The best articles on the evolving NSA scandal
Edward Snowden’s allegations about the NSA are so serious and pervasive that the only person who looks to have been ahead of the curve is Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist whack job. Unfortunately, he makes the mistaken assumption that the whole thing is Obama’s fault, while the scarier truth is that it’s bigger than any one man. Alex may blame Obama, more sensible people might blame the NeoCons, but the ones closest to the truth realize the Security State feeds off itself; it grows no matter what party is in power, no matter what figurehead is at the helm. Eisenhower didn’t warn against the military-industrial complex because the people in industry and the military were evil but because, like cancer, the system’s nature is to aggregate power and control to itself, growing and metastasizing, regardless of the damage to the host that makes it possible. Today’s world would be anathema to our founders but it IS where we live. Its very existence poses perhaps the most fundamental question our democratic experiment can ever face… whether the snowballing power and scope of a corporate fascistic security state can co-exist with popular oversight in a free society. Most people alive today will live to see the answer, and we think these people should have a hand in shaping it.
The Snowden fiasco will be unfolding for many months and years to come. There’s very little we can add to the debate, but maybe we can save you some time if you’d like to dig into it a little deeper. We’ve been reading a lot of information on the scandal, so we’ve brought together some of the best reporting and opinion pieces we’ve seen to date. We’ve broken things up into eleven sections:
- Just The Facts, Ma’am- Factual material about the specifics of the alleged programs and abuses. As it deals with classified programs being exposed bit-by-bit, please read it with a little caution.
- Digging for answers- The response to politicians asking for clarification
- The FISA Court- Details on the court charged with issuing fig leaves
- Opinion and Analysis- The bigger picture sketched in by many artists
- Whistleblowers- What’s happened (or is happening) to other Snowdens?
- World reaction- Americans aren’t the only ones upset about this
- “I don’t have anything to hide…”- Why you should care anyway
- Are those pesky reporters really necessary?- The ultimate in blaming the messenger
- Snowden watch- The sideshow- It’s irrelevant, but still interesting
- Big Brother is only getting bigger- What else is happening in surveillance and censorship?
- Is there anything… ANYTHING I can do?- No. But here’s a couple suggestions anyway.
You probably won’t want to read everything we’ve picked, but look around and we’re sure you’ll find something to hold your interest!
Just The Facts, Ma’am…
Here’s everything (so far) about how the NSA’s secret programs work
By Timothy Lee at Washington Post
Any one of Snowden’s revelations would have been a big story in its own right, but the news has been coming so rapidly that it’s difficult to keep track of it all. Here’s a handy guide from the Washington Post summing up the recent revelations about what the NSA’s been up to…
Timeline of NSA domestic spying
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Inner workings of a top-secret spy program
Barton Gellman and Todd Lindeman in Washington Post National
The National Security Agency’s PRISM program, which collects intelligence from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants, is “targeted” at foreigners. But it also collects the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of an unknown number of Americans — “inadvertently,” “incidentally” or deliberately if an American is conversing with a foreign target overseas. Here are new details on how the program works, from top-secret documents and interviews…
All 14 published reports of the Church Committee are available here
After the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, an aggressive media and a reform-minded Congress began uncovering abuses by the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. President Ford appointed a Commission on CIA Activities in the United States, headed by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller. But this was quickly overtaken by the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The so-called “Church Committee” most famously delved into U.S. plots to assassinate foreign leaders including Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, but its investigation went well beyond these plots. The Committee published 14 volumes of reports on a variety of activities in 1975 and 1976. These included the FBI’s CointelPro program to infiltrate and disrupt domestic organizations, mail opening programs by the FBI and CIA, abuses by the Internal Revenue Service, and much more…
Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data
Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill at The Guardian
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications. The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.
11 Shocking Things Snowden Has Taught Us (So Far)
By Angus West at Global Post
Falling behind on the increasingly byzantine NSA scandal? We’ve got you covered. Updated July 9, 2013
Digging for answers
James Clapper Says He Answered Senator Wyden in the ‘Least Untruthful Manner’ He Could Think Of
By Dan Amira in NY Magazine
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is still working on his explanation for why he told Senator Ron Wyden in March that the NSA does not wittingly “collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” As we now know, the NSA does precisely that — metadata (but not content) from pretty much every phone call made in America is collected and stored.
On Thursday, Clapper claimed, “What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails. I stand by that.” Of course, that’s not what he said, and everyone knows it, because video. So now Clapper says that he simply has a different definition of collect than most humans, and this defniition allowed him to answer in the “least untruthful manner.” He admits that this explanation is probably “too cute by half”…
“Dianne Feinstein is Outright Lying” about NSA Surveillance
Glenn Greenwald video from Democracy Now!
Senators accuse government of using ‘secret law’ to collect Americans’ data
Dan Roberts at the Guardian
A bipartisan group of 26 US senators has written to intelligence chiefs to complain that the administration is relying on a “secret body of law” to collect massive amounts of data on US citizens. The senators accuse officials of making misleading statements and demand that the director of national intelligence James Clapper answer a series of specific questions on the scale of domestic surveillance as well as the legal justification for it. In their strongly-worded letter to Clapper, the senators said they believed the government may be misinterpreting existing legislation to justify the sweeping collection of telephone and internet data revealed by the Guardian. “We are concerned that by depending on secret interpretations of the Patriot Act that differed from an intuitive reading of the statute, this program essentially relied for years on a secret body of law,” they say…
Senators: NSA must correct inaccurate claims over privacy protections
Spencer Ackerman for The Guardian
Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, two senators on the intelligence committee, accused the National Security Agency of publicly presenting “inaccurate” information about the privacy protections on its surveillance on millions of internet communications. However, in a demonstration of the intense secrecy surrounding NSA surveillance even after Edward Snowden’s revelations, the senators claimed they could not publicly identify the allegedly misleading section or sections of a factsheet without compromising classified information.
Senators Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) and Mark Udall (Democrat, Colorado) wrote to General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, to correct “inaccurate” portrayals about restrictions on surveillance published in a factsheet available on the NSA’s homepage. The factsheet, concerning NSA’s powers under Section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act, was also supplied to members of Congress…
How Do You Know When President Obama is Lying? MSNBC Won’t Tell You
By Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams
I was a young person when I first heard the quip: “How do you know when the President is lying? His lips are moving.” At the time, President Nixon was expanding the war in Vietnam to other countries and deploying the White House “plumbers” to commit crimes against antiwar leakers.
Like Nixon, our current president is prolonging an endless, borderless and counter-productive war (“on terror”) and waging a parallel war against “national security” leakers that makes the plumbers’ burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office look almost quaint.
The World War I vintage Espionage Act, originally used to imprison socialists for making antiwar speeches, has been used by the administration against whistleblowers with a vengeance unprecedented in history: eight leakers have been charged with Espionage under Obama, compared to three under all previous presidents. The Obama administration has prosecuted not a single CIA torturer, but has imprisoned a CIA officer who talked about torture with a journalist. National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who was unable to get abuses fixed internally, now has a criminal record for communicating with a reporter years ago about sweeping domestic surveillance…
Chris Hayes: Unequal Responses to Leaked Security Intel
Video at Common Dreams
Chris Hayes points to the unequal and uneven response to leaked information that advances the Pentagon’s agenda and leaked information that doesn’t.
The FISA Court…
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
Washington Post Politics
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the government is required to obtain a judicial warrant — similar to those issued in criminal investigations — before federal intelligence agencies can conduct electronic surveillance and gather intelligence within the United States in the interest of national security. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established by Congress to approve or deny warrant applications related to national security investigations…
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (infographic)
The FISA court is acting like a legislature, and that’s a problem
By Timothy B. Lee, in Washington Post
One of the National Security Agency’s key talking points since the PRISM program was revealed two weeks ago has been that its surveillance activities are subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In his latest scoop, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald has revealed two of the documents the government submits to the court prior to engaging in surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
These documents are often compared to the warrants the government ordinarily needs for searches of Americans. But they’re dramatically different from a conventional search warrant. A warrant is supposed to “particularly” describe who will be targeted by a search. It will typically include a suspect’s name, as well as the address to be searched or the phone number to be wiretapped.
The documents released by the Guardian don’t look like that at all. The first document is nine pages long and explains in some detail the factors the NSA uses to determine whether a potential surveillance target is a “US person”—if the answer is yes, then the agency cancels the planned surveillance. The second document, also nine pages, describes what the NSA does if it accidentally collects the private communications of Americans.
Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of ‘collaboration’ with government
Carol Leonnig, Ellen Kanashima, in Washington Post Politics
Recent leaks of classified documents have pointed to the role of a special court in enabling the government’s secret surveillance programs, but members of the court are chafing at the suggestion that they were collaborating with the executive branch. A classified 2009 draft report by the National Security Agency’s inspector general relayed some details about the interaction between the court’s judges and the NSA, which sought approval for the Bush administration’s top-secret domestic surveillance programs. The report was described in The Washington Post on June 16 and released in full Thursday by The Post and the British newspaper the Guardian. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took the highly unusual step Friday of voicing open frustration at the account in the report and court’s inability to explain its decisions…
Opinion and Analysis…
America, Passive Nation — Why Can’t We Stand Up for Ourselves When Our Rights Are Stolen?
Dan Gillmore at The Guardian
I’m a longtime subscriber to an internet mail list that features items from smart, thoughtful people. The list editor forwards items he personally finds interesting, often related to technology and/or civil liberties. Not long after the Guardian and Washington Post first started publishing the leaks describing the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance dragnet, an item appeared about a White House petition urging President Obama to pardon Edward Snowden. The post brought this reply, among others: “Once upon a time I would have signed a White House petition to this administration with no qualms. Now, however, a chilling thought occurs: what ‘watch lists’ will signing a petition like this put me on? NSA? IRS? It’s not a paranoid question anymore, in the United States of Surveillance”…
The Internet As We Know It Is On Its Deathbed
Steven Rosenfeld on AlterNet
The original vision of the Internet, where information and media is freely shared, without one’s computer strokes and searches being metered, tracked, traced, archived, dissected, marketed and warehoused in government data banks, is dead. And that’s what’s being lost by mainstream media in the ongoing Edward Snowden coverage…
By Glenn Greenwald in Salon
The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic “homeland security” projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of “9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret” to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that — which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all — is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Uncle Sam and Corporate Tech: Domestic Partners Raising Digital Big Brother
Norman Soloman at Common Dreams
A terrible formula has taken hold: warfare state + corporate digital power = surveillance state. “National security” agencies and major tech sectors have teamed up to make Big Brother a reality. “Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors,” the New York Times noted. The synergy is great for war-crazed snoops in Washington and profit-crazed moguls in Silicon Valley, but poisonous for civil liberties and democracy.
“Much of the coverage of the NSA spying scandal has underplayed crucial context: The capacity of the government to engage in constant surreptitious monitoring of all civilians has been greatly enhanced by the commercialization of the Internet,” media analyst Robert McChesney pointed out this week. Overall, he said, “the commercialized Internet, far from producing competition, has generated the greatest wave of monopoly in the history of capitalism.” And the concentration of online digital power is, to put it mildly, user-friendly for the surveillance state…
Terror v. Surveillance? Keeping Americans Safe in Two Simple Steps
By Robert Jensen at Common Dreams
In the frenzy over Edward Snowden’s leak of classified information about government data-mining surveillance, public officials and pundits have tried to lock us into a narrowly defined and diversionary discussion that ignores the most important question we face about terrorism.
Their argument goes something like this: No one wants to die in a terrorist attack. This kind of spying is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. So, stop whining about how information is being collected, used, and potentially misused—it’s better than dying.
Let me be clear: I do not want to die in a terrorist attack. But before I am bullied into accepting intrusive government surveillance that is open to politicized abuse, I have another question: Are there other ways we could reduce the risk of U.S. citizens, at home or abroad, being targeted by terrorists? Two possibilities come to mind…
Robert Koehler at Common Dreams
America, America . . . Certainly Edward Snowden’s crime is one of public relations. In this day and age, power ain’t just jackboots, tanks and missiles. What he did by outing the NSA and its gargantuan surveillance operation was mess hugely with the American image — the American brand — with its irresistible combination of might and right.
That’s the nature of his “treason.” The secret he gave away was pretty much the same one the little boy blurted out in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale: “The emperor has no clothes!” That is, the government’s security industry isn’t devoted, with benevolent righteousness, to protecting the American public. Instead, it’s obsessively irrational, bent on accumulating data on every phone call we make. It’s a berserk spy machine, seemingly to no sane end…
How America’s Surveillance State Breeds Conformity and Fear
Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian- Video (at the bottom of the page) and transcript here.
And after the investigation concluded, he (Senator Church in the Church Commission) issued all sorts of warnings about the Surveillance State and how it was emerging, and the urgency of only allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, that they have all kinds of layers of oversight in the courts and Congress, but he issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is really remarkable in terms of what he said. And this is what he said — and you can find this anywhere online, in the New York Times, everywhere — he said, as part of a written report, and in an interview: “The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter”. He continued, “There would be no place to hide. If a dictator takes over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back”.
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Slams Surveillance State, Hails NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden
Andrea Germanos at Common Dreams
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has cheered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and admonished the rise of the surveillance state. Speaking with CNN‘s Piers Morgan on Thursday, Wozniak expressed support for the whistleblower and said, “I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot with a book he wrote…” He continued: “Read the facts—it’s a government of, by and for the people. That sorta means we own the government. We’re the ones that pay for it, and then we discover something that our money is being used for. That just can’t be, that level of crime…”
Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Sprigman in NY Times Opinion
The twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh”…
Whistleblowers…
Obama Has Charged More Under Espionage Act Than All Other Presidents Combined
By Daniel Politi at Slate
The U.S. government charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act. He now becomes the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Act under Obama, according to Firedoglake. That is more than double all previous presidents combined. Prior to Obama’s administration only three people who leaked information had been charged under the 1917 statute that was never really intended for leakers. The arguments that Obama uses now to use that statute to go after those who reveal information were first brought up by Ronald Reagan’s administration when it went after a Navy civilian analyst who leaked photographs to a British military magazine. But now the practice has become widespread.
NSA Leaker Thomas Drake on Snowden’s Case
NPR’s “The Takeaway” Audio interview with Thomas Drake
A column by Thomas Drake in The Guardian is here.
What might have happened if the former defense contractor Ed Snowden had decided to stay here and had taken up his complaint within the official chain of command? It’s what former National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake, one of Snowden’s idols, did. After September 11th, Drake became uncomfortable about the agency’s top-secret counterterrorism programs. He grew to believe that the NSA’s actions, which included warrantless wiretapping “subverted the Constitution.” Drake took his complaint to the highest levels of the NSA, to Congress, the Pentagon and finally the press. He was eventually indicted by the Justice Department and faced up to 35 years in prison. But eventually, the charges against Drake were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a minor misdemeanor. Drake explains why he supports Snowden and describes his concerns about the NSA’s actions following 9/11…
Prosecution of NSA Whistleblower Collapses
By Scott Horton at Harpers
The Obama Administration’s highly touted effort to prosecute Thomas A. Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, for violations of the Espionage Act due to his disclosure of pervasive fraud, waste, and abuse connected with a $1-billion surveillance-technology contract has collapsed in a federal court in Baltimore. In a plea-bargain arrangement, Drake agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of misuse of a government computer, while prosecutors agreed not to push for jail time. The Espionage Act charges that formed the core of the prosecution are being withdrawn.
3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: “We told you so”
Roundtable discussion on USA Today
When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.
For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.
To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.
Today, they feel vindicated…
Obama’s Attack on Whistleblowers Criminalizes News Gathering
Interview by Paul Jay, Real News Network
The Obama administration’s seizure of phone records of Associated Press is clearly a message, first of all, to whistleblowers. If we can go after AP, we can go after anybody. And whoever you might phone, we can get hold of those records. And, of course, if they can go after AP, they can go after any journalist, so it’s also a message to journalists across the country.
Now joining us to talk about all of this is Kathleen McClellan. She’s a national security and human rights counsel at the Government Accountability Project, a leading whistleblower rights organization in D.C. Thanks for joining us, Kathleen…
Daniel Ellsberg Issues Call for a New Church Committee To Probe NSA
By Miranda Green at The Daily Beast
“I’m hoping that we will see public pressure successful in causing Congress to name a select committee investigating the potential full scale of surveillance by the whole intelligence community and proposing legislation that will reflect a full congressional investigation,” Ellsberg told The Daily Beast about a new petition he’s putting his name behind, calling for greater congressional oversight of the NSA and the intelligence community. The petition is hosted by CREDO Action, an activist website that approached Ellsberg after hearing his remarks in recent weeks in defense of Private Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. “Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate these revelations might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the Bill of Rights,” Ellsberg writes in the petition.
Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
By Marisa Taylor and Jonathan Landay, McClatchy Washington Bureau
Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions. President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct…
James Cartwright, retired Marine general, target of Iran leak investigation
Video, CBS This Morning
Whistleblowers come in many shapes and sizes. General James Cartwright is confirmed to be the target of a criminal leak investigation. If this turns out to be true, it will make it harder to paint him with the “treasonous leftwinger” sobriquet…
An appeal from Ethan McCord for Bradley Manning’s defense
Ethan McCord appears in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks–the subject of the 2012 Academy Award nominated short documentary “Incident in New Baghdad.” Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing WikiLeaks with the video, sits before a hearing this morning at Fort Meade (near Washington DC) that will determine the time line for his upcoming court martial. Please join Ethan in supporting Bradley by making a tax-deductible donation today to the Bradley Manning Defense Fund.
World reaction…
Ecuador’s president to U.S.: Don’t threaten us on Snowden case
Catherine Shoichet, CNN, video and text
Defiant authorities in Ecuador say they won’t bow to U.S. pressure as they weigh former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s request for asylum. Ecuador’s president and other top officials said Thursday that they’re turning down the trade benefits the United States gives them as part of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act. “In the face of threats, insolence and arrogance of certain U.S. sectors, which have pressured to remove the preferential tariffs because of the Snowden case, Ecuador tells the world we unilaterally and irrevocably renounce the preferential tariffs,” President Rafael Correa said Thursday, reiterating comments other officials from his government made earlier in the day. In a fiery speech at an event in Quevedo, Ecuador, the president vowed not to back down. “It is outrageous to try to delegitimize a state for receiving a petition of asylum,” Correa said…
NSA Spied on European Union Offices
By Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid and Holger Stark at Spiegel Online
America’s NSA intelligence service allegedly targeted the European Union with its spying activities. According to SPIEGEL information, the US placed bugs in the EU representation in Washington and infiltrated its computer network. Cyber attacks were also perpetrated against Brussels in New York and Washington.
Information obtained by SPIEGEL shows that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) not only conducted online surveillance of European citizens, but also appears to have specifically targeted buildings housing European Union institutions. The information appears in secret documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that SPIEGEL has in part seen. A “top secret” 2010 document describes how the secret service attacked the EU’s diplomatic representation in Washington…
Europeans plan to fight back against PRISM
By Tero Kuittinen at bgr.com
Finnish communications minister Pia Viitanen has stated bluntly that the NSA may be breaking the laws of Finland. According to the Finnish Constitution, capturing and reading emails or text messages without privileges is illegal. Viitanen plans to take up the issue with the European Comission. Several European countries are apparently considering unleashing Neelie Kroes, the feared European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, in an effort to fight back against the NSA’s PRISM program.
“I don’t have anything to hide…”
Privacy and the Threat to the Self
Michael Lynch at NYTimes Opinion
In the wake of continuing revelations of government spying programs and the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA collection – both of which push the generally accepted boundaries against state intrusion on the person — the issue of privacy is foremost on the public mind. The frequent mantra, heard from both media commentators and government officials, is that we face a “trade-off” between safety and convenience on one hand and privacy on the other. We just need, we are told, to find the right balance.
This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person…
To those who say ‘trust the government’ on NSA spying: Remember J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI?
Barrett Brown, The Guardian
It’s a fine thing to see mainstream American media outlets finally sparing some of their attention toward the cyber-industrial complex – that unprecedented conglomeration of state, military and corporate interests that together exercise growing power over the flow of information. It would be even more heartening if so many of the nation’s most influential voices, from senator to pundits, were not clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends…
Security-State Creep: The Real NSA Scandal Is What’s Legal
By Rebecca Rosen in The Atlantic
“We doubt,” the Supreme Court held, “that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.” And even if they did, the opinion continued, such an expectation would not be a “reasonable” one, for once you’ve disclosed anything to a third party, you cannot “reasonably” expect it to remain private.
That decision, in a case called Smith v. Maryland, is highly relevant again today. The Court decided that a local police department did not violate the Fourth Amendment (“unreasonable searches and seizures”) when, without obtaining a warrant, the police asked a telephone company to record all the numbers dialed from a suspect’s home. The year of that decision? 1979, long before the rise of our modern, counter-terrorist security state…
The Dictionary of the Global War on You (GWOY)
by Tom Engelhardt at Common Dreams
In the months after September 11, 2001, it was regularly said that “everything” had changed. It’s a claim long forgotten, buried in everyday American life. Still, if you think about it, in the decade-plus that followed — the years of the PATRIOT Act, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “black sites,” robot assassination campaigns, extraordinary renditions, the Abu Ghraib photos, the Global War on Terror, and the first cyberwar in history — much did change in ways that should still stun us. Perhaps nothing changed more than the American national security state, which, spurred on by 9/11 and the open congressional purse strings that followed, grew in ways that would have been alien even at the height of the Cold War, when there was another giant, nuclear-armed imperial power on planet Earth.
Unfortunately, the language we use to describe the world of the national security state is still largely stuck in the pre-9/11 era. No wonder, for example, it’s hard to begin to grasp the staggering size and changing nature of the world of secret surveillance that Edward Snowden’s recent revelations have allowed us a peek at. If there are no words available to capture the world that is watching us, all of us, we’ve got a problem…
Tom Dwyer’s “Book Spotlight” for July
by Tom Dwyer in Your Car Matters
“Not having anything to hide” isn’t the same as “not having done anything illegal”. This month we spotlight two books that tell you how many things that aren’t wrong can still land you in trouble with the Man. Check out “Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything” by Gene Healy and “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” by Harvey Silvergate.
Chomsky Says Young People Don’t Care About Surveillance — Is He Right?
April Short at AlterNet
When the leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed warrantless, secret government surveillance of U.S. citizens’ phone and Internet records—including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats—Noam Chomsky surmised that younger people were less “offended” than older people by the privacy intrusion. In a Guardian article, he called this attitude a generational issue that “someone ought to look into.” Younger people, he warned, are “much less shocked” at being spied on by the U.S. government than the older generation, “and did not view it as such a problem.” He said: “It may have to do with the exhibitionist character of the Internet culture, with Facebook and so on. … On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.”
Well, there is absolutely a generation gap when it comes to issues of freedom of information, the NSA leaks, and scandal in general—especially online—but it’s not necessarily what you might expect. The lack of an “OMG” attitude over the U.S. government’s mass-scale privacy intrusions stem from much more than a general air of nonchalance about technology.
How You’re Breaking the Law Every Day (and What You Can Do About It)
By Adam Dachis at LifeHacker.com
You share music, rip DVDs, make Hitler whine about your first world problems, and much more in the course of your regular online activities—and more often than not, you do these things without giving a thought to the fact that you’re actually breaking the law. Here’s a look at how you’re inevitably circumventing copyright law and what you can do to protect yourself…
Are those pesky reporters really necessary?
Glenn Greenwald destroys David Gregory on Meet The Press
Video
10 Questions for NBC Host Who Shamelessly Suggested Greenwald Be Arrested for NSA Leaks
By David Sirota at Salon
Two weeks into the hullaballoo surrounding whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, one thing is clear: they did not just reveal potentially serious crimes perpetrated by the government — including possible perjury,unlawful spying and unconstitutional surveillance. They also laid bare in historic fashion the powerful double standards that now define most U.S. media coverage of the American government — the kind that portray those who challenge power as criminals, and those who worship it as heroes deserving legal immunity. Indeed, after “Meet the Press” host David Gregory’s instantly notorious performance yesterday, it is clear Snowden’s revelations so brazenly exposed these double standards that it will be difficult for the Washington press corps to ever successfully hide them again. The best way to see these double standards is to ponder 10 simple questions…
Glenn Greenwald Is ‘Aiding and Abetting’ Democracy
John Nichols in The Nation
Imagine if the Sunday morning talk shows had existed in 1776. Surely, they would have welcomed the most widely read and provocative journalist of that historic year. Perhaps the hosts would have asked Tom Paine if he felt that by penning articles calling out the hypocrisy of colonial officials—and incendiary pamphlets such as Common Sense—he was “aiding and abetting” the revolutionaries that King George III imagined to be “traitors.” An intimidating question, to be sure. Too intimidating, determined the founders of the American experiment.
After Paine’s compatriots prevailed in their revolutionary endeavor, they wrote into the Bill of Rights a protection of the ability of a free press to speak truth to power, to call out and challenge the machinations of those in government.
Unfortunately, this history is sometimes lost on contemporary Washington…
Snowden watch- The sideshow
Chris Hedges Defends Snowden’s Heroism in the Face of a Growing Smear Campaign
In this excellent debate from Democracy Now!, Chris Hedges makes a brilliant defense of Edward Snowden, and the collapse of our institutions.
As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point
By Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone
Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.
In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there’s a reporter character named “Sam Miller” played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you’re doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you’re probably eating Chumpbait…
Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S.
By Daniel Ellsberg at WP Opinions
Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.
After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice”…
What Have Snowden and Greenwald Got to Do With Gandhi?
by Subhankar Banerjee at Common Dreams
There is a linguistic gobbledegoo going on about what it is that Edward Snowden has committed that was made possible by the “advocacy journalism” of Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian. While many, in the US and around the world, seem to believe that Snowden committed a “heroic act” by blowing a loud whistle on the global spying by the US, the established order keeps insisting—noop, it’s “treason.” On Friday, one more US Senator confirmed the latter view. Senator Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Takeaway: “I’ve been thinking about this as the story has unfolded, and at first I thought [Edward Snowden] was trying to raise a public debate about important issues, and that maybe he’s more like a whistle-blower. … As it’s gone on, I’m moving more and more towards the treason end of the scale.” Treason is not the right word. Sedition is…
N.S.A. Leak Puts Focus on System Administrators
Christopher Drew and Somini Sengupta in NY Times
Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked details about American surveillance, personifies a debate at the heart of technology systems in government and industry: can the I.T. staff be trusted? As the N.S.A., some companies and the city of San Francisco have learned, information technology administrators, who are vital to keeping the system running and often have access to everything, are in the perfect position if they want to leak sensitive information or blackmail higher-level officials…
Seven Myths About Edward Snowden, NSA Whistleblower
Chase Madar in The Nation
So many questions! How much of our personal information can the NSA get at, with and without a warrant? What exactly does “server” mean on that NSA PowerPoint slide? Is Snowden in Moscow, Havana, Quito, none of the above? Tracking the fast-evolving scandal of NSA surveillance and whistleblower Edward Snowden requires a bullshit-detector cranked up to eleven. Though the NSA-Snowden affair is scarcely three weeks old, all manner of official folklore and panic-infused idées reçues have already glommed on, limpet-like, to media accounts, often deforming the story beyond recognition. Below is your handy myth-stripping guide to understanding this critical news item…
Big Brother is only getting bigger…
Military Blackout: Army Blocks Access to NSA News Reports
Sarah Lazare at Common Dreams
The U.S. Army is blocking all internet access to the Guardian‘s coverage of the NSA spying scandal to prevent service members and military employees from leaking information themselves, the Monterey Herald revealed Thursday. The censorship at Army bases across the U.S. is in place to ward off further leaks and ensure ‘network hygiene,’ said Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army’s NETCOM network. He told the Monterey Herald: “We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security, however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information.” Yet, supporters of whistleblower rights argue that media filtering from the Army command ultimately cannot stop soldiers from learning about them or prevent them from potentially acting on their own consciences…
James Bamford at Wired
(Added 7/15/2013) Inside Fort Meade, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles. Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras. To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh.
This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army…
How Obama Is Expanding the Century-Long Project to Build a Total Surveillance State
Alfred W. McCoy on Alternet
(Added 7/15/2013) The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
James Bamford at Wired
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
FBI admits using drones in the US
Video, The Young Turks
Bradley Manning Trial Gets No Stenographers, Orders Court
Joshua DeLeon at Ring of Fire
After majors news outlets raised over $60,000 to hire stenographers to record Pfc. Bradley Manning’s trial, the military court overseeing the trial has denied the stenographers press passes, cutting off any publicly-accessible written record of the proceedings.
Numerous news organizations that pooled together and formed the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) started the fundraiser to pay for a stenographer to ensure the court’s transparency during the trial. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange also assembled a group of journalists and first-amendment activists to file a lawsuit, on two accounts, against the Department of Defense to force the court into transparency. Both time of which were ultimately struck down…
Mythbusters banned from talking about RFID
Video wherein Adam Savage tells how censorships worked in his corporate world. In a word? It works efficiently.
Is there anything… ANYTHING I can do?
Why Edward Snowden’s Leaks Have Empowered All of Us
Elliot Sperber at AlterNet
If the expression “knowledge is power”- attributed to the English Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon- is true, then it implies, among other things, that its opposite is also true. The is, if knowledge is power, then the lack of knowledge, or ignorance, amounts to a lack of, or exclusion from, power. As such, removing, obscuring, or hiding knowledge- in a word, secrecy- not only creates power, it produces powerlessness, weakness, and vulnerability as well. Indeed, as Elias Canetti phrased it in his “Crowds and Power”, “Secrecy lies at the very core of power”. As the state, then, acquires ever more knowledge/power through such programs as PRISM, ‘the people’ in general- in spite of the State’s dubious claims of enhancing security and safety- are only further weakened, put into an ever more vulnerable, precarious position. In addition to the myriad political, legal, and ethical issues embedded in the debate concerning the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s ongoing disclosures of classified information. This nonconsensual, actual precarization of the public (by secretive state and private-sector agencies whose authority to gather this power is by no means clear) constitutes a substantial harm in itself.
How to hide your data from Internet Snoops
Doug Gross, CNN Tech
Having concerns about NSA cybersnooping doesn’t mean we must surrender all privacy — what’s left of it — in our day-to-day online activities. It’s easy to forget that we’re volunteering basic information about ourselves in return for free e-mail, social networking and other digital services. And let’s remember that third parties — from government agencies to cybercriminals — can get their hands on even more personal stuff if they’re actively trying. So, whether it’s due to a vague fear of Big Brother or a more specific desire to keep your bank information out of the hands of thieves, you might be considering ways to keep your communication more secure…
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF is asking individuals to email Congress right away to tell them in the strongest possible terms that you do not consent to dragnet domestic surveillance. Tell your elected officials that you object to this mass domestic spying program. Demand that they initiate a full-scale, public investigation immediately with the results of the investigation made public as much as possible. Demand that the public officials responsible for this program are held to account.
Fight for the Future is dedicated to protecting and expanding the Internet’s transformative power in our lives by creating civic campaigns that are engaging for millions of people. Alongside internet users everywhere we beat back attempts to limit our basic rights and freedoms, and empower people to demand technology (and policy) that serves their interests. Activating the internet for the public good can only lead to a more vibrant and awesome world. And Fight For The Future will keep you posted on all internet-related threats
Call for Investigations at FireDogLake
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing, we now have a small but significant glimpse into our government’s vast, secret surveillance state. As information continues to trickle out, Americans are starting a serious debate about the proper balance of security, privacy and liberty Call your representatives now and ask them to convene a special congressional investigation into the surveillance activities of the NSA, FBI and CIA. You can reach your representative using the number 1-STOP-323-NSA — a project of the Stop Watching Us coalition or you can look up your rep’s number and call directly.
How You’re Breaking the Law Every Day (and What You Can Do About It)
By Adam Dachis at LifeHacker.com
You share music, rip DVDs, make Hitler whine about your first world problems, and much more in the course of your regular online activities—and more often than not, you do these things without giving a thought to the fact that you’re actually breaking the law. Here’s a look at how you’re inevitably circumventing copyright law and what you can do to protect yourself…
