US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Lauren Johnson]

Lauren, I respectfully submit that I think you're on the wrong track. I can not see how this could be played into a strategy of tension or have been of benefit as a planned leak. The government is on the defensive now and sadly, my guess is that Snowden will soon find himself in a Bradley Manning 'moment' and situation.....life imprisonment or death sentence for treason. They might even dispense with a trial and all the nasty things that would drag into the open and just have him killed. He has just checked out of his hotel and 'disappeared' - no one knows if on his own or by opposition 'forces'. I sense him to be what he portrays himself to be....a whistleblower and one deeply in danger of his life and liberty for telling the truth.

Peter, as much as I can be wrong -- I admit, it happened that one time -- this is just one a strategy of tension plays out.

This appealing young man is arranged to be the leaker and play the role of abused leaker against a cold, unfeeling govt who wants to have all power. This role is however not at all popular with the masses. He is screwing things up. He creates the fear that the government will not be able to spy on us thus making us safe from terrorists. The Extreme Left migh make it illegal for the govt to spy on us. The majority in effect embraces the spying fleeing into the arms, yet again, of a fascist government. The few who still care enough are further enraged pushing them closed to more protest actions -- which will be met with more severe actions -- making the terrified majority flee into the loving, caring arms of their fascist state once again.

In the meantime, Congress becomes united on this issue making future attempts to reign in the power of the state as over and done with. If Obama truly is a target in this (possible) charade, and he is brought down, the left is provoked even further to violence. Even the prospect that this is the case makes false flag left wing groups plausible with -- wait for it -- the majority fleeing into the loving, caring arms of their fascist state.

Of course, all of this is absurd since we knew this was all going on years ago and no one would ever have needed a leaker to reveal to us what we already knew.

The POTUS angle has so many possibilities. Even if he is just weakened, he is more vulnerable to being manipulated into doing the bidding of others.

Peter, once again, the guy might well be legit. But take the other side in your mind as a exercise and see what possibilities you come up with.

Edit: One more thing. This whole thing infuriates some factions of the right wing. More tension. Glenn Beck for example has millions who wait on his every word.

[Peter Lemkin]

I have 'taken q look at the other side' [and see nothing there], and think you may have become overly involved/invested in wheels within wheels within wheels ad infinitum - trusting nothing and no one - in deed, word or motive. You are free to so speculate, but it seems to me to be going overboard and advocating paranoia in a world full to bursting of it, mostly for good reasons [additional not needed]. IMHO.

Again, I can't think of a viable scenario where this would benefit the hidden hands you seem to imagine. They would/could have more convenient means without giving up their treasured secrets. [OK, not secret to you and I and other cognoscenti; but hidden or unproven to the general population - and further even forcing their controlled media to discuss and investigate it!]. Sometimes one has to take a person's actions and intentions at face value [without demonstrable reason to question it!]. I think this is one of those occasions. My take and the general consensus I sense here and in the mainstream Deep Political investigative community. Why not consider your conjecture is posited by those who are trying to put the genie back in the bottle...then your conjecture starts to makes some sense! IMHO

More will become clear as we see how this plays out. I'll stick with my take until I see evidence to do otherwise. I think he's a genuine whistleblower and in deep trouble of being killed or imprisoned very soon. He gave up a large salary, wife and children, comfortable life and home and so far I take him at his word - seeing no reason not to. One can always invent deeper hidden scenarios - but the simplest construct that fits the facts usually turns out to most closely approximate the truth. The facts sometimes change; changing the best construct.

More alarming to me is the low viewer count on this thread....perhaps the biggest Deep Political whistleblower event in decades receiving a 'ho-hum' attitude from those who watch this Forum and elsewhere on the internet'.....very odd.

I also suspect that Glenn Greewald is now to be treated as Assange is....and is also soon to be in deep trouble.

[Magda Hassan]

It could be many things. It might be a trojan horse into China or Iceland. It could most likely amount to nothing at all and just be buried and forgotten. Like so many outrageous government actions and inactions. It could be what it appears to be. Some one with a conscience who isn't going to be a willing cog or keep quiet about it any longer. It could be to make Obama look soft on security with all the whistle blowing breeches on his watch and usher in even more draconian Big Brother. Time will tell.

[Peter Lemkin]

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EDWARD SNOWDEN: My name's Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.

GLENN GREENWALD: What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the things people are going to be most interested in, in trying to understand whatwho you are and what you're thinking, is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. Walk people through that decision-making process.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: When your in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for these sort of the intelligence community agencies, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee, and because of that, you see things that may be disturbing. But over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis, and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about them in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem, until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.

GLENN GREENWALD: Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of Americans?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: NSA and the intelligence community, in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible, that it believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically. And to do that, theythe NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyzes them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time, simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email.

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope, often, is forever. You, on the other hand, have this attitude of the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures. Why did you choose to do that?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting the power of government, that that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, you know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took, it will kind of get its officials a mandate to go, "Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing, so the public is on our side." But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens. But they're typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of these people are against the country, they're against the government. But I'm not. I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. I'm just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office, watches what happeningwhat's happening, and goes, "This is something that's not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong." And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, "I didn't change these. I didn't modify the story. This is the truth. This is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

GLENN GREENWALD: Have you given thought to what it is that the U.S. government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict to, what they might try to do to you?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners. You know, they work closely with a number of other nations. Or, you know, they could pay off the triads or, you know, anyany of their agents or assets. We've got a CIA station just up the road in the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I'm sure they're going to be very busy for the next week. And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk, because they're such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they'll get you, in time.

But at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you. And if livingliving unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to acceptand I think many of us are; it's the human natureyou can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that that's the world that you helped create and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

GLENN GREENWALD: Why should people care about surveillance?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Because even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently, by orders of magnitude, to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

GLENN GREENWALD: We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong, which is where we are because you travel here. Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here. And specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate that what you really intend to do is to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival of the United States, which is China, and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Sure. So there's a couple assertions in those arguments that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong. The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not. I mean, there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government. But the peoples, inherently, you know, we don't care. We trade with each other freely. You know, we're not at war. We're not, you know, armed conflict, and we're not trying to be. We're the largest trading partners out there for each other.

Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. People think, "Oh, China, great firewall." Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech, but the Hong Kongthe people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known. The Internet is not filtered here, no more so than any other Western government. And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments.

GLENN GREENWALD: If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material gain, were there things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Absolutely. I mean, anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had could, you know, suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to Russia. You know, they always have an open door, as we do. I had access to, you know, the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth. If I had just wanted to harm the U.S., you know, thatyou could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that's not my intention. And I think, for anyone making that argument, they need to think, if they were in my position, and, you know, you live a privileged lifeyou're living in Hawaii, in Paradise, and making a ton of moneywhat would it take to make you leave everything behind?

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the length that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over American society and global society, but they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. And the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse, until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they'll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it'll be turnkey tyranny.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the National Security Agency, we're joined by Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald from Hong Kong, where he's broken a series of articles about the NSA over the past week based on information provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. He conducted the interview with Snowden that we just aired.
Since we last spoke to Glenn on Friday, he's broken two more major stories about the NSA. On Friday, he exposed how President Obama ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber-attacks. Then Greenwald revealed details about an NSA data-mining tool called Boundless Informant that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. A top-secret NSA "global heat map" shows in March 2013 the agency collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide. The NSA most frequently targeted Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India. The Boundless Informant documents also showed the agency collected more than three billion pieces of intelligence from U.S. computer networks over a 30-day period ending March 2013.
Glenn, welcome to Democracy Now! A lot has happened this weekend. Edward Snowden has come out. We've just aired the interview that you did with him. Talk about the significance of this series of exposés that you're continuing from Hong Kong.
GLENN GREENWALD: The primary point that I think needs to be made from all of these stories, and particularly from the very courageous outing, self-outing, of Ed Snowden, is that there is this massive surveillance apparatus that is being gradually constructed in the United States that already has extremely invasive capabilities to monitor and store the communications and other forms of behavior not just of tens of millions Americans, but of hundreds of millions, probably billions of people, around the globe. And it's one thing to say that we want the United States government to have these capabilities. It's another thing to allow this to be assembled without any public knowledge, without any public debate, and with no real accountability. And what ultimately drove him forwardand what ultimately is driving our reporting and will continue to drive our reportingis the need for a light to be shined on what this incredibly consequential world is all about and the impact that it's having both on our country and our planet.
AMY GOODMAN: On Saturday, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper criticized the leaks.

JAMES CLAPPER: It is literallynot figuratively, literallygut-wrenching to see this happen, because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities. And, of course, for me, this is a key tool for preserving and protecting the nation's safety and security. So, every one of us in the intelligence community, most particularly the great men and women of NSA, are veryare profoundly affected by this.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: This is just the same playbook that U.S. government officials have been using for the last five decades whenever anything gets done that brings small amounts of transparency to the bad conduct that they do in the dark. They immediately accuse those who brought that transparency of jeopardizing national security. They try and scare the American public into believing that they've been placed at risk and that the only way they can stay safe is to trust the people in power to do whatever it is they want to do without any kinds of constraints, accountability or light of any kind. This has been going on since Daniel Ellsberg, who now is considered a hero, but back then was accused by the Clappers of the world of being a traitor who jeopardized national security and put the lives of men and women in American uniform in harm's way.
The reality is that if you look at what it is that we disclosed, we disclosed things like the fact that the U.S.the National Security Agency is collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans without regard to any wrongdoing, or that they're tapping into the servers of the largest Internet companies that people around the world use to communicate with one another. It is inconceivablethere's just no rational, sane argument that one can make that anything that we disclosed in any way alerts the terrorists, who all knew already for many years that the government is trying to monitor them, or in any way enabled attacks to be done on the United States. The only thing that we exposed is the wrongdoing of these political officials. And the only thing that has been damaged is their reputation and credibility. Top-secret designations are more often than not used to protect the political officials from having known what they'rewhat they are doing in the eyes of the American people, not protecting national security. And that's certainly the case of the stories that we published.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, can you tell us more about Edward Snowden, why he came forward, what he risks, and why even you both are in Hong Kong, why he chose Hong Kong?
GLENN GREENWALD: It's really one of the most remarkable experiences I've ever had, meeting him and having interviewed him for several months now, really, and for the last eight days in person here in Hong Kong. And I say that because he has undertaken actions that he knows are going to result in serious harm to his personal interest and to his well-being, whether that means that he will never see his home again, or he will spend many decades or the rest of his life in a cage or will be passed around from government to government. In the short term, he knows his life has been turned upside down, and he knew that when he did it. And there are all kinds of ways that he could have personally benefited from this information. If he had wanted to get rich, he could have sold it to all sorts of intelligence agencies. If he wanted to harm the United States, he could have dumped it indiscriminately on the Internet or passed it to U.S. enemies and uncovered all sorts of covert operations and covert agents. He chose to do none of that. He did something that doesn't really benefit him at all. It just benefits the public. It benefits the rest of us, because we learn what our government is doing and how our world is being affected by it. And yet he did that knowing that he would be put into that situation, and he never betrayed, when he talked to us, any degree of fear about it. He was worried about what would happen. We was tense about gettingabout seeing what was going to happen. But he never had any regret. He had made his choice, and he was very at peace with it, because he knew that it was the right thing.
As far as coming to Hong Kong, the main reason that he did that was because he has watched, over the past four years, as the U.S. government, under President Obama, has prosecuted whistleblowers more aggressively and more prolifically than any other prior administration in American history by far. And he has watched as the trial of Bradley Manning, that is now underway, takes place in extreme amounts of secrecy, very little transparency, hardcore fundamental abridgments of due process. And he knew that if he stayed in the United States, he was going to be subjected to exactly that treatment, and so he came to a place where he believed that the political values that prevailed were ones that he found amenable, that there's lots of robust free speech and political dissent. But also he believed that he was coming to a place where the government would not instantly succumb to the demands of the American government when it came to what was done to him, but instead would assert its own interest and principles of law, and he felt like this was the ideal place for that.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of who he worked for, Booz Allen Hamilton, that he had worked at the Central Intelligence Agency and then for several contractors that work within the National Security Agency.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. So he was never actually directly employed, as you say, by the NSA. He was directly employed by the CIA, where he was stationed with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, for roughly two-and-a-half years in this 2007, 2008, 2009 time frame. Both prior to that and then after that, he was employed by a multitude of private contractors, including Booz Allen and the Dell corporation, where he would be essentially tasked to the NSA. So, even though he wasn't working directly for the NSAtechnically that wasn't his employerhe went into the office of the NSA every day. He took orders and got instructions from supervisors of the NSA.
What this really shows is this incredibly interlinked world between private corporations and our most powerful and secretive intelligence agencies. It's all been privatized, or the great bulk of it has been privatized. There's immense amounts of profit made on it. And it's all the more reason to be concerned when these extreme surveillance capabilities are vested in these agencies, because it isn't just the public government officials who control it, but also these private agencies that play a very substantial role in how it operates.
And Booz Allen, in particular, is one of the largest and most significant defense contractors. One of the primary officials of it is General Michael McConnell, who was the director of national intelligence under George Bush. And it's the kind of prototypical defense contractor where, when there's a Republican administration, Booz Allen executives go and fill the security positions, and those ofthe prior officials go and fill the executive slots at Booz Allen, and then it reverses when a Democrat comes into play. It's one of the most significant and most influential defense contractors in the world. And the fact that he worked for them, I think, is going to create a lot of problems for them.
AMY GOODMAN: And McConnell's tie to Total Information Awareness? I mean, 10 years ago, the country was up in arms about the possibility that Americans would be spied on, and so it was killed, supposedly, TIA, Total Information Awareness. And McConnell's link to that?
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And what's fascinating about that was that that took place in late 2002, 2003, when it was revealed that the Pentagon was planning this Total Information Awareness program. It was actually being run by John Poindexter, who was the former national security adviser to President Reagan who resigned in disgrace and almost went to prison over the Iran-Contra scandal. And what was amazing about that was that there was great public uproar, as you say, even in the early stages after 9/11, when the public, the media, the Congress were extremely subservient to whatever the government wanted to do, but that was just a bridge too far, even then. And yet, with these revelations, the ones that we published thus far and the ones that we'll continue to be publishing in the future, what they really illustrate is exactly what you said, which is that they don't call it Total Information Awareness anymore. That was a little bit too honest of a term. That was probably the main reason why it created such uproar, because it was just tootoo nakedly clear what it was intending to accomplish. But what the NSA is doing, not just domestically, but globally, is creating a Total Information Awareness system. The last story that we published, as you said, was a program, a miningdata-mining program called Boundless Informant, Boundless Informant. That is what the NSA is about, is eroding all vestiges of privacy in the world and ensuring that they have full and unfettered monitoring ability to all forms of human behavior. And this is ultimately why he came forward, because he said, in good conscience, he couldn't allow that to be done in secrecy. If the public wants that to happen, so be it, but we needthey need to be informed that it's happening and then have a public debate about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to go back to what Edward Snowden said.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, Edward Snowden is a 29-year-old contractor with Booz Allen. He was working in Hawaii, and he said he could wiretap any of these people. Explain how that is possible, Glenn Greenwald, just to make this very clear, in plain language, for people all over this country and around the world.
GLENN GREENWALD: The NSA sucks up into its systems billions and billions of communication activities every weekbillions and billions. In fact, the data-mining documents that we published reflected it sucks up 90 billion in a 30-day period, including three billion in the United States. The Washington Post three years ago told us that every single day the NSA collects and stores 1.7 billion emails and telephone calls by and among Americans. Their argument is that we may suck it up, we may store it, we may monitor it, but the law says we can't actually listen to it or read it if it's by and between Americans without first going to a FISA court. And what Edward Snowden is telling you is that, although that might be the law, the monitors, the systems at NSA allow full and unfettered access at any time to any one of these analysts to go and listen to whatever it is they want, to read whatever emails they want, to monitor in real time whatever online chats are taking place. And because there's no oversight, because there's really no accountability or transparency, there is no check on this abuse. And we know for certainwe should have learned the lesson 35 years ago when the Church Committee documented it, that when human beings are able to spy on other human beings in the dark, abuse, rampant abuse, is inevitable. That was supposed to be why we don't have spying abilities without accountability any longer. But as Mr. Snowden is documenting to us, that's exactly what we have, and that's why it's so menacing.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to break, then come back to Glenn Greenwald, who's in Hong Kong right now as he continues tothis series of explosive revelations about what the National Security Agency is doing. But before we go to break, we understand that Edward Snowden has checked out of the hotel he's been in for the last weeks. Glenn, do you know where he is?
GLENN GREENWALD: I do, although I'm not going to share that with anybody.

AMY GOODMAN: There is a great irony in Snowden revealing his identity from Hong Kong, President Obama at the time wrapping up a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California. The outgoing national security adviser, Tom Donilon, said Obama confronted Xi on U.S. allegations of China-based cyberpiracy, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, that was one of the main reasons why we published the article is because the Obama administration has spent three years now running around the world warning about the dangers of cyber-attacks and cyberwarfare coming from other nations like China, like Iran, like other places, and what is unbelievably clear is that it is the United States itself that is far and away the most prolific and the most aggressive perpetrator of exactly those cyber-attacks that President Obama claims to find so alarming. And as you say, we published the story on the eve of his conference with the president of China, in which the top agenda item, because of the United States' insistence, was their complaints about Chinese cyber-attacks and hacking. And it just shows the rancid, fundamental hypocrisy of the statements the United States makes, not just to the world, but to its own people about these crucial matters.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring William Binney into the conversation, as well. William Binney, you quit after almost 40 years at the NSA, deeply involved in developing the whole surveillance mechanism, and yet you quit over it, as well. Your response to these series of revelations?
WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it's certainly an extension of what I've been trying to say, that we were on a slippery slope to a totalitarian state. And that was simply based on the idea that the government was collecting so much information about all the citizens inside the country, that it gave them so much power. They could target people in thefor example, use it, use the knowledge to collectively assemble all of the people participating in the tea party, target them, and dothey could even do active attack on them with, going across the network, taking material out of their computers. So it was a very dangerous situation, in my mind. And still is.
AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, when you quit over a decade ago, would you ever think it would get to this point, or were we at this point a decade ago, as well?
WILLIAM BINNEY: Actually, it started about then. I mean, certainly 2003 was important because of all of the Naris devices they were putting and other equipment that would allow them to take whatever was on the optical fiber network inside the United States. They deployed those and started collecting all that material, so that becamethat was content coming in. Emails, voice over IP, all of that kind of material was coming in and being stored. And then, before that, starting right after 9/11, they started pulling in all of the call records, which, by the way, some of the numbers everybody is talking about are pretty low. They're just too low. The call records that I estimated would have been on the order of three billion a day.
Now, it doesn't mean that they're transcribing what's being said on the phone calls; they're just recording the fact that they occurred. They're using a target list, I'm sure, to target people who arewho they want to record and transcribe. And that list is provided to the switch networks, and whenever the switches detect them, they route those audiosthat audio to recorders, and then it gets recorded, stored and put in a priority list. Then the transcribers go through that and transcribe it.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to return to remarks made over the weekend by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In an interview with NBC, he said the leaks would aid enemies of the United States.

JAMES CLAPPER: While we're having this debate, discussion and all this media explosion, which of course supports transparency, which is a great thing in this country, but that same transparency has a double-edged sword, in that our adversaries, whether nation state adversaries or nefarious groups, benefit from that same transparency. So, as we speak, they are going to school and learning how we do this. And so, that's why it potentially hascan render great damage to our intelligence capabilities.

AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, can you respond to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper? And then I want to ask Glenn to do the same.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Sure. In my mind, that's a red herring. I mean, it's just a false issue. The point was, the terrorists have already known that we've been doing this for years, so there's no surprise there. They're not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that they'rewe're notthe government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; it's trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States. That's where I see it.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Glenn Greenwald, I mean, this, of course, is the debate that's going on in all of the networks right now, is that you're compromising national security by publishing what Edward Snowden has given to you, and of course that Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower, but a threat to national security, they are saying. If you could also comment, Glenn, after you respond to that, on the fact that Edward Snowden did not want everything released that he had access to, that he was careful, for example, not to release the location of CIA stations and other information?
GLENN GREENWALD: The claim that the director is making is so ludicrous that I'm surprised he can get it out with a straight face. It really ought to insult theit does insult the intelligence of every single person to whom he's directing it. The idea that there are any terrorists in the world who pose any real threat who aren't aware or who weren't aware until our articles appeared last week that the United States government tries to monitor their communications and listen in on their telephone calls and read their emails, any terrorist who is unaware of the fact that the U.S. government was doing that is a terrorist who is incapable of even writing their own name, let alone detonating a bomb inside the United States. Exactly as Mr. Binney said, their only concern isthis has nothing to do with terrorism. They're not trying to keep any of this from the terrorists; they're trying to keep it from the American people. And that's the point.
And as far as the documents are concerned, he had access to enormous sums of top-secret documents that would be incredibly harmful. He went through and turned over only a small portion of those documents to us, all of which he read very carefully. And I know that not only because he told me that, but also because the way we got the documents was in extremely detailed folders all divided by content, that you could have only organized them had you carefully read them. And when he gave them to us, he said, "Look, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a high-level government official. I am not saying that everything I gave you should be published. I don't want it all to be published. I want you, as journalists, to go through it and decide what is in the public interest and what will not cause a lot of harm." He invitedin fact, urgedus to exercise exactly the kind of journalistic judgment that we have exercised. And so, had it been his intention to harm the United States, he could have just uploaded all these documents to the Internet or found the most damaging ones and caused them to be published. He did the opposite. The NSA and the rest of the country owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all of the work he has done to inform the American public without bringing about any harm to them.
AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, he understands the stakes right now. I mean, this is the first week of the Bradley Manning trial, who faces life in prison, possibly death, for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, on trial at Fort Meadeactually, the headquarters of NSA. Glenn Greenwald and William Binney, if you could give a final comment on this?
WILLIAM BINNEY: Who should go first?
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Bill Binney.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is why I find it so incredibly courageous
AMY GOODMAN: No, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: to watch what he did, because he knowssorry, because he knows exactly how the government treats whistleblowers, and yet he went forward and did it anyway. And what I really hope is that his courage is contagious, that people get inspired by his example, as I have been, and decide that they ought to demand that their rights not be abridged and that they have the full authority to stand up to the United States government without being afraid.
AMY GOODMAN: Will there be more exposés, Glenn Greenwald, that we can expect from you at The Guardian?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yes, there will definitely be more exposés that you can expect from me in The Guardian.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Bill Binney, very quickly, 10 seconds.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I'm sureI mean, it was a conscious decision that he made to do what he did, and of course the government is going to try to get him, and he knew that. So, he'she is doing his
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us
WILLIAM BINNEY: Yeah.

[Magda Hassan]

US-centric but the principle applies in many western countries.

10 Things Americans Underestimate About Our Massive Surveillance State
The latest revelations are just the tip of the iceberg.
June 7, 2013 |
Americans may be upset about the latest revelations in the government's ability to spy on citizens via their online lives, but no one should be surprised. We've underestimated and overlooked many key aspects of the government's ability to track our lives for years.
The bottom line, which resonates most strongly among civil liberties advocates on the left and conservative libertarians on the right, is not just the loss of privacy but also the growing power of the state to target and oppress people who it judges to be critics and enemies. That list doesn't just include foreign terrorists of the al-Qaeda mold, or even the Chinese government that has stolen the most advanced U.S. weapon plans; it also includes domestic whistleblowers, protesters and journalistsall of whom have been targeted by the Obama administration Justice Department.

Let's go through 10 points about these latest revelations of domestic spying to better understand what Americans have underestimated and overlooked about electronic eavesdropping.

1. Underestimated: The National Security Agency's abilities. The last time Americans focused on domestic spying as they have this week was a half-dozen years ago when the media broke the story that the Bush administration had placed data interceptors on key junction points on AT&T's telephone network to try to trace calls by al-Qaeda. What Americans have underestimated is that as the Internet has grown and more data pathways have been developedsuch as WiFi streams used in smart phones and other platformsso has the NSA's electronic dragnet.

2. Overlooked: The expanding NSA dragnet. This week's revelations started with the UK Guardian publishing a copy of a secret federal intelligence court order that Verizon turns its customer's "metadata" to the NSA. That was followed by the Washington Post's scoopfrom a whistleblowerof a new (to the public) federal domestic spying effort in which the biggest Internet companies were also told to turn over metadata, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.

Even these latest scoops are not the whole picture. Other phone providers like Sprint have told their customers they will share information with the government if asked. The NSA installed tracking devices on Google's servers after the company realized it had been hacked by China four years ago in an effort to see what the FBI knew about China's spies in America. Americans have overlooked that as the Internet has grown, so has the NSA's ability to track and trace everyone's online lives.

3. Underestimated: The erosion of constitutional rights. For two centuries, the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment barred the government from unreasonable search and seizure by police authorities. Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA intelligence analyst, told NPR on Thursday that collecting vast reams of electronic data was changing the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" foundation of constitutional law.

"Now, unfortunately, people like the former director of NSA, Michael Hayden, and others have recast the Fourth Amendment from one that is based on probable cause in presenting evidence for subsequent invasion of privacy to one of reasonable suspicion," Wiebe said. "That phrase has not been defined except by some managers controlling this information about you and me."

4. Overlooked: How the NSA is getting away with this. If you really want to know how the NSA has been able to get away with thisand how the Obama administration has been able to say it has been doing nothing that has not been approved by Congressyou have to look at the reality that high-ranking lawyers inside the government have been exploiting legal loopholes to let NSA do what it wants.

This is no different than what election lawyers do when they want to get around campaign finance laws. Congress passes laws. The administration drafts regulations to carry out those laws. And lawyersin and outside of governmentfind ways to get around what they don't like in those laws. This article on the Balkinization legal blog explains exactly how that path unfolded from the Patriot Act, to the FBI, to the NSA. It includes the astounding legal construction that the data dumps are not data "collection" because they're electronic, not on paperuntil they are processed.

"So the NSA gets to obtain information in a more intrusive way than it might otherwise be allowed," wrote Rachel Levinson-Waldman, counsel at the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School for the blog.

5. Underestimated: Loss of privacy. Americans need to realize that every electronic transaction can be traced and seen by the governmentperiod. There's no e-mail, smart phone app, or even visit to a porn website that's not traceable. This is much bigger than posting an unflattering picture on Facebook that will not disappear and be discovered by a potential co-worker or employer. Unless people want to live without electricity in the woods, modern life has evolved to the point where expectations of privacy are a myth, not a reality anymore.

6. Overlooked: The surveillance state transcends political party. Another dimension of the loss of privacy is that the surveillance state keeps growing regardless of who holds power in Congress or the White House. On Thursday, the libertarian Republican senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and the socialist Independent senator, Bernard Sanders of Vermont, both decried the "assault on the Constitution. But the top Democratic and Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee said the NSA activities were "protecting America" and there was nothing new going onthis is business as usual. It's as if Congress and the intelligence establishment created a genie that will never be put back into a bottle.

7. Underestimated: Corporate America doesn't like this either. One of the most curious aspects of these disclosures about NSA eavesdropping is that the corporations involved are not exactly fans of it. That is not to say that they would not want to be using similar data-mining and customer profiling technology to sell more products, but they worry that it is a public relations nightmare for them to be caught turning over customer information.

The Wall Street Journal on Friday quoted Denny Strigl, who retired as Verizon's president in 2009, saying, "You've got Verizon between a rock and a hard place here… If people are going to make an issue of this, the issue is with the governmentnot with the corporate citizen who complies with the law."

8. Overlooked: It's easier for businesses to comply than to say no. Americans' sympathies for corporate executives like the ex-Verizon president should only go so far, because let's face itpeople at the highest echelons of corporate power have more access and influence than ordinary Americans into Washington's halls of power and they are not saying "No, this goes too far." Instead, Friday's papers were filled with comments from Apple, Google, Facebook, Verizon and others all saying they value their customers but they follow the law as required. That's not really corporate citizenship, that's caving in.

9. Underestimated: The power that government is accumulating. People do not realize how powerful the government is until they become its target. The most chilling aspect of the interview NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake gave on Democracy Now! was how his life came undone once the federal government decided he was its enemybecause he believed the press and public needed to know that earlier NSA electronic surveillance violated the Constitution. The power of the statewhether local police videotaping protesters or the Justice Department going after journalists and whistleblowersis staggering. The United States in 2013 is not Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but what is true about both countries in both eras is that the populace was far too compliant as the state accumulated power and selectively undermined civil liberties.

10. Overlooked: A smarter way to respect civil liberties and fight foreign enemies. Some of the press reports on the latest NSA election dragnet suggest that Americans face a choice between losing their privacy rights and protecting national security. That seems like a false choice. Where the White House, Congress and corporate America's leadership has utterly failed is explaining what the real threats are and what needs to be doneincluding safeguarding the rights that Americans value. On Friday, President Obama said the media reports of the surveillance were "hype" and nobody was reading private e-mails, saying the government's efforts were limited, balancing privacy and security concerns. In short, he said "trust us."
Obama's comments were not reassuring, because they lacked details about what's going on. The NSA's electronic dragnet was created after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Is al-Qaeda a big threat anymore? Or is the bigger threat how the Chinese government hacked into the security systems that supposedly protected US weapons systems and stole all the blueprints to the most advanced technology? Americans hear all about the continuing threat of al-Qaeda and very little about the much bigger Chinese intelligence coup.
What's missing is a much smarter public discussion that respects Americans' intelligence and rights, including elected public representatives telling permanent government agencies that "no means no." And, though it's unlikely to happen, corporate America drawing a line on domestic spying for the government.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/...paging=off

[David Guyatt]

I can see how, on the face of Snowden's professional past, suspicions of his motives arise.

But the same can be said of my background too. And, in fact, has been said - once in the distant past anyway.

The problem with this sort of subject matter is that it does create a thought process that necessarily looks at alternative interpretations, often with good cause too. Often not so. But it does behove us to consider all options and then engage a good dose of critical thinking and discrimination.

As a community we just cannot get it right all the time, as we are on the outside looking in, and simply weighing up clues.

Where's Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

[David Guyatt]

The Daily Bellylaugh's take on PRISM and Snowden: you can't do anything about it, just bend over and accept it - and Snowden is a conspiracy theorists to boot. Ignore him then, okay.

Got to love the Bellylaugh's Deputy Editor attempt to strangle liberty and freedom with shocking bollocks reasoning and toady appreciation of dem powers that be.

Where do these people come from? Do they build them on a conveyor line and insert the locked pre-programmed brain at the last minute?

Benedict Brogan

Benedict Brogan is the Daily Telegraph's Deputy Editor. His blog brings you news, gossip, analysis, occasional insight into politics, and more. You can email him at benedict.brogan@telegraph.co.uk. Sign up to Brogan's Briefing, Westminster's must-read morning email, by clicking here.

Why shouldn't governments and spies make sense of all this data?

By Benedict Brogan Politics Last updated: June 10th, 2013
329 Comments Comment on this article

The digital revolution is a boon in many ways, but it's also a thicket bad guys can hide in

From Tuesday's Daily Telegraph
It might reassure you to know, as you wonder what dark forces are snooping on your Ocado order, that we have long since passed the point of no return. The amount of digital data produced worldwide doubles every two years or so, and already far exceeds human ability to make any sense of it. There is far more information about us out there than governments, let alone spy agencies, know what to do with. In the age of Big Data, we provide it willingly every time we swipe our travel pass or click to agree a website's terms without bothering to read them.
Politicians delude themselves that privacy can still be protected. They talk about state intrusion into our lives as if grey men with earphones were hiding in the loft listening to our bedtime conversations while large spools of reel-to-reel tapes turned silently in the background. When Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, asked a Hay festival audience recently what it thought of swallowing a pill that would beam information about our bodies to computers by Wi-Fi, there were nervous mutterings. "Too late," he said, "it's already being licensed." We have not kept up with reality.
The excitement generated by the claims of Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old American computer spy, has exposed how little we understand about the revolution in digital information going on around us. It has also thrown up how ill-suited our politics is to the challenge posed by a transformation that is both beneficial and overwhelming. The supply of information grows exponentially, and astonishing uses for it are being developed every day, most of which improve lives. At a very basic level, the danger is less that we will be oppressed and more that we and states will succumb to info overload. Whatever some politicians might say, it is no longer credible to talk of preventing the collection of data. What the latest revelations underscore, rather, is the question of what should be done with it.
But the debate prompted by Mr Snowden's revelations has also illustrated how acute the political challenge is on the Right. Traditional conservative beliefs in institutions of the state are being tested by an anti-state populism that paradoxically thrives on the internet and values the power of the individual over manifestations of the collective will as traditionally embodied in governments, their agencies, and their elected representatives.
Mr Snowden leaked details of apparent American programmes to monitor internet data. A close reading of his manifesto, with his talk of a "federation of secret law" ruling the world, CIA hit-squads, surveillance nets on the verge of activation and his right to act against a duly constituted, democratically elected government, suggests he has spent too much time watching Hollywood DVDs on his laptop and studying conspiracy theory forums on the web. Whether he is naive, deluded or malicious, he has generated a drama that is more about the fantastical steps he took to put himself beyond America's grasp than the content of the classified information he released. Much sport is being had over his choice of Hong Kong as a bolthole ("They have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent," he says, suggesting he is not as familiar with the power of Google as he could be), and the US government's habit of putting its secrets in the hands of quixotic young men.
But before we mock too much, and certainly before we give credence to Washington's doom-laden complaints about the damage he has done, we should be thankful for the insight he has given us into the dilemma governments and spies face: if defending its citizens is a state's first duty, and if information is power, then modern-day governments have to find ways of keeping an eye on the information available. A century ago, it meant a steaming kettle in the customs shed at Dover to open the odd letter from the Continent. Now it means supercomputers able to mine vast stockpiles of data, quickly, for clues that might prevent disaster.
If the amount available is more than we can handle, what next? The scientists at Cern, for example, who use the Large Hadron Collider to conduct super-clever experiments on the very beginnings of time, keep less then 1 per cent of the data they produce; the rest they just throw away in some giant electronic waste bin because they haven't anywhere to put it. Consider too all the emails, tweets, Facebook updates, shared photographs, Tesco Clubcard points, CCTV footage, dental records, Google searches and every single piece of information entered into a computer anywhere, and you start to get a sense of the tera-haystack security agencies have to search these days to find the needle that might save a life somewhere. Big data is a boon, but it is also a thicket the bad guys can hide in.
Appreciating the mind-boggling volume of electronic bits zipping around the ether or stored in computer servers around the world is a necessary first step towards understanding why states are struggling to keep up with technological change. It's the point the data scientists Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier made in a recent lecture on the benefits and challenges of Big Data: there's so much of it that it's useful, but also messy. In their view, those who fear a malicious Orwellian dystopia should think more of the film Brazil and its vision of pointless bureaucracies. Just as individuals must cope with a rising torrent of information pouring through their lives, so governments are pedalling furiously to avoid being overwhelmed by the digital revolution. Of course, as more of what we know and do is turned into electronic pulses, opportunities arise to harness all that knowledge. The process throws up unlikely successes. Take the spread of a recent flu epidemic: statisticians were able to study the patterns of particular Google searches for example, "what are the symptoms of flu" to work out a way of predicting its course. Business is just as clever: a hedge fund bought access to data on weekend traffic patterns around a particular retailer in order to work out whether its shares were worth investing in. Yesterday, three mobile phone providers agreed to pool data they hold about their users to target advertisements at them.
But the growth in data runs in parallel with the growth of individual power, with the internet as the magnifier. Where in the past we deferred to institutions as depositories of information, we are all now experts, campaigners empowered as Mr Snowden declared to act when we think we are right and the state is wrong.
Politicians, and a particular strand of libertarians on the Right, have revelled in the anarchic freedom and democratic power the internet provides. To them, it is a corrective to the might of the state and the self-interest of politicians. But if institutions, be they parliaments or spy agencies, cannot be entrusted to make sense of this ocean of data on our behalf, then who can? Why should Mr Snowden, or The Guardian, or David Davis, be a better judge?
The question concerns Conservatives before all others. William Hague was eloquent in the Commons yesterday about the legal rigour and proportionate judgments that rule how the Government handles our data. "This is not a casual process," he said; threats against us are launched in secret, so the methods to combat them must be secret too. There is too much information out there for one unknown young man to be able to tell us what is right or wrong.

[Magda Hassan]

http://schoolofprivacy.eu/post/526563553...ts-mirrors

[Keith Millea]

I consider Scott Creighton to be an essential read and sometimes just flat wrong but always entertaining.

I find Scott Creighton flat wrong most of the time and certainly not an essential read....pinwheels:

[David Guyatt]

Zerohedge's Tyler Durden's take on it:

"Will Obama See Out His Full Term?"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/10/2013 22:32 -0400

• Barack Obama
  
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• Glenn Beck
  
• Hong Kong
  
• None
  
• Obama Administration
  
• Twitter
  
• White House
  

It seems the question on many people's minds, as scandal after scandal crashes on the shores of Obama's White House is best summed up by The Telegraph's Damian Thompson. Yet another non-US paper asks, will Obama last the duration of his second term in a surveillance context where what has been revealed is said to be worse than Watergate.

Via The Telegraph,
"They could pay off the Triads," says Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower interviewed by the Guardian in his Hong Kong hideout. Meaning: the CIA could use a proxy to kill him for revealing that Barack Obama has presided over an unimaginable to the ordinary citizen expansion of the Federal government's powers of surveillance over anyone.
Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment. Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter:

Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden

Snowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:

NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible... Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and its stores them for periods of time ... While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…

I do not see how Obama can talk his way out of this one. Snowden is not Bradley Manning: he's not a disturbed disco bunny but a highly articulate network security specialist who has left behind a $200,000 salary and girlfriend in Hawaii for a life on the run. He's not a sleazy opportunist like Julian Assange, either. As he says: "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
It will be very difficult for the Obama administration to portray Snowden as a traitor. For a start, I don't think US public opinion will allow it. Any explanations it offers will be drowned out by American citizens demanding to know:

"So how much do you know about me and my family? How can I find out? How long have you been collecting this stuff? What are you going to do with it?"

Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn't seem overblown. And I do wonder: can a president who's presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?