Edward Snowden, American Hero

[conniption]

Obama's Afraid of YOU | Snowden's Big Brother Alert

5:49
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqrd_Nama04

Published on Jul 2, 2013

Abby Martin gives an update on the Edward Snowden case, calling out the corporate media for their biased coverage, and citing seeking asylum is a human right guaranteed under the International Declaration of Human rights.

[KeenInsight]

Obama's Afraid of YOU | Snowden's Big Brother Alert

5:49
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqrd_Nama04

Published on Jul 2, 2013

Abby Martin gives an update on the Edward Snowden case, calling out the corporate media for their biased coverage, and citing seeking asylum is a human right guaranteed under the International Declaration of Human rights.

Abby Martin tells it like it is! Love her reporting.

[beeline]

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/05/world/americas/venezuela-snowden/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

(CNN) -- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has offered asylum to U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, the state-run AVN news agency reported Friday, without offering details.

The report came shortly after Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said he would grant Snowden asylum in his country "if the circumstances permit." Ortega didn't elaborate on his announcement, made during a speech in Managua, except to say his country is "open and respectful to the right of asylum."

"It's clear that that if the circumstances permit it we will gladly receive Snowden and will grant him asylum here in Nicaragua," Ortega said.

Meanwhile, an Icelandic lawmaker said Snowden would not get citizenship there, as he had requested, because Iceland's parliament refused to vote on an asylum proposal before ending its current session.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

And now a word from an apologist for the State.


http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/domest ... ce-2013-7/

Here’s one dirty little secret about the revelations of domestic spying at the National Security Agency: Had Edward Snowden not embarked on a madcap escape that mashed up plot elements from Catch Me If You Can, The Fugitive, the O.J. Bronco chase, and “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?,” the story would be over. The leaker’s flight path, with the Feds and the press in farcical flat-footed pursuit, captured far more of the public’s attention than the ­substance of his leaks. That’s not his fault. The public was not much interested in the leaks in the first place. It was already moving on to Paula Deen.

At first blush, the NSA story seemed like a bigger deal. The early June scoops in the Guardian and the Washington Post were hailed universally as “bombshells” and “blockbusters” by the networks. America’s right and left flanks were unified in hyperventilating about their significance: Rand Paul and The Nation, Glenn Beck and Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh and the Times editorial page all agreed that President Obama had presided over an extra­ordinary abuse of executive power. But even as Daniel Ellsberg hailed the second coming of the Pentagon Papers, the public was not marching behind him or anyone else. The NSA scandal didn’t even burn bright enough to earn the distinction of a “-gate” suffix. Though Americans were being told in no uncertain terms that their government was spying on them, it quickly became evident that, for all the tumult in the media-political Establishment, many just didn’t give a damn.
Only 36 percent of the country felt that government snooping had “gone too far,” according to CBS News. A Pew–Washington Post survey found that 62 percent (including 69 percent of Democrats) deemed fighting terrorism a higher priority than protecting privacy. Most telling was a National Journal survey conducted days before the NSA stories broke: Some 85 percent of Americans assumed that their “communications history, like phone calls, e-mails, and Internet use,” was “available for businesses, government, individuals, and other groups to access” without their consent. No wonder the bombshell landed with a thud, rather than as a shock. What was the news except that a 29-year-old high-school dropout was making monkeys of the authorities with a bravado to rival Clyde Barrow?

An ACLU official argued that the so-what poll numbers were misleading: “If terrorism was left out, it would change the polling results dramatically.” In other words, blame the public’s passivity on the post-9/11 cultural signposts of 24 and Homeland, which have inured Americans to a bipartisan Patriot Act regimen in which a ticking terrorist time bomb always trumps the Constitution. Obama, a Homeland fan himself, hit the point hard to deflect criticism. “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said when alluding to the terrorist plots NSA spying had disrupted. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

The virtue of this rationale is that it casts not just the domestic eavesdroppers in a patriotic light but also the citizenry that valiantly sacrifices its Fourth Amendment rights to the greater good of stopping the evildoers. But that’s letting everyone off easy and is hardly the whole story of the choices Americans have made “as a society”—and that were made before Obama or, for that matter, George W. Bush took office. Many of those choices predate 9/11 and have nothing to do with fighting terrorism at all.

The truth is that privacy jumped the shark in America long ago. Many of us not only don’t care about having our privacy invaded but surrender more and more of our personal data, family secrets, and intimate yearnings with open eyes and full hearts to anyone who asks and many who don’t, from the servers of Fortune 500 corporations to the casting directors of reality-television shows to our 1.1 billion potential friends on Facebook. Indeed, there’s a considerable constituency in this country—always present and now arguably larger than ever—that’s begging for its privacy to be invaded and, God willing, to be exposed in every gory detail before the largest audience possible. We don’t like the government to be watching as well—many Americans don’t like government, period—but most of us are willing to give such surveillance a pass rather than forsake the pleasures and rewards of self-exposure, convenience, and consumerism.

R.I.P. the contemplative America of ­Thoreau and of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, who “would prefer not to”; this is the America that prefers to be out there, prizing networking, exhibitionism, and fame more than privacy, introspection, and solitude. And while it would be uplifting to believe that Americans are willing to sacrifice privacy for the sole good of foiling Al Qaeda, that’s hardly the case. Other motives include such quotidian imperatives as shopping, hooking up, seeking instant entertainment and information, and finding the fastest car route—not to mention being liked (or at least “liked”) and followed by as many friends (or “friends”) and strangers as possible, whether online or on basic cable. In a society where economic advancement is stagnant for all but those at the top, a public profile is the one democratic currency most everyone can still afford and aspire to—an indicator of status, not something to be embarrassed about. According to the Pew-Post poll, a majority of Americans under 50 paid little attention to the NSA story at all, perhaps because they found the very notion of fearing a privacy breach anachronistic. After the news of the agency’s PRISM program broke, National Donut Day received more American Google searches than PRISM. There has been no wholesale (or piecemeal) exodus of Americans from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, or any of the other information-vacuuming enterprises reported to have, in some murky fashion, siphoned data—meta, big, or otherwise—to the NSA. Wall Street is betting this will hold. A blogger on the investment website Motley Fool noticed that on the day PRISM was unmasked, share prices for all the implicated corporate participants went up.

If one wanted to identify the turning point when privacy stopped being a prized commodity in America, a good place to start would be with television and just before the turn of the century. The cultural revolution in programming that was cemented by the year 2000 presaged the devaluation of privacy that would explode with the arrival of Facebook and its peers a few years later.

What we now call reality television had been around since the dawn of the medium. Allen Funt’s Candid Camera had its television debut in 1948 (and had been on radio before that as “Candid Microphone”). But the everyday Americans spied on in Funt’s wholesome Peeping Tom pranks were caught by surprise; they didn’t volunteer for public exposure. The twelve-hour 1973 PBS mini-series An American Family (supported by funding from the Ford Foundation, no less) was a breakthrough because the troubled Louds of Santa Barbara willingly submitted to parading their travails in close-up on-camera. By the time MTV unveiled its series The Real World in 1992, the advent of video, digitalization, and compact cameras had made projects emulating An American Family much easier to produce in quantity and at greater length.

The Real World began as a somewhat earnest docu-soap of multicultural American youth wrestling with Real Issues. But by the end of the decade, sex and alcohol were being stirred profusely into the mix. In 2000, CBS took the genre a step further by airing an American adaptation of a Dutch television hit, Big Brother, in which occupants of a quarantined house are captured on camera 24/7, bathroom visits included, for three months as the participants are voted out one by one. Sure enough, the ­coinage Big Brother would soon become unmoored from George Orwell’s vision of totalitarian terror and become known as the brand of a cheesy entertainment franchise hosted by Julie Chen. As it happened, Big Brother’s second-season contestants were isolated in their San Fernando Valley barracks on 9/11, and one of those contestants was the cousin of a missing Aon worker on the 90th floor of World Trade Center 2. After some debate over whether the house’s inmates should even be told the news in real time, which would be a violation of the show’s lab-rat rules, the young woman with a familial stake in the attacks was filled in. She chose to remain on-camera with her surrogate reality-television family (and audience) rather than return to her real family in New York, which was still waiting to learn that her cousin was dead.

Big Brother began its fifteenth season last week. We now know that it was merely a harbinger of what was to come. In 2000, it and Survivor (also on CBS) were novelties. In 2013, more than 300 reality shows are airing on a profusion of networks, including some that have revised their identities to accommodate them. (History, formerly known as the History Channel, is home to Ax Men and Swamp People.) That count does not include YouTube, where home productions can rival the biggest TV reality hits in audience. The 2011 video of 6-year-old Lily Clem’s reaction to her birthday present, a trip to Disneyland, attracted 5 million viewers in just its first three weeks.

Reality television is not a showbiz fad but a national pastime whose participants are as diverse as America in terms of class, race, creed, and ethnicity. If redneck subjects are now the rage—Here Comes Honey Boo Boo outdrew Fox News coverage of the GOP convention in the prime 18-49 demographic—the desperate urban middle class is at the heart of shows like the Vegas-based smash Pawn Stars (another History hit). Though some participants cash in—the Robertson brood of Duck Dynasty has transformed an already prosperous rural Louisiana business selling duck calls into a multi-platform entertainment empire—money isn’t the only motive. Many reality-show performers receive nominal pay, and the workplace protections afforded to union members usually don’t apply. The Kardashians notwithstanding, the payoff in fame also can be slight, not even fifteen minutes’ worth on the lower-rated shows. More often, exhibitionism is its own reward. Many Americans simply want to be seen, even in financial or psychological extremis, by as many of their fellow citizens as possible. That the government may also be watching—whether in pursuit of terrorism, ordinary criminality, immigration violations, employee malfeasance, tax evasion, or whatever—seems no deterrent.

The same risk of surveillance is taken by the many more Americans who bare their lives online, trading off privacy for speedier transactions, self-expression, and self-indulgence. With the notable exception of Anthony Weiner, few are naïve about that bargain. It’s no surprise that 85 percent of the country thinks it is being snooped on: Uncannily precise recommendations of products, friends, and followers stalk our every keystroke on the web. Given that Facebook’s members are more than three times as numerous as the American population, all of them linked to multiple networks that often have little or nothing to do with friendship, it’s a no-brainer that the infinity of data will be trolled by outsiders, whether flesh-and-blood or algorithmic, and whether the motive be investigative, prurient, mercantile, masturbatory, altruistic, or criminal. And that trolling is so easy! As Evgeny Morozov has written in The Net Delusion, the 2006 German film The Lives of Others is a potent reminder of “how costly surveillance used to be” for a totalitarian state in the Cold War era: “Recording tape had to be bought, stored, and processed; bugs had to be installed one by one; Stasi officers had to spend days and nights on end glued to their headphones, waiting for their subjects to launch into an antigovernment tirade or inadvertently disclose other members of their network.” Ah, the good old days of government surveillance, when the spies had to jump through exhausting hoops to do their dirty work.

Whatever the fine points of the NSA’s snooping, anyone who cared could surmise enough of the big picture to be wary long before the Snowden leaks filled in graphic details. The NSA is crying wolf when it claims that his disclosures are an enormous boon to terrorists, unless you believe terrorists are morons. There have been NSA leakers before Snowden, and they provided plenty of connectable dots. A remarkable two-year Washington Post investigation published in 2010 found that as of then, some 854,000 Americans had top-secret clearances—nearly one and a half times the population of the nation’s capital. Nearly a third were private contractors like Snowden. The Post also discovered that after 2001, intelligence agencies began building 33 new facilities in the Washington area alone, with a total square footage (17 million) almost equal to three times that of the Pentagon. What could all these people possibly be up to? What was all that space needed for?

In March 2012, James Bamford, for three decades the most authoritative journalist on the NSA beat, provided answers in a Wired cover story prompted by a clandestine $2 billion NSA data center under construction in Utah. “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private e-mails, cell-phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter,’ ” Bamford reported. Why? “The NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the U.S. and its citizens.”

In fact, the prolific public clues about the NSA’s intent also predate 9/11. In the Jerry Bruckheimer–Tony Scott movie Enemy of the State (1998), a fictional retired NSA officer played by Gene Hackman says, “The government’s been in bed with the entire telecommunications business since the forties. They have infected everything. They can get into your bank statements, computer files, e-mail, listen to your phone calls.” The NSA’s then-director, Michael Hayden, was so concerned about this fictional leak that he tried to mount a PR offensive to counter it. Just a few months after that film’s release, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in essence confirmed it with his own famous dictum: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

And so we did learn to stop worrying and love the promiscuous use of Big Data by business and government. Mark Zuckerberg was telling the truth, even if to serve his own interests, when in 2010 he explained his rationale for the constant, incremental loosening of Facebook’s dense and ever-changing privacy policies: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” The Snowden leaks show that Facebook and PRISM had aligned six months earlier, and in 2010, as the Times recently discovered, the keeper of Facebook’s secrets, its chief security officer, Max Kelly, defected to the NSA. But even as early as 2008, an internal memo at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had recommended that the agency’s fraud office start exploiting social networks as an “excellent vantage point” for observing “the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners” suspected of wrongdoing. The memo—cited by the public-interest lawyer Lori Andrews in her book I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did—was nothing if not prescient. Facebook was a gift to surveillance that would keep on giving, it argued, because the “narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends.’ ”

In the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, those who want to shut down dubious NSA programs have been hard pressed to come up with ways of getting that done. The ACLU is suing, and so are Rand Paul and Larry Klayman, the right-wing activist known for his quixotic legal battles against Bill Clinton in the nineties. Commentators at The New Yorker and The New Republic are calling for a national commission. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a fierce NSA defender, has proposed monthly hearings, presumably to bore the country into inertia. No doubt the Obama administration will toss out a few crumbs of transparency to satisfy its liberal base, but neither the president nor his party’s leaders, exemplified by Feinstein, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, want change from the status quo. Neither would Hillary Clinton. The same is true of Republican leaders, despite their professed loathing of big-government overreach in Obamacare and at the IRS. That leaves Paul on the Republican side and the two Democratic Senate apostates, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who have been on the NSA’s case for years. They have about as much of a chance of bringing change in 2013 as the former senator Russ Feingold did in his lonely opposition to the Patriot Act in 2001. Little short of a leak stating that the NSA is tracking gun ownership is likely to kindle public outrage.

Of course, there are some steps that ordinary Americans can take to cover their daily digital tracks and limit their vulnerability to snooping of all kinds. But there aren’t many. In their new book, Big Data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier observe that “in the era of big data, the three core strategies long used to ensure privacy—individual notice and consent, opting out, and anonymization—have lost much of their effectiveness.” Their proposed workarounds are laudable—why not have “new principles by which we govern ourselves”?—but not exactly an action plan. Andrews calls for a new “Social Network Constitution” but for the short term points out that citizens of Facebook, the third-biggest nation in the world as measured by population, have “little recourse other than to leave the service.” This would require asceticism on a mass scale unknown to modern America.

The easiest individual solutions for trying to protect one’s privacy are the obvious ones. Quit social networks. Stop using a cell phone. Pay for everything in cash (but stop using ATMs). Abandon all Google apps, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Apple’s iTunes store, E-ZPass, GPS, and Skype. Encrypt your e-mail (which will require persuading your correspondents to encrypt, too). Filter (and handcuff) your web browser with anti-­tracking software like Tor. Stop posting to YouTube and stop tweeting. As Big Data elucidates: “Twitter messages are limited to a sparse 140 characters, but the metadata—that is, the ‘information about information’—associated with each tweet is rich. It includes 33 discrete items.”

So vast a cultural sea change is beyond today’s politics; it would require a national personality transplant. What the future is most likely to bring instead is more of the same: an ever-larger embrace of ever-more-brilliant toys and services that invite more prying from strangers, corporations, and government. No sooner had Snowden’s leaks landed than Instagram, owned by Facebook, announced a new mobile service enabling its users to post their own brief reality-television-style video nuggets much as the equivalent Twitter service, Vine, already does. Soon to ship from Microsoft is a new Xbox game console requiring a device called Kinect, which, besides monitoring bodily motions, listens to users even when the console is turned off. It’s unlikely that fanboys (and girls) will shun the new Xbox any more than they will disdain the intrusiveness of the much-awaited Google Glass. If anything, they’ll fight to be first in line.

Civil libertarians can protest about how the government will track us on these devices, too, but as long as the public and the political Establishment of both parties remain indifferent, the prospect of substantial change is nil. The debate would be more honest, at least, if we acknowledge our own responsibility for our “choices as a society.” Those who complain about the loss of privacy have an obligation to examine their own collaboration, whether by intent or apathy, in the decline and fall of the very concept of privacy. We can blame terrorists for many things that have happened since 9/11, but too many Americans cavalierly spilling TMI on too many porous public platforms is not one of them.

COMMENTS:

Your analysis is myopic.

What we are witnessing is the proliferation of control technologies. And we are at the dawn of the new age of "societies of control." Societies where the digital proles have no secrets from Big Data Brother. Digital Proles trained and conditioned to hide no secrets, do what they are told and feast in a never ending pacification pipeline of useless consumer garbage.

The fact that the masses are now able to self mesmerise in an orgy of inane digital exhibitionism should not be interpreted as a signal that privacy has jumped the digital shark. It is a sophisticated form of techno-misdirection that distracts from basic issues of profound constitutional importance.

You can be sure that the nonsense shared on Facebook is not what the censors such places as China are preoccupied with. It is the activity of those who have the gall to pollute the digital ether with political dissent.

The MSM is of course culpable misdirecting attention from the important issues raised by the Snowden affair, because they have a direct commercial stake in promoting the new control model.

Love Frank and always look forward to his perspective but there's a major flaw in the basic premise of this story. It's OUR choice to use twitter, facebook, appear on reality shows, etc. It's NOT our choice to have the govt. secretly monitor our emails, phone calls, etc. Just because I use a cell phone doesn't give the govt. the right to monitor my calls without my knowing it. That's like saying if you have a conversation in a room, someone can put a glass up to the room and listen in.Last time I checked that's not in my Verizon plan. Rare swing and a miss by Frank.

And who can forget Enemy of The State, starring semi-closeted Scientologist Will Smith?

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/enemy- ... te-2013-7/



"Enemy of the State screenwriter David Marconi says he warned us about the NSA fifteen years ago."

When the NSA story broke last month, many commentators invoked Enemy of the State, the 1998 movie you wrote in which Will Smith is chased by an omnipresent security state. Did this instance of life imitating art surprise you at all?
It didn’t. When Lucas Foster at Simpson/Bruckheimer brought me in, he said he wanted to do a movie about how a guy gets taken down electronically. Behind him on his office wall was a poster of North by Northwest. So I said, “All right, North by Northwest, a guy is taken down electronically, got it.” I started looking around at possible bogeymen, and I came across this book called The Puzzle Palace, by James Bamford, in which he pretty much lays out everything that the NSA is doing now and has done for years. It was a massive eye opener. Anyone who was in any way paying attention to this stuff knew that the NSA was a big vacuum cleaner and that they were storing everything. This has been going on since World War II.

Did you hope the film would set off a debate?
I did. I thought it was important to bring these issues up. The first director I’d gotten the script to was Oliver Stone. Oliver called up the head of Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer and said, “This is a great conspiracy film, and I’d love to do this.” Ultimately Jerry brought in Tony Scott, who did a terrific job, but Tony made it much more entertainment fare. I think had Oliver been involved, the issues would have been highlighted.

What kind of comments did you get from viewers?
A lot of the critics found the plot far-fetched. At the time, no one had ever heard of the NSA, so when I was telling people about the NSA’s capabilities, they would look at me like I’d just come off a UFO after having been abducted by aliens. They’d say, “The government can’t do this, the government can’t do that.” But I was reading a lot of reports. Several whistle-blowers have come forward saying this is what they’re doing. You had Frank Church and the Church Committee warning about this stuff years ago. They used to open up every piece of mail that was coming back and forth between East Germany and West Germany. Can you imagine the manpower it would take to do that?

Did anyone from the NSA get in touch with you?
The Department of Defense asked me to come down and speak to them after the film came out. I met CIA guys and NSA guys. I found them all to be very professional. They were very focused on the mission and on defending the country. I didn’t walk away with a sense that any of them were malevolent. But some of them also had a very myopic view—here’s what you do, and you sit at your computer and you do it.

What you have is this machine that’s self-perpetuating. It starts to grow on its own, and the more power it gets, the more power it wants to assume. And as a result of the Patriot Act and 9/11, that apparatus is looking more and more at what’s going on inside this country.

Do you think we now view the privacy-security trade-off differently than we did in 1998?
Something that Orwell never figured out in 1984 is that people would embrace the idea of Big Brother if there’s a game attached to it, or if it’s convenient. You buy a monitor at Best Buy that has a little camera inside that allows you to make Skype calls, and you don’t realize what else is behind that camera. As long as you can present that kind of technology with a fun app, it’s no longer the omnipotent HAL with a red glowing eye—it’s a little black dot at the top of your computer that allows you to talk to your friends all over the world. But that comes at a price. You as an individual have to make a choice: Do you want to use this technology and what comes with it, or do you want to move out to a cabin in the woods and start growing vegetables?

Do you think the most recent leaks are going to send more people out to cabins in the woods?
I don’t think your average American cares. After a couple of months these kind of things usually blow over, and no one thinks about it anymore. But with the Snowden leaks, it might be a bit different. Every day that he is out and free, he’s bringing more attention to this issue. People get it thrown in their face on the nightly news.

So Snowden is a character who can keep a narrative alive.
Yeah. And he’s not a villain, he’s not a spy. He’s just a man who saw something that he believed was quite wrong. I salute him for his guts and his courage. And I’m sure there are twenty screenwriters in Hollywood right now trying to track down the rights to his story.

[JackRiddler]

NSA recruiters are treated to a spectacular takedown by Wisconsin students!

Must read - and hilarious.

Only I'd change the headline: This went TERRIFICALLY RIGHT!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/shortcu ... rive/print

NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong

Staff from the National Security Agency got more than they bargained for when they attempted to recruit students to their organisation earlier this week …

Bim Adewunmi
guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 July 2013 08.15 EDT

On Tuesday, the National Security Agency called at the University of Wisconsin on a recruitment drive.

Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be "adversaries", and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.

She has posted a recording of the session on Soundcloud, which you can hear above, and posted a rough transcript on her blog, The Mob and the Multitude. Here are some highlights.

The session begins ...

Tahir: "Do you consider Germany and the countries that the NSA has been spying upon to be adversaries, or are you, right now, not speaking the truth?"

Recruiter 1: "You can define adversary as 'enemy' and, clearly, Germany is not our enemy. But would we have foreign national interests from an intelligence perspective on what's going on across the globe? Yeah, we do."

Tahir: "So by 'adversaries', you actually mean anybody and everybody. There is nobody, then, by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?"

Recruiter 1: "That is not correct."

Recruiter 2: "… for us, our business is apolitical, OK? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us ... We might use the word 'target'."

Tahir: "I'm just surprised that for language analysts, you're incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn't seem to be clear."

Later ...

Tahir: "... this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren't true. And we also know that the NSA took down brochures and factsheets after the Snowden revelations because those factsheets also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them, right? So how are we supposed to believe what you're saying?"

Even later ...

Tahir: "I think the question here is do you actually think about the ramifications of the work that you do, which is deeply problematic, or do you just dress up in costumes and get drunk?" [A reference to an earlier comment the recruiter made about NSA employees working hard and going to the bar to do karaoke.]

Recruiter 2: "... reporting the info in the right context is so important because the consequences of bad political decisions by our policymakers is something we all suffer from."

Unnamed female student: "And people suffer from the misinformation that you pass along so you should take responsibility as well."

Later still ...

Male student: "General Alexander [head of the NSA] also lied in front of Congress."

Recruiter 1: "I don't believe that he did."

Male student: "Probably because access to the Guardian is restricted on the Department of Defence's computers. I am sure they don't encourage people like you to actually think about these things. Thank God for a man like Edward Snowden who your organisation is now part of a manhunt trying to track down, trying to put him in a little hole somewhere for the rest of his life. Thank God they exist."

And finally ...

Recruiter 2: "This job isn't for everybody, you know ..."

Tahir: "So is this job for liars? Is this what you're saying? Because, clearly, you're not able to give us forthright answers. I mean, given the way the NSA has behaved, given the fact that we've been lied to as Americans, given the fact that factsheets have been pulled down because they clearly had untruths in them, given the fact that Clapper and Alexander lied to Congress – is that a qualification for being in the NSA? Do you have to be a good liar?"

Recruiter 1: I don't believe the NSA is telling complete lies. And I do believe that you know, I mean people can, you can read a lot of different things that are, um, portrayed as fact and that doesn't make them fact just because they're in newspapers."

Unnamed female student: "Or intelligence reports."

Recruiter 1: "That's not really our purpose here today and I think if you're not interested in that ... there are people here who are probably interested in a language career."


© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
;

[Allegro]

Here’s the audio of the recruitment meeting transcript JR posted ^ above.

Like JR said, Only I'd change the headline: This went TERRIFICALLY RIGHT!

[Jerky]

Have we all been SNOWED by Snowden?

As some of us have suspected here since the beginning, he may be "too good to be true" after all.

Read this and let me know what you make of it.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/07/06 ... d-snowden/

[Hunter]

Elf posted his chatlogs upthread, they are very interesting and this Jerky article expounds on it a little more, intriguing stuff one way or another


I am still on the fence about Snowden, I really want to believe in him, he did give up a lot but there are some journalists out there asking some good questions, I dont know a lot about Jon Rappaport but this particular article asks some good questions and talks about a possible NSA vs CIA turf war for budget money and how it may tie in to all of this. Interesting reading, it suggests he is still working for the CIA and is purposely on a mission with the CIA to make NSA look bad or something along those lines...

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/ ... e-through/

Ed Snowden, NSA, and fairy tales a child could see through

By Jon Rappoport

June 25, 2013

http://www.nomorefakenews.com

Sometimes cognitive dissonance, which used to be called contradiction, rings a gong so loud it knocks you off your chair.

But if you’re an android in this marvelous world of synthetic reality, you get up, put a smile back on your face, and trudge on…

Let’s see. NSA is the most awesome spying agency ever devised in this world. If you cross the street in Podunk, Anywhere, USA, to buy an ice cream soda, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, they know.

They know if you sit at the counter and drink that soda or take it and move to the only table in the store. They know if you lick the foam from the top of the glass with your tongue or pick the foam with your straw and then lick it.

They know if you keep the receipt for the soda or leave it on the counter.

They know whether you’re wearing shoes or sneakers. They know the brand of your underwear. They know your shaving cream, and precisely which container it came out of.

But this agency, with all its vast power and its dollars…

Can’t track one of its own, a man who came to work every day, a man who made up a story about needing treatment in Hong Kong for epilepsy and then skipped the country.

Just can’t find him.

Can’t find him in Hong Kong, where he does a sit-down video interview with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. Can’t find that “safe house” or that “hotel” where he’s staying.

No. Can’t find him or spy on his communications while he’s in Hong Kong. Can’t figure out he’s booked a flight to Russia. Can’t intercept him at the airport before he leaves for Russia . Too difficult.

And this man, this employee, is walking around with four laptops that contain the keys to all the secret spying knowledge in the known cosmos.

Can’t locate those laptops. Can’t hack into them to see what’s there. Can’t access the laptops or the data. The most brilliant technical minds of this or any other generation can find a computer in Outer Mongolia in the middle of a blizzard, but these walking-around computers in Hong Kong are somehow beyond reach.

And before this man, Snowden, this employee, skipped Hawaii, he was able to access the layout of the entire US intelligence network. Yes. He was able to use a thumb drive.

He walked into work with a thumb drive, plugged in, and stole…everything. He stole enough to “take down the entire US intelligence network in a single afternoon.”

Not only that, but anyone who worked at this super-agency as an analyst, as a systems-analyst supervisor, could have done the same thing. Could have stolen the keys to the kingdom.

This is why NSA geniuses with IQs over 180 have decided, now, in the midst of the Snowden affair, that they need to draft “tighter rules and procedures” for their employees. Right.

Now, a few pieces of internal of security they hadn’t realized they needed before will be put in place.

This is, let me remind you, the most secretive spying agency in the world. The richest spying agency. The smartest spying agency.

But somehow, over the years, they’d overlooked this corner of their own security. They’d left a door open, so that any one of their own analysts could steal everything.

Could take it all. Could just snatch it away and copy it and store it on a few laptops.

But now, yes now, having been made aware of this vulnerability, the agency will make corrections.

Sure.



And reporters for elite US media don’t find any of this hard to swallow.

A smart sixth-grader could see through this tower of fabricated baloney in a minute, but veteran grizzled reporters are clueless.

Last night, on Charley Rose, in an episode that left me breathless, a gaggle of pundits/newspeople warned that Ed Snowden, walking around with those four laptops, could be an easy target for Chinese spies or Russian spies who could get access to the data on those computers. The spies could just hack in.

But the NSA can’t. No. The NSA can’t find out what Snowden has. They can only speculate.

It’s charades within charades.

This whole Snowden affair is an op. It’s the kind of op that works because people are prepared to believe anything.

The tightest and strongest and richest and smartest spying agency in the world can’t find its own employee. It’s in the business of tracking, and it can’t find him.

It’s in the business of security, and it can’t protect its own data from its employees.

If you believe that, I have timeshares to sell in the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

In previous articles (see Spygate on this blog), I’ve made a case for Snowden being a CIA operative who still works for his former employer. He was handed a bunch of NSA data by the CIA. He didn’t steal anything. The CIA wants to punch a hole in the NSA. It’s called an internal turf war. It’s been going on as long as those agencies have existed side by side.

For example….the money.

Wired Magazine, June 2013 issue. James Bamford, author of three books on the NSA, states:

“In April, as part of its 2014 budget request, the Pentagon [which rules the NSA] asked Congress for $4.7 billion for increased ‘cyberspace operations,’ nearly $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation. At the same time, budgets for the CIA and other intelligence agencies were cut by almost the same amount, $4.4 billion. A portion of the money going to…[NSA] will be used to create 13 cyberattack teams.”

That means spying money. Far more for NSA, far less for CIA.

Turf war.



But in this article, let’s stay focused on the fairy tales, which are the cover stories floated to the press, the public, the politicians.

We have reporters at the Washington Post and at The Guardian. We have Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks. They’re all talking to Snowden. The NSA can spy on them. Right? Can listen to their calls and read their emails and hack into their notes. Just like people have been hacking into the work and home computers of Sharyl Attkisson, star CBS investigative reporter.

But the NSA can’t do all this spying and then use it to find Snowden. Just can’t manage it.

So…everybody in the world with a computer has passwords. The NSA can cut through them like a sword through hot butter. But Assange and the Post and Guardian and Snowden must have super-special passwords.

They got these passwords by sending a stamped self-addressed envelope, along with 25 cents, and a top from a cereal box, to The Lone Ranger. These passwords are charged with atomic clouds that obscure men’s minds so they cannot see or spy. They’re immortal and invulnerable.

The NSA can spy on anyone else in the world, but they can’t get their foot in the door, when it comes to the Post, The Guardian, and Assange.

And if Snowden winds up in Ecuador, that too will become an insurmountable mystery.

“Nope, we don’t know where he is. He’s vanished. Ecuador has a Romulan shield surrounding it. The cloaking technology is too advanced.”

Perhaps you recall that, in the early days of this scandal, Snowden claimed he could spy on anyone in the US, including a federal judge or even the president, if he had their email addresses.

Uh-huh. But the combined talents of the NSA, now, can’t spy on Snowden. I guess they just can’t find his email address.

Snowden isn’t the only savvy computer kid in the country. There must be a million people, at minimum, who can cook up email addresses that evade the reach of the NSA. Yes?

What we have here are contradictions piled on contradictions piled on lies.

And in the midst of this, a whole lot of people are saying, “Don’t look too closely. Snowden is a hero and he exposed the NSA and that’s a wonderful thing.”

And a whole lot of other people are saying, “Snowden is a traitor and he should be tried for treason or killed overseas. That’s all you need to know.”

The truth? Well, the truth, as they say, is the first casualty in war. But in the spying business, the truth was never there to begin with. That’s one of the requirements of the industry.

Son, if you think you’ve lied before, you haven’t got a clue. We’re going to tell you to do things that’ll make your head spin. That’s the game we’re in. We’re going to make you tell lies in your sleep.”

And these are the people the public believes.

It’s a beautiful thing. It really is. The fairy tales are made of sugar and the public, the press, and the people eat them. And then they ask for more.

Jon Rappoport

I am keeping an open mind but I will also continue to engage discussion that may suggest things are not as they seem to be.


BWT thanks for sharing Jerky that was interesting as well.

[Jerky]

You are very welcome, Hunter.

YOPJ

[Hunter]

Saw something on Reddit this morning about Anon is going to start releasing the personal information and lots of dirt of all congresscritters who voted in favor of PRISM and PRISM like legislation, starting tomorrow, one person per week in a sort of "how you like them apples" counter attack.

Anyone else heard of this?

[divideandconquer]

I don't believe Snowden is the real thing. Especially after talking to a former database administrator for a defense contractor to the CIA from the 1970s to the late 1990s.. He had to prepare reports for the Joint Chiefs every morning, no matter what, regarding all our military activity around the world.. But he is totally confused by Snowden's ability to evade capture. He said that when he was working for defense, they had the technology to zoom in on something as small as a pinprick located anywhere in the world, including inside a submarine submerged thousands of feet deep. Moreover, he said that there would've been a hit placed on Snowden...like, right away!

Even though this man still believes in the system, that we're still the good guys--despite acknowledging that in his 20+ years...not even one peaceful day-- Snowden's apparent ability to circumvent the elaborate US global defense grid boggles his mind. The thing is this guy is anything but a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the US...at least as far as I could tell.

[JackRiddler]

Totally unimpressed by Rappoport's faux incredulity, basically free of fact or argument. His Podunk example is stupid. Meanwhile, Snowden's in Moscow. Sure the NSA knows where he is. So? They'd like to swoop in and grab him, I'm sure. But he's in Moscow, see? They'd also love to invade the Ecuadoran embassy in London. But they're not quite there, see? Plus, they've got the rest of this poor young bastard's life to kill him. As for what some panicmongering stories in the press say about his laptops blah blah... who cares?

[American Dream]

http://cryptome.org/2013/07/snowden-spi ... 707-en.htm

7 July 2013

Snowden Der Spiegel Interview

Article in German: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/snowden-spiegel-13-0707.pdf

Related article in German: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/snowden-spi ... 0707-2.pdf

English translation provided by A: http://pastebin.com/zVC14byX

Translation of Der Spiegel Magazine article, July 7, 2013:

Just before Edward Snowden became a world famous whistleblower, he answered an extensive catalog of questions. These came from, amongst others, Jacob Appelbaum, 30, a developer of encryption and security software. Appelbaum educates international human rights groups and journalists on how to work with the Internet in safe and anonymous way.

He became more publicly known in 2010, when he represented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking at a hacker conference in New York. Along with Assange and other co-authors he has recently published the interview recording "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet." [Link by Cryptome.]

In the course of investigations into the WikiLeaks disclosures, Appelbaum came to the attention of American authorities, who demanded companies such as Twitter and Google to divulge his accounts. He himself describes his attitude to WikiLeaks as "ambivalent" - and describes below how it came about that he was able to ask Snowden these questions.

In mid-May I was contacted by the documentary-maker Laura Poitras. She told me, that at this time she was in contact with an anonymous NSA source, which had consented to be interviewed by her.

She put together questions and asked me to contribute questions. This was, among other reasons, to determine whether she was really dealing with a NSA whistleblower. We sent our questions via encrypted e-mails. I did not know that the interlocutor was Edward Snowden until he revealed himself as such in public in Hong Kong. He did not know who I was. I had expected that he was someone in his sixties.

The following is an excerpt from a extensive interview which dealt with further points, many of them technical in nature. Some of the questions now appear in a different order to understand the context.

The discussion focused almost exclusively on the activities of the National Security Agency. It is important to know that these questions were not asked as relating to the events of the past week or the last month. They were entirely asked without any unrest, since, at that point, Snowden was still in Hawaii.

At a later stage I was again in direct contact with Snowden, at which time I also revealed my own my identity. He told me then that he gave consent to publish his statements.

+++++

Question: What is the mission of the National Security Agency (NSA) - and how is their job in accordance with the law?

Snowden: It is the mission of the NSA, to be aware of anything of importance going on outside of the United States. This is a considerable task, and the people there are convinced that not knowing everything about everyone could lead to some existential crisis. So, at some point, you believe it's all right to bend the rules a little. Then, if people hate it that you can bend the rules, it suddenly becomes vital even to break them.

Question: Are German authorities or politicians involved in the monitoring system ?

Snowden: Yes of course. They (the NSA people -- ed.) are in cahoots with the Germans, as well as with the most other Western countries. We (in the U.S. intelligence apparatus -- ed.) warn the others, when someone we want to catch, uses one of their airports - and they then deliver them to us. The information on this, we can for example pull off of the monitored mobile phone of a suspected hacker’s girlfriend -- who used it in an entirely different country which has nothing to do with the case. The other authorities do not ask us where we got the leads, and we do not ask them anything either. That way, they can protect their political staff from any backlash if it came out how massive the global violation of people’s privacy is.

Question: But now as details of this system are revealed, who will be brought before a court over this?

Snowden: Before U.S. courts? You're not serious, are you? When the last large wiretapping scandal was investigated - the interception without a court order, which concerned millions of communications - that should really have led to the longest prison sentences in world history. However, then our highest representatives simply stopped the investigation. The question, who is to be accused, is theoretical, if the laws themselves are not respected. Laws are meant for people like you or me - but not for them.

Question: Does the NSA cooperate with other states like Israel?

Snowden: Yes, all the time. The NSA has a large section for that, called the FAD - Foreign Affairs Directorate.

Question: Did the NSA help to write the Stuxnet program? (the malicious program used against the Iranian nuclear facilities -- ed.)

Snowden: The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

Question: What are the major monitoring programs active today, and how do international partners help the NSA?

Snowden: The partners in the "Five Eyes" (behind which are hidden the secret services of the Americans, the British, the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians -- ed.) sometimes go even further than the NSA people themselves. Take the Tempora program of the British intelligence GCHQ for instance. Tempora is the first "I save everything" approach ("Full take") in the intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which rights are violated by it. This buffered storage allows for subsequent monitoring; not a single bit escapes. Right now, the system is capable of saving three days’ worth of traffic, but that will be optimized. Three days may perhaps not sound like a lot, but it's not just about connection metadata. "Full take" means that the system saves everything. If you send a data packet and if makes its way through the UK, we will get it. If you download anything, and the server is in the UK, then we get it. And if the data about your sick daughter is processed through a London call center, then ... Oh, I think you have understood.

Question: Can anyone escape?

Snowden: Well, if you had the choice, you should never send information over British lines or British servers. Even the Queen’s selfies with her lifeguards would be recorded, if they existed.

Question: Do the NSA and its partners apply some kind of wide dragnet method to intercept phone calls, texts and data?

Snowden: Yes, but how much they can record, depends on the capabilities of the respective taps. Some data is held to be more worthwhile, and can therefore be recorded more frequently. But all this is rather a problem with foreign tapping nodes, less with those of the U.S. This makes the monitoring in their own territory so terrifying. The NSA’s options are practically limitless - in terms of computing power, space or cooling capacity for the computers.

Question: The NSA is building a new data center in Utah. What is it for?

Snowden: These are the new mass data storage facilities.

Question: For how long will the information there be stored?

Snowden: Right now it is still so, that the full text of collected material ages very quickly, within a few days, especially given its enormous amount. Unless an analyst marked a target or a particular communication. In that case the communication is saved for all eternity, one always get an authorization for that anyway. The metadata ages less quickly. The NSA at least wants all metadata to be stored forever. Often the metadata is more valuable than the contents of the communication, because in most cases, one can retrieve the content, if there is metadata. And if not, you mark all future communications that fits this metadata and is of interest, so that henceforth it will be recorded completely. The metadata tells you what you actually want from the broader stream.

Question: Do private companies help the NSA?

Snowden: Yes. But it's hard to prove that. The names of the cooperating telecom companies are the crown jewels of the NSA... Generally you can say that multinationals with headquarters in the USA should not be trusted until they prove otherwise. This is unfortunate, because these companies have the ability to deliver the world's best and most reliable services - if they wanted to. To facilitate this, civil rights movements should now use these revelations as a driving force. The companies should write enforceable clauses into their terms, guaranteeing their clients that they are not being spied on. And they should include technical guarantees. If you could move even a single company to do such a thing, it would improve the security of global communications. And when this appears to not be feasible, you should consider starting one such company yourself.

Question: Are there companies that refuse to to cooperate with the NSA?

Snowden: Yes, but I know nothing of a corresponding list that would prove this. However, there would surely be fewer companies of this type if the companies working with the NSA would be punished by the customer. That should be the highest priority of all computer users who believe in the freedom of thoughts.

Question: What are the sites you should beware, if you do not want to become targeted by the NSA?

Snowden: Normally one is marked as a target because of a Facebook profile or because of your emails. The only place which I personally know where you can become a target without this specific labeling, are jihadist forums.

Question: What happens if the NSA has a user in its sights?

Snowden: The target person is completely monitored. An analyst will get a daily report about what has changed in the computer system of the targeted person. There will also be... packages with certain data which the automatic analysis systems have not understood, and so on. The analyst can then decide what he wants to do - the computer of the target person does not belong to them anymore, it then more or less belongs to the U.S. government.

[divideandconquer]

Dave Emory thinks Eddie "the Friendly Spook" Snowden, as he calls him, may be in the employ of the BND. http://spitfirelist.com/

In the back­ground of both Eddie the Friendly Spook, as well as his co-conspirators at Wik­iLeaks are far-right, fas­cist ele­ments, espe­cially the big money men who loom large in the back­ground such as Peter Thiel and Carl Lund­strom.

Both Snow­den and Assange hold far-right polit­i­cal views in direct con­trast with their man­u­fac­tured pub­lic per­sonae of “cru­saders for free­dom and human rights.” Snow­den decamped first to China and then to Rus­sia, nei­ther a bas­tion of inter­net free­dom and civil lib­er­ties. Snowden’s actions only make sense in the con­text of work­ing to dam­age Obama.

Snowden’s actions give every indi­ca­tion of being an intel­li­gence com­mu­nity desta­bi­liza­tion oper­a­tion. We ini­tially thought that Obama and was the tar­get and that cer­tainly appears to be the case. It may well alien­ate young, ide­al­is­tic vot­ers from Obama and, per­haps, direct naifs toward the 2016 can­di­dacy of Rand Paul, the son of crypto-Nazi Ron Paul, Cit­i­zen Snowden’s can­di­date of choice. Rand Paul has been walk­ing point in the attack on NSA.

How­ever, as the “op” has devel­oped, it appears to be far larger than just an anti-Obama gam­bit, and directed at the United States and U.K. as well.

Snow­den leaked infor­ma­tion about NSA spy­ing on Ger­many (and now the EU) just as Obama was going to meet Angela Merkel.

Now, Ger­many (and the German-dominated EU) are attack­ing both NSA and GCHQ over spy­ing on Ger­many and EU. We will explore this more fully in future posts on the sub­ject. (See text excerpts below.)

We note that, just like a slight-of-hand artist who has his audi­ence watch­ing the wav­ing of a brightly-colored ker­chief while a rab­bit is osten­si­bly pulled from a hat, Germany/BND/EU has much to gain from direct­ing atten­tion and ire toward NSA and GCHQ.

The focus on “Evil Amer­ica and Evil Britain” eclipses a Ger­man court rul­ing that the BND can keep its file on Adolph Eich­mann secret. The sup­posed rea­son is that to dis­close this would (ahem) reveal sen­si­tive data that would be bet­ter kept secret. This “data” con­cerns a man who has been dead for over fifty years! Don’t expect Wik­iLeaks, Snow­den, Anonymous/Pirate Bay or any of the rest of that crowd to pur­sue this! (See text excerpts below.)

Exam­in­ing the Eich­mann sit­u­a­tion would reveal the oper­a­tions of the Under­ground Reich (See text excerpt below.)

In addi­tion to Eich­mann him­self, many of his top aides worked for BND, includ­ing Alois Brun­ner and Walther Rauff.

Look­ing beyond the BND/Gehlen org itself, the de-nazification of Ger­many itself is a myth. Not even Der Spiegel can deny that.

Focus­ing pub­lic atten­tion on “bad NSA, bad GCHQ, bad U.S., bad U.K.” dis­tracts from the fact that Ger­many has not only been doing the same thing, but is ramp­ing up its own, ille­gal elec­tronic inter­cep­tion pro­grams.

[barracuda]

So is he in Venezuela or not?