Edward Snowden - Internal Whistleblower Behind NSA Leaks

[JohnQPublic]

Good points. I am still waiting for some significant information from Snowden. He did get things in a roil, but really nothing new other than maybe some specific names of programs.

I think this article raises some very significant issues.

Snowden, CIA Shill? (http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/06/18/snowden-cia-shill/comment-page-1/#comment-488927)

Webster tarpley

How to identify CIA limited hangout op?

"The operations of secret intelligence agencies aiming at the manipulation of public opinion generally involve a combination of cynical deception with the pathetic gullibility of the targeted populations.

There is ample reason to believe that the case of Edward Joseph Snowden fits into this pattern. We are likely dealing here with a limited hangout operation, in which carefully selected and falsified documents and other materials are deliberately revealed by an insider who pretends to be a fugitive rebelling against the excesses of some oppressive or dangerous government agency.

But the revelations turn out to have been prepared with a view to shaping the public consciousness in a way which is advantageous to the intelligence agency involved. At the same time, gullible young people can be duped into supporting a personality cult of the leaker, more commonly referred to as a “whistleblower.” A further variation on the theme can be the attempt of the sponsoring intelligence agency to introduce their chosen conduit, now posing as a defector, into the intelligence apparatus of a targeted foreign government. In this case, the leaker or whistleblower attains the status of a triple agent..."

"...The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled corporate media..."

"...Another important feature of the limited hangout operation if that the revelations often contain nothing new, but rather repackage old wine in new bottles..."

"...Although, as we have seen, limited hangouts rarely illuminate the landmark covert operations which attempt to define an age, limited hangouts themselves do represent the preparation for future covert operations..."

"...Over the past century, there are certain large-scale covert operations which cast a long historical shadow, determining to some extent the framework in which subsequent events occur. These include the Sarajevo assassinations of 1914, the assassination of Rasputin in late 1916, Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome, Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the assassination of French Foreign Minister Barthou in 1934, the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, in 1963 Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. A common feature of the limited hangout operations is that they offer almost no insights into these landmark events.

In the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy assassination is virtually a nonexistent event about which we learn nothing. As already noted, the principal supporters of Ellsberg were figures like Chomsky, whose hostility to JFK and profound disinterest in critiques of the Warren Commission were well-known. As for Assange, he rejects any further clarification of 9/11. In July 2010, Assange told Matthew Bell of the Belfast Telegraph: “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” This is on top of Cass Sunstein’s demand for active covert measures to suppress and disrupt inquiries into operations like 9/11. Snowden’s key backers Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon have both compiled impressive records of evasion on 9/11 truth, with Greenwald specializing in the blowback theory..."

[messianicdruid]

by Peter Eisler and Susan Page, USA TODAY

http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/2428809

When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.

Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.

For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.

To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.

Today, they feel vindicated.

They say the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former NSA contractor who worked as a systems administrator, proves their claims of sweeping government surveillance of millions of Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. They say those revelations only hint at the programs' reach.

On Friday, USA TODAY brought Drake, Binney and Wiebe together for the first time since the story broke to discuss the NSA revelations. With their lawyer, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, they weighed their implications and their repercussions. They disputed the administration's claim of the impact of the disclosures on national security — and President Obama's argument that Congress and the courts are providing effective oversight.

And they have warnings for Snowden on what he should expect next.



Q: Did Edward Snowden do the right thing in going public?

William Binney: We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress or — we couldn't get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general's office didn't pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand.

Q: So Snowden did the right thing?

Binney: Yes, I think he did.

Q: You three wouldn't criticize him for going public from the start?

J. Kirk Wiebe: Correct.

Binney: In fact, I think he saw and read about what our experience was, and that was part of his decision-making.

Wiebe: We failed, yes.

Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted — and it was for blowing the whistle.


Q: There's a question being debated whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor.

Binney: Certainly he performed a really great public service to begin with by exposing these programs and making the government in a sense publicly accountable for what they're doing. At least now they are going to have some kind of open discussion like that.

But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.

So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor.

Thomas Drake: He's an American who has been exposed to some incredible information regarding the deepest secrets of the United States government. And we are seeing the initial outlines and contours of a very systemic, very broad, a Leviathan surveillance state and much of it is in violation of the fundamental basis for our own country — in fact, the very reason we even had our own American Revolution. And the Fourth Amendment for all intents and purposes was revoked after 9/11. ...

He is by all definitions a classic whistle-blower and by all definitions he exposed information in the public interest. We're now finally having the debate that we've never had since 9/11.

Radack: "Hero or traitor?" was the original question. I don't like these labels, and they are putting people into categories of two extremes, villain or saint. ... By law, he fits the legal definition of a whistle-blower. He is someone who exposed broad waste, abuse and in his case illegality. ... And he also said he was making the disclosures for the public good and because he wanted to have a debate.

Q: James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Snowden's disclosures caused "huge, grave damage" to the United States. Do you agree?

Wiebe: No, I do not. I do not. You know, I've asked people: Do you generally believe there's government authorities collecting information about you on the Net or your phone? "Oh, of course." No one is surprised.

There's very little specificity in the slides that he made available (describing the PRISM surveillance program). There is far more specificity in the FISA court order that is bothersome.


Q: Did foreign governments, terrorist organizations, get information they didn't have already?

Binney: Ever since ... 1997-1998 ... those terrorists have known that we've been monitoring all of these communications all along. So they have already adjusted to the fact that we are doing that. So the fact that it is published in the U.S. news that we're doing that, has no effect on them whatsoever. They have already adjusted to that.

Radack: This comes up every time there's a leak. ... In Tom's case, Tom was accused of literally the blood of soldiers would be on his hands because he created damage. I think the exact words were, "When the NSA goes dark, soldiers die." And that had nothing to do with Tom's disclosure at all, but it was part of the fear mongering that generally goes with why we should keep these things secret.

Q: What did you learn from the document — the Verizon warrant issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — that Snowden leaked?

Drake: It's an extraordinary order. I mean, it's the first time we've publicly seen an actual, secret, surveillance-court order. I don't really want to call it "foreign intelligence" (court) anymore, because I think it's just become a surveillance court, OK? And we are all foreigners now. By virtue of that order, every single phone record that Verizon has is turned over each and every day to NSA.

There is no probable cause. There is no indication of any kind of counterterrorism investigation or operation. It's simply: "Give us the data." ...

There's really two other factors here in the order that you could get at. One is that the FBI requesting the data. And two, the order directs Verizon to pass all that data to NSA, not the FBI.

Binney: What it is really saying is the NSA becomes a processing service for the FBI to use to interrogate information directly. ... The implications are that everybody's privacy is violated, and it can retroactively analyze the activity of anybody in the country back almost 12 years.

Now, the other point that is important about that is the serial number of the order: 13-dash-80. That means it's the 80th order of the court in 2013. ... Those orders are issued every quarter, and this is the second quarter, so you have to divide 80 by two and you get 40.


If you make the assumption that all those orders have to deal with companies and the turnover of material by those companies to the government, then there are at least 40 companies involved in that transfer of information. However, if Verizon, which is Order No. 80, and the first quarter got order No. 1 — then there can be as many as 79 companies involved.

So somewhere between 40 and 79 is the number of companies, Internet and telecom companies, that are participating in this data transfer in the NSA.

Radack: I consider this to be an unlawful order. While I am glad that we finally have something tangible to look at, this order came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They have no jurisdiction to authorize domestic-to-domestic surveillance.

Binney: Not surprised, but it's documentation that can't be refuted.

Wiebe: It's formal proof of our suspicions.

Q: Even given the senior positions that you all were in, you had never actually seen one of these?

Drake: They're incredibly secret. It's a very close hold. ... It's a secret court with a secret appeals court. They are just not widely distributed, even in the government.

Q: What was your first reaction when you saw it?

Binney: Mine was that it's documentary evidence of what we have been saying all along, so they couldn't deny it.

Drake: For me, it was material evidence of an institutional crime that we now claim is criminal.

Binney: Which is still criminal.

Wiebe: It's criminal.


Q: Thomas Drake, you worked as a contractor for the NSA for about a decade before you went on staff there. Were you surprised that a 29-year-old contractor based in Hawaii was able to get access to the sort of information that he released?

Drake: It has nothing to do with being 29. It's just that we are in the Internet age and this is the digital age. So, so much of what we do both in private and in public goes across the Internet. Whether it's the public Internet or whether it's the dark side of the Internet today, it's all affected the same in terms of technology. ...

One of the critical roles in the systems is the system administrator. Someone has to maintain it. Someone has to keep it running. Someone has to maintain the contracts.

Binney: Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed.

So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.


Q: As he said, he could tap the president's phone?

Binney: As a super-user and manager of data in the data system, yes, they could go in and change anything.

Q: At a Senate hearing in March, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden asked the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, if there was mass data collection of Americans. He said "no." Was that a lie?

Drake: This is incredible dissembling. We're talking about the oversight committee, unable to get a straight answer because if the straight answer was given it would reveal the perfidy that's actually going on inside the secret side of the government.

Q: What should Clapper have said?

Binney: He should have said, "I can't comment in an open forum."

Wiebe: Yeah, that's right.

Q: Does Congress provide effective oversight for these programs?

Radack: Congress has been a rubber stamp, basically, and the judicial branch has been basically shut down from hearing these lawsuits because every time they do they are told that the people who are challenging these programs either have no standing or (are covered by) the state secrets privilege, and the government says that they can't go forward. So the idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.

Binney: But the way it's set up now, it's a joke. I mean, it can't work the way it is because they have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing. And as long as the agencies tell them, they will know. If they don't tell them, they don't know. And that's what's been going on here.

And the only way they really could correct that is to create billets on these committees and integrate people in these agencies so they can go around every day and watch what is happening and then feed back the truth as to what's going on, instead of the story that they get from the NSA or other agencies. ...

Even take the FISA court, for example. The judges signed that order. I mean, I am sure they (the FBI) swore on an affidavit to the judge, "These are the reasons why," but the judge has no foundation to challenge anything that they present to him. What information does the judge have to make a decision against them? I mean, he has absolutely nothing. So that's really not an oversight.

Radack: The proof is in the pudding. Last year alone, in 2012, they approved 1,856 applications and they denied none. And that is typical from everything that has happened in previous years. ... I know the government has been asserting that all of this is kosher and legitimate because the FISA court signed off on it. The FISA court is a secret court — operates in secret. There is only one side and has rarely disapproved anything.


Q: Do you think President Obama fully knows and understands what the NSA is doing?

Binney: No. I mean, it's obvious. I mean, the Congress doesn't either. I mean, they are all being told what I call techno-babble ... and they (lawmakers) don't really don't understand what the NSA does and how it operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand.

Radack: Even for people in the know, I feel like Congress is being misled.

Binney: Bamboozled.

Radack: I call it perjury.

Q: What should Edward Snowden expect now?

Binney: Well, first of all, I think he should expect to be treated just like Bradley Manning (an Army private now being court-martialed for leaking documents to WikiLeaks). The U.S. government gets ahold of him, that's exactly the way he will be treated.

Q: He'll be prosecuted?

Binney: First tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed.

Wiebe: Now there is another possibility, that a few of the good people on Capitol Hill — the ones who say the threat is much greater than what we thought it was — will step forward and say give this man an honest day's hearing. You know what I mean. Let's get him up here. Ask him to verify, because if he is right — and all pointers are that he was — all he did was point to law-breaking. What is the crime of that?

Drake: But see, I am Exhibit No. 1. ...You know, I was charged with 10 felony counts. I was facing 35 years in prison. This is how far the state will go to punish you out of retaliation and reprisal and retribution. ... My life has been changed. It's been turned inside, upside down. I lived on the blunt end of the surveillance bubble. ... When you are faced essentially with the rest of your life in prison, you really begin to understand and appreciate more so than I ever have — in terms of four times I took the oath to support the Constitution — what those rights and freedoms really mean. ...

Believe me, they are going to put everything they have got to get him. I think there really is a risk. There is a risk he will eventually be pulled off the street.


Q: What do you mean?

Drake: Well, fear of rendition. There is going to be a team sent in.

Radack: We have already unleashed the full force of the entire executive branch against him and are now doing a worldwide manhunt to bring him in — something more akin to what we would do for Osama bin Laden. And I know for a fact, if we do get him, he would definitely face Espionage Act charges, as other people have who have exposed information of government wrongdoing. And I heard a number of people in Congress (say) he would also be charged with treason.

These are obviously the most serious offenses that can be leveled against an American. And the people who so far have faced them and have never intended to harm the U.S. or benefit the foreign nations have always wanted to go public. And they face severe consequences as a defector. That's why I understand why he is seeking asylum. I think he has a valid fear.

Wiebe: We are going to find out what kind of country we are, what have we become, what do we want to be.

Q: What would you say to him?

Binney: I would tell him to steer away from anything that isn't a public service — like talking about the ability of the U.S. government to hack into other countries or other people is not a public service. So that's kind of compromising capabilities and sources and methods, basically. That's getting away from the public service that he did initially. And those would be the acts that people would charge him with as clearly treason.

Drake: Well, I feel extraordinary kinship with him, given what I experienced at the hands of the government. And I would just tell him to ensure that he's got a support network that I hope is there for him and that he's got the lawyers necessary across the world who will defend him to the maximum extent possible and that he has a support-structure network in place. I will tell you, when you exit the surveillance-state system, it's a pretty lonely place — because it had its own form of security and your job and family and your social network. And all of a sudden, you are on the outside now in a significant way, and you have that laser beam of the surveillance state turning itself inside out to find and learn everything they can about you.

Wiebe: I think your savior in all of this is being able to honestly relate to the principles embedded in the Constitution that are guiding your behavior. That's where really — rubber meets the road, at that point.

Radack: I would thank him for taking such a huge personal risk and giving up so much of his life and possibly facing the loss of his life or spending it in jail. Thank him for doing that to try to help our country save it from itself in terms of exposing dark, illegal, unethical, unconstitutional conduct that is being done against millions and millions of people.

Drake: I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.

Wiebe: Well, I don't want anyone to think that he had an alternative. No one should (think that). There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered.


Q: Is there a way to collect this data that is consistent with the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure?

Binney: Two basic principles you have to use. ... One is what I call the two-degree principle. If you have a terrorist talking to somebody in the United States — that's the first degree away from the terrorist. And that could apply to any country in the world. And then the second degree would be who that person in the United States talked to. So that becomes your zone of suspicion.

And the other one (principle) is you watch all the jihadi sites on the Web and who's visiting those jihadi sites, who has an interest in the philosophy being expressed there. And then you add those to your zone of suspicion.

Everybody else is innocent — I mean, you know, of terrorism, anyway.

Wiebe: Until they're somehow connected to this activity.

Binney: You pull in all the contents involving (that) zone of suspicion and you throw all the rest of it away. You can keep the attributes of all the communicants in the other parts of the world, the rest of the 7 billion people, right? And you can then encrypt it so that nobody can interrogate that base randomly.

That's the way of preventing this kind of random access by a contractor or by the FBI or any other DHS (Department of Homeland Security) or any other department of government. They couldn't go in and find anybody. You couldn't target your next-door neighbor. If you went in with his attributes, they're encrypted. ... So unless they are in the zone of suspicion, you won't see any content on anybody and you won't see any attributes in the clear. ...

It's all within our capabilities.

Drake: It's been within our capabilities for well over 12 years.

Wiebe: Bill and I worked on a government contract for a contractor not too far from here. And when we showed him the concept of how this privacy mechanism that Bill just described to you — the two degrees, the encryption and hiding of identities of innocent people — he said, "Nobody cares about that." I said, "What do you mean?"

This man was in a position to know a lot of government people in the contracting and buying of capabilities. He said. "Nobody cares about that."


Drake: This (kind of surveillance) is all unnecessary. It is important to note that the very best of American ingenuity and inventiveness, creativity, had solved the major challenge problem the NSA faced: How do you make sense of vast amounts of data, provide the information you need to protect the nation, while also protecting the fundamental rights that are enshrined in the Constitution?

The government in secret decided — willfully and deliberately — that that was no longer necessary after 9/11. So they said, you know what, hey, for the sake of security we are going to draw that line way, way over. And if it means eroding the liberties and freedoms of Americans and others, hey, so be it because that's what's most important. But this was done without the knowledge of the American people.

Q: Would it make a difference if contractors weren't used?

Wiebe: I don't think so. They are human beings. You know, look at what's going on with the IRS and the Tea Party. You know, there (are) human beings involved. We are all human beings — contractors, NSA government employees. We are all human beings. We undergo clearance checks, background investigations that are extensive and we are all colors, ages and religions. I mean this is part of the American fabric.

Binney: But when it comes to these data, the massive data information collecting on U.S. citizens and everything in the world they can, I guess the real problem comes with trust. That's really the issue. The government is asking for us to trust them.

It's not just the trust that you have to have in the government. It's the trust you have to have in the government employees, (that) they won't go in the database — they can see if their wife is cheating with the neighbor or something like that. You have to have all the trust of all the contractors who are parts of a contracting company who are looking at maybe other competitive bids or other competitors outside their — in their same area of business. And they might want to use that data for industrial intelligence gathering and use that against other companies in other countries even. So they can even go into a base and do some industrial espionage. So there is a lot of trust all around and the government, most importantly, the government has no way to check anything that those people are doing.

Q: So Snowden's ability to access information wasn't an exception?

Binney: And they didn't know he was doing (it). ... That's the point, right? ...They should be doing that automatically with code, so the instant when anyone goes into that base with a query that they are not supposed to be doing, they should be flagged immediately and denied access. And that could be done with code.

But the government is not doing that. So that's the greatest threat in this whole affair.

Wiebe: And the polygraph that is typically given to all people, government employees and contractors, never asks about integrity. Did you give an honest day's work for your pay? Do you feel like you are doing important and proper work? Those things never come up. It's always, "Do you have any association with a terrorist?" Well, everybody can pass those kinds of questions. But, unfortunately, we have a society that is quite willing to cheat.

Editor's note: Excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.

[JohnQPublic]

Inside the Feds' Secret Wiretapping Rooms (http://www.alternet.org/story/41819/inside_the_feds%27_secret_wiretapping_rooms)

September 19, 2006

"...Earlier this year Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) accused President Bush and the National Security Agency (NSA) of breaking the law by authorizing wiretaps without seeking a judicial warrant. Vice President Cheney quickly went to the Hill to work out a compromise with Sen. Specter. The so-called Specter-Cheney bill would give the president the option -- not the requirement -- to submit his electronic surveillance programs for review by the special secret court created by FISA, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A contrasting bill sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) affirms that FISA court approval for eavesdropping is the "exclusive" means for authorizing wiretaps in domestic terrorism and espionage cases. And a third proposal by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) requires only that the administration notify Congress when it conducts wiretaps without a warrant.


All of the proposed bills give the Bush administration more wiretapping flexibility through exceptions, disclosure delays and retroactive warrants..."

"...How many Americans' phone calls, faxes and e-mails are already being spied upon? Both political parties act as if the number is in the low thousands -- in other words, not us. But the truth is: not even the minority leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D- W.V.), has the slightest idea. "Even though Senator Rockefeller could be briefed on a classified basis," says Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists' Government Accountability Project, "he hasn't been given answers to the most basic questions. Senator Rockefeller doesn't know how many people have been subjected to electronic surveillance, he doesn't know what the results of any program have been, he doesn't know what errors have been committed."..."

"...The lawsuit is based upon a sworn statement by Mark Klein, an AT&T technician for 22 years who oversaw AT&T's WorldNet Internet facilities in San Francisco. According to Klein, AT&T provided NSA agents access to all voice calls, while diverting all the data (e-mail, Web surfing, credit card transactions) crossing the Internet through data-mining equipment installed in a series of secret rooms in San Francisco San Diego, San Jose, Los Angeles, Seattle and other cities..."

"...Klein reports that in order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet had to be installed, as well as a secret room admitting only people with NSA clearance. "My job required me to connect new circuits to the "splitter" cabinet and get them up and running," Klein wrote in a public statement provided to the press in April of this year.

"I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the 'splitter' cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room," Klein wrote. "The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect WorldNet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world."

Why couldn't the eavesdropping be done remotely in a less conspicuous way? Fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their signals the way copper wires do. In order to snoop, someone has to physically cut into the fiber and divert a portion of the light signal to a "secret room" via the splitter. The San Francisco "secret room" is numbered "3," suggesting that fiber optic backbones are being sliced into elsewhere. Currently, AT&T controls about one-third of America's Internet bandwidth..."

[JohnQPublic]

I wonder if a big court case is about to break, and the NSA are scrambling for the hills? Tarpley thinks this is being used to push Obama into Syria. S is about to HTF.

[messianicdruid]

Naomi Wolf: My Creeping Concern That The NSA Leaker Is Not Who He Purports To Be
June 15th, 2013

Update: Even AP Admits that Prism Is Chicken Feed Compared to What We Learned Years Ago About Mass Intercepts

Via: AP:

With Prism, the government gets a user’s entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That’s one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it’s the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

“I’m much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone,” said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. “I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to.”

…

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn’t really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.


—

I’m still waiting for Snowden to release something, anything, that hasn’t been intuitively obvious to me for at least the past 15 years, and confirmed as fact since 2006/7 (Klein/Room641A).

If Snowden is the real deal, why are we having to contend with the corporate media censors to decide which sections of the documents we get to see and which ones we don’t?

Snowden, if you’re out there, what happens to the encrypted emails that come across the wire? Or, how does NSA run man in the middle attacks on SSL sessions? (Don’t hold your breath waiting for answers to these questions.)

Anyway, this spectacle is far from over. I’d suggest keeping your dial set somewhere between outright cynicism and ambivalence going forward.

Via: Facebook / Naomi Wolf:

I hate to do this but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be. This is in no way to detract from the great courage of Glenn Greenwald in reporting the story, and the gutsiness of the Guardian in showcasing this kind of reporting, which is a service to America that US media is not performing at all. It is just to raise some cautions as the story unfolds, and to raise some questions about how it is unfolding, based on my experience with high-level political messaging.

Some of Snowden’s emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them.

a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps — which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101? — are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates.

b) In the Greenwald video interview, I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points — again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points.

c) He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away; a real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.” Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice. That is why they are heroes, among other reasons. But a police state would like us all to think about everything we would lose by standing up against it.

d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’

e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded…

f) Snowden is in Hong Kong, which has close ties to the UK, which has done the US’s bidding with other famous leakers such as Assange. So really there are MANY other countries that he would be less likely to be handed over from…

g) Media reports said he had vanished at one point to ‘an undisclosed location’ or ‘a safe house.’ Come on. There is no such thing. Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it.

h) I was at dinner last night to celebrate the brave and heroic Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Several of Assange’s also brave and talented legal team were there, and I remembered them from when I had met with Assange. These attorneys are present at every moment when Assange meets the press — when I met with him off the record last Fall in the Ecuadoran embassy, his counsel was present the whole time, listening and stepping in when necessary.

Seeing these diligent attentive free-speech attorneys for another whisleblower reinforced my growing anxiety: WHERE IS SNOWDEN’S LAWYER as the world’s media meet with him? A whistleblower talking to media has his/her counsel advising him/her at all times, if not actually being present at the interview, because anything he/she says can affect the legal danger the whistleblower may be in . It is very, very odd to me that a lawyer has not appeared, to my knowledge, to stand at Snowden’s side and keep him from further jeopardy in interviews.

Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive — even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times — rather than the machine itself — that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests — why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times — unless we know about it?

Naomi

http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=35659

[messianicdruid]

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."

the rest: http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/

[JohnQPublic]

As Wendy's said 25 years ago, "Where's the Beef?".

Still waiting. :(??

[vacuum]

There are a lot of good points in this thread. It's kind of like a trap. The information is good, but we behave so predictably that it's used for an agenda that's over-all bad.

The thing we have to do is take and use the good information, but not let predictable actions and biases drown out our otherwise keen awareness.

[JohnQPublic]

Tweet (https://twitter.com/BenDoernberg/statuses/347039312858210304): NSA Director to Deputy FBI Director after hearing: "tell your boss I owe him another frickin beer" http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/34534147 … (http://t.co/wjCdhmkjOw) 25:00

In article form. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2344098/NSA-hearing-Tell-boss-I-owe-friggin-beer-Hot-mic-catches-NSA-boss-praising-FBI-chiefs-supportive-testimony-surveillance-programs.html)

[JohnQPublic]

Michelle Bachmann shows her true colors.


http://youtu.be/_X7rD8wKqDE

[Glass]

Good points. I am still waiting for some significant information from Snowden. He did get things in a roil, but really nothing new other than maybe some specific names of programs.


I would like to hear some phone calls. Some calls between Bush Senior, Junior, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Wolfawitz, Rice, Powell and that little piggy faced guy in the glasses.... any of these guys in phone calls either talking about how they put out a contract on so and so whistleblower or how they fabricated the evidence leading to GWII.

This is how I see Prism being of use to the people. IF it hoovers up everything then those things will be in there as well. There should even be the ability to link all of the 911 players during their conspiracy planning.

Lets hear some of those please.

[Cebu_4_2]

and that little piggy faced guy in the glasses....

Napolitano?

http://tucsoncitizen.com/morgue/files/2008/07/l91572-1.jpg

[JohnQPublic]

FISA Talking Points (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130613/17490723465/leaked-nsas-talking-points-defending-nsa-surveillance.shtml)


FISA/NSA Talking Points

o The news articles have been discussing what purports to be a classified, lawfully-authorized order that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) issued under an Act of Congress - the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under this Act, the FISA Court authorized a collection of business records. There is no secret program involved here - it is strictly authorized by a U.S. statute.

o The FISA Court's order for a lawfully-authorized collection of business records does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls. It does not authorize the collection of any call content, individual names, or organization names. It authorizes only metadata collection, which includes barebones records - such as a telephone number or the length of a call.

o This legal tool, as enacted by Congress, has been critical in protecting America. It has been essential in thwarting at least one major terrorist attack to our country in the past few years.

o This legal tool also allows our counterterrorism and law enforcement officials to close the gap on foreign and domestic terrorist activities. It enables our Intelligence Community to discover whether foreign terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.

o Despite what appears to be a broad scope in the FISA Court's order, the Intelligence Community uses only a small fraction of a percent of the business records collected to pursue terrorism subjects.

o All three branches - Congress, the Courts, and the Executive Branch - review and sign off on FISA collection authorities. Congress passed FISA, and the Intelligence Committees are regularly and fully briefed on how it is used.

o The FISA Court authorizes intelligence collection only after the Intelligence Community has proven its case, based on underlying facts and investigations.

o This legal tool has been reauthorized only after ongoing 90-day renewal periods. That means that every 90 days, the Department of Justice and the FBI must prove to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that they have the facts and legal basis to renew this legal authority. It is not a rubber stamp.

o FISA-authorized collections are subject to strict controls and procedures under oversight of the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA Court, to ensure that they comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.

[Glass]

Napolitano?

http://tucsoncitizen.com/morgue/files/2008/07/l91572-1.jpg


No I think it was Libby?

[messianicdruid]

Hidden in Plain Sight-The Politics of Misdirection

"This latest transparent machination concerning the sudden media exposé revelations of NSA data mining with the active cooperation of Internet and TeleCommunications industries is simply another case of classic misdirection. The establishment of the NSA mega facility in Bluffdale, Utah ensures that despite the attempts to suggest otherwise, Big Brother tracks anything and everything in the USSA and will continue to do so indefinitely. And that is not to speak of ECHELON the original super computerized signals intelligence tracking unit. In other words the intensive monitoring of of all digital and internet surveillance has been common knowledge for years. Likewise, the subornation and infiltration of print and wire service media has been going on for decades by the CIA. The fact that the major mainstream media news outlets are not only owned by major corporations but that the press and TV are nothing more than the mouthpieces of statist propaganda is once again, common knowledge. In other words, the latest scandals are very old news to anyone with half a brain left. Likewise, the gun walking expeditions across the Mexican border dubbed "Fast and Furious", as if it was all some Hollywood thriller, which has some calling for the resignation of the attorney general, is but the tip of the iceberg of a long established government policy of drug running and arms transshipments going back to the Clinton administration in Mena, Arkansas and further to the Iran Contra scandals of the Reagan regime. The same holds for the arming of the band of Al-CIAda terrorists gangs of the so-called Free Syrian Army via Libya and Turkey. And why is it a surprise to anyone that the criminal enforcement arm of the Federal Reserve, the dreaded IRS, singles out political opposition groups and activists for "special treatment"? Has it something to do with the critical role the IRS plays in the enforcement of Obamacare, soon to be dropped on the unsuspecting dupes of AmerCIA like a ton of bricks. Isn't this entire corrupt matrix of control based on intimidation and fear? C'mon let's get real! The point is that the media follows an agenda dictated to it by its corporate and government (read fascist) masters and the mesmerized, hypnotized, flouridated, chemtrailed, and brainwashed minions of the AMeriatrix only regurgitate the mental pablum force fed to their Alpha wave resonating zombified brains through their television screens. The question remains though. Why are the puppet masters pulling the strings on the Obama marionette tripping him up on the devil's dance floor which is the MSM? We think that with the wheels coming off the American economy as is already happening in the Japanese bond and stock markets, that something very big is afoot indeed. The puppet's strings have become hopelessly entangled, his programming is shot and the stage is being cleared for the debut of the next act which will inexorably lead to the final denouément of this American nightmare.

Then again things aren't going so well in Syria which is proving an unexpectedly tough nut to crack. The Al-CIAda thug army is hopelessly splintered and on the verge of defeat. Assad seems to be in control, and as the fighting continues to spread across the borders into Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, US marines are being posted a the Jordanian border and Russia begins delivering the dreaded S-300 missile defense system. By the time WW III breaks out, we might see the martial law crackdown we've been expecting for so long and Barry Soetero Obama or whoever he is will return to Punaho and soon be teeing it up on Maui possibly unaware that he was ever the president of the former United States of America.

The putative president's performance in the following video might lead one to question not his competence but his basic sanity as well. Not only does he bumble and stumble across his words with an alarming incoherence but the very substance of his attempt at speaking speaks once again of some elemental cognitive dissonance at avery deep level. We will leave the discerning reader to decide for himself."

the vid: http://kushmonster.blogspot.com/2013/06/hidden-in-plain-sight-politics-of.html

[JohnQPublic]

Julian Assange hints WikiLeaks might publish next Edward Snowden revelations (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2013/0619/Julian-Assange-hints-WikiLeaks-might-publish-next-Edward-Snowden-revelations)"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday his organization is helping Edward Snowden seek asylum in Iceland. Assange also hinted that he might publish Snowden's next revelations."

[JohnQPublic]

3 Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/3-former-nsa-employees-praise-edward-snowden-corroborate-key-claims/276964/)"...Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe each protested the NSA in their own rights. "For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens," the newspaper reports (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/). "They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media."


In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden's critics suggest he should have done. Their method didn't get through to the members of Congress who are saying, in the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no idea what was going on. But they are nonetheless owed thanks..."


"...


His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.



What Snowden discovered is "material evidence of an institutional crime."



As a system administrator, Snowden "could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure -- because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, 'I can even target the president or a judge.' If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that."



"The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth."



Congressional overseers "have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing."



Lawmakers "don't really don't understand what the NSA does and how it operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand."



Asked what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men, William Binney, answered, "first tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed." Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S. government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.



"There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered." ..."

[JohnQPublic]

Uk To Brit Hacks: Shut Up (http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/13003.html)
Defence Ministry Warns Against Leaks on Joint US-Brit Spying

A British Defense Ministry press advisory committee, reacting to a flurry of revelations in the American press about massive warrantless US government electronic surveillance programs, quietly warned UK organizations Friday not to publish British national security information.

Defiance of the advisory could make British journalists vulnerable to prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

The June 7 "DA-Notice," or Defence Advisory Notice, which was itself confidential, accepted that the U.S. National Security Agency was sharing information gleaned from the surveillance programs with its British counterparts, and said UK intelligence organizations were worried about revelations of their own roles in the programs.

"There have been a number of articles recently in connection with some of the ways in which the UK Intelligence Services obtain information from foreign sources," said the notice issued by the Defence Advisory Committee, a joint body with media organizations.

"Although none of these recent articles has contravened any of the guidelines contained within the Defence Advisory Notice System, the intelligence services are concerned that further developments of this same theme may begin to jeopardize both national security and possibly UK personnel," it said.

The notice itself was marked "Private and Confidential: Not for publication, broadcast or use on social media."

It warned British media not to publish information on "specific covert operations, sources and methods of the security services, SIS and GCHQ [the NSA's British counterpart], Defence Intelligence Units, Special Forces and those involved with them, the application of those methods, including the interception of communications and their targets; the same applies to those engaged on counter-terrorist operations."

British news organizations are concerned about the tenor of the advance warning.

"They're sending out a notice saying nothing'

Warning follows exposé of UK cooperation in massive warrantless US government electronic spying
s been published that damages national security but we're concerned the press might (and on the back of developments in the US, no less)," said a media source.

The worry is that British authorities may be preparing to pursue reporters through the courts if they publish details on UK participation in the massive US electronic surveillance programs, code-named "PRISM" and "BLARNEY," according to a report in The Washington Post.

The NSA collects "directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple," the Post reported.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the NSA has been sharing intelligence from the same internet companies with GCHQ.

President Obama on Friday defended the spying programs, which access every Americans' email and Internet searches, saying "a whole bunch of safeguards [are] involved" to protect privacy.

[JohnQPublic]

Icelandic businessman says plane ready to take Snowden to Iceland (http://news.yahoo.com/icelandic-businessman-says-plane-ready-021008270.html)


"...An Icelandic businessman linked to WikiLeaks said he has readied a private plane to take Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed secret U.S. surveillance programmes, to Iceland if the government grants him asylum.

"We have made everything ready at our end now we only have to wait for confirmation from the (Icelandic) Interior Ministry," Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson told Reuters. He is a director of DataCell, a company which processed payments for WikiLeaks.

"A private jet is in place in China and we could fly Snowden over tomorrow if we get positive reaction from the Interior Ministry. We need to get confirmation of asylum and that he will not be extradited to the U.S. We would most want him to get a citizenship as well," Sigurvinsson said.

Neither a WikiLeaks spokesman nor the Icelandic government were immediately available for comment..."

[JohnQPublic]

Lame excuse. Not even worth publishing except to document it.

(http://news.yahoo.com/watchdog-faults-background-check-nsa-leaker-235639806.html)Watchdog faults background check of NSA leaker (http://news.yahoo.com/watchdog-faults-background-check-nsa-leaker-235639806.html)


"...Appearing at a Senate hearing, Patrick McFarland, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, said USIS, the company that conducted the background investigation of former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, is now under investigation itself.

McFarland declined to say what triggered the inquiry of USIS or whether the probe is related to Snowden. But when asked by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., if there were any concerns about the USIS background check on Snowden, McFarland answered: "Yes, we do believe that there may be some problems."..."