Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Hunter » Tue Jun 11, 2013 11:29 am
by Hunter » Tue Jun 11, 2013 11:35 am
27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine
By Michael, on June 10th, 2013
Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up? He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world. He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy. He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine. Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us. But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything. Essentially, his previous life is now totally over. And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere. There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare. And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn't even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society. Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally. Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us. Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain. Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world. The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine...
#1 "The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate."
#2 "...I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents."
#3 "The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to."
#4 "...I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
#5 "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything."
#6 "With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards."
#7 "Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere... 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..."
#8 "To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR communications to do so."
#9 "I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians."
#10 "...they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them."
#11 "Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. ...it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life."
#12 "Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."
#13 "Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state."
#14 "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."
#15 "I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."
#16 "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."
#17 "I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act."
#18 "There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich."
#19 "The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things... And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that... because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
#20 "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
#21 "You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk."
#22 "I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me."
#23 "We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be."
#24 "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end."
#25 "There’s no saving me."
#26 "The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night."
#27 "I do not expect to see home again."
Would you make the same choice that Edward Snowden made? Most Americans would not. One CNN reporter says that he really admires Snowden because he has tried to get insiders to come forward with details about government spying for years, but none of them were ever willing to...
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies. I always begged them to write about it or to let me do so while protecting their identities. They refused to come forward and believed my efforts to shield them would be futile. "I don't want to lose my security clearance. Or my freedom," one told me.
And if the U.S. government has anything to say about it, Snowden is most definitely going to pay for what he has done. In fact, according to the Daily Beast, a directorate known as "the Q Group" is already hunting Snowden down...
The people who began chasing Snowden work for the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, according to former U.S. intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The directorate, sometimes known as “the Q Group,” is continuing to track Snowden now that he’s outed himself as The Guardian’s source, according to the intelligence officers.
If Snowden is not already under the protection of some foreign government (such as China), it will just be a matter of time before U.S. government agents get him.
And how will they treat him once they find him? Well, one reporter overheard a group of U.S. intelligence officials talking about how Edward Snowden should be "disappeared". The following is from a Daily Mail article that was posted on Monday...
A group of intelligence officials were overheard yesterday discussing how the National Security Agency worker who leaked sensitive documents to a reporter last week should be 'disappeared.'
Foreign policy analyst and editor at large of The Atlantic, Steve Clemons, tweeted about the 'disturbing' conversation after listening in to four men who were sitting near him as he waited for a flight at Washington's Dulles airport.
'In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit,' he tweeted at 8:42 a.m. on Saturday.
According to Clemons, the men had been attending an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
As an American, I am deeply disturbed that the U.S. government is embarrassing itself in front of the rest of the world like this.
The fact that we are collecting trillions of pieces of information on people all over the planet is a massive embarrassment and the fact that our politicians are defending this practice now that it has been exposed is a massive embarrassment.
If the U.S. government continues to act like a Big Brother police state, then the rest of the world will eventually conclude that is exactly what we are. At that point we become the "bad guy" and we lose all credibility with the rest of the planet.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 3:31 pm
Published on Tuesday, June 11, 2013 by Common Dreams
When Will the Other Shoe Drop? 'More To Come' in NSA Leaks
Save your energy, Greenwald warns - you will need it
- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer
Any minute now journalist Glenn Greenwald could release the next installment of the historic NSA leaks that infamous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg referred to as the most important in history.
Glenn Greenwald (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
There will be plenty more to come, journalist Glenn Greenwald insisted in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday referring to a trove of information yet to be revealed.
Greenwald, the journalist who first reported on the vast extent of a NSA surveillance program through documents leaked by the American defense contractor Edward Snowden, told AP, "We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months."
"There are dozens of stories generated by the documents he provided, and we intend to pursue every last one of them," Greenwald said.
Greenwald told AP the decision is currently being made on when to release the next story based on the information provided by Snowden.
In anticipation of what is to come, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should save his "melodrama and rhetoric," Greenwald tweeted earlier—referring to Clapper's anti-leak media campaign in recent days.
by Hunter » Tue Jun 11, 2013 3:34 pm
by Nordic » Tue Jun 11, 2013 3:44 pm
seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 2:31 pm wrote:Published on Tuesday, June 11, 2013 by Common Dreams
When Will the Other Shoe Drop? 'More To Come' in NSA Leaks
Save your energy, Greenwald warns - you will need it
- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer
Any minute now journalist Glenn Greenwald could release the next installment of the historic NSA leaks that infamous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg referred to as the most important in history.
Glenn Greenwald (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
There will be plenty more to come, journalist Glenn Greenwald insisted in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday referring to a trove of information yet to be revealed.
Greenwald, the journalist who first reported on the vast extent of a NSA surveillance program through documents leaked by the American defense contractor Edward Snowden, told AP, "We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months."
"There are dozens of stories generated by the documents he provided, and we intend to pursue every last one of them," Greenwald said.
Greenwald told AP the decision is currently being made on when to release the next story based on the information provided by Snowden.
In anticipation of what is to come, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should save his "melodrama and rhetoric," Greenwald tweeted earlier—referring to Clapper's anti-leak media campaign in recent days.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 3:56 pm
The woman behind the NSA scoops
Laura Poitras is "one of the bravest and most brilliant people I've ever met," Glenn Greenwald tells Salon(Updated)
BY IRIN CARMON
By now, we know the revelations about U.S. government surveillance published in the Guardian and the Washington Post in the past week have the same source, Edward Snowden. And despite what Politico, in typically overheated fashion, is calling a “feud” between reporters at the two news organizations, they share something else: the involvement of award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.
Despite the customary competition between news sources — heightened, in this case, by differing accounts of how the story was reported — Poitras achieved the unusual distinction of sharing a byline both with Barton Gellman on the June 6 Washington Post story on PRISM and with Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill on the June 8 Guardian story naming Edward Snowden as a source. In the accompanying video interview of Snowden, Greenwald is credited as “interviewer” and Poitras as “filmmaker.” Greenwald wrote in a tweet this morning, “The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with [Snowden] since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”
Salon reached out to Poitras, Gellman and Greenwald to elaborate on her involvement in the reporting, but they have not yet responded to those queries. However, Greenwald did offer up this comment on his colleague: ”She’s easily one of the bravest and most brilliant people I’ve ever met.”
Poitras is a MacArthur genius grantee who was nominated for an Oscar for 2006′s “My Country, My Country” on the impact of the Iraq War on ordinary Iraqis, the first of a trilogy of documentaries about American post-9/11 policies. The second documentary, “The Oath,” focused on Salim Hamdan (former driver to Osama bin Laden and namesake of a major Supreme Court case on detention policies and military commissions) and his brother-in-law, and the third, currently in the works, is not coincidentally about whistle-blowers.
“My work is absolutely, completely dependent on the people who open their lives to me and take huge risks in doing so, often,” Poitras says in a video on the MacArthur Foundation’s website. “In most of the films that I’ve been working on in this trilogy, pretty much everyone has their life on the line in one way or another. Their life, their freedom. The films are based on their courage to sort of allow me to go along on these journeys.”
Julian Assange has said he and WikiLeaks cooperated with Poitras on her upcoming film, the title of which hasn’t been publicized. In March, Poitras and Jenny Perlin released a video short, “Providence — a short film featuring Bradley Manning’s voice,” in which Manning discussed the 2007 Baghdad Apache airstrike video. She’s on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is “dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government,” alongside Greenwald, Daniel Ellsberg, John Cusack and Xeni Jardin, among others.
Since “My Country, My Country,” Poitras wrote in the New York Times last year, she has been detained at U.S. borders over 40 times. “In 2006 I was put on a watch list and I’ve been repeatedly detained at the U.S. border as I travel,” she told NPR last year. She added, “At the moment, it feels safer for me to work outside of the United States, which is a sad thing to say.”
According to an opinion piece she published in the New York Times last year, a border agent at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport told her in 2011, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics,”
In 2012, Greenwald wrote about her repeated detention for Salon, saying she “produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters.” He also noted that “documents obtained from a FOIA request show that DHS has repeatedly concluded that nothing incriminating was found from its border searches and interrogations of Poitras.” A coalition of nonfiction filmmakers, including Albert Maysles, Alex Gibney and Morgan Spurlock, signed an open letter protesting Poitras’ treatment at borders and calling her “one of America’s most important nonfiction filmmakers.”
Also last year, Poitras presented a “Surveillance Teach-In” at the Whitney Biennial, which Filmmaker magazine described as “part technological seminar, part radical teach-in, and part DeLillo-esque spy theater.” Visitors, the reviewer wrote, “were forcibly detained as they tried to enter the museum, while downstairs a masked man handed out leaflets with lists of addresses (NSA listening posts?), sinister in their nondescription. Slides flashed, of the anonymous desert buildings that house the servers that index our every email, phone call, transaction. And on the dais, an odd couple riffing one acronym after another: ‘NSA, NARIS, AES….’”
“The job of an artist is to express things; we’re not activists, we’re not organizers, we’re not politicians. So even though I do have political beliefs, my job as an artist is to express how I’m perceiving the world,” Poitras said in a 2011 video interview with the New York Times. ”And so the work I’ve tried to do as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, as somebody who captures images, is to create documents, to create a record, and to create a record that’s grounded in human stories. ”
Update: After viewing this post, Laura Poitras agreed to an interview with Salon, in which she detailed how she was contacted by Edward Snowden, among other things.
How we broke the NSA story
Exclusive: Laura Poitras tells Salon about getting contacted by Edward Snowden, and reveals more footage is coming
BY IRIN CARMON
Shortly after Salon’s biographical sketch on Laura Poitras went live, the award-winning documentary filmmaker agreed to a phone interview, her first since she helped reveal the scope of the National Security Agency’s digital surveillance. “I feel a certain need to be cautious about not wanting to do the work for the government,” she told Salon, but agreed to clarify some parts of her role in the story.
Poitras is still in Hong Kong, where she is filming the story behind the story — including her co-author on the Guardian story and former Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald — for her forthcoming documentary on whistle-blowers and leaks. In a wide-ranging interview, she explained how she first made contact with Snowden, her reaction to the possible future investigation into his leaks, and why Snowden didn’t go to the New York Times. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
So how did this all begin?
I was originally contacted in January, anonymously.
By Edward Snowden?
Well, I didn’t know who it was.
What was the format?
Via email. It said, I want to get your encryption key and let’s get on a secure channel.
And he didn’t say what it was about?
He just said — that was the first, and the second was, I have some information in the intelligence community, and it won’t be a waste of your time.
Do you get a lot of those kinds of requests?
No, I don’t.
Did you immediately know what was the best, most secure protocol to go about it?
I actually did. I have a lot of experience because I’ve been working with — as you note in your thing, I’ve done filming with WikiLeaks, I know Jacob Appelbaum. I already had encryption keys but what he was asking for was beyond what I was using in terms of security and anonymity.
How did it proceed from there?
So that’s where I’m not going into a lot of details, but sort of ongoing correspondence. I didn’t know, I didn’t have any biographical details or where he worked, had no idea. He made claims and said he had documentation. At that point it was all completely theoretical, but I had a feeling it was legit.
Why do you think he contacted you? Were you the first person he contacted?
I can’t speak for him. Glenn and I just touched base about, what was your story, because we connected later in the spring. He, I think, got an email in February. But I didn’t know he’d gotten an email.
He told me he’d contacted me because my border harassment meant that I’d been a person who had been selected. To be selected –and he went through a whole litany of things — means that everything you do, every friend you have, every purchase you make, every street you cross means you’re being watched. “You probably don’t like how this system works, I think you can tell the story.” … Of course I was suspicious, I worried that it was entrapment, it’s crazy, all the normal responses you have to someone reaching out making, claims. He said he’d seen a piece that I’d done on Bill Binney in the Times.
I can say from conversations I had with him after that, I think he had a suspicion of mainstream media. And particularly what happened with the New York Times and the warrantless wiretapping story, which as we know was shelved for a year. So he expressed that to me but I think also in his choices of who he contacted. I didn’t know he was reaching out to Glenn at that point.
And you and Glenn were already colleagues, right, you sit on a board together?
At that point the foundation had just opened. So we knew each other and we were colleagues and friends.
How did it get to the point where you knew it was going to be a story, and how did you decide where it was going to be published?
Those are the details I’m not going to go into. What I can say is that once I had a few pieces of correspondence, I said, let me ask a couple of people about this, people who have experience, and I sat down with a couple of people, one of whom was Bart Gellman … and he said, it looks like this person could be legit. And that was probably February.
These disputes that have been played out on the internet about who got in touch with whom and who needed assurances –
In a situation like this, this is a confidential source and has been until very, very recently, actually has been a person whose identity I did not know. To actually go on the record and talk about — it seems to be a violation of a lot of relationships with someone who’s trusted you. There’s partly that, so I’ve been hesitant. I’ve asked, you know, like, Bart, don’t go try and tell my story. I’ll tell my story, you know, about my reporting. I don’t need reporters reporting on my reporting. So maybe that stuff contributed to different timelines. But that seems now — I’m not quite sure, what makes the most sense. Because I don’t want to tell the whole story now, I don’t think it’s the right time. And I want to tell it in my own words. I’m a storyteller. I’ll tell it when I’m ready to tell it, in detail.
But it makes sense to go on the record to explain why I was attached to both of those stories.
So you ended up getting in touch with Bart and Glenn because you wanted their help to vet the claims in documents?
There weren’t documents yet … I wanted to know if this correspondent — it was possible something else would be entrapment or just crazy, that’s always an option. I had an instinct that it was legit. I wanted to talk to people who knew.
So then they said, my paper would be happy to publish it?
No, it was just colleagues saying, this was happening, what do you think. There was nothing to — it was just somebody wanting to start a conversation and claiming to have information … There was no material at that point.
So how did it then become two separate stories in the Washington Post and the Guardian?
The source also has a relationship with Glenn. Which I can’t speak to.
I know that Glenn said he had more stories to come. Do you have more footage you’re planning on using in your documentary?
Of course. I’m here working.
Are you still in touch with him?
I’m not going to comment on that.
Do you know where he is?
Not going to comment.
Are you going to be working on more stories in print before your documentary comes out?
I really can’t predict.
Are you going to be sticking around Hong Kong for awhile or do you think you’ll come to the U.S.?
I haven’t decided. I’m trying to figure that out right now. But I’m actually based right now outside the U.S.
Are you worried about retaliation in any investigation that goes forward?
You know what? I’m not. I’ve been harassed for a long time, I wouldn’t be surprised if that continues. Being here and seeing the kind of — actually, Glenn was really inspiring. Really incredible courage in journalism and just saying, we need to talk to him about these things. It’s not OK that we have a secret court that has secret interpretations of secret laws; what kind of democracy is that? I felt like, this is a fight worth having. If there’s fallout, if there’s blowback, I would absolutely do it again, because I think this information should be public. Whatever part I had in helping to do that I think is a service.
People take risks. And I’m not the one who’s taking the most in this case.
And you feel like the person who is taking the most risk — meaning Snowden — is aware of all the possible ramifications of it?
You can see it in the video, right? I think he is. I think he wanted to reveal his identity because he didn’t want to create a situation where he was anonymous and everyone would have been investigated. In these investigation cases, there are repercussions for many, many people. I think he wanted to take responsibility.
Did he always plan to reveal his identity?
I don’t know. At some point I became aware of that but I don’t know what his intention was.
It’s this complicated situation because we have a source who decided to reveal himself. I still feel like I have journalistic obligations to the source even though they’ve made that choice … There’s something that Glenn said that I actually want to contradict. He said we began “working with” him. There was no working with. We were contacted. It was totally cold contact.
Since he contacted you before he started working at Booz Allen, the implication people were drawing was that he went to Booz Allen with the express intention of leaking this.
That’s completely absurd. I had no dialogue about what the information was — there were claims, that’s all I received.
So the implication that you sent him into Booz Allen to spy was incorrect.
Are you kidding? I didn’t know where he worked, I didn’t know he was NSA, I didn’t know how — nothing. There was no like, Oh do you think you …, no nudging. It’s like the crazy correlations that the NSA does. There’s no connection here. We were contacted, we didn’t know what he was up to, and at some point he came forward with documents.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 4:00 pm
European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM
By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Tuesday, June 11, 2013, at 9:15 AM
BLUFFDALE, UT - JUNE 10: A new National Security Agency (NSA) data center is seen June 10, 2013 in Bluffdale, Utah.
Photo by George Frey/Getty Images
Ryan Gallagher wrote yesterday afternoon (US time) about European political response to recent revelations about US surveillance. While Americans were sleeping many more statements came down the pike during Tuesday morning's European parliament debates. The highlights from the main parliamentary party groups:
"My data belongs to me, that is the cornerstone of European thinking on data protection," said Manfred Weber, the German vice-chair of the EPP group. "It is completely unacceptable that the US have different rules [for] US citizens and citizens of other countries." He added: "The US approach is not our approach but we work together as partners".
On behalf of S&D, Claude Moraes, spoke of "a major breach of trust, non compliant with EU data protection legislation", yet cautioned that the "vital balance between security and the need to protect data, must be safeguarded". The British MEP added: "Trust has clearly been breached. We must ensure US public authorities processing EU citizens data, do so within our standards."
"We are failing the EU citizens and we should be ashamed of ourselves," Sophie In 't Veld, a Dutch member of the ALDE group. She criticised the Commission and the "doublespeak" of member states. "Obama said to his citizens: 'Don't worry, we are not spying on you as citizens, we are only spying on foreigners.' But this is us." She added: "What kind of special relationship is that?"
"This not only about data protection, this is about democracy and the rule of law, which cannot be in line with mass surveillance of citizens around the world," said Jan Philipp Albrecht. The German member of the Green group, who is responsible for steering new legislation on data protection through Parliament, said: "I would like to agree on standards with the US but we need legislative changes on the other side of the Atlantic too."
EPP is the christian democrats umbrella group, S&D is the socialists and social democrats, ALDE is libertarianish parties, and the Greens are green. In other words, that's the full spectrum of European opinion. Even before this came out, there was pressure from parliament for data privacy rules that would've been bad for a lot of US web companies and now that the US Intelligence Community seems determined to turn commercial relationships with US companies into intelligence relationships with the US government, things are going to get a lot worse for Google, Facebook, etc. In 't Veld has the key point that the administration's pushback is largely based on reassuring Americans that our data isn't being accessed lightly. But that doesn't help on the other side of the Atlantic.
I Am Worried. You Should Be Too.
We shouldn’t have to wait for an abuse of power to know that the NSA’s snooping has gone too far.
By Emily Bazelon|Posted Friday, June 7, 2013, at 4:36 PM
An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency headquarters building in Fort Meade, Md.
Photo by Handout/Reuters
After the Guardian’s revelation that the National Security Agency is mining the data of Verizon customers on Thursday, some of my colleagues told me to settle down. Some volunteered to be spied on in exchange for reduced rates. I figured that the level of outrage would rise only if people thought the government had access to the actual content of their communications. But apparently I was wrong. The second shock wave about PRISM—the NSA’s program for vacuuming up online content including “emails, file transfers, photos, videos, chats, and even live surveillance of search terms”—has hit. And my Twitter feed and my email inbox are still filled with jokes and shrugs.
Why is that? To me, it’s kind of a mystery. I’m disturbed by all the secrecy—the secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that’s behind the court order to Verizon, as Noah Feldman points out, and the secret decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves almost every request for information it gets from the government. And I’m also with Rebecca J. Rosen, who traces the history of “security-state creep” and worries about how it is increasing. That’s what creep means, after all. She notes, however, that the Supreme Court dismissed a recent challenge to the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the law that enables PRISM—because no one who sued could prove that he or she had actually been spied on.
Maybe that’s the problem. We now know the government has access to all sorts of our Internet data. But we don’t know whose has been targeted or what has happened because of the snooping. It’s not like the NSA is sending a note telling you to stop cheating on your boyfriend or even to shut down your cocaine business. NSA snoops are not all up in our business, as far as we can tell. The danger is that they could be. Once the government has access to all this data, it has untrammeled power over it—which it could abuse. How you feel about that possibility is probably a function of how much you care about privacy in general and government intrusions on privacy in particular, and how much you imagine that you’d personally be at risk if some NSA agent did actually read your email. If you think your life is already spread all over the Internet, and that the agent would only be bored by your mundane messages about work and whose turn it is to pick up the kids, then hey, you’re good.
Advertisement
But then ask yourself: What would it take for you to be disturbed by massive data trawling by government agents? What if a nugget of information unearthed through PRISM surfaced when the president was vetting a nominee for confirmation? What if the NSA used such a nugget to embarrass an enemy of the president? Would that be Nixonian enough? Or would it take a series of abuses before the public decided that the country had traded away too much civil liberty? I can’t tell you that what the government is doing is illegal. The government’s defenders are correct that Congress has given the executive the opportunity to use these powers, and that the executive branch has followed the process for judicial oversight, such as it is. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t dial back these laws now that we have a real glimpse into the full scope of their reach.
President Obama offered two reassurances Friday. “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” Right, except they’re scrolling through emails and online chats. Oh but wait, “With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States." Right, except that NSA agents only have to be 51 percent sure the target they locate in the mounds of data is foreign. Everyone seems to acknowledge that they will inevitably sweep in “incidental” information about Americans. And when they pick up “U.S. content” by mistake, we are told they will put it into a separate database and then “it’s nothing to worry about.” Yes it is, as Amy Davidson points out. And it is depressing to watch this president become a misleading parser of words in the service of arrogating authority.
The government has admitted to unconstitutional NSA spying before—last year. The existence of these newly reported databases should be worrisome because once the information is collected, it is so much easier for the government to misuse it. The more data mining, the more it becomes routine and the more tempting to come up with more uses for it. If you trust President Obama and his people not to go too far, what about the next president, or the one after that? We have now had a Republican and a Democrat administration sign up for a broad expansion of warrantless wiretapping and other surveillance, and bipartisan support in Congress for the tradeoffs we have struck. And yes, there is more to the current revelations than we know—in particular, the rationale for the FISA court’s long-standing order for the phone data, and the rationale for PRISM. Let’s concede that a terrorist attack somewhere has probably been prevented as a result of these efforts. So how do we ever go back?
We probably don’t. And someday, the abuses will begin, in all likelihood long before we know about them. I’m not usually moved by slippery slope arguments. But this one looks so very easy to slide down.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 4:29 pm
Edward Snowden and the Iceland Option
—By Stephanie Mencimer and Erika Eichelberger| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 3:30 PM PDT
Pincasso/Shutterstock
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed details about two massive spying programs, initially holed up in a hotel in Hong Kong, a part of the world he chose apparently because of its "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent." But it's not clear that Hong Kong officials are especially interested in sheltering him. And Snowden said when he went public this weekend that he might try to seek asylum in Iceland.
But Iceland is a long way from Hong Kong. At least 20 hours by air and easily a $3,000 ticket, the trip also would almost certainly require a stop in another European country that might be inclined to turn him over to the US during a layover. But could he try to follow the lead of Julian Assange and make his way to the Icelandic consulate in Hong Kong, where he could submit an application for asylum? The consulate is only about five miles from Snowden's last known whereabouts, the swanky Mira hotel in Kowloon.
A spokesman for the government of Iceland told USA Today this would not be possible because asylum seekers have to be in Iceland to start the application process:
"The main stipulation for seeking asylum in Iceland would be that the person must be in Iceland to start the process," said Johannes Tomasson, the chief spokesman for Iceland's Ministry of Interior in Reykjavik. "That would be the ground rule No. 1."
Snowden does have supporters in the country, namely Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament, who released a statement this week saying, "We feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability." In an interview with Mother Jones, Jónsdóttir noted that Iceland's interior minister is a conservative "who has been saying [he wants] to strengthen ties with US, which means he will want to do everything that the US government tells him to do." But she explained that the parliament has the power to grant citizenship to people in special cases, which could spare Snowden from extradition because, she says, Iceland has never extradited an Icelandic citizen anywhere. This would still require Snowden to get from Hong Kong to Iceland. If he did, whether Jónsdóttir could rally enough of her colleagues to take action is anything but certain.
Jónsdóttir is the public face of the Pirate Party, a newly formed opposition party dedicated to media freedom and digital innovation. The party won only 3 out of 63 seats in the recently formed parliament and may not have much clout in the matter. Moreover, others in the government have not expressed a great desire to help Snowden. After all, the United States is one of Iceland's largest trading partners, and Iceland has a long-standing extradition treaty with the US, factors that even Jónsdóttir concedes could mean that Iceland is "not the best location" for Snowden to seek refuge.
If all else fails, Jónsdóttir says, "maybe we need to create like a whistleblower freedom boat somewhere to pick up refugees."
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 5:54 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 10, 2013 8:07 pm wrote:DrVolin » Mon Jun 10, 2013 7:56 pm wrote:Bradbury got only one thing wrong in F451. The danger isn't that all written material is destroyed. The danger is that all written material is saved.
The danger isn't that all written material is destroyed. The danger is that all written material is saved by private contractors with very lax security
A Modern-Day Stasi State
Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know that an army of private contractors can monitor anyone’s phone calls and e-mails.
June 11, 2013
This photograph shows a copy of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis,” to give the National Security Administration (NSA) information on all landline and mobile telephone calls of Verizon Business in its systems. (AP Photo)
When I first heard that the source for Glenn Greenwald’s blockbuster stories on the National Security Agency was a contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton, I felt a surge of vindication. After all, I’ve been writing about the murky world of intelligence contracting for a decade, and here was finally a sign of how extensively the government has outsourced its most secretive operations. Plus at the center of the scandal was a company that I have long identified as one of the most important companies in the intelligence-industrial complex.
Edward Snowden, who is only 29, worked for Booz Allen at the NSA as an infrastructure analyst and telecommunications systems officer. His time there and at other private contractors included stints at NSA listening posts in Hawaii and Japan, and his job gave him access to some of the NSA’s most classified operations. They included a massive surveillance program called PRISM that monitors virtually all global Internet traffic on a real-time basis, and a telephone-monitoring program that gives the NSA access to millions of phone records of calls, including domestic ones, routed through telecom provider Verizon.
From his vantage point, he learned that the NSA monitors Americans “even if you’re not doing anything wrong.” From “just sitting at my desk,” Snowden said he had the “authority to wiretap anyone…” “If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.” He also discovered that the NSA is “using the system to go back in time to discover everything you’ve done.”
All of this is terrifying stuff that confirms much of what has been revealed about NSA surveillance by Bill Binney and his fellow NSA whistleblowers Tom Drake and Kirk Wiebe, who I recently profiled in The Nation.
Some news reports have focused on how such a “low level” contract employee could possibly have access to such secret material. But to me the greater revelation is what he has said about his employer. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that Booz Allen operates at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful intelligence-gathering organization and is engaged in operations that many Americans believe are unconstitutional and dangerous. We can only assume that the other companies at these heights—a list that includes SAIC, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, CSC, CACI, ManTech and many others—are doing the same.
If that is so, then tens of thousands of Americans working for private intelligence contractors have access to the personal information of millions of their fellow citizens, including their phone and e-mail communications as well Internet chats on Yahoo, Google and other ISPs. Combine this private army of contractors with the outlandishly huge federal intelligence bureaucracy, and the term Stasi—the East German secret police frequently invoked by Bill Binney—doesn’t sound like an exaggeration. Except this is state surveillance plus capitalism: spying for profit.
Snowden’s revelations also belie the claim that the government uses contractors like Booz Allen only to fill technical gaps, provide a little analysis here and there, or for engineering or management skills. This is something I’ve heard frequently from agency and corporate flacks. It was also the theme of former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell—who came from Booz and is back there now—when he ordered the government’s first and only press conference on the use of contractors.
In that 2008 briefing, Ronald Sanders, the associate DNI for human capital, confirmed that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to the private sector, as I’d reported a year earlier. These contractors, he argued, “augment our intelligence staffs—the military and civilian members of the intelligence community.” But he stressed that “the reason they’re are so important to us is because they provide flexibility, responsiveness, and in many cases very unique expertise in support of the intelligence mission.” Well, if Snowden was merely “augmenting” the NSA workforce, you have to wonder what the actual workforce is up to. (Interestingly, Sanders too is now in the private sector, working for—who else?—Booz Allen).
To be honest, all of this makes me a little jealous. When I was researching my 2008 book Spies for Hire, I interviewed dozens of people, including many contractors, and managed to ferret out a huge amount of information about what private companies do for the NSA, the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. Their insights also helped me get deep inside some of the agencies (check out my chapter on imagery and geospatial intelligence, for example).
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
But even though I tried, I never found anyone in the industry who could get beyond the veil of secrecy and confirm what I’d heard about the involvement of contractors with US surveillance programs or other aspects of the dark side. Kudos, then, to Greenwald and his colleagues for finding a source like Snowden: a contractor whistleblower inside US intelligence is a rare bird indeed.
I came close: at one point, I had several intriguing conversations with a former NSA contractor who had spent a year monitoring communications in Iraq for the agency. He told me a story about a contract manager who managed to convince the NSA that a gang of thugs in Baghdad who used their cellphones to plan robberies was in fact a terrorist organization. As a result of his “discovery,” his company won a new contract to monitor this new “threat.” That seemed pretty corrupt to me. But my source had no documents to back his claim. He was also frightened. Before we sat down at a bar in Washington, he asked me to turn my phone all the way off and sit on it. The NSA, he explained, could remotely activate your phone and listen in—anytime, anywhere. I never confirmed either one of his stories.
Since I wrote my book, of course, I’ve gotten to know the four NSA whistleblowers who exposed the corruption behind the agency’s foolish decision to privatize its analysis of signals intelligence in 2000. That project, called Trailblazer, wasted billions of dollars—Tom Drake estimates the damage at over $6 billion, far more than the official figure of $1.2 billion—and may have played a role in NSA’s failure to detect the 9/11 attacks. (Booz Allen, by the way, was deeply involved in the project as an adviser and subcontractor).
Unlike Snowden, however, none of the NSA Four ever revealed classified information, and they still refuse to talk about anything they know is secret. But my conversations with Drake, Binney, Wiebe and Ed Loomis were a revelation to me. I had written in detail about Trailblazer in the book and gotten most of the details right; but until I met the NSA Four and heard their story, I never knew how unbelievably corrupt the system was. That’s the value of whistleblowing.
But here’s the rub. The NSA Four followed protocol all the way; they complained about the corruption to a Pentagon hot line and tried to alert Congress. The Pentagon eventually exonerated them with a report, but stamped it secret and still keeps about 95 percent of it classified. But the government went after them anyway, persecuted them for leaking NSA secrets and eventually charged Tom Drake with a spying charge under the Espionage Act. The case fell apart, and a federal judge accused the Justice Department of overreach. Still, their careers were ruined, and they were denied thousands of dollars in income when their security clearances were yanked.
Perhaps if Snowden had seen a legal way out that would have allowed him to report wrongdoing without jeopardizing secrets or himself, he might have chosen a different route. But he’s on the run, and being called a traitor and worse. These are the costs of our surveillance state, and it’s a modern-day tragedy.
by bks » Tue Jun 11, 2013 6:32 pm
Glenn Greenwald tweet:
Clapper: leaks "literally gut-wrenching" - "huge, grave damage" - save some melodrama and rhetoric for coming stories. You'll need it.
11:53 AM - 9 Jun 2013
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 11, 2013 7:20 pm
Outrage grows over revelations of US surveillance programme
Big News Network.comTuesday 11th June, 2013
BERLIN - European leaders reacted with anger to revelations of the US' internet surveillance programme that included their citizens and moved to demand more information from the US government even as internet firms Mozilla, Reddit and 4chan joined others to urge US lawmakers to immediately halt the PRISM web snooping programme.
In Britain, where intelligence agencies have long had robust cooperation with their American counterparts, a top official tried Monday to limit potential uproar, telling Parliament that the partnership had not been used to circumvent British laws.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said she will raise the issue with President Barack Obama when he visits Berlin next week.
Merkel's pledge reflects anger not just among German citizens but fellow government officials as well, part of a larger trend of European reaction against the spying programmes, that were reported by The Washington Post.
The country's justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger in a Spiegel Online editorial on Tuesday said reports that the U.S. could "access and track" most forms of Internet communication were "deeply disconcerting" and "potentially dangerous".
"The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is," she said.
Markus Ferber, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Bavarian sister party, took it a step further, accusing the U.S. of using "American-style Stasi methods", - a reference to East Germany's dreaded secret police, whose name is still closely associated with the worst abuses of the now-defunct communist regime, Reuters reports.
"I thought this era had ended when the DDR fell," he said, referring to the German initials used for the failed German Democratic Republic.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding plans to raise the concerns with US Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday.
Internet firms Mozilla, Reddit and 4chan have joined their voices with 86 other organisations, including Access and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, urging US lawmakers to immediately halt its PRISM web snooping programme.
The organisations have signed a letter to Congress calling on US lawmakers to immediately halt PRISM and other forms of surveillance.
The letter coincided with the coalition's launch of StopWatchingUs, a petition site demanding an inquiry into the scope and scale of the National Security Agency (NSA)'s spying activities
Last week, the actions of disenchanted CIA contractor Edward Snowden led to major revelations that the US government employed a technology called PRISM that enabled it to spy on the activities of users of sites and services like Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube and others.
The Guardian journalist who exposed classified U.S. surveillance programmes leaked by Snowden said Tuesday that there will be more 'significant revelations' to come from the documents.
"We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months," said Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.
Greenwald told The Associated Press the decision was being made on when to release the next story based on the information provided by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, who has been accused by U.S. Senate intelligence chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California of committing an "act of treason" that should be prosecuted.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday there were no plans to scrap the programmes that, despite the backlash, continue to receive widespread if cautious support within Congress. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive security issue.
The US insists its snooping is legal under domestic law.
The Obama administration is investigating whether the disclosures by former CIA worker Edward Snowden were a criminal offence.
Snowden's employer, defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said on Tuesday it had fired the infrastructure analyst for violating its ethics code.
US officials say the snooping programme known as Prism, revealed in last week's leaks, is authorised under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).
It gives the US National Security Agency (NSA) the power to obtain emails and phone records relating to non-US nationals.
But details about the individuals targeted under the act remain secret, and there are concerns the NSA is overstepping its powers.
Documents leaked to the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers claimed the US authorities had direct access to the servers of nine major US technology firms, including Apple, Facebook and Google.
Although the firms denied granting such access, saying they agreed only to legal requests, US officials have admitted Prism exists.
Snowden's whereabouts on Tuesday were unknown, a day after he checked out of a plush hotel in Hong Kong. But large photos of his face were splashed on most Hong Kong newspapers with headlines such as "Deep Throat Hides in HK," and "World's Most Wanted Man Breaks Cover in Hong Kong."
A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia would consider granting asylum to the American, should he ask for it
Google asked the justice department to release every government information request to prove it did not give officials "unfettered access" to user data
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a liberal advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration challenging the legality of its phone surveillance programme
by JackRiddler » Tue Jun 11, 2013 11:18 pm
http://www.deadline.com/2012/04/documentary-directors-protest-homeland-security-treatment-of-helmer-laura-poitras/
Documentary Directors Protest Homeland Security Treatment Of Helmer Laura Poitras
By MIKE FLEMING JR | Monday April 9, 2012 @ 2:54pm PDT
A disturbing article by Glenn Greenwald detailed the continuing harassment that Oscar nominated documentary maker Laura Poitras receives each time she returns from abroad and has her electronic devices seized and probably copied. Now a group of documentary filmmakers have created a petition. They are protesting treatment they feel is an unwarranted invasion of privacy inflicted on hot button filmmakers and made possible in a post-9/11 era that doesn’t even necessitate a search warrant. Greenwald asserts this detainment happens routinely to anyone associated with WikiLeaks, but it also happens with increasing regularity to journalist/filmmakers like Poitras. She was Oscar nominated for My Country, My Country and won a Sundance prize for The Oath. Both were films about the tensions in Middle Eastern countries, Guantanamo Bay, and the war on terrorism. She regularly has her electonic equipment seized and held (sometimes for weeks). The danger is compromising sources, and she and other filmmakers have had to resort to sending sensitive materials through other means.
Last week, when Poitras was detained in Newark and tried to take notes on her interrogation, she was told her pen could be construed as a dangerous weapon and that if she didn’t stop writing, she would be handcuffed. Here is the petition drive organized by Cinema Eye:
by JackRiddler » Tue Jun 11, 2013 11:21 pm
by Prac » Wed Jun 12, 2013 12:31 am
Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?
by Jon Rappoport
June 11, 2013
http://www.nomorefakenews.com
Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo.
That still doesn’t preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.
Snowden’s exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn’t mean we have the whole story.
How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned to NSA, and he can get access to, and copy, documents that expose the spying collaboration between NSA and the biggest tech companies in the world—and he can get away with it.
If so, then NSA is a sieve leaking out of all holes. Because that means a whole lot of other, higher NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Poof.
If the NSA is not a sieve, it’s quite correct to suspect Snowden, a relatively low-level man, was guided and helped.
Does that diminish what Snowden accomplished? No. But it casts it in a different light.
Or you can believe a scenario like this:
“Mr. Snowden, I’m closing up now for the day. Do you need anything before I go?”
“No thanks, Sarah, I’ll be staying late tonight.”
NSA isn’t a little community bank or a liquor store. We aren’t talking about an employee with a printer and a file folder to hold top-secret pieces of paper he carries in a briefcase out of the office on his way home.
If there are people who arranged Snowden’s access to NSA secrets, without him knowing it, they’ll be obscured by the maze of partisan political squabbling and Congressional idiots holding hearings.
Between these morons and the press, the public will be treated, night and day, to the following: Can Snowden be extradited back here? Is he a terrorist? Should those giant tech companies have agreed to supply the government with information on private citizens? If so, how much information? Etc., etc. Diversions. False trails.
To understand who might have been behind Snowden, we first need to understand the real reach of the Surveillance State.
The Surveillance State has created an apparatus whose implications are staggering. It’s a different world now. And sometimes it takes a writer of fiction to flesh out the larger landscape.
Brad Thor’s novel, Black List, posits the existence of a monster corporation, ATS, that stands along side the NSA in collecting information on every move we make. ATS’ intelligence-gathering capability is unmatched anywhere in the world.
At his site, http://www.BradThor.com, the author lists some of the open-source material he discovered that formed the basis for Black List. The material, as well as the novel, is worth reading.
On pages 117-118 of Black List, Thor makes a stunning inference that, on reflection, is as obvious as the fingers on your hand:
“For years ATS [substitute NSA] had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the technology, hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They created mountains of ‘black dollars’ for themselves, which they washed through various programs they were running under secret contract, far from the prying eyes of financial regulators.
“Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to the Pentagon or the CIA.
“In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach.”
In real life, whether the prime criminal source is one monster corporation or the NSA itself, the outcome would be the same.
Total surveillance has unlimited payoffs when it targets financial markets and the people who have intimate knowledge of them.
“Total security awareness” programs of surveillance are ideal spying ops in the financial arena, designed to grab millions of bits of inside information, and then utilize them to make investments and suck up billions (trillions?) of dollars.
It gives new meaning to “the rich get richer.”
Taking the overall scheme to another level, consider this: those same heavy hitters (NSA) who have unfettered access to financial information can also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain scandals and crimes.
In this way, they can, at their whim, cripple governments, banks, and corporations. They can cripple investment houses, insurance companies, and hedge funds. Or, alternatively, they can merely blackmail these organizations.
It’s likely that the probe Ron Paul has been pushing—audit the Federal Reserve—has already been done by those who control unlimited global surveillance. They already know far more than any Congressional investigation will uncover. If they know the deepest truths, they can use them to blackmail, manipulate, and control the Fed itself.
Corruption on top of corruption.
In this global-surveillance world, we need to ask new questions and think along different lines now.
For example, how long before the mortgage-derivative crisis hit did the Masters of Surveillance know, from spying on bank records, that insupportable debt was accumulating at a lethal pace? What did they do with that information?
When did they know that at least a trillion dollars was missing from Pentagon accounting books (as Donald Rumsfeld eventually admitted on 9/10/2001), and what did they do with that information?
Did they discover precisely where the trillion dollars went? Did they discover where billions of dollars, in cash, shipped to post-war Iraq, disappeared to?
When did they know the details of the Libor rate-fixing scandal? Press reports indicate that Barclays was trying to rig interest rates as early as January 2005.
Have they tracked, in detail, the men responsible for recruiting hired mercenaries and terrorists, who eventually wound up in Syria pretending to be an authentic rebel force?
Have they discovered the truth about how close or how far away Iran is from producing a nuclear weapon?
Have they collected detailed accounts of the most private plans of Bilderberg, CFR, and Trilateral Commission leaders?
For global surveillance kings, what we think of as the future is, in many respects the present and the past.
It’s a new world. These overseers of universal information-detection can enter and probe the most secret caches of data, collect, collate, cross reference, and assemble them into vital bottom-lines. By comparison, an operation like Wikileaks is an old Model-T Ford puttering down a country road, and Julian Assange is a mere piker.
Previously, we thought we needed to look over the shoulders of the men who were committing major crimes out of public view. But now, if we want to be up to date, we also have to factor in the men who are spying on those criminals, who are gathering up those secrets and using them to commit their own brand of meta-crime.
And in the financial arena, that means we think of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as perpetrators, yes, but we also think about the men who already know everything about GS and Morgan, and are using this knowledge to steal sums that might make GS and Morgan blush with envy.
Therefore….when looking for who might have helped Ed Snowden punch a hole in NSA, we should think about who the NSA has been spying on. Not the little guy, not the medium-sized guy, but a very big guy. Perhaps a Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan.
At the highest levels of criminal power, the players don’t always agree. It’s not always a smooth conspiracy. There is fierce in-fighting as well.
Goldman Sachs, Chase, and Morgan consider trillion-dollar trading markets their own private golden-egg farm. They run it, they own it, they manipulate it for their own ends.
If NSA has been looking over their shoulders for the past 30 years, discovering all their knowledge, and operating a meta invasion, siphoning off enormous profits, NSA would rate as Enemy Number One.
And would need to be torpedoed.
Enter Ed Snowden.
Looking elsewhere, consider this. Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there.
Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA.
The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war.
Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise.
You can bet your bottom dollar that NSA analysts are looking into this possibility right now.
by Prac » Wed Jun 12, 2013 12:48 am
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests
