Tag Archives: Edward Snowden

He Said That? 12/7/16

Posted on December 7, 2016 | 1 comment

This is an article from Turning Points [an offshoot of the New York Times], a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.

Edward J. Snowden, a former C.I.A. employee and National Security Agency contractor, leaked top-secret documents in 2013 that exposed the extent of the N.S.A.’s classified cybersecurity program, revealing that the agency was seizing the private communications records of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Mr. Snowden, who is living in asylum in Russia, is wanted in the United States on several charges, including two under the United States Espionage Act of 1917.

Speaking by video link during the Athens Democracy Forum in Greece, convened by The New York Times in September, Mr. Snowden said that his disclosures had improved privacy in the United States and that “being patriotic doesn’t mean simply agreeing with your government.”

Following is an edited excerpt from a discussion between Mr. Snowden and Steven Erlanger, The New York Times’s London bureau chief.

Q. There’s a campaign for President Obama to pardon you before he leaves office. For many people, you’re a whistle-blowing hero, and for many other people you’re a traitor who broke your oath and betrayed your country. Having knowingly broken the law and fled the jurisdiction of the American courts, why should you be granted asylum?

Snowden: Whether or not I should be granted a pardon is not for me to answer. By partnering with journalists, I sought to exercise our democratic system of checks and balances in a series of disclosures in 2013. The N.S.A.’s system of global mass surveillance was unlawful. And the courts agreed with me. Congress ultimately changed the law, putting new restrictions on the intelligence community’s powers.

I never published a single document on my own. I partnered with some of the most respected news outlets in the world: The Washington Post and The Guardian. These groups received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their reporting. This is why we have a free press in a democracy. The government has many great powers, particularly as they relate to the handling of state secrets, but it is the press that is charged with determining what information is truly within the public interest to know.

Daniel Ellsberg, a fellow whistle-blower who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, put himself forward to the court, understanding that the history of civil disobedience is being willing to accept any punishment for the moral act of standing up against authority. Why would you not return to face a jury in America?

Snowden: Daniel Ellsberg himself has argued that I made the right decision not to present myself to the court. Things have changed since the 1970s, and today the law doesn’t allow you to make a defense against Espionage Act charges in front of the jury. I am legally prohibited from even speaking to the jury about my motivation.

Can there be a fair trial when you can’t put forward a defense? At the sentencing phase you can express to the judge why you did what you did, but that is not democratic. The jury system was created so you can discuss with your peers what you did, why you did it.

You’ve said that concrete improvements have transpired as a direct result of your revelations. Are you concerned that governments are still doing whatever they want to do by other means or that these results are transitory?

Snowden: Do I think things are fixed? No. Do I think that any whistle-blower, any single individual, can change the world? No, but I do believe that we have some oversight over our privacy rights now, and that things are improving in a material way. The United States has made some initial reforms, and European courts struck down the previous safe harbor agreement, where European companies handed over their citizens’ data to U.S. companies without any controls or guarantees of how that would be handled.

The U.S. has right now a two-tiered system of handling surveillance. If you’re a U.S. citizen, the government will go to a court to get a warrant before they spy on you. This is almost always a secret court called the FISA court, which in 33 years was asked roughly 34,000 times to authorize surveillance and only said no 11 times. They’re a rubber stamp. If you’re not a U.S. citizen, no warrant is required at all in most cases. That’s gotten a little bit better because some companies have actually begun resisting these demands. This is uncomfortable for some governments, but there is no question that this is very positive in terms of the protection of rights and the enforcement of due process around the world.

Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency, is against a pardon for you. He believes the benefits of the leaks could have been achieved with only three or four documents and that the flood of documents released harmed United States intelligence and national interests. Do you believe that if you’d leaked less you might have had the same effect?

Snowden: No. What he’s actually arguing here is not against me, it’s against journalism. He’s criticizing the journalists who continue to report on the archive and continue to break stories that are changing law and policy today.

What does it mean when we’re saying to journalists that it’s O.K. if they run the first three stories, but after they run the next three or the next 300, that’s too much? Who makes that decision? I believe that it should be the press. They’re the best placed to make those decisions, and that’s why we have the First Amendment.

I’m certainly with you there. You don’t speak a lot of Russian, and it’s not a place you particularly wanted to be. What do you do all day?

Snowden: I speak at conferences in Athens mostly.

It’s an income.

Snowden: No, but seriously, I’ve always been sort of an indoor cat. My life has been the internet. This is an explanation for why I was so moved by what I witnessed at the N.S.A. What we saw in 2013 wasn’t just about surveillance; it was about rights and democracy.

When many people think about privacy they think about their Facebook settings, but privacy is actually the fountainhead of all our rights. It is the right from which all others are derived and is what makes you an individual. It is the right to an independent mind and life.

Freedom of speech doesn’t have meaning without the protected space to speak freely. The same [goes] for freedom of religion: If you can’t decide for yourself what you want to worship, you’ll simply adopt whatever is popular or whatever the state religion is to avoid the judgment of others.

The less power you wield within society, the stronger your case for your personal privacy. If you’re an individual and you don’t really have any influence over anything, you are the target audience for which privacy was designed. If you’re a public official, if you enjoy an incredible amount of privilege and influence, transparency is intended for you. It’s the only way that we can hold you to the account of our standards and laws and be able to cast our votes in an informed way.

You’ve said that you think of yourself as still working for the United States. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Snowden: Being patriotic doesn’t simply mean agreeing with your government. Being willing to disagree, particularly in a risky manner, is actually what we need more of today. When we have this incredible, often fact-free environment where politicians can make claims and then they’re reported as truth, how do we actually steer democracy? If we have facts, we can help facilitate democracy, and this is my role.

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Snowden: Petraeus disclosed more ‘highly classified’ information than I did, by Mallory Shelbourne

Posted on December 5, 2016 | 2 comments

David Petraeus is one of the “special” people who can disclose government secrets and get his wrist slapped. Edward Snowden, living in excile in Russia, is not. From Mallory Shelbourne at thehill.com:

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who shared classified information about the U.S. government’s surveillance programs with journalists, criticized the U.S. justice system Sunday for how it treats “well-connected” individuals.

Snowden cited the case of retired Gen. David Petraeus, who is being considered by President-elect Donald Trump for the position of secretary of State, as a prime example.

“We have a two-tiered system of justice in the United States, where people who are either well-connected to government or they have access to an incredible amount of resources get very light punishments,” said Snowden in an exclusive interview with Yahoo News published Sunday.

“Perhaps the best-known case in recent history here is Gen. Petraeus — who shared information that was far more highly classified than I ever did with journalists,” he said.

Petraeus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in 2015 for the mishandling of classified information.

“And he shared this information not with the public for their benefit, but with his biographer and lover for personal benefit — conversations that had information, detailed information, about military special-access programs, that’s classified above top secret, conversations with the president and so on,” he added.

“He never spent a single day in jail, despite the type of classified information he exposed,” Snowden said.

Snowden has sought asylum in Moscow, as he faces felony charges in America for espionage.

http://thehill.com/homenews/308693-snowden-petraeus-disclosed-more-highly-classified-information-than-i-did

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Assange, Manning, and Snowden, Standing With the Conscience of Truthtellers, by Nozomi Hayase

Posted on September 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

Someday the three in the title will be recognized as the heroes they are. From Nozomi Hayase at antiwar.com:

Last week, Oliver Stone’s biopic “Snowden” hit the theaters. The film illuminates the life of Edward Snowden between 2004 and 2013, aiming to humanize one of the most wanted men in the world. Just before its release, a public campaign was launched urging President Obama to pardon this renowned NSA whistleblower.

The massive US government persecution of truthtellers over the past years has exiled conscience from civil society, locking it behind bars and driving it into asylum. Yet, despite these attacks, it refuses to die.

From prison where she is serving 35 years, Chelsea Manning is standing up for her dignity. Recently, she protested her dehumanizing treatment by engaging in a hunger strike. All the while, WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange keeps publishing, giving asylum to the most persecuted documents, while being arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy for the last 4 years. As this struggle continues, the torch for transparency and courage that kindled hearts and has sparked public debate keeps shedding light on the state of the world we live in.

In a debate with executive director of Freedom Press, Trevor Timm, which addressed the question of pardoning Snowden, National security attorney Bradley Moss expressed his disdain over the former NSA contractor providing information to the Press. He criticized Snowden’s act, noting how journalists are unauthorized to possess government information:

“There’s approximately 4 million people who also hold clearances. It is a sacred trust and Snowden broke it by giving these documents to people who were not authorized to have it.”

Moss’s statement revealed the culture of the Intelligence community that permeates the life of not only U.S. citizens, but of people around the globe. What is this “sacred trust” that Moss referred to that would give exclusive privilege to a certain population? Implied in Moss’s comment is that honoring this trust would take precedence over the right to free speech, requiring journalists to ask for permission to engage in activities that are supposedly protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This signals the existence of an invisible governance that claims superiority over the highest law of the land.

Government Secrecy

There are some who have come to see the internal working of a patronage network that is bound within this exclusive trust. In his 2006 seminal writing Conspiracy as Governance, Assange noted how secrecy was used by political elites “as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power”. He then assessed how “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial”.

In his latest book, The WikiLeaks Files, Assange described how through seeing “a level of hysteria and non-corporeality” displayed by the intelligence community in reaction to WikiLeaks’ disclosures, he observed something “that is not easily captured by traditional theories of power”. He recognized how classified documents function as a tangible object that symbolizes a bond among those who are inside this secret network, in a similar way that “many religions and cults imbue their priestly class with additional scarcity value by keeping their religious texts secret from the public or the lower orders of the devoted”. He pointed out how US government employees who have been cleared to read classified documents are forbidden to read the same documents when published by journalistic organizations like WikiLeaks:

“If cleared employees ever come across them, they are expected to self-report their contact with the newly profaned object, and destroy all traces of it … The implication is that there is a non-physical property that inhabits documents once they receive their classification markings, and that this marginal property is extinguished, not by copying the document, but by making the copy public. The now public document has, to devotees of the national security state, not merely become devoid of this marginal property and reverted to a mundane object, it has been inhabited by another nonphysical property; an evil one.”

To continue reading: Assange, Manning, and Snowden, Standing With the Conscience of Truthtellers

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WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer), by Glenn Greenwald

Posted on September 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

Every time you think the MSM has plumbed the absolute depths of speaking lies for power, it reaches a new low. Now the Washington Post is calling for the prosecution of its own source, Edward Snowden. From Glenn Greenwald at theintercept.com:

THREE OF THE four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

But not the Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

In doing so, the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against the paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.

The Post editors concede that one — and only one — of the programs that Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed — namely, the domestic metadata program, because it “was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.” Regarding the “corrective legislation” that followed its exposure, the Post acknowledges: “We owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.” But that metadata program wasn’t revealed by the Post, but rather by The Guardian.

Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, the editors say, real harm was done by their exposure. That includes PRISM, about which the Post says this:

The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.)

In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper that (simultaneous with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual all over its front page is called … the Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

To continue reading: WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

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He Said That? 9/18/16

Posted on September 18, 2016 | 1 comment

For today’s quote of the day, which is actually a series of quotes, SLL shamelessly steals from The Burning Platform’s quote of the day, from Edward Snowden:

“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give to an American.”

“What is right is not always the same as what is legal.”

“I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.”

“Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”

“…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

“If we can’t understand the policies and the programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent.”

“I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

“I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.”

“We have an executive […] who will stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth.”

“With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

“Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. …it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life.”

“The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things… And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that… because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”

“These programs don’t make us more safe. They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak, think, live, and be creative.”

“So many of the things we’re told by the government simply aren’t true.”

“The definition of a security state is one that prioritizes security over all other considerations.”

“The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

“To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR communications to do so.”

“…I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

“The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.”

“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”

“I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.”

“Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

“Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.”

“I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

“You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.”

“I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.”

“I do not expect to see home again.”

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/09/18/quotes-of-the-day-snowden-edition-2/

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New Film Tells the Story of Edward Snowden; Here are the Surveillance Programs He Helped Expose, Jenna McLaughlin, Talya Cooper

Posted on September 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

This is a brief review of Oliver Stone’s movie “Snowden,” plus a fairly exhaustive compendium of Snowden-fueled disclosures, with links. It’s a good article to bookmark. For the links, please refer to the original article. From Jenna McLaughlin and Talya Cooper at theintercept.com:

OLIVER STONE’S LATEST film, “Snowden,” bills itself as a dramatized version of the life of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the global extent of U.S. surveillance capabilities.

Stone’s rendering of Snowden’s life combines facts with Hollywood invention, covering Snowden being discharged from the military after an injury in basic training, meeting his girlfriend, and training in the CIA with fictitious mentors (including Nicolas Cage’s character, most likely a composite of whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Bill Binney). Snowden then goes undercover, only to see an op turn ugly; becomes a contractor for the CIA and NSA; and finally chooses to leave the intelligence community and disclose its vast surveillance apparatus, some of which he helped develop.

The movie hits key points in Snowden’s story, including his growing interest in constitutional law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, some of the U.S. surveillance programs he eventually unmasked, and parts of his furtive meetings in Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (co-founders of The Intercept), as well as The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill.

There are doses of artistic license — for example, a Rubik’s Cube hiding the drive where he stored the documents, and Snowden’s CIA mentor spying on his girlfriend through her webcam. In hazier focus are the global questions his revelations raised, including the legal and moral implications of the U.S. government collecting data on foreigners and Americans with relative impunity, and the very real stories born of Snowden’s massive disclosures.

So here’s a retrospective of sorts for moviegoers and others interested in the journalism Edward Snowden made possible through his decision to become a whistleblower: In all, over 150 articles from 23 news organizations worldwide have incorporated documents provided by Snowden, and The Intercept and other outlets continue to mine the archive for stories of social and political significance.

In the hope that Stone’s movie will spark more widespread interest in the NSA programs Snowden helped bring to light, The Intercept has compiled its stories based on the archive of documents, which can be explored through the chart below.

To continue reading and to see the compilation: New Film Tells the Story of Edward Snowden; Here are the Surveillance Programs He Helped Expose

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She Said That? 9/15/16

Posted on September 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

Where is the Old Left that made a hero out of Daniel Ellsberg and would have plucked their own eyes out before they voted for corrupt, bank-coddling, war-mongering Hillary Clinton? Judging by the measly 3 percent Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, gets in the polls, that contingent exists no more. She makes a strong case for pardoning Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou, our day’s equivalents of Daniel Ellsberg. From Stein at theguardian.com:

On 6 June 2013, the Guardian broke the news National Security Agency (NSA) had ordered Verizon to provide it with the phone records of its customers. As the story developed it became clear that the two other major telephone networks as well as credit card companies were doing the same thing; and that the NSA and FBI were being provided with access to server systems operated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Skype.

On 11 June the Guardian reported the source as Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old who had been working at the NSA for four years.

Snowden believed it was important for him to publicly acknowledge his role in order to provide a human face to the story. He knew he was putting his life at risk and exposing himself to decades of incarceration. “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he explained. Snowden hoped to trigger a debate “about the kind of world we want to live in”. The US government began an immediate campaign to track, harass and silence him.

More revelations followed that exposed a massive national security complex that spies on virtually everyone, everywhere. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), which is a secret court that was supposed to protect our privacy rights, was rubber-stamping every NSA request for the authority to spy without any real oversight. The US government was spying on foreign leaders, working with British spies to collect massive amounts of global data across the planet, and collecting over 200 million text messages daily. And the NSA was working to stop encryption (a technology developed to protect the privacy of both private individuals and businesses).

NSA director James Clapper was forced to acknowledge that he had given false testimony to Congress about NSA spying on Americans, and that Snowden’s leaks had created a healthy public debate about the balance between privacy and national security. “It’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen,” he said. Even Barack Obama admitted that the revelations required the US to re-think how we uphold “the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals – and our Constitution – require.”

Federal judges ruled that such massive collection of citizens’ metadata without any connection to a particular investigation was patently illegal, essentially vindicating Snowden. His goal was to tell the truth about the government spying on all of us, and to create public and judicial pressure on the government to create real changes in the way things are done and to stop the trajectory towards a surveillance state.

Snowden’s whistleblowing was among the most important in US history. It showed us that the relationship between the people of the United States and the government has gone off track and needs a major course correction.

The fourth amendment of the constitution provides that a court must find probable cause that an individual has committed a crime before issuing a warrant, and forbids systematic spying on the American people. The requirement of individualized suspicion should prohibit this type of dragnet surveillance. Spying on whole populations is not necessary, and is actually counterproductive.

If elected president I will immediately pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou for their important work in exposing the massive, systematic violation of our constitutional rights. I would invite them to the White House to publicly acknowledge their heroism, and create a role for them in the Stein-Baraka Green party administration to help us create a modern framework that protects personal privacy while still conducting effective investigations where warranted.

The American people have a right to privacy. My hope is that Obama uses his power to pardon Snowden now. The debate he began must be continued so we find a resolution that protects the freedom of press, association, religion and speech as well as the privacy of people in the United States and around the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/pardon-edward-snowden-jill-stein

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How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers, by Mark Hertsgaard

Posted on May 23, 2016 | Leave a comment

Criticizing Edward Snowden for “not going through channels” and for absconding with the documents is idiotic. He well knew that whistleblowers who go through channels are usually the only ones punished in cases of intelligence services wrongdoing. Good luck trying to subpoena the materials that would allow them to make their cases. From Mark Hertsgaard at the guardian.com:

By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did. He leaked top-secret documents revealing that the National Security Agency was spying on hundreds of millions of people across the world, collecting the phone calls and emails of virtually everyone on Earth who used a mobile phone or the internet. When this newspaper began publishing the NSA documents in June 2013, it ignited a fierce political debate that continues to this day – about government surveillance, but also about the morality, legality and civic value of whistleblowing.

But if you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance programme were largely ignored.

“The government spent many years trying to break me, and the more I resisted, the nastier they got,” Drake told me.

Drake’s story has since been told – and in fact, it had a profound impact on Snowden, who told an interviewer in 2015 that: “It’s fair to say that if there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there wouldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”

But there is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.

His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane’s failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.

During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.

The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself. Snowden was unaware of the hidden machinations inside the Pentagon that undid Drake, but the outcome of those machinations – Drake’s arrest, indictment and persecution – sent an unmistakable message: raising concerns within the system promised doom.

To continue reading: How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers

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The Snowden Effect, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on May 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

What’s the good of having a surveillance state if the observed don’t know they’re being observed? From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

I’ve never met Edward Snowden, so please understand that I’m not trying to besmirch his character. And the truth is that I was thrilled when his disclosures hit. I was managing a professional-level VPN and traveling widely, warning people (who were often skeptical) about state-level surveillance. Edward Snowden vindicated me.

But it’s now becoming clear that there is a serious down-side to the Snowden disclosures. I’ve been noticing it in my work at Cryptohippie and it has recently started to appear in scholarly literature.

For example, a new study from Oxford University (read about it here) shows that mass surveillance makes people less likely to read about surveillance topics online, and significantly so. Even page-viewing on Wikipedia has been affected.

A second study, from MIT, showed a “substantial empirical… chilling effect.” The study goes on to say that this chilling effect seems related to an “increased awareness of government surveillance.”

In other words, Snowden’s proof of surveillance made people turn away from the entire discussion. And there’s a reason for this.

Sooner Or Later, the Sword Must Be Seen

Again, I am not implying that this was Ed Snowden’s intent, but the fact remains that mass surveillance is never more than half-effective until people know about it. Consider this, please:

Every ruling regime (republic, monarchy, whatever) is fully dependent upon their subjects obeying them: Without obedience, no government could survive.

The ruled, at some places and times more than others, will obey because they feel it’s their duty. But the rest of the time, fear is required. How many Americans, for example, would pay more than minimal levels of income tax if they didn’t fear the IRS?

So, given the current consensus that politicians are liars at best, instilling fear would seem necessary for any state to function.

The Snowden revelations made Joe and Jane Average face the threat of surveillance, often against their will. In other words, they were force-fed a new reason to be afraid. As a result, they pulled back from thinking on the subject, turning away from another class of things that might get them into trouble.

Civic propaganda aside, we all know that the true operating principle of government is mandatory compliance. We also know that ‘mandatory’ has sharp teeth; that’s why we lower our voices when complaining about the IRS or the FBI.

So, now that NSA surveillance is undeniable – now that the sword is seen – Mr. and Ms. Average have closed themselves down that much further. That’s what I’m referring to as the Snowden Effect.

To continue reading: The Snowden Effect

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Inside the Assassination Complex: Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance, by Edward Snowden

Posted on May 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

A fair number of us talk the talk; very few have walked the walk. One of the few is Edward Snowden. From Snowden on a guest post at theburningplatform:

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the grass.”)

A single act of whistleblowing doesn’t change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society — if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that injustice — they might still be held to account. The thread by which good governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.

Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has existed for as long as our government.

To continue reading: Inside the Assassination Complex: Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

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