US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

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Snowden Coverage: If U.S. Mass Media Were State-Controlled, Would They Look Any Different?

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The Edward Snowden leaks have revealed a U.S. corporate media system at war with independent journalism. Many of the same outlets -- especially TV news -- that missed the Wall Street meltdown and cheer-led the Iraq invasion have come to resemble state-controlled media outlets in their near-total identification with the government as it pursues the now 30-year-old whistleblower.

While an independent journalism system would be dissecting the impacts of NSA surveillance on privacy rights, and separating fact from fiction, U.S. news networks have obsessed on questions like: How much damage has Snowden caused? How can he be brought to justice?
Unfazed by polls showing that half of the American rabble -- I mean, public -- believe Snowden did a good thing by leaking documentation of NSA spying, TV news panels have usually excluded anyone who speaks for these millions of Americans. Although TV hosts and most panelists ar e not government officials, some have a penchant for speaking of the government with the pronoun "We."
After Snowden made it out of Hong Kong to Russia, New York Times journalist and CNBC talking head Andrew Ross Sorkin [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hvpXztqqzCc]expressed his frustration: "We've screwed this up, to even let him get to Russia." By "we," he meant the U.S. government.
Last time I checked, Sorkin was working for the Times and CNBC, not the CIA or FBI.
When a huge swath of the country is on the side of the guy-on-the-run and not the government, it's much easier to see that there's nothing "objective" or "neutral" about journalists who so closely identify with the spy agencies or Justice Department or White House.
The standard exclusion of dissenting views -- panels often span from hawk ("he's a traitor who needs to be jailed") to dove ("he may have been well-intentioned but he needs to be jailed") -- offers yet another reason why young people, more libertarian in their views, have turned away from these outlets. Virtually no one speaks for them. While a TIME poll found 53 percent of respondents saying Snowden did "a good thing," that was the sentiment of 70 percent of those age 18 to 34.

I teach college journalism classes about independent media. New developments like WikiLeaks and independent bloggers like Glenn Greenwald may scare the wits out of establishment media, but they sure don't scare young people or journalism students.

by YouTube


As media employees at elite outlets have grown cozier with their government and corporate sources (Sorkin is famously close with Wall Street CEOs), they exhibit an almost instinctual antipathy toward those adversarial journalists who challenge powerful elites day after day.
Look at the reactions of some top mainstream journalists to Greenwald, who built up a big readership as a solo blogger before moving his blog to Salon and then the Guardian, where he broke the Snowden/NSA stories. I know several journalism professors who view Greenwald as one of the world's best journalists. He's known as accurate, thorough, well-documented and ethical.
It was Sorkin, the New York Times guy, who declared on CNBC that maybe Greenwald should be arrested: "I told you this in the green room -- I would arrest him [Snowden] and now I'd almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who's the journalist who seems to be out there, almost, he wants to help him get to Ecuador."
If it's strange for a journalist to suggest another journalist's arrest, it was almost as strange when Sorkin wrote in a Times column that he went down to check out the Occupy Wall Street encampment "after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank." Sorkin concluded: "As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don't have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn't seem like a brutal group -- at least not yet."
Another mainstream media star is NBC's David Gregory (seen literally dancing with White House source Karl Rove in 2007). Since he interviewed Greenwald on Sunday's "Meet the Press," there's been scrutiny of Gregory's factually-misleading question: "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you be charged with a crime?" And of Greenwald's response: "I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies."
But I'm just as bothered by Gregory's retort -- "Well, the question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regards to what you're doing " -- and the ensuing discussion in mainstream outlets questioning Greenwald's bona fides as a journalist.
A Washington Post article ("On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter?") questioned the blogger's credentials as a journalist because he's also an advocate: "Greenwald has appeared frequently on TV to plead Snowden's case as a whistleblower -- an advocacy role many mainstream journalists would be uncomfortable with."
The Post article spoke of "the line between journalism -- traditionally, the dispassionate reporting of facts -- and outright involvement in the news seems blurrier than ever." Libertarian journalist Matt Welch critiqued the article as "historically illiterate."

The truth is that many of the greatest journalists in our country's history -- from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone -- were accurate reporters of fact, but hardly dispassionate. And mainstream outlets have always had hybrid reporter/columnists offering both fact and advocacy; one of the most famous, David Broder, graced the pages of the Washington Post for years, including its front page.
Broder was a reporter, columnist and TV talking head -- yet no one questioned whether Broder was a genuine journalist. That's because, unlike Greenwald, the reporting and opinions of a David Broder were militantly pro-establishment, pro-bipartisan consensus.
And Broder's not alone as a hybrid reporter/columnist in the mainstream. Let's not forget the delightful pundit who wanted to "almost arrest" Greenwald. His official Times bio states: "Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist, chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, and editor of Dealbook for The New York Times."
The reason Glenn Greenwald's credentials as a journalist are being questioned by some mainstreamers is not that he blurs the line between journalist and advocate. It's because of the anti-establishment content of his journalism and advocacy.

[Jan Klimkowski]

While an independent journalism system would be dissecting the impacts of NSA surveillance on privacy rights, and separating fact from fiction, U.S. news networks have obsessed on questions like: How much damage has Snowden caused? How can he be brought to justice?

I've often stated my judgement that the number of actual Mockingbirds in MSM is lower than is sometimes claimed.

I've yet to see a reliable source for the notorious alleged DCIA Colby claim that "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

If Colby did say it, it was a lie.

And probably a psyop.

Here is my own experience of working in MSM.

There are key editors who are witting Mockingbirds, acting as gatekeepers, ensuring that stories which can damage national security are either toned down or pulled.

There are journalists who are witting Mockingbirds, in the direct pay and influence of intelligence organs, or publishing stories given to them by intelligence sources literally verbatim, without performing any journalistic due diligence.

There are journalists who are unwitting Mockingbirds, for instance through relying on a source who, unknown to the reporter, is an intelligence asset.

However, the Mockingbirds in key editorial and managerial positions can have a devastating impact in terms of setting and controlling the agenda. I suspect that in most American newsrooms it has been made clear that How much damage has Snowden caused? How can he be brought to justice? IS the angle, and promoting any other angle will not make it onto air or into print, and represents career suicide.

Here in the UK, several "security correspondents" have been commissioned to make programmes or write articles about "the huge number of terror plots that have been thwarted by Prism type techniques". These are not journalistic pieces. There is no sense that if the security correspondent found that actually Prism has prevented next to no terror attacks, then this would be reported in their piece. So we are forced to conclude that their pieces are actually propaganda.

In my experience, there are a high number of witting Mockingbirds amongst security correspondents.

[Magda Hassan]

Now there's an novel idea! Are you reading this NSA? Give peace a chance.

So what is a poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars, the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American terrorists, that compel the National Security State in pure self defense to spy on the entire world.

I know, fat chance.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Pentagon censorship of mainstream British newspaper.

Must keep those teenage mutant ninja drone killer minds clear of anything resembling independent thought.....

Can you imagine the squeals of outrage from the spectrum of idiocy that extends from Cheney to Obama, an increasingly short but condensed spectrum, if China or Russia had banned access to the New York Times or Faux News?

US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve 'network hygiene'

Military admits to filtering reports and content relating to government surveillance programs for thousands of personnel


Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 June 2013 16.42 BST
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The Pentagon insisted the Department of Defense was only seeking to restrict access to certain content. Photograph: Rick Wilking/Reuters

The US army has admitted to blocking access to parts of the Guardian website for thousands of defence personnel across the country.

A spokesman said the military was filtering out reports and content relating to government surveillance programs to preserve "network hygiene" and prevent any classified material appearing on unclassified parts of its computer systems.

The confirmation follows reports in the Monterey Herald that staff at the Presidio military base south of San Francisco had complained of not being able to access the Guardian's UK site at all, and had only partial access to the US site, following publication of leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Pentagon insisted the Department of Defense was not seeking to block the whole website, merely taking steps to restrict access to certain content.

But a spokesman for the Army's Network Enterprise Technology Command (Netcom) in Arizona confirmed that this was a widespread policy, likely to be affecting hundreds of defence facilities.

"In response to your question about access to the guardian.co.uk website, the army is filtering some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks," said Gordon Van Vleet, a Netcom public affairs officer.

"The Department of Defense routinely takes preventative 'network hygiene' measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information onto DoD unclassified networks."

The army stressed its actions were automatic and would not affect computers outside military facilities.

"The department does not determine what sites its personnel can choose to visit while on a DoD system, but instead relies on automated filters that restrict access based on content concerns or malware threats," said Van Vleet. "The DoD is also not going to block websites from the American public in general, and to do so would violate our highest-held principle of upholding and defending the constitution and respecting civil liberties and privacy."

Similar measures were taken by the army after the Guardian and other newspapers published leaked State Department cables obtained via WikiLeaks.

"We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security, however there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information," added the Netcom spokesman.

"Until declassified by appropriate officials, classified information including material released through an unauthorized disclosure must be treated accordingly by DoD personnel. If a public website displays classified information, then filtering may be used to preserve 'network hygiene' for DoD unclassified networks."

A Defense Department spokesman at the Pentagon added: "The Guardian website is NOT being blocked by DoD. The Department of Defense routinely takes preventative measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information onto DoD unclassified networks."

[Magda Hassan]

I thought I would just mention that the use of private corporations in the government intel business is not recent. Christopher Boyle of Snowman and the Falcon fame was working for TRW Inc when he learned while working there about the US destabilising the Whitlam government in Australia in the early to mid 1970's.

[Magda Hassan]

'Network hygiene'? Who makes these names up? Sounds reminiscent of 'Racial Hygiene' too. Same intent.

US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve 'network hygiene'

Military admits to filtering reports and content relating to government surveillance programs for thousands of personnel

[Peter Lemkin]

'Network hygiene'? Who makes these names up? Sounds reminiscent of 'Racial Hygiene' too. Same intent.

US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve 'network hygiene'

Military admits to filtering reports and content relating to government surveillance programs for thousands of personnel

Any Military Personnel found looking at the Guardian site will have their eyes 'waterboarded' with caustic water to cleanse the icky 'hygiene' :lol:

[Jan Klimkowski]

'Network hygiene'? Who makes these names up? Sounds reminiscent of 'Racial Hygiene' too. Same intent.

US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve 'network hygiene'

Military admits to filtering reports and content relating to government surveillance programs for thousands of personnel

The Department of Volkland Security entirely understands the nuances of language.....

[Peter Lemkin]

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Greenwald: Every Phone Call is Recorded and Stored-- A Globalized System Designed to Destroy Privacy, includes video

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Glenn Greenwald speaking to the audience via Skype, on 4 Huge Screens by Margo Rush




Glenn Greenwald, in a skyped in talk to the Socialism 2013 Conference, told the audience, for the first time, according to him, about his experience going through the process of encountering, interacting with Ed Snowden, at first anonymously, then seeing his first evidence that Snowden was the real deal. "It made me dizzy," he described.

Greenwald, who has been a regular at the conference for several years, told the audience that a bombshell he would soon be releasing was that "NSA can redirect to its storage one billion cell phone calls every thing day. They are storing every call and have the capability to listen to them... It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy--- with no accountabliity and no safeguards."


He described the debate about his journalism is " being led by TV actors who play the role of journalists on TV. "

Glenn discussed how the US military's banning of access to the Guardian, the paper he publishes with, at all military bases, was better than receiving a Pulitzer or any other journalism award. He cited David Halberstam, saying, "David Halberstam viewed the measure of good journalism by how much you anger the people in power."


Jeremy Scahill by Margo Rush



Greenwald was introduced by fellow investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who spoke before Greenwald. Scahill said, "What Glenn Greenwald has done in the past few weeks, with his reporting is to shake the foundations of power. " and, also, in Scahill's own talk, he said, "there already was a coup in this country. It happened a long time ago. It was when corporations took control."

Glenn talked at length about Edward Snowden. Here are some of the quotes from his talk. (They're from notes so some may be paraphrased. Check the video below for the verbatim wording.)

There's more to life than material comfort or career stability or trying to live as long as you can. He judged his life based on his beliefs and the actions he took in the face of those beliefs.

Here's the video of Greenwald below. This is almost an hour and worth every second. He is scathing about the mainstream media. So was Scahill. More tomorrow-- I'm on my way back to the Socialism 2013 conference. #s13 on twitter.

[Jan Klimkowski]

No surprise here.

They're all in it together....

I sense more "Network Hygiene" coming along to stop ordinary folk reading the, ahem, truth about the military-multinational-intelligence complex.

They'll be particularly irritated at Madsen's claims being given prominence by The Observer, the Sunday sister paper of The Guardian.

Revealed: secret European deals to hand over private data to America

Germany 'among countries offering intelligence' according to new claims by former US defence analyst

Jamie Doward
The Observer, Saturday 29 June 2013 21.02 BST
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Wayne Madsen, an NSA worker for 12 years, has revealed that six EU countries, in addition to the UK, colluded in data harvesting.

At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data, according to a former contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the dark".

Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.

Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.

Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.

In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming concerned about the "half story" told by EU politicians regarding the extent of the NSA's activities in Europe.

He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the "NSA gets the lion's share" of the sigint "take". In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received "highly sanitised intelligence".

Madsen said he was alarmed at the "sanctimonious outcry" of political leaders who were "feigning shock" about the spying operations while staying silent about their own arrangements with the US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused the UK of spying when their country had a similar third-party deal with the NSA.

Although the level of co-operation provided by other European countries to the NSA is not on the same scale as that provided by the UK, the allegations are potentially embarrassing.

"I can't understand how Angela Merkel can keep a straight face, demanding assurances from [Barack] Obama and the UK while Germany has entered into those exact relationships," Madsen said.

The Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford, a senior member of the European parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee, said Madsen's allegations confirmed that the entire system for monitoring data interception was a mess, because the EU was unable to intervene in intelligence matters, which remained the exclusive concern of national governments.

"The intelligence agencies are exploiting these contradictions and no one is really holding them to account," Ludford said. "It's terribly undermining to liberal democracy."

Madsen's disclosures have prompted calls for European governments to come clean on their arrangements with the NSA. "There needs to be transparency as to whether or not it is legal for the US or any other security service to interrogate private material," said John Cooper QC, a leading international human rights lawyer. "The problem here is that none of these arrangements has been debated in any democratic arena. I agree with William Hague that sometimes things have to be done in secret, but you don't break the law in secret."

Madsen said all seven European countries and the US have access to the Tat 14 fibre-optic cable network running between Denmark and Germany, the Netherlands, France, the UK and the US, allowing them to intercept vast amounts of data, including phone calls, emails and records of users' access to websites.

He said the public needed to be made aware of the full scale of the communication-sharing arrangements between European countries and the US, which predate the internet and became of strategic importance during the cold war.

The covert relationship between the countries was first outlined in a 2001 report by the European parliament, but their explicit connection with the NSA was not publicised until Madsen decided to speak out.

The European parliament's report followed revelations that the NSA was conducting a global intelligence-gathering operation, known as Echelon, which appears to have established the framework for European member states to collaborate with the US.

"A lot of this information isn't secret, nor is it new," Madsen said. "It's just that governments have chosen to keep the public in the dark about it. The days when they could get away with a conspiracy of silence are over."

This month another former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed to the Guardian previously undisclosed US programmes to monitor telephone and internet traffic. The NSA is alleged to have shared some of its data, gathered using a specialist tool called Prism, with Britain's GCHQ.