Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears

[David Guyatt]

bump:

The welfare state, warfare state, and corporate state are of a piece. The government interventions needed to assist well-connected economic interests and to carry out world hegemony create permanent structural economic problems and hardships for the most vulnerable in society. To buy off the victims and reduce the chance of civil strife, the power elite builds an intrusive welfare bureaucracy designed to toss crumbs to the trapped population. In other words, the welfare state is a mechanism of social control made necessary by the corporate-welfare/warfare state.

Indeed. The modern welfare state was created by 19th century warfare state actor Otto Von Bismark. Too keep European aristocracy from being murdered by their serfs and pawns. A profoundly reactionary policy. Yet most in the US and UK think it socialist.

It was a very interesting recognition that wages in the west - certainly here in the UK - were noticeably better during the cold war than after it ended. The fear of communism spreading west meant the population needed to be kept onside and treated well. Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was doomed (as I recall that was realised in elite circles almost a decade before it finally happened?), these more benevolent attitudes began to change.

[Magda Hassan]

It was a very interesting recognition that wages in the west - certainly here in the UK - were noticeably better during the cold war than after it ended. The fear of communism spreading west meant the population needed to be kept onside and treated well. Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was doomed (as I recall that was realised in elite circles almost a decade before it finally happened?), these more benevolent attitudes began to change.

Yep yep yep. No more need for good cop and bad cop. Just bad cop and what are you gonna do about it hey? Speaking of cops noticed how what was once spent on welfare is now manifesting in the massive increase in expaning and militarising the police and society in general?

[Peter Lemkin]

Edward Snowden says 'significant threats' to his life ::

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Reuters
Jan 27, 2014 at 11:03

Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told German TV on Sunday about reports that US government officials want to assassinate him for leaking secret documents about the NSA's collection of telephone records and emails.
In what German public broadcaster ARD said was Snowden's first television interview, Snowden also said he believes the NSA has monitored other top German government officials along with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Snowden told ARD that he felt there are "significant threats" to his life but he said that he nevertheless sleeps well because he believes he did the right thing by informing the public about the NSA's activities.

Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden German TV about reports that US government officials want to assassinate him for leaking secret documents.


"I'm still alive and don't lose sleep for what I did because it was the right thing to do," said Snowden at the start of what ARD said was a six-hour interview that was filmed in a Moscow hotel suite. ARD aired 40 minutes of the six-hour interview.
"There are significant threats but I sleep very well," he said before referring to a report on a US website that he said quoted anonymous US officials saying his life was in danger.
"These people, and they are government officials, have said they would love to put a bullet in my head or poison me when I come out of the supermarket and then watch me die in the shower," Snowden said.
Questions about US government spying on civilians and foreign officials became heated last June when Snowden leaked documents outlining the widespread collection of telephone records and email.
Snowden was granted asylum in Russia last summer after fleeing the United States, where he is wanted on espionage charges for leaking information about government surveillance practices.
The revelations shocked Germany, a country especially sensitive after the abuses by the Gestapo during the Nazi reign and the Stasi in Communist East Germany during the Cold War.
Reports the NSA monitored Merkel's mobile phone have added to the anger in Germany, which has been pushing for a 'no-spy' agreement with the United States, a country it considers to be among its closest allies.
"What I can say is that we know that Angela Merkel was monitored by the NSA," said Snowden, wearing a dark suit and loose-fitting white shirt. "But the question is how logical is it that she's the only one who was monitored, how likely is it that she was the German person the NSA was watching?
"I'd say that it's not very likely that anyone who was watching the German government was only watching Merkel and not her advisers nor other government officials nor ministers, heads of industries or even local government officials."
Snowden said the NSA is active in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its national security value. He said the NSA doesn't limit its espionage to issues of national security and he cited German engineering firm Siemens as a target.
"If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to US national interests - even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security - then they'll take that information nevertheless," Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia where he has claimed asylum.
Targets
Snowden's claim the NSA is engaged in industrial espionage follows a New York Times report earlier this month that the NSA put software in almost 100,000 computers around the world, allowing it to carry out surveillance on those devices and could provide a digital highway for cyberattacks.
The NSA planted most of the software after gaining access to computer networks, but has also used a secret technology that allows it entry even to computers not connected to the Internet, the newspaper said, citing US officials, computer experts and documents leaked by Snowden.
The newspaper said the technology had been in use since at least 2008 and relied on a covert channel of radio waves transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards secretly inserted in the computers.
Frequent targets of the programme, code-named Quantum, included units of the Chinese military and industrial targets.
Snowden faces criminal charges after fleeing to Hong Kong and then Russia, where he was granted at least a year's asylum.
He was charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national security information and giving classified intelligence data to an unauthorised person.

[Peter Lemkin]

US media blacks out Snowden interview exposing death threats

By Bill Van Auken
28 January 2014

The former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared Sunday night in his first extended television interview. Citing published statements by unnamed US intelligence and military operatives calling for his assassination, he warned that he faces "significant threats" to his life and that US "government officials want to kill me."
The interview, broadcast by the German television network ARD, was largely blacked out by the US media. The New York Times carried not a word of what Snowden said, while the cable and broadcast news programs treated the interview with near total silence.
The American media's reaction stood in stark contrast to that of both broadcast and print media in Germany, where the interview conducted with Snowden in Russia was treated as a major political event.
The interview itself was preceded by a segment dedicated to Snowden on Germany's most popular news talk show, with commentary delivered before a sizable live television audience. Those who spoke out in Snowden's defense received enthusiastic applause, while the defenders of Washington's spying operations, including a right-wing German journalist and a former US ambassador to Germany, were treated coolly or with outright derision.
Polls conducted in Germany have shown six out of ten surveyed expressing admiration for Snowden, with only 14 percent regarding him as a criminal. The public is evenly divided over whether he should be granted asylum in Germany. Anger over NSA spying on German telephone and Internet communicationsincluding Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal cell phoneis widespread.
In the interview, Snowden eloquently laid out the core questions of basic democratic rights posed by the massive NSA spying programs exposed in the documents he has made public.
"Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace and the government has decided that it's a good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you've never been suspected of any crime," he said.
Snowden went on to note that, while in the past intelligence agencies would identify a suspect through an investigation and then obtain a warrant for surveillance, "Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advanceprior to an investigation."
The former NSA contractor told his interviewer that his "breaking point" in terms of deciding to make the NSA documents public came in March of last year, "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress" when he denied the existence of any programs gathering intelligence on millions of Americans. "Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this," he added. "The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public."
While Snowden stuck to his position of allowing journalists to determine what material to make public out of the estimated 1.7 million secret documents he took from the NSA, he did indicate that the agency was spying both on a wide range of German officials as well as carrying out industrial espionage against German corporations.
"If there's information at Siemens [the German engineering and electronics conglomerate] that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they'll go after that information and they'll take it," he said.
Snowden also answered the McCarthyite smears spread by politicians of both major parties and the media in attempting to brand him as a "traitor" or even a Russian spy.
Insisting that he acted alone and neither accepted nor required help from any foreign government, he stated: "If I am a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they're working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy. Beyond that as far as my personal safety, I'll never be fully safe until these systems have changed."
Snowden insisted that what he had done was right, even though the government claims it was a crime, and that what the government is doing is a crime, even though it claims it is legal. He told his interviewer: "I think it's clear that there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history and it doesn't take long for either an American or a German to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things which were not right."
He added that, while he would welcome an opportunity to defend himself in open court, the Obama administration had no intention of allowing him to do so. Rather, it has charged him under the Espionage Act, whose terms would preclude his making any case to a jury that his actions were in the interest of the American people. "So it's I would say illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should face the music, when he knows that the music is a show trial," he said.
The near blackout of this interview by the US media is deliberate and highly conscious. From the outset of Snowden's revelations last June, the media has lined up squarely behind the Obama administration, peddling the official lie that the mass domestic surveillance programs are justified by the "war on terror," while joining in the vilification of Snowden as a traitor and possible Russian spy.
Prominent TV announcers like ABC's George Stephanopoulos and NBC's David Gregory have devoted airtime to arguing that not only Snowden, but even journalists reporting on the documents he has released, like Glenn Greenwald, should be jailed.
This form of "journalism" reflects the class interests of the giant corporations that control the mass media and of the capitalist system as a whole. Its coverage of the NSA revelations themselves has been abysmal, minimizing the significance of the mass domestic spying operations. It is significant that in the face of this media manipulation, Snowden enjoys powerful support within the American public, and hostility to the NSA spying has continued to grow since his revelations.
The media's silencing of the German television interview has another, even more sinister implication. It wants to silence Snowden's warnings about the threats against his life in order to facilitate the work of any death squad formed by the US government to make good on these threats.

[Peter Lemkin]

US Threats Mount Against Journalists, Snowden

By Patrick Martin
Global Research, February 06, 2014







Congressional leaders and representatives of the US military-intelligence apparatus have stepped up their threats against Edward Snowden and the journalists who have worked with him to expose massive illegal spying by the National Security Agency (NSA).
At a hearing Tuesday of the House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, repeatedly suggested that journalists who received leaked NSA documents from Snowden and wrote articles about them were guilty of criminal acts.
These statements follow published death threats against Snowden from unnamed military and intelligence officials and demands from the Obama administration that he plead guilty and turn himself in.
Rogers engaged his main witness at Tuesday's hearing, FBI Director James Comey, in a lengthy exchange over whether an unnamed journalist would be guilty of "fencing stolen material" if he published articles based on the Snowden revelations. Because reporters are paid for their work, Rogers suggested, they were engaged in selling stolen material for profit. He posed the question to Comey, "If I'm hocking stolen classified material that I'm not legally in possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime?"
Comey was more cautious in his public utterances, agreeing that a journalist who sold stolen jewelry was guilty of a crime, but suggesting stolen documents might not be as clear a case. "I think that's a harder question because it involves a news-gathering function," he said. It "could have First Amendment implications," he added. [Emphasis added].
However, Comey did not rule out prosecution. Rogers continued, "So if I'm a newspaper reporter forfill in the blankand I sell stolen material, is that legal because I'm a newspaper reporter?"
Comey eventually declared, after being pressed by Rogers, "I don't want to talk about the case in particular because it's an active investigation of ours."
Rogers then asked, "It's an active investigation for accomplices brokering in stolen information?" Comey replied, "We are looking at the totality of the circumstances around the theft and promulgation."
After the hearing, Rogers made it clear that one of the journalists he had in mind was Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian reporter who has written numerous articles on the NSA based on his access to the trove of documents taken by Snowden. "For personal gain, he's now selling his access to information, that's how they're terming it," Rogers claimed. "A thief selling stolen material is a thief."
Rogers also said, referring to Snowden himself, "I can tell you from a whole series of classified meetings, the folks who do this for a living believe he is under the influence of the Russians."
The obvious conclusion of the exchange between Rogers and Comey is that the Obama administration is considering criminal charges against Greenwald, as well as filmmaker Laura Poitras and Washington Post contributor Barton Gellman, who also have access to the Snowden documents and have reported on them.
Greenwald strongly defended his actions and the actions of his fellow journalists in interviews and Twitter postings after the House committee hearing. "There's something that has become pretty sick about DC political culture if the idea of prosecuting journalists is now this mainstream," he said on Twitter. "The main value in bandying about theories of prosecuting journalists is the hope that it will bolster the climate of fear for journalism."
No journalist has ever been prosecuted in the United States on the claim that receiving unauthorized information was akin to receipt of stolen goods. Greenwald added, "What they're trying to do is to remove it from the realm of journalism so that they can then criminalize it."
The McCarthy-style threats against journalists by Rogers came amid mounting threats against Snowden and his allies by top military-intelligence officials.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, speaking at another hearing Tuesday, referred to the journalists who have extensively reported on the NSA as "accomplices" of Snowden, a term suggesting co-conspirators in a criminal enterprise. This comment followed Clapper's testimony the previous week before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he denounced Snowden as the architect of the "most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history."
Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who commands the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Matt Olsen, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, claimed that Snowden's revelations had resulted in changes in how Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups conduct their communications activities.
"What we've seen in the last six to eight months is an awareness by these groups…of our ability to monitor communications and specific instances where they've changed the ways in which they communicate to avoid being surveilled," Olsen said.
This is both unprovable and likely bogus, since the vast bulk of the Snowden revelations concern US government spying on ordinary citizens of the United States and other countries to accumulate a gigantic database of all the communications linking all individuals throughout the world. This has nothing to do with fighting terrorism and everything to do with profiling the population politically and preparing the military-intelligence apparatus to suppress movements from below that would threaten the profits and property of the financial aristocracy.
The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing coincided with the release of a 27-page report, "Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community," filed annually with Congress by the director of national intelligence (DNI). This year's report for the first time cites internal leaks as a major danger to US national security and actually ranks such leaks ahead of terrorism as a threat.
"Trusted insiders with the intent to do harm can exploit their access to compromise vast amounts of sensitive and classified information as part of a personal ideology or at the direction of a foreign government," the report warns. "The unauthorized disclosure of this information to state adversaries, non-state activists or other entities will continue to pose a critical threat."
The DNI report now lists terrorism only third in its list of threats. Top billing is given to the danger of cyberattacks, with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea cited as the main concerns. This list gives a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes discussions in the Pentagon, CIA and State Department, where there is increasing focus on the prospect of direct military conflict with Russia and China, countries with the second- and third-largest nuclear arsenals after the United States.
The ranking of Snowden-type leakers ahead of terrorism as a threat has the most ominous implications. Terrorism has been used as the justification for an unprecedented assertion of presidential power to order the killing of American citizens without trial or any other judicial process. Obama has acknowledged giving the first such order, which was carried out in 2011 when a CIA-fired drone missile killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Islamic cleric living in Yemen.
If Snowden is an even bigger threat, as the DNI report suggests, what is to stop the "commander in chief" from ordering his assassination? In the course of the past month, there have been increasingly bloodthirsty declarations from NSA operatives and congressional Republicans advocating such an operation.
The White House has not joined in the open discussion of killing Snowden, but Obama's style in such matters has been to act first and talk about it later.

[Peter Lemkin]

Attorney for Edward Snowden Interrogated at U.K. Airport, Placed on "Inhibited Persons List" ::::

Four journalists who revealed the National Security Agency's vast web of spying have been awarded the 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post were among the winners announced on Sunday. Even as the journalists who broke the stories based on Edward Snowden's leaks were awarded one of journalism's highest honors, a lawyer who represents Snowden was recently detained while going through customs at London's Heathrow Airport. Jesselyn Radack joins us today to tell her story. Radack says she was subjected to "very hostile questioning" about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an "inhibited persons list," a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers. Radack is just one of a growing number of people who are being stopped, harassed and interrogated for their work around Snowden, WikiLeaks and National Security Agency documents. Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower support organization.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Four journalists who revealed the National Security Agency's vast web of spying have been awarded the 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post were among the winners announced on Sunday. Even as the journalists who broke the stories based on Snowden's leaks were awarded one of journalism's highest honors, a lawyer who represents Snowden was detained while going through customs at London's Heathrow Airport. Jesselyn Radack told Firedoglake she was subjected to, quote, "very hostile questioning" about Snowden and her trips to Russia. Radack also learned she might be on an inhibited persons list, a designation reportedly used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to require further vetting of certain passengers. After the Polk Awards were announced, Glenn Greenwald tweeted, quote, "In the UK government, this is known as the George Polk Award for Excellence in Terrorism."
Jesselyn Radack is just one of a growing number of people who are being stopped, harassed and interrogated for their work around Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks and National Security Agency documents. In this clip, we hear from journalist Laura Poitras, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, and then journalist Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda, who have all been stopped and interrogated in airports.

LAURA POITRAS: I've actually lost count of how many times I've been detained at the border, but it's, I think, around 40 times. And on this particular trip, lately they've been actually sending someone from the Department of Homeland Security to question me in the departing city, so I was questioned in London about what I was doing. I told them I was a journalist and that, you know, my work is protected, and I wasn't going to discuss it.

JACOB APPELBAUM: I was targeted by the U.S. government and essentially, until the last four times that I've flown, I was detained basically every time. Sometimes men would meet me at the jetway, similarly, with guns.

DAVID MIRANDA: [translated] I stayed in a room with three different agents that were entering and exiting. They spoke to me, asking me questions about my whole life. They took my computer, my video game, cellphone, everything.

AMY GOODMAN: That was journalist Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda; before him, computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and journalist Laura Poitras. You can go to our website to see our interview with Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras at democracynow.org. But all of them have been interrogated at airports, as has most recently Jesselyn Radack, the attorney representing Edward Snowden, joining us from London. She is a former ethics adviser to the U.S. Department of Justice under George W. Bush, currently director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower organization.
Jesselyn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe what happened at Heathrow on Sunday.
JESSELYN RADACK: I was trying to enter through customs, which at Heathrow is called the Border Force, and I was directed to a very specific station rather than the regular line. And after the first question, which is, "Why are you here?" which is a normal question, things just got more bizarre as we went along. I said that I was here to see friends. They wanted me to be more specific. I said, "In the Sam Adams Association," the group that awarded Edward Snowden the award last yearI didn't add that part. And then they asked for the names of the people in the group. And so I gave names of people who are publicly known to be members. And then they asked where we were meeting, and I said at the Ecuadorean embassy. And they asked, "With Julian Assange?" And I said, "Yes." But then, at that point, I was asked why I had been to Russia twice in the past three months. And I said, "Because I have a client there." And they asked, "Who?" And I said, "Edward Snowden." And then, this was the most bizarre thing: They said, "Who is Edward Snowden?" And I just said matter-of-factly, "He is a whistleblower and an asylee." They next asked, "Who is Bradley Manning?" And I said, "A whistleblower. And then they asked, "Where is Bradley Manning?" And I said, "In jail." And he said, "So, he's a criminal." And I said that he's a political prisoner. And then they said, "But you represent Snowden." And I said, "Yes, I'm a human rights attorney, and I'm one of his legal advisers."
But I found that entire line of questioning very jarring and very unnerving. I didn't know what kind of answer I was supposed to give. I mean, obviously, it's like asking, "Who is President Obama?" They're asking about some of the most famous people on the planet. Obviously, I have an attorney-client relationship to protect. I'm not going to get into meetings that I've had with clients. And only some of my clients are public, Edward Snowden being one of them, so that's why I could answer that question. But I walked away from the interview just shaking. During the interview, I was fine. I maintained my composure. But I walked away just shaking and just upset. I just cried. It was very intimidating and very, very, again, unnerving to be asked that line of questions as an attorney. And I don't think journalists or attorneys should be harassed or intimidated at the border, and it's very disturbing to me that this has occurred in the U.S. and the U.K., and I've heard that this happened to someone recently in Germany, though I don't know the details of that. But certainly, as an attorney, having gone to 14 different countries in the past year, I have never endured a line of questioning like that. You get the usual, "Hi. Why are you here? Who are you seeing? Where are you staying?" But not, "Who do youwho is Edward Snowden? Where is Edward Snowden? Where is Bradley Manning? Do you represent Bradley Manning?" which I wouldn't even be allowed to answer, obviously, because that would be attorney-client privileged information. I, in fact, do not represent him, but it would have put me in a really difficult situation of actually making a false statement if I did represent him and had to answer a question like that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jesselyn, could you talk about the significance of the inhibited persons list? How did you first learn about it, and are you in fact on it?
JESSELYN RADACK: As hardas a graduate or an alumnus of the no-fly list, you're never officially told, "You are on this list." It's implied, and you hear it. This apparently is some list maintained in Great Britain, but originating from the Department of Homeland Security. And I wish I could tell you more about it, but that's just what I was able to learn from speaking with other people who have had difficulty getting out of the U.K. My difficulty was getting in. I'm hoping I don't have any difficulty getting out. But an inhibited persons list, to me, is another kind of watch list, just like how ridiculous it was that I spent a number of years on the no-fly list, when I obviously posed no direct threat. To Snowden, I'm an attorney doing my job, and being a human rights lawyer does not pose any kind of immigration violation or safety threat to entering the United Kingdom, so I'm not sure why I was subjected to that interrogation other than to try to intimidate me from doing my job.

[Peter Lemkin]

Security certification group EC-Council's website defaced with Snowden passport

Hacker claims to have grabbed thousands of law enforcement and military passports.

by Megan Geuss - Feb 24 2014, 4:40am CET

Enlarge / A screencap of the defaced EC-Council page.
The website for EC-Council, an "International Council of E-Commerce Consultants," was defaced on Sunday evening. The hacker, who went by Eugene Belford (named for the "thieving evil computer genius" from the movie Hackers) also claimed to have found "thousands of passports belonging to LE [Law Enforcement] (and .mil) officials" in the process of breaking into the site.
Eugene Belford wrote on the EC-Council homepage, "Defaced again? Yep, good job reusing your passwords morons jack67834#". With respect to the claim that passport and other information was stolen, the hacker posted a photo of Edward Snowden's passport, along with an e-mail from him to the council from 2010.
EC-Council has long been an administrator of information security certification, and the organization's training programs are sometimes used by employers to get employees up to speed on certain skills. Some of EC-Council's certification programs include Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Computer Hacking Forensics Investigator (CHFI), and EC-Council Certified Security Analyst (ECSA)/License Penetration Tester (LPT).
Still, the site's hacker referred to an attrition.org page that lists its grievances against the certifier. "EC-Council's history is mired in controversy, with a wide variety of criticism coming from both the education and information security professions," attrition.org says. "The company not only runs an extensive certification program, they also operate a virtual university. This has not stopped them from taking shortcuts usually reserved for students, by plagiarizing content from other sources and including it in their commercial offerings."
This is not the first defacement for EC-Council. Based on the e-mail screenshot posted to the organization's homepage, security researcher Ashkan Soltani and Collin D. Anderson suggested on Twitter that the "attacker hijacked DNS and gained access to GApps through domain verification account reset."
Ars attempted to contact EC-Council but there was no response as of this publishing. Ars will update this story if EC-Council provides a statement.
On its Facebook page, EC-Council writes that it "has trained over 80,000 individuals and certified more than 30,000 security professionals from such fine organizations as the US Army, the FBI, Microsoft, IBM, and the United Nations."

[Magda Hassan]

I had the misfortune to come accross Lucas' work the other day. Truly he lives in another world. ::::face.palm::

The Silliest Snowden Theory Yet

"The Snowden Operation": A short book that's long on wacky spy stories about the real source of the NSA leaks.

By Jon Schwarz
| Fri Feb. 28, 2014 3:00 AM GMT



Of the millions of secret Iraqi documents the United States captured in 2003, my favorite is the one from Saddam's General Security Directorate that explained how Pokemon was an operation run by International Zionism to undermine Iraq. According to their analysts, "Pokemon" meant "I am Jewish" in Hebrew, and this was going to sap all of Iraq's precious bodily fluids.
It's fun to laugh at Iraq's Super Spies, and everyone on Earth should. But the joke's on us if we don't recognize that their brains were screwed in just a half turn tighter than many of their American and British counterparts. Throughout history, the security state in every country has attracted employees who were already a bit squirrelly, and then encouraged their squirreliness to blossom in the dark. Eventually many of them end up like the CIA's James Angleton, who was convinced the Soviet Union was going to "fake" its collapse, or the top Pentagon officials who opposed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 because the Soviets were going to cheat by testing their hydrogen bombs on the dark side of the moon. This same tendency is often found in reporters who get close to their own intelligence services, are fascinated by spies, and spend their careers dependent on them for scoops about espionage.
What these kinds of people share in common is that the pattern-recognition software in their head is badly calibrated and oversensitive. If they weren't spies or intelligence "experts," they'd spend their days proving Paul Is Dead or discovering the face of Jesus in tortillas. Which brings me to Economist editor Edward Lucas and the most ridiculous thing I've ever read, his short new ebook, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster.

The main thing The Snowden Operation wants us to know is that "this affair has Kremlin fingerprints on it. They may be faint and smudged, but they are there." Yes, Lucas acknowledges, it's possible the Russians aren't involved, "but not likely." The naive might be fooled into thinking all was exactly what it appeared to be on the surface and Snowden was simply an NSA contractor who reached out to journalists on his own. But sophisticated observers like Lucas, with "30 years of looking at Soviet and then Russian intelligence and propaganda operations," see the truth. Maybe Snowden was recruited by the Russians to leak NSA documents and knew it was them doing the recruiting; maybe he was recruited by them but they fooled him into thinking they were someone more sympathetic; or maybe the Russians somehow "brokered an introduction" between Snowden and others who would encourage and publicize his leaks (i.e., journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and hacker Jacob Appelbaum) without any of them being aware of the hidden Kremlin hand.
So let's take a look at these smudgy fingerprints. Here's a good example, one so portentous that it's the last sentence of book's last chapter:

[Blogger Catherine] Fitzpatrick has identified the background to one of the rare photos of Snowden in Moscow: on the basis of the distinctive striped pavements, the logo on a supermarket trolley he is pushing, and other visual clues it is, she believes, a shopping centre in Yasenevo, near Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service [SVR] headquarters.

Throughout history, the security state in every country has attracted employees who were already a bit squirrelly, and then encouraged their squirreliness to blossom in the dark.
Let's leave aside the fact we don't know if this photo (published by a Russian tabloid) actually shows Edward Snowden. And let's leave aside that if it does show Snowden in Yasenevo, him being two miles away from SVR headquarters would not actually mean he's a secret Russian agent. Let's just focus on what Fitzpatrick says.
And what she says is that she's "going to take a WAG" about the photoi.e., a wild-assed guess. This guess is based on these features of the photo:
The stripes on the curb, which she says are found near shopping centers and metro stations in Yasenevo…and also the rest of Moscow.
The logo on the shopping cartwhich I find totally illegible but she believes starts with a Russian D, so "maybe" it's Dialayt. There's a shopping center called the Dialayt Torgovy Kompleks in Yasenevo.
The trees, which are the "same kind" as in Yasenevo. I'm not an expert on trees or Moscow or Moscow trees, but my guess is such trees are found in more than one Moscow location.
The metal kiosks, which she (incorrectly) says look like those close to Dialayt Torgovy Kompleks.
That isn't cherry-pickedliterally the entire book is like that. Here's another faint, smudged fingerprint: Appelbaum (who, in May 2013, helped Greenwald and Poitras verify that Snowden had the technical knowledge he claimed) went to a hacker conference in Hawaii in March 2013. That somehow means that Appelbaum was in contact with Snowden "well before January, 2013"…which means that Appelbaum was actually the first person Snowden contacted…which means he and Snowden were working together with another hacker…which, several links further in the chain, means that Justin Bieber is actually Vladimir Putin in disguise.
Moreover, Lucas didn't dream any of this up himself. Not only does the book contain no original reporting whatsoever, it actually contains almost no original speculationit all leans heavily on the conjecture of Fitzpatrick, Craig Pirrong (a finance professor at the University of Houston), and John Schindler (a former NSA analyst and now professor at the Navy War College). For his part, Schindler believes that not only is Snowden a Russian operation, so was the creation of WikiLeaks and the exposure of Echelon during the '90s. Schindler also ran a 2002-03 intelligence task force that concluded Iraq had WMD, which does not appear to have shaken his faith in his own judgment.
All that said, I agree there's something about this which seems reminiscent of Russiaand that's The Snowden Operation itself. It reads exactly like internal Soviet documents about Andrei Sakharov, who, the Politburo fumed in 1975, was "divulging state secrets concerning the most vital defense issues of the country." And who was behind the Sakharov Operation? As Gen. Jack D. Ripper said to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, it's incredibly obvious, Mandrake:

The State Security Committee reports that US special services have been assigned a definite role in the anti-Soviet campaign "in defense of democratic freedoms in the USSR" which has been now unleashed...the new CARTER administration and well-known senators [are involved] in this operation.

So hopefully someday Lucas, Fitzpatrick, Pirrong, and Schindler will be able to get together with their Soviet and Iraqi equivalents. Only with their combined brainpower will it be possible to finally blow the lid off the whole Power Rangers situation.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014...n-spy-book

[Peter Lemkin]

SXSW Interactive adds most controversial name to lineup with addition of Edward Snowden

By Katie Friel
3.4.14 | 10:54 am



[URL="http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/03-04-14-edward-snowden-sxsw-interactive-lineup-nsa-leaks/slideshow#slide0"]

[/URL] [URL="http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/03-04-14-edward-snowden-sxsw-interactive-lineup-nsa-leaks/slideshow#slide0"] Edward Snowden comes to SXSW Interactive on March 10. Photo courtesy of The Guardian


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Austin Convention Center
Get Directions - 500 East Cesar Chavez Street Austin




Move over Julian Assange, there's an even bigger name heading to SXSW Interactive this year. SXSW announced Tuesday morning that it is adding former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden to the official lineup.
Appearing via teleconference, presumably from Russia where he currently has asylum following the release of thousands of classified documents revealing the NSA's extensive surveillance program of both U.S. citizens and allied governments, Snowden will be speaking on March 10 with Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union. The conversation will discuss surveillance and online privacy, a topic that will likely be a hot-button issue at this year's conference.
As the ACLU press release points out, this is Snowden's "first conversation in front of an audience since his disclosures began making global headlines last year." The documents Snowden released made him not only an enemy of the state in his home country, but rocked relationships abroad, most notably with Germany after it was revealed that the U.S. government may have tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's private cell phone.
Also moderating will be Snowden's legal counsel, undoubtedly there to ensure that Snowden does not further incriminate himself as he attempts to seek clemency from the U.S. government, something the Obama administration has repeatedly said it will not grant. Perhaps the most exciting part of the panel is that Snowden has agreed to take questions directly from the audience.
"A Virtual Conversation with Edward Snowden," which, we predict, will be the hottest panel during SXSW Interactive, will be held at Exhibit Hall 5 on the first floor of the Austin Convention Center and open to Interactive, Gold or Platinum badge holders only.
For those of us who can't be there in person, The Texas Tribune will be livestreaming the event.

[Peter Lemkin]

What are the chances that this 'incident' is totally unrelated to Snowden speaking there?!

Another tragedy hit the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where a suspected drunk driver chased by police drove into a crowd of people leaving a music event. At least two people were killed and more than 20 wounded.