Establishment renders harsh verdict on Edward Snowden – Alexander Burns – POLITICO.com
Daniel Ellsberg said something slightly different :
Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden’s leak as even more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history.
NSA snooping: Obama under pressure as senator denounces ‘act of treason’ | World news | The Guardian
Nixon went after Ellsberg. How did that work out for him?
Nixon’s impeachment was, via Watergate, the end result of his “plumbers” going after Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers
Edward Snowden and the security state laid bare | Clay Shirky | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Why would the co-conspirators against the American people applaud having the curtain pulled back from their treasonous activity?
Indeed – the co-conspirators against the American people must feel that THEIR treasonous activity is being exposed, too.
In 1971 the radicals were hippies and reporters. Those radicals are now in charge.
“It is the sight of Skeeter walking upright, on his hind legs. At this moment, all of the pigs leave the farmhouse in single file, all upright on two legs. Finally, Napoleon emerges from the farmhouse, upright and carrying a whip.
The monster has two wings. You still think they represent We The People ?
Here is my take coming from a silicon valley network engineer who has been doing this for some 20 years in this area and has worked for operations serving users globally:
Many of the claims made WRT “PRISM” were just plain wrong. To my knowledge nobody has NSA directly on their servers monitoring accounts in real time allowing NSA to “see your thoughts evolve as you type them”. In fact, THAT claim comes from a man named Binney who left NSA 12 years ago, some 7 years before PRISM was even created. PRISM is a data management tool, apparently. I have seen all sorts of wild statements on the Internet from people along the lines of NSA monitors 100% of the traffic of these providers and has dedicated data collections where all traffic is snooped in real time. That is actually quite ridiculous. First of all, it would be physically impossible because it would require a doubling of the US bandwidth infrastructure to handle a duplicate copy of all data. Secondly, I am not aware of a network that has been asked to have a dedicated connection of any sort from NSA or any other government entity. I *HAVE* seen a request by law enforcement to monitor a data stream with a server for some period of time, after which their server is retrieved and the monitoring stops. This is done with paperwork signed off by a judge.
It is easier for your local county Sheriff to snoop your email than it is for NSA. All the Sheriff needs is a subpoena from a local judge. NSA requires action by Dept. of Justice, Congress, and a judge at the federal level. Even in an absolute emergency, NSA would still have to get permission from Justice. It is against the law for NSA to unilaterally snoop on citizens inside the US.
As for the phone bill information that Justice requested to be sent to NSA, I believe that actually REDUCES snooping. If NSA is aware of overseas individuals who are bad actors, they can use that information to see who inside the US is communicating with them or their associates. Then they can provide that list to FBI for further scrutiny while leaving the rest of us alone.
So far the actual information released is rather tame. It is the speculative stuff being spouted by people like Binney and outright false claims by Snowden (I could “wiretap” anyone’s email) that people are reacting to, not the released information itself.
And Snowden’s story might be coming apart a bit: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100221535/is-edward-snowdens-story-unravelling-why-the-guardians-scoop-is-looking-a-bit-dodgy/
By the way, nothing went to NSA that isn’t already available to any Verizon employee that is authorized to look up billing data. Any abuse of that data by NSA by someone looking up information on a rival or ex could also be done by any number of Verizon employees. That sort of human abuse (as opposed to institutional abuse) can happen anywhere in any organization.
What a Verizon employee can see is a non sequitur.
But it lacks the scope and more importantly, the cross referencing with other data collections that turn one piece of a puzzle into a naked man with nothing left to hide.
Turns my stomach whenever Politico deigns to speak for the GOP, conservatives, or libertarians.
They are Obama bots without concern for the destruction and evil inflicted by their chosen slate of candidates.
So they can STFU. If I wanted a moron’s advice I beat it out of them.
This indicates to me how little individual freedoms mean to all of these “politicians”, Left and Right. I was surprised by how quickly both camps jumped on the “he is a traitor” narrative, which they apparently all want the American people to fervently believe–like the “it was a YouTube video” Benghazi propaganda. That’s because they are all part of the deeper problem: The whole system is broken, and they don’t want to face that, their instinct is just to exercise power. It’s the same with those in the climate debate, on both sides, who insist upon dealing only with “peer-reviewed” literature (although it is peer review’s endemic flaws and wholesale failures, that prevented corrective views, that got climate science into its current mess, and indeed keeps the fraud going).
This whole episode goes into my “dogma wars” folder, by the way.
Let me add to the story:
http://www.freewebs.com/thegeorgetrymanreport/nsaspycenterinutah.htm
“Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.”
The BIG DEAL here is that a few years ago the US Crypto people made a breakthrough in code breaking that requires enormous processing power and LOTS of messages to alledgedly be able to decrypt ALL current encryption schemes in use. This project was implementing that process. Whether they could get feeds of EVERYTHING into it I don’t know, but, Echelon has been up and running on signals since the early 70’s and this is supposedly a huge jump over it.
Back to the decryption. Snowden is claiming to be a whistleblower. He has arguably the most desirable secrets in the world today and decamps to Hong Kong which is under the authority of the Chinese. A number of mega rich left there when the British decided to hand it to them so I have serious doubts as to its independence in any form not allowed by the Chinese. Either he is a total MORON thinking he will be safe there or he specifically went there to sell his goods or deliver them to his masters.
Here is a history of signal and data gathering and processing. Some of you old guys should remember at least some of it:
http://freeworld.thc.org/root/docs/communication_interception/InterceptionCapabilities2000/IC2KREPORT.html
This is what was PUBLIC knowledge in 2000!!!