kind of typing that he could see.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Edward Snowden. A federal judge or the president of the United States—and this, of course, is what the Obama administration at first completely denied.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And the Obama administration—and I say this really advisably—was knowingly lying to the public when they denied the truth of what he had said. And, you know, this was in the very first week, and that was explosive claim, and the NSA had no idea what evidence we had, so they could—they thought they could lie with impunity. And then we ultimately published documents, and I publish on purpose a lot more in the book, that demonstrate exactly what analysts are capable of doing. And what they’re capable of doing is exactly what Edward Snowden said, which is—the phrase that describes what the NSA is attempting to do and is close to doing is their own phrase, which is "collect it all." They want to collect and store the entire Internet, literally every email, every chat, every Google search, every website that you click on.
And they then have the capability, using programs that all of these NSA analysts can access and use, including Edward Snowden, even though he was a private corporation employee, to literally, in a simple form that’s extremely easy to use—you just enter the email address that you want to read emails from, you click on a drop-down menu of, quote, "justification"—this person’s a terrorist, this person is an agent of a foreign power—and then the database returns to your desk all of the emails from the selector, the email address, that you’ve just asked for. It is literally that easy. There’s no supervisor who has to approve it. There’s very little auditing that takes place even after the fact. When they do discover what looks like an unjustified search, they just kind of concoct a reason to cover it all up that it’s being done. And what he said an NSA analyst can do, which is eavesdrop and read the communications of any person, including even the president, is exactly what the system has been constructed to enable.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to interrupt for a minute, because you talked about him working at Dell, you talked about him working as a security guard and, of course, at Booz Allen. What about at the Defense Intelligence Agency? In fact, he was teaching others.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it was fascinating. You know, you can know that the media is unbelievably unreliable in all sorts of ways when, you know, you’re just watching them kind of from a distance. But when you’re in the middle of a story, you realize the extreme extent to which that’s true. And almost instantly, the entire U.S. media decided to depict him as this kind of idiot and knave, this low-level IT guy who just kind of stumbled into these documents. And I knew from the beginning that the reality was exactly the opposite. He was a very highly trained cyber-operative who had been not only trained in the highest levels of cyber-attack and cyberdefense; he was trained as a hacker to invade other countries’ systems and to protect the United States. But he advanced to the level where he was training other operatives in how to protect information, but also how to steal it from other places.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s training government operatives.
GLENN GREENWALD: Government operatives inside the United States national security state about how to do these sorts of things. And so he was a very sophisticated operative who had been trained, essentially, how to steal information. And there was an irony there that he was now being charged for espionage, when it’s really the NSA that’s doing the espionage, stealing all the time. And they had trained him to steal from other governments, but not from their own. And so, right away it was clear that he was going to be the number one most wanted fugitive in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, all of that is to say that the government knew exactly who he was once he revealed himself.
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I mean, they—I mean, once—I believe that they did not know, prior to that article being published, who the source of this—these documents were. It took them a while to get up to speed and just up and running and to realize the magnitude of it. So I think he did reveal himself to the government. I don’t think they knew by then who he was. But, of course, once he then identified himself, they knew exactly who he was, what his capabilities were and what they had trained him in.
AMY GOODMAN: This is President Obama speaking on Charlie Rose last June. This was weeks after Edward Snowden had revealed some of what he knew.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: 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 emails.
CHARLIE ROSE: And have not.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and—unless they—and usually it wouldn’t be "they," it would be the FBI—go to a court and obtain a warrant and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way, when we were growing up and were watching movies, you know, you want to go set up a wiretap, you’ve got to go to a judge, show probable cause.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama in June, weeks after the first revelations came out. Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, it’s—of all the statements that have been made by the government that have been false, I think that one is the most deliberately and starkly false. There was a scandal in 2005 that The New York Times revealed and won the Pulitzer Prize for, which was that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Americans without obtaining warrants from the court. And in 2008, the Congress, a bipartisan Congress, supported by President Obama, then Senator Obama, enacted a new law, the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, the purpose of which was to legalize the essence of that Bush program. And what the law said was that the NSA has the power to listen in on the telephone conversations of Americans or read their emails without a warrant—without a warrant—whenever they are speaking to a foreign national. So, all the time, the NSA listens to the telephone calls of Americans or reads their emails without going and getting a warrant, completely contrary to what President Obama said.
And then, the other aspect of it, as well, is that the FISA court is a well-known joke. It was created in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee uncovered decades of surveillance abuses, and the government had to find a way to placate American anger. And what they said was, "Oh, don’t worry. We’re going to create this court that from now on the government has to go to to get permission." And they created the court to be the ultimate rubber-stamping court. It meets in secret. Only the government is allowed to appear. And so, as a result, by design, this court almost never rejects any request for surveillance. So, even to the extent what President Obama said was truthful, in the limited sense that it was, it’s extremely misleading, because there’s very little oversight on the system.
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 21, 2014 11:52 am
Greenwald Accepts Hugh Hefner Award
Reporter gushes that he's made his dad proud.
By Steven Nelson May 21, 2014 Leave a Comment SHARE
Glenn Greenwald accepted the 2014 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for journalism Tuesday.
He didn’t show up for the awards ceremony, emceed by the Playboy publisher’s daughter, Christie Hefner, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
But in a recorded video message to attendees, Greenwald said he thought of his politically conservative father when he found out he won.
“I realized instantly that receiving an award named after Hugh Hefner would be the first time that he really felt unqualified enthusiasm about the work that I was doing, and would be truly impressed in a way that was free of caveats, so thank you for that,” he said.
Greenwald’s award was presented by Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office.
Proposed surveillance reforms in the USA Freedom Act (which goes up for a vote Thursday in the House) “wouldn’t have happened without Glenn,” Murphy said. “[He] broke the logjam.”
Earlier this year, Greenwald won a George Polk Award for his reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks, and the Guardian co-won a Pulitzer Prize with The Washington Post for its Greenwald-led coverage.
The Hefner awards were first presented in 1980.
Other winners, each of whom appeared in the flesh Tuesday, included authors Christopher Finan and Thomas Healy, student free-speech advocates Mary Beth Tinker and Mike Hiestand, Oklahoma Muslim activist Muneer Awad and Norman Dorsen, former president of the ACLU.
Watch Greenwald’s speech:
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 28, 2014 11:52 pm
Greenwald's Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance
By Toby Harnden - May 26, 2014
The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.
His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.
Greenwald, who is promoting his book No Place To Hide and is trailed by a documentary crew wherever he goes, was speaking in a boutique hotel near Harvard, where he was to appear with Noam Chomsky, the octogenarian leftist academic.
“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’," he said.
“Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists?
What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”
Greenwald said the names would be published via The Intercept, a website funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder and chairman of eBay. Greenwald left The Guardian, which published most of the Snowden revelations, last autumn to work for Omidyar.
“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ magazine. “The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.”
The publication last week of Greenwald’s book about the story behind Snowden’s leaks has re-ignited controversy about the motives of the young computer technician, who fled to Hong Kong nearly a year ago and was then given refuge by Russia, which has resisted US demands to extradite him.
Greenwald has even debated Gen Michael Hayden, a former NSA and CIA director, in Toronto. A famously aggressive and relentless former lawyer, Greenwald refused to engage in any social niceties with his adversary.
"I think that's he's a war criminal and belong in the Hague," he explained. "And so to shake his hand or chat with him at a cocktail party is something really unpleasant to me." Away from TV studios and debating chambers, however, Greenwald is affable and engaging.
There are even flashes of self-doubt. He confided that when he first met Snowden in Hong Kong "I wanted him to be this really presentable reliable figure so badly I was a little bit concerned my desires would influence or muddy my perceptions".
Some senior intelligence figures claim Snowden could have been a spy for China, Russia or even both — a notion that Greenwald rejects as "just a standard demonisation tactic".
Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the vast majority of what Snowden stole related to "military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures" - something the fugitive vehemently denies.
James Clapper, director of National Intelligence and another figure Greenwald wants jailed, has described Snowden’s actions as the “most massive and damaging theft of intelligence” ever carried out.
Snowden is believed to have used a “spider” such as Googlebot, an easily available automated web crawler that Google developed to find and index new pages on the web. After Snowden set parameters for how far the spider should range, investigators have concluded, it was able to collect data when he wasn’t present.
Jack Devine, a former CIA director of operations, said he did not believe Snowden had been a spy, but that he shared many psychological characteristics of American traitors such as his former colleague Aldrich Ames, who spent years betraying secrets to Russia and is now serving life in prison.
These included an inflated sense of cleverness and self-importance, clashes with superiors at work, a dissatisfaction with carrying out mundane tasks and a sense of being under-appreciated.
“If I saw it and I were [the Russians or the Chinese] I’d come running for him,” said Devine. “But I don’t think the system worked that well. Even if you spot a bad apple, it takes a lot to get them.”
Devine, author of the forthcoming Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story, said Snowden’s current situation bore similarities to that of Kim Philby, the MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet Union and ended up in Russia, alone and vulnerable.
“The Russians have been doing espionage for a long time. They understand the psychology of discontented people. It would be most unusual if he were allowed to remain there as a guest for free.
“I don’t think he was a controlled asset but I think at the end of the day he will be.”
Greenwald said he and Snowden still speak nearly every day via an encrypted computer link. “Literally of all the people that I’ve ever met and now know in the world, Edward Snowden is by far the person most at peace and fulfilled as a human being,” he said.
Greenwald said the NSA’s failure to catch Snowden was part of the paradox that “there is this genuinely menacing system and at the same time are really inept about how they operate it’.
“Not only was he out there under their noses downloading huge amounts of documents without being detected but to this day they’re incapable of finding out what he took.”
Greenwald, who has 12 dogs, ranging in size from a Bernese mountain dog to a miniature pinscher, at his home in Brazil, also promised further revelations about GCHQ, the NSA’s British sister agency.
“The British are more unrestrained and vicious in their surveillance mindset than even the US.” he said. “When you go to the park in New York, you see these built-up muscular guys and they have these tiny Shih Tzu dogs.
“It will seem like a mismatch but the Shih Tzu is super-vicious and yapping. That’s how I see the relationship between the GCHQ and the NSA.”
Toby Harnden is the Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times.
This article originally appeared in The Sunday Times. It is reprinted here with permission.
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 28, 2014 11:53 pm
Greenwald's Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance
By Toby Harnden - May 26, 2014
The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.
His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.
Greenwald, who is promoting his book No Place To Hide and is trailed by a documentary crew wherever he goes, was speaking in a boutique hotel near Harvard, where he was to appear with Noam Chomsky, the octogenarian leftist academic.
“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’," he said.
“Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists?
What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”
Greenwald said the names would be published via The Intercept, a website funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder and chairman of eBay. Greenwald left The Guardian, which published most of the Snowden revelations, last autumn to work for Omidyar.
“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ magazine. “The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.”
The publication last week of Greenwald’s book about the story behind Snowden’s leaks has re-ignited controversy about the motives of the young computer technician, who fled to Hong Kong nearly a year ago and was then given refuge by Russia, which has resisted US demands to extradite him.
Greenwald has even debated Gen Michael Hayden, a former NSA and CIA director, in Toronto. A famously aggressive and relentless former lawyer, Greenwald refused to engage in any social niceties with his adversary.
"I think that's he's a war criminal and belong in the Hague," he explained. "And so to shake his hand or chat with him at a cocktail party is something really unpleasant to me." Away from TV studios and debating chambers, however, Greenwald is affable and engaging.
There are even flashes of self-doubt. He confided that when he first met Snowden in Hong Kong "I wanted him to be this really presentable reliable figure so badly I was a little bit concerned my desires would influence or muddy my perceptions".
Some senior intelligence figures claim Snowden could have been a spy for China, Russia or even both — a notion that Greenwald rejects as "just a standard demonisation tactic".
Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the vast majority of what Snowden stole related to "military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures" - something the fugitive vehemently denies.
James Clapper, director of National Intelligence and another figure Greenwald wants jailed, has described Snowden’s actions as the “most massive and damaging theft of intelligence” ever carried out.
Snowden is believed to have used a “spider” such as Googlebot, an easily available automated web crawler that Google developed to find and index new pages on the web. After Snowden set parameters for how far the spider should range, investigators have concluded, it was able to collect data when he wasn’t present.
Jack Devine, a former CIA director of operations, said he did not believe Snowden had been a spy, but that he shared many psychological characteristics of American traitors such as his former colleague Aldrich Ames, who spent years betraying secrets to Russia and is now serving life in prison.
These included an inflated sense of cleverness and self-importance, clashes with superiors at work, a dissatisfaction with carrying out mundane tasks and a sense of being under-appreciated.
“If I saw it and I were [the Russians or the Chinese] I’d come running for him,” said Devine. “But I don’t think the system worked that well. Even if you spot a bad apple, it takes a lot to get them.”
Devine, author of the forthcoming Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story, said Snowden’s current situation bore similarities to that of Kim Philby, the MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet Union and ended up in Russia, alone and vulnerable.
“The Russians have been doing espionage for a long time. They understand the psychology of discontented people. It would be most unusual if he were allowed to remain there as a guest for free.
“I don’t think he was a controlled asset but I think at the end of the day he will be.”
Greenwald said he and Snowden still speak nearly every day via an encrypted computer link. “Literally of all the people that I’ve ever met and now know in the world, Edward Snowden is by far the person most at peace and fulfilled as a human being,” he said.
Greenwald said the NSA’s failure to catch Snowden was part of the paradox that “there is this genuinely menacing system and at the same time are really inept about how they operate it’.
“Not only was he out there under their noses downloading huge amounts of documents without being detected but to this day they’re incapable of finding out what he took.”
Greenwald, who has 12 dogs, ranging in size from a Bernese mountain dog to a miniature pinscher, at his home in Brazil, also promised further revelations about GCHQ, the NSA’s British sister agency.
“The British are more unrestrained and vicious in their surveillance mindset than even the US.” he said. “When you go to the park in New York, you see these built-up muscular guys and they have these tiny Shih Tzu dogs.
“It will seem like a mismatch but the Shih Tzu is super-vicious and yapping. That’s how I see the relationship between the GCHQ and the NSA.”
Toby Harnden is the Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times.
This article originally appeared in The Sunday Times. It is reprinted here with permission.
by conniption » Tue Jul 01, 2014 5:07 am
Washington's Blog
(embedded links)
Government Stops Glenn Greenwald from Publishing His Big Snowden Revelation … But Others Will Release ALL of the Snowden Documents to Prevent a War
Posted on July 1, 2014
by WashingtonsBlog
It’s been a dramatic day for whistleblowing news.
A month ago, Glenn Greenwald announced that he was going to publish his biggest story yet: the names of those the NSA has been spying on.
Earlier today, Greenwald tweeted that he would finally publish the story tonight at midnight.
8 hours later, he tweeted:
After 3 months working on our story, USG [the United States government] today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing
Many responded that it’s a trap, and that the government is dishonestly and illegally censoring Greewald.
At the same time, Cryptome announced that all of the Snowden documents will be released in July … supposedly in order to avert a war.
As the Daily Register notes:
All the remaining Snowden documents will be released next month, according to whistle-blowing site Cryptome, which said in a tweet that the release of the info by unnamed third parties would be necessary to head off an unnamed “war”.
Cryptome said it would “aid and abet” the release of “57K to 1.7M” new documents that had been “withheld for national security-public debate [sic]“.
The site clarified that will not be publishing the documents itself.
***
“July is when war begins unless headed off by Snowden full release of crippling intel. After war begins not a chance of release,” Cryptome tweeted on its official feed. “Warmongerers are on a rampage. So, yes, citizens holding Snowden docs will do the right thing,” it said.
“For more on Snowden docs release in July watch for Ellsberg, special guest and others at HOPE, July 18-20: http://www.hope.net/schedule.html,” it added.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 01, 2014 3:34 pm
What Happened to Glenn Greenwald's Big Scoop?
Adam Weinstein
Something big is brewing in NSA Revelation Land—a scoop from columnist and reporter Glenn Greenwald that was supposed to be published at midnight last night. But now Glenn Greenwald and fellow Intercept reporter Murtaza Hussein have delayed their story, pending new government information, and the internet is freaking out.
Greenwald, whose work with NSA leaker Edward Snowden exposed the extent of the NSA's data collection on Americans and foreigners, hinted late yesterday that another huge revelation was coming that evening:
That hint sent the webs atwitter, especially since the NSA-centric Intercept—a fledgling media startup that's published in fits and starts—hasn't put out a new story since June 18.
Tinfoil hatters—both pro- and anti-Greenwald—let loose.
But then, something strange happened: Greenwald put the brakes on the story, ostensibly because some new reporting was necessary:
What new claims was the government making? How did they affect the story? And what was the story, anyway? Greenwaldologists quickly went to work, trying to figure out what could be up. The Daily Dot insisted he was about to name names—specific people targeted by NSA surveillance:
Greenwald, author of the critically acclaimed No Place to Hide, a first-hand account of his experiences with National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, was set to publish what's likely to be his most shocking U.S. intelligence revelations yet: a list of individuals actively targeted by the U.S. government for surveillance.
"One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, 'Who have been the NSA's specific targets?'" Greenwald told the Sunday Times. "Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we'd regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer."
The evidence offered was that Sunday Times interview, which dates from late May—about the same time Greenwald told GQ that, "as with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues." Greenwald also alludes to the naming-names story in the MSNBC interview above, from late June.
But it's unclear whether that's the story that was supposed to come last night, and it's also unclear what government claims might have required further investigation. Those claims may have been made directly to the Intercept, since the only government response to Snowden's activities in recent days have been a deflection of new surveillance details released by the Washington Post and rumors about Snowden's cloak-and-dagger activities before hooking up with Greenwald and fellow journalist Laura Poitras in Hong Kong last year.
Intercept editor John Cook, who formerly edited Gawker dot com, didn't respond to an emailed request for comment today (he's on vacation), and we won't speculate too wildly about the possibly upcoming story or its intrigues. But anti-government-secrecy website Cryptome has picked up where the Intercept left off, claiming on Twitter and in email that it will facilitate the release of millions of Snowden's captured secrets:
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 01, 2014 4:04 pm
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nsa-spied-on-barack-obama-2004-russ-tice-2013-6
NSA whistleblower Russell Tice:
"The abuse is rampant and everyone is pretending that it's never happened, and it couldn't happen. ... I know [there was abuse] because I had my hands on the papers for these sorts of things: They went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of congress — Senate and the House — especially on the intelligence committees and the armed services committees, lawyers, law firms, judges, State Department officials, part of the White House, multinational companies, financial firms, NGOs, civil rights groups ..."
Tice added:
"In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-some-year-old senator from Illinois. You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives now would you? It's a big White House in Washington D.C. That's who the NSA went after. That's the President of the United States now.
Tice told PBS and other media that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers, including Supreme Court Justices, highly-ranked generals, Colin Powell and other State Department personnel, and many other top officials:
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