Glenn Greenwald speaks out

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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 02, 2013 12:20 pm



The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald paid a visit to "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning for an interview with conservative commentator Eric Bolling.

Bolling asked Greenwald if he cared to use the morning program as a venue to break another scoop on the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.

"Unfortunately, Eric, you're gonna have to wait along with everybody else until our stories are published," Greenwald said. "But I will say that there are vast programs of both domestic and international spying that the world will be shocked to learn about that the NSA has engaged in without any democratic accountability and that's what's driving our reporting."

When the topic turned to NBC's David Gregory — who aggressively asked The Guardian writer if he should be charged for reporting on the top secret programs — Greenwald said he hasn't received an apology from the "Meet The Press" host but he's hardly been discouraged.

"This is what journalism is about — shining a light on what the most powerful people in the country are doing to them in the dark — so we're going to continue to do that no matter what David Gregory and his friends say," Greenwald said.

Greenwald took to Twitter on Tuesday to respond to criticism he evidently received for appearing on Fox, linking to a pair of interviews President Barack Obama granted to the conservative cable news network:

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald

For all the Obama loyalists saying today how outrageous it is to speak to Fox News viewers: http://video.foxnews.com/v/4526781/bill ... ent-obama/ … - http://video.foxnews.com/v/928345905001 ... ent-obama/

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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 04, 2013 8:22 pm

Who Helped Snowden Steal State Secrets?
The preparations began before he took the job that landed him at the NSA.

By Edward Jay Epstein
In March 2013, when Edward Snowden sought a job with Booz Allen Hamilton at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, he signed the requisite classified-information agreements and would have been made well aware of the law regarding communications intelligence.

Section 798 of the United States Code makes it a federal crime if a person "knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States" any classified information concerning communication intelligence.

Mr. Snowden took that position so he could arrange to have published classified communications intelligence, as he told the South China Morning Post earlier this month. The point of Mr. Snowden's penetration was to get classified data from the NSA. He subsequently stated: "My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked, that is why I accepted that position."

My question would be, then: Was he alone in this enterprise to misappropriate communications intelligence?

Before taking the job in Hawaii, Mr. Snowden was in contact with people who would later help arrange the publication of the material he purloined. Two of these individuals, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald, were on the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that, among other things, funds WikiLeaks.

In January 2013, according to the Washington Post, Mr. Snowden requested that Ms. Poitras get an encryption key for Skype so that they could have a secure channel over which to communicate.

In February, he made a similar request to Mr. Greenwald, providing him with a step-by-step video on how to set up encrypted communications.

So, before Mr. Snowden proceeded with his NSA penetration in March 2013 through his Booz Allen Hamilton job, he had assistance, either wittingly or unwittingly, in arranging the secure channel of encrypted communications that he would use to facilitate the publication of classified communications intelligence.

On May 20, three months into his job, Mr. Snowden falsely claimed to his employer that he needed treatment for epilepsy. The purpose of the cover story was to conceal his trip to Hong Kong, where the operation to steal U.S. secrets would be brought to fruition.

Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras also flew to Hong Kong. They were later joined by Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks representative who works closely with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Mr. Snowden reportedly brought the misappropriated data to Hong Kong on four laptops and a thumb drive. He gave some of the communications intelligence to Mr. Greenwald, who had arranged to publish it in the Guardian, and Mr. Snowden arranged to have Ms. Poitras make a video of him issuing a statement that would be released on the Guardian's website. Albert Ho, a Hong Kong lawyer, was retained to deal with Hong Kong authorities.

This orchestration did not occur in a vacuum. Airfares, hotel bills and other expenses over this period had to be paid. A safe house had to be secured in Hong Kong. Lawyers had to be retained, and safe passage to Moscow—a trip on which Mr. Snowden was accompanied by WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison—had to be organized.

The world now knows that the misappropriation of U.S. communications intelligence began appearing in the Guardian and other publications on June 5, and Mr. Snowden left Hong Kong for the Moscow airport on June 21. A question that remains to be answered: Who, if anyone, aided and abetted this well-planned theft of U.S. secrets?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 09, 2013 11:17 pm

Email to Walter Pincus
Dear Mr. Pincus:

That you decided to write an entire column grounded solely in baseless innuendo is between you and your editors. But your assertion of several factually false claims about me, Laura Poitras, and others is not:

(1) "On April 10, 2012, Greenwald wrote for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog about Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. government officials."

I have no idea what you're talking about here, and neither do you. I never wrote anything "for the WikiLeaks Press's blog". How you decided to pull that fact out of thin air is a genuine mystery.

The April 10, 2012, article of mine you seem to be referencing - about the serial border harassment of the filmmaker Laura Poitras - was written for Salon, where I was a Contributing Writer and daily columnist. Neither it, nor anything else I've ever written, was written "for the WikiLeaks Press's blog".

(2) "In that same interview, Assange previewed the first Greenwald Guardian story based on Snowden documents that landed a week later."

This claim is not just obviously false, but deeply embarrassing for someone who claims even a passing familiarity with surveillance issues.

The sentence you quoted from Assange's May 29 interview about the collection of phone records was preceded by this: "The National Security Agency — and this has come out in one court case after another — was involved in a project called Stellar Wind to collect all the calling records of the United States."

Stellar Wind, as you rather amazingly do not know, is the code name for the 2001-2007 Bush NSA spying program. As part of that program, the NSA (as you also rather amazingly did not know) engaged in the bulk collection of Americans' phone records.

Back in April, 2012, NSA whistleblower William Binney went on Democracy Now and detailed how, under Stellar Wind, the NSA argued that the Patriot Act "gives them license to take all the commercially held data about us" and has thus "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens."

When "Assange described how NSA had been collecting 'all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years'", he was not "preview[ing] the first Greenwald Guardian story based on Snowden documents that landed a week later" (a story that revealed for the first time that a radical interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act was being used by the FISA court and the Obama DOJ to justify the bulk collection of Americans' communications record and that this indiscriminate domestic surveillance program was active under the Obama administration).

Instead, Assange was describing - explicitly - a Bush program from 8 years earlier, one that was widely reported at the time and thus known to the entire world (except, apparently, to you and your editors).

(3) "He [Snowden] worked less than three months at Booz Allen, but by the time he reached Hong Kong in mid-May, Snowden had four computers with NSA documents."

Edward Snowden has worked more or less continuously at the NSA for various contractors since 2009 - not since March, 2013. See this July 4, 2013, New York Times article on Snowden's four-year history at the NSA as a sophisticated cyber-operative:

"In 2010, while working for a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden learned to be a hacker. . . .By 2010, he had switched agencies and moved to Japan to work for Dell as an N.S.A. contractor, and he led a project to modernize the backup computer infrastructure, he said on the résumé. That year also appears to have been pivotal in his shift toward more sophisticated cybersecurity."

By the time he contacted us, he had already been working at the NSA with extensive top secret authorization for almost four years. To conceal this vital fact from your readers - in order to leave them with the false impression that he only began working at the NSA after he spoke with me, Laura Poitras and your Washington Post colleague Bart Gellman - is deceitful and reckless.

(4) "Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?"

Although you also conceal this from your readers, both Poitras and I have repeatedly, publicly and in great detail addressed all of these questions. I did so in a newspaper called "the Washington Post" ("It was only in May — and not before — that Snowden told [Greenwald] who he was, who he worked for (at that point he identified himself as affiliated with the NSA) and what sort of documents he had to share, Greenwald says. It wasn’t until June — when Greenwald visited Snowden in Hong Kong — that Snowden told him he worked specifically for Booz Allen"), as well as in the New York Times.

Poitras did so in an interview with Salon: "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".

You're free to disbelieve those answers in pursuit of your frenzied conspiracy theorizing. But you should not feel free to pretend those answers haven't been provided and thus hide them from your readers.

Apparently, some establishment journalists have decided that the way to save a discredited and dying industry is to fill articles and columns speculating about the news-gathering process on a significant story in which they had no involvement, and thus traffic in innuendo-laden "questions" designed to imply elaborate and nefarious conspiracy theories. So be it: I don't think that will work - I think what readers want are fact-based revelations about those in power - but feel free to try.

But making up facts along the way, as you've done, should still be deemed unacceptable. At the very least, they merit a prominent correction.

All of this is independent of the fact that the conspiracy theory you've concocted is just laughable on its own terms. The very notion that Julian Assange would have masterminded this leak from the start, but then chose to remain demurely and shyly in the background so that others would receive credit for it, would prompt choking fits of laughter among anyone who knows him. Your suggestion that Assange would refrain from having WikiLeaks publish these documents, and instead direct these news-breaking leaks to The Guardian of all places - with which he has a bitter, highly publicized and long-standing feud - is even more hilarious.

Our NSA stories have been published and discussed in countless countries around the world, where they have sparked shock, indignation and demands for investigation. So revealingly, it is only American journalists - and them alone - who have decided to focus their intrepid journalistic attention not on the extremist and legally dubious surveillance behavior of the US government and serial deceit by its top officials, but on those who revealed all of that to the world.

This is an important news story and journalists should be free to ask all sorts of questions about who was involved and how. That's why we've been so forthcoming - unusually so - about addressing all these questions. Read your Washington Post colleague Erik Wemple as he explains that to you: "In response to various questions going back to the days just after his first NSA stories, Greenwald has delivered a remarkable amount of disclosures about how he got the story, how he executed it and how he plans to continue pursuing it."

But when those questions are posed by fabricating events that never happened and ignoring the answers that have already been provided, it strongly suggests that something other than truth-seeking is the objective.


Glenn Greenwald


Washington Post's WikiLeaks/Snowden/Greenwald Conspiracy Theory
By Peter Hart 4 Comments


Walter Pincus
To Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus (7/9/13), something about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden just doesn't smell right. Lucky for him he gets space in a prestigious newspaper to work out his hunch–apparently without any editors or factcheckers to get in his way.
Right from the start, Pincus lays out where he's coming from:
Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hawaii facility as an IT systems administrator to gather classified documents about the National Security Agency's worldwide surveillance activities?
He's just asking questions, right? Not really–the whole point of the column is to insinuate that Snowden's being controlled, on some level, by WikiLeaks, in cahoots with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald.
Pincus finds it odd that he "worked less than three months at Booz Allen, but by the time he reached Hong Kong in mid-May, Snowden had four computers with NSA documents."
Then Pincus wonders: "Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?"
That could be, since he seems to think it's happened before:
In the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier on trial for disclosing thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, it was Julian Assange and his organization who directed the collection of documents, U.S. prosecutors have alleged.
Of course, what the government is alleging about Manning isn't necessarily reality; Manning himself has taken credit for the decision to share the information with WikiLeaks.
But Pincus is on his trail to… somewhere. How did Snowden choose which journalists to talk to? Pincus draws a line between Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks. You see, Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras "have had close connections with [WikiLeaks' Julian] Assange and WikiLeaks." How close? Pincus writes:
On April 10, 2012, Greenwald wrote for the WikiLeaks Press's blog about Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. government officials.
So that tight connection could explain how it is that Julian Assange knew about Greenwald's NSA scoops before they were published. He was interviewed by Democracy Now! on May 29, writes Pincus:
Assange previewed the first Greenwald Guardian story based on Snowden documents that landed a week later. Speaking from Ecuador's embassy in London, Assange described how NSA had been collecting "all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years…. Those calling records already [are] entered into the national security complex."
Did he know ahead of time of that Guardian story describing the U.S. court order permitting NSA's collection of the telephone toll records of millions of American Verizon customers and storing them for years?
Pincus closes by noting that WikiLeaks continues to assist Snowden, and writing somewhat ominously, "What other roles the group played in getting Snowden to this point remain a mystery."

Glenn Greenwald (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)
Unfortunately for Pincus, Glenn Greenwald reads the Washington Post. And he wrote a devastating rebuttal, taking on all of the inaccuracies that Pincus floated in his piece.
Did Greenwald writing for WikiLeaks' blog? No. "I have no idea what you're talking about here, and neither do you," Greenwald writes, noting that the piece in question was one of his columns for Salon.com (4/8/12).
But never mind that–didn't Greenwald's WikiLeaks connection mean that Julian Assange "previewed" his NSA scoops? That claim, Greenwald writes, is "deeply embarrassing for someone who claims even a passing familiarity with surveillance issues." Why? Because what Assange was talking about were the well-documented Bush-era NSA scandals that had been widely discussed years earlier.
But still it's odd that Snowden could amass all those NSA documents in three months, right? No, Greenwald explains, because Snowden had worked for various NSA contractors for four years.
OK, but isn't it fair to wonder whether someone instructed Snowden to take this job to leak information? Well, Greenwald explains, this has all been pretty thoroughly reported, albeit in obscure outlets like the New York Times (6/11/13) and…the Washington Post (6/24/13).
Greenwald writes that "making up facts… should still be deemed unacceptable. At the very least, they merit a prominent correction." He's right. But how did the Washington Post not factcheck any of this before they ran Pincus' tendentious piece?
I would say it'd be a good issue for the Post's ombud to take up, but they got rid of that position earlier this year. They do have a readers' representative, though–Doug Feaver. His email is readers@washpost.com. Maybe he could look into it?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 10, 2013 8:03 am

The journalistic practices of the Washington Post and Walter Pincus
Fifteen hours after acknowledging that an innuendo-filled article is factually false, the Post still has not corrected it

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 July 2013 07.24 EDT

On Monday night - roughly 36 hours ago from this moment - the Washington Post published an article by its long-time reporter Walter Pincus. The article concocted a frenzied and inane conspiracy theory: that it was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, working in secret with myself and Laura Poitras, who masterminded the Snowden leaks ahead of time and directed Snowden's behavior, and then Assange, rather than have WikiLeaks publish the documents itself, generously directed them to the Guardian.

To peddle this tale, Pincus, in lieu of any evidence, spouted all sorts of accusatory innuendo masquerading as questions ("Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton's Hawaii facility?" - "Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?" - "Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?") and invoked classic guilt-by association techniques ("Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections, including as founding members in December of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation" - "Poitras and Greenwald have had close connections with Assange and WikiLeaks").

Apparently, the Washington Post has decided to weigh in on the ongoing debate over "what is journalism?" with this answer: you fill up articles on topics you don't know the first thing about with nothing but idle speculation, rank innuendo, and evidence-free accusations, all under the guise of "just asking questions". You then strongly imply that other journalists who have actually broken a big story are involved in a rampant criminal conspiracy without bothering even to ask them about it first, all while hiding from your readers the fact that they have repeatedly and in great detail addressed the very "questions" you're posing.

But shoddy journalism from the Washington Post is far too common to be worth noting. What was far worse was that Pincus' wild conspiracy theorizing was accomplished only by asserting blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods.

As I documented in an email I sent to Pincus early yesterday morning - one that I instantly posted online and then publicized on Twitter - the article contains three glaring factual errors: 1) Pincus stated that I wrote an article about Poitras "for the WikiLeaks Press's blog" (I never wrote anything for that blog in my life; the article he referenced was written for Salon); 2) Pincus claimed Assange "previewed" my first NSA scoop in a Democracy Now interview a week earlier by referencing the bulk collection of telephone calls (Assange was expressly talking about a widely reported Bush program from 8 years earlier, not the FISA court order under Obama I reported); 3) Pincus strongly implied that Snowden had worked for the NSA for less than 3 months by the time he showed up in Hong Kong with thousands of documents when, in fact, he had worked at the NSA continuously for 4 years. See the email I sent Pincus for the conclusive evidence of those factual falsehoods and the other distortions peddled by the Post.

There is zero possibility that the Washington Post was unaware of my email to Pincus early yesterday. Not only was it re-tweeted and discussed by numerous prominent journalists on Twitter, but it was also quickly written about in venues such as Politico and Poynter.

Nonetheless, the Post allowed the falsehoods to stand uncorrected all day. Finally, at 3:11 pm ET yesterday afternoon - 15 hours ago as of this moment, and more than 8 hours after I first publicized his errors - Pincus emailed me back to acknowledge that his claim about my having written for the WikiLeaks blog was false, and vowed that a correction would be published (he did not address the other errors):
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 11, 2013 10:29 am

the WaPo probably should've retracted Pincus' column since it barely makes sense anymore

The Washington Post Has Issued An Exhaustive Correction On A Column About Glenn Greenwald And Edward Snowden
BRETT LOGIURATO 22 MINUTES AGO 335

The Washington Post issued a rather remarkable correction late Wednesday on a column written earlier in the week by national security reporter Walter Pincus — one that Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has been challenging all week.
Pincus' column, entitled "Questions for Snowden," now appears with an exhaustive, three-paragraph correction at its top to set straight original errors and assumptions by Pincus. It originally suggested that NSA leak source Edward Snowden had taken a job with Booz Allen Hamilton to collaborate with the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

In an open letter to Pincus on Tuesday, Greenwald took issue with this "baseless innuendo" — along with other fact errors in the piece, including an error that purported one of his columns had been written for the "WikiLeaks Press Blog."

Pincus also asserted that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had "previewed" Greenwald's extensive reporting on the Obama administration's surveillance of phone and electronic communication data. There's no evidence Assange did so.

Here's the Washington Post's full correction:

A previous version of this Fine Print column incorrectly said that an article by journalist Glenn Greenwald was written for the WikiLeaks Press blog.The article, about filmmaker Laura Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. officials, was written for the online publication Salon and first appeared April 8, 2012. Its appearance on the WikiLeaks Press blog two days later was a reposting. This version has been corrected.

A previous version of the column also asserted that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, during a May 29 interview with Democracy Now, “previewed” the story that Greenwald wrote for the Guardian newspaper about the Obama administration’s involvement in the collection of Americans’ phone records. There is no evidence that Assange had advance knowledge of the story; the assertion was based on a previously published interview in which Assange discussed an earlier surveillance project involving the collection of phone records.The assertion has been taken out of this version.

The column also does not mention Snowden’s past work in the intelligence community. The lack of this context may have created the impression that Snowden’s work for Booz Allen Hamilton gave him his first access to classified surveillance programs.

In an email to Business Insider, Greenwald said he was mostly happy with how the Post had resolved the correction. But he added that it probably should have retracted the column, because it "barely makes any sense at this point."

"That's because the crux of Pincus' innuendo was false, so once you remove it, there's no narrative cohesion left," Greenwald said.

Indeed, the column still contains, for example, Pincus' "question" that asks whether Assange had advance knowledge of Greenwald's reporting on the NSA's collection of phone metadata — something that their correction counters.

"That said, I think the correction is quite thorough and does the most important job of illustrating what a shabby, reckless, error-strewn attack this was," Greenwald said.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/wapo-cor ... z2YkNmomK6
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jul 13, 2013 1:20 pm

SATURDAY, JUL 13, 2013 09:30 AM CDT
Q&A with Glenn Greenwald: Americans’ reaction “surprising and gratifying”
Glenn Greenwald discusses how Americans see Snowden, and details the non-U.S. world's anger at NSA privacy invasion
BY FALGUNI A. SHETH

In the wake of his explosive reporting about the U.S. government’s surveillance regime over the last six weeks, I spent some time talking with Guardian reporter (and Salon alumnus) Glenn Greenwald Friday about the impact and scope of these revelations — as well as some other aspects of the fallout in the U.S. and internationally. The following is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

There was a Quinnipiac poll that came out two days ago reporting that over half of Americans regarded Edward Snowden as a whistleblower rather than a traitor, despite the fact that we’ve heard tons of calls for him to be arrested and tried for leaking state secrets. What do you think? How do you reconcile these? Do you think something substantial has changed in terms of Americans’ opinions about the state’s tracking?

I do. What was most amazing to me about that poll was the idea that he’s more of a traitor rather than a whistleblower has become pretty much the consensus of the United States government, both political parties, the leadership of these parties and the D.C. press corps. So the message that has just been continuously churned out from those large institutions is that what he did was bad and wrong, that he shouldn’t be treated as a whistleblower and that he’s really a criminal. So to watch a large majority of Americans reject that consensus and reach their own conclusion, which is that what he has revealed is a good amount of wrongdoing, which is the definition of a whistleblower, is both surprising and gratifying. I think it’s really a testament to how powerful these revelations are that they have disturbed Americans so much that they have just disregarded the message they’ve been bombarded with for six straight weeks now.

It feels like the message coming from Congress is pretty much the same: This is a legal program; there was nothing unethical about it; we need to do this to fight the terrorists. What do you think? Is there a space to challenge Congress on this?


Well, Washington has proven, over and over, that they’re not bothered by the fact that what they’re doing and thinking is completely at odds with mass sentiments of the public that they pretend to represent. So the mere gap between public opinion and what they’re doing isn’t, in and of itself, enough to change their behavior. But what they do start to respond to is serious pressure on the part of the American public over some of the things that they’re doing, and you do see some movement in Congress already to start to institute reforms, to put checks on these surveillance abuses. But I think that ultimately the real issue is the top levels of the Obama administration repeatedly went to Congress and lied to the faces of Congress, which is a felony, over what these NSA programs were and weren’t. And ultimately, I think the first step is going to have to be, are we willing to tolerate having top-level Obama officials blatantly lie to our representatives in Congress and prevent them from exercising oversight about these spying programs? And that, I think, has to be the first scandal to show that there are actually consequences for this behavior.

That would require them to call someone like [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper to task in the same way – “You blatantly lied, we’ve got you on record, what do you have to say about it?” And that hasn’t seemed to have happened yet.

I think there’s clearly some influential members of Congress, not just the handful of dissidents, but people who genuinely wield some influence, both within the Congress and the Democratic Party, who are quite angry over what happened with Clapper. His credibility is clearly damaged. He hasn’t made very many public opinions throughout this period. He’s definitely on the defensive. I think the same is true for [NSA Director] Keith Alexander. Washington scandals tend to erode people’s credibility slowly rather than instantly, but I do think that Clapper’s credibility is irrevocably damaged, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some serious repercussions in terms of him leaving at some point in the near future.

Let’s turn to the other part of this. Yesterday, you reported some more details from these documents that Snowden has been sharing, including the fact that “Microsoft has helped NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be able to intercept web chats.” I’m quoting directly from the story. So it’s not just that NSA is intercepting emails and data, but there’s actually more and more proof that these companies have been working hand-in-hand with the NSA.

Right. The relationship between the private telecoms and Internet companies and the NSA is one of the crucial components of this entire story. The NSA really can’t do that much spying domestically or internationally without the ongoing cooperation of these private corporations. So with the revelations that we’ve published in the past week and a half – with Laura Poitras reporting in Der Spiegel about mass spying in Germany, in Europe, and the reporting that I did with O Globo in Brazil about a similar collection of communications in Brazil and Latin America, more broadly – the linchpin of all of this is that there’s some large telecommunication company, an American company, exploiting their partnership with foreign telecommunications companies to use their access to those countries’ systems to direct traffic back to NSA repositories. Domestically, the same thing is happening. All these companies like to say they only cooperate with the bare minimum way under the law with the NSA, but what the documents we published yesterday and reported on demonstrate is that Microsoft has continuous and ongoing meetings with the NSA about how to build and construct new methods for enabling unfettered access to the calls and emails and Internet communications that the NSA specifies that they want, and the technicians at Microsoft work hand-in-hand with the technicians at NSA to enable that, and that is really at odds with the public statements Microsoft and Skype and Outlook have made to their users about what they’re doing to protect their privacy.

Are these actions technically legal? What’s the implication that we should be walking away with? That there was “just” hand-in-hand cooperation, or that there was something illegal that’s being done?

Well, first of all, hovering over everything is always the Fourth Amendment, regardless of what Congress says is legal. The Fourth Amendment constrains what Congress and the government are permitted to do. One of the arguments from privacy activists and the ACLU and other groups has always been that the new FISA law, which was passed in 2008 with the support of all parties in Congress including President Obama, which was designed essentially to legalize the illegal Bush-Cheney wordless eavesdropping program, is unconstitutional. And there have been all sorts of lawsuits brought to argue that this law that Congress passed is unconstitutional, and yet no court has been able to rule on the merits of it, because the Obama administration has gone into court repeatedly and said two things: Number 1: All this is too secret to allow courts to rule on, and Number 2: Because we keep everything so secret, nobody can prove that they’ve been subjected to this spying, and therefore nobody has standing to contest the constitutionality of it. So there’s this huge argument out there, which is that all of this is illegal because it’s a violation of the Constitution, that the Obama DOJ has succeeded in preventing a judicial answer to.

Secondly, under the law, the U.S. government is free to intercept the communications of anybody they believe with 51 percent probability is not a U.S. citizen and is not on U.S. soil. So they’re free to go to any of these Internet companies or just simply take off the cables and fiber-optic wires that they have access to, whatever communications they want of anybody outside the United States who’s not a U.S. person, and oftentimes those people are speaking to American citizens. The NSA is free to invade those communications without having to go into a FISA court and get a specific warrant, which is why when President Obama said nobody’s listening to your calls without a warrant, he was simply not telling the truth. That was completely false and deceitful, what he said, because even under the law, the NSA is allowed to intercept communications with American citizens without getting a warrant. The only time they need a warrant is when they’re specifically targeting a U.S. person, an American citizen or somebody on U.S. soil. So it’s a scandal in that – not just that they’re violating the Constitution, but also what the law allows, because of the level of abuse that it entails.

As you’ve pointed out in the last few weeks as well, this is about American citizens, but it’s also about non-American citizens, right? It’s about world citizens. A number of people have written stories about how it really tends to affect those who are much more vulnerable under American foreign policy and domestic policy – Muslims of various backgrounds. But it also affects Brazilians, the French, the Germans, and so it’s an international scandal. What has been happening in Brazil with regards to these revelations?

Right, so let me just say one quick thing about domestic versus international. Even domestically, there are indications that the law has been violated. I mean, the bulk collection of telephone records of all Americans, for example, has been done under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which even the Republican author of that [Jim Sensenbrenner] has said they never imagined it would enable bulk collection of records. It was only supposed to lower the threshold to be able to get specific records of people who were targeted with investigations.

But internationally, the response is so much different than it is in the U.S., you know in the U.S. there’s this obsession with what are Edward Snowden’s personality flaws: Why is he choosing the countries that he seems to be wanting to seek asylum from? Should the journalists involved in reporting these stories be arrested?

Everywhere else in the world, the focus is on the actual substance of the revelations, which is why should we allow the U.S. and its allied governments to construct a ubiquitous spying system that basically destroys privacy globally for everyone on the planet who uses electronic means to communicate. And in Brazil, ever since we published these stories last weekend about mass spying on Brazilians by the millions, in terms of emails and phone calls, it has completely dominated the news cycle of the political class. Not just in Brazil, but in Latin America generally there are formal criminal investigations underway to determine the culpability of Brazilian telecoms, to find out the identity of the U.S. telecom who enabled all this mass access into the telecommunication systems of Latin America. There’s real indignation and a genuine debate over privacy that is taking place throughout the world, much, much more serious and more substantive and profound than the one that has been led by American journalists inside the U.S.

I noticed the president and other high-level political officials in Brazil said that there were chills running down their spines when they were reading that Brazilians were being spied on [note: Actually, it was stated by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner]. Presumably the French government and the German government was also startled about it, but they don’t seem to have had as strong a reaction. Do you think that there’s a definite difference in degree or quality of response from the Brazilian government versus some of the Europeans, or that it’s pretty much on the same level?

I think that a lot of the indignation expressed by European governments is completely artificial and manipulative, designed to show their populations that they’re angry about this, when in reality they’re not. In part because they participate in many of these U.S. spying programs, and in part because European governments are incredibly and completely subservient to the dictates of the U.S. So, we saw that very vividly, when the French and the other EU states spent a week, you know, parading around, showing how angry they were at what the U.S. had done, but then immediately obeyed American orders to deny airspace rights to a plane that they thought was carrying the person who had allowed them to learn about this—Edward Snowden. And they did it by taking the very extreme step of denying airspace rights to a plane carrying the president of a sovereign state, Bolivia, and sparking anger in the continent, over what felt to them — Latin Americans — like the standard type of racism, colonialism and imperialism that they have been subjected to by the U.S. and its Western allies for… for centuries. And so, I think that the true colors of the E.U. states with regard to all of these issues was revealed very clearly in that incident, although the populations of the E.U. are genuinely angry. The contrast of Latin American governments is very stark. They are genuinely angry, because they weren’t aware of any of this; they weren’t participating in it, and often they were the targets of it. And so I think the repercussions of these stories is going to be very long term, and still has yet to be really appreciated, just in terms of the wedge that it has placed between the U.S. and these governments, and the change in how populations around the world think of the U.S. government.

This has been an occasion to call a number of Latin American states together to decide what to do, how to respond to the U.S. It seems to be a catalyst for further declaring their independence from American imperial dictates. Even Bill Richardson has said something to that effect, that this is really kind of going to be this pivotal moment there. That raises the issue of asylum for Snowden, which we know a number of European countries have rejected. Venezuela’s indicated that they’re quite open to it, I guess Bolivia as well. How is this going to play out? Snowden’s stuck in the airport. He is a stateless person, as he’s pointed out. I think by most legal contexts, he’s right. I don’t think he’s exaggerating in any sense. So, what happens here in terms of his seeking of asylum? And to these Latin American states’ responses to the NSA issue?

Well, there’s a really great article by the ACLU today by Jamil Dakwar, who’s the director of the ACLU Human Rights program, and another senior staff attorney [Chandra Bhatnagar] with the Human Rights Program, describing that the behavior in the Snowden case is basically threatening the right for people around the world to seek and obtain asylum, a right that is centuries old and is guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory, because essentially what they’ve done is not just bully other states that have offered asylum to him or are considering doing so, but have demonstrated that they’re willing physically to block him from going to countries to seek asylum or obtain asylum, or even to use lawless or rogue behavior, like we just discussed with the effective downing of Evo Morales’ plane. And so the precedent that’s being set is that if you are a sufficiently powerful country, you can prevent weaker countries through bullying tactics from granting people asylum who are the subject of persecution.

I encourage everybody to go and look for that ACLU piece on it, and I hope you’ll link to it because it really, you know, demonstrates just how extreme the U.S. behavior in this case is. As far as whether or not he’s being persecuted, there are all kinds of liberal journals who generally support the Democratic Party and the Obama administration — from Mother Jones and The Nation, and lots of others — that have detailed that the Obama administration’s treatment of whistleblowers, people who leak classified information, is unprecedentedly vindictive and hostile and aggressive. Of course, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers under espionage statutes than all prior presidents combined, including George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, and so the fact that Snowden is being persecuted is hardly in dispute. And Daniel Ellsberg made this point himself in an op-ed he wrote in the Washington Post a week ago or so, in which he said, “the fact that Snowden fled the U.S. makes all the sense in the world. He should have because the U.S. has changed radically in the four decades since I was on trial. I was allowed to be on bail and participate in public debates about my case. Snowden would be put into a cage, unquestionably, and never released and be silenced. And the justice system would treat him unfairly, which was never the case for Daniel Ellsberg, even in the Nixon years,” said Daniel Ellsberg. I think clearly there’s a case for persecution. He has a right to seek it, but the U.S. is blocking him from seeking that right.

Yesterday, there was an interview on “Democracy, Now,” with Peter Ludlow, who’s been reporting on the Barrett Brown case…Barrett Brown has now faced over 300 days in jail. He’s been pursued pretty vigorously by the U.S. government, especially in the face of an interview [with NBC’s Michael Isikoff] where he thought he was fairly protected because he had a bunch of high-level lawyers. They’ve also gone after his mother and you know it looks like — this is in a way, along with Assange, an important precedent for the fears that Edward Snowden has. It turns out that one of the things that he discovered, or at least that Anonymous discovered, was that this company, HBGary, was trying to plant information that would undermine yours and Wikileaks’ credibility at the same time, so it looks like the U.S. government is definitely aware of the kind of damage that whistleblowers can cause. Do you have any thoughts about the Barrett Brown case in connection to Snowden as well?

Sure, I’ve written about the Barrett Brown case. I think the broader point is that if you in some way are any kind of dissident to the United States government and the private corporations that essentially have emerged with it in the intelligence and national security worlds, then you’re going to suffer serious repercussions in terms of legal prosecutions or other kinds of recriminations that are formal in nature, and it’s happened to every single person who has done that. I remember when those emails were first divulged about how they were going to try and put me in a position where I had to choose between cause and career, meaning if I continued to support Wikileaks they would try and destroy my career. At first I sort of swept it off as people who had been watching spy films until I realized that the corporations and companies involved in that planning were some of the most well-connected ones in the tech and D.C. worlds, you know, Palantir and others, and I took it more seriously, and what it really indicated to me was that this is how people in that world think — that if you oppose them in any meaningful way, even through constitutionally protected activities like whistleblowing or journalism — that you should be and will be punished, and the point of this is to create a climate of fear where people are intimidated out of opposing the U.S. government or working against its interests or opposing its policies, not through the ballot box, which they don’t care about, but through more aggressive action, and that I think is the lesson of Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown and Bradley Manning and Aaron Schwartz and a whole variety of other cases that we’ve seen similar to it, and the persecution of whistleblowers as well, that are all designed to bolster this point.

As you know, we’ve just entered the month of Ramadan, which is a very important month of fasting for Muslims. On top of just the general kind of human rights concerns about detaining political prisoners in Guantanamo, there are also, as we know, at least 45 Guantanamo prisoners who are being force-fed. Any thoughts about this?

You know the thing that has struck me the most about this whole last six weeks of political discourse, obviously I’ve been most focused — to the exclusion of almost everything else — on the NSA stories, is the idea that somehow Snowden is illegitimate for seeking asylum in countries like Venezuela or Nicaragua or Ecuador or traveling through Russia and China in order to get there, at the very same time the United States continues to maintain this incredibly oppressive lawless prison system at Guantanamo where people are dying from having been in prison for over a decade, with no charges of any kind, to the point where they’re actually committing suicide virtually through a hunger strike in protest of the helplessless of their situation.

During the same six weeks we’ve killed dozens of people again with drone strikes, have propped up the most oppressive dictators in the world. And the refusal to focus on how oppressive we are to Muslims around the world, specifically, and human beings generally, is just incredibly striking as we sit there and rail against and mock other countries for their supposed human rights abuses. At the same time we are supportive of — or at best apathetic to — the much more severe ones of our own government, and I think Ramadan is a perfect time to reflect on that, given how the vast bulk of that oppression and violence and aggression over the last decade has been born by Muslims around the world.

There’s been speculation that you’re really covering the story for personal glory, that you’ve never cared about Muslims before, that you’ve barely written about Muslims before and that this is really kind of about catapulting yourself and Snowden into the spotlight. Thoughts about this?

Anybody who says that is either extremely stupid or extremely dishonest — probably both. I have spent the last eight years writing about one topic more than any other, and that has been the persecution of Muslims domestically in terms of civil rights violations, civil liberty violations and the targeting of them internationally with all kinds of oppression and torture and state violence, and so anybody who claims that I’ve just suddenly discovered these issues or I only cared when Obama got into office, has to be one of the stupidest people in the world to say something like that. I wrote three books on George Bush’s civil liberties abuses, I have given all kinds of speeches to Muslim organizations around the world about the profiling and persecution that American Muslims and Muslims around the world face from exactly these same kinds of policies, including surveillance. So it’s almost just too stupid to even dignify by addressing.

Falguni A. Sheth, a professor of philosophy and political theory at Hampshire College, writes about politics, race, and feminism at translationexercises.wordpress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @FalguniSheth.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 15, 2013 8:00 pm

Q&A with Glenn Greenwald: Americans’ reaction “surprising and gratifying”
Glenn Greenwald discusses how Americans see Snowden, and details the non-U.S. world's anger at NSA privacy invasion
BY FALGUNI A. SHETH

In the wake of his explosive reporting about the U.S. government’s surveillance regime over the last six weeks, I spent some time talking with Guardian reporter (and Salon alumnus) Glenn Greenwald Friday about the impact and scope of these revelations — as well as some other aspects of the fallout in the U.S. and internationally. The following is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

There was a Quinnipiac poll that came out two days ago reporting that over half of Americans regarded Edward Snowden as a whistleblower rather than a traitor, despite the fact that we’ve heard tons of calls for him to be arrested and tried for leaking state secrets. What do you think? How do you reconcile these? Do you think something substantial has changed in terms of Americans’ opinions about the state’s tracking?

I do. What was most amazing to me about that poll was the idea that he’s more of a traitor rather than a whistleblower has become pretty much the consensus of the United States government, both political parties, the leadership of these parties and the D.C. press corps. So the message that has just been continuously churned out from those large institutions is that what he did was bad and wrong, that he shouldn’t be treated as a whistleblower and that he’s really a criminal. So to watch a large majority of Americans reject that consensus and reach their own conclusion, which is that what he has revealed is a good amount of wrongdoing, which is the definition of a whistleblower, is both surprising and gratifying. I think it’s really a testament to how powerful these revelations are that they have disturbed Americans so much that they have just disregarded the message they’ve been bombarded with for six straight weeks now.

It feels like the message coming from Congress is pretty much the same: This is a legal program; there was nothing unethical about it; we need to do this to fight the terrorists. What do you think? Is there a space to challenge Congress on this?


Well, Washington has proven, over and over, that they’re not bothered by the fact that what they’re doing and thinking is completely at odds with mass sentiments of the public that they pretend to represent. So the mere gap between public opinion and what they’re doing isn’t, in and of itself, enough to change their behavior. But what they do start to respond to is serious pressure on the part of the American public over some of the things that they’re doing, and you do see some movement in Congress already to start to institute reforms, to put checks on these surveillance abuses. But I think that ultimately the real issue is the top levels of the Obama administration repeatedly went to Congress and lied to the faces of Congress, which is a felony, over what these NSA programs were and weren’t. And ultimately, I think the first step is going to have to be, are we willing to tolerate having top-level Obama officials blatantly lie to our representatives in Congress and prevent them from exercising oversight about these spying programs? And that, I think, has to be the first scandal to show that there are actually consequences for this behavior.

That would require them to call someone like [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper to task in the same way – “You blatantly lied, we’ve got you on record, what do you have to say about it?” And that hasn’t seemed to have happened yet.

I think there’s clearly some influential members of Congress, not just the handful of dissidents, but people who genuinely wield some influence, both within the Congress and the Democratic Party, who are quite angry over what happened with Clapper. His credibility is clearly damaged. He hasn’t made very many public opinions throughout this period. He’s definitely on the defensive. I think the same is true for [NSA Director] Keith Alexander. Washington scandals tend to erode people’s credibility slowly rather than instantly, but I do think that Clapper’s credibility is irrevocably damaged, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some serious repercussions in terms of him leaving at some point in the near future.

Let’s turn to the other part of this. Yesterday, you reported some more details from these documents that Snowden has been sharing, including the fact that “Microsoft has helped NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be able to intercept web chats.” I’m quoting directly from the story. So it’s not just that NSA is intercepting emails and data, but there’s actually more and more proof that these companies have been working hand-in-hand with the NSA.

Right. The relationship between the private telecoms and Internet companies and the NSA is one of the crucial components of this entire story. The NSA really can’t do that much spying domestically or internationally without the ongoing cooperation of these private corporations. So with the revelations that we’ve published in the past week and a half – with Laura Poitras reporting in Der Spiegel about mass spying in Germany, in Europe, and the reporting that I did with O Globo in Brazil about a similar collection of communications in Brazil and Latin America, more broadly – the linchpin of all of this is that there’s some large telecommunication company, an American company, exploiting their partnership with foreign telecommunications companies to use their access to those countries’ systems to direct traffic back to NSA repositories. Domestically, the same thing is happening. All these companies like to say they only cooperate with the bare minimum way under the law with the NSA, but what the documents we published yesterday and reported on demonstrate is that Microsoft has continuous and ongoing meetings with the NSA about how to build and construct new methods for enabling unfettered access to the calls and emails and Internet communications that the NSA specifies that they want, and the technicians at Microsoft work hand-in-hand with the technicians at NSA to enable that, and that is really at odds with the public statements Microsoft and Skype and Outlook have made to their users about what they’re doing to protect their privacy.

Are these actions technically legal? What’s the implication that we should be walking away with? That there was “just” hand-in-hand cooperation, or that there was something illegal that’s being done?

Well, first of all, hovering over everything is always the Fourth Amendment, regardless of what Congress says is legal. The Fourth Amendment constrains what Congress and the government are permitted to do. One of the arguments from privacy activists and the ACLU and other groups has always been that the new FISA law, which was passed in 2008 with the support of all parties in Congress including President Obama, which was designed essentially to legalize the illegal Bush-Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program, is unconstitutional. And there have been all sorts of lawsuits brought to argue that this law that Congress passed is unconstitutional, and yet no court has been able to rule on the merits of it, because the Obama administration has gone into court repeatedly and said two things: Number 1: All this is too secret to allow courts to rule on, and Number 2: Because we keep everything so secret, nobody can prove that they’ve been subjected to this spying, and therefore nobody has standing to contest the constitutionality of it. So there’s this huge argument out there, which is that all of this is illegal because it’s a violation of the Constitution, that the Obama DOJ has succeeded in preventing a judicial answer to.

Secondly, under the law, the U.S. government is free to intercept the communications of anybody they believe with 51 percent probability is not a U.S. citizen and is not on U.S. soil. So they’re free to go to any of these Internet companies or just simply take off the cables and fiber-optic wires that they have access to, whatever communications they want of anybody outside the United States who’s not a U.S. person, and oftentimes those people are speaking to American citizens. The NSA is free to invade those communications without having to go into a FISA court and get a specific warrant, which is why when President Obama said nobody’s listening to your calls without a warrant, he was simply not telling the truth. That was completely false and deceitful, what he said, because even under the law, the NSA is allowed to intercept communications with American citizens without getting a warrant. The only time they need a warrant is when they’re specifically targeting a U.S. person, an American citizen or somebody on U.S. soil. So it’s a scandal in that – not just that they’re violating the Constitution, but also what the law allows, because of the level of abuse that it entails.

As you’ve pointed out in the last few weeks as well, this is about American citizens, but it’s also about non-American citizens, right? It’s about world citizens. A number of people have written stories about how it really tends to affect those who are much more vulnerable under American foreign policy and domestic policy – Muslims of various backgrounds. But it also affects Brazilians, the French, the Germans, and so it’s an international scandal. What has been happening in Brazil with regards to these revelations?

Right, so let me just say one quick thing about domestic versus international. Even domestically, there are indications that the law has been violated. I mean, the bulk collection of telephone records of all Americans, for example, has been done under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which even the Republican author of that [Jim Sensenbrenner] has said they never imagined it would enable bulk collection of records. It was only supposed to lower the threshold to be able to get specific records of people who were targeted with investigations.

But internationally, the response is so much different than it is in the U.S., you know in the U.S. there’s this obsession with what are Edward Snowden’s personality flaws: Why is he choosing the countries that he seems to be wanting to seek asylum from? Should the journalists involved in reporting these stories be arrested?

Everywhere else in the world, the focus is on the actual substance of the revelations, which is why should we allow the U.S. and its allied governments to construct a ubiquitous spying system that basically destroys privacy globally for everyone on the planet who uses electronic means to communicate. And in Brazil, ever since we published these stories last weekend about mass spying on Brazilians by the millions, in terms of emails and phone calls, it has completely dominated the news cycle of the political class. Not just in Brazil, but in Latin America generally there are formal criminal investigations underway to determine the culpability of Brazilian telecoms, to find out the identity of the U.S. telecom who enabled all this mass access into the telecommunication systems of Latin America. There’s real indignation and a genuine debate over privacy that is taking place throughout the world, much, much more serious and more substantive and profound than the one that has been led by American journalists inside the U.S.

I noticed the president and other high-level political officials in Brazil said that there were chills running down their spines when they were reading that Brazilians were being spied on [note: Actually, it was stated by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner]. Presumably the French government and the German government were also startled about it, but they don’t seem to have had as strong a reaction. Do you think that there’s a definite difference in degree or quality of response from the Brazilian government versus some of the Europeans, or that it’s pretty much on the same level?

I think that a lot of the indignation expressed by European governments is completely artificial and manipulative, designed to show their populations that they’re angry about this, when in reality they’re not. In part because they participate in many of these U.S. spying programs, and in part because European governments are incredibly and completely subservient to the dictates of the U.S. So, we saw that very vividly, when the French and the other EU states spent a week, you know, parading around, showing how angry they were at what the U.S. had done, but then immediately obeyed American orders to deny airspace rights to a plane that they thought was carrying the person who had allowed them to learn about this—Edward Snowden. And they did it by taking the very extreme step of denying airspace rights to a plane carrying the president of a sovereign state, Bolivia, and sparking anger in the continent, over what felt to them — Latin Americans — like the standard type of racism, colonialism and imperialism that they have been subjected to by the U.S. and its Western allies for… for centuries. And so, I think that the true colors of the E.U. states with regard to all of these issues was revealed very clearly in that incident, although the populations of the E.U. are genuinely angry. The contrast of Latin American governments is very stark. They are genuinely angry, because they weren’t aware of any of this; they weren’t participating in it, and often they were the targets of it. And so I think the repercussions of these stories is going to be very long term, and still has yet to be really appreciated, just in terms of the wedge that it has placed between the U.S. and these governments, and the change in how populations around the world think of the U.S. government.

This has been an occasion to call a number of Latin American states together to decide what to do, how to respond to the U.S. It seems to be a catalyst for further declaring their independence from American imperial dictates. Even Bill Richardson has said something to that effect, that this is really kind of going to be this pivotal moment there. That raises the issue of asylum for Snowden, which we know a number of European countries have rejected. Venezuela’s indicated that they’re quite open to it, I guess Bolivia as well. How is this going to play out? Snowden’s stuck in the airport. He is a stateless person, as he’s pointed out. I think by most legal contexts, he’s right. I don’t think he’s exaggerating in any sense. So, what happens here in terms of his seeking of asylum? And to these Latin American states’ responses to the NSA issue?

Well, there’s a really great article by the ACLU today by Jamil Dakwar, who’s the director of the ACLU Human Rights program, and another senior staff attorney [Chandra Bhatnagar] with the Human Rights Program, describing that the behavior in the Snowden case is basically threatening the right for people around the world to seek and obtain asylum, a right that is centuries old and is guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory, because essentially what they’ve done is not just bully other states that have offered asylum to him or are considering doing so, but have demonstrated that they’re willing physically to block him from going to countries to seek asylum or obtain asylum, or even to use lawless or rogue behavior, like we just discussed with the effective downing of Evo Morales’ plane. And so the precedent that’s being set is that if you are a sufficiently powerful country, you can prevent weaker countries through bullying tactics from granting people asylum who are the subject of persecution.

I encourage everybody to go and look for that ACLU piece on it, and I hope you’ll link to it because it really, you know, demonstrates just how extreme the U.S. behavior in this case is. As far as whether or not he’s being persecuted, there are all kinds of liberal journals who generally support the Democratic Party and the Obama administration — from Mother Jones and The Nation, and lots of others — that have detailed that the Obama administration’s treatment of whistleblowers, people who leak classified information, is unprecedentedly vindictive and hostile and aggressive. Of course, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers under espionage statutes than all prior presidents combined, including George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, and so the fact that Snowden is being persecuted is hardly in dispute. And Daniel Ellsberg made this point himself in an op-ed he wrote in the Washington Post a week ago or so, in which he said, “the fact that Snowden fled the U.S. makes all the sense in the world. He should have because the U.S. has changed radically in the four decades since I was on trial. I was allowed to be on bail and participate in public debates about my case. Snowden would be put into a cage, unquestionably, and never released and be silenced. And the justice system would treat him unfairly, which was never the case for Daniel Ellsberg, even in the Nixon years,” said Daniel Ellsberg. I think clearly there’s a case for persecution. He has a right to seek it, but the U.S. is blocking him from seeking that right.

Yesterday, there was an interview on “Democracy, Now,” with Peter Ludlow, who’s been reporting on the Barrett Brown case…Barrett Brown has now faced over 300 days in jail. He’s been pursued pretty vigorously by the U.S. government, especially in the face of an interview [with NBC’s Michael Isikoff] where he thought he was fairly protected because he had a bunch of high-level lawyers. They’ve also gone after his mother and you know it looks like — this is in a way, along with Assange, an important precedent for the fears that Edward Snowden has. It turns out that one of the things that he discovered, or at least that Anonymous discovered, was that this company, HBGary, was trying to plant information that would undermine yours and Wikileaks’ credibility at the same time, so it looks like the U.S. government is definitely aware of the kind of damage that whistleblowers can cause. Do you have any thoughts about the Barrett Brown case in connection to Snowden as well?

Sure, I’ve written about the Barrett Brown case. I think the broader point is that if you in some way are any kind of dissident to the United States government and the private corporations that essentially have merged with it in the intelligence and national security worlds, then you’re going to suffer serious repercussions in terms of legal prosecutions or other kinds of recriminations that are formal in nature, and it’s happened to every single person who has done that. I remember when those emails were first divulged about how they were going to try and put me in a position where I had to choose between cause and career, meaning if I continued to support Wikileaks they would try and destroy my career. At first I sort of swept it off as people who had been watching spy films until I realized that the corporations and companies involved in that planning were some of the most well-connected ones in the tech and D.C. worlds, you know, Palantir and others, and I took it more seriously, and what it really indicated to me was that this is how people in that world think — that if you oppose them in any meaningful way, even through constitutionally protected activities like whistleblowing or journalism — that you should be and will be punished, and the point of this is to create a climate of fear where people are intimidated out of opposing the U.S. government or working against its interests or opposing its policies, not through the ballot box, which they don’t care about, but through more aggressive action, and that I think is the lesson of Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown and Bradley Manning and Aaron Schwartz and a whole variety of other cases that we’ve seen similar to it, and the persecution of whistleblowers as well, that are all designed to bolster this point.

As you know, we’ve just entered the month of Ramadan, which is a very important month of fasting for Muslims. On top of just the general kind of human rights concerns about detaining political prisoners in Guantanamo, there are also, as we know, at least 45 Guantanamo prisoners who are being force-fed. Any thoughts about this?

You know the thing that has struck me the most about this whole last six weeks of political discourse, obviously I’ve been most focused — to the exclusion of almost everything else — on the NSA stories, is the idea that somehow Snowden is illegitimate for seeking asylum in countries like Venezuela or Nicaragua or Ecuador or traveling through Russia and China in order to get there, at the very same time the United States continues to maintain this incredibly oppressive lawless prison system at Guantanamo where people are dying from having been in prison for over a decade, with no charges of any kind, to the point where they’re actually committing suicide virtually through a hunger strike in protest of the helplessless of their situation.

During the same six weeks we’ve killed dozens of people again with drone strikes, have propped up the most oppressive dictators in the world. And the refusal to focus on how oppressive we are to Muslims around the world, specifically, and human beings generally, is just incredibly striking as we sit there and rail against and mock other countries for their supposed human rights abuses. At the same time we are supportive of — or at best apathetic to — the much more severe ones of our own government, and I think Ramadan is a perfect time to reflect on that, given how the vast bulk of that oppression and violence and aggression over the last decade has been born by Muslims around the world.

There’s been speculation that you’re really covering the story for personal glory, that you’ve never cared about Muslims before, that you’ve barely written about Muslims before and that this is really kind of about catapulting yourself and Snowden into the spotlight. Thoughts about this?

Anybody who says that is either extremely stupid or extremely dishonest — probably both. I have spent the last eight years writing about one topic more than any other, and that has been the persecution of Muslims domestically in terms of civil rights violations, civil liberty violations and the targeting of them internationally with all kinds of oppression and torture and state violence, and so anybody who claims that I’ve just suddenly discovered these issues or I only cared when Obama got into office, has to be one of the stupidest people in the world to say something like that. I wrote three books on George Bush’s civil liberties abuses, I have given all kinds of speeches to Muslim organizations around the world about the profiling and persecution that American Muslims and Muslims around the world face from exactly these same kinds of policies, including surveillance. So it’s almost just too stupid to even dignify by addressing.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jul 21, 2013 11:33 am

This week in press freedoms and privacy rights
The travesty calling itself "the Bradley Manning court-martial", the kangaroo tribunal calling itself "the FISA court", and the emptiness of what the Obama DOJ calls "your constitutional rights"


Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 20 July 2013 06.23 EDT
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A military judge this week refused to dismiss the most serious charge against Bradley Manning. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
I'm on a (much-needed) quick vacation until Sunday, so I'll just post a few brief items from what has been a busy and important week of events, particularly when it comes to press freedom and privacy:

(1) In the utter travesty known as "the Bradley Manning court-martial proceeding", the military judge presiding over the proceeding yet again showed her virtually unbreakable loyalty to the US government's case by refusing to dismiss the most serious charge against the 25-year-old Army Private, one that carries a term of life in prison: "aiding and abetting the enemy". The government's theory is that because the documents Manning leaked were interesting to Osama bin Laden, he aided the enemy by disclosing them. Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler explained in the New Republic in March why this theory poses such a profound threat to basic press freedoms as it essentially converts all leaks, no matter the intent, into a form of treason.

At this point, that seems to be the feature, not a bug. Anyone looking for much more serious leaks than the one that Manning produced which ended up attracting the interest of bin Laden should be looking here. The Obama White House yesterday told Russia that it must not persecute "individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption" - as Bradley Manning faces life in prison for alerting the world to the war abuses and other profound acts of wrongdoing he discovered and as the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers rolls on. That lecture to Russia came in the context of White House threats to cancel a long-planned meeting over the Russian government's refusal to hand over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the US to face espionage charges.

(2) The kangaroo tribunal calling itself "the FISA court" yesterday approved another government request (please excuse the redundancy of that phrase: "the FISA court approved the government's request"). Specifically, the "court" approved the Obama administration's request for renewal of the order compelling Verizon to turn over to the NSA all phone records of all Americans, the disclosure of which on June 6 in this space began the series of NSA revelations. This ruling was proudly announced by the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declassified parts of that program only after we published the court ruling. In response, the ACLU's privacy expert Chris Soghoian sarcastically observed: "good thing the totally not a rubberstamp FISA court is on the job, or we might turn into a surveillance state"; the Wall Street Journal's Tom Gara noted: "Reminder: The style guide for mentioning the FISA court is that it's written 'court' with scare quotes."

(3) In response to our NSA reporting, several groups, including the ACLU and EFF, filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the US government's spying programs. A federal court yesterday heard arguments in the suit brought by the ACLU, and the Obama DOJ asked the court to dismiss it on several grounds, including that it "cannot be challenged in a court of law".

(4) Speaking of the Obama DOJ attempting to block judicial adjudication of the legality of its actions: a different federal judge heard a lawsuit yesterday challenging the constitutionality of Obama's extra-judicial killings by drones of three American citizens, including the 16-year-old American-born Abdulrahaman Awlaki, whose grandfather wrote this powerful Op-Ed in the New York Times this week under the headline "The Drone That Killed My Grandson". The judge repeatedly expressed incredulity at the DOJ's argument that courts had no role to play in reviewing the legality of these killings, which then led to this exchange:


"'Are you saying that a US citizen targeted by the United States in a foreign country has no constitutional rights?' she asked Brian Hauck, a deputy assistant attorney general. 'How broadly are you asserting the right of the United States to target an American citizen? Where is the limit to this?'

"She provided her own answer: 'The limit is the courthouse door' . . . .

"'Mr. Hauck acknowledged that Americans targeted overseas do have rights, but he said they could not be enforced in court either before or after the Americans were killed.'"

Re-read that last line, as it's the Obama administration in a nutshell: of course you have those pretty rights, dear citizens. It's just that nobody can enforce them or do anything to us when we violate them. But you do have them, and they're really, really important, and we do value them so very highly, and President Obama will deliver another really majestic speech soon in front of the Constitution about how cherished and valued they are.

(5) The Obama DOJ obtained what it considers an important victory: an appellate court in Virginia rejected the argument from New York Times reporter Jim Risen that, as a journalist, he cannot be compelled to testify about the identity of his sources. I wrote last year about the reasons the Obama DOJ's pursuit of Risen is so pernicious and threatening to press freedom and gave the background to the case: here. As he set forth in his affidavit, Risen believes, with good reason, that the DOJ's pursuit of him is in retaliation for his prior reporting, including his having exposed the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping program in 2005.

(6) In 2003, two dozen or so CIA agents kidnapped an Egyptian citizen from a street in Milan where he was living after Italy granted him asylum from persecution by the US-allied Mubarak regime. The CIA then rendered their kidnapped victim back to Egypt where he was interrogated and tortured. Italian authorities criminally charged the CIA agents with kidnapping, and after the US refused to turn them over for trial, they were convicted in abstentia. One of them, Milan CIA station chief Robert Lady, was sentenced to several years in prison. I wrote about that case, and US behavior in it, several months ago: here.

Lady ended up in Panama, and when the Italians learned of this, they requested his extradition to Italy. The US government intervened and applied significant pressure to Panamanian officials, who, yesterday, predictably released Lady and put him on a plane back to the US. The next time the US lectures the world about the rule of law and need for accountability, I'm sure this incident will be on many people's minds. It should be.

Also: for those in official Washington - including its press corps - who have been demanding that Edward Snowden come and "face the music" of the charges against him, will you be demanding the same of CIA official Robert Lady, who - unlike Snowden - has committed serious crimes (kidnapping) and has been convicted of those crimes?

(7) For a glimpse into the mind of the National Security State when it comes to transparency and press freedoms, do read this unhinged screed published by CNN from Bush-era CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden about the NSA stories in which, among other things, he says that I am "far more deserving of the Justice Department's characterization of a co-conspirator than Fox's James Rosen ever was". What makes that so ironic is that I've been arguing for many years now that Hayden and the other Bush officials who implemented the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program aimed at American citizens should be criminally prosecuted. Speaking of glimpses into the minds of the US National Security State, do read this remarkable exchange between AP's excellent reporter Matt Lee and a State Department spokesman over Russia and Snowden.

(8) I'm going to write more about this next week, but Rep. Rush Holt is running for the New Jersey Senate seat that became vacant when Democrat Frank Lautenberg died. The special election is on August 13. Holt has long been one of the best members of Congress: a genuine stalwart on civil liberties and privacy and vehement opponent of the crony capitalism that governs DC. A physicist by profession, he's incredibly smart, independent, and unique. Here was Holt on the House floor in 2008 expressing his vehement opposition to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, the bill enacted with a bipartisan majority (including the support of President Obama) that legalized much of the massive surveillance state that now plagues us:


The favorite in the race is a typical Democratic establishment candidate, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who will be a loyal party member and is drowning in Wall Street cash. Having Rush Holt in the Senate would be a substantial boost to all sorts of issues that I write about here most.

Here he is in 2007 warning again of the dangers of the surveillance state:


Those interested can (and I hope will) read about, support and donate to his candidacy here.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 31, 2013 10:47 am

Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey Toobin Clash In On-Air Debate (VIDEO)
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TOM KLUDT 7:38 AM EDT, WEDNESDAY JULY 31, 2013


The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin sparred Tuesday night in an intense on-air debate that touched on the Bradley Manning trial and, more broadly, government leaks.

Toobin admitted that he found the aiding the enemy charge that was brought against Manning to be over-the-top, but said the soldier who gave scores of government files to WikiLeaks still deserved jail time. Manning was acquitted of the aiding the enemy charge, but still faces a steep sentence. Greenwald, meanwhile, levied a staunch defense of Manning, saying he finds it "bizarre" and "baffling" that any journalist would support the prosecution of the leaker.

"And the thing that I find most bizarre is that anybody who would go into the field of journalism or call themselves a journalist who would call for the prosecution and imprisonment for decades of a source like Bradley Manning, who as I said didn't publish anything top secret the way that most sources for large media outlets in America do all the time, it's baffling," Greenwald said during an appearance on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." "What Bradley Manning did is the job of journalists, which is to bring transparency to what the government is doing."

Toobin said that he trusts the government officials overseeing the files that were published by WikiLeaks more than he does Manning.

"But it's not up to Bradley Manning to make the decision to disclose this," Toobin said. "These are people, the people who wrote those cables have devoted their lives to trying to make the world a better place, particularly Foreign Service Officers. You know, maybe you disagree about that, Glenn, but I admire the Foreign Service a great deal and I trust their judgment about what's a secret a lot more than I do Bradley Manning."

Greenwald then got fired up, suggesting that Toobin was arguing "for the end of investigative journalism." Toobin, however, argued that Manning was indiscriminate released hundreds of cables.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 18, 2013 2:46 pm

Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours

David Miranda, partner of Guardian interviewer of whistleblower Edward Snowden, questioned under Terrorism Act

Guardian staff
The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013 14.21 EDT

Glenn Greenwald (right) and his partner David Miranda, who was held by UK authorities at Heathrow aiport. Photograph: Glenn Greenwald

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.30am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last under an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was then released without charge, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

Since 5 June, Greenwald has written a series of stories revealing the NSA's electronic surveillance programmes, detailed in thousands of files passed to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian has also published a number of stories about blanket electronic surveillance by Britain's GCHQ, also based on documents from Snowden.

While in Berlin, Miranda had visited Laura Poitras, the US film-maker who has also been working on the Snowden files with Greenwald and the Guardian.

"This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process," said Greenwald. "To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ. The actions of the UK pose a serious threat to journalists everywhere.

"But the last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. Quite the contrary: it will only embolden us more to continue to report aggressively."

A spokesperson for the Guardian said: "We were dismayed that the partner of a Guardian journalist who has been writing about the security services was detained for nearly nine hours while passing through Heathrow airport. We are urgently seeking clarification from the British authorities."

A spokesperson for Scotland Yard said: "At 08:05 on Sunday 18 August 2013 a 28-year-old man was detained at Heathrow airport under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was not arrested. He was subsequently released at 17:00."

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers. Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offense to refuse to cooperate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.

Last month, the UK government announced it would reduce the maximum period of detention to six hours, and promised a review of the operation on schedule 7 amid concerns that it unfairly targets minority groups and gives individuals fewer legal protections than they would have if detained at a police station.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 18, 2013 5:28 pm

Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
The detention of my partner, David Miranda, by UK authorities will have the opposite effect of the one intended
Follow Glenn Greenwald On Security And Liberty

Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Sunday 18 August 2013 14.44 EDT
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At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.

I immediately contacted the Guardian, which sent lawyers to the airport, as well various Brazilian officials I know. Within the hour, several senior Brazilian officials were engaged and expressing indignation over what was being done. The Guardian has the full story here.

Despite all that, five more hours went by and neither the Guardian's lawyers nor Brazilian officials, including the Ambassador to the UK in London, were able to obtain any information about David. We spent most of that time contemplating the charges he would likely face once the 9-hour period elapsed.

According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, "fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders" (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, "most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour." An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used "to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.

This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.

If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

David was unable to call me because his phone and laptop are now with UK authorities. So I don't yet know what they told him. But the Guardian's lawyer was able to speak with him immediately upon his release, and told me that, while a bit distressed from the ordeal, he was in very good spirits and quite defiant, and he asked the lawyer to convey that defiance to me. I already share it, as I'm certain US and UK authorities will soon see.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby 8bitagent » Sun Aug 18, 2013 5:45 pm

nine hours, under the terrorism act? geez.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby justdrew » Sun Aug 18, 2013 6:51 pm

red alert. :woot:

It may be time to change course.



Snowden’s Ride, Part 6: Why Did Glenn Greenwald Represent Neo-Nazis Pro Bono?
We note that the indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions involved with Snow­den, as well as Fast Eddie him­self, track back to the far right, Nazi, white suprema­cists, Holo­caust deniers and ele­ments and indi­vid­u­als involved with the Under­ground Reich. Again, PLEASE exam­ine the pre­vi­ous posts on the sub­ject, as there is no way to flesh out this line of inquiry in this post. [/i]

In past dis­cus­sion of Eddie the Friendly Spook’s leaker of choice, Guardian jour­nal­ist Glenn Green­wald, we noted that he has pro­fes­sion­ally net­worked with the Koch broth­ers funded Cato Insti­tute. Greenwald’s pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions include far more odi­ous relationships.

Green­wald launched his own legal busi­ness, rep­re­sent­ing “unpop­u­lar clients,” includ­ing neo-Nazis. For five years, Green­wald defended Matthew Hale, head of the World Church of the Cre­ator, cur­rently serv­ing a 40-year prison term for plot­ting against the life of a judge. (See text excerpt below.)

(We’ve spo­ken of the World Church of the Cre­ator in FTR #‘s 168, 222, 633.)

We high­light a num­ber of con­sid­er­a­tions in light of Greenwald’s efforts on behalf of Nazi bloodletters:
  • As is the case with Snowden’s embrace of Nazi Ron Paul for Pres­i­dent, this asso­ci­a­tion negates any pre­tense on the part of Green­wald of being “for humanity.”
  • In his defense of Matthew Hale (being sued by shoot­ing victims, who were set upon by one of Hale’s foot sol­diers) Green­wald vio­lated legal ethics by tap­ing wit­nesses. (See text excerpt below.) Appar­ently, Greenwald’s belief in the incor­rect­ness of secret tap­ing of pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions is highly selective.
  • Green­wald labeled and insulted the plain­tiffs in the case in very strong terms, call­ing them “odi­ous.” (See text excerpt below.)
  • We won­der about Greenwald’s lover of some 11 years–an Austrian-born lawyer named Werner Achatz. Might he have been Under­ground Reich? Might Achatz have recruited/assisted Green­wald? Greenwald’s legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Nazis was largely pro bono. How was he pay­ing his bills? Did he have money saved up? Were other “unpop­u­lar clients” more fis­cally forthcoming?
  • It is quite clear that Green­wald is a “conservative/libertarian mole” within the pro­gres­sive move­ment, whose intent is to dam­age Obama.
  • In past dis­cus­sion of L’Affaire Snow­den, we opined that part of the goal of this psy-op was to alien­ate younger and more ide­al­is­tic vot­ers from Obama, in order to per­mit the GOP to grab the White House and both houses of Congress.
  • In an arti­cle about Green­wald by Out.com, Green­wald touted the neces­sity for a third party, laud­ing GOP gov­er­nor Charles John­son of New Mex­ico as a pos­si­ble can­di­date in 2012. (See text excerpt below.)
  • It will be inter­est­ing to see if another pied-piper in the Ralph Nader mode is fash­ioned in 2016 to siphon off votes from the Democrats.

“Van­field” posted an inter­est­ing com­ment, not­ing that Stephen Walt, whose anti-Israel Lobby tome appears to be a man­i­fes­ta­tion of doc­tri­naire anti-Semitism and prob­a­ble Mus­lim Broth­er­hood influ­ence has lauded Snow­den as another “Edward R. Mur­row”–as grotesque a mis­nomer as one could think of.

“How Glenn Green­wald Became Glenn Green­wald” by Jes­sica Testa; buzzfeed.com; 6/26/2013.

EXCERPT: . . . . Green­wald also spent roughly FIVE YEARS defend­ing the First Amend­ment rights of neo-Nazis, includ­ing Matthew Hale, the “Pon­tifex Max­imus” of the Illi­nois church for­merly known as the World Church of the Cre­ator, one of whose dis­ci­ples went on a mur­der­ous spree in 1999.

“I almost always did it pro bono,” Green­wald said. “I was inter­ested in defend­ing polit­i­cal prin­ci­ples that I believed in. I didn’t even care about mak­ing money anymore.” . . .

“Glenn Green­wald: Life Beyond Bor­ders” by Fred Bern­stein; out.com; 4/18/2011.

EXCERPT: . . . .By the third year of law school, he was work­ing for a large law firm. But real­iz­ing that rep­re­sent­ing Gold­man Sachs would have destroyed him psy­cho­log­i­cally, he set up his own firm, which rep­re­sented sev­eral neo-Nazis and other unpop­u­lar clients.

When he and his for­mer boyfriend, Werner Achatz, an Austrian-born lawyer, tried to lease an apart­ment, they were told they couldn’t aggre­gate their incomes. “They said they only do that for mar­ried cou­ples,” Green­wald recalls. “We said we were a mar­ried cou­ple.” When that didn’t fly, Green­wald became his own lawyer, suing the land­lord for sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion and mar­i­tal sta­tus discrimination.

By 2004 he had tired of lit­i­gat­ing, and was also at the end of an 11-year rela­tion­ship with Achatz. He rented an apart­ment in Rio de Janeiro, expect­ing to remain there for two months. Emo­tion­ally drained, he says, “The last thing I was look­ing for was another rela­tion­ship. Espe­cially in Rio.” But on his first day on the beach, he met Miranda. . . .

. . . . One of his hopes for 2012 is that can­di­dates will emerge to take on the red and the blue teams — he is keep­ing an eye on Gary John­son, a two-term Repub­li­can gov­er­nor of New Mex­ico, who is pro-gay and anti­war, and who could run with a Demo­c­rat like for­mer Wis­con­sin sen­a­tor Russ Fein­gold. He would also be happy to see a bil­lion­aire run with­out the help of either party, to dis­rupt the two-party stran­gle­hold. . . .

“Glenn Green­wald Uneth­i­cally Taped Wit­nesses While Work­ing for Matt Hale, White Suprema­cist; Demo­c­ra­tic Under­ground.

EXCERPT: . . . .Case in point:

Glenn Green­wald made a choice to defend Matthew Hale in a series of civil law­suits that Hale faced after he encour­aged shooter Ben­jamin Smith to go on a two-state shoot­ing rampage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Nathaniel_Smith

If you don’t know who Hale is, well, he’s a pretty famous white suprema­cist who is cur­rently serv­ing 40 years for solic­it­ing the mur­der of a fed­eral judge who ruled against him in a trade­mark case. Who put him away? Patrick Fitzger­ald. (Yes. And Mr. Green­wald got an FBI visit regard­ing the pass­ing of coded mes­sages by Hale while under SAMS restrictions.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_F._Hale

Mr. Hale, for his role in the shoot­ings, was sued by a num­ber of sur­vivors. This included a case filed by two teenage Ortho­dox Jew­ish boys. And another case filed by a Black min­is­ter. These peo­ple were selected by Ben­jamin Smith because they looked like the religious/ethnic minori­ties they are.

And Glenn Green­wald called them ‘odi­ous and repug­nant’ for suing his client–

Indeed the Center’s suit appears to link Hale’s rejec­tion into the bar to Smith’s “ram­page.” In late June, the state bar’s Com­mit­tee on Char­ac­ter and Fit­ness again denied Hale’s peti­tion to join the bar. Smith, who had tes­ti­fied as a char­ac­ter wit­ness for Hale that April, began shoot­ing two days later. “Imme­di­ately after the Illi­nois State Bar’s deci­sion and as part of the World Church of the Creator’s war, Smith ... began a ram­page of geno­ci­dal vio­lence,” the law­suit states.

And while Hale him­self has linked the shoot­ings to his bar appli­ca­tion in the past, he said Tues­day that it’s ridicu­lous to think he had any con­trol over Smith.

SNIP

Fur­ther, Green­wald said, “I find that the peo­ple behind these law­suits are truly so odi­ous and repug­nant, that cre­ates its own moti­va­tion for me.”

The first suit, filed in state court by Chicago attor­ney Michael Ian Ben­der on behalf of two Ortho­dox Jew­ish teens shot at in Rogers Park, is pend­ing, though a cir­cuit judge in Chicago threw out alle­ga­tions that Smith’s par­ents were some­how respon­si­ble for the shootings.

http://www.rickross.com/reference/hale/hale33.html

It wasn’t enough that Glenn took the case, which was his right to do. No–he had to insult the Plaintiffs–shooting vic­tims. And then, he uneth­i­cally taped the wit­nesses he sub­poe­naed, even direct­ing their state­ments. A court found that he vio­lated TWO sep­a­rate rules–

“The mag­is­trate judge granted both motions, find­ing defense counsel’s con­duct uneth­i­cal under two sep­a­rate rules: Local Rule 83.58.4(a)(4), pro­hibit­ing “dis­hon­esty, fraud, deceit or mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion;” and Local Rule 83.54.4, stat­ing “a lawyer shall not ... use meth­ods of obtain­ing evi­dence that vio­late the legal rights of person.”“ANDERSON v. HALE 159 F.Supp.2d 1116 (2001)

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=20011275159FSupp2d1116_11178.xml

He also attempted to manip­u­late the wit­ness state­ments, per the magistrate’s find­ings of fact–

“A 52-page tran­script of one con­ver­sa­tion showed defen­dants’ coun­sel steered the con­ver­sa­tion by elic­it­ing par­tic­u­lar responses to detailed ques­tions, lead­ing to more detailed ques­tions, to lure the wit­ness into damn­ing state­ments for later use.” Ander­son v. Hale, 202 F.R.D. 548 (N.D.Ill. 2001),

That’s right–Glenn Green­wald, self-proclaimed civil rights lawyer, vio­lated the civil right of wit­nesses. The New York Bar later wrote a clar­i­fy­ing opin­ion on the ethics of said tap­ing, ref­er­enc­ing this case–

http://www2.nycbar.org/Publications/reports/show_html.php?rid=122

And of course, Glenn Green­wald thinks Matthew Hale is wrongly impris­oned by Pros­e­cu­tor Fitzgerald.

“Mr. Green­wald, who said he believed that Mr. Hale was wrongly impris­oned, said he did not recall the exact mes­sage Ms. Hutch­e­son relayed to him, or the per­son it was intended for, but that he had declined to deliver it. He called the mes­sage “a car­i­ca­ture of what a coded mes­sage would be.””

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/national/09hale.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Let­ter to the Nation Mag­a­zine: Glenn Green­wald Is a Conservative/Libertarian Mole.

After lis­ten­ing to Chris Hayes and read­ing that one of his ref­er­ences to the story about Obama assas­si­na­tions was Glenn Green­wald, I perused many of Greenwald’s anti-Obama arti­cles clev­erly dis­guised as “civil lib­er­tar­ian” and won­der how any­one in the pro­gres­sive move­ment can take Glenn Green­wald seri­ously. Green­wald admits to being a civil lib­er­tar­ian, much in the mold of Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and most lib­er­tar­i­ans on the far right. After doing a stint at a Wall Street cor­po­rate law firm (Wach­tel, Lip­ton) he strikes it out on his own by rep­re­sent­ing white suprema­cist Matthew Hale, who was the leader of the World Church of the Cre­ator, and is now doing forty years in prison for autho­riz­ing a hit on a fed­eral judge. Green­wald has not writ­ten a sin­gle arti­cle that has been favor­able toward the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion, and he was one of the lead­ing voices push­ing this dis­proven idea that Obama is “the same as Bush” to try to under­mine Obama’s sup­port in his pro­gres­sive base. The con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine Forbes indi­cates Green­wald is “one of the 25 most influ­en­tial lib­er­als in the media,” despite his lib­er­tar­ian views and admis­sion that he is not a liberal.

With this back­drop, it doesn’t take a rocket sci­en­tist to fig­ure out that Glenn Green­wald is a conservative/libertarian mole within the pro­gres­sive move­ment with the sole mis­sion of under­min­ing the move­ment. Specif­i­cally, with respect to autho­rized killing of Al Qaeda oper­a­tives: since when does one need a trial when one admits in writ­ing con­tin­u­ously that they are part of Al Qaeda and are found to be engaged in an oper­a­tional role in killing Amer­i­cans? When have we ever asked on the bat­tle­field whether one is autho­rized to defend one­self against the guy with the gun shoot­ing at you, who is dressed in enemy gear and who has promised to kill you? Should we do as Green­wald sug­gests, and call a “time out” dur­ing the heat of bat­tle and have a civil trial to deter­mine whether this guy really is what he has demon­strated to be? I am all for due process when it make prac­ti­cal sense, but dur­ing the heat of bat­tle when some­one is actively try­ing to kill you, I think defend­ing one­self first in bat­tle and then defend­ing one­self in court later if nec­es­sary appears to be the appro­pri­ate course of action. Maybe we should put Green­wald on the bat­tle­field and see if he really thinks it’s prac­ti­cal to call a time-out and go to court. Only in the wildest fan­tasy of an obsessed lawyer would such a thought even be pos­si­ble, and Green­wald appears to be obsessed with second-guessing com­man­ders on the ground, even though he him­self could never really imag­ine what it is like to be on the bat­tle­field of war.

War sucks, and I at least agree with Green­wald that we should avoid war if nec­es­sary, and quickly bring to an end any out­stand­ing wars, as long as it is done respon­si­bly so we do not have to go back in after we leave. But Greenwald’s obses­sion with under­min­ing Obama in this effort should make any pro­gres­sive pause, espe­cially given his right-wing back­ground, his inabil­ity to write a sin­gle pos­i­tive story about the Obama admin­is­tra­tion and his inabil­ity to write about any­thing other than civil lib­er­ties that pro­gres­sives care about.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby wordspeak2 » Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:08 pm

We talked about this on a different thread. I wouldn't defend Greenwald's legal defense of Matthew Hale, whatever the exact circumstances are (that I don't know), but I'm not going to hang him from it or suggest that he's actually some right-winger in disguise. And he wrote for the Cato Institute exactly twice on drug policy issues. I would take Cato's money too, if they offered it to me. Greenwald wrote a very valuable report on drug decriminalization in Portugal, which was funded by Cato. He's not a "Koch agent." Dave Emory needs to get his head checked sometimes. Let's get back to how Empire forces just tried to seriously intimidate (and directly attack, by seizing lots of electronic equipment) Greenwald by detaining his boyfriend for nine hours at the airport under the auspices of Britain's version of the PATRIOT Act. This is the news at the moment.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby Joao » Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:10 pm

Is that Emory piece parody?

When he and his for­mer boyfriend, Werner Achatz, an Austrian-born lawyer

Only in Dave Emory's mind could being Austrian be more relevant when ferreting out a crypto-Nazi than the fact that a person is openly gay. I guess the Underground Reich has really come a long way.

I go through a phase every few years where I try to take Dave Emory seriously, but it never takes long to be reminded why I've always written him off.

(Edited for slightly clearer prose, perhaps.)
Last edited by Joao on Mon Aug 19, 2013 2:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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