Posted by: adonis49 on: June 7, 2020
And what kinds of courage? Other this faked “Moral Courage” or “Moral Entity”?
Note: Re-edit of “Moral Courage? And what other kinds of courage? March 5, 2014
Last Thursday Chris Hedges opened a team debate at the Oxford Union at Oxford University with this speech arguing in favor of the proposition “This house would call Edward Snowden a hero.”
The others on the Hedges team, which won the debate by an audience vote of 212 to 171, were William E. Binney, a former National Security Agency official and a whistle-blower; Chris Huhne, a former member of the British Parliament; and Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for the United Kingdom.
The opposing team was made up of Philip J. Crowley, a former U.S. State Department officer; Stewart A. Baker, a former chief counsel for the National Security Agency; Jeffrey Toobin, an American television and print commentator; and Oxford student Charles Vaughn.
I have been to war. I have seen physical courage.
But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage.
For moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.
And with moral courage comes persecution.
The American Army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of U.S. soldiers and 10 terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre.
Thompson ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing U.S. soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. And for this act of moral courage, Thompson, like Snowden, was hounded and reviled.
Moral courage always looks like this.
It is always defined by the state as treason—the Army attempted to cover up the massacre and court-martial Thompson. It is the courage to act and to speak the truth. Thompson had it.
Daniel Ellsberg had it. Martin Luther King had it.
What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.
In this still image from video footage released by WikiLeaks on Oct. 11, 2013, former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden speaks in Moscow during a presentation ceremony for the Sam Adams Award. (AP photo)
“My country, right or wrong” is the moral equivalent of “my mother, drunk or sober,” G.K. Chesterton reminded us.
So let me speak to you about those drunk with the power to sweep up all your email correspondence, your tweets, your Web searches, your phone records, your file transfers, your live chats, your financial data, your medical data,
And your criminal and civil court records and your movements, those who are awash in billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars, those who have banks of sophisticated computer systems, along with biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies and miniature drones, those who have obliterated your anonymity, your privacy and, yes, your liberty.
There is no free press without the ability of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power.
Those few individuals inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance have been charged as spies or hounded into exile.
An omnipresent surveillance state—and I covered the East German Stasi state—creates a climate of paranoia and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible.
Any state that has the ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is Not a free state.
It does not matter if it does not use this capacity today; it will use it, history has shown, should it feel threatened or seek greater control.
The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt wrote: ” is Not, in the end, to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”
The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.
Those who wield this unchecked power become delusional.
Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, hired a Hollywood set designer to turn his command center at Fort Meade into a replica of the bridge of the starship Enterprise so he could sit in the captain’s chair and pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had the audacity to lie under oath to Congress.
This spectacle was a rare glimpse into the absurdist theater that now characterizes American political life.
A congressional oversight committee holds public hearings. It is lied to.
It knows it is being lied to.
The person who lies knows the committee members know he is lying.
And the committee, to protect their security clearances, says and does nothing.
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 13, 2018
CIA behind the formation of extremist Islamic faction Al Nousra since 2004
: كيف تعمل قوى الظلام وإلى متى؟
من وثائق إدوارد سنودن، د. سمير قطامي
كشف ضابط المخابرات الأمريكية السابق إدوارد سنودن عن وثيقة خطيرة تعود إلى سنة 2004 تفيد أن الـ (C I A) هي التي استولدت المنظمة الإرهابية الجديدة (جبهة النصرة)، من رحم القاعدة لتحلّ محلّها، وتكون قادرة على جلب المتطرفين من جميع أنحاء العالم، وتجميعهم في الشرق الأوسط في عملية سميت بعش الدبابير (SWAPS NEST)، لزعزعة استقرار الدول العربية، بعد أن وضعت أمريكا يدها على العراق سنة 2003.
يقول سنودن اجتمع في لندن يوم 19/2/2004 مدراء المخابرات (الأمريكية والبريطانية والإسرائيلية) في قصر أحد الأمراء العرب جنوب لندن، لمدة ثلاثة أيام، وتقرّر أن يكون العمل ذا شقين:
1. تأسيس التنظيم المتطرّف
2. القضاء التام على حزب الله اللبناني
وقد اختاروا (أبا مصعب الزرقاوي) و (أحمد فاضل نزال الخلايلة) الذي كان معتقلا في الأردن، وقد أطلق سراحه وخضع لفترة تدريب في أحد معسكرات الـ (C I A) في إحدى الدول العربية، ثم نقل إلى الأنبار العراقية، ومن هناك انطلق في تأسيس التنظيم الجديد (الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والتي اضيف إليها بعد ذلك والشام) تحت إشراف العقيد في المخابرات البريطانية مايكل أريسون الذي يجيد العربية بكل طلاقة، ويتحدّث بلهجة فلسطينية كأنه أحد أبناء فلسطين..
وقد حوّل للتنظيم في بداية الأمر 860 مليون دولار، وكانت الأموال تنقل إلى الزرقاوي بالشاحنات، ليقوم بإرسال المتدربين إلى معسكر مراد ناظملي في (غازي عنتاب) بتركيا، كي يعمل على تدمير المقاومة المسلحة العراقية التي كانت قد بدأت ضد القوات الأمريكية.
اتّسع نفوذ الزرقاوي في الموصل وتكريت والأنبار وديالي، فبدأ يتمرّد على قائده العقيد مايكل أريسون، مما اضطره إلى التخلص منه وقتله في بعقوبة في 7/6/2006، ليسلم التنظيم لـ (إبراهيم البدري) المكنى بـ (أبي بكر البغدادي) الذي كان في سجن بوكا في بغداد، إذ أخرج ونقل بطائرة أمريكية إلى إسرائيل حيث تلقّى تدريبا عسكريا ومخابراتيا مكثفا لدى الموساد الإسرائيلي في مركز نحال موشي، وعاد بعد ذلك إلى العراق وأخذ يجيّش أبناء الشعب العراقي من الطائفة السنية بحجة التهميش وقتال المحتلين والروافض، وينفق عليهم من الأموال التي كانت ترسل إليه، ليلتف حوله عدد كبير من أبناء الشعب العراقي.
كانت سنة 2006 سنة الفصل الأساسي في منطقة الشرق الأوسط، إذ قرّرت الحكومة الإسرائيلية أن تنفّذ العملية ضد حزب الله في شهر أيلول سنة 2006، وحدّدت لها بين 7 – 10 أيام من خلال عملية إنزال بحري وجوي شمال مدينة صيدا، ليقع حزب الله بين فكّي كماشة من شمال ومن جنوب (الحدود الإسرائيلية).
لكن حزب الله علم بالخطة فقام بالاستعداد الكبير لها من خلال التنسيق مع سورية وإيران، لينقل إلى حزب الله آلاف الصواريخ والمعدات العسكرية عبر سورية..
ونشبت الحرب في منتصف شهر حزيران سنة 2006 بسبب أسر حزب الله جنديين لإسرائيل.. وامتدت الحرب لمدة 33 يوما دمّرت خلالها إسرائيل البنية التحتية للبنان من الشمال إلى الجنوب دون أن تتمكن من القضاء على حزب الله كما كان مخططا، بل إنها خرجت بخسائر هائلة في الأفراد والمعدات، مما دفع الحكومة لتشكيل لجنة تحقيق لتقييم الأمر، وكشف جوانب القصور..
وقد قضت اللجنة شهورا عدة من البحث والتقييم، لتخرج بنتيجة أن القضاء على حزب الله لا يمكن أن يتمّ إلا بتجفيف منابعه من سورية وإيران..
وهكذا بدأت خطط الإعداد الإسرائيلية الأمريكية العربية ضد حزب الله وإيران.
يقول سنودن في شهر نيسان سنة 2007 استدعي (أبو بكر البغدادي) إلى تركيا، ومنها نقل إلى تل أبيب بطائرة خاصة، ليطلب منه أن يستوعب أعدادا كبيرة من المقاتلين السنة من السعودية واليمن وتونس وفرنسا وبريطانيا…
وتمّ فتح مركز تدريب في (غازي عنتاب) لتدريب المقاتلين الجدد، وكلّف (أشرف ريفي) و (وسام الحسن) من مديرية الأمن الداخلي في لبنان، بتهريب الأسلحة إلى القرى السورية التي يغلب فيها نفوذ الإخوان المسلمين، كما بدأ ضخّ الأموال إلى الداخل السوري..
وما أن انطلقت الانتفاضة في درعا حتى كان هناك 17 ألف مقاتل سوري تمّ تدريبهم في تركيا وبعض الدول العربية، وكانت تصرف لكل منهم 750 دولارا راتبا شهريا، كما طلب من البغدادي التوسع إلى الداخل السوري.. وقد عملت هذه الأجهزة على أن تكون سورية محطة يجتمع فيها كافة المتطرفين الإسلاميين في العالم.. وهكذا بلغ عدد الجنسيات التي تقاتل في سورية 78 جنسية، وعدد المقاتلين 148 ألفا، وقد أنفق على هذه العمليات 107 مليارات دولار من الدول العربية، كما يقول سنودن، علما بأن حمد بن جاسم رئيس وزراء قطر السابق يقول إنهم أنفقوا على ما سمي بالثورة السورية 137 مليار دولار، وإنهم دفعوا لرياض حجاب رئيس الوزراء السوري 50 مليون دولار كي ينشق عن النظام!..
هذا ما كشفه ضابط المخابرات الأمريكي، فماذا نقول نحن أبناء اليعاربة الكرام ونحن نشاهد سيول الدماء المسفوكة بالمال العربي والسلاح الأجنبي، ومدننا المدمرة، وأبناءنا المشرّدين في أصقاع المعمورة؟
متى نعي أننا ضحايا مؤامرات رهيبة خططت في ليل دامس بمشاركة إخوة عرب؟
Posted by: adonis49 on: December 28, 2016
How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers
Not a secret. Just how doing it
Sunday 22 May 2016
Long before Edward Snowden went public, John Crane was a top Pentagon official fighting to protect NSA whistle-blowers.
By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did. He leaked top-secret documents revealing that the National Security Agency was spying on hundreds of millions of people across the world, collecting the phone calls and emails of virtually everyone on Earth who used a mobile phone or the internet.
When this newspaper began publishing the NSA documents in June 2013, it ignited a fierce political debate that continues to this day – about government surveillance, but also about the morality, legality and civic value of whistleblowing.
But if you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.
The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.
Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance programme were largely ignored.
“The government spent many years trying to break me, and the more I resisted, the nastier they got,” Drake told me.
Drake’s story has since been told – and in fact, it had a profound impact on Snowden, who told an interviewer in 2015 that: “It’s fair to say that if there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there wouldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”
But there is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.
His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane’s failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.
During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake.
First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.
The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself.
Snowden was unaware of the hidden machinations inside the Pentagon that undid Drake, but the outcome of those machinations – Drake’s arrest, indictment and persecution – sent an unmistakable message: raising concerns within the system promised doom.
“Name one whistleblower from the intelligence community whose disclosures led to real change – overturning laws, ending policies – who didn’t face retaliation as a result. The protections just aren’t there,” Snowden told the Guardian this week. “The sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”
Snowden saw what had happened to Drake and other whistleblowers like him. The key to Snowden’s effectiveness, according to Thomas Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project (GAP), was that he practised “civil disobedience” rather than “lawful” whistleblowing. (GAP, a non-profit group in Washington, DC, that defends whistleblowers, has represented Snowden, Drake and Crane.)
“None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”
Crane, a solidly built Virginia resident with flecks of grey in a neatly trimmed chinstrap beard, understood Snowden’s decision to break the rules – but lamented it. “Someone like Snowden should not have felt the need to harm himself just to do the right thing,” he told me.
Crane’s testimony is not simply a clue to Snowden’s motivations and methods: if his allegations are confirmed in court, they could put current and former senior Pentagon officials in jail. (Official investigations are quietly under way.)
But Crane’s account has even larger ramifications: it repudiates the position on Snowden taken by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – who both maintain that Snowden should have raised his concerns through official channels because US whistleblower law would have protected him.
By the time Snowden went public in 2013, Crane had spent years fighting a losing battle inside the Pentagon to provide whistleblowers the legal protections to which they were entitled. He took his responsibilities so seriously, and clashed with his superiors so often, that he carried copies of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and the US constitution in his breast pocket and pulled them out during office conflicts.
Crane’s attorneys at GAP – who were used to working with all types of government and corporate whistleblowers – were baffled by him: in their experience, most senior government officials cared little for whistleblowers’ rights. So what motivated Crane to keep fighting for the rights of whistleblowers inside the Pentagon, even as his superiors grew increasingly hostile and eventually forced him to resign?
To hear Crane tell it, the courage to stand up and fight runs in his family. He never forgot the story he heard as a child, about his own grandfather, a German army officer who once faced down Adolf Hitler at gunpoint – on the night the future Fuhrer first tried to take over Germany.
A former press aide to Republican members of Congress, John Crane was hired by the Inspector General’s office of the Department of Defense in 1988. Within US government agencies, an inspector general serves as a kind of judge and police chief. The IG, as the inspector general is known, is charged with making sure a given agency is operating according to the law – obeying rules and regulations, spending money as authorised by Congress. “In the IG’s office, we were the guys with the white hats,” Crane said.
By 2004 Crane had been promoted to assistant inspector general. At the age of 48, his responsibilities included supervising the whistleblower unit at the Department of Defense, as well as handling all whistleblower allegations arising from the department’s two million employees (by far the largest workforce in the US government), in some cases including allegations originating in the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
Drake, a father of five, had worked for the NSA for 12 years as a private-sector contractor. Now, as a staff member proper, he reported directly to the NSA’s third highest ranking official, Maureen Baginski; she headed the NSA’s largest division, the Signals Intelligence Directorate, which was responsible for the interception of phone calls and other communications.
Tall, sombre, intense, Drake was a championship chess player in high school whose gift for mathematics, computers and languages made him a natural for foreign eavesdropping and the cryptographic and linguistic skills it required. During the cold war, he worked for air force intelligence, monitoring the communications of East Germany’s infamous secret police, the Stasi.
Within weeks of the September 11 attacks, Drake was assigned to prepare the NSA’s postmortem on the disaster. Congress, the news media and the public were demanding answers: what had gone wrong at the NSA and other federal agencies to allow Osama bin Laden’s operatives to conduct such a devastating attack?
As Drake interviewed NSA colleagues and scoured the agency’s records, he came across information that horrified him. It appeared that the NSA – even before September 11 – had secretly revised its scope of operations to expand its powers.
Since its inception, the NSA had been strictly forbidden from eavesdropping on domestic communications. Drake’s investigation persuaded him that the NSA was now violating this restriction by collecting information on communications within as well as outside of the United States. And it was doing so without obtaining legally required court orders.
A straight arrow since high school – he once gave the police the names of classmates he suspected of selling pot – Drake told me he felt compelled to act. “I took an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic,” he explained.
To Drake, the President’s Surveillance Program, as it was known inside the George W Bush administration, recalled the mindset of the Stasi. “You don’t spend year after year listening to a police state without being affected, you just don’t,” he told me. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Wow, I don’t want this to happen in our country!’ How could you live in a society where you always have to be looking over your shoulders, not knowing who you could trust, even in your own family?”
Drake’s descent into a nightmare of persecution at the hands of his own government began innocently. Having uncovered evidence of apparently illegal behaviour, he did what his military training and US whistleblower law instructed: he reported the information up the chain of command. Beginning in early 2002, he shared his concerns first with a small number of high-ranking NSA officials, then with the appropriate members of Congress and staff at the oversight committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives.
Drake spent countless hours in these sessions but eventually came to the conclusion that no one in a position of authority wanted to hear what he was saying. When he told his boss, Baginski, that the NSA’s expanded surveillance following 9/11 seemed legally dubious, she reportedly told him to drop the issue: the White House had ruled otherwise.
John Crane first heard about Thomas Drake when Crane and his colleagues at the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General received a whistleblower complaint in September 2002.
The complaint alleged that the NSA was backing an approach to electronic surveillance that was both financially and constitutionally irresponsible. The complaint was signed by three former NSA officials, William Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, and a former senior Congressional staffer, Diane Roark.
Drake also endorsed the complaint – but because he, unlike the other four, had not yet retired from government service, he asked that his name be kept anonymous, even in a document that was supposed to be treated confidentially within the government.
Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark shared Drake’s concerns about the constitutional implications of warrantless mass surveillance, but their complaint focused on two other issues.
Drake had discovered a shocking example while researching his postmortem report on the September 11 attacks. Months beforehand, the NSA had come into possession of a telephone number in San Diego that was used by two of the hijackers who later crashed planes into the World Trade Center. But the NSA did not act on this finding.
As Drake later told the NSA expert James Bamford, the NSA intercepted seven phone calls between this San Diego phone number and an al-Qaida “safe house” in Yemen. Drake found a record of the seven calls buried in an NSA database.
US officials had long known that the Yemen safe house was the operational hub through which Bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, ordered attacks. Seven phone calls to such a hub from the same phone number was obviously suspicious. Yet the NSA took no action – the information had apparently been overlooked.
The NSA whistleblowers first sent their complaint to the inspector general of the NSA, who ruled against them. So they went up the bureaucratic ladder, filing the complaint with the Department of Defense inspector general. There, Crane and his staff “substantially affirmed” the complaint – in other words, their own investigation concluded that the NSA whistleblowers’ charges were probably on target.
In the course of their investigation, Crane and his colleagues in the inspector general’s office also affirmed the whistleblowers’ allegation that the Bush administration’s surveillance programme violated the fourth amendment of the US constitution by collecting Americans’ phone and internet communications without a warrant. “We were concerned about these constitutional issues even before we investigated their complaint,” Crane told me. “We had received other whistleblower filings that flagged the issue.”
In line with standard procedure, these investigative findings were relayed to the House and Senate committees overseeing the NSA – and this helped nudge Congress to end funding for the Trailblazer programme. But for the NSA whistleblowers, this apparent victory was the beginning of a dark saga that would change their lives for ever.
Crane could not believe his ears. “I told Henry that destruction of documents under such circumstances was, as he knew, a very serious matter and could lead to the inspector general being accused of obstructing a criminal investigation.” Shelley replied, according to Crane, that it didn’t have to be a problem if everyone was a good team player.
On 15 February, 2011, Shelley and Halbrooks sent the judge in the Drake case a letter that repeated the excuse given to Crane: the requested documents had been destroyed, by mistake, during a routine purge. This routine purge, the letter assured Judge Richard D Bennett, took place before Drake was indicted.
“Lynne and Henry had frozen me out by then, so I had no input into their letter to Judge Bennett,” Crane said. “So they ended up lying to a judge in a criminal case, which of course is a crime.”
With Drake adamantly resisting prosecutors’ pressure to make a plea deal – “I won’t bargain with the truth,” he declared – the government eventually withdrew most of its charges against him. Afterwards, the judge blasted the government’s conduct. It was “extraordinary”, he said, that the government barged into Drake’s home, indicted him, but then dropped the case on the eve of trial as if it wasn’t a big deal after all.
“I find that unconscionable,” Bennett added. “Unconscionable. It is at the very root of what this country was founded on … It was one of the most fundamental things in the bill of rights, that this country was not to be exposed to people knocking on the door with government authority and coming into their homes.”
When John Crane put his career on the line by standing up for legal treatment of Pentagon whistleblowers, he was following a moral code laid down 80 years before by his German grandfather. Crane grew up in suburban Virginia, but he spent nearly every summer in Germany with his mother’s extended family.
During these summer sojourns, Crane heard countless times about the moment when his grandfather confronted Hitler. His mother and his grandmother both told the story, and the moral never changed. “One must always try to do the right thing, even when there are risks,” Crane recalled being instructed. “And should someone do the right thing, there can of course be consequences.”
Crane’s grandfather was days shy of turning 40 on the night of Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch”, 8 November, 1923. Plotting to overthrow the Weimar Republic, Hitler and 600 armed members of his fledgling Nazi party surrounded a beer hall in Munich where the governor of Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr, was addressing a large crowd. The rebels burst into the hall, hoping to kidnap Von Kahr and march on Berlin.
After his men unveiled a machine gun hidden in the upstairs gallery, Hitler fired his pistol into the air and shouted, “The national revolution has begun!”
Crane’s grandfather, Günther Rüdel, was in the hall as part of his military duties, Rüdel recalled in an eight-page, single-spaced, typewritten affidavit that provides a minute-by-minute eyewitness account of the putsch. (Rüdel was later a government witness in the trial that sentenced Hitler to five years in prison, though he was not called to testify.)
The son of a prominent German general, Rüdel had served with distinction in the first world war, earning two Iron Crosses. By 1923, he was serving as chief political aide to General Otto von Lossow, the German army’s highest official in Bavaria. As such, Rüdel was the chief liaison between Von Lossow and Von Kahr and privy to the two men’s many dealings with Hitler.
Suspecting that Hitler and his followers were planning a coup, Lossow and Rüdel had forced their way into the beer hall to monitor developments. The head of Bavaria’s state police, Hans Ritter von Seisser, was also there, accompanied by a bodyguard. Rüdel was standing with Lossow and Von Seisser when armed men burst into the hall, with Hitler in the lead.
“Hitler, with pistol held high, escorted on right and left by armed men, his tunic stained with beer, stormed through the hall towards the podium,” Rüdel wrote in his affidavit. “When he was directly in front of us, police chief Von Seisser’s adjutant gripped [but did not unsheath] his sword. Hitler immediately aimed his pistol at the man’s chest. I shouted, ‘Mr Hitler, in this way you will never liberate Germany.’ Hitler hesitated, lowered his pistol and pushed his way between us to the podium.”
In the surrounding chaos, Hitler’s men tried to force Von Kahr, Lossow and Von Seisser to join the coup, but their uprising soon fizzled. A few days later, Hitler was arrested and charged with treason. He served a year in jail, where he wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf.
Incredible as it may sound, Crane aims to get his old job back. His attorney, Devine, thinks that is a fantasy. In Devine’s view, the problems facing whistleblowers are systemic – and the system does not forgive, especially someone who has exposed the system’s corruption as devastatingly as Crane has done.
To Crane, however, it is a simple matter of right and wrong. It was not he who broke the law; it was his superiors. Therefore it is not he who should pay the price but they.
“I just want to see the system work properly,” he says. “I know the system can fail – world war two, Nazi Germany – but I also know that you need to do what is right. Because the government is so powerful, you need to have it run efficiently and honestly and according to the law.”
“What are the odds the system will work properly in your case?” I asked Crane.
“I’m not giving you odds,” he replies with a chuckle. “This is just something that I have to do.”
This article is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s new book, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing in the Age of Snowden (Hot Books/Skyhorse)
• Illustration by Nathalie Lees
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 10, 2016
First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)
Journalistic treachery
Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges.
That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.
But not the Washington Post.
In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”
The Post editors concede that one — and only one — of the programs that Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed — namely, the domestic metadata program, because it “was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.”
Regarding the “corrective legislation” that followed its exposure, the Post acknowledges: “We owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.” But that metadata program wasn’t revealed by the Post, but rather by The Guardian.
Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, the editors say, real harm was done by their exposure.
That includes PRISM, about which the Post says this:
The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.)
In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did the Post editors forget to mention?
That the newspaper that (simultaneous with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual all over its front page is called … the Washington Post.
Then, once they made the choice to do so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
If the Post editorial page editors really believe that PRISM was a totally legitimate program and no public interest was served by its exposure, shouldn’t they be attacking their own paper’s news editors for having chosen to make it public, apologizing to the public for harming their security, and agitating for a return of the Pulitzer?
If the Post editorial page editors had any intellectual honesty at all, this is what they would be doing — accepting institutional responsibility for what they apparently regard as a grievous error that endangered the public — rather than pretending that it was all the doing of their source as a means of advocating for his criminal prosecution.
Worse than the intellectual dishonesty of this editorial is its towering cowardice.
After denouncing their own paper’s PRISM revelation, the editors proclaim: “Worse, he also leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations.” But what they inexcusably omit is that it was not Edward Snowden, but the top editors of the Washington Post who decided to make these programs public.
Again, just look at the stories for which the Post was cited when receiving a Pulitzer Prize:
Almost every one of those stories entailed the exposure of what the Post editors today call “details of international intelligence operations.” I personally think there were very solid justifications for the Post’s decision to reveal those.
As Snowden explained in the first online interview with readers I conducted, in July 2013, he was not only concerned about privacy infringement of Americans but of all human beings, because — in his words — “suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95 percent of the world instead of 100 percent. Our founders did not write that ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all U.S. Persons are created equal.’”
So I support the decision of the Post back then to publish documents exposing “international intelligence operations.” That’s because I agree with what Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2014, in an article in the Washington Post where they celebrated their own Pulitzer:
Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday that the reporting exposed a national policy “with profound implications for American citizens’ constitutional rights” and the rights of individuals around the world (emphasis added). “Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSA’s surveillance network absolutely was a public service. In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight.”
The editorial page is separate from the news organization and does not speak for the latter; I seriously doubt the journalists or editors at the Post who worked on these news stories would agree with any of that editorial.
But still, if the Post editorial page editors now want to denounce these revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper’s own source on this ground, then they should at least have the courage to acknowledge that it was the Washington Post — not Edward Snowden — who made the editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public.
They might want to denounce their own paper and even possibly call for its prosecution for revealing top-secret programs they now are bizarrely claiming should never have been revealed to the public in the first place.
But this highlights a chronic cowardice that often arises when establishment figures want to denounce Snowden. As has been amply documented, and as all newspapers involved in this reporting (including the Post) have made clear, Snowden himself played no role in deciding which of these programs would be exposed (beyond providing the materials to newspapers in the first place).
He did not trust himself to make those journalistic determinations, and so he left it to the newspapers to decide which revelations would and would not serve the public interest.
If a program ended up being revealed, one can argue that Snowden bears some responsibility (because he provided the documents in the first place), but the ultimate responsibility lies with the editors of the paper that made the choice to reveal it, presumably because they concluded that the public interest was served by doing so.
Yet over and over, Snowden critics — such as Slate’s Fred Kaplan and today’s Post editorial — omit this crucial fact, and are thus profoundly misleading.
In attacking Snowden this week, for instance, Kaplan again makes the same point he has made over and over: that Snowden’s revelations extended beyond privacy infringements of Americans.
Leave aside the narcissistic and jingoistic view that whistleblowers and media outlets should only care about privacy infringements of American citizens, but not the 95 percent of the rest of the planet called “non-Americans.”
And let’s also set to the side the fact that many of the most celebrated news stories in U.S. media history were devoted to revealing secret foreign operations that had nothing to do with infringing the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens (such as the Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib, and the Post’s revelations of CIA black sites).
What’s critical here is that Kaplan’s list of Bad Snowden Revelations (just like the Post’s) invariably involves stories published not by Snowden (or even by The Intercept or The Guardian), but by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But like the Post editorial page editors, Kaplan is too much of a coward to accuse the nation’s top editors at those two papers of treason, helping terrorists, or endangering national security, so he pretends that it was Snowden, and Snowden alone, who made the choice to reveal these programs to the public.
If Kaplan and the Post editors truly believe that all of these stories ought to have remained secret and have endangered people’s safety, why are they not attacking the editors and newspapers that made the ultimate decision to expose them? Snowden himself never publicly disclosed a single document, so any programs that were revealed were the ultimate doing of news organizations.
Whatever else may be true, one’s loyalty to U.S. government officials has to be slavish in the extreme in order to consider oneself a journalist while simultaneously advocating the criminalization of transparency, leaks, sources, and public debates.
But that’s not new: There has long been in the U.S. a large group that ought to call itself U.S. Journalists Against Transparency: journalists whose loyalty lies far more with the U.S. government than with the ostensible objectives of their own profession, and thus routinely take the side of those keeping official secrets rather than those who reveal them, even to the point of wanting to see sources imprisoned.
But what makes today’s Washington Post editorial so remarkable, such a tour de force, is that the editors are literally calling for the criminal prosecution of one of the most important sources in their own newspaper’s history.
Having basked in the glory of awards and accolades, and benefited from untold millions of clicks, the editorial page editors of the Post now want to see the source who enabled all of that be put in an American cage and branded a felon. That is warped beyond anything that can be described.
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 18, 2015
Hot posts this week (May 12/2015)
Photos of Lebanon civil war: 40th commemoration
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 16, 2015
NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett: Responds to Edward Snowden?
After a surprise appearance by Edward Snowden at TED2014, Chris Anderson said: “If the NSA wants to respond, please do.” And yes, they did.
Appearing by video, NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett answers Anderson’s questions about the balance between security and protecting privacy.
Chris Anderson: We had Edward Snowden here a couple days ago, and this is response time.
And several of you have written to me with questions to ask our guest here from the NSA.
So Richard Ledgett is the 15th deputy director of the National Security Agency, and he’s a senior civilian officer there, acts as its chief operating officer, guiding strategies, setting internal policies, and serving as the principal advisor to the director. And all being well, welcome, Rick Ledgett, to TED.
0:54 Richard Ledgett: I’m really thankful for the opportunity to talk to folks here. I look forward to the conversation, so thanks for arranging for that.
1:03 CA: Thank you, Rick. We appreciate you joining us. It’s certainly quite a strong statement that the NSA is willing to reach out and show a more open face here.
You saw, I think, the talk and interview that Edward Snowden gave here a couple days ago. What did you make of it?
RL: So I think it was interesting. We didn’t realize that he was going to show up there, so kudos to you guys for arranging a nice surprise like that.
I think that, like a lot of the things that have come out since Mr. Snowden started disclosing classified information, there were some kernels of truth in there, but a lot of extrapolations and half-truths in there, and I’m interested in helping to address those.
I think this is a really important conversation that we’re having in the United States and internationally, and I think it is important and of import, and so given that, we need to have that be a fact-based conversation, and we want to help make that happen.
2:15 CA: So the question that a lot of people have here is, what do you make of Snowden’s motivations for doing what he did, and did he have an alternative way that he could have gone?
RL: He absolutely did have alternative ways that he could have gone, and I actually think that characterizing him as a whistleblower actually hurts legitimate whistleblowing activities.
So what if somebody who works in the NSA — and there are over 35,000 people who do.
They’re all great citizens. They’re just like your husbands, fathers, sisters, brothers, neighbors, nephews, friends and relatives, all of whom are interested in doing the right thing for their country and for our allies internationally, and so there are a variety of venues to address if folks have a concern.
First off, there’s their supervisor, and up through the supervisory chain within their organization. If folks aren’t comfortable with that, there are a number of inspectors general.
In the case of Mr. Snowden, he had the option of the NSA inspector general, the Navy inspector general, the Pacific Command inspector general, the Department of Defense inspector general, and the intelligence community inspector general, any of whom would have both kept his concerns in classified channels and been happy to address them.
(CA and RL speaking at once) He had the option to go to congressional committees, and there are mechanisms to do that that are in place, and so he didn’t do any of those things.
CA: Now, you had said that Ed Snowden had other avenues for raising his concerns. The comeback on that is a couple of things:
one, that he certainly believes that as a contractor, the avenues that would have been available to him as an employee weren’t available,
two, there’s a track record of other whistleblowers, like [Thomas Andrews Drake] being treated pretty harshly, by some views, and
thirdly, what he was taking on was not one specific flaw that he’d discovered, but programs that had been approved by all three branches of government. I mean, in that circumstance, couldn’t you argue that what he did was reasonable?
4:40 RL: No, I don’t agree with that. I think that the — sorry, I’m getting feedback through the microphone there — the actions that he took were inappropriate because of the fact that he put people’s lives at risk, basically, in the long run, and I know there’s been a lot of talk in public by Mr. Snowden and some of the journalists that say that the things that have been disclosed have not put national security and people at risk, and that is categorically not true. They actually do.
I think there’s also an amazing arrogance to the idea that he knows better than the framers of the Constitution in how the government should be designed and work for separation of powers and the fact that the executive and the legislative branch have to work together and they have checks and balances on each other, and then the judicial branch, which oversees the entire process. I think that’s extremely arrogant on his part.
CA: Can you give a specific example of how he put people’s lives at risk?
5:59 RL: Yeah, sure. So the things that he’s disclosed, the capabilities, and the NSA is a capabilities-based organization, so when we have foreign intelligence targets, legitimate things of interest — like, terrorists is the iconic example, but it includes things like human traffickers, drug traffickers, people who are trying to build advanced weaponry, nuclear weapons, and build delivery systems for those, and nation-states who might be executing aggression against their immediate neighbors, which you may have some visibility into some of that that’s going on right now, the capabilities are applied in very discrete and measured and controlled ways.
So the unconstrained disclosure of those capabilities means that as adversaries see them and recognize, “Hey, I might be vulnerable to this,” they move away from that, and we have seen targets in terrorism, in the nation-state area, in smugglers of various types, and other folks who have, because of the disclosures, moved away from our ability to have insight into what they’re doing.
The net effect of that is that our people who are overseas in dangerous places, whether they’re diplomats or military, and our allies who are in similar situations, are at greater risk because we don’t see the threats that are coming their way.
7:25 CA: So that’s a general response saying that because of his revelations, access that you had to certain types of information has been shut down, has been closed down.
But the concern is that the nature of that access was not necessarily legitimate in the first place. I mean, describe to us this Bullrun program where it’s alleged that the NSA specifically weakened security in order to get the type of access that you’ve spoken of.
7:54 RL: So there are, when our legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the type that I described before, use the global telecommunications system as their communications methodology, and they do, because it’s a great system, it’s the most complex system ever devised by man, and it is a wonder, and lots of folks in the room there are responsible for the creation and enhancement of that, and it’s just a wonderful thing.
But it’s also used by people who are working against us and our allies. And so if I’m going to pursue them, I need to have the capability to go after them, and again, the controls are in how I apply that capability, not that I have the capability itself.
Otherwise, if we could make it so that all the bad guys used one corner of the Internet, we could have a domain, badguy.com. That would be awesome, and we could just concentrate all our efforts there. That’s not how it works. They’re trying to hide from the government’s ability to isolate and interdict their actions, and so we have to swim in that same space. But I will tell you this.
So NSA has two missions:
One is the Signals Intelligence mission that we’ve unfortunately read so much about in the press.
The other one is the Information Assurance mission, which is to protect the national security systems of the United States, and by that, that’s things like the communications that the president uses, the communications that control our nuclear weapons, the communications that our military uses around the world, and the communications that we use with our allies, and that some of our allies themselves use.
And so we make recommendations on standards to use, and we use those same standards, and so we are invested in making sure that those communications are secure for their intended purposes.
9:42 CA: But it sounds like what you’re saying is that when it comes to the Internet at large, any strategy is fair game if it improves America’s safety.
And I think this is partly where there is such a divide of opinion, that there’s a lot of people in this room and around the world who think very differently about the Internet.
They think of Internet as a momentous invention of humanity, kind of on a par with the Gutenberg press, for example. It’s the bringer of knowledge to all. It’s the connector of all.
And it’s viewed in those sort of idealistic terms. And from that lens, what the NSA has done is equivalent to the authorities back in Germany inserting some device into every printing press that would reveal which books people bought and what they read. Can you understand that from that viewpoint, it feels outrageous?
10:37 RL: I do understand that, and I actually share the view of the utility of the Internet, and I would argue it’s bigger than the Internet. It is a global telecommunications system.
The Internet is a big chunk of that, but there is a lot more. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about the balance between transparency and secrecy. (It is basically the lack of this balance that transpired in an entire decade)
That’s sort of been couched as a balance between privacy and national security. I don’t think that’s the right framing. I think it really is transparency and secrecy. And so that’s the national and international conversation that we’re having, and we want to participate in that, and want people to participate in it in an informed way.
So there are things, let me talk there a little bit more, there are things that we need to be transparent about: our authorities, our processes, our oversight, who we are. We, NSA, have not done a good job of that, and I think that’s part of the reason that this has been so revelational and so sensational in the media.
Nobody knew who we were. We were the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything. There’s takeoffs of our logo of an eagle with headphones on around it. And so that’s the public characterization.
And so we need to be more transparent about those things. What we don’t need to be transparent about, because it’s bad for the U.S., it’s bad for all those other countries that we work with and that we help provide information that helps them secure themselves and their people, it’s bad to expose operations and capabilities in a way that allows the people that we’re all working against, the generally recognized bad guys, to counter those.
12:19 CA: But isn’t it also bad to deal a kind of body blow to the American companies that have essentially given the world most of the Internet services that matter?
RL: It is. It’s really the companies are in a tough position, as are we, because the companies, we compel them to provide information, just like every other nation in the world does.
Every industrialized nation in the world has a lawful intercept program where they are requiring companies to provide them with information that they need for their security, and the companies that are involved have complied with those programs in the same way that they have to do when they’re operating in Russia or the U.K. or China or India or France, any country that you choose to name.
And so the fact that these revelations have been broadly characterized as “you can’t trust company A because your privacy is suspect with them“ is actually only accurate in the sense that it’s accurate with every other company in the world that deals with any of those countries in the world.
And so it’s being picked up by people as a marketing advantage, and it’s being marketed that way by several countries, including some of our allied countries, where they are saying, “Hey, you can’t trust the U.S., but you can trust our telecom company, because we’re safe.” And they’re actually using that to counter the very large technological edge that U.S. companies have in areas like the cloud and Internet-based technologies.
13:57 CA: You’re sitting there with the American flag, and the American Constitution guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. How do you characterize the American citizen’s right to privacy? Is there such a right?
RL: Yeah, of course there is. And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure, inordinate and appropriate, actually I should say, amount of time and effort in order to ensure that we protect that privacy. and beyond that, the privacy of citizens around the world, it’s not just Americans.
Several things come into play here.
First, we’re all in the same network. My communications, I’m a user of a particular Internet email service that is the number one email service of choice by terrorists around the world, number one. So I’m there right beside them in email space in the Internet.
And so we need to be able to pick that apart and find the information that’s relevant. In doing so, we’re going to necessarily encounter Americans and innocent foreign citizens who are just going about their business, and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out, that says, when you find that, not if you find it, when you find it, because you’re certain to find it, here’s how you protect that.
These are called minimization procedures. They’re approved by the attorney general and constitutionally based. And so we protect those.
And then, for people, citizens of the world who are going about their lawful business on a day-to-day basis, the president on his January 17 speech, laid out some additional protections that we are providing to them. So I think absolutely, folks do have a right to privacy, and that we work very hard to make sure that that right to privacy is protected.
15:51 CA: What about foreigners using American companies’ Internet services? Do they have any privacy rights?
15:58 RL: They do. They do, in the sense of, the only way that we are able to compel one of those companies to provide us information is when it falls into one of three categories: We can identify that this particular person, identified by a selector of some kind, is associated with counterterrorist or proliferation or other foreign intelligence target.
16:27 CA: Much has been made of the fact that a lot of the information that you’ve obtained through these programs is essentially metadata.
It’s not necessarily the actual words that someone has written in an email or given on a phone call. It’s who they wrote to and when, and so forth.
But it’s been argued, and someone here in the audience has talked to a former NSA analyst who said metadata is actually much more invasive than the core data, because in the core data you present yourself as you want to be presented. With metadata, who knows what the conclusions are that are drawn? Is there anything to that?
17:03 RL: I don’t really understand that argument. I think that metadata’s important for a couple of reasons.
Metadata is the information that lets you find connections that people are trying to hide. So when a terrorist is corresponding with somebody else who’s not known to us but is engaged in doing or supporting terrorist activity, or someone who’s violating international sanctions by providing nuclear weapons-related material to a country like Iran or North Korea, is trying to hide that activity because it’s illicit activity.
What metadata lets you do is connect that.
The alternative to that is one that’s much less efficient and much more invasive of privacy, which is gigantic amounts of content collection.
So metadata, in that sense, actually is privacy-enhancing. And we don’t, contrary to some of the stuff that’s been printed, we don’t sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you’re not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.
18:07 CA: So in terms of the threats that face America overall, where would you place terrorism?
18:15 RL: I think terrorism is still number one. I think that we have never been in a time where there are more places where things are going badly and forming the petri dish in which terrorists take advantage of the lack of governance.
An old boss of mine, Tom Fargo, Admiral Fargo, used to describe it as arcs of instability. (That the US created)
And so you have a lot of those arcs of instability in the world right now, in places like Syria, where there’s a civil war going on and you have massive numbers, thousands and thousands of foreign fighters who are coming into Syria to learn how to be terrorists and practice that activity, and lots of those people are Westerners who hold passports to European countries or in some cases the United States, and so they are basically learning how to do jihad and have expressed intent to go out and do that later on in their home countries.
You’ve got places like Iraq, which is suffering from a high level of sectarian violence, again a breeding ground for terrorism. And you have the activity in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel area of Africa. Again, lots of weak governance which forms a breeding ground for terrorist activity. So I think it’s very serious. I think it’s number one.
I think number two is cyber threat. I think cyber is a threat in three ways:
One way, and probably the most common way that people have heard about it, is due to the theft of intellectual property, so basically, foreign countries going in, stealing companies’ secrets, and then providing that information to state-owned enterprises or companies connected to the government to help them leapfrog technology or to gain business intelligence that’s then used to win contracts overseas. That is a hugely costly set of activities that’s going on right now. Several nation-states are doing it.
Second is the denial-of-service attacks. You’re probably aware that there have been a spate of those directed against the U.S. financial sector since 2012. Again, that’s a nation-state who is executing those attacks, and they’re doing that as a semi-anonymous way of reprisal.
And the last one is destructive attacks, and those are the ones that concern me the most. Those are on the rise. You have the attack against Saudi Aramco in 2012, August of 2012. It took down about 35,000 of their computers with a Wiper-style virus. You had a follow-on a week later to a Qatari company.
You had March of 2013, you had a South Korean attack that was attributed in the press to North Korea that took out thousands of computers. Those are on the rise, and we see people expressing interest in those capabilities and a desire to employ them.
21:10 CA: Okay, so a couple of things here, because this is really the core of this, almost. I mean, first of all, a lot of people who look at risk and look at the numbers don’t understand this belief that terrorism is still the number one threat.
Apart from September 11, I think the numbers are that in the last 30 or 40 years about 500 Americans have died from terrorism, mostly from homegrown terrorists. The chance in the last few years of being killed by terrorism is far less than the chance of being killed by lightning. I guess you would say that a single nuclear incident or bioterrorism act or something like that would change those numbers. Would that be the point of view?
21:51 RL: Well, I’d say two things.
One is, the reason that there hasn’t been a major attack in the United States since 9/11, that is not an accident. That’s a lot of hard work that we have done, that other folks in the intelligence community have done, that the military has done, and that our allies around the globe have done. You’ve heard the numbers about the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54, 25 of those in Europe, and of those 25, 18 of them occurred in three countries, some of which are our allies, and some of which are beating the heck out of us over the NSA programs, by the way.
So that’s not an accident that those things happen. That’s hard work. That’s us finding intelligence on terrorist activities and interdicting them through one way or another, through law enforcement, through cooperative activities with other countries and sometimes through military action.
The other thing I would say is that your idea of nuclear or chem-bio-threat is not at all far-fetched and in fact there are a number of groups who have for several years expressed interest and desire in obtaining those capabilities and work towards that.
23:05 CA: It’s also been said that, of those 54 alleged incidents, that as few as zero of them were actually anything to do with these controversial programs that Mr. Snowden revealed, that it was basically through other forms of intelligence, that you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, and the effects of these programs, these controversial programs, is just to add hay to the stack, not to really find the needle.
The needle was found by other methods. Isn’t there something to that?
23:37 RL: No, there’s actually two programs that are typically implicated in that discussion.
One is the section 215 program, the U.S. telephony metadata program, and the other one is popularly called the PRISM program, and it’s actually section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act.
But the 215 program is only relevant to threats that are directed against the United States, and there have been a dozen threats where that was implicated. Now what you’ll see people say publicly is there is no “but for” case, and so there is no case where, but for that, the threat would have happened.
But that actually indicates a lack of understanding of how terrorist investigations actually work. You think about on television, you watch a murder mystery. What do you start with? You start with a body, and then they work their way from there to solve the crime. We’re actually starting well before that, hopefully before there are any bodies, and we’re trying to build the case for who the people are, what they’re trying to do, and that involves massive amounts of information.
Think of it is as mosaic, and it’s hard to say that any one piece of a mosaic was necessary to building the mosaic, but to build the complete picture, you need to have all the pieces of information. On the other, the non-U.S.-related threats out of those 54, the other 42 of them, the PRISM program was hugely relevant to that, and in fact was material in contributing to stopping those attacks.
CA: Snowden said two days ago that terrorism has always been what is called in the intelligence world “a cover for action,” that it’s something that, because it invokes such a powerful emotional response in people, it allows the initiation of these programs to achieve powers that an organization like yours couldn’t otherwise have. Is there any internal debate about that?
25:34 RL: Yeah. I mean, we debate these things all the time, and there is discussion that goes on in the executive branch and within NSA itself and the intelligence community about what’s right, what’s proportionate, what’s the correct thing to do. And it’s important to note that the programs that we’re talking about were all authorized by two different presidents, two different political parties, by Congress twice, and by federal judges 16 different times, and so this is not NSA running off and doing its own thing.
This is a legitimate activity of the United States foreign government that was agreed to by all the branches of the United States government, and President Madison would have been proud.
26:21 CA: And yet, when congressmen discovered what was actually being done with that authorization, many of them were completely shocked.
Or do you think that is not a legitimate reaction, that it’s only because it’s now come out publicly, that they really knew exactly what you were doing with the powers they had granted you?
26:41 RL: Congress is a big body. There’s 535 of them, and they change out frequently, in the case of the House, every two years, and I think that the NSA provided all the relevant information to our oversight committees, and then the dissemination of that information by the oversight committees throughout Congress is something that they manage. (NSA constantly lied to Congress)
I think I would say that Congress members had the opportunity to make themselves aware, and in fact a significant number of them, the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility, did have the ability to do that. And you’ve actually had the chairs of those committees say that in public.
CA: Now, you mentioned the threat of cyberattacks, and I don’t think anyone in this room would disagree that that is a huge concern, but do you accept that there’s a tradeoff between offensive and defensive strategies, and that it’s possible that the very measures taken to, “weaken encryption,” and allow yourself to find the bad guys, might also open the door to forms of cyberattack?
RL: So I think two things. One is, you said weaken encryption. I didn’t. And the other one is that the NSA has both of those missions, and we are heavily biased towards defense, and, actually, the vulnerabilities that we find in the overwhelming majority of cases, we disclose to the people who are responsible for manufacturing or developing those products.
We have a great track record of that, and we’re actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way that the Internet companies are being allowed to publish transparency reports for them. We want to be more transparent about that. So again, we eat our own dog food. We use the standards, we use the products that we recommend, and so it’s in our interest to keep our communications protected in the same way that other people’s need to be.
28:44 CA: Edward Snowden, when, after his talk, was wandering the halls here in the bot, and I heard him say to a couple of people, they asked him about what he thought of the NSA overall, and he was very complimentary about the people who work with you, said that it’s a really impassioned group of employees who are seeking to do the right thing, and that the problems have come from just some badly conceived policies. He came over certainly very reasonably and calmly. He didn’t come over like a crazy man.
Would you accept that at least, even if you disagree with how he did it, that he has opened a debate that matters?
29:33 RL: So I think that the discussion is an important one to have. I do not like the way that he did it. I think there were a number of other ways that he could have done that that would have not endangered our people and the people of other nations through losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing. But I do think it’s an important conversation.
29:58 CA: It’s been reported that there’s almost a difference of opinion with you and your colleagues over any scenario in which he might be offered an amnesty deal. I think your boss, General Keith Alexander, has said that that would be a terrible example for others; you can’t negotiate with someone who’s broken the law in that way. But you’ve been quoted as saying that, if Snowden could prove that he was surrendering all undisclosed documents, that a deal maybe should be considered. Do you still think that?
30:30 RL: Yeah, so actually, this is my favorite thing about that “60 Minutes” interview was all the misquotes that came from that. What I actually said, in response to a question about, would you entertain any discussions of mitigating action against Snowden, I said, yeah, it’s worth a conversation. This is something that the attorney general of the United States and the president also actually have both talked about this, and I defer to the attorney general, because this is his lane.
But there is a strong tradition in American jurisprudence of having discussions with people who have been charged with crimes in order to, if it benefits the government, to get something out of that, that there’s always room for that kind of discussion. So I’m not presupposing any outcome, but there is always room for discussion.
31:21 CA: To a lay person it seems like he has certain things to offer the U.S., the government, you, others, in terms of putting things right and helping figure out a smarter policy, a smarter way forward for the future. Do you see, has that kind of possibility been entertained at all?
RL: So that’s out of my lane. That’s not an NSA thing. That would be a Department of Justice sort of discussion. I’ll defer to them.
31:53 CA: Rick, when Ed Snowden ended his talk, I offered him the chance to share an idea worth spreading. What would be your idea worth spreading for this group?
32:04 RL: So I think, learn the facts. This is a really important conversation, and it impacts, it’s not just NSA, it’s not just the government, it’s you, it’s the Internet companies. The issue of privacy and personal data is much bigger than just the government, and so learn the facts. Don’t rely on headlines, don’t rely on sound bites, don’t rely on one-sided conversations. So that’s the idea, I think, worth spreading.
We have a sign, a badge tab, we wear badges at work with lanyards, and if I could make a plug, my badge lanyard at work says, “Dallas Cowboys.” Go Dallas. I’ve just alienated half the audience, I know. So the lanyard that our people who work in the organization that does our crypto-analytic work have a tab that says, “Look at the data.” So that’s the idea worth spreading. Look at the data.
33:00 CA: Rick, it took a certain amount of courage, I think, actually, to come and speak openly to this group. It’s not something the NSA has done a lot of in the past, and plus the technology has been challenging. We truly appreciate you doing that and sharing in this very important conversation. Thank you so much.
Note: I have posted 2 reviews on No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 10, 2015
Appearing by telepresence robot, Edward Snowden speaks at TED2014 about surveillance and Internet freedom.
The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it.
“Your rights matter,” he says, “because you never know when you’re going to need them.” Chris Anderson interviews, with special guest Tim Berners-Lee
Chris Anderson:
The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. (Applause)
Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. Ed, welcome to the TED stage. What can you see, as a matter of fact?
0:44 Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. This is amazing. (Laughter)
0:52 CA: Ed, some questions for you. You’ve been called many things in the last few months. You’ve been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. What words would you describe yourself with?
1:08 ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me.
But when I think about it, this isn’t the question that we should be struggling with. Who I am really doesn’t matter at all.
If I’m the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters here are the issues.
What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies.
And that’s what I’m hoping the debate will move towards, and we’ve seen that increasing over time. If I had to describe myself, I wouldn’t use words like “hero.” I wouldn’t use “patriot,” and I wouldn’t use “traitor.” I’d say I’m an American and I’m a citizen, just like everyone else.
1:58 CA: So just to give some context for those who don’t know the whole story .
This time a year ago 2013, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA.
As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June’s revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this?
ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone.
But there are also things that go too far. There are things that shouldn’t be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public’s awareness, without the public’s consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs.
When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks?
And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out.
But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that’s to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk.
And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we’ve had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone.
And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized.
We’ve never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I’m comfortable with the decisions that I made.
4:45 CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don’t know whether you can see, the slides are here. This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed.
5:02 ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there’s been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn’t.
Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. They’ve said it’s just metadata, it’s just metadata, and they’re talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country’s phone records, things like that — who you’re talking to, when you’re talking to them, where you traveled.
These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It’s a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA.
And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them — I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court.
They were only tried by a secret court. And something that we’ve seen, something about the PRISM program that’s very concerning to me is, there’s been a talking point in the U.S. government where they’ve said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don’t tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that’s considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests.
These aren’t the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be.
6:47 CA: Now, this slide that we’re showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them.
Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA?
7:09 ES: Right. So the NSA’s own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers.
It doesn’t mean that there’s a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they’re going to give this stuff away.
Now each company handles it different ways. Some are responsible. Some are somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it’s coming from the companies themselves. It’s not stolen from the lines.
But there’s an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let’s do this through a warrant process, let’s do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users’ data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren’t as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself.
So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn’t satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they’re going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users.
And I think over the last year, we’ve seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue.
8:59 CA: What more should they do?
9:01 ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit.
The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of “1984” on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. They can all see it because it’s unencrypted.
The world’s library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books.
This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don’t mean to single them out, but they’re a great example. All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven’t taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. That’ll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide.
10:12 CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. What is that?
10:22 ES: So, I’ve got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms.
Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we don’t track those stats, and we can’t track those stats. We can’t tell you how many communications we’re intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy.
Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists. It’s already in place.
The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. I’m not sure that’s what an intelligence agency should be aiming for.
11:43 CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. The headline says, “NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year.” Tell us about that.
11:54 ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who’s seen the actual internal documents, knows what’s in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA’s rules, when we knew this story was coming.
But what’s especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people.
In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. What’s amazing about this, this report, that didn’t get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year?
13:20 CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? I mean, look, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about. What’s wrong with that point of view?
ES: Well, so the first thing is, you’re giving up your rights. You’re saying hey, you know, I don’t think I’m going to need them, so I’m just going to trust that, you know, let’s get rid of them, it doesn’t really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing.
Your rights matter because you never know when you’re going to need them.
Beyond that, it’s a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world.
People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they’re going to be misinterpreted and what they’re going to think your intentions were.
We have a right to privacy. We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored.
14:55 CA: Some people are furious at what you’ve done. I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you’ve committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that?
15:21 ES: Dick Cheney’s really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
I think it’s amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he’s saying it’s a flea bite.
So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials.
But let’s assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe.
The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn’t make us safe, and that applies whether it’s in Iraq or on the Internet.
The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society.
It’s a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by.
17:13 CA: But it’s alleged that you’ve stolen 1.7 million documents. It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. Are there more revelations to come?
17:27 ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. I don’t think there’s any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come.
17:41 CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. It’s about a program called “Bullrun.” Can you explain what that is?
18:01 ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we’ve got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle.
The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they’re named this way is because they target our own infrastructure.
They’re programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they’re giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services.
They’re building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world’s communications.
And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. We won’t be able to access our banks and we won’t be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends.
19:27 CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources?
19:38 ES: Absolutely. One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we’ve seen in the post-9/11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. They’ve been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they’ve also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they’ve always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more.
If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can’t get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they’re not only putting the world at risk, they’re putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we’re going to be paying for it for years.
20:40 CA: But they’ve made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America’s defense against terrorism. Surely that makes it a price worth paying.
20:50 ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that’s unfounded, and you don’t have to take my word for it, because we’ve had the first open court, the first federal court that’s reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional.
Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. So is it really terrorism that we’re stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well.
21:48 CA: I mean, do you think there’s a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism?
21:53 ES: I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you, say again?
21:55 CA: Sorry. Do you think there’s a deeper motivation for them other than the war against terrorism?
22:01 ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn’t give otherwise. The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s.
They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. But Congress and the American people said no. They said, it’s not worth the risk to our economy. They said it’s worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains. But what we saw is, in the post-9/11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it’s that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value.
23:03 CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I’ve got a more personal question for you. Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you’re in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. How are you coping with this? How are you coping with the fear?
23:36 ES: It’s no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I’ve made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. I don’t want to harm my government. I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they’re willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. We shouldn’t be threatening dissidents. We shouldn’t be criminalizing journalism. And whatever part I can do to see that end, I’m happy to do despite the risks.
24:32 CA: So I’d actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there’s widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. Suppose you had the following two choices, right? You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world’s long-term good? Those are the two choices I’ll give you. I’m curious to see who’s willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? There are some hands going up. Some hands going up. It’s hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them.
25:15 ES: I can see you. (Laughter)
25:18 CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act?
25:22 (Applause) (Cheers)
25:25 And I think it’s true to say that there are a lot of people who didn’t show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn’t split along traditional political lines. It’s not left or right, it’s not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. Part of it is almost a generational issue. You’re part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. Is there some truth to that?
26:02 ES: It is. I think it’s very true. This is not a left or right issue. Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don’t just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it’s not a partisan issue.
These are things that all people believe, and it’s up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it’s up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don’t change things, if we don’t stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we’re going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world.
26:49 CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim?
27:04 Tim, good to see you. Come up there. Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but —
27:17 Tim Berners-Lee: I’ve given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two.
27:26 CA: And Ed, I think you’ve read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. Is that something that makes sense?
ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there’s something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression.
And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it’s something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in.
28:34 CA: Do you have a question for Ed?
28:36 TBL: Well, two questions, a general question —
28:39 CA: Ed, can you still hear us?
28:41 ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he’s back.
28:45 TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. (Laughter)
28:50 ES: It’s a little bit of an NSA problem.
28:52 TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want?
29:08 ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that’s a question that’s really only limited by what we’re willing to put into it. I think the Internet that we’ve enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that.
We’ll get not just the Internet we’ve had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that’ll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined.
30:06 CA: It’s 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. It’s not Big Brother watching us. We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there’s a way of doing something about that. And you do too.
30:36 ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights.
Now, that hasn’t happened since the government’s surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that’s why we’re in the problem that we’re in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology.
I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that’s something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities.
31:58 CA: I’m not quite sure how you shake the hand of a bot, but I imagine it’s, this is the hand right here.
TBL: That’ll come very soon.
ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does.
32:12 CA: Thank you, Tim.
32:20 I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. Would you welcome the chance to come back to America?
32:29 ES: Absolutely. There’s really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that’s a powerful argument, but it’s not the final argument, and I think that’s something that public should decide.
But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I’ve been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. I did this to do what was right, and I’m not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. (Applause)
33:35 CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you’re here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. I’m curious, how does that feel?
33:51 ES: Canada is different than what I expected. It’s a lot warmer. (Laughter)
34:01 CA: At TED, the mission is “ideas worth spreading.” If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment?
ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don’t have to give up our privacy to have good government. We don’t have to give up our liberty to have security.
And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen.
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 5, 2015
From “Bind man by chains of Constitution” to “Bind man by chains of Cryptography”: No more confidence or faith in man behaviors
Equal Internet to all? Any why science must outpace laws on restricting collective data gathering and national security?
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798:
“In questions of power. Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution”
In 2008, Edward Snowden wrote in his manifesto of pro-privacy, anti-surveillance of massive collective data gathering solidarity cause:
“Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.
Equal internet will work to the advantage of the average person when science outpaces law.
By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win. We can guarantee people equal protection against unreasonable search through universal law, but only if the technical community is willing to face the threat and commit to implementing over engineered solutions in (cryptography)”
The successive US governments worked hard in the last decade to demonstrate unlimited power. It preempted wars, tortured prisoners and imprisoned people without charges in undisclosed incarceration camps, drone-bombed targets in extrajudicial killings in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria…
President Obama directive of Nov. 2012 stated:
“To senior national security and intelligence officials: Draw up list of potential overseas targets for US cyber attacks. Prepare for a series of aggressive offensive cyber operations around the world…
And the messengers of divulging such atrocities and mass collective gathering of communication on private citizens in the US and abroad were Not immune under the law of free press.
Whistle-blowers were abused, prosecuted and jailed.
Investigative reporters and journalists were threatened with jail terms.
The decade of cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who even contemplate of challenging the power-to-be in the US is still thriving and immune from blame and prosecution.
On June 9, 2013, The Guardian revealed Edward Snowden, the leaker of top secret documents on the worldwide data gathering of the NSA.
Laura Poitras posted a 12-minute interview with Ed:
“Um, my name is Ed Snowden. I’m 29 years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii…
For 6 months, Snowden was emailing Glenn Greenwald under Cincinnatus encouraging him to install a PGP encryption program that shield email and online communication from surveillance and hacking activities. and so communications cannot be intercepted
And Glenn procrastinated because he was no expert in such installation. Snowden then contacted Laura Poitras and sent her a few secret documents in order to win Glenn over and join him in Hong Kong. Snowden identity was still a secret and on leave for epileptic treatments.
Snowden didn’t finish high school but was hired as an internet expert by the CIA, NSA and Booz Allen. He had a diplomatic passport when stationed in Switzerland and was ordered to visit many locations in Europe to install communication infrastructure in order to gather secret communication on a wide scale.
And Glenn and Laura published a series of top secret documents of the NSA in the Guardian.
And I’m wondering:
1. By what chains can we bind our morbid species from igniting a Hydrogen Bomb?
2. By what chains can we bind our fickle and instant gratifying species from poisoning our environment to an irreversible state of no return?
If history is a guide, the few occasional decades of enlightenment and culture do Not match the consistent trend of our species for self-immolation
Note 1: Laura Poitras made the documentaries “My Country” in the Sunni Triangle during the US invasion of Iraq and “The Oath” following bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver in Yemen.
Note 2: Read “No Place to Hide” by Glenn Greenwald
https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/no-place-to-hide-when-investigative-journalists-are-prosecuted-for-divulging-secret-government-illegal-actions/
Posted by: adonis49 on: April 17, 2015
No Place to Hide? When investigative journalists are prosecuted for divulging secret government illegal actions
Machiavelli wrote in The Prince:
The character of the common people is mobile and easy to lead to an opinion. The real problem for the power-to-be is how to maintain this character, how to force the common people to believe when they cease to believe in the opinion of the powerful.
Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil:
The key word for those keen minds of conscientious people working on secret projects is: How to Trespass morality.
Roland Barthes wrote:
Fascism is to pressure people to express the opinions of the rulers
From a 1975 statement of Senator Frank Church to the committees of the intelligence agencies:
“The US government has perfected a tech capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air…
That capability could at any time turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left…
Such is the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegram…it doesn’t matter.
There would be No Place to Hide”
This monitoring capability has extended to internet, social platforms, mobile phones, public and private video cameras, satellite imaging, instant location capturing features…
The US government strategy, backed by Congressmen, Senators and leading journalists… was to mute Glenn Greenwald bold and direct reporting on the widespread surveillance on everyone (collective data gathering). The strategy was to label Glenn as just another blogger and an activist. Why?
Journalists in the US and in many other States have formal and unwritten legal protection that are unavailable to any one else when they reveal secret intelligence pieces through their job of investigative reporting.
Thus, robbing Glenn from this status of journalist was to expose him to legal criminal harassment.
For example, the misleading claims that he is:
1. A co-conspirator working with sources to obtain document
2. Establishing a covert communication plan to speak without being detected with sources
3. Employing flattery and playing to the sources’ vanity and ego to persuade the source to leak secrets documents
are routine tactics within the job description and methods of investigative journalists, but would not cover bloggers and activists.
Leonard Downie Jr. former executive editor of the Wash. Post, wrote in the name of the Committee to protect Journalists:
“The Obama Administration war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive since the Nixon Adm. The 30 experienced Wash Journalists at a variety of news organizations interviewed for the report could not remember any precedent (on this scale)”
“The Obama Adm. had crossed a red line that no other administration has crossed before and blown right past” said Jane Mayer in the New republic. It is a huge impediment to reporting and beyond chilling. It’s more like freezing the whole process into a standstill”
Even the NYTimes reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, who had fought all the way to the US Supreme Court in order to publish the Pentagon Papers, advocated the arrest of Glenn.
No one in the US dared confirm any “informal assurance” that Glenn would not be prosecuted if he lands in the USA.
The US government was ready to concoct a theory that Greenwald’s repeated meetings with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and in Russia and publishing reports on a “freelance basis” with newspapers around the world do fall under the criminal law of “aided and abetted” Snowden in his leaks and helped a “fugitive” flee justice or that the reports constituted some type of espionage.
It is evident that the security state in the USA is more powerful than the highest elected officials and do boast a wide array of influential loyalists.
So what kinds of reforms are necessary to check this wave of collective meta-data collection surveillance on people and institutions?
1. Targeted surveillance backed with substantial evidence of real wrongdoing
2. This “Collect it all” approach and indiscriminate mass surveillance is constitutionally illegal.
3. Using metadata analysis technique has not produced or disclosed a single terrorist plot: This a terrible burden on the budget dedicated to hiring specialized data analysts who have no clue on how to handle their job.
4. The government must provide some evidence of probable cause of wrongdoing before listening to a person conversations. That’s the job of FISA court.
5. FISA court. must be reformed so that it is not used as a rubber stamp. Converting FISA court into a real judicial system would be a positive first step in the reform
6. This trend of co-opting entities by the national security state badly needs an oversight control system to tame its abuses.
7. Building a new Internet infrastructure so that all the communication traffics have no longer to transit through the US network. European tech companies are spewing alternative special platforms to Google and Facebook intended Not to provide data to the NSA
8. More encryption programs and browsing-anonymity tools are being designed for users working in sensitive jobs such as journalists, lawyers, civil rights advocate organizations…
9. Advancing government transparency reforms
Whistle-blowers have learned that speaking the truth does not necessarily destroy their life: The side of supporters has grown immensely and are promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions outside the boundaries of government status quo.
Note: Glenn Greenwald published 4 books. Among them:
1. With Liberty and Justice for some
2. A Tragic Legacy
3. No place to hide
He published Edward Snowden secret stories in The Guardian before co-founding the investigative publication The Intercept
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 31, 2014
Snowden confirms: Al Baghdadi (ISIS Caliphate) was formed by Israel MOSSAD
Everyone in the “Arab” world know this fact.
And the program was planed many decades ago by the British under the code-name “Hornet Nest” and taken up by Israel and the US for their Greater Middle East dismemberment of this region.
Just to safeguard the “existence of the State of Israel”
Snowden a indiqué que les services de renseignement de trois pays, à savoir les États-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne et l’entité sioniste ont collaboré ensemble afin de créer une organisation terroriste qui soit capable d’attirer tous les extrémistes du monde vers un seul endroit, selon une stratégie baptisée « le nid de frelons ».
Les documents de l’Agence nationale de sécurité américaine évoque « la mise en place récente d’un vieux plan britannique connu sous le nom de “nid de frelons” pour protéger l’entité sioniste, et ce en créant une religion comprenant des slogans islamiques qui rejettent toute autre religion ou confession ».
Selon les documents de Snowden, « la seule solution pour la protection de “l’État juif” est de créer un ennemi près de ses frontières, mais de le dresser contre les États islamiques qui s’opposent à sa présence ».
Les fuites ont révélé qu’« Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi a suivi une formation militaire intensive durant une année entière entre les mains du Mossad, sans compter des cours en théologie et pour maîtriser l’art du discours ».
Adonis Diaries