Edward Snowden, American Hero

[JackRiddler]

… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?"

Interesting question. Slippery slope: yes. But that's much harder to stop or reverse than instantaneous sea changes (if they're social).

[DrEvil]

Seeking the permission of the organisation that they are publishing 'highly' secret documents from?
That certainly enhances their credibility, right?.

Yes actually. It's called journalism. It's standard procedure for any real journalist to give whoever they're writing about a chance to comment on any allegations before publishing.

He's not seeking permission for anything. He's basically saying: "Hi. This is the story we're going to run tomorrow. Any comments?". In other words - he's doing his job.

[coffin_dodger]

I sincerely hope you're right, Evil. I hope Greenwald is legit. I hope the NSA is being highly embarassed by all of these relevations. I hope Snowden is a hero. I hope it leads to change. Good change.

[seemslikeadream]

The Silliest Snowden Theory Yet
"The Snowden Operation": A short book that's long on wacky spy stories about the real source of the NSA leaks.
—By Jon Schwarz | Fri Feb. 28, 2014 3:00 AM GMT


Complot/Shutterstock
Of the millions of secret Iraqi documents the United States captured in 2003, my favorite is the one from Saddam's General Security Directorate that explained how Pokemon was an operation run by International Zionism to undermine Iraq. According to their analysts, "Pokemon" meant "I am Jewish" in Hebrew, and this was going to sap all of Iraq's precious bodily fluids.

It's fun to laugh at Iraq's Super Spies, and everyone on Earth should. But the joke's on us if we don't recognize that their brains were screwed in just a half turn tighter than many of their American and British counterparts. Throughout history, the security state in every country has attracted employees who were already a bit squirrelly, and then encouraged their squirreliness to blossom in the dark. Eventually many of them end up like the CIA's James Angleton, who was convinced the Soviet Union was going to "fake" its collapse, or the top Pentagon officials who opposed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 because the Soviets were going to cheat by testing their hydrogen bombs on the dark side of the moon. This same tendency is often found in reporters who get close to their own intelligence services, are fascinated by spies, and spend their careers dependent on them for scoops about espionage.

What these kinds of people share in common is that the pattern-recognition software in their head is badly calibrated and oversensitive. If they weren't spies or intelligence "experts," they'd spend their days proving Paul Is Dead or discovering the face of Jesus in tortillas. Which brings me to Economist editor Edward Lucas and the most ridiculous thing I've ever read, his short new ebook, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster.


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The main thing The Snowden Operation wants us to know is that "this affair has Kremlin fingerprints on it. They may be faint and smudged, but they are there." Yes, Lucas acknowledges, it's possible the Russians aren't involved, "but not likely." The naive might be fooled into thinking all was exactly what it appeared to be on the surface and Snowden was simply an NSA employee who reached out to journalists on his own. But sophisticated observers like Lucas, with "30 years of looking at Soviet and then Russian intelligence and propaganda operations," see the truth. Maybe Snowden was recruited by the Russians to leak NSA documents and knew it was them doing the recruiting; maybe he was recruited by them but they fooled him into thinking they were someone more sympathetic; or maybe the Russians somehow "brokered an introduction" between Snowden and others who would encourage and publicize his leaks (i.e., journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and hacker Jacob Appelbaum) without any of them being aware of the hidden Kremlin hand.

So let's take a look at these smudgy fingerprints. Here's a good example, one so portentous that it's the last sentence of book's last chapter:

[Blogger Catherine] Fitzpatrick has identified the background to one of the rare photos of Snowden in Moscow: on the basis of the distinctive striped pavements, the logo on a supermarket trolley he is pushing, and other visual clues it is, she believes, a shopping centre in Yasenevo, near Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service [SVR] headquarters.

Throughout history, the security state in every country has attracted employees who were already a bit squirrelly, and then encouraged their squirreliness to blossom in the dark.
Let's leave aside the fact we don't know if this photo (published by a Russian tabloid) actually shows Edward Snowden. And let's leave aside that if it does show Snowden in Yasenevo, him being two miles away from SVR headquarters would not actually mean he's a secret Russian agent. Let's just focus on what Fitzpatrick says.

And what she says is that she's "going to take a WAG" about the photo—i.e., a wild-assed guess. This guess is based on these features of the photo:

• The stripes on the curb, which she says are found near shopping centers and metro stations in Yasenevo…and also the rest of Moscow.
• The logo on the shopping cart—which I find totally illegible but she believes starts with a Russian D, so "maybe" it's Dialayt. There's a shopping center called the Dialayt Torgovy Kompleks in Yasenevo.
• The trees, which are the "same kind" as in Yasenevo. I'm not an expert on trees or Moscow or Moscow trees, but my guess is such trees are found in more than one Moscow location.
• The metal kiosks, which she (incorrectly) says look like those close to Dialayt Torgovy Kompleks.

That isn't cherry-picked—literally the entire book is like that. Here's another faint, smudged fingerprint: Appelbaum (who, in May 2013, helped Greenwald and Poitras verify that Snowden had the technical knowledge he claimed) went to a hacker conference in Hawaii in March 2013. That somehow means that Appelbaum was in contact with Snowden "well before January, 2013"…which means that Appelbaum was actually the first person Snowden contacted…which means he and Snowden were working together with another hacker…which, several links further in the chain, means that Justin Bieber is actually Vladimir Putin in disguise.

Moreover, Lucas didn't dream any of this up himself. Not only does the book contain no original reporting whatsoever, it actually contains almost no original speculation—it all leans heavily on the conjecture of Fitzpatrick, Craig Pirrong (a finance professor at the University of Houston), and John Schindler (a former NSA analyst and now professor at the Navy War College). For his part, Schindler believes that not only is Snowden a Russian operation, so was the creation of WikiLeaks and the exposure of Echelon during the '90s. Schindler also ran a 2002-03 intelligence task force that concluded Iraq had WMD, which does not appear to have shaken his faith in his own judgment.

All that said, I agree there's something about this which seems reminiscent of Russia—and that's The Snowden Operation itself. It reads exactly like internal Soviet documents about Andrei Sakharov, who, the Politburo fumed in 1975, was "divulging state secrets concerning the most vital defense issues of the country." And who was behind the Sakharov Operation? As Gen. Jack D. Ripper said to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, it's incredibly obvious, Mandrake:

The State Security Committee reports that US special services have been assigned a definite role in the anti-Soviet campaign "in defense of democratic freedoms in the USSR" which has been now unleashed...the new CARTER administration and well-known senators [are involved] in this operation.

So hopefully someday Lucas, Fitzpatrick, Pirrong, and Schindler will be able to get together with their Soviet and Iraqi equivalents. Only with their combined brainpower will it be possible to finally blow the lid off the whole Power Rangers situation.

[seemslikeadream]

Transcript & Audio of Remarks from NSA Inspector General on Edward Snowden
By: Kevin Gosztola Wednesday February 26, 2014 7:02 pm

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The inspector general for the NSA spoke on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for the first time yesterday. His remarks came during a panel discussion on a “new paradigm of leaking” at Georgetown Law Center that took place in the afternoon and was part of a day-long conference.

A full report on what NSA Inspector General George Ellard said was posted last night with reactions to his comments from journalist Glenn Greenwald and one of Snowden’s lawyers, Jesselyn Radack (who was a speaker at the conference). Now, here’s a transcript of his prepared initial remarks and an audio recording of statements that were previously reported at Firedoglake.


*

TRANSCRIPT

…[inaudible] asserted Mr. Snowden has done long term irreversible negative impact to our national security. They asserted that he has damaged the intelligence community’s ability to keep our country safe, that he has put the lives of Americans at risk and that he’s helped terrorists whose aim is to kill us.

I do not think that these assertions are hyperbolic and I’d like to start out by first giving you some idea of what Mr. Snowden has done and then compare to him another person—nobody has called Snowden a spy—but another person who indeed was a spy and I happen to know something.

Seven years ago, I read an article in Der Spiegel, the German equivalent of Time magazine or Newsweek. The article reported that the NSA was able to so to speak tap into the communications of senior Al Qaeda leadership including Osama bin Laden. The article went on to explain that these terrorists believe that if an email were not sent the NSA would not be able to catch it. So Osama bin Laden, according to Spiegel, would type up his instructions to his agents and save the message in a draft folder. Agents knew his password and they would go into his account, look in the draft folder, respond as well, save the draft. Nary an email was sent. As a consequence, according to Spiegel, we were able to thwart dangerous terrorist plots.

I’m not going to comment on the accuracy of the Der Spiegel report, but I can tell you one thing. If the NSA were able to tap into the communications of senior Taliban or bin Laden associates the day before the Spiegel report was issued, we could not do it the day after. Our adversaries are very sophisticated particularly in the IT realm. They do not live in caves in Afghanistan. And they read Speigel and the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Guardian.

I think, at least to the degree I can explain today in this open forum, Mr. Snowden has done two kinds of harm. First of all he has revealed particular weapons that our intelligence community had been using to protect our security. Once they’re made public, we lose them.

Secondly, he’s revealed a great deal of stuff, a great deal of information about NSA’s current strategic posture and how it intended to proceed in the future. All of that is lost.

In deciding whether Snowden and Private Manning are exhibits of a new paradigm of leaking, I would like to very briefly contrast and compare – At least, Mr. Snowden. I don’t know a lot about Private Manning—Another person who leaked an incredible amount of classified information, then-Supervisory Special Agent Robert Hanssen of the FBI.

A presidential commission declared that Hanssen had perpetrated “the worst intelligence disaster in US history.” In a sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutors described Hanssen’s crimes as “surpassing evil and almost beyond comprehension.”

Hanssen had a career of over 23 years during which he gave, first of all, the Soviet and then later Russian governments reams of information and dozen of computer diskettes containing, according to the presidential commission, “national security information of incalculable value.”

I’ll give you an example: Hanssen compromised a plan that developed to protect its military and political command in an event of a first strike by the Soviet Union. And he did that at a time when key elements within the Soviet oligarchy were advocating a first strike against the United States fearing that America would take advantage of then-crumbling communist Soviet Empire to launch its own preemptive strike.

So, Hanssen stands, I thought, until last year, alone, in the damage he has done to our country and to our national security. And Hanssen and Snowden were alike in that they both used very well-honed IT abilities to steal and disclose classified information vital to our national security. But I think the comparison ends there and I think perhaps Snowden and Private Manning really do exhibit or are exemplars of a new paradigm.

Hanssen’s motives were venal, for cash perhaps or perhaps they were psychological, a desire to play a very, very dangerous game that is therefore very, very exciting. At the end of his career, Hanssen had almost 30 years in intelligence and counterintelligence. He knew exactly what was of value to his spy handlers and he was very specific in choosing documents to steal. He knew how to control his handlers better than they knew how to control him.

Snowden, in contrast, was manic in his thievery, which was exponentially larger than Hanssen’s. Hanssen’s theft was in a sense finite whereas Snowden is open-ended, as his agents decide daily which documents to disclose. Snowden had no background in intelligence and is likely unaware of the significance of the documents he stole.

In contrast to Hanssen, Snowden’s apparent confidence that he control others that were interested in those documents for whatever reasons is to me astonishingly naive, ignorant and egotistical. In sum, it [inaudible] new paradigm in Snowden’s treachery and for that matter Private Manning’s. It is of young, inexperienced unknowledgeable people claiming to act out of noble intentions, making sweeping collection of material vital to the national security and transferring possession of that material to other parties who controls distribution.

[seemslikeadream]

What James Clapper Doesn't Understand About Edward Snowden
The director of national intelligence says he can't understand the leak nor guarantee there won't be another one. So why should we trust the NSA with sensitive data about Americans?
CONOR FRIEDERSDORFFEB 24 2014, 9:00 AM ET

If you've been wondering how James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, experienced the Edward Snowden leaks, look no further than Eli Lake's latest. The sympathetic profile, published Sunday at The Daily Beast, is interesting throughout. Two of its passages struck me as particularly noteworthy.

1) The first passage to consider is alluded to in the headline, "Spy Chief James Clapper: We Can’t Stop Another Snowden." The article reports the following:

Clapper also acknowledges that the very human nature of the bureaucracy he controls virtually insures that more mass disclosures are inevitable. “In the end,” he says, “we will never ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.”
Consider the implications of that admission.

The NSA has collected information about the communications of millions of Americans. Nefarious actors, given access to metadata from the phone dragnet alone, could blackmail countless citizens and quietly manipulate the political process. The NSA doesn't deny that. They just insist that they're not nefarious actors, that safeguards are in place, and that we should trust them as stewards of this data.

Well, here is Clapper telling the truth: Despite regarding Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as having done grave damage to the United States with their data thefts, he can't guarantee the same thing won't happen again. And if a future whistleblower could gain access to the most sensitive data, so could a blackmailer.

So could a foreign spy.

Data retention of this sort, whether carried out by the NSA or telecoms, poses a grave threat to privacy, in part because neither the NSA nor the telecoms can guarantee that the highly sensitive information they collect on us won't be stolen. "To this day," Lake writes, "the U.S. government doesn’t know the full extent of what Snowden revealed or whether more documents that have yet to be published in the press have made their way into the hands of Russian or Chinese intelligence."

But they expect us to keep trusting them with our data. Why?

2) The second noteworthy passage suggests that one of America's highest-ranking intelligence professionals lacks the imagination to understand his adversaries:

And maybe the worst part for Clapper is, he still doesn’t get why Snowden did it. Clapper sees himself as the man who’s opened up the intelligence community to public scrutiny, who keeps the Constitution on his wall, and who’s endured the endless congressional grillings—all while keeping Americans safe. How could Snowden, a fellow intelligence analyst and contractor, not see that? “Maybe if I had I’d understand him better because I have trouble understanding what he did or what he’d do,” the director said. “From my standpoint, the damage he’s done. I could almost accept it or understand it if this were simply about his concerns about so-called domestic surveillance programs. But what he did, what he took, what he has exposed, goes way, way, way beyond the so-called domestic surveillance programs.”
Snowden has actually addressed this subject directly, and given what he said, I think it's safe to assume that Clapper is aware of this particular interview:

Edward Snowden: I would say the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me that there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.
Granted, no one but Snowden himself can know his motivations with 100 percent certainty. Still, he has offered what strikes me, and millions of other Americans, as a perfectly plausible explanation: earnest alarm at the scale of NSA spying.

It isn't as if no one else has felt this alarm. Snowden's revelations alarmed masses in multiple countries, including heads of state, legislators in both American political parties, professionals at some of the world's leading IT companies. Clapper can't even imagine what might've inspired Snowden? The answer is everywhere. Maybe he should get outside the SIGINT bubble.

As well, he should grasp that he alienates most of his audience when he refers to "so-called domestic surveillance programs," as if the bulk collection of information about the telephone calls of Americans isn't "domestic" and "surveillance."

A final interesting bit in Lake's piece is the suggestion that the NSA was vulnerable to the Snowden leaks in part because it followed the 9/11 Commission's recommendation and set itself up to share intelligence more readily. "Snowden pilfered documents from databases designed to share intelligence more broadly within the government," Lake writes. "Promoting this integration of secrets is the primary mission of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The office was created on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that faulted the intelligence agencies for jealously guarding information that could have prevented the attacks of that day." I don't know whether post-9/11 changes made the NSA more vulnerable to Edward Snowden or not. I trust we'll hear more about that point in coming days.

[seemslikeadream]

German Lawmakers Want to Interview Snowden
BERLIN May 8, 2014 (AP)
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER Associated Press
Associated Press
German lawmakers agreed Thursday to ask NSA leaker Edward Snowden to testify in their inquiry into surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel by the U.S. National Security Agency.

Snowden's documents showing that the NSA targeted Merkel's cell phone caused an uproar in Germany. That prompted the chancellor's governing coalition and opposition lawmakers in March to establish a parliamentary committee to investigate the scope of the NSA spying.

The committee decided Thursday to try to question Snowden directly, German news agency dpa reported. Snowden has reportedly indicated he is willing to testify, but it is not yet clear whether the committee will invite him to Germany or interview him via video conference.

Opposition parties insist Snowden should be brought to Berlin as a key witness, while Merkel's governing coalition has opposed that. The U.S. has revoked Snowden's passport, meaning he would need the government's help to enter Germany. He has been granted asylum in Russia.

Following the committee's decision, Germany's top counterintelligence official told reporters that regardless of where he is questioned, Snowden is unlikely to shed much light on the question of U.S. espionage activities in Germany.

"I can't imagine that he, in his function as a data administrator ... would be able to tell us very much about the content" of the files he leaked, said Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

The German government warned last week that inviting Snowden to appear before parliament in person could harm Germany's relations with the United States. Maassen declined to say whether he had received any direct warning that intelligence cooperation with the United States could be affected, but noted that currently cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies is of "a high level."

Maassen said the fact that Snowden was able to take large amounts of data with him when he left the United States highlighted a security problem within the U.S. intelligence.

[seemslikeadream]

Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii
BY KEVIN POULSEN 05.21.14 | 6:30 AM

It was December 11, 2012, and in a small art space behind a furniture store in Honolulu, NSA contractor Edward Snowden was working to subvert the machinery of global surveillance.

Snowden was not yet famous. His blockbuster leaks were still six months away, but the man destined to confront world leaders on a global stage was addressing a much smaller audience that Sunday evening. He was leading a local “Crypto Party,” teaching less than two dozen Hawaii residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the internet anonymously.

“He introduced himself as Ed,” says technologist and writer Runa Sandvik, who co-presented with Snowden at the event, and spoke about the experience for the first time with WIRED. “We talked for a bit before everything started. And I remember asking where he worked or what he did, and he didn’t really want to tell.”

The grassroots crypto party movement began in 2011 with a Melbourne, Australia-based activist who goes by Asher Wolf. The idea was for technologists versed in software like Tor and PGP to get together with activists, journalists, and anyone else with a real-life need for those tools and show them the ropes. By the end of 2012, there’d been more than 1,000 such parties in countries around the world, by Wolf’s count. They were non-political and open to anyone.

“Don’t exclude anybody,” Wolf says. “Invite politicians. Invite people you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It was about being practical. By the end of the session, they should have Tor installed and be able to use OTR and PGP.”

The site of Edward Snowden's December, 2012 Crypto Party. Image: Google Street View
The site of Edward Snowden’s December, 2012 Crypto Party. Image: Google Street View

That Snowden organized such an event himself while still an NSA contract worker speaks volumes about his motives. Since the Snowden revelations began in June 2013, the whistleblower has been accused in editorial pages, and even the halls of Congress, of being a spy for China or Russia. A recent Wall Street Journal column argues that Snowden might have been working for the Russians and Chinese at the same time. “[O]nly a handful of the secrets had anything to do with domestic surveillance by the government and most were of primary value to an espionage operation.”

For the most part, these attacks have bounced harmlessly off Snowden, deflected by the Teflon of his well-managed public appearances and the self-evident risk and sacrifice he took on. One notable exception came last month, when Snowden submitted a video question to a televised town hall with Russian president Vladamir Putin; his question to Putin about Russia’s surveillance apparatus came across as a softball, and for a moment Snowden looked like a prop in Putin’s stage show.

But regardless of what you think of his actions, Snowden’s intentions are harder to doubt when you know that even before he leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to expose the surveillance world, he spent two hours calmly teaching 20 of his neighbors how to protect themselves from it. Even as he was thinking globally, he was acting locally. It’s like coming home to find the director of Greenpeace starting a mulch pit in your backyard.

The roots of Snowden’s crypto party were put down on November 18, 2012, when he sent an e-mail to Sandvik, a rising star in privacy circles, who was then a key developer on the anonymous web surfing software Tor.

Tor is free software that lets you go online anonymously. The software is used by a wide swath of people in need of extreme anonymity, including human rights groups, criminals, government agencies, and journalists. It works by accepting connections from the public internet, encrypting the traffic and bouncing it through a winding series of relays before dumping it back on the web through any of more than 1,000 exit nodes.

Most of those relays are run by volunteers, and the pre-leak Edward Snowden, it turns out, was one of them. (Through his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, Snowden declined to comment for this story).

In his e-mail, Snowden wrote that he personally ran one of the “major tor exits”–a 2 gbps server named “TheSignal”–and was trying to persuade some unnamed coworkers at his office to set up additional servers. He didn’t say where he worked. But he wanted to know if Sandvik could send him a stack of official Tor stickers. (In some post-leak photos of Snowden you can see the Tor sticker on the back of his laptop, next to the EFF sticker).

“He said he had been talking some of the more technical guys at work into setting up some additional fast servers, and figured some swag might incentivize them to do it sooner rather than later,” Sandvik says. “I later learned that he ran more than one Tor exit relay.”

Runa Sandvik (Photo courtesy Sandvik)
Technologist Runa Sandvik held a how-to digital privacy session with Edward Snowden in Hawaii in 2012. Photo: Courtesy of Sandvik

Snowden used the address cincinnatus@lavabit.com — the same account he would use again less than two weeks later in his initial approach to journalist Glenn Greenwald. Snowden followed up by sending Sandvik his real name and street address in Hawaii, for the stickers.

Sandvik had never heard of Edward Snowden; at that point, nobody had. But she was already scheduled to be in Hawaii the next month for a vacation. She wrote Snowden back and offered to give a presentation about Tor to a local audience. Snowden was enthusiastic and offered to set up a crypto party for the occasion.

“I don’t think Hawaii has had a successful crypto party yet, so that could be a really good opportunity to get the community going,” he wrote.

In Melbourne, Wolf received an e-mail asking for advice on putting together the Oahu event. She offered some tips: Teach one tool at a time, keep it simple. “If I’d known it was someone from the NSA, I’d have gone and shot myself,” she says.

Snowden used the Cincinnatus name to organize the event, which he announced on the Crypto Party wiki, and through the Hi Capacity hacker collective, which hosted the gathering. Hi Capacity is a small hacker club that holds workshops on everything from the basics of soldering to using a 3D printer.

“I’ll start with a casual agenda, but slot in additional speakers as desired,” write Cincinnatus in the announcement. “If you’ve got something important to add to someone’s talk, please share it (politely). When we’re out of speakers, we’ll do ad-hoc tutorials on anything we can.”

When the day came, Sandvik found her own way to the venue: an art space on Oahu in the back of a furniture store called Fishcake. It was filled to its tiny capacity with a mostly male audience of about 20 attendees. Snowden spotted her when she walked in and introduced himself and his then-girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who was filming the event. “He was just very nice, and he came to the door and introduced himself and talked about how the event was going to run,” Sandvik says.

They chatted for a bit. Sandvik asked Snowden where he worked, and after hemming and hawing, he finally said he worked for Dell. He didn’t let on that his work for Dell was under an NSA contract, but Sandvik could tell he was hiding something. “I got the sense that he didn’t like me prying too much, and he was happy to say Dell and move on,” she says.

Asher Wolf
Crypto Party founder Asher Wolf. Photo: Courtesy of Wolf

Sandvik began by giving her usual Tor presentation, then Snowden stood in front of the white board and gave a 30- to 40-minute introduction to TrueCrypt, an open-source full disk encryption tool. He walked through the steps to encrypt a hard drive or a USB stick. “Then we did an impromptu joint presentation on how to set up and run a Tor relay,” Sandvik says. “He was definitely a really, really smart guy. There was nothing about Tor that he didn’t already know.”

“Everything ran very smoothly,” she adds. “There were no questions about how to do things or where to put the chairs. Maybe he’s just really good at organizing events.”

At the end of the party, Sandvik said goodbye and returned to her Hawaii vacation. Snowden, in a follow-up post to the Crypto Party wiki, pronounced the event a “huge success.” “More people attended than expected, and we had a solid mix of age groups and genders.”

Sandvik, based in Washington, DC, didn’t think of the Dell worker again, until six months later on June 9, 2013, when the Guardian identified the source of its first two blockbuster NSA leaks. “It was pretty funny. Twitter was talking about ‘Edward Snowden,’” she says. “I click on a link to the Guardian and think, he looks really familiar.”

After Snowden revealed himself, Sandvik began quietly keeping tabs on his Tor relays, which went dark a month later. But she kept the story to herself. “I didn’t feel it was my story to tell, but it’s online and anyone can easily find out I was there,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for it to pop up.”

Surprisingly, she was never contacted by the FBI–who would probably not find her cooperative anyway. “That puzzled me a bit,” she says. “His girlfriend was filming it–the whole thing was on film. But the video was never put online, I’m told because the audio was bad.”

Last week Glenn Greenwald published his book on Snowden, No Place To Hide, which revealed the Cincinnatus nickname for the first time, leading me and others to the Oahu crypto party post. It turns out Snowden sent his first anonymous e-mail to Greenwald just 11 days before the party. At the time of the event, he was still waiting for Greenwald to reply.

“I kind of hope, secretly, that the crypto party offered Snowden an outlet to think about what he was already beginning to plan to do,” Wolf says.

“I’m kind of proud that he taught a group of people as well,” she says. “That’s huge. We relied on volunteers who often put themselves at risk to teach at places and situations that were uneasy for them. That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto party while he was working for the NSA. I’m glad he did. What a fucking legend.”

(Disclosure: I’m on the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board with Sandvik, and both Snowden and Greenwald sit on the foundation’s board of directors.)

[Luther Blissett]

Holy shit.

Edward Snowden 'was trained as a spy,' he tells NBC
By Dana Ford, CNN
updated 7:33 AM EDT, Wed May 28, 2014

(CNN) -- A low-level systems administrator? Or a highly trained spy?

Edward Snowden sought to bolster his credentials during an interview with NBC "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams.

The one-hour interview, Snowden's first with a U.S. television network, is scheduled to air at 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

An excerpt aired Tuesday night.

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word -- in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not -- and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Snowden said.

"Now, the government might deny these things. They might frame it in certain ways, and say, oh, well, you know, he's a low-level analyst.

"But what they're trying to do is they're trying to use one position that I've had in a career, here or there, to distract from the totality of my experience, which is that I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, undercover, overseas.

"I've worked for the National Security Agency, undercover, overseas. And I've worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world."

Snowden continued: "So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading."

A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to comment Tuesday on the NBC report.

Williams traveled to Moscow, where Snowden fled to escape prosecution for leaking classified documents that detailed U.S. surveillance programs.

Snowden hasn't been able to leave Russia since U.S. officials charged him with espionage and revoked his passport.

What he leaked sparked a national debate about privacy and security.

President Barack Obama and military officials remain in support of mass, warrantless surveillance. But civil libertarians, technology companies and others oppose it, noting the lack of transparency.

By the way I really dislike this BBC / CNN format, one sentence per paragraph.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

I watched that last night. Of course, they had to frame Snowden within the binary logic of #Traitor or #Patriot? Whatever you do NBC, don't upset the paradigm! Don't you dare ask if the GOVERNMENT is a traitor or patriot!

[JackRiddler]

A low-level systems administrator? Or a highly trained spy?

Breathless, panicky writing? Or standard CNN-level journalism?

Because it could never be both, right? These are mutually exclusive choices. Not only that, they must be enhanced with adjectival extremes.

[elfismiles]

NBC Censors Snowden’s Critical 9/11 Comments From Prime Time Audience
"They found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community... to detect this plot"
By Mikael Thalen / Global Research, May 30, 2014

Statements made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden regarding the 9/11 terror attacks were edited out of his NBC Nightly News interview with Brian Williams Wednesday in what appears to be an attempt to bolster legitimacy for the agency’s controversial surveillance programs.

Snowden’s comments surrounding the failure of dragnet surveillance in stopping the 9/11 attacks were censored from the prime time broadcast and instead buried in an hour long clip on NBC’s website.

“You know this is a key question that the 9/11 commission considered, and what they found in the postmortem when they looked at all the classified intelligence from all the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States, to detect this plot,” Snowden said.

“We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we had.”

NBC’s decision to bury Snowden’s comments are unsurprising given the fact that the 9/11 attacks are exhaustively used by the federal government as the prime justification for surveilling millions of innocent Americans. Snowden remarked on the government’s prior knowledge of the accused Boston bombers as well, also cut from the prime time interview.

‘If we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass-surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world, didn’t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country or are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way of life,” Snowden said.

Despite countless government officials pointing to 9/11 foreknowledge, whether missed or ignored, establishment media outlets have continually worked to keep such voices out of relevant reporting.

Former NSA senior executive turned whistleblower Thomas Drake, who revealed unconstitutional surveillance programs targeting Americans in 2005, has repeatedly commented on NSA intelligence that would have “undoubtedly” stopped the 9/11 attacks.

“The NSA had critical intelligence about Al Qaeda and associated movements in particular that had never been properly shared outside of NSA,” Drake said in a recent interview. “They simply did not share critical intelligence although they had it.”

In a January letter to President Obama, Drake and fellow whistleblowers William Binney, Edward Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe not only detailed the agency’s foreknowledge, but the ensuing cover-up as well.

“The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there,” the letter reads. “We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.”

Outside of the NSA, countless intelligence officials have also commented on 9/11 foreknowledge and the federal government’s attempts to stifle any investigation into negligence and wrongdoing.

Former senior intelligence officer Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer, who attempted to inform the government after identifying the two terrorist cells later charged for the 9/11 attacks in 2000 during Operation Able Danger, was attacked and demonized by the Defense Intelligence Agency after informing Congress of the agency’s refusal to act.

“I had no intention of joining the ranks of ‘whistle blowers,’” Shaffer said in 2009. “When I made my disclosure to the 9/11 commission regarding the existence of a pre 9/11 offensive counter-terrorism operation that had discovered several of the 9/11 terrorists a full year before the 9/11 attacks my intention was to simply tell the truth, and fulfill my oath of office.”

Former FBI wiretap translator Sibel Edmonds, who had access to top-secret communications, told reporters in 2004 that the FBI had detailed 9/11 foreknowledge that specifically mentioned a terrorist attack involving airplanes.

“We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available,” Edmonds told Salon. “There was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should’ve alerted the people to the threat we’re facing.”

According to Edmonds, after the 9/11 attacks, FBI supervisors ordered translators to “work slowly” in order to ensure that the agency would get larger funding the next year.

The vast number of whistleblowers in the intelligence community not only gives credence to Snowden’s comments, but also exemplifies the NSA’s illegitimate growth since 9/11.

In a desperate attempt to gain the moral high ground, Secretary of State John Kerry claimedSnowden had aided terrorists during an interview on “Good Morning America” Wednesday despite having absolutely no evidence to support his accusation.

Despite the fact that the NSA leaks have proven the agency to be involved in issues unrelated to national security, such as economic espionage, the claim of using mass surveillance to stop terrorism deteriorates even further in light of recent decisions by the Obama Administration.

In 2013, President Obama waived a federal law designed to prevent the US from arming terrorists in order to provide military support to the “Syrian rebels.” Even with Syrian Revolutionary Front leader Jamal Maarouf admitting that his fighters work alongside the Al-Qaeda aligned Jabhat al-Nusra, the Obama Administration has continued its unflinching support.

The president’s support of Al-Qaeda was so transparent during the Libyan overthrow that former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich publicly questioned why the US-backed “Libyan rebels” had placed an Al Qaeda flag over the top of the courthouse in Benghazi.

Whether it be issuing fake terror alerts, creating domestic terror plots or allowing them to take place, the national security state will undoubtedly do whatever it can to continue its unabated growth towards total information awareness.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/nbc-censor ... ce/5384576

[The Consul]

Several different whistle blowers from several different angles/agencies say that CIANSAFBI had sufficient information and evidence to prevent the 911 attacks. It seems to me a bit outrageous that each agency was guilty of inaction because of some kind of territorial competition. It is a veiled "human error" suggestion. Everything is a fucking okay, okay? A few people who were maybe a little bit too personally ambitious did not do what they should have done. And we are supposed to accept this like all the dead in NY, DC, Iran, Iraq...all the detentions and tortures and renditions...we are supposed to accept it all as some kind of understandable collateral damage caused by a handfull of assholes in a handfull of agencies? WTF is wrong with us that we continue to swallow this shit year after year?

[thatsmystory]

Several different whistle blowers from several different angles/agencies say that CIANSAFBI had sufficient information and evidence to prevent the 911 attacks. It seems to me a bit outrageous that each agency was guilty of inaction because of some kind of territorial competition. It is a veiled "human error" suggestion. Everything is a fucking okay, okay? A few people who were maybe a little bit too personally ambitious did not do what they should have done. And we are supposed to accept this like all the dead in NY, DC, Iran, Iraq...all the detentions and tortures and renditions...we are supposed to accept it all as some kind of understandable collateral damage caused by a handfull of assholes in a handfull of agencies? WTF is wrong with us that we continue to swallow this shit year after year?

I think your priorities are messed up. The real outrage is for the 9/11 museum to sell cheese trays in the gift shop.

WIEBE: Jessica, I think Brian Williams missed an opportunity to raise an issue that has not been broadly or widely discussed, and that is the fact that NSA had information that could have prevented 9/11. This is before any Patriot Act, before any terrorist surveillance program on behalf of the president and Cheney and all of this stuff. If [you] go back, push the clock back to before 9/11, we actually had the information. But we didn't know we had it in one instance. And in another instance, we did know we had it, but didn't report it to anybody, didn't tell anybody. Drake has made that very clear. And they have said so publicly. He was there at NSA right after 9/11. He was there. And Binney and myself and Loomis retired, but Drake was still there. And at some point, he participated in the Saxby Chambliss 9/11 committee that looked into what went wrong and told that committee that NSA had the data to prevent 9/11 and didn't share it. Why you wouldn't share that information I don't know, but I think he should have raised that as an issue.

NBC's Snowden Interview Overlooks Pre-9/11 Data Collection by the NSA

It should be noted the entire mainstream media has failed for over a decade to cover the issue of obstructed pre-9/11 al Qaeda investigations.

Nada Bakos: Snowden is wrong about the 9/11 commission results...good lord. No, the IC didn't now who they all were FFS

https://twitter.com/nadabakos/status/471857759571288065

Bakos was a member of Alec Station who took part in a documentary called Manhunt which was billed as the real Zero Dark Thirty. During the entire press tour for the documentary the CIA agents involved were never asked to explain what happened with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Documentary director Greg Barker never mentioned the issue of deliberate withholding. How do you make a documentary about Alec Station and fail to cover this issue?

[82_28]

They are mainlining what skeptics already know via intuition, because they know that what Snowden "did" is a popular sentiment. How do you make an "illegal" sentiment popular? Why not thrust it into the narrative as though it was simultaneously illegal and heroic? "They" know we know and that given the time between now and when 9/11 happened, they are not going to convince anyone. There have been so many analyses of 9/11 that they know I am here and you are there. They know that we recognize the crime. Snowden is a perfect actor for the fake fakery of data collection.

As for myself, I noted to others as the google glass thing was going down and making the news and Snowden was as well, that his glasses resemble the "google glass". My nearly 70 year old dad said when viewing the interview, "is he wearing that google glass thing?"

Does Snowden have an online presence besides what the MSM tells us? I feel this should be a sign of false flagishness. . .