THE 2030 AGENDA 'STATE OF CONTROL' DOCUMENTARY! (ENGLISH)

ACLU: Snowden Proved NSA Internet Spying Harms Americans

U.S.



By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSMARCH 10, 2015, 5:50 P.M. E.D.T.


BALTIMORE — The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the National Security Agency and the Justice Department on Tuesday, challenging the government's practice of collecting personal information from vast amounts of data harvested directly from the Internet's infrastructure.

The suit filed in federal court in Maryland accuses the NSA of scooping up virtually everything sent via the Internet between Americans and people outside the United States, and then scouring it to identify and monitor foreign intelligence targets.

A similar challenge was turned away by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said the plaintiffs couldn't prove they'd been harmed. This lawsuit says that's changed since the government confirmed the surveillance after its scope and details were leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

This "upstream" surveillance of the Internet's "backbone" of digital networks reaches far beyond any individuals the government is targeting to combat terror attacks, and violates constitutional protections of free speech and privacy, the plaintiffs say.

ACLU staff attorney Patrick Toomey said Tuesday that Snowden's leaks changed the whole legal paradigm.

"We believe the Snowden disclosures will make an immense difference in how this case will play out," Toomey said. "Prior to Snowden, the public had never heard of upstream surveillance. But based on those disclosures and what the government has acknowledged itself, we know the government isn't just surveilling its targets, its surveilling everyone."

The suit's other plaintiffs include The Wikimedia Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, the Rutherford Institute, PEN American Center, The Nation magazine, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women and Washington Office on Latin America.

Wikipedia was included on an NSA slide Snowden leaked in 2013 that demonstrated the agency's interest in monitoring communications on certain websites. That frightened Wikipedia contributors, particularly in countries where human rights aren't respected, whose anonymity is essential to the free flow of information, founder Jimmy Wales said.

The Wikimedia Foundation — which hosts 12 websites including Wikipedia that received more than 248 billion page requests between October 2013 and October 2014 — is directly threatened by the fear that the U.S. government can share the surveillance information it gathers with intelligence agencies in other countries, Wales wrote Tuesday.

"Surveillance erodes the original promise of the Internet: an open space for collaboration and experimentation, and a place free from fear," he wrote.

Toomey said the government's surveillance tactics are particularly dangerous because they discourage organizations from engaging in global human rights work, saying the programs have a "chilling effect on the work of organizations that are essential to democracy."

The suit filed Tuesday echoes the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit in California accusing the NSA of tapping into an AT&T network in San Francisco to harvest the communications of private U.S. citizens. A federal judge ruled last month that the plaintiffs would not be able to make their case, since forcing disclosure could compromise national security.

Mark Rumold, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Snowden's disclosures could certainly bolster ACLU's argument, but the state secret privilege remains a challenge.

"The government still uses the threat of damage to national security to get legitimate constitutional claims blocked in court," Rumold said. "Snowden's disclosures have absolutely changed the playing field, but the playing field is not level."

The NSA made no public comment on the suit, but current and former U.S. government officials have said the Internet surveillance is authorized by a secret intelligence court and focused so that it minimizes the collection of communications by American citizens.

And while they acknowledge that some communications of American citizens are collected in pursuit of foreign data, they say those are subject to special handling, including blacking out the names unless they are relevant, and they say a U.S. citizen or resident can't be targeted without a specific warrant.

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Associated Press Writer Ken Dilanian in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.

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New York Film Fest Will World Premiere Laura Poitras’ Edward Snowden Docu ‘CITIZENFOUR’

by Jeremy Gerard
September 16, 2014 9:08am







New York Film Festival director Kent Jones said today that the Film Society of Lincoln Center has added the world premiere of Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR to its Main Slate lineup. The presentation will run Friday, October 10 at 6 PM at Alice Tully Hall. Poitras will also participate in a free HBO Directors Dialogues the following day at 4 PM, at the Walter Reade Theater. The film, from RADiUS in association with Participant Media and HBO Documentary Films, opens theatrically October 24.

RelatedOliver Stone Buys Edward Snowden Russian Lawyer's "Novel" About Asylum-Seeking Whistleblower

According to the festival: In January 2013, Poitras was several years into the making of a film about abuses of national security in post-9/11 America when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and reporter Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely sui generis in the history of cinema: a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.

“Seeing CITIZENFOUR for the first time is an experience I’ll never forget,” Jones said in a statement released by the society. “The film operates on multiple levels at the same time: a character study (of Edward Snowden)… a real-life suspense story… and a chilling exposé. When the lights came up, everyone in the room was alternately stunned, excited, and deeply troubled. A brave documentary, but also a powerful work from a master storyteller.”

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Treasure Map: The NSA Breach of Telekom and Other German Firms

By Andy Müller-Maguhn, Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Michael Sontheimer and Christian Grothoff

DPA

According to internal NSA and GCHQ documents, the intelligence agencies managed to break into Deutsche Telekom networks.

According to top-secret documents from the NSA and the British agency GCHQ, the intelligence agencies are seeking to map the entire Internet, including end-user devices. In pursuing that goal, they have broken into networks belonging to Deutsche Telekom.


When it comes to choosing code names for their secret operations, American and British agents demonstrate a flare for creativity. Sometimes they borrow from Mother Nature, with monikers such as "Evil Olive" and "Egoistic Giraffe." Other times, they would seem to take their guidance from Hollywood. A program called Treasure Map even has its own logo, a skull superimposed onto a compass, the eye holes glowing in demonic red, reminiscent of a movie poster for the popular "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, starring Johnny Depp.

Treasure Map is anything but harmless entertainment. Rather, it is the mandate for a massive raid on the digital world. It aims to map the Internet, and not just the large traffic channels, such as telecommunications cables. It also seeks to identify the devices across which our data flows, so-called routers.

Furthermore, every single end device that is connected to the Internet somewhere in the world -- every smartphone, tablet and computer -- is to be made visible. Such a map doesn't just reveal one treasure. There are millions of them.

The breathtaking mission is described in a Treasure Map presentation from the documents of the former intelligence service employee Edward Snowden which SPIEGEL has seen. It instructs analysts to "map the entire Internet -- Any device, anywhere, all the time."

Treasure Map allows for the creation of an "interactive map of the global Internet" in "near real-time," the document notes. Employees of the so-called "FiveEyes" intelligence agencies from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which cooperate closely with the American agency NSA, can install and use the program on their own computers. One can imagine it as a kind of Google Earth for global data traffic, a bird's eye view of the planet's digital arteries.

Battlefield Map

In addition to monitoring one's own networks as well as those belonging to "adversaries," Treasure Map can also help with "Computer Attack/Exploit Planning." As such, the program offers a kind of battlefield map for cyber warfare.

The New York Times reported on the existence of Treasure Map last November. What it means for Germany can be seen in additional material in the Snowden archive that SPIEGEL has examined.

Treasure Map graphics don't just provide detailed views of German cable and satellite networks. Red markings also reveal to agents which carriers and internal company networks FiveEyes agencies claim to have already accessed. Of particular interest from the German perspective are two "Autonomous Systems" (AS) -- networks -- marked in red. They are labeled Deutsche Telekom AG and Netcologne, a Cologne-based provider.

The legend for the graphics in question explains the meaning behind the red markings: "Red Core Nodes: SIGINT Collection access points within AS." SIGINT refers to signals intelligence. In other words, networks marked with a red dot are under observation.

Regional provider Netcologne operates its own fiber-optic network and provides telephone and Internet services to over 400,000 customers. The formerly state-owned company Telekom, of which the German government still owns a 31.7 percent stake, is one of the dozen or so international telecommunications companies that operate global networks, so-called Tier 1 providers. In Germany alone, Telekom provides mobile phone services, Internet and land lines to 60 million customers.

According to the logic of the undated Treasure Map documents, that would mean that the NSA and its partner agencies are perhaps not only able to monitor the networks of these companies and the data that travels through them, but also the end devices of their customers. Where exactly the NSA gained access to the companies' networks is not made clear in the graphics. The red-marked AS of Deutsche Telekom by itself includes several thousand routers worldwide.

'Completely Unacceptable'

The German company is also active in the US and Great Britain. Furthermore, it is part of the TAT14 telecommunications cable consortium; the cable runs via Great Britain to the east coast of the US. "The accessing of our network by foreign intelligence agencies," says a Telekom spokesperson, "would be completely unacceptable."

Because Netcologne is a regional provider, it would seem highly likely that the NSA or one of its Treasure Map partners accessed the network from within Germany. That would be a clear violation of German law and potentially another NSA-related case for German public prosecutors. Thus far, the only NSA-related casecurrently being investigated is the monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.

Several weeks ago, SPIEGEL shared a GCHQ document with both companies in order to give them an opportunity to look into the alleged security breaches themselves. The security departments of both firms say they launched intensive investigations but failed to find suspicious mechanisms or data streams leaving the network.

Telekom and Netcologne are not the first German companies to have been successfully hacked by Anglo-American intelligence agencies, according to their own documents. In March, SPIEGEL reported on the large-scale attack by the British agency GCHQ on German satellite teleport operators Stellar, Cetel and IABG. Such providers offer satellite Internet connections to remote regions of the world. All three companies are marked red on the Treasuremap graphic, meaning that the NSA and its partner agencies have, according to their documents, internal "Collection Access Points."

SPIEGEL also contacted 11 non-German providers marked in the documents to request comment. Four answered, all saying they examined their systems and were unable to find any irregularities. "We would be extremely concerned if a foreign government were to seek unauthorized access to our global networks and infrastructure," said a spokesperson for the Australian telecommunications company Telstra.

'Key Staff'

Just how far GCHG and NSA go to improve their secret map of the Internet and its users can be seen in the example of Stellar.

The document describing the attack on the business, part of the so-called Mittelstand of small- to medium-sized companies that form the backbone of the German economy, originates from the Network Analysis Center of Britain's GCHQ, which is based in Bude along the Atlantic coast in Cornwall. The document lists "key staff" at the company. The document states they should be identified and "tasked." "Tasking" somebody in signals intelligence jargon means that they are to be targeted for surveillance. In addition to CEO Christian Steffen, nine other employees are named in the document.

The attack on Stellar has notable similarities with the GCHQ surveillance operation targeting the half-state-owned Belgian provider Belgacom, which SPIEGEL reported on in the summer of 2013. There too, the GCHQ Network Analysis department penetrated deeply into the Belgacom network and that of its subsidiary BICS by way of hacked employee computers. They then prepared routers for cyber-attacks.

SPIEGEL reporters visited Stellar at its offices in Hürth, near Cologne, and presented passages of the documents in question to the CEO as well as three other employees cited by the British. A video of the visit can be seen here.

Katy Scoggin / Laura Poitras

Among other things, Steffen and his colleagues were able to recognize in the GCHQ document a listing for their central server including the company's mail server, which the attackers appear to have hacked.

The document also includes details about the concrete findings of the spying efforts, including an internal table that shows which Stellar customers are being served by which specific satellite transponders. "Those are company secrets and sensitive information," said Stellar's visibly shocked IT chief, Ali Fares, who is himself cited as an employee to be "tasked."

'Xxxx!'

Any remaining sanguinity is lost at the point the Stellar officials see the password for the central server of an important customer in the intelligence agency documents. The significance of the theft is immense, Fares says. The information, he continues, could allow the agencies to cut off Internet access to customers in, for example, Africa. It could also allow them to manipulate links and emails.

CEO Steffen commented on the document with a terse "xxxx!" He considers it to be final proof that his company's systems were illegally breached. "The hacked server stood behind our company's own firewall," he said. "The only way of accessing it is if you first successfully break into our network." The company in question is no longer a customer with Stellar.

When asked if there are any possible reasons that would prompt Britain, an EU partner country, to take such an aggressive approach to his company, Steffen just shrugged his shoulders, perplexed. "Our customer traffic doesn't run across conventional fiber optic lines," he said. "In the eyes of intelligence services, we are apparently seen as difficult to access." Still, he argues, "that doesn't give anyone the right to break in."

The founder and CEO of Stellar says he has no intention of letting this pass. "A cyber-attack of this nature is a clear criminal offense under German law," he said. "I want to know why we were a target and exactly how the attack against us was conducted -- if for no other reason than to be able to protect myself and my customers from this happening again." Six weeks ago, Steffen wrote a letter to the British government asking for an explanation, but he has not received an answer. Both GCHQ and NSA have likewise declined comment on the matter.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom's security division has conducted a forensic review of important routers in Germany, but has yet to detect anything. Volker Tschersich, who heads the security division, says it's possible the red markings in Treasure Map can be explained as access to the Tat14 cable, in which Telekom occupies a frequency band in Britain and the US. At the end of last week, the company informed Germany's Federal Office for Information Security of SPIEGEL's findings.

The classified documents also indicate that other data from Germany contributes to keeping the global treasure map current. Of the 13 servers the NSA operates around the world in order to track current data flows on the open Internet, one is located somewhere in Germany.

Like the other servers, this one, which feeds data into the secret NSA network is "covered" in a data center.

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NSA and GCHQ Treasure Map Documents

The following selection of NSA and GCHQ documents pertain to Treasure Map and the access to internal networks of German and non-German companies achieved via the program. SPIEGEL has redacted them to obscure the most sensitive information.

Satellite Teleport Knowledge -- Stellar
Bad Guys Are Everywhere -- Treasure Map Presentation
Treasure Map Announces a New Release

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FYI:
T-Mobile International AG is a holding company for Deutsche Telekom AG's various mobile communications subsidiaries outside Germany.

T-Mobile - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them

BY ANDY GREENBERG
08.13.14 |
7:00 AM |




Platon

If the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, it’s not because of Edward Snowden’s attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSA’s most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files he’d copied.

In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents he’d smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed. Those hints, he says, were intended to make clear his role as a whistleblower rather than a foreign spy, and to allow the agency time to minimize the national security risks created by the documents’ public release.

The fact that NSA officials have told the press that his haul may have been as large as 1.7 million documents, says Snowden, is a sign that the agency has either purposely inflated the size of his leak or lacks the forensic skills to see the clues he left for its auditors. “I figured they would have a hard time,” Snowden tells WIRED, describing the agency’s attempts to reverse-engineer his leak. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

In a speech late last year, NSA director Keith Alexander said that Snowden had given reporters “between 50,000 and 200,000 documents.” But in later statements to the press, NSA officials have said only that Snowden “accessed” 1.7 million documents, without specifying how much of that access was part of his authorized NSA duties. And Alexander also admitted in an interview after his resignation that the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of Snowden’s leak. Indeed, an agency official said in a 60 Minutes interview that its post-leak investigation removed from the NSA’s classified network every computer Snowden could have ever accessed, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, for fear that he might have planted spyware on the machines for future data collection.

That image of Snowden as a stealthy spy contrasts sharply with Snowden’s own depiction of his leaking actions. As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in his book No Place To Hide, Snowden claims he could have left no trace on the NSA’s network due to its lack of audit controls. But he said he instead left behind some “footprints” to show NSA investigators that he had acted alone and to prevent suspicion of his coworkers.

Snowden’s new claims go further: That he intended those footprints to outline exactly what he’d taken. In addition to shedding light on his motives, Snowden says he meant the clues to allow the NSA to avoid collateral damage from his leaks, changing codenames and plans to anticipate the release of some of its most sensitive secrets.

The repetition of the 1.7 million number by political figures and the press is at least partly intended to mischaracterize Snowden’s intentions, argues his lawyer Jesselyn Radack, who is also national security director for the whistleblower-focused Government Accountability Project. “I think they probably didn’t spot the bread crumbs,” she says of the NSA’s investigators. “Even if they did get them, I think this [1.7 million] number is manufactured out of whole cloth to give the impression of a wholesale data dump. In fact, Ed very carefully selected exactly what he wanted to turn over and why.”

When WIRED asked an NSA spokesperson to comment on Snowden’s new claims or its internal estimate of the size of his leak, spokesperson Vanee Vines responded with this statement: “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the U.S. Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”

In a followup inquiry through his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, Snowden wouldn’t offer any more details on how exactly he left his network bread crumbs for the NSA or the real total number of documents he took. In forensic analyses of a typical computer network, a leaker’s behavior could be found in everything from logs kept by network monitoring tools to changes in operating system files like Windows’ system registry, which can be analyzed to show what documents a user has opened.

Despite his early intention to make the NSA aware of the scope of his data theft, Snowden may have good reason to now keep the extent of his leaks secret. That knowledge could serve as an important bargaining chip if Snowden seeks to return to the U.S. and negotiate a plea deal, an option he’s hinted at exploring.

In the meantime, Snowden tells WIRED—perhaps with a certain amount of schadenfreude—that the government’s overestimation of the size of his leak has left it to imagine the worst. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

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United States of Secrets: Part One

PBS



Published on May 14, 2014

From PBS and Frontline: Last year Edward Snowden downloaded tens of thousands of top-secret documents from a highly secure government computer network. The revelations that followed touched off a fierce debate over the massive surveillance operations conducted by the National Security Agency. Now FRONTLINE investigates the secret history of the unprecedented surveillance program that began in the wake of September 11th and continues today. Through exclusive interviews with intelligence insiders, cabinet officials, and government whistle-blowers, Part One reveals how the U.S. government came to monitor the communications of millions of Americans and to collect billions of records on ordinary people around the world..

Watch it for free on WNET 13
or
Watch it gratis on PBS site

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Democracy Needs Whistleblowers — That's Why I Broke into the FBI in 1971

The Guardian / By Bonnie Raines


Like Snowden, we broke laws to reveal something that was more dangerous, and we wanted to hold J Edgar Hoover accountable.



Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
January 7, 2014 |


I vividly remember the eureka moment. It was the night we broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in March 1971 and removed about 1,000 documents from the filing cabinets. We had a hunch that there would be incriminating material there, as the FBI under J Edgar Hoover was so bureaucratic that we thought every single thing that went on under him would be recorded. But we could not be sure, and until we found it, we were on tenterhooks.

A shout went up among the group of eight of us. One of us had stumbled on a document from FBI headquarters signed by Hoover himself. It instructed the bureau's agents to set up interviews of anti-war activists as "it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

That was the first piece of evidence to emerge. It was a vindication.

Looking back on what we did, there are obvious parallels with what Edward Snowden has done in releasing National Security Agency documents that show the NSA's blanket surveillance of Americans. I think Snowden's a legitimate whistleblower, and I guess we could be called whistleblowers as well.

A look back at what happened

I was 29 when my husband John and I decided to join six other people to carry out the break-in. I was a mother of three children, aged eight, six and two, and I was working on a degree in education at Temple University, where John was a professor of religion.

We had both been heavily involved in the civil rights movement. John had been a freedom rider, and in Philadelphia we participated in anti-war protests against Vientnam. Through that activity we knew that the FBI was actively trying to squelch dissent, illegally and secretly. We knew that they were sending informants into university classrooms, infiltrating meetings, and tapping phones. The problem was that though we knew all this, there was no way to prove it.

A physics professor at Haverford College named Bill Davidon called a few of us together at his home. Bill, who died last November, floated the idea of doing something to obtain evidence. He just came out with it: "What do you think about breaking into an FBI office to remove the files?" If it hadn't been for Bill, who was so smart and strategic, I'm not sure we would have taken it seriously. But we did.

Bill articulated for all of us the frustration over the foment of those times, and the feeling that we all had of being compelled to do something as ordinary citizens because no one in Washington was holding Hoover accountable. We started looking into the feasibility of a break-in. Right away, we found out the main FBI office in Philadelphia was in a high-rise in the center of the city, and that it was impregnable. Then we learned there were other field offices in the suburbs, and that lead us to Media.

John and I lived in a big old house in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, and we set aside a room in the third floor to be our base of operations. We lined the walls with maps of Media. We had to tell our elder children not to talk to anyone about the maps on the walls. Even though they knew nothing of our plans, we worried the detail might give something away.

We cased the FBI office in Media for about three months. Two of us would go and watch activity in and around that building, record people going in and out and the patterns of police patrols.

I was chosen to carry out the last piece of casing, which involved getting into the office during business hours to check out its security systems. I called and made an appointment to interview the head of the office, under the ruse that I was a Swarthmore College student researching opportunities for women in the FBI.

I tried not to arouse suspicions, tucking up my long hippy hair in a hat, wearing glasses and gloves throughout the interview even though I was taking notes. Through that visit I learned there was no security, none at all, in the office – even the filing cabinets were left unlocked.

I think it was Bill Davidon's idea to choose 8 March 1971 as the operation's date. It was the night of Muhammad Ali's fight against Joe Frazier, and we thought people would be listening on their radios and that the police would perhaps be a little less vigilant.

As the day approached, we both grew anxious. We had three children, there was a lot at jeopardy. We knew that if things went wrong and we were convicted, we could go to federal prison for a long time. We talked to my husband's brother and to my parents, without telling them the details, and asked them to take care of our children if the worst happened.

John wasn't sleeping well. I was a little more bold and determined, a little gung-ho I guess. My association with good people in the movement gave me strength, and the idea that citizens have to take responsibility for when our rights are being abused.

Four of us broke into the FBI office. Keith Forsyth had trouble picking the lock, which was daunting. My job that night was to distract any patrolling police cars by pretending my own vehicle had broken down. Luckily, no police drove by.

We spent a week going through the documents and then mailing them out anonymously to congresspeople and some progressive journalists. All the journalists, including the New York Times, returned the documents to the FBI under pressure from the Nixon White House. Everyone was afraid of Hoover, except the Washington Post. After the Post published the documents, everyone else jumped on board.

We were so happy that, finally, the right kind of information was getting out, and that it was accurate information that could stir things up. It had that effect, too – it really did stir things up. Senator Frank Church from Idaho, head of the Senate intelligence committee, called for hearings on the FBI and the intelligence. We felt our work was done.

Democracy needs whistleblowers

Democracy needs whistleblowers. Snowden was in a position to reveal things that nobody could dispute. He has performed a legitimate, necessary service. Unlike us, he revealed his own identity, and as a result, he's sacrificed a lot.

On our part, you could accuse us of being criminals – and Hoover did just that: he was apoplectic and sent 200 agents to try and find us in Philadelphia. "Find me that woman!" he screamed at them.

But to us there didn't seem to be an alternative at that point. No one was going to be hurt. We hoped for the outcomes that we wanted. We knew, of course, that we were breaking law, but I think that sometimes you have to break laws in order to reveal something dangerous, and to put a stop to it.

For five years we lived under the threat of arrest. There was a sketch of me that the FBI circulated from when I impersonated a Swarthmore student, though I didn't know it at the time. And the FBI interviewed John, luckily while I was out of the house. After five years, the statute of limitations fell for the burglary and we knew we were safe. We didn't celebrate on the fifth anniversary, though after that we were more relaxed. We now know they closed the case in 1976 for lack of any physical evidence.

Eventually, we told the children, and the story became part of family lore. We wanted them to know about that chapter in our history, and besides, you can't ask your children to act according to their conscience unless you show them what you have done in your life, too.

I still worry a great deal about the state of our democracy. Back in 1971, the country was so divided, there was so much foment, but there was also much determination to change things, and people felt empowered to do so.

Nowadays, the country is divided once again, but I don't see much concern about the abuses that are happening today, like the surveillance of mosques in America, using agent provocateurs. I hear people say, "I don't care," the government can do what it needs to do as long as it protects me from terrorism …" To me, that's giving the authorities blanket permission to cross the line again.

Dissent and accountability are the lifeblood of democracy, yet people now think they just have to roll over in the name of "anti-terrorism". Members of government thinks it can lie to us about it, and that they can lie to Congress. That concerns me for the future of my children and grandchildren, and that too makes me feel I can talk about, at my age, doing something as drastic as breaking-in to an FBI office in the search for truth.



Bonnie Raines was one of eight Americans who committed burglary on the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971.


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Edward Snowden's Message to the World on Christmas 2013

Raw: Snowden Sends Christmas Day Message to US



AssociatedPress


Published on Dec 25, 2013

Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared in a televised Christmas message released to the British public by TV station Channel 4 on Wednesday. (Dec. 25)
 

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Open Letter to Obama and Congress From Internet Giants Calls For Reining In Government Surveillance

Ronald Bailey
Dec. 9, 2013 10:20 am

EFF

Today, eight leading internet companies have published in several major newspapers an open letter to President Barack Obama and to Members of Congress urging them to rein in the growth of the national security surveillance state. From the letter:

We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.

For our part, we are focused on keeping users’ data secure — deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope.

We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight.

The companies behind the letter are AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo. They set out a list of five principles at the ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com website including (1) no bulk collection of user data; (2) independent judicial review of intelligence agency demands, (3) transparent reports on what is being compelled; (4) no country firewalls against cross border data; and (5) a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) among countries to prevent conflicts.

Given the attitudes of authoritarian governments with respect to the internet privacy of their citizens, a comprehensive MLAT that also protects the constitutioinal rights of American citizens to be free from government surveillance might be difficult to negotiate. Or sadly, given the Edward Snowden revelations about the extent of National Security Agency spying, perhaps not that difficult after all.

Privacy violations mean something very different when companies collect collect vast amounts of customer data in order to target ads and services (as annoying as that may be to some users) than when governments collect the similar information in order to monitor the activities of their citizens. The government gaze is a lot more threatening to liberty than is the Google gaze.

Ronald Bailey is a science correspondent at Reason magazine and author of Liberation Biology (Prometheus).
 

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NSA director Keith Alexander and deputy expected to depart in early 2014

News
World news
NSA



Alexander, who was rocked by Edward Snowden's revelations, has formalized plans to leave by next March or April, officials say

Reuters in Washington
theguardian.com, Wednesday 16 October 2013 17.10 EDT




General Keith Alexander has served as NSA director since August 2005, making him its longest-serving chief. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP


The director of the National Security Agency and his deputy are expected to depart in the coming months, US officials said on Wednesday, in a development that could give President Obama a chance to reshape the eavesdropping agency.

Army general Keith Alexander's eight-year tenure was rocked this year by revelations contained in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency's widespread scooping up of telephone, email and social media data.

Alexander has formalized plans to leave by next March or April, while his civilian deputy, Chris Inglis, is due to retire by year's end, according to US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

One leading candidate to replace Alexander is Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, currently commander of the US navy's 10th Fleet and US Fleet Cyber Command, officials told Reuters. The 10th Fleet and Fleet Cyber Command both have their headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. The NSA is also headquartered at Fort Meade.

There has been no final decision on selecting Rogers to succeed Alexander, and other candidates may be considered, the officials said.

An NSA spokeswoman had no comment on the leadership changes.

Alexander has served as NSA director since August 2005, making him its longest-serving chief. He also serves as commander of a related military unit, the US Cyber Command.

Alexander, who has vigorously defended the NSA's activities as lawful and necessary to detect and disrupt terrorist plots, has previously said he planned to leave in the spring.

Inglis, who began his NSA career as a computer security scientist, has been the NSA's second-ranking official since 2006.

While both men are leaving voluntarily, the dual vacancies give Obama an opportunity both to install new leadership following Snowden's revelations and to decide whether the NSA and Cyber Command should have separate leaders.

Cyber Command, which has grown significantly in recent years, has the authority to engage in both defensive and offensive operations in cyberspace. Many NSA veterans argue that having the same person lead the spy agency and Cyber Command diminishes the emphasis on the NSA's work and its unique capabilities.

Rogers has been the navy's top cyber commander since September 2011. Prior to that, he was director of intelligence for the US joint chiefs of staff and for the US Pacific Command.

Rogers is "a good leader, very insightful and well thought of within the community," said a US defense official.

Rogers has worked hard to ensure that the navy has sufficient sailors trained to take on added cyber responsibilities, the official said.

The NSA – which spies on electronic communications of all kinds and protects US government communications – has been one of the most secretive of all US intelligence outfits. Its employees used to joke that NSA stood for either "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything."

But the agency became the focus of controversy this year when Snowden leaked to the media tens of thousands of highly classified documents from the NSA and its British eavesdropping partner. Alexander vigorously defended the agency's actions in congressional testimony and other public appearances.


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Reporter Had To Decide If Snowden Leaks Were 'The Real Thing'

September 11, 2013 3:11 PM




http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=221359323&m=221413468

47 min 18 sec





According to Barton Gellman, Edward Snowden (above) specifically asked journalists not to make all the documents he leaked available to the public. Getty Images

Since the beginning of June, Barton Gellman has been reporting on classified intelligence documents given to him by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. As a result of the Snowden leaks, Gellman and reporter Laura Poitras of the PRISM program, which mines data from nine U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook.

Gellman, who has been writing for The Washington Post, also that the NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress expanded the agency's powers in 2008. He that the U.S. has conducted cyber-operations against computer networks in foreign countries — including Iran, Russia, China and North Korea — and on the "black budget" used to fund secret programs in America's 16 spy agencies.

Gellman is in the process of writing a book on the expansion of government surveillance since the Sept. 11 attacks 12 years ago. He shared a Pulitzer Prize with the rest of The Washington Post's staff in 2002 for reporting after Sept. 11, and won another Pulitzer with Jo Becker in 2008 for their series of articles on Vice President Dick Cheney. That series became the basis of Gellman's best-selling book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Gellman is also a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

He joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross to discuss working with Edward Snowden and the effectiveness of post-Sept. 11 surveillance systems.

Interview Highlights

On how he began corresponding with and trusting Snowden

"The combination of knowing [investigative filmmaker Laura Poitras], of having a background on surveillance issues and of knowing how to communicate securely, all of those were required. She had been approached by Snowden late last year, and honestly lots of journalists get approached by lots of people who purport to know a lot about secret worlds and to have important secrets to disclose. And quite often they can be dismissed quickly as cranks. This one couldn't.

"Laura did not know who she was talking to. He was only willing to talk through the use of these very secret, very secure channels, and she came to me one day and said, 'Can I talk to you in confidence?' And she showed me some of her notes of these conversations. She said, 'Does this look like it's for real to you?' I said, 'So far, it does. But you're going to need a lot more verification, a lot more back-and-forth.'



Barton Gellman is also a contributing editor at large for Time. David Burnett/Contact Press Images

"I started suggesting questions to ask this mystery correspondent. She started showing me answers. ... And finally I opened a direct channel to Snowden and, working alongside Laura, we finally convinced ourselves that if and when he revealed his identity and if and when he actually transferred a document ... we were convinced it was going to be the real thing."

On Snowden's intentions

"[Snowden] gave these documents, ultimately, to only three journalists. What he said he wanted was for us to use our own judgment and to make sure that his bias was kept out of it so that we could make our own judgment about what was newsworthy and important for the public to know. And he said we should also consider how to avoid harm.

"Now, in case anyone doubts his intentions, let's consider what he could've done. If Chelsea [aka Bradley] Manning was able to exfiltrate and send to WikiLeaks and publish in whole half a million U.S. government documents, Edward Snowden — who is far, far more capable [and] had far greater access, certainly knows how to transmit documents — he could've sent them to WikiLeaks. He could've set up and mirrored around the Internet in a way that could not have been taken down. All of the documents could be public right now and they're not. ... He told us not to do it."

On revealing the names of private companies that cooperated with the PRISM program

"There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s. The old telecommunication systems — like AT&T and Verizon and their predecessors — did this sort of routinely and without legal compulsion and out of some combination of patriotism and business-as-usual and fairly lucrative contracts.

"The new Silicon Valley-based Internet companies did not have the same traditions, but to one degree or another they went along and they were under legal compulsion to do so. ... But it was very important to them and to the government to keep their identities a secret. ...

"The thing the intelligence community most wanted to protect in that first story [we wrote] — the most they asked us to hold back was the names of the companies. And we cooperated to a considerable degree with security requests, but my argument back to them was if the damage that you're worried about consists of the companies being less willing to cooperate or suffering a blow to their businesses because the public or their customers don't like what they're doing or don't approve of the program, that's exactly why we have to publish it. That's the core duty we have in terms of accountability reporting."

On whether we're living in a Big Brother society

"Big Brother is a very imperfect analogy. On the one hand ... I see no evidence that the government is assembling these tools in order to spy on political opponents or corruptly to serve some private interest, or things that you worry about with the Big Brother analogy.

"On the other hand, it has accumulated powers that were beyond all imagination of George Orwell — that dwarfed the surveillance capabilities of Orwell — and as it has done so — as it has made the whole world and the U.S. population more and more transparent — it has become more and more opaque about what it's doing. So, increasingly we are living behind one-way mirrors in which the government knows more and more about us and we know less and less about what the government is doing."








On the effectiveness of post-Sept. 11 surveillance

"I have no doubt from reading through some of these files that the surveillance has achieved very important goals, has found very important facts that have served American security. It's not all ... in the field of counterterrorism, but we care a lot about the spread of nuclear weapons; we care a lot about certain activities that are undertaken by foreign governments. So I am absolutely not making the claim that this stuff does not serve American security.

"But you know, in the preamble to the Constitution there are six major purposes that are set out for the design of our government. One of them ... is to secure the national defense. It's not the only interest we have and there has to be a balance, and the balance has not been debated by an informed public because there was an absolute dearth of information. And what we're seeing now, what a lot of Americans say they appreciate, is enough transparency to enable Congress and the American public to decide where they want to draw the lines."


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Internet pioneer Phil Zimmermann on the future of online privacy

Phil Zimmerman on Q

Huffduffed by BigDaveDiode on September 3rd, 2013


In the wake of the Snowden affair and revelations about Gmail privacy (or lack thereof), internet pioneer and cryptography expert Phil Zimmermann joins Jian to discuss the future of online privacy and why he fears the spread of government surveillance.

Zimmermann is the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy, and one of the founders of Silent Circle, which offers a variety of secure communications services. But the company recently shut down its email service, and deleted all its clients’ data, over concerns they couldn’t guarantee its security.

Zimmermann explains just how easy it is to collect data from popular email services, why he believes everyone has something to hide, and why he doesn’t buy the justifications for widespread snooping.

"The problem is that the way things are going now with surveillance, the government doesn’t distinguish between criminals and the rest of us," he said.

"When you feel resigned, that is exactly where they want you to be."


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

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

Glenn Greenwald: a failed attempt at intimidation



Guardian staff
The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013 16.08 EDT




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


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

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

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

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotland Yard refused to be drawn on why Miranda was stopped using powers which enable police officers to stop and question travellers at UK ports and airports.

There was no comment from the Home Office in relation to the detention. However, there was surprise in political circles and elsewhere. Labour MP Tom Watson said that he was shocked at the news and called for it to be made clear if any ministers were involved in authorising the detention.

He said: "It's almost impossible, even without full knowledge of the case, to conclude that Glenn Greenwald's partner was a terrorist suspect.

"I think that we need to know if any ministers knew about this decision, and exactly who authorised it."

"The clause in this act is not meant to be used as a catch-all that can be used in this way."

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers.

Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offence to refuse to co-operate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.

Last month the UK government said it would reduce the maximum period of detention to six hours and promised a review of the operation on schedule 7 amid concerns it unfairly targets minority groups and gives individuals fewer legal protections than they would have if detained at a police station.
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NSA changes in review: The Snowden effect

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3032608/vp/52727674#52727484
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Obama Snubs, Russia Laughs, Putin Wins

 

Vladimir Putin was this close to caring that Barack Obama decided not to meet with him. Photographer: Jochen Eckel/Bloomberg

 

By Leonid Bershidsky Aug 7, 2013 12:53 PM ET





In the U.S., President Barack Obama's decision to cancel a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin for harboring fugitive Edward Snowden is seen as an important diplomatic demarche.

From the Russian perspective, it's a bit of a joke.

One freshly minted Russian witticism, picked up by the news site Gazeta.ru, portrayed the U.S. president as a jilted suitor: "Obama won't see Putin because Putin is already seeing Snowden."
The White House issued a statement saying Obama "looked forward to" the September G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, but that he had decided against a one-on-one meeting with Putin "given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last 12 months." As regards the man wanted in the U.S. for leaking information on government surveillance, the White House said: "Russia’s disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship."

The fact that Obama stopped short of skipping the entire G-20 meeting was seen in the Putin camp as a sign of weakness. The dominant theory is that the U.S. president did not really want to make hostile moves against Russia, but domestic interests forced him to make a show of chastising Putin.

"Obama is under powerful pressure from the cold war lobby," political analyst Sergei Markov told the news agency Interfax.

"This is clearly a political defeat for Obama," pro-Putin newspaper editor Vitaly Tretyakov wrote on the social network Vkontakte. In an eerie echo of the White House statement, Tretyakov added: "Russia, strictly speaking, does not care. What could we expect from Obama's visit? A second reset? But the first one failed. A second detente? Who even remembers the first one?"

Putin's liberal opponents, for their part, could not sympathize with Obama's move. They saw better reasons than Snowden's asylum to chastise Putin.

"It's sad that Obama did not refuse to meet with Putin because of human rights violations in Russia but rather because of rights violations in the U.S.," blogger Oleg Kozyrev wrote on Twitter.

The two leaders did not have much to discuss, anyway.

Russia and the United States do not see eye to eye on most issues, from gay rights to the civil war in Syria. The differences have been starkly evident for at least a year, since Putin returned to the Kremlin after a four-year hiatus. Now a man wanted in the U.S. for espionage has found an apartment in Moscow, is looking for a job and sending out invitations to family in the U.S. If a meeting would not have changed anything, neither does its cancellation.

"Obama canceled his meeting with Putin," Russia's most popular anti-Putin politician Alexei Navalny, who is now running for mayor of Moscow, wrote on Twitter. "As for me, I held my meeting with the residents of Zyablikovo neighborhood as planned."

(Leonid Bershidsky, an editor and novelist, is a Bloomberg View contributor. Follow him on Twitter.)

 

 

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It will be madness in America soon, Out of control

Politics / US Politics Aug 03, 2013 - 05:09 PM GMT

By: Michael_T_Bucci



I bought a copy of USA Today Weekend at the supermarket and wanted to gag. A front-page lead story showing a picture of Edward Snowden's Russian permit was titled: "Welcome, Comrade Snowden" (Is John McCain now writing their headlines?). To read American mainstream news is to collide with an illusory but impenetrable wall of rigid propaganda (rah, rah, America #1; rah, rah, S&P 1700; rah, rah, Washington vs. a world of enemies). In short, the paper's almost one-million readers were encouraged. In so many words, "Don't worry about NSA. Congress has heard the American people and is now moving to reform it. Sleep well tonight, Senator Patrick Leahy is awake."

The mood is critically nervous among those who have written for years about America's war atrocities, descent into post-democracy, vulture economics, systemic corruption and international lawlessness; they might be seeing their worst nightmares - the ones they wished to prevent - occurring, and ones worse becoming more probable.
Why write for a people who appear to have done nothing to preempt their current security (police) state and growing despotism? Why write (or be a whistle-blower) to be demonized, criminalized and decapitated by the very people you are trying to warn? On one hand, writers might pay a heavy price for what they commit to print; on the other hand, they fulfill themselves and fulfill the First Amendment - they speak the truth as they see it. At this juncture, however, the time for using words freely, casually and directly might be changing.

And the time for sustaining the juvenile notion of a world jealous of America's wealth and liberty needs be long buried.

Writer Paul Craig Roberts is correct this week in his vitriol:

"The schizophrenic denizens of Washington have made Americans a hated people. Those with the foresight to know to escape from the growing tyranny also know that wherever they might seek refuge, they will be seen as vermin from the most hated nation and subjected to being scapegoated as spies and evil influences, and at risk of being decimated in reprisals against Washington’s latest atrocity.

"Washington has destroyed the prospects of Americans both at home and abroad."

Not one person wants "the People" to share blame or wants to apply the word "fascism" to the American security-state. Yet, it is the majority of people in America who, for one reason or another, are responsible for their predicament, as the majority of German people during WWII were responsible for theirs and the Japanese people theirs. A democracy thrives from awake, alert individuals; an unbiased press; a tolerance of diverse opinions; and laws (the Constitution and international treaties). As it stands today, Americans have chosen authoritarianism over democracy; consumerism over citizenship; censorship over free-thought; militancy over diplomacy; financial oppression over equity. When they should have they didn't force President Obama to close Gitmo; end the wars; constrain the FBI, CIA, NSA and Gen. Keith B. Alexander; indict financial CEOs and officers. They didn't rebel over airport body scanners; RFID chips in passports; indefinite detentions; torture; state-sponsored assassinations; death squads; military war crimes; drones; Wall Street and corporate pillage of Main Street; or, for that matter, they didn't criminalize anyone except those who "blew the whistle" or dissented. Mr. Obama's constituents are "waking up" (after five years) if comments left at The New York Times over Snowden revelations are any indication. But I place much blame on "Obama people" who, on the one hand, voted for the president to reverse the tide of war and international disgrace generated by former President George W. Bush (or so they claimed); and on the other enabled if not cheered Mr. Obama as he perpetuated the same and worse practices. These are hypocrites.

What destruction and death has been and is propagated by the United States armed forces against the world will now be visited on "the People". What economic exploitation has been waged against the third world countries by American banks and investors will now be waged against "the People". What civil wars the Pentagon and CIA have engineered in the Mid-East will now be applied at home. And if it takes a regime change in Washington, it too will be done. It will be madness in America from this point forward; the world is in its cross hairs and knows it.

Some Americans will cheer a military coup, an assassination, a civil war, a de facto war against most of the planet. The world believed in a president who was never his own man; who sold out early; who relied on stage managers and PR to conceal his identity and conceal the identities of controllers from finance, the Pentagon and intelligence community. Since Snowden, the world has a clearer idea of the untrustworthiness of America's leadership, its corporations and military.

(I believe Mr. Obama might not continue as President, and believe a financial-military coup might have already occurred.)

In this week's Asia Times, Pepe Escobar concludes:

"For the moment, what we have is an Orwellian/Panopticon complex that will persist with its unchecked powers; an aphasic populace; a quiet, invisible man in a Moscow multitude; and a POTUS consumed with boundless rage. Watch out. He may be tempted to wag the (war) dog."

It will be madness in America soon, out of control.

(c) 2013 Michael T Bucci. All Rights reserved.

(Note: responses to emails might be delayed or not met.)

Michael T Bucci is a retired public relations executive from New Jersey presently residing in New England. His essays have appeared at The Market Oracle (UK). He is the author of nine books on practical spirituality including White Book: Cerithous.


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Why NSA Surveillance Will Be More Damaging Than You Think

The real threat from terrorism is not the harm it inflicts directly but the over-reaction it provokes. We saw that with the invasion of Iraq. We're seeing it with security-state overreach.



JAMES FALLOWS


JUL 30 2013, 4:39 AM ET




This column over the weekend, by the British academic John Naughton in the Guardian, takes us one more step in assessing the damage to American interests in the broadest sense-- commercial, strategic, ideological - from the panopticon approach to "security" brought to us by NSA-style monitoring programs.

Naughton's essay doesn't technically tell us anything new. For instance, see earlier reports like this, this, and this. But it does sharpen the focus in a useful way. Whoever wrote the headline and especially the subhead did a great job of capturing the gist:



In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet's continued growth.
American companies, because no foreigners will believe these firms can guarantee security from U.S. government surveillance; 

American interests, because the United States has gravely compromised its plausibility as world-wide administrator of the Internet's standards and advocate for its open, above-politics goals.

Why were U.S. authorities in a position to get at so much of the world's digital data in the first place? Because so many of the world's customers have trusted* U.S.-based firms like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc with their data; and because so many of the world's nations have tolerated an info-infrastructure in which an outsized share of data flows at some point through U.S. systems. Those are the conditions of trust and toleration that likely will change.

The problem for the companies, it's worth emphasizing, is not that they were so unduly eager to cooperate with U.S. government surveillance. Many seem to have done what they could to resist. The problem is what the U.S. government -- first under Bush and Cheney, now under Obama and Biden -- asked them to do. As long as they operate in U.S. territory and under U.S. laws, companies like Google or Facebook had no choice but to comply. But people around the world who have a choice about where to store their data, may understandably choose to avoid leaving it with companies subject to the way America now defines its security interests.

Here's Naughton's version of the implications:

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

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.... Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their [ie, US-based companies] "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.

The real threat from terrorism has never been the damage it does directly, even through attacks as horrific as those on 9/11. The more serious threat comes from the over-reaction, the collective insanity or the simple loss of perspective, that an attack evokes. Our government's ambition to do everything possible to keep us "safe" has put us at jeopardy in other ways.
One more note: it is also worth emphasizing that this damage was not done by Edward Snowden, except in an incidental and instrumental sense. The damage comes from the policies themselves, just as the lasting damage from Abu Ghraib came not from the leaked photos but from the abuse they portrayed.

What governments do eventually becomes known. Eventual disclosure is likely when a program involves even a handful of people. (Latest case in point: Seal Team Six.) It is certain when an effort stretches over many years, entails contracts worth billions of dollars, and requires the efforts of tens of thousands of people -- any one of whom, as we've seen from Snowden, may at any point decide to tell what he knows.

In launching such an effort, a government must assume as a given that what it is doing will become known, and then calculate whether it will still seem "worthwhile" when it does. Based on what we've seen so far, Prism would have failed that test.

____

* Of course the "trust" comes with the caveat that the companies have been piling up this data for their own commercial, ad-targeting, data-mining purposes. But that's a known risk, more or less. The demands placed on the companies by the U.S. government are, for the public at large, the main news of the Snowden revelations.

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Why the fuss with Ecuador all of a sudden?

Ecuador breaks US trade pact to thwart 'blackmail' over Snowden asylum

The Guardian - ‎1 hour ago‎

Ecuador has ramped up its defiance of the US over Edward Snowden by waiving preferential trade rights with Washington even as the whistleblower's prospect of reaching Quito dimmed. President Rafael Correa's government said on Thursday it was ...


Ecuador Tells US To Take Its Trade Agreement And Shove It, After Threats ...

Techdirt - ‎19 minutes ago‎



Ecuador Cancels US Trade Pact Over Repeated Threats

Antiwar.com - ‎23 minutes ago‎


Ecuador renounces trade benefits from US Congress

Thegardenisland.com - ‎45 minutes ago‎



US senator says Snowden case risks Ecuador trade status

Chicago Tribune - ‎1 hour ago‎

-----------------------------------------

Edward Snowden, the alleged 'fugitive' NSA Surveillance leaker, has supposedly asked Ecuador for Asylum; So, now the U.S. has a controversy with Ecuador, because the U.S. wants to apprehend Snowden to prosecute him for treason.  

Here's an ironic fact about the South American country of Ecuador:

The present currency of Ecuador is the United States dollar.

Now that is strange.  

They use the American Dollar and we have a diplomatic crisis?  

What's next?  An embargo? 

Resource

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

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P.S.
The United States dollar (sign: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$), also referred to as the U.S. dollar or American dollar, is the official currency of the United States and its overseas territories. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents.

Source: Wikipedia.

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The Terminal - Snowden Sequel

Edward Snowden stars in the latest installment from Hollywood:  The Terminal: The Snowden Stall

Ed

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...

NSA scandal: the deepest secret of the Ed Snowden operation

by Jon Rappoport

June 18, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Everyone wants to see a hero.

When that hero emerges from the shadows and says all the right things, and when he exposes a monolithic monster, he’s irresistible.

However, that doesn’t automatically make him who he says he is.

That doesn’t automatically exempt him from doubts.

Because he’s doing the right thing, people quickly make him into a spokesman for their own hopes. If he’s finally blasting a hole in the dark enemy’s fortress, he has to be accepted at face value. He has to be elevated.

When dealing with the intelligence community and their spooks and methods, this can be a mistake. Deception is the currency of that community. Layers of motives and covert ops are business as usual.

In previous articles, I’ve raised a number of specific doubts about Ed Snowden.

Here I want to replay four statements Snowden made and examine them.

“When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this [NSA]…over time that awareness of wrongdoing sorts of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem…”

This statement describes Snowden, an analyst working at NSA, chatting regularly to colleagues about his growing doubts over the morality of NSA spying. This is quite hard to believe.

As Steve Kinney, writing at the Centre for Research on Globalisation points out, Snowden would have raised all sorts of red flags about himself.

If he hadn’t been fired outright, he certainly would have come under serious scrutiny, which, at the very least, would have reduced his ability to hack documents out of NSA’s most secret recesses.

And yet, Snowden, an analyst, claims he had access to “full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.”

Really?

That stretches doubt far beyond the point of credulity.

Both The Guardian and the Washington Post supposedly vetted Snowden carefully. I’d really like to see the results of that vetting.

“Rosters of everyone working at the NSA [and] the entire intelligence community…” That’s untold thousands of people. That’s referring to many separate agencies.

Snowden doesn’t stop there. He maintains the security of NSA is not just a sieve, it’s also thousands of separate hunting parties, undertaken at the whim of any analyst:

“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”

Sure. NSA just opens the door to their own analysts, who can, on their own hook, launch spying episodes on anyone in the US. Boom. No operational plans, no coordination. A free-for-all.

“Hey, dig this. Nancy Pelosi was just talking to her hairdresser. I’m going to follow up on her. Think I’ll spy on Nancy and her husband, see what they’re up to. I’ll file reports as I go along…”

“A guy at Los Alamos just wrote to his boss about a new weapons system. Want to see what they’re planning?”

Finally, Snowden claimed he could “shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that’s not my intention.”

Not just spy on everybody in the US. Snowden asserts he could do that. But he could also make the entire spying apparatus of NSA (and even all other intelligence agencies?) go dark with a few hours of work—and he’d evade notice of his NSA bosses as he performed this herculean task.

No. Ridiculous. The very first thing an agency like NSA does is set up a labyrinth to prevent itself from being taken down.

Consider these four Snowden statements together, back up and think. These are propositions that cast the man into a deep pit of doubt.

Who is he?

What is his mission? Is that mission his own, or is he working for someone who wants to punch a hole in the NSA?

In another article, I’ve developed the hypothesis that Snowden is still actually operating for his former bosses at the CIA; people at the CIA, long engaged in a turf war with the NSA, are running him in this op.

Snowden didn’t steal anything from NSA. He couldn’t. People at the CIA could and did steal, and they handed him documents to use in his assigned op.

There are other possible explanations. None of them exonerates the NSA or what it is doing. Let’s be clear about that.

But how far would the CIA go in exposing the guts of the NSA? It’s clear that these intelligence agencies overlap in their efforts (crimes). Therefore, the CIA would be satisfied to smear the NSA without exposing too much.

If so, Snowden’s cache of documents won’t “go all the way.”

His documents won’t yield the longed-for holy grail, though Snowden implies he could unwrap it. I’m talking about the entire interlocking system of US and global surveillance and how it isbuilt.

More than piecemeal exposures about PRISM, US hacks of China, and the G20 meeting in England, an account of the technical “architecture,” as John Young of Cryptome rightly calls it, would torpedo the underlying global Surveillance State.

If Snowden can do that, he hasn’t shown it so far. Right now, he’s put his work in the hands of several journalists, who will dole it out on their own inexplicable timetables.

Why make that move? Why hasn’t Snowden put up a dozen sites and laid everything he has on the line? Before those sites could be taken down, the material would have been copied and sent around the world thousands of times.

Snowden has already said he won’t endanger specific spies or operations that could actually prevent terrorists’ missions.

All right. Then give us everything else. Give us the whole shooting match. Let’s see how the watchers have built their edifice.

But so far, Snowden has shown himself to be a different kind of person, someone who makes claims that far exceed his reach.

Read his four statements again. The sub-text is:

I could complain, raise doubts, and criticize NSA openly at work. No one cared. It was a typical office you’d find in any company. It certainly wasn’t a super-controlled environment. Things were so loose, I could access the complete map of the entire NSA network. Names, places, operations. On a whim, any analyst could spy on anyone in the US. If I wanted to, I could shut down all of US intelligence in a few hours. Forget the popular image of NSA as a fortress with dozens of layers of protection. Forget the notion that I’d have to be granted elite privilege to all sorts of secret keys to get into the inner sanctum, or that, while navigating my way in, I’d be setting off alarm bells all over the place. It was a piece of cake.

Smear.

“NSA is an open book. A book written by idiots. It cost a trillion dollars, but anyone could waltz in there and read the whole thing. Use a thumb drive, and you can also walk out with the whole thing.”

If you set aside Snowden’s remarks about his motives, his morality, and his high mission, his explanation falls apart. It makes no sense.

His CIA handlers would now be telling him that. “Hey Ed, tone down the ‘child’s-play’ angle, okay? You’re making it sound too easy. Remember? You’re the ‘whiz kid genius.’ Yeah, we want to smear NSA, but it’s got to be credible. People have to think it took at least some ingenuity to access the most heavily protected data in the world. Get it?”

A common man of the people, serving the greater good, exposing ongoing crimes that threaten the very lifeblood of the Republic? Is Ed Snowden that hero?

Or is he an operator, an agent?

So far, he’s made himself seem like the agent.

Executives at the NSA are well aware of this. Sitting down with their counterparts at the CIA, they’d be getting an earful. CIA people would be saying:

“Of course Snowden is our boy. He worked for us in Geneva, and he’s working for us now. We told you, after 9/11, we didn’t like you clowns at NSA throwing all the blame on CIA for the Trade Center attacks. We didn’t like that at all. And in the intervening years, we haven’t liked you cutting us out of the spying game. We warned you. So now we’ve given you a taste of what we can do. We can do more. Either we play ball together, or we’ll put NSA in the dumper. Get it?”

Playing ball together. Harmonization.

A sharp reader has just pointed out to me that this is the op behind the op. The fallout from Snowden will be used as the reason for more and better global sharing of spying and surveillance data.

Separate Surveillance States, which already share mountains of data, will come together to coordinate their efforts in an even tighter Surveillance Planet.

The US NSA won’t be tolerated as the pompous king of the hill any longer. It will have to play well with others.

After all, Globalism means the whole globe.

And “we’re all in this together.”

“We” meaning the elites who want to track every move made by every person on Earth, 24/7, in order to predict and control in the new paradise, where the sun rises every day on …compliance.

That’s the takeaway from the Snowden affair. That’s why the secret surveillance/spying at the G20 meeting in England was exposed.

“Gentlemen, we’re all rational here at the table. This is ridiculous. We’re all spying on each other. This can’t go on. It’s counterproductive. We want to work together. So let’s do it. We all want the same thing. A planet under control. The way to achieve that goal is to cooperate. We’ll spy on those who need to be spied on: the population of the planet. We’ll do it together. The primary violator of cooperation is that cowboy outfit in America, the NSA. They have to be brought into line. They have to learn they’re only part of the Whole. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atwww.nomorefakenews.com

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