Edward Snowden, American Hero

[DrEvil]

Hunter wrote:

So this isnt far from what I predicted, they are tapping in to our video cameras in some way or another and if they are doing this on skype I am certain they can activate the cameras on your laptops and smart TVs too, THIS is the information that Snowden is sitting on and using as leverage by saying look if you harm me this information is all set to be released the day I die or am captured and it will result in massive blowblack throughout the entire world.

A small pedantic point:
They don't have to tap into your camera to get your skype conversations. They just grab it off the servers, or en-route.
But you're absolutely right about remotely activating cameras (and microphones). That was done years ago.

As for the info he's still sitting on, I got the impression he's not intending to ever release it.
It could be anything really, but since the purpose of having it is to get leverage, it's probably something that could be very damaging. Operational details, technical specs. or something like that.

PS! Smart TV is one of my favorite marketing ploys, up there with "the Cloud". Since when did the words TV and smart ever fit together?

[fruhmenschen]

see link for full story
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175726/ ... tory/#more




Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Emerging From Darkness, the Edward Snowden Story
July 18, 2013.


It’s true that, as Glenn Greenwald and others have written, the American media has focused attention on the supposed peccadillos of Edward Snowden so as not to have to spend too much time on the sweeping system of government surveillance he revealed. At least for now, the Obama administration has cornered the document-less whistleblower at Moscow’s international airport, leaving him nowhere on the planet to go, or at least no way to get there. As a result, the media can have a field day writing negative pieces about his relationship to Putin’s Russia.

So Greenwald certainly has a point, and yet it would be a mistake to ignore Snowden’s personal story. After all, the unending spectacle of a superpower implacably tracking down a single man across the planet has its own educational value. It’s been a little like watching one of those Transformers movies in which Megatron, the leader of the evil Decepticons, stomps around the globe smashing things, but somehow, time and again, misses his tiny human target. In this strange drama, in a world in which few eyeball-gluing stories outlast the week in which they were born, almost alone and by a kind of miracle Snowden has managed to keep his story andthe story of the building of the first full-scale global surveillance state going and going. He seems a little like the Energizer Bunny of whistleblowers.

No matter what’s written about him here in the mainstream, the spectacle of a single remarkably articulate and self-confident individual outwitting the last superpower has been, in its own way, uplifting. Although the first global polls haven’t come in, I think it’s safe to assume that from Bolivia to Hong Kong, Germany to Japan, Washington is taking a remarkable licking in the global opinion wars. Even at home, we know that, among the young in particular, opinion seems to be shifting on both Snowden’s acts and the surveillance state whose architecture he revealed.

Given its utter tone-deafness and its flurry of threats against various foreign governments, the downing of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane, and ever more ham-handed moves against Snowden himself, Washington is clearly building up a store of global anger and resentment, including over the way it’s scooping up private communications worldwide. In the end, this twenty-first-century spectacle may truly make a difference. As Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch regular and author of the new book The Faraway Nearby, writes today, it’s been a moving show so far. One man against the machine: if you’ve ever been to the local multiplex, given such a scenario you can’t for a second doubt where global sympathies lie. Tom

Prometheus Among the Cannibals
A Letter to Edward Snowden
By Rebecca Solnit

Dear Edward Snowden,

Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.

I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety -- if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life -- with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.

I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.

Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don’t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can’t or won’t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes -- Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi -- endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.

The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.

Private Eyes and Public Rights

Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy -- even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified -- is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand -- you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy -- is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.

You yourself said it so well on July 12th:

“A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone's communications at any time. That is the power to change people's fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice -- that it must be seen to be done.”

They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata -- the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content -- is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.

The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates, "is to be able to identify where the ‘hubs’ are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.”

Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.

Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out in a fine essay in the London Review of Books, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,

“was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”

You said, "I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me." Who you are is fascinating, but what you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people -- those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.

What You Love

What’s striking about your words on video, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald’s questions, is that you’re not talking much about what you hate, though it’s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us, "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions... [but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant." You love our world, our country -- not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).

You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:

"I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics."

Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?

What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.

“This country is worth dying for,” you said in explanation of your great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier’s courage with a thinker’s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a dangerous thing. That’s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.

When the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult and a violation of Bolivia’s sovereignty and international law. The allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness, and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent: one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It’s a reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country could be different.

Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century

How did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other things. At the time, I put “building a bridge to the nineteenth century” on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once: erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century. The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.

The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.

What the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century’s welfare states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The comfortable don’t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.

Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create and to destroy.

Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from the World Trade Organization actions of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged: populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers. They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two actions are true opposites.

Meanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S. itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change spurred by the profits a few are piling up to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species, and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the devil’s bargains of the twenty-first either.

[seemslikeadream]

^^^^^^

THANK YOU

A hero with a thousand faces

COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS


A HERO IS SOMEONE WHO HAS GIVEN HIS OR HER LIFE TO SOMETHING BIGGER THAN ONESELF - JOSEPH CAMPBELL

[seemslikeadream]

Glenn Greenwald: Growing Backlash Against NSA Spying Shows Why U.S. Wants to Silence Edward Snowden
Congress is holding its second major public hearing on the National Security Agency’s bulk spying.
July 18, 2013 |

The following is a transcript of a Democracy Now! segment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Wednesday, lawmakers held the second major public congressional hearing into the NSA’s widespread surveillance programs since they were revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. During a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, representatives on both sides of the aisle expressed deep concern about the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records and other communications. In a stark contrast to last month’s hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, the bipartisan House panel forcefully questioned senior officials from the NSA, FBI, Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the committee’s highest-ranking Democrat, noted that collecting telephone metadata is not covered under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: We never at any point during this debate have approved the type of unchecked, sweeping surveillance of United States citizens employed by our government in the name of fighting the war on terrorism. Section 215 authorized the government to obtain certain business records only if it can show to the FISAcourt that the records are relevant to an ongoing national security investigation. Now, what we think we have here is a situation in which if the government cannot provide a clear, public explanation for how its program is consistent with the statute, then it must stop collecting this information immediately. And so, this metadata problem, to me, has gotten quite far out of hand, even given the seriousness of the problems that surround it and created its need.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: During Wednesday’s hearing, the NSA admitted its analysis of phone records and online behavior far exceeded what it had previously disclosed. NSA Deputy Director John Inglis revealed that analysts can perform what is called a "second or third hop query" in its pursuit of terrorists. The word "hop" is a technical term indicating connections between people. So, a three-hop query means the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but also from everyone that suspected terrorist communicated with and then from everyone those people communicated with, and so on.

Republican Congressmember James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, author of the PATRIOT Act, called on the Obama administration to rein in the scope of its surveillance on Americans’ phone records, saying it would otherwise lack enough votes in the House to renew the provision, which is set to expire in 2015. Sensenbrenner said, quote, "You’re going to lose it entirely."

Meanwhile, the man who sparked the national—and global—discussion on the NSA surveillance programs remains stranded in Russia, unable to travel to Latin America, where three countries have offered him refuge. Edward Snowden spoke Friday after he met with officials from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in Moscow’s airport.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I also had the capability, without any warrant of law, to search for, seize and read your communications, anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, for more, we’re joined now by Glenn Greenwald, a columnist on civil liberties and U.S. national security issues for The Guardian. He’s also a former constitutional lawyer. Greenwald first published Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance programs and continues to write extensively on the topic. His most recent piece looks at "The Crux of the NSAStory in One Phrase: 'Collect It All.'"

Glenn Greenwald, welcome back to Democracy Now!

GLENN GREENWALD: Good to be back, Juan. Thanks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn, let’s start—your reaction to this latest hearing now, where now both Democrats and Republicans are beginning to seriously question government officials about the NSAscandal?

GLENN GREENWALD: It’s very encouraging. It’s really remarkable that if you look at what much of the American media is focused on—the trivialities and the personalities surrounding the story—it’s completely divergent from what is taking place in the halls of Washington, in the FISA court and in American public opinion. The most recent poll of Americans showed that they view Edward Snowden overwhelmingly as a whistleblower and not a traitor, because they know that the revelations for which he’s responsible were extremely significant and things that they ought to know. And the fact that you now see members of both political parties within the United States Senate and the House of Representatives increasingly angry over the fact that they were misled and lied to by top-level Obama administration officials, that the laws that they enacted in the wake of 9/11, as broad as they were, are being incredibly distorted by secret legal interpretations approved by secret courts, really, I think, indicates exactly that the motives that motivated Snowden to come forward with these revelations, at the expense of his liberty and even his life, were valid and compelling. And if you want to think about whistleblowing in terms of people who expose things the government is hiding that they shouldn’t be doing, in order to bring about reform, I think what you’re seeing is the fruits of classic whistleblowing. And it’s encouraging and gratifying certainly to him and, I think, to me and lots of other people, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn, I want to go to a clip from Republican Representative Blake Farenthold of Texas, who tore into the administration officials testifying before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Here’s Farenthold questioning Deputy Attorney General James Cole, one of four administration witnesses who were present.

REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: How is having every phone call that I make to my wife, to my daughter, relevant to any terror investigation?
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: I don’t know that every call you make to your wife—
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: But you’ve got them.
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: I don’t know that they would be relevant, and we would probably not seek to query them, because we wouldn’t have the information that we would need to make that query.
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: But, you know, somebody like Mr. Snowden might be able to query them without your knowledge.
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: I don’t believe that’s proven. Mr. Inglis could answer that. I don’t think he would have access to that or be able to do it.
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: OK.
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: We don’t believe that he could query those without our knowledge, and therefore those would be caught.
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: All right, that’s slightly reassuring. The Fourth Amendment specifically was designed, as Judge Poe pointed out, to prohibit general warrants. How could collecting every piece of phone data be perceived as anything but a general warrant?
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: Because the phone data, according to the Supreme Court, is not something with which—within which citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: So, do I have a reasonable expectation—
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: It belongs to the phone—
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD: —of privacy in any information that I share with any company, my Google searches, the email I send? Do I have a reasonable expectation of privacy in anything but maybe a letter I hand-deliver to my wife in a skiff?
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE: Those are all dependent on the facts and circumstances of the documents we’re talking about. In the case of metadata, the Supreme Court specifically ruled that there was not coverage by the Fourth Amendment, because of no reasonable expectation of privacy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Republican Representative Blake Farenthold of Texas questioning the Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Glenn Greenwald, your response?

GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, Obama officials and NSA officials have been bald-faced lying to the public ever since we first revealed the identity of Edward Snowden and published the video online, in which he now, rather famously, said, "As an NSA analyst, I could access anyone’s communication that I wanted, including even the president’s, if I had their email address or their telephone number." NSA officials came out and said that it was—that Mr. Snowden was lying about that, but NSA officials are lying about that, as that exchange just revealed.

The NSA is collecting, storing and monitoring billions of emails and telephone calls every single day—"billions" with a B, every single day. Once those communications, the content of those communications, are stored in the NSA system, any NSA analyst sitting at their terminal can query those communications, pull them up on their screen, and then listen to the telephone calls or read the emails or listen—or read the content of the chats. Any NSA analyst has the technological capability to do that, exactly as Mr. Snowden said, and there are hundreds of documents, if not thousands, in our possession that prove that conclusively, including training manuals that tell theNSA analysts how to do that.

There are legal constraints on their ability to do that. They’re not supposed to read the communications of Americans without first getting individual warrants from the FISA court, but the technological and physical capability exists. All they have to do is click a few pull-down menus, and they have exactly what they want. The oversight is very poor, to the extent it exists at all. And so, what that exchange was really getting at was the extraordinary potential for abuse that this system not only has embedded within it, but virtually guarantees. We know from the Church Committee, from investigations, from how human nature functions, that if we allow a spying agency to collect all of our communications—all of our communications—of American citizens and people around the world, and do so in the dark, with virtually no oversight, no need to go to a court except in the rarest of cases to get individual warrants, that that power is going to be abused.

And that, more than anything, is what prompted Mr. Snowden to step forward, was to tell Americans and the world that there has been this spying agency creating a ubiquitous spying program, an apparatus unlike anything we’ve seen before, that sweeps up all forms of human communication and is doing so unbeknownst to the citizenry which pays for it and which—and in whose name it’s being done. And it’s a real threat to privacy, but also to democracy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn, I think it was particularly significant that Sensenbrenner, the author of the PATRIOT Act, is now telling the federal government, "You’ve gone too far, and we’re likely to withdraw your authority to do this, if you don’t begin to change what you’ve been doing." But I also wanted to go to another Republican, who you have written about, and—former two-term Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, who emailed Edward Snowden on Monday. And he wrote, in part, quote, "Mr. Snowden, provided you have not leaked information that would put in harms way any intelligence agent, I believe you have done the right thing in exposing what I regard as massive violation of the United States Constitution. Having served in the United States Senate for twelve years as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, the Armed Services Committee and the Judiciary Committee, I think I have a good grounding to reach my conclusion. I wish you well in your efforts to secure asylum and encourage you to persevere." You wrote about this exchange of emails between Snowden and Gordon Humphrey.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think it’s remarkable on several levels. I’ve been writing for years about the fact that civil liberties abuses and excessive government invasions are really the issue that can bridge the ideological gap and create these transpartisan, transideological coalitions more than probably any other. And then you’ve seen this over the past 10 years. The ACLU has long partnered with right-wing groups like the Christian Coalition to challenge the PATRIOT Act. And I think what you’re seeing is lots of support for Mr. Snowden and for our NSA reporting on the left, groups like Amnesty International and the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, lots of liberals and progressives who have been outspoken in their support of these disclosures, but you also see a lot of support for it on the right, as well, from people who take seriously their rhetoric about limited government and the rights of individuals and the need for safeguarding individual privacy. And I think Senator Humphrey’s letter really reflects that.

What you—the only people at this point who are defending the NSA are the hardcore neocons in the Republican Party, people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain and the like, who see national security as the only value that matters, and the really hardcore Obama loyalists and Democrats, who defend anything the Obama administration does and have become the loudest proponents, ironically, of the massive secret surveillance state and of the government’s power to listen in. So those two groups—Republican neocons, Democratic Party loyalists—are at this point the only real defenders the NSA has left. And I think you’re seeing a real breakdown of partisan and ideological divisions in support of what Mr. Snowden did, of the reporting that we’ve done, and the need for there to be transparency and light shined on what the government has been doing to our privacy completely in the dark.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Glenn, I wanted to ask you about another development, the move by several major Silicon Valley companies, together with civil liberties groups, again, to request—formally request in court that they be allowed to disclose the numbers and the extent of requests from the government to get into their systems. Could you talk about that?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yes. One of the big problems is that most of what the government is doing is being done without any transparency of any kind. And one of the most significant things they’ve done, completely in the dark, is that they have all sorts of agreements in place with Silicon Valley companies—Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Skype—that allow them all sorts of access. And sometimes the Internet companies say, "We’re only doing what we are compelled by law to do." There’s other evidence, including an article we published 10 days ago, that shows, in the case of Microsoft, that they go far beyond what the law requires and collude and cooperate very aggressively with the NSAin secret. And what these Internet companies are saying, in essence, is that "We don’t want there to be this wall of secrecy built around what it is that we’re told by the NSA to do. We want to be able to engage in the public debate in order to tell all our customers, look, this is what we’re being forced to do, this is what we think goes too far, and here’s what it is that we’ve been doing to try and resist some of these things." And it’s great to see these Internet companies wanting to have light shined on what it is it’s been doing. That’s certainly part of the impact of the reporting we’ve done. Unfortunately, the law and the Obama administration are really rigidly holding onto this requirement that these things stay secret.

And I think you’re going to see the FISA court increasingly looking toward transparency as a guiding value and allowing at least some of this process, some of this legal process, to see the light of day. I mean, that might be the most amazing thing about all of this, is that we have a secret court that meets in complete secrecy, with only the government present, and this court is issuing rulings that define what our constitutional rights are. How can you have a democracy in which your rights are determined in total secrecy by a secret court issuing 80-page rulings about what rights you have as a citizen? It is Orwellian and absurd. And I think one of the reforms that will come and is coming from our reporting is that a lot more light is going to be shined on the shenanigans that have been taking place within that court.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Glenn, interestingly, the companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter are saying that they want to release this information, but not the telecom companies. And some people are saying that for Google and Facebook and Twitter, there’s international implications, that other countries will not want to use their systems if they think that the—if they’re allowing easy access to the government to the information they collect. Your response to the silence of the telecom companies?

GLENN GREENWALD: That’s a really important point, Juan. Look, we’ve known for a long time that the telecoms—AT&T, Sprint, Verizon—are completely in bed with the United States government. Remember, the scandal of the NSA in the Bush years was that—not just that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the calls of Americans without the warrants required by law, but also that the telecoms were vigorously cooperating in that program and turning over full and unfettered access to the telephone calls and records of millions of their customers even though there was no legal basis for doing so. And, in fact, the telecoms were on the verge of losing in court and being sued successfully by millions of their customers that they had violated their civil rights and also that they had violated their privacy rights and broken the law, criminally and civilly. And it was only because the Congress stepped in, with the leadership of both political parties, and retroactively immunized the telecoms. But the telecom industry makes massive profits on their extreme cooperation with these—with the NSA to allow all kinds of unfettered access to the communications of their customers. And so, the telecoms are the last people that want transparency brought to their cooperation with the NSA, because that would really shock people to learn just how untrustworthy those companies are when it comes to protecting the privacy of their customers’ communications.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: OK. And, Glenn, finally, I want to go into the flap that has arisen between you and Carl Bernstein. On Monday, the veteran investigative reporter Carl Bernstein publicly criticized you for the statements you allegedly made during an interview with an Argentinian paper over the weekend. Reuters reported you said, quote, "Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the U.S. government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States," and then went on to say, quote, "The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare." This is how Carl Bernstein responded to those supposed quotes that Reuters had from you.

CARL BERNSTEIN: With all my regard for The Guardian, which is considerable, especially given its role in the Murdoch case, that’s an awful statement—
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.
CARL BERNSTEIN: —that that reporter made, and the tone in which he made it. It’s one thing to say that Mr. Snowden possesses some information that could be harmful, and that ought to be part of the calculation that everybody makes here. It’s another to make that kind of an aggressive, non-reportorial statement that seems to me—
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I—something has happened.
CARL BERNSTEIN: —a reporter has no business making.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.
CARL BERNSTEIN: At the same time, there indeed are precautions—I, other journalists know about this—that Snowden has taken in terms of secreting some information in various places that perhaps would disclose—definitely would disclose more things, some of which might or might not be inimical to the interests of the United States. But that statement by that reporter is out of line.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn Greenwald, briefly—we just have a few seconds—your response to Carl Bernstein?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I think the way that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein went from being aggressive adversarial reporters against the government to insider Washington defenders of the government is a nice illustration for what happened to the U.S. media. My criticism of him was that he relied on a Reuters summary of what I said, rather than taking the time to go read the actual interview. The Reuters summary was a complete distortion of what I said. I made the exact opposite point, that the criticism of Mr. Snowden for being reckless or harming the U.S. is based in complete fantasy, given that what he has could be damaging if he released it, if that were his goal, and yet he has safeguarded that very responsibly to make sure that only what the public should know is learned and that nothing harmful has been released. But it was a 36-hour media frenzy attacking him, attacking me, based on a complete distortion by Reuters. And Carl Bernstein and others were just too lazy to look into what was actually said.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you again, a columnist on civil liberties and U.S. national security issues for The Guardian, is also a former constitutional lawyer. Greenwald first published Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance program and continues to write extensively on the topic. His most recent articles are "The Crux of the NSA Story in One Phrase: 'Collect It All'" and "Email Exchange Between Edward Snowden and Former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey."

When we come back, we’ll go to South Africa, as the nation celebrates former President Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. Stay with us.

[seemslikeadream]

Ex-CIA chief: What Edward Snowden did
By Michael Hayden, CNN Terrorism Analyst
July 19, 2013 -- Updated 1050 GMT (1850 HKT)
Some did it for the money, some did it for idealism, others didn't do it at all. The U.S. has seen a number of high profile leak scandals including the Pentagon Papers during the administration of President Richard Nixon. Click through to see more high-profile intelligence leaking cases.

Michael Hayden: Snowden will likely be most damaging leaker in American history
He says the large trove of data reveals how America collects much of its intelligence
Hayden says U.S. economic rivals will use it to disadvantage American companies
He says other nations will doubt whether the U.S. can do anything in secret
Editor's note: Gen. Michael V. Hayden, a former NSA director who was appointed by President George W. Bush as CIA director in 2006 and served until February 2009, is a principal with the Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm. He serves on the boards of several defense firms and is a distinguished visiting professor at George Mason University.
(CNN) -- Edward Snowden will likely prove to be the most costly leaker of American secrets in the history of the Republic.
I know that we have had our share of spies.
Benedict Arnold was bent on betraying the garrison at West Point to the British during the Revolution. Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ferreted out nuclear secrets for the Russians. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen identified American penetrations for ultimate execution by the Soviets.
We have also had our share of leakers.
Daniel Ellsberg copied thousands of pages of documents related to the Vietnam War. Bradley Manning is accused of indiscriminately scoured the Defense Department's SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) for all manner of military reports and diplomatic cables.

Michael Hayden
But Snowden is in a class by himself.
The secrets that Arnold wanted to betray fit into the heel of the boot of his British case officer. The "atom bomb" spies reported out using secret ink. Ellsberg was limited to the number of documents he could physically Xerox. Manning, although fully empowered by digital media, had access only to a secret level network housing largely tactical information.
Snowden fled to China with several computers' worth of data from NSANET, one of the most highly classified and sensitive networks in American intelligence. The damage is potentially so great that NSA has taken one of its most respected senior operations officers off mission tasks to lead the damage assessment effort.
In general terms, it's already clear Snowden's betrayal hurts in at least three important ways.
First, there is the undeniable operational effect of informing adversaries of American intelligence's tactics, techniques and procedures. Snowden's disclosures go beyond the "what" of a particular secret or source. He is busily revealing the "how" of American collection.
The Guardian newspaper's Glenn Greenwald, far more deserving of the Justice Department's characterization of a co-conspirator than Fox's James Rosen ever was, claims that Snowden has documents that comprise "basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built. ... [To prove] what he was saying was true, he had to take ... very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do."
Greenwald has disputed the notion that he aided Snowden, telling David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press": "The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea I've aided and abetted him in any way."
And Michael Clemente, Fox News' executive vice president of news, has said, "we are outraged to learn ... that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter."
Greenwald: Snowden is 'the classically responsible whistle-blower'
Reporter: Snowden a responsible whistleblower Will Snowden release more intelligence?
Absent "rogue" U.S. action to silence him, Snowden has promised not to reveal this data, but there are already reports of counterterrorism targets changing their communications patterns. And I would lose all respect for China's Ministry of State Security and Russia's FSB if they have not already fully harvested Snowden's digital data trove.
As former director of CIA, I would claim that the top 20% of American intelligence -- that exquisite insight into an enemy's intentions -- is generally provided by human sources. But as a former director of NSA, I would also suggest that the base 50% to 60% of American intelligence day in and day out is provided by signals intelligence, the kinds of intercepted communications that Snowden has so blithely put at risk.
But there is other damage, such as the undeniable economic punishment that will be inflicted on American businesses for simply complying with American law.
Others, most notably in Europe, will rend their garments in faux shock and outrage that these firms have done this, all the while ignoring that these very same companies, along with their European counterparts, behave the same way when confronted with the lawful demands of European states.
The real purpose of those complaints is competitive economic advantage, putting added burdens on or even disqualifying American firms competing in Europe for the big data and cloud services that are at the cutting edge of the global IT industry. Or, in the case of France, to slow negotiations on a trans- Atlantic trade agreement that threatens the privileged position of French agriculture, outrage more based on protecting the production of cheese than preventing any alleged violation of privacy.
The third great harm of Snowden's efforts to date is the erosion of confidence in the ability of the United States to do anything discreetly or keep anything secret.
Manning's torrent of disclosures certainly caused great harm, but there was at least the plausible defense that this was a one-off phenomenon, a regrettable error were aggressively correcting.
Snowden shows that we have fallen short and that the issue may be more systemic rather than isolated. At least that's what I would fear if I were a foreign intelligence chief approached by the Americans to do anything of import.
Snowden seems undeterred by any of these consequences. After all, he believes he is acting for a higher good -- an almost romantic attachment to the merits of absolute transparency -- and he seems indifferent to the legitimacy of any claims of national security.
The appropriate balance between liberty and security has bedeviled free peoples, including Americans, for centuries. But it takes a special kind of arrogance for this young man to believe that his moral judgment on the dilemma suddenly trumps that of two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers.
Arrogant or not, Snowden has thrust into public view sensitive and controversial espionage activities. So what of his facts, fictions and fears and of the national debate that he claims he intended to stimulate?
More on this in following columns.

[fruhmenschen]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/18-15


Thursday, July 18, 2013 by Common Dreams
Unveiled! Portrait of American Truth Teller Edward Snowden
With today's 'online unveiling' artist Robert Shetterly portrays NSA whistleblower in historic light
- Jon Queally, staff writer

Artist and author Robert Shetterly—best known for his work depicting and sharing the stories of truth telling luminaries from throughout US history—has today released the most recent work in his Americans Who Tell the Truth series with this portrait of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In an exclusive online 'unveiling' on Common Dreams, Shetterly says that he began painting the portrait almost immediately after seeing the first interview Snowden gave to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras more than five weeks ago.

"The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the ‘consent of the governed’ is meaningless. . . The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed." - Edward Snowden (Portrait by Robert Shetterly / 2013 / Americans Who Tell The Truth Project) Click on the image for a high-resolution version...

Describing the 30-year-old Snowden as the "lemming that ran the other way," artist Shetterly—in an essay posted today—said it seemed that Snowden is "a tiny chunk of the vast, submerged NSA iceberg, a chunk that had chipped itself free and willed itself to drift in the opposite direction."

"I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves—with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)—to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveillance state"
- Daniel EllsbergShetterly chose Edward Snowden as part of his growing series focused on 'whistleblowers'—which includes, among others—Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War; Pfc. Bradley Manning, currently on trial for his leaks of material related to US foreign policy and the execution of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; and former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who is serving a prison sentence for public discussion of the agency's torture program.

Daniel Ellsberg told Common Dreams today that he welcomes Snowden to the club of US whistleblowers painted by Shetterly. He said Snowden's case exemplifies the courage of those who use their unique position of access to act on behalf of the greater society. He did so, explains Ellsberg, knowing full well the costs to his individual liberty would be great, but acted anyway.

"I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves—with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)—to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveillance state," Ellsberg said.

"His extraordinary civil courage should inspire other Americans to take up his challenge to bring the National Security Agency (NSA)—now spying on all of us—under genuine oversight by Congress, courts and press and within the constraints of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law," Ellsberg said.

Why whistleblowers?

In an email exchange with Common Dreams, Shetterly explained that though our political and legal institutions are designed to protect individuals, the natural environment, and our democracy overall, those institutions can fail. And when they fail from the inside, the situation becomes dire.

When this happens, according to Shetterly, "the whistleblower is the only thing standing between accountability and failure."

"In effect, the courage of whistleblowers becomes the only working democratic institution," he explains. "What's so compelling is the courage, the insistence on integrity, the persistence against enormous government and corporate power to do the right thing for the common good."

"Snowden fits perfectly into the legacy of our whistleblowers except for one thing. He's seen that many recent whistleblowers have failed to galvanize public attention and concern by submitting to the "justice" system which serves to discredit and disappear them and the major media which ignores them."
- artist Robert ShetterlyArtistically the challenge is interesting," continued Shetterly, "Whistleblowers are immediately attacked, demeaned, marginalized by power. My effort is to show them not as fanatics but deeply humane people who are sacrificing for the rest of us. My effort is to both single them out for their courage but also show that they are part of a continuum and a community of social justice—that they cannot be marginalized and ostracized."

Asked about Snowden's current predicament—seeking political asylum while stranded, stripped of his US passport and languishing in a Moscow airport transit terminal—Shetterly responded:

"Snowden fits perfectly into the legacy of our whistleblowers except for one thing. He's seen that many recent whistleblowers have failed to galvanize public attention and concern by submitting to the "justice" system which serves to discredit and disappear them and the major media which ignores them. The irony is that by "retreating," I'd call it, to countries that we generally think of as not having much in the way of civil liberties, he has maintained his freedom of speech and dissent. And, therefore, can continue to keep this discussion vibrant. A great tactic of asymmetric conflict."

Visit Robert Shetterly's The Americans Who Tell the Truth Project's website, where posters of the Edward Snowden portrait, and many others, are now available.

[seemslikeadream]

PATRICK COCKBURN

Sunday 21 July 2013
Germany should honour its debt and offer NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum
World View: When such figures as Albert Einstein fled the Nazis, the US provided a haven. Now it’s time for Berlin to offer asylum to the persecuted

Authoritarian states have a genius for damaging themselves by the obsessive persecution of individual dissidents whom they thereby transform into celebrity martyrs. The Soviet Union used to do this with Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and a host of lesser critics of its system. Today, it is the post 9/11 United States that discredits itself by its relentless pursuit of Edward Snowden under the pretence that he is an arch-traitor aiding the enemies of America.
Western Europeans often view the moral and political failings of the US with a certain secret satisfaction. Slavish imitation of American culture and political and economic norms traditionally combines with an undercurrent of resentment. But there is less to envy in America today. Whatever Osama bin Laden thought he was doing by staging 9/11 he tipped the US towards developing a menacing and ever-more powerful security apparatus. The US lost its immense advantage in world politics of being the country where people believed that they were not going to be unjustly jailed or otherwise mistreated by the state.
Snowden is very clear why he made his initial revelations about National Security Agency surveillance. He was enjoying “a very comfortable life” with a salary of $200,000, a home in Hawaii and a close and loving family. He said: “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine ....” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”
It is satisfying, if gruesome, to watch great powers shoot themselves in the foot. This was true of the mistreatment of Bradley Manning after the WikiLeaks revelations and it is true again of Snowden. Washington imagined it was a smart move to chase him into the limbo of the transit area in Moscow’s main airport, but thereby guaranteed that he was at the centre of international attention, rather than allowing him to proceed to the great media-hub of Bogota (The Shah made a similar mistake in 1978 when he got Saddam Hussein to force Ayatollah Khomeini to quit Iraq for Paris).
One of the most striking features of the Snowden saga is the craven cooperation of most European states. That Spain, France, Italy and Portugal all denied passage to the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, in case Snowden might be on board, removes any doubts about US superpower status. There was little lasting anger in Europe, whatever the rage in Latin America, and there was a foretaste of the essential indifference of European intelligentsia, certainly in Britain, to freedom of expression and state secrecy last year, with the shallow media sneers at Julian Assange.
The only person in Europe to see Snowden’s fate both in terms of political morality and in the context of the history of the US and Europe, is Rolf Hochhuth, the German author and playwright. He presented an eloquent petition to Chancellor Angela Merkel asking that Snowden be given asylum.
Hochhuth points out in the petition that where government is both accuser and perpetrator “the accused has no hope of justice”. He added that if Snowden returns to the US he faces years in prison, but if he stays in Russia he will be permanently muzzled.
So, why should Germany of all countries offer asylum to an American? Hochhuth writes that “more than any other, the German people are obligated to honour the right of asylum because, beginning in 1933, our elite, without exception from the Mann brothers to Einstein, survived the 12-year Nazi dictatorship purely because other countries, with the US as the greatest example, offered asylum to these refugees.”
Hochhuth emphasises that he is far from being moved by any automatic anti-Americanism, but is motivated by memory of what the US did for Germany in the past. He remembers newsreel of when the Americans liberated Buchenwald in 1945 and saw Eisenhower in tears as he witnessed his GIs bulldozing mounds of corpses. “They could not understand how we Germans could have been capable of such acts. Yet what was America’s answer? Through their airlift they rescued Berlin from Stalin’s grasp.”
Hochhuth argues that the US has changed, saying “no nation remains lastingly great”. It might be difficult to sustain a charge of treason against Snowden in the US, but he could still receive multiple 10-year sentences, under the Espionage Act, for revealing classified information. Hochhuth cites with approval George Bernard Shaw’s somewhat self-regarding bon mot: “I am held to be a master of irony. But even I would not have had the idea of erecting the Statue of Liberty in New York.”
In its pursuit of Snowden the US government has given substance to his accusations about an over-mighty and uncontrolled security apparatus. The sovereign rights of independent states have been trodden down as readily as the rights of individuals. Hochhuth asks Merkel whether “you know of a similar act over a European state which considers itself sovereign, an act by which for 12 hours orders from the US prevent the plane of a South American president continuing its flight?”
Aside from Hochhuth, there is something neutered and pro forma about the response of Europe’s leaders to Snowden’s revelations despite initial expressions of shock and anger. The British may have been subjected to less intense surveillance, but even if that were not so it is doubtful that they would care. Almost every significant act in Britain’s foreign policy over the past 30 years has been geared to strengthening its status as America’s greatest ally.
Concern for human rights and liberty is at its height when the abuses happen in Benghazi, Aleppo or Homs, but it ebbs to nothing when the abuse is closer to home or involves US citizens.
“It is the highest moral duty of Germany to give asylum to Edward Snowden,” concludes Hochhuth’s petition, “[because] we as no other Europeans are duty bound in the light of our shameful past!”

[seemslikeadream]

Snowden Gets Whistleblower Award in Germany
Topic: Ex-CIA Employee Discloses US Secret Surveillance Programs

Fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden
© AFP 2013/ The Guardian
05:38 23/07/2013

MOSCOW, July 23 (RIA Novosti) - Fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has become the winner of this year’s Whistleblower Award established by German human rights organizations, the German branch of Transparency International said in a statement.
“This year’s winner of the Whistleblower Award is Edward Snowden,” the statement posted on TI Germany website on Monday said.
The award, established in 1999, is sponsored by the Association of German Scientists (VDW) and the German branch of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA).
A VDW spokesperson told RIA Novosti on Monday that the award money, amounting to 3,000 euros, would be passed to Snowden through his representatives – either a lawyer or a “friendly” organization.
Snowden, who faces prosecution in the United States for leaking highly sensitive classified data about the US National Security Agency's surveillance activities, submitted a request for temporary asylum in Russia last week, having been holed up in the transit zone of a Moscow airport since arriving from Hong Kong on June 23.
He is still waiting for a decision by the Russian migration authorities.
Washington has repeatedly called on Moscow to reject Snowden’s request for asylum and send him back to the United States to stand trial on charges of espionage and theft.

[Luther Blissett]

One doesn't say?

Edward Snowden's fear of flying is justified
Snowden is a refugee, not a spy. But America has history when it comes to forcing down planes in defiance of international law

Geoffrey Robertson
The Guardian, Tuesday 23 July 2013 14.30 EDT

As Edward Snowden sits in an airside hotel, awaiting confirmation of Russia's offer of asylum, it is clear that he has already revealed enough to prove that European privacy protections are a delusion: under Prism and other programmes, the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ can, without much legal hindrance, scoop up any electronic communication whenever one of 70,000 "keywords" or "search terms" are mentioned. These revelations are of obvious public interest: even President Obama has conceded that they invite a necessary debate. But the US treats Snowden as a spy and has charged him under the Espionage Act, which has no public interest defence.

That is despite the fact that Snowden has exposed secret rulings from a secret US court, where pliant judges have turned down only 10 surveillance warrant requests between 2001 and 2012 (while granting 20,909) and have issued clandestine rulings which erode first amendment protection of freedom of speech and fourth amendment protection of privacy. Revelations about interception of European communications (many leaked through servers in the US) and the bugging of EU offices in Washington have infuriated officials in Brussels. In Germany, with its memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi, the protests are loudest, and opposition parties, gearing up for an election in September, want him to tell more.

So far Snowden has had three offers of asylum from Latin America, but to travel there means dangerous hours in the air. International law (and the Chicago Convention regulating air traffic) emphatically asserts freedom to traverse international airspace, but America tends to treat international law as binding on everyone except America (and Israel). Thus when Egypt did a deal with the Achille Lauro hijackers and sent them on a commercial flight to Tunis, US F-14 jets intercepted the plane in international airspace and forced it to land in Italy, where the hijackers were tried and jailed. President Mubarak condemned the action as "air piracy contrary to international law" and demanded an apology, to which Reagan replied: "Never." The UK supported the action as designed to bring terrorists to trial.

In 1986 Israel forced down a Libyan commercial plane in the mistaken belief that PLO leaders were among its passengers, and the US vetoed UN security council condemnation. So there must be a real concern, particularly after Nato allies collaborated in forcing down the Bolivian president's jet, that the US will intercept any plane believed to be carrying Snowden to asylum, either because he is tantamount to a terrorist (Vice-President Biden has described Julian Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist") or simply because they want to put him on trial as a spy.

That, no doubt, is why Snowden cancelled his ticket to Cuba a few weeks ago, fearing the flight would end in Florida. Russia has, in effect, provided him with temporary asylum (there is no legal magic about staying airside – he is in Russia) so he might be best advised to accept the gag and enjoy Moscow's hospitality. Until, perhaps, a new government in Germany after its September elections offers him a platform if he turns up as a refugee, whereupon he could take a tramp steamer to Hamburg.

In the meantime, states should start considering the impact of the information he has revealed so far. It was, ironically, the White House that last year called for an international convention to regularise "consumer data privacy in a networked world". There is no international standard for permissible periods of data retention, for what data can be retained or to whom data can be released. Western democracies differ in modes of protection. Canada, Germany and Australia require warrants from independent judges; the US from judges in a secret security court whose record shows them to be rubber stamps. In Britain ministers lack the time or ability to assess the warrants they routinely sign. France is even worse – the prime minister's office can authorise "national security" interceptions with no oversight.

Does this mean that the possibility intelligence services might find a terrorist needle in a data haystack justifies abandoning any hope of effective privacy regulation? Foreign secretary William Hague, who is in political charge of GCHQ, seems to think so: "Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear." But it is precisely law-abiding citizens who have had careers ended by dissemination of secret state surveillance. Ironically, it has been suggested that one victim of the NSA's metadata search machine was none other than the CIA director General Petraeus – guilty, at least in American eyes, of adultery.

Snowden is not a "traitor", and nor does he deserve to be prosecuted as a "spy". These laws have no public interest defence, and until they do any European country that surrenders him to end his life in an American supermax prison would be in breach of the free speech guarantee of the European convention of human rights, which is meant to protect those who release information of importance to democratic debate.

[seemslikeadream]

Letter from US AG Eric Holder to Russian equiv demanding #Snowden demanding return, promising not to kill, torture

[barracuda]

Letter from US AG Eric Holder to Russian equiv demanding #Snowden demanding return, promising not to kill, torture

So, Eric Holder signs his official correspondence with a purple magic marker? That strikes me as sort of a giveaway that the whole "we don't torture" bit is meant to be privately humorous.

[slimmouse]

That is despite the fact that Snowden has exposed secret rulings from a secret US court, where pliant judges have turned down only 10 surveillance warrant requests between 2001 and 2012 (while granting 20,909)

Would it be interesting to be able to find out which applications they turned down?

[seemslikeadream]

Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin
July 28, 2013
Exclusive: The Obama administration continues to compound the diplomatic mess around former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The latest blunder was announcing that the U.S. wouldn’t torture or execute Snowden, a reminder to the world how far Official Washington has strayed from civilized behavior, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.


By Ray McGovern

The main question now on the fate of truth-teller Edward Snowden is whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will see any benefit in helping stop the United States from further embarrassing itself as it prances around the globe acting like a “pitiful, helpless giant.” That image was coined by President Richard Nixon, who insisted that the giant of America would merit those adjectives if it did not prevail in South Vietnam.

It is no secret that Putin is chuckling as Attorney General Eric Holder and other empty-shirts-cum-corporate-law-office-silk-ties – assisted ably by White House spokesperson Jay Carney – proceed willy-nilly to transform the Snowden case from a red-faced diplomatic embarrassment for the United States into a huge geopolitical black eye before the rest of the world.


Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Reminding the planet how out of step the United States has been from most of the civilized world, Holder offered a written promise to the Russians on July 9 (and released on Friday) that Snowden would neither be tortured nor put to death for disclosing secrets about how the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans and pretty much everybody else on Earth.

Holder assured the Russian Justice Minister that the U.S. “would not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States.” Holder also saw fit to reassure his Russian counterpart that, “Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States.” Wow, that’s a relief!

The United States is so refined in its views on human rights that it won’t torture or execute a whistleblower. Of course, that only reminded everyone that the United States is one of the few advanced societies that still puts lots of people to death and was caught just last decade torturing detainees at CIA “black sites,” not to mention the brutal treatment of other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And, there was the humiliating treatment afforded another American whistleblower, Private Bradley Manning, whose forced nudity and long periods in solitary confinement during eight months of confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. prompted international accusations of torture.

Holder’s strange promise may have been designed to undercut Snowden’s bid for asylum, but it also reminded the world of America’s abysmal behavior on human rights. And, even if the United States promises not to torture someone, government lawyers have shown how they can play games with the definition of the term or just outright lie. Holder’s reputation for veracity is just a thin notch above that of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who admits he has chosen to testify under oath to the “least untruthful” things.

Perhaps no one has told Holder how shockingly out of step with other civilized nations the U.S. finds itself on the issue of capital punishment. Just calling attention to that is a diplomatic gaffe of some proportion. The global trend toward abolition of the death penalty is unmistakable and increasing. The United States even is the outlier on this issue when compared to “brutal” Russia. In Russia, there has been a moratorium on executions since 1996, although it is still technically lawful.

The European Union holds a strong and principled position against the death penalty, and the abolition of capital punishment is a pre-condition for entry into the Union. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of joining a list with China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia as the leaders in executing people.

Closing the Barn Door Too Late

Holder’s high-profile push to get the Russians to hand over Snowden damages the United States in other ways, too, such as reminding the world how the U.S. government has violated the privacy rights of people everywhere, including in allied countries. There is a reasonable argument to be made that the smartest U.S. move would be to simply leave Snowden alone.

Depending on your perspective, Edward Snowden has already done his damage – or, in my view, accomplished his patriotic duty of truth-telling – demonstrating with documents how the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have trashed the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Moreover, Snowden apparently had the foresight to handle his revelations in such way that, to the degree there are still more genies about to be let out of the bottle, it will be near impossible to stuff them back in. Indeed, he has said as much, in indicating how easily he can accede to Putin’s condition that he does “no further harm” to the U.S. Snowden has even been specific in acknowledging that he cannot prevent journalist Glenn Greenwald and others from publishing more of the material he made available.

So why the hue and cry from Washington? While the Obama White House has utterly failed to honor Obama’s earlier promises to run a transparent administration, there is one area in which it has been as transparent as Saran Wrap. And that is its fixation with pursuing whistleblowers “to the full extent of the law” … and then some.

The administration has been transparently vindictive, revengeful and determined to exact retribution on “leakers” as a warning to others whose consciences might trouble them enough to reveal war crimes, as Bradley Manning did, or crass violations of our rights as citizens, as Edward Snowden did.

But the recent thrashing around — demanding and cajoling Putin to turn over Snowden — has further made the United States look petulant and inept. Meanwhile, Putin has demonstrated a much more deft touch in handling this delicate international incident.

After making it clear that “we do not extradite,” Putin has had the good sense to put some distance between himself and the Snowden affair. As Secretary of State John Kerry bemoaned (from Saudi Arabia, of all places) about “standards of behavior between sovereign nations,” and (of all things) “respect for the rule of law,” Putin said the issue is simple:

“Should such people [as Snowden] be extradited to be jailed, or not? In any case, I would prefer not to deal with such issues, because this is just the same as shaving a piglet – too much noise but too little hair.”

Will Putin Cave?

Do the feckless folks running President Barack Obama’s foreign policy really think they can force Putin to back down? Can they actually believe they can achieve that by putting into play what they apparently consider a diplomatic “nuclear option”? The thinly veiled threat surfaced ten days ago that Obama will snub Putin by canceling their planned tete-a-tete before the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg in September.

Can they possibly think that by pouting, jibing and stamping their feet, they will frighten Putin into “behaving” as obediently as the malleable Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Austrians did when they forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane for inspection? Morales was en route home from a visit to Russia when someone provided the U.S. with a “tip” that Snowden was hiding on Morales’s plane.

I find myself wondering who provided Washington with that great tip, and whether it is no longer the practice among U.S. intelligence agencies to take rudimentary steps to verify such tips before they let their masters get greasy diplomatic egg all over their faces?

Finally, how many more times does Putin have to say, as he did through his spokesman again Friday that: “Russia has never extradited anyone, and will not extradite [Snowden].”

Months ago, former UK MI6 intelligence officer Annie Machon coined the term “asymmetric extradition law” referring to U.S. policy, which, in the vernacular, might be called “pick-and-choose.” While there is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia, there has been one between the U.S. and Italy for 30 years. Yet, Washington has turned a deaf ear to Italy’s appeals to extradite convicted kidnapper Robert Seldon Lady, former head of the CIA worker bees in Milan where the CIA mounted an “extraordinary rendition” against the Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar off the streets in 2003. Omar was given over to the tender mercies of Egyptian intelligence interrogators.

In 2005, when Lady got a tip that the Italian police were coming for him, he reportedly fled his villa without destroying sensitive files on the CIA’s mission. Italy convicted Lady and 22 other U.S. operatives in absentia and gave them hefty jail sentences. Last December, Italy’s justice minister signed a warrant for Lady’s arrest. On July 18, Lady was identified and detained in Panama, but slipped away the next day on a plane headed toward the U.S.

Few were surprised that Panama was pressured into joining the servile company of the four U.S.-crony European countries that had already embarrassed themselves as accessories to the Washington’s latest Excellent Adventure regarding Evo Morales’s plane – a fiasco code-named OARR (for Operation Airline Rest Room) after the suspected place where Snowden was believed stowed away.

But when it came to extraditing a convicted kidnapper from Panama to Italy? Puleeze. Great powers don’t have to do that kind of thing, treaty or not. Except for Russia, you see. Moscow must surrender Snowden, even absent a U.S.-Russia extradition treaty. And Putin should understand that, no?

It must have been that kind of superpower-think that prompted Jay Carney on July 12 to add insult to injury, as he jibed at the Russian government to “afford human rights organizations the ability to do their work in Russia throughout Russia, not just at the Moscow transit lounge.” That kind of comment is sure to endear the White House to the Kremlin.

Vladimir Volokh, head of the Russian Migration Service, seemed to welcome a chance to retaliate in kind. Rubbing in the awkwardness of Snowden’s present status because of actions by Washington, Volokh told the Interfax news agency Friday: “We know that he is Edward Snowden only from his words. The passport he has has been canceled. … He is under protection in the transit area for his safety. He is an individual being pursued and his life is in danger.”

The Russians, and pretty much everyone else, are smart enough to realize that, given Washington’s transparent motives, there is nothing to be gained by serving Snowden up to American “justice,” such as it has become. Russia is no banana republic, so it beggars belief that President Putin will follow the supine example of Panama. Nor is the fawning example of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal something Putin would wish to emulate.

Russian History

Scholars of Russian history make an important point that is relevant here: it is Russia’s deeply embedded inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. Recite to Vladimir Putin the familiar adage, “Scratch the Russian and find the Tatar,” and see what happens.

In short, while Europe was coming out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance, the Russians were for more than two centuries under the likes of Genghis Khan and his hordes – a period the Russians call the “Tatar Yoke.” This reality had very serious consequences and is deeply embedded in the Russian consciousness. In a sense, the Russians have been playing catch-up ball ever since.

Their struggle seems never ending, but now and again they reach high ground. L’Affaire Snowden is one of those “nows.” Russia occupies the high moral ground, helped immeasurably by the behavior of the Bush and Obama administrations, which have squandered the moral advantage the U.S. used to enjoy.

Worse still, from President Obama’s perspective, there is little leverage he can bring to bear on the Russian Bear. If Putin thought Obama was really running things in Washington, he might try to barter Snowden’s freedom for some significant concession. But Moscow is not likely to believe Obama could deliver on any such concession, and Russian officials are probably right.

Obama, Holder, Carney and the rest would be well advised not to push any more geopolitical chips onto the table in a risky bet on winning back Snowden. Russia has the better cards on this one, and it is a mark of realism, as well as intelligence, to recognize “when to fold them.”

Otherwise, and particularly if Putin keeps seeing the pastel-tie empty suits pontificating on how Russia must do its duty in surrendering Edward Snowden, there is a chance we may see Putin take Snowden to asylum in Latin America on his own plane, overflying Austria, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Panama en route.

[seemslikeadream]

Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is
The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted

John Naughton
The Observer, Saturday 27 July 2013
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While the press concentrates on the furore surrounding Edward Snowden's search for political asylum, it has forgotten the importance of his revelations. Photograph: Tatyana Lokshina/AP
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

[seemslikeadream]

Snowden's father says FBI asked him to visit his son

Lonnie Snowden spoke to Russian TV from a studio in the US

The father of US fugitive Edward Snowden has said the FBI asked him to travel to Moscow and see his son, but adds that he wants more details.

Lon Snowden said he had been asked several weeks ago about Edward, who is sought by the US for leaking details of electronic surveillance programmes.

However, he wants to know the FBI's intentions, he told Russian state TV.

He said his son would not get a fair trial in America and, if he were in his son's place, he would stay in Russia.

He described his son as a "true patriot" who had "made America a more democratic country" by revealing secret details of the US National Security Agency's surveillance programmes.

The interview was broadcast live, early in the morning, on the Russia 24 news channel. Mr Snowden spoke English, with a Russian translation.

Mr Snowden has been stuck in transit at a Moscow airport for more than a month as he has no valid travel documents.

'Forever grateful'
"Edward, I hope you are watching this," Lon Snowden said in the interview.

"Your family is well. We love you. We hope you are healthy, we hope you are well, I hope to see you soon, but most of all I want you to be safe. I want you to find a safe haven."

The fugitive's father also thanked the Russian authorities for keeping his son safe.

"I also would like to thank President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government for what I believe to be their courage and strength and conviction to keep my son safe," he said.


Campaigners against secret US surveillance programmes demonstrated in support of Edward Snowden in Berlin on Sunday
"Like any mother or father who loves their child, I love my son and I will be forever grateful for what you have done, very much."

Edward Snowden arrived in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport on 23 June from Hong Kong, after making his revelations.

He has requested temporary asylum in Russia, while saying he hopes eventually to go to Latin America..

The Snowden affair has caused diplomatic ructions around the world, upsetting America's close allies and traditional enemies.

The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, has given Moscow an assurance that he will not face the death penalty if extradited to America, but the Russians say they do not intend to hand him over.

Snowden's NSA Domestic Surveillance Revelations Are Old News
Posted by Bill Conroy - July 25, 2013 at 7:14 pm
So Why Are US Power Centers So Intent on Portraying The Whistleblower As a Traitor?
Edward Snowden is now holed up in a Russian airport trying to make his way to Latin America, where several countries have offered him safe harbor.
Snowden is on the run from the US government because of his act, while working for private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, of leaking documents that reveal the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA) is carrying out widespread domestic surveillance.
The proof of that claim is an order made public by Snowden that was issued in April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court — a US legal body charged with reviewing and approving clandestine government surveillance requests.
But what was disclosed in that FISA court order is nothing new. It has all been reported previously, dating back to at least 2005, when the first media stories surfaced revealing that the NSA is engaging in widespread domestic surveillance.
At the time, the same telecom company mentioned in the current FISA court order, Verizon, also was accused in media reports of participating in the NSA domestic surveillance program. In fact, it is likely that program — allegedly launched under the Bush administration in 2002 as a response to 9/11 — has never ended and is the same surveillance program referred to in the FISA court order made public by Snowden.
An April 2008 report for Congress prepared by the Congressional Research Service, lays out the facts:
In December 2005 news reports appeared for the first time revealing the existence of a classified NSA terrorist surveillance program, dating back to at least 2002, involving the domestic collection, analysis, and sharing of telephone call information.
… In May 2006 news reports alleged additional details regarding the NSA terrorist surveillance program, renewing concerns about the possible existence of inappropriately authorized domestic surveillance. According to these reports, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the NSA contracted with AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth to collect information about domestic telephone calls handled by these companies. The NSA, in turn, reportedly used this information to conduct “social network analysis” to map relationships between people based on their communications.
After Verizon was exposed in the media as being a party to the NSA domestic surveillance program, the company issued a public statement denying it was sharing any phone-call data with the DoD agency.
More from the 2008 CRS report:
Verizon has issued a public statement [in 2006] saying that due to the classified nature of the NSA program, “Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to the classified NSA program,” but that “Verizon’s wireless and wireline companies did not provide to NSA customer records or call data, local or otherwise.” [Emphasis added.]
Verizon was not the only alleged party to the NSA surveillance program that appears to have provided a less than believable statement to the public on the matter. In a January 2007 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
A Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders authorizing the Government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization. [Emphasis added.]
Again, like Verizon, the Bush administration seems to rely on semantics to obfuscate. Though the NSA surveillance program revealed by Snowden does target “international communications into or out of the United States,” that is only half the truth, since we now know the program, as was reported by the media in 2005 and 2006, also scoops up massive volumes of data involving domestic telecommunications traffic.
So, we have to wonder why the US government and the nation’s commercial media are beating the drum of treason so loud when it comes to Snowden’s disclosures, alleging they have caused devastating damage to our national security, when what Snowden revealed has been disclosed previously by the same commercial media.
One source with ties to the intelligence community told Narco News that a "team has already been dispatched" to apprehend Snowden via extraordinary rendition — the extrajudicial removal of an individual from one country for the purpose of transfering the person to another country.
“That team is now shadowing him,” the source claims.
That probably comes as no surprise to anyone, particularly Snowden, who faces incredible obstacles in any bid to make it to a safe-harbor country in Latin America, given all routes by air from Moscow to Latin America will take him through the airspace of the US or its allies.
The international campaign launched by US authorities to vilify and apprehend Snowden is puzzling in its intensity since clearly the disclosures made by him concerning NSA domestic surveillance have all been put into the public arena in the past. The only thing Snowden’s recent disclosures have succeeded in doing is resurfacing the issue, based on new evidence.
Could it be that the sin Snowden committed in releasing that new evidence is that the proof is too good, that it leaves no wiggle room for weasel words, for our government and corporate leaders to mislead the public about their activities — even if they are technically legal and approved by the FISA court.
What is it that might be so damaging about such disclosures now?
For one thing, this nation’s understanding of the power of social networks is far advanced from where it was in the mid-2000s, due to the mass acceptance and use of social media engines such as Facebook and Twitter.
Social Network Mapping
Key to understanding the NSA surveillance program is the underlying reason for gathering the domestic telecommunications data in the first place. As the CRS report notes, the NSA back in 2006 was allegedly collecting data from Verizon and other telecom carriers for “‘social network analysis' to map relationships between people based on their communications.”
In essence, that means the NSA is creating a massive, clandestine social-media system for conducting surveillance. Social network analysis, in simple terms, is a highly refined version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game, which is based on the premise that any two people on the planet can be linked to the actor Kevin Bacon via six or fewer acquaintances.
Of course, the social-network mapping employed by the NSA makes use of a powerful computer infrastructure and sophisticated software that together are capable of analyzing huge quantities of data at an incredibly high speed.
And undoubtedly this data includes a mix of public-source information, such as voter-registration records (which include names, email addresses and phone numbers) and private data — such as the phone records being obtained by the NSA through the FISA warrant.
When combined, these databases can provide very precise, name-specific relationship maps that can be integrated with real-time geospatial data [already employed in the US drone program as Narco News has previously reported], so that the NSA not only knows who a person is and who they are connected to at any given time, but also where they are on the planet and where they are likely to go next.
It is, in essence, the ultimate Facebook account.
Snowden also has disclosed as part of his whistleblowing that the major purveyors of email and social media globally, companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook, are also swept up in the NSA surveillance net under a program called PRISM, through which these companies allegedly are providing the NSA with massive amounts of user data by allowing the agency to access their servers. These tech giants, like Verizon did in 2006, all have denied this is the case, however.
Mission Creep
Clearly, social network mapping on the scale likely being employed by the NSA would be an invaluable tool in tracking terrorist cells seeking to operate inside the US.
But it could be used with equal ease to identify and track individuals associated with legitimate political or religious organizations and movements that some corporations or government agencies deem a threat.
From the CRS report:
Mission creep is one of the leading risks of data mining cited by civil libertarians, and represents how control over one’s information can be a tenuous proposition. Mission creep refers to the use of data for purposes other than that for which the data was originally collected. This can occur regardless of whether the data was provided voluntarily by the individual or was collected through other means.
… The potential wide reuse of data suggests that concerns about mission creep can extend beyond privacy to the protection of civil rights in the event that information is used for “targeting an individual solely on the basis of religion or expression, or using information in a way that would violate the constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination.”
Whether you are a Democrat, Republican or neither, you have to consider that, if not our current president, then maybe it will be the next one who will be less-than vigilant about preventing this “mission creep.”
The implications for the people of this nation and their Constitutional rights is profound should this powerful social-network mapping be applied to areas that might compromise civil liberties — say using it to disrupt union organizing or to manipulate vote counts.
In the final analysis, when it comes to intelligence-community surveillance of the domestic population, this country could well be faced with a stark choice. What do we as a people really fear more: terrorism or despotism?
Stay tuned…..