US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

Last rumoured to be in a hotel room at the airport in Moscow and, therefore, un-extriditable as he's not officially on Russian soil.

It is only speculation, but there could be several reasons for the delay:
- the Russians are interested to know what the NSA knows about Russian communications and their own sigint~!
- the USA is putting heavy pressure on the Russians to hold him - though I do NOT think this will work!
- this is a trick to throw off the US and the reporters now hounding Snowden and part of a plan that we don't know about.
- the passport cancellation has temporarily caused a problem and they are working on temporary travel documents.
- some mix of the above.
:what:

[Peter Lemkin]

So When Will Dick Cheney Be Charged With Espionage?

Posted on Jun 24, 2013

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By Juan Cole
This piece first appeared on Juan Cole's website, Informed Comment.
The US government charged Edward Snowden with theft of government property and espionage on Friday.
Snowden hasn't to our knowledge committed treason in any ordinary sense of the term. He hasn't handed over government secrets to a foreign government.
His leaks are being considered a form of domestic spying. He is the 7th leaker to be so charged by the Obama administration. All previous presidents together only used the charge 3 times.
Charging leakers with espionage is outrageous, but it is par for the course with the Obama administration.


The same theory under which Edward Snowden is guilty of espionage could easily be applied to former vice president Dick Cheney.
Cheney led an effort in 2003 to discredit former acting ambassador in Iraq, Joseph Wilson IV, who had written an op ed for the New York Times detailing his own mission to discover if Iraq was getting uranium from Niger. (The answer? No.)
Cheney appears to have been very upset with Wilson, and tohave wished to punish him by having staffers contact journalists and inform them that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was secretly a CIA operative. While Cheney wasn't the one whose phone call revealed this information, he set in train the events whereby it became well known. (Because Cheney's staff had Plame's information sitting around in plain sight, Armitage discovered it and then was responsible for the leak, but he only scooped Libby and Rove, who had been trying to get someone in the press to run with the Plame story.
What Cheney did in ordering his aides Scooter Libby and Karl Rove to release the information about Plame's identity was no different from Snowden's decision to contact the press.
And yet, Cheney mysteriously has not been charged with Espionage. Hmmm….

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today's show with the international mystery surrounding Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor who leaked documents about the United States' secret domestic and global surveillance programs. Snowden reportedly landed in Moscow Sunday after leaving Hong Kong, but his exact whereabouts are unknown. He was expected to fly from Moscow to Cuba today, but journalists aboard the flight said his seat was empty. It was believed Snowden's final destination would be Ecuador, which has confirmed it was considering an asylum request for Snowden. He has not been seen publicly or photographed since his reported arrival in Moscow on Sunday afternoon from Hong Kong.
The developments come just days after the United States publicly revealed it had filed espionage charges against Snowden for theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person. The criminal complaint was dated June 14th but only came to light on Friday.
The United States has also revoked his passport. On Sunday, Snowden was allowed to fly out of Hong Kong even though Washington asked the Chinese territory to arrest him on espionage charges. In a statement, the Hong Kong government says documents submitted by the U.S. did not, quote, "fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law," and it had no legal basis to prevent him from leaving. In addition, the Hong Kong government said in a written statement that it wanted more information alleged hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by U.S. government agencies.
WikiLeaks is playing a central role in aiding Snowden's travels. A WikiLeaks activist named Sarah Harrison reportedly accompanied Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow. In an interview with The New York Times, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said, quote, "Mr. Snowden requested our expertise and assistance. We've been involved in very similar legal and diplomatic and geopolitical struggles to preserve the organization and its ability to publish."
Snowden, who turned 30 Friday, had anticipated risks for exposing the NSA's surveillance program.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: 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.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Edward Snowden being interviewed by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, filmed by Laura Poitras earlier this month in Hong Kong.
Since then, the former contractor has revealed a secret court order showing that the U.S. government had forced the telecom giant Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans. He also revealed the existence of a secret program called PRISM, which internal NSA documents claim gives the agency access to data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. Internet giants.
For more, we go to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story. He is a columnist and blogger for The Guardian, also a constitutional lawyer. His recent piece is called "On the Espionage Act Charges Against Edward Snowden."
First of all, Glenn Greenwald, well, welcome back to Democracy Now! Do you know where Edward Snowden is right now?
GLENN GREENWALD: No, I don't. I know what news reports are indicating with regard to his whereabouts, and outside of a small circle of people who are traveling with him, it seems that nobody really knows at the moment where he is.
AMY GOODMAN: Where do wewhere do you know he last was, where we last know where he was?
GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, I haven't spoken with him personally since there were reports that he left Hong Kong, and so I can't say with any firsthand knowledge that he's been anywhere once he left Hong Kong. I only know what the news media is reporting on that, and there seemed to be confirmation that he was on a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, that the plan was that he would land in Moscow, spend a night ineither in the airport or in an embassy of Venezuela or Ecuador, and then travel on to Havana on a flight this morning. And there are lots of reporters on that flight, all of whom are reporting that he doesn't seem to be on that flight. And so, the question is, was there an alternative travel arrangement made for him to go to Ecuador or somewhere else, whether it be an alternative commercial flight or a private plane, or has he been detained by the Russian government, which said that it wouldn't detain him, or has something else happened to him? I don't think anybody knows at this point. I certainly don't.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, Ed Snowden turned 30 on Friday. Also, then, the charges against him were made known. Can you explain what he has been charged with by the United States?
GLENN GREENWALD: He's been charged so far with three felony counts, one of which is essentially stealing property that doesn't belong to him. The other two are the much more serious ones. They're offenses under the Espionage Act of 1917 that has been amended several times since then, and the statutethe provisions of that law under which he's been charged were amended most recently in 1950. And they essentially accuse him of releasing classified information that he knew or should have known was likely to harm the United States or result in benefit to its adversaries.
This is the statute that, until President Obama was inaugurated, had only been used a grand total of three times in all of American history to prosecute leakers, people who disclose classified information, as opposed to those who actually do espionage, which is passing secrets to an enemy of the United States or selling it. But for pure leakers, it's almost never been used. There's only been three cases before Obama, one of which was Daniel Ellsberg. Since President Obama's inauguration, there have now been sevenhe is now the seventhleakers or whistleblower who has been prosecuted under the statute, so more than double the number of all previous presidents combined.
The charges, at the moment, each carry a penalty of 10 years in prison, so you're talking about 30 years in prison. But he's not even been indicted yet. The pattern of the Obama administration has been to add many more charges once there's an indictment. And so, it's almost certain that he will face life imprisonment if the United States ever apprehends him and is able to bring him to trial.
AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers said the United States should use every legal avenue to bring Edward Snowden back to face espionage charges. He was speaking to host David Gregory on NBC's Meet the Press.

REP. MIKE ROGERS: So, if you think about what he says he wants and what his actions are, it defies logic. He has taken information that does not belong to him; it belongs to the people of the United States. He has jeopardized our national security. I disagree with the reporter. Clearly, the bad guys have already changed their way. Remember, these were counterterrorism programs, essentially. And we have seen that bad guys overseas, terrorists who are committing and plotting attacks on the United States and our allies, have changed the way they operate. We've already seen that. To say that that is not harmful to the national security of the United States or our safety is just dead wrong.

They should use every legal avenue we have to bring him back to the United States. And, listen, if he believes that he's doing something goodand, by the way, he went outside all of the whistleblower avenues that were available to anyone in this government, including people who have classified information. We get two or three visits from whistleblowers every single week in the committee, and we investigate every one thoroughly. He didn't choose that route. If he really believes he did something good, he should get on a plane, come back and face the consequences of his actions.

DAVID GREGORY: Is he gone? Do you think he's gone, not to return?

REP. MIKE ROGERS: I don'tI'm not sure I would say gone forever. I do think that we'll continue with extradition activities wherever he ends up, and we couldshould continue to find ways to return him to the United States and get the United States public's information back.

AMY GOODMAN: House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers. Your response to this, Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, there's this constant claim that's made about how Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throat and have radically different views of the world that are irreconcilable. Mike Rogers is one of the most right-wing members of the Republican House caucus when it comes to national security issues, and yet he sounds exactly the same as Dianne Feinstein, as every single Democrat in the Senate who is speaking about these issues. There's absolutely no division, and there never is on these questions. The political class binds together every single time to declare to be an enemy anybody who brings transparency to what it is that they're doing.
Secondly, the idea that he has harmed national security is truly laughable. If you go and look at what it is that we published, the only things that we published were reports that the U.S. government is spying, not on the terrorists or the Chinese government, but on American citizens indiscriminatelyhundreds of millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions at a time. The terrorists have long known that the U.S. government is trying to listen in on their telephone calls and emails. We didn't tell them anything they didn't know. The only thing that wasn't known was that the bulk of the spying apparatus is directed not at the terrorists, but at the American citizenry and at innocent people around the world. That's the only thing that has been damaged, not the national security of the United States, but the reputation and credibility of American political officials like Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein and all the executive branch officials who have lied about this program to Congress and who have implemented it in secret.
And then the final issue is the idea that he could have used whistleblower channels. He would have ended up having to go to the very same members of Congress who think that not only are these programs good, but that they ought to remain secret. And you have two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence CommitteeRon Wyden and Mark Udallwho have been screaming for three years, saying there are secret things going on inside the NSA based on secret law of the Obama administration that is so warped and distorted that Americans would be stunned to learn what the government is doing to them in terms of the spying, and that even those members of the Intelligence CommitteeSenators Udall and Wydeneither lacked the courage or were incapable of even disclosing to the American people what they had discovered that was so alarming to them. It took Edward Snowden to come forward the way he did and make us all, as citizens around the world, publicly aware of what the government is doing to us, so that we could have an open and informed debate about what is being done. Anyone who says that it should have been done in another way has the obligation to identify what this other way was that could have informed the people of this country and the world about what the NSA is doing.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, then come back to this discussion. And I want to say, as we're speaking, in Vietnam right now the foreign minister of Ecuador, Patiño, is holding a news conference. And he hasjust reading a letter that Edward Snowden has written to the president of Ecuador, Correa, asking for political asylum. And in it, he is saying that it's the U.S. government that's intercepting freedom of speech; Congress and media is involved, as well. And he says, "And they're accusing me of being a traitor. They want to imprison me or execute me for telling people this," he said. We'll come back to this discussion with Glenn Greenwald. He's the man, the journalist, who leaked the story of the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. They met in Hong Kong, where Edward Snowden had gone to release the information he had gotten as he was a contractor for Hamilton Booz AllenBooz Allen Hamilton, sorry, when he was working for thefor Booz Allen Hamilton as a contractor for the NSA in Hawaii. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back with Glenn Greenwald in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We're speaking with Glenn Greenwald, the columnist for The Guardian newspaper. I'm Amy Goodman. As news emerged of Edward Snowden's departure from Hong Kong, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared on Face the Nation. She talked about what might have facilitated Edward Snowden's departure.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I had actually thought that China would see this as an opportunity to improve relations and extradite him to the United States. China clearly had a role in this, in my view. I don't think this was just Hong Kong without Chinese acquiescence. I think his choice of Moscow was interesting. I think what's interesting is that he was taken off in a car, and his luggage in a separate car. I think it will be very interesting to see what Moscow does with him. Thirdly, he clearly was aided and abetted, possibly by the WikiLeaks organization. I heard a rumor that he was traveling with someone, and so this had to have been all preplanned. Now, what the destination is, no one really knows. But I think, from the point of view of our committee, something that concerns me more is that we get an understanding in this nation that what this is all about is the nation's security.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Feinstein also said she had seen no evidence of abuse by the National Security Agency, instead pointed a finger at China's surveillance practices.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I have seen no abuse by these agencies, nor has any claim ever been made, in any way, shape or form, that this was abused. You know, it's interesting to me because, I mean, I've been going to China for 34 years now trying to increase relationships between our two countries. There is no question about China's prowess in this arena. There is no question about their attempts to get into our national defense networks, as well as major private businesses.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Feinstein on Face the Nation. Glenn Greenwald, your response to some of her points?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, Dianne Feinstein is outright lying when she says that she doesn't know of any instances of abuse at the National Security Agency. Leaving aside the fact that there have been several different reports by ABC News, by The New York Times, of the NSA abusing its eavesdropping powers over the last four years, there is a 2011 opinion, 80 pages long, from the FISA court, the secret court that oversees the NSA. And what it ruled, although the courtthe opinion is top-secret and hasn't been publicly released. What it ruled is that the way in which the NSA is spying on American citizens is in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, as well as in excess of the limitations imposed by the statute, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. In other words, what the NSA is doing is both unconstitutional and illegal. And so, although the public doesn't have access to that opinionshockingly, that in a democracy you could have a court rule the government has violated the law and the Constitution and keep it all a secretDianne Feinstein has access to that opinion. And so, when she says into the camera that there's no evidence that she is aware of that the NSA has abused its spying powers, she's simply lying, because she knows that the claim she's making is false.
Secondly, theas far as the outrage that she expressed, that Obama officials routinely express, over the fact that China is hacking into our military installations and the like, she's right. They are doing that. But one of the things that these documents exposedI mean, that Mr. Snowden exposed to China is that the United States is not only hacking into China's military systems but also its civilian systems. And part of the reason why the Chinese government was unable to turn Snowden over to the U.S., even had they wanted to, was because public opinion in China and in Hong Kong was so enraged by that revelationthat their text messages are being directed into NSA repositoriesthat they simply couldn't, consistent with public opinion, hand Snowden over to the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: What about this latest news, Glenn Greenwald, about the South China Morning Post revelations of Snowden, about how the U.S. hacked China's mobile phone companies and two universities?
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, I think the reason why Snowden made those revelations is extremely obvious, which is that he was in Hong Kong and needed to protect himself from being turned over to the U.S., where he would spend the rest of his life in prison. And so he stepped forward to say that his government has been lying to the world when it pretends that only China, but not it, the U.S. government, hacks into civilian infrastructure. It was an act of self-preservation. It was also a way of exposing the deceit and hypocrisy of top-level political officials in the United States who have tricked their own public into believing that China, but not the United States, does these sorts of things.
AMY GOODMAN: Is this espionage?
GLENN GREENWALD: Espionage is when you work for and at the behest of a foreign government to steal secretsthere's zero evidence he did thator when you covertly pass secrets to an adversary governmenthe never did thator when you sell secrets to another country, which he could have done for millions of dollars to enrich himself and yet never did. It is not espionage in any sense of the word. And, of course, the irony here is that the ones who are engaged in massive spying is the U.S. government. Mr. Snowden essentially refused to engage in spying, and now they're accusing him of espionage.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Glenn, I want to play a clip of your interview when you were on Meet the Press with David Gregory yesterday.

DAVID GREGORY: To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themself a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I've aided and abetted him in any way. The scandal that arose in Washington before our stories began was about the fact that the Obama administration is trying to criminalize investigative journalism by going through the emails and phone records of AP reporters, accusing a Fox News journalist of the theory that you just embraced: being a co-conspirator with felonyin felonies for working with sources. If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their resources, who receives classified information, is a criminal. And it's precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States. It's why The New Yorker's Jane Mayer said investigative reporting has come to a "standstill"her wordas a result of the theories that you just referenced.

DAVID GREGORY: Well, the question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you are doing. And, of course, anybody who's watching this understands I was asking a question. That question has been raised by lawmakers, as well. I'm not embracing anything. But, obviously, I take your point.

AMY GOODMAN: That is David Gregory, the host of Meet the Press. Glenn Greenwald, would you like to carry this conversation forward? Of course, it's been raised over and overPeter King, the congressman from New York, calling for you to be prosecuted.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And, actually, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the extremely Wall Street-friendly New York Times quote-unquote "reporter" who covers Wall Street, apparently went on CNBC this morning and essentially speculated or suggested that I ought to be arrested, as well. You know, it's interesting, Amy. I don't know of anybody who has a lower opinion of the Beltway media, generally, of David Gregory, specificallyfor that matter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, specificallythan I do. And yet, it actually is even surprising to me to watch them openly do the dirty work of the U.S. government in essentially suggesting publicly that journalists who report on what the government is doing ought to be turned into criminals.
You know, one of the main criticisms that I've voiced about the Beltway media is that they're not adversarial to the government at all, but actually that they are servants of the government, mouthpieces for it. Lots of other people have made that critique, including you, Amy. And I think it's almost like Christmas, for those of us who believe that, to watch this gift being handed to us that so vividly proves it, that rather than defend what is supposed to be their right that they are supposed to safeguard, which is freedom of the press, they're leading the chorus against other journalists on behalf of the government that they serve, demanding essentially and theorizing that we're guilty of crimes for doing what journalists are supposed to do, which is shining a light on what political officials are doing in the dark.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, McClatchy had an interesting piece, "Obama's Crackdown Views Leaks as Aiding Enemies of [the] U.S." talking about President Obama's unprecedented initiative known as the Insider Threat Program. Can you explain what that is?
GLENN GREENWALD: The Insider Threat Program is a program implemented by the Obama administration that is very consistent with their overall unprecedented attack on leakers and whistleblowersthat is even what The New York Times this morning called it, an unprecedented attack on leaksin which government employees are encouragedin fact, requiredto report to authorities any other government employees that they even suspect might be thinking about leaking. And what makes it so pernicious is that it defines people who leak as being enemies of the state. So, if any government employee sees wrongdoing and brings that wrongdoing to light, then if that wrongdoing was conducted behind a wall of secrecy by having it be called classified or anything else, they are deemed by the U.S. government to be essentially enemies of the state. That's the term that this program uses for them.
And this is the vital context for everything that is happening with Mr. Snowden, for WikiLeaks, for this entire story, which is that the reason why we need Ed Snowdens, the reason why he came forward in the way that he did and the reason why he felt he had to flee the United States is precisely because there are no people in the United States more persecuted at the moment than those who bring transparency to what the U.S. government is doing. They are treated as enemies of the state. They are called traitors, as John Kerry called Mr. Snowden today. And that's the reason that investigative journalism is being so threatened by the policies of the Obama administration. I hope all of your viewers will go to Google and type "McClatchy, Obama and leaks" and read that McClatchy report on what the Obama administration is doing to wage a war on transparency like no other president has ever done.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, do you have more documents leaked by Edward Snowden that you're going to be writing about, more exposés in the coming days?
GLENN GREENWALD: Definitely. And we're going to take our time in reporting it. We're going to make sure that everything we report is accurate and the picture is complete. But my only priority at the moment is going through these documents, vetting them and continuing to report on them. And there are lots of other stories coming.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian, also a constitutional lawyer, speaking to us from his home in Brazil.

[Magda Hassan]

Pirate Party Norway: - Snowden Passed Through Norway to Iceland

Organization Pirate Party Norway claims that spy accused Edward Snowden landed at Oslo Gardermon airport last night.

Photo : Zennie Abraham

The party leader Øystein Jakobsen would meet with Snowden when he landed on Sunday evening, according to the party's twitter account.

- We have received information from our international umbrella party, the Pirate Parties International (PPI), that he will stop in Norway. The reason is that this is probably the quickest and easiest way to fly to Iceland, says Tale Østrådal from the Pirate Party to TV2 Norway
Øsrådal also said that Pirate Party in Iceland confirmed Snowden's stay in the country. Iceland has become a haven for people like him, almost a "Pirate Island," says Østrådal.
The party leader Jakobsen, on the other hand, thanked the former agent. He has sacrificed his whole life for something he felt wrong. What he has done is exemplary. He has sacrificed a life of freedom to inform the public about a serious infringement, says Jakobsen to TV 2
According to Oslo Gardermoen Airport websites, a flight from Moscow arrived in Oslo at 19.25 on Sunday evening. But the press officer of the airport did not give any information aboout the details.
Also, police at the airport told TV 2 that they do not have any information about the case.
About Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden is a former technical contractor and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), before leaking details of classified NSA mass surveillance programs to the press. Snowden shared classified material on a variety of top-secret NSA programs, including the interception of US telephone metadata and the PRISM surveillance program, primarily with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, which published a series of exposés based on Snowden's disclosures in June 2013. Snowden said the leaks were an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."
Snowden's alleged leaks are said to rank among the most significant breaches in the history of the NSA. Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said disclosures linked to Snowden have "confirmed longstanding suspicions that NSA's surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew." On June 14, 2013, US federal prosecutors filed a sealed complaint, made public on June 21,[8][9] charging Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified intelligence with an unauthorized person; the latter two allegations are under the Espionage Act.
About Pirate Party Norway
Piratpartiet Norge (Norwegian for The Pirate Party of Norway) is a Norwegian political party which was founded on the 16. December 2012. The basic principles are "full transparency in the state management, privacy on the internet, as well as better use of IT and technology to make a better democracy." On December 17. 2012 they announced that the 5000 signatures required to take part in the next general election had been received. The party is a part of the Pirate Parties International.
http://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/3802-p...to-iceland

[Magda Hassan]

Is PRISM just a not-so-secret web tool?

(Updated: June 24, 2013)

Since The Guardian first published about the PRISM data collection program on June 6, there have been new disclosures of top secret documents almost every day, resulting in some fierce protests against apparently illegal wiretapping by the NSA and GCHQ. However, it remains unclear what PRISM actually is or does, as The Guardian didn't provide any new details or disclosed more than 5 of the 41 presentation slides about the program.

This makes it hard to determine whether PRISM really is the illegal or at least embarrassing program which most people now think it is. Especially, because it could even be the hardly secret Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM), which is a web-based tool to manage information requests widely used by the US military. Here we will take a closer look at this program and try to determine whether this could be the same as the PRISM revealed by The Guardian.

Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management

The earliest document which mentions the Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM) is a paper (pdf) from July 2002, which was prepared by the MITRE Corporation Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. The document describes the use of web browsers for military operations, the so-called "web-centric warfare", for which intelligence collection management programs were seen as the catalyst. These programs fuse battlefield intelligence information with the national data that they already possess, in order to provide a complete picture to their users.

PRISM was developed by SAIC (formerly Science Applications International Corporation, a company that was also involved in the 2002 TRAILBLAZER program for analyzing network data). The program was originally prototyped and fielded for the US European Command, but is also being used in other military operation areas such as Iraq. Involved in the establishment of PRISM was Ron Baham. His LinkedIn profile says that he currently is senior vice president and operations manager at SAIC and that he worked on CMMA PRISM at JDISS from 2000 - 2004, so PRISM might be developed somewhere between 2000 and early 2002.

On its website, SAIC says that the PRISM application allows theater users, in various functional roles and at different echelons, to synchronize Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) requirements with current military operations and priorities. The application was first developed for use on JWICS, the highly secure intelligence community network, but is now also being used on SIPRNet, the secure internet used by the US military.

Screenshot of the PRISM Input Tool (EEI = Essential Elements of Intelligence)
source: GMTI Utility Analysis for Airborne Assets (pdf)

Other sources clarify that PRISM consists of a web-based interface which connects to PRISM servers, and that it's used by a variety of users, like intelligence collection managers at military headquarters, to request the intelligence information which is needed for operations. These requests are entered in the PRISM interface, which sends them to the PRISM server. From there the request goes to units which collect the raw data. These are processed into intelligence, which then becomes available through the PRISM server.

PRISM is able to manage and prioritize these intelligence collection requirements to ensure critical intelligence is timely available to the commander during crisis operations. The application integrates these requirements and, with other tools, generates the so called daily collection deck. PRISM also provides traceability throughout the so-called intelligence cycle, from planning through exploitation to production.

The PRISM application made by SAIC is still widely used. It's mentioned in joint operations manuals from 2012 and in quite a number of job descriptions, like this one from March 2013 for a systems administator in Doha, Qatar, which says that part of the job is providing on-site and off-site PRISM training and support. Also these %7D]US government spending data show that in 2011 a maintaince contract (worth $ 1.085.464,-) for PRISM support services was awarded to SAIC, with options for 2012 and 2013.


Are there two different PRISMs?

So now it looks like as if there are two different programs called PRISM: one is a web-based tool for requesting and managing intelligence information from a server that gets input from various intelligence sources. The other is the program from which The Guardian says it's a top secret electronic surveillance program that collects raw data from the servers of nine major US internet companies.

If the Guardian's claims are true, it's strange that two important intelligence programs apparently have the exact same name. For sure, this would not be very likely, if "PRISM" would be an acronym or a codeword in both cases. But if we assume one PRISM being an acronym and the other PRISM a codeword, it could be somewhat more likely.

As we know, the PRISM tool developed by SAIC is an acronym, just like the names of many other military and intelligence software tools are often lengthy acronyms. This leaves the PRISM which was unveiled by The Guardian likely to be a codeword, or more correctly said, a nickname. NSA data collection methods, officially designated by an alphanumerical SIGAD like US-984, can have nicknames which may or may not be classified.

These are different from codenames, which are always classified and often assigned to the intelligence products from the various data collection methods. This can cause some confusion, as "PRISM" perfectly fits in the NSA tradition of using 5-letter codewords for products of sensitive Signals Intelligence programs.

If PRISM had been a classified codename, it should also have been part of the classification line, and the marking should have read TOP SECRET // SI-PRISM // [...] instead of the current TOP SECRET // SI // [...]. This indicates that PRISM isn't a codeword for intelligence from a specific source, but more likely the nickname of a collection method.

This still leaves the question of why in 2007 an apparently new collection program got a nickname which is exactly the same as the already widely used computer application which is going to task this internet data collection method.


A less spectacular PRISM?

Allthough The Guardian presented PRISM as a method of directly collecting raw data from major internet companies, other sources say that PRISM might well be a much less spectacular internal computer program.

Initially, The Washington Post came with the same story as The Guardian, but revised some of its claims by citing another classified report that describes PRISM as allowing "collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations." These words very much resemble the way the PRISM Planning Tool is described.

National security reporter Marc Ambinder describes PRISM as "a kick-ass GUI (Graphical User Interface) that allows an analyst to look at, collate, monitor, and cross-check different data types provided to the NSA from Internet companies located inside the United States" - which also sounds much more like the SAIC application, than like a data dragnet with free access to commercial company servers.

This view was also confirmed by a statement (pdf) of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, which says: "PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program. It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government's [...] collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers [...]".

With this statement, Clapper officially confirms the existance of a program called PRISM, and allthough his description could also fit that of the Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management, he didn't positively identified PRISM as such.

Finally, an anonymous former government official told CNet.com that The Guardian's reports are "incorrect and appear to be based on a misreading of a leaked Powerpoint document", making journalist Declan McCullagh go one step further by suggesting that PRISM might be actually the same as the web application named Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management.


PRISM as an all-source planning tool

Some sources, like a joint operations manual and a number of job descriptions, seem to indicate that the PRISM planning tool is primarily used for geospational intelligence (GEOINT), which is analysed imagery of the earth as collected by spy planes and satellites.

However, more extensive research has shown that the Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM) is not only used for geospatial intelligence, but for fusing intelligence from all sources. Besides GEOINT, sources prove that PRISM is also used for SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), IMINT (Imagery Intelligence) and HUMINT (Human Intelligence), probably through additional modules for each of these sources.

Even the 2006 Geospatial Intelligence Basic Doctrine (pdf) says PRISM is a "web-based application that provides users, at the theater level and below, with the ability to conduct Integrated Collection Management (ICM). Integrates all intelligence discipline assets with all theater requirements."
More specifically, the 2012 Joint and National Intelligence Support to Military Operations manual describes that where applicable, requests for SIGINT support should be entered into approved systems such as PRISM, for approval by a military commander.

In a job description for an Intelligence Training Instructor from 2010 we see a distinction being made between PRISM-IMINT and PRISM-SIGINT, and a LinkedIn profile mentions the IMINT/SIGINT PRISM training in 2006 of someone who was administrator for PRISM, which is described as the system of record USCENTCOM uses for submitting, tracking, and researching theater ISR requirements. In a job description for a SIGINT Collection Management Analyst (by Snowden-employer Booz Allen Hamilton!) experience with PRISM is required too.

Also a module was added to PRISM for accessing information from HUMINT (Human Intelligence) sources. Testing of this module was done during the Empire Challenge 2008 exercise. In the daily reports of this exercise we can read that for example the Defense Intelligence Agency's HUMINT team loaded "additional data into PRISM HUMINT module for operations on Tuesday morning". From a French report about this exercise we learn that the PRISM HUMINT module was a new application, just like the Humint Online Tasking & Reporting (HOT-R) tool, which runs on SIPRNet.


Are both PRISMs one and the same?

If The Guardian's PRISM really is just a computer system for sending tasking instructions directly to equipment that collects raw data, it is hard to believe that it's different from the Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM), which for many years is used to order and manage intelligence from all sources. This would also fit claims by which PRISM is most used in NSA reporting.

If this could be true, and there's only one PRISM program, what about the slides which were disclosed by The Guardian? First of all, as this newspaper is not willing to publish all PRISM-slides, we cannot be sure about what this presentation is really about, but it's possible that it's not about a PRISM which is a nickname of the US-984XN collection method, but about how to gather material from that source by using the PRISM web tool.

More specific, we can think of a machine-to-machine interface between the PRISM system and dedicated data collection devices at remote locations, like a secure FTP server or an encrypted dropbox at sites of the internet companies. At the PRISM desktop interface this tasking may be done through a separate SIGINT module. As one of the slides says: "Complete list and details on PRISM web page: Go PRISMFAA" we can even imagine a module called "PRISM FAA" for requesting intelligence from intercepts of foreign communications under the conditions of the FISA Amendment Act (FAA) from 2008.

By publishing the PRISM slides The Guardian for the first time revealed evidence about the NSA collecting data from major internet companies. But as this apparently surprised the general public, the practice is hardly new. Spies and later intelligence agencies of all countries have always tried to intercept foreign communications and of course tried to do this with every new way of communication: first letters, later phonecalls and nowadays internet based social media.

Therefore, it may hardly come as a surprise that NSA also found ways to intercept those new means of communications too. And whether these interception and collection methods might have nicknames or not, it's very likely that access to their processed output was added to all the other intelligence sources which can be tasked by using the PRISM Planning Tool.

What looks more of a problem, is the fact that in the past, enemies were nation states, which could be targeted by focussing on diplomatic and military communications. Nowadays, with terrorism considered as the main enemy, almost every (foreign) citizen could be a potential adversary, which made intelligence agencies try to search all communications available.


Next time we will discuss more specific details of the Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM), as this gives an interesting look at internal intelligence procedures.


Links

- TheWeek.com: Is the NSA PRISM leak much less than it seems?
- CNet.com: What is the NSA's PRISM program? (FAQ)
- CNet.com: No evidence of NSA's 'direct access' to tech companies
- VanityFair.com: PRISM Isn't Data Mining and Other Falsehoods in the N.S.A. "Scandal"
- ExtremeTech.com: Making sense of the NSA Prism leak as the real details emerge
- Medium.com: The PRISM Details Matter
- Reflets.info: #PRISM : let's have a look at the big picture

[Peter Lemkin]

Hide and leak: Where is Edward Snowden?

June 25, 2013 | Filed under: Activism,Breaking News,News,Politics,Rights | Posted by: True Activist
When it comes to the whereabouts of Edward Snowden, there has been far more conjecture than concrete fact. While Washington would do anything to get its hands on the whistleblower, tracking down Snowden has turned into a full on cloak and dagger affair.
On Sunday Edward Snowden left Chinese territory two days after espionage charges were leveled against him, setting off an international game of cat and mouse which has the United States' massive global intelligence apparatus trying to cut the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor off at the pass.
The White House for its part seemed to be certain that Snowden did in fact reach Moscow after taking off from Hong Kong on Sunday.
"We have known where he is and believe we know where he is now," White House press secretary Jay Carney said during a Monday afternoon briefing. "It is our assumption that he is in Russia."
"I'm not going to get into specifics, but it is our understanding that he is still in Russia," Carney continued. "We have asked the Russians to look at all the options and expel Snowden to the US," he said.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said on Monday that Snowden was in a "safe place." Assange, who was unable to give further information as to Snowden's whereabouts, claimed that Snowden had left Hong Kong on June 23 "bound for Ecuador via a safe pass through Russia and other states."
Shortly after Snowden allegedly arrived in Moscow, the government of Ecuador announced it had received an asylum request from the fugitive whistleblower. Assange claimed Snowden, whose passport was reportedly revoked one day prior to his departure from Hong Kong, was further granted a refugee document of passage.
It has been reported that Snowden was snaking his way around the globe to avoid capture, with a complicated route which would have seen him fly from Moscow to Caracas via Havana, with the expectation that he would later travel on to the Ecuadorian capital Quito.
While the state-controlled Russian airline Aeroflot said that he had checked in for flight SU150 to Havana with two seats (17A and 17C) in his name on Monday, seemingly half the world's press corps was on board, but Snowden was conspicuously absent.
The fact that he failed to board a Moscow-to-Havana flight on Monday following his hasty escape from Hong Kong one day prior begs the question: did the world's most infamous whistleblower step foot on Russian soil at all?
Wikileaks and unnamed sources

The government of Hong Kong never specified Snowden's destination, only stating that he had in fact left Chinese territory for "a third country" on Sunday. The Russian government has made no official comment regarding his alleged arrival either.
Although reporters noted the heavy presence of Russian security services at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov disavowed any knowledge of Snowden's arrival in the Russian capital.
"I don't [know if he's planning to stay in Moscow]. I heard about his potential arrival from the press. I know nothing," Peskov told the Guardian on Sunday.
When RT contacted Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) regarding the matter, the agency declined to comment.
With no corroborating video footage, the only actual proof that Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday evening stem from three primary sources: WikiLeaks, the government of Ecuador and anonymous sources working within the airport.
Wikileaks, whose representative Sarah Harrison reportedly accompanied Snowden on the flight, regularly sent out tweets up until flight SU213 touched down in the Russian capital around 5:00 p.m. local time.
The anti-secrecy group said in a statement that the former CIA technician is on his way to Ecuador "via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks."
A source from within WikiLeaks, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to RT that the rogue NSA leaker was indeed on the flight, passing on the names of Ecuadorian officials who were slated to meet Snowden at the airport.
An unnamed Aeroflot official also told Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency that the former CIA technician was indeed on board Flight SU213 which landed in Moscow.
Smoke and mirrors?

Shortly after flight 213 landed, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino tweeted that "The Government of Ecuador had received an asylum request from Edward J. #Snowden." Cars baring license plates for the Ecuadorian diplomatic mission were spotted at Moscow International Airport Sheremetyevo.
Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino reacts as he speaks at a news conference in Hanoi June 24, 2013. (Reuters / Kham)
Ecuador's ambassador to Russia, Chavez Zavala, was also seen at the airport. Just moments before stepping into a hotel on the airport's premises, he reportedly told journalists: "We're waiting for [Sarah] Harrison. We're going to talk to them."
Although Snowden had reportedly taken a suite at the «V-Express» Capsule Hotel in Terminal E of the airport's transit area, no visual confirmation of the former contractor has surfaced despite the myriad passengers and swarm of journalists staking out quite possibly the world's most wanted man.
A source at Aeroflot told Interfax news agency that Snowden had checked into the hotel, noting that "he cannot leave the terminal as he has no Russian visa." Harrison, he added, did have a Russian visa.
Another source told the agency of the unprecedented security measures which had been taken "to maintain Snowden's security and to guarantee his safe departure."
"Everything has been done to allow Snowden to spend the night peacefully at the airport's capsule hotel and to fly quietly to Cuba," the source continued.
However, on Monday evening a source at the hotel later told RT that Snowden had in fact never checked in or out of the facility.
It bears recalling that WikiLeaks, which did everything possible to draw attention to Snowden's location between takeoff and landing, has a vested interest in concealing the whistleblower's actual movements.
Ecuador has already shown its willingness to take big political risks by granting Assange diplomatic asylum at its London embassy, where the Wikileaks founder has remained holed up for over a year. With round the clock police surveillance and a diplomatic standoff with the UK government set to last for years, Quito might have decided on avoiding another diplomatic showdown by facilitating Snowden's safe passage before he arrives in Ecuador.
Destination unknown

Once Snowden failed to show for his Havana-bound flight, RT's Irina Galushko noted there were at least four flights leaving on Monday that could put Snowden on route to Ecuador.
A source familiar with the situation earlier told Interfax that Snowden might take the next flight to Latin America via Cuba.
"He's probably got another ticket also via Cuba, as there are no direct flights [from Moscow] to Caracas or Quito."
Like so much other information that has leaked out of Moscow's international hub, nothing ever materialized. The same source later told Interfax that Snowden was probably already outside of the Russian Federation.
Speaking at a joint press conference with his Indian counterpart in New Delhi, Secretary of State John Kerry said he had no knowledge of Snowden's final destination, adding he would be deeply troubled if Moscow or China had prior notice of Snowden's travel plans, Reuters reports.
More baffling to Washington is how Snowden ever left Hong Kong as his passport had been revoked one day prior. On the same day, the US asked Hong Kong to hand over Snowden under the terms of a 1998 extradition treaty with the Chinese territory.
However, The Hong Kong special administrative region [HKSAR] government said their decision not to block Snowden's departure stemmed from the fact that "the documents provided by the US government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law."
"As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong. The HKSAR government has already informed the US government of Mr Snowden's departure," the statement continued.
On Friday, federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Snowden for leaking a trove of documents regarding the NSA's clandestine surveillance programs.
Snowden was charged with theft, "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person." The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act, which allow for the issuance of an international arrest warrant against him.
Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the US, said it would be under no obligation to hand over a US citizen. Foreign Minister. Sergey Lavrov has previously said Russia would be willing to consider an asylum request from Snowden.
However, an unnamed security official told RIA-Novosti news agency on Monday that no orders for Snowden's arrest have been dispatched through Interpol to Russian law enforcement agencies.
Speaking from Hanoi on Monday, Patino said he did not know Snowden's current whereabouts, or where the whistleblower planned to travel next.
The Ecuadorian FM, who read a letter in which Snowden likened himself to Bradley Manning, the US army private who is currently on trial for leaking classified information to Wikileaks, intimated that the former NSA contractor's asylum request would be considered on human rights grounds.
Following news that Snowden's passport had been revoked, State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said he "should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States."
That Snowden could leave Hong Kong on an invalidated passport despite the charges leveled against him speaks volumes about the fallout from the United States sweeping surveillance activities.
And despite the massive troves of information the US government continues to cull both at home and abroad through PRISM and related surveillance programs, one critical fact remains elusive: where in the world is Edward Snowden?


Read more: [URL="http://www.trueactivist.com/hide-and-leak-where-is-edward-snowden/"]http://www.trueactivist.com/hide-and-leak-where-is-edward-snowden/

-[/URL]-----------------------------------------

Snowden hoodwinks world on Cuba magical mystery tour
Aeroflot flight SU 150 to Havana, on the stand at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on June 24, 2013. US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden was scheduled to occupy a seat to Cuba but never appeared.


AFP - Throughout the 12-hour Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Havana, the window seat 17A stood conspicuously empty, waiting for a passenger who never came.
This was the seat that according to Aeroflot's flight records fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden was scheduled to occupy, supposedly on his way to claiming asylum in South America.
But like a twist from a Hollywood spy thriller, the main protagonist never showed up and the supporting cast -- dozens of journalists including AFP correspondents packed onto the aircraft -- were left chasing shadows.
In the end, the journalists had travelled to the other side of the world to find themselves none the wiser as to where on earth Edward Snowden was.
"I have a feeling that we are all participating in some grandiose spy conspiracy," said Olga Denisova, a journalist with Voice of Russia radio. "The fact that we have not seen him for two days means he is receiving some good support."
After arriving from Hong Kong on Sunday, Snowden and his legal assistant Sarah Harrison were checked in on Aeroflot SU 150 from Moscow to Havana for Monday, Aeroflot records seen by AFP showed.
Snowden was allocated 17 A and Harrison 17 C. But as boarding was completed and the last calls were made, the pair never showed up.
When the heavy doors of the Airbus 330 shut tight, several dozen journalists, who had bought the $2,000 round-trip tickets during a mad scramble to get onto Snowden's plane, realised they would be making the 12-hour journey to Cuba without him.
Passengers on the flight to Cuba boarded the plane amid extra security but most regular travellers seemed unaware of the espionage drama unfolding in front of them.
Snowden had been widely expected to be the last passenger to get on the plane. Several reporters watched the main entrance like hawks ignoring the pleas of the crew to take their seats and not to crowd the entryway.
"We are expecting seven more passengers," said the crew. Several minutes later the countdown went to three. Finally, all passengers were on board but Snowden was not among them.
Refusing to give up hope, some journalists speculated that Snowden might have boarded the aircraft through a different entrance directly from the tarmac, while others suggested he was hiding in the cockpit.
Takeoff was some 30 minutes behind schedule. Up in the air came the realisation that Snowden might have never intended to board that plane.
"I think he would have been a total fool if he took the flight. You can see for yourself the frenzy here," said flight attendant Yelena as she prepared to serve champagne to passengers in business class.
"I would do just the same."
Even without the passengers, the two empty seats in the 17th row drew curious stares. Camera clicks could occasionally be heard as reporters took their pictures.
But after the initial excitement, by the time the plane touched down in Havana at around 2300 GMT Monday, the flight felt like any other long haul route.
Mystery surrounded Snowden's whereabouts since he arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday.
As a transit passenger planning to travel to Latin America, he had been widely expected to spend the night at a hotel at the airport but hotel officials never confirmed his stay.
It was still unclear if Snowden had himself changed the scheduled travel plans or if higher forces -- like Russian special services -- could have been involved.
Arriving in Havana empty-handed, the reporters on the flight still said they had to be on that plane.
"I am starting to see the funny side of things," said Jussi Niemelainen, a Moscow correspondent for Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper. "But sometimes you just have to follow your instincts."
"We've been fooled," said Anna Nemtsova, a Moscow correspondent for Newsweek and a contributor for NBC News television. "But I am sticking around for a couple of days to make sure he does not arrive by the next plane."

[Peter Lemkin]

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Russian President Vladimir Putin says US whistleblower was still at Moscow airport, and was free to leave.

Last Modified: 25 Jun 2013 15:41

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[TD="class: DetailedSummary"]Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the US whistleblower Edward Snowden was still in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, and was free to leave and should do so as soon as possible.

Putin told a news conference during a visit to Finland on Tuesday that he hoped the affair would not affect relations with Washington, which wants Russia to send the former National Security Agency contractor to the US, but indicated Moscow would not hand him over.

"We can only hand over foreign citizens to countries with which we have an appropriate international agreement on the extradition of criminals," Putin said, adding that Snowden has committed no crime in Russia.
He dismissed US accusations against Russia over the case as "rubbish," saying that Russian security agencies had not worked with Snowden.

The news comes a day after he was reported to have left Moscow for Havana, apparently en route to Ecuador.
Ricardo Patino, the foreign minister of Ecuador, where Snowden is seeking asylum to evade being arrested by the United States for leaking classified details about its spying programme, said on Tuesday that the country knew nothing about his whereabouts or what documents he might be using to travel.
Earlier reports suggested that Snowden took a flight out of Moscow on Monday, having arrived there from Hong Kong the previous day.
The United States has annulled Snowden's passport and wants him returned to face espionage charges for revealing details of two widespread surveillance programmes. Washington has strongly criticised China for allowing Snowden to leave Hong Kong.
Chinese rebuttal

China said on Tuesday, however, that the United States' accusations of Beijing facilitating Snowden's departure from Hong Kong were "groundless and unacceptable".
Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, told a regular briefing that all parties should accept that the Hong Kong government had handled Snowden's case in accordance with the law.

The White House said Hong Kong's decision was "a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant, and that decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the US-China relationship".
Meanwhile, Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website Wikileaks, has described Snowden as "healthy and safe", but did not provide any details of his whereabouts. Assange has been granted asylum by Ecuador in a separate case, and has been living in the country's London embassy for more than a year.
Snowden has been charged by the US of espionage and spying after he revealed to Western newspapers how the United States' National Security Agency spies on the internet and phone activities of billions of people.
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[Adele Edisen]

US Rulers Fear American People
By Finian Cunningham

he American rulers are jealously guarding their criminal behaviour and that is
why they are hunting down with a vengeance people like Snowden who are seen to
be exposing this criminality.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e35419.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001hkPcq4bua...8WuPlJto=]




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US Rulers Fear American People

By Finian Cunningham

June 25, 2013 "Information Clearing House - What the disclosures of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden show perhaps above all else is just how petrified the leaders of the United States have become - of ordinary citizens both in the US and around the world. When we say "leaders" we mean the ruling elite - the top one percent of the financial-corporate-military-industrial complex and its bought- and paid-for politicians.

The international manhunt by the US authorities for Snowden, which has accelerated with his flight to Moscow to evade extradition from Hong Kong, is indicative of the desperation in Washington's elitist establishment to quash him and what he is revealing about their despotic rule.

Today, the US has evolved into a dystopia, not a democracy, where obscene wealth and privilege stand in the face of massive poverty and misery. One indicator of this abysmal inequality is the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more material wealth than 155 million of their fellow citizens combined. Another datum: some 50 million Americans - a sixth of the population - are surviving on food handouts. Unemployment, homelessness, suicide rates, prescription drug addiction, rampant gun crime all speak in different ways of social meltdown.

American society is collapsing from the sheer weight of its decrepit capitalist economy. The social system is unsustainable. It is like a distended rotten sack that is coming apart at the seams from inexorable burgeoning pressure. This is not unique to the US. All around the world, people are rebelling against the inequity of crony capitalism - there is only one form of capitalism - from Europe to the Arab Middle East, from Turkey to Brazil.

But the US is a phenomenal case in point of collapsing capitalist society. It's hard to believe that not so long ago, within living memory; the US was regarded as the economic paradigm of the world. Now it more and more resembles a giant sprawling ghetto of unremitting poverty that is interspersed with a few gated rich communities, the latter populated by the top one percent of society.

This is the historical context for fully understanding the significance of gargantuan state surveillance by the elite against the citizenry, as revealed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The American ruling class, as with their elite counterparts around the world, are figuratively sitting within their privileged niches and petrified by the mounting discontent "outside". Through their criminal ransacking and rigging of wealth, the powers-that-be have through their own insatiable greed created a powerful potential enemy -virtually the entire population, both in the US and around the world.

In this highly unstable situation of elites and masses that bankrupt capitalism has furnished, "democracy" can no longer be tolerated by the rulers. That is why the rulers have embarked on massive information gathering, monitoring, spying and surveillance. It is all about maintaining "control" of a precarious and explosive disequilibrium.

One basic duty of any state is to protect its citizens from foreign enemies. Enemies are conventionally understood to be state militaries or non-state terrorist groups. But from Snowden's revelations of US government surveillance of telecommunications, the vast bulk of America's spying is on civilians. The phone calls, emails, cyber chats and photos of billions of people all around the world are vacuumed up and stored for analysis. Snowden disclosed in one instance how Chinese hospitals and universities - not military installations - were among the many international civilian targets for American government snooping.

US national security officials defend this global dragnet method as a necessary way to trawl for terrorists. Last week, the chief of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander told the American Senate that more than 50 terrorist plots against the US had been foiled by the NSA's interception of civilian communications. The evidence for the alleged thwarted terrorist attacks cited by General Alexander was sketchy at best, so we are obliged to accept the NSA's dubious word on its self-serving claims of success.

Even if we accept this claim on face value, an alleged terror threat numbering 50, gleaned from billions of communication files, is a negligible ratio, akin to a needle in a haystack. That means two things. First, the statistical terror threat against US citizens is likewise negligible to the point of being virtually non-existent. As Snowden himself pointed out, the chances of Americans dying from slipping in their bathtub are far great than from terrorism. The second thing is that the official pretext for global, industrial-scale infringement of privacy - that is, national security of its citizens - is grotesquely disproportionate, and therefore unjustifiable.

In the aftermath of these revelations, US President Barack Obama and his security officials are claiming that the infringements of individual privacy are minor. "No-one is listening to your phone calls," said Obama. He also added that there must be a trade-off between national security and what he called "minor breaches" of civil liberties.

These assurances from Obama and US National Intelligence Director James Clapper, among others, are rejected by Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers, as well as by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is litigating against the American government over the recent revelations. Official claims of limited surveillance and breaches are also repudiated by various digital privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as by common knowledge of American constitutional rights.

Edward Snowden says that when he was working at the NSA, he had clearance to hack into anyone's email "including the president's". That is far from "minor".

Another former senior employee of the NSA, Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted under the US Espionage Act for similar whistleblowing in 2011, says that the American government and its secret agencies have systematically "subverted the constitution" by arrogating the power to tap into all and any communications that they desire. In a narrow sense, Obama may be right that "no-one is listening to your phone calls". Not yet, at least, but the executive powers and technology are in place for this totalitarian system of eavesdropping to be switched on.

Drake writes, "The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation - the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court, the congressional committees - is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is: they [the US government] just want it all, period." He added: "They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye."

It seems an incredible lack of judgment among some alternative commentators who have dismissed Snowden's revelations as trivial. Worse still, some commentators have even insinuated that the former NSA analyst is a witting or unwitting player in an elaborate CIA hoax aimed at intimidating citizens from using mass communications.

Such views badly underestimate the extent of American government criminality towards its own sacrosanct constitution and the deeply corrupting implications that has for democracy.

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story earlier this month, has said, "The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or terrorists, but at them."

Greenwald adds, "And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been harmed' is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability."

Since the US Espionage Act was instituted nearly a century ago in 1917, there have been a total of 10 prosecutions against American government employees deemed to have broken the law and compromised national security through whistleblowing. One of those was former State Department staffer Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, revealing the spurious legal grounds for the American genocidal war on Vietnam.

Seven out of the total 10 prosecutions against whistleblowers - 70 percent - have occurred under the Obama administrations. That figure alone tells of a growing anxiety within the American ruling class. That anxiety is related to their increasingly criminal secret powers and the ongoing subversion of democracy. The American rulers are jealously guarding their criminal behaviour and that is why they are hunting down with a vengeance people like Snowden who are seen to be exposing this criminality. It is something of an irony that this week Snowden had to flee to Russia (the former "evil empire" in the words of late American President Ronald Reagan) in order to avoid extradition to the US where he is charged with felonies under the Espionage Act.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake says that when he was working as an analyst during the Cold War he was assigned to monitor the espionage activities of Stalinist East Germany and its secret Stasi police. Drake says that the Stasi had an obsession to "knowing everything" about its citizens and kept a huge archive of paper files. However, this voluminous archiving is a fraction of what is stored and accessible by American secret services owing to the internet and digital technology. Drake describes the American NSA as "a Stasi on steroids".

In the 1970s, US Senator Frank Church led a groundbreaking investigation into illicit American government covert operations. Church warned then that if the secret powers of the NSA were to ever become deployed against the American public - as opposed to "foreign enemies" - then that country's democracy would be finished. That is precisely the present abysmal outcome of secret US state powers.



There are two corollaries of the imploding capitalist system, for which the US still remains the lynchpin for historical reasons. The first is the increasing militarism of the US and its Western allies to compensate for this economic demise. This militarism has evolved over the past decade since the purported 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001 to become a condition of "permanent war". The present US-led covert war in Syria and underway against Iran are part of a continuum of imperialist war-making that connects Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, as well as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Mali. This state of permanent war is needed by the waning capitalist powers to try to assert control of natural resources, markets, finance and investment against perceived rivals, such as Russia and China.


The other corollary of the historic failure of capitalism, and in particular in the US, is the imperative to assert control over social meltdown and rebellion. That is why the growth in militarism abroad has gone hand-in-glove with the intensification of surveillance powers and repression against citizens at home. American, and Western, democracy is, for all intents and purposes, a dead corpse. Only criminal wars and repression of its citizens are keeping the moribund system on a life-support system.

As Thomas Drake noted, "Since the [US] government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out."

The rulers of America are despotic elites who are living in fear and trepidation of their own people and of people power around the world rising in rebellion against the misrule of capitalism.

Finian Cunningham, is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

CIA WHISTLEBLOWER, Edward Snowden has distributed encrypted copies of thousands of NSA documents all over the world.

In an interview with The Daily Beast , reporter Glenn Greenwald - who first broke the story of the Snowden leaks - said the former CIA contractor took "extreme precautions to ensure different people around the world have these archives to ensure the stories will inevitably be published".
Greenwald said he will be given access to the full archives "if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden" meaning that the US intelligence community has a new challenge on their hands in trying to recover all the documents and examine the full extent of the breach.
Snowden recently fled Hong Kong - where he had been hiding for weeks - to Moscow after leaking documents that proved the NSA had been spying on internet users by making it legal for tech giants like Google and Facebook to provide information to it without the need for a warrant.
Russian President, Vladimir Putin today said Snowden was currently in a transit zone at Moscow airport. The whistleblower has so far managed to evade authorities. The world awaits his next move.


Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/snowde...z2XIuIqgy7

[Magda Hassan]

Because it doesn't comform to reality....

NSA takes surveillance fact sheets off website

By ALEX BYERS |

6/25/13 8:37 PM EDT

Following a complaint from two senators, the National Security Agency has removed from its website two fact sheets designed to shed light on and defend a pair of surveillance programs. Users now trying to access the documents detailing surveillance under legal authorities known as Section 215 and Section 702 receive an error message when they try to load the fact sheets.
On Monday, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) wrote to the head of the spy agency alleging that one of the documents was misleading and inaccurate. The senators claimed, without elaborating, that a fact sheet "contains an inaccurate statement about how the section 702 authority has been interpreted by the U.S. government."
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander responded to the two lawmakers Tuesday, and while he didn't admit inaccuracy, he said the documents could have been clearer.
"After reviewing your letter, I agree that the fact sheet that the National Security Agency posted on its website on 18 June 2013 could have more precisely described the requirements for collection under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act," Alexander said in a letter of his own (posted here).
Separately Tuesday, another NSA official said the removal of the fact sheets and letter from the senators were unrelated.
"Given the intense interest from the media, the public, and Congress, we believe the precision of the source document (the statute) is the best possible representation of applicable authorities," NSA spokesperson Judith Emmel said in a statement.
The documents, still available here, were published in the wake of revelations about the extent of the NSA's surveillance programs. They sought to highlight the safeguards the NSA uses to make sure American communications aren't caught up in its surveillance or if they are, what the NSA does to remove identifying information about U.S. citizens. Wyden and Udall, both of whom sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have long called for more transparency on how the NSA protects Americans' privacy -- but said the NSA's fact sheets gave the wrong impression.
"The Senator has received the letter and appreciates that the misleading fact sheet has been taken down," Wyden spokesman Tom Caiazza said.
The NSA procedures for targeting foreigners and minimizing American communications were further unveiled last Thursday when The Guardian and Washington Post posted detailed copies of the guidelines. Many privacy advocates were not satisfied with the procedures, arguing that they give the government too much leeway when determining if a potential target is foreign or American. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had no comment on the procedures after they were disclosed.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-...67073.html