Edward Snowden at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. (C) Tatyana Lokshina/Human Rights Watch
BY CATHERINE A. FITZPATRICK
I'm shocked at the participation of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in what has been rightly called by HRW's Tanya Lokshina "a media circus". I think this is a stunt engineered by the people collaborating all along with Snowden -- radical blogger and lawyer Glenn Greenwald; Julian Assange of WikiLeaks who is currently in the embassy of Ecuador evading justice in Sweden; Jacob Appelbaum of Tor who is frequently questioned by US law-enforcement for his role in support of WikiLeaks and other hacking expeditions; and Laura Poitras, a radical film-maker who has been questioned at the US border numerous times over her role in embedding with militants in Iraq who executed an attack on US troops.
No doubt the leaders of Human Rights Watch believe themselves to be participating in a high-minded exercise of exacting application of international refugee law, but as has been increasingly the case with this politicized organization, their selection of the ways and means to get involved in this controversial case have put them on the side of radicals who would be the first to abuse all our rights if they were in power -- and already do, frequently.
I didn't get to chose through my elected or appointed representatives whether to "have a national conversation" about secrecy and accompany it with disclosures to our enemies in China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere. Did you? Instead, these choices were made for us by a band of unaccountable hackers who have arrogated power to themselves in an international anarchists' movement. Sophisticates in the international law jet-set chuckle at the claims that such supposedly idealistic radicals have any influence or power. Wait until they are hacked and doxed, and maybe they'll see it differently.
If I had any doubts about publicly criticizing the "nuanced" policies that Human Rights Watch has come to develop over the years (in blog posts here and here), and noting with alarm at how it has departed from its liberal origins, embracing a combination of vocal neo-progressive radical politics and quiet insiderist transactional relations with abusive states, I dropped them in a hurry when I saw what transpired at Sheremetyevo yesterday.
Ellen Barry sure got it right in her lede about this remarkably manipulated occasion:
In a high-profile spectacle that had the hallmarks of a Kremlin-approved event, Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American intelligence contractor, broke his silence after three weeks of seclusion on Friday, telling a handpicked group of Russian public figures that he hoped to receive political asylum in Russia.
To put it to a fine point if you don't want to read my long post (although people have endless patience for the 4,000 word posts of Glenn Greenwald or the 8,000 world posts of Mark Ames, you know?):
If the White House does not view Edward Snowden as a human rights activist, and Human Rights Watch is ready to bless Edward Snowden as a human rights activist, what are we to make of Obama's nomination of Tom Malinowski, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, to the official US government position of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Rights, and Labor?
The series of events and choices over the years lets us know how this sorry state of affairs came to pass, but let me take you back to the era before 9/11:
"IF ONLY WE CAN THROW HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH..."
In August 2001, I flew to South Africa to attend the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban. I had arranged to meet a colleague, Yuri Dzhibladze of the Russian human rights movement at the airport, as we had planned to maintain a presence at the WCAR NGO Forum to precede the official conference along with dozens of groups with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union concerned about racism, xenophobia and antisemitism in this region. All along in the preparatory phase dominated by Cuban and other Soviet-style idealogues and bad actors from some of the world's worst oppressive regimes such as Iran, we had found little willingness from either states or NGOs to concede that racism outside the white/black paradigm existed -- those bringing the issues of the Dalits of India or the Tibetans of China found the same difficulties.
When we got into a local bus to take the long ride to a hotel some 30 miles outside the city, we fell in behind two African Americans from my flight. From their conversation and dress, we soon discovered they were supporters of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam from Chicago -- they were 1960s radicals combining the rhetoric of the Black Panthers with the Islamists who viewed the US through the prism of radical politics.
At one point on the slow and bumpy journey, the man turned to the woman and said:
"If we can just throw Human Rights Watch, we will take over this conference and succeed."
Yuri and I exchanged worried glances. What if they discovered we were colleagues of Human Rights Watch?! We stayed mum, and overheard them discussing vehemently their plans to pressure the liberals and moderates at the conference in international NGOs who had rejected a politicized and radical approach to the conference and the draft outcome document, refusing to endorse, for example the discredited staple of the left that "Zionism is Racism".
I had seen this dynamics before at international human rights and peace conferences -- if the radicals can persuade the moderates to reject a rights-based or law-based approach referencing international treaties, and get them to endorse the ideological approach of socialist and other radical movements, they would win.
ABDICATION OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS NGOS
Yuri and I proceeded to go through a very difficult week, culminating in a raucous meeting where the fellow travelers in the bus and their comrades did everything to hijack the agenda and push for anti-Israel and antisemitic language -- making outrageous displays all along the way. What I hadn't expected was that they wouldn't find it hard at all to "throw" Human Rights Watch; its representative commented blandly to me that he "didn't have a problem" with wording characterizing Israel's policies as "apartheid".
Feeling themselves above the fray and not directly representing victims' groups, HRW and other international groups ducked the confrontation with radical international movements and let them hold sway on this awful occasion. The whole week as I walked around the large soccer stadium and grounds where various stalls and pavilions were set up, where some haters were even distributing discredited books like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or displaying a poster of Hitler with the slogan "What if I Had Won?," I noticed all the regional and issue caucus tents teeming with activity in drafting the final document.
The INGO tent -- international non-governmental groups -- was empty. They didn't feel the need to caucus or do anything about the troublesome politics of the meeting. On the outside of the tent was a cartoon that had been published that week in a South African paper. It depicted Colin Powell standing on the steps of the White House, dejected, and two blacks with bundles on their backs heading in the direction of a sign that said "To Durban".
"The massah in da Big House say I cain't go," was the disgusting caption.
The capitulation of INGOs in Durban was among the early signs of the inability of the international human rights movement to withstand the shocks of radicalism, which were only beginning as the next week we saw the attacks on the World Trade Center, which felt like a continuation of the hatred and extremism we saw in Durban. No policy of support to Israel -- which is a legitimate policy -- would justify such mass crimes against humanity, yet we were to hear the sarcastic explanation of "chickens coming home to roost" or the unfounded claim that large transfers of wealth would prevent terrorism for years to come.
That night in the big tent in the soccer stadium, the Jewish caucus was forced to leave and our delegation, the East European caucus, decided to remain for the paragraph-by-paragraph vote, and Yuri's hand, as the head of our caucus, was the lone hand in the big tent raising objection to the tendentious and hateful final document of the NGO forum. Staying up into the wee hours, we drafted an alternative document condemning the process and the hateful result but stressing the need to continue to fight racism in all its forms. We arose early and distributed it at the morning NGO briefing with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights's office, and got about 80 signatures right away. Human Rights Watch was not among them.
For the next 12 years, I was to see the gradual lurching to the left of the moderate organization where I had worked for 10 years in the 1980s and early 1990s and an increasing obsession not only with Israel-Palestine but a lessoning of a critical approach to Russia and other tyrannies. There were lots of reasons for this, among them the belief (enforced with obvious contradictions here) that you should pressure more aggressively democracies that are able to transform, as you will have more of an effect -- except if they are certain new democracies in the process of transition from autocracy, like Russia, when you could be "in dialogue," and where you would not use the "naming and shaming" method but would be more "interactive".
HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS AND HACKERS
So...If before the stunt at Sheremetyevo today I was inclined to shug and assume that Malinowski's appointment will sail through because not even right-wing senators will want to bother with the lower-level position at State that isn't the place where grand matters around Israel or Syria or Russia are really decided, today I sure hope that some senator asks this very question I've posed. What is human rights activism and why does only Human Rights Watch get to decide?Because in a world where every rogue programmer who calls himself a "human rights activist" can overthrow even a liberal, democratic elected state's security programs on a radical anarchist whim, and liberal human rights groups turned neo-progressive activists can bless this, then we live in a world that is run not by sovereign states who are the protectors of human rights, but by transnational movements of networked elites unaccountable to the rule of law themselves. If you think this is a grand thing, keep in mind that it won't be the nice ladies and gentlemen at Human Rights Watch running things in the end, who care at least for "all human rights for all" at some level, but the radical hackers and e-thugs of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Lulz-Sec and worse -- the Bolsheviks of our time.
I'm not kidding. If you think wired civic movements turned into radical secretive hacking operations are not as strong as liberal states, tell me why it is that neither the duplicitious Putin nor the Latin American authoritarians were unafraid to refuse to turn over Snowden -- and tell me who really has the power when radical hacker movements succeed at their sabotage of a liberal democracy and run for cover to their authortiarn state helpers. Pro-tip: it's not our Community-Organizer-in-Chief.
WHY DID HRW SUPPORT SNOWDEN?
Yes, Human Rights Watch greeted the US defector Edward Snowden, who has been missing from the public eye for weeks as he bargained for various options in the lounge of the Moscow international airport -- greeted and supported him with a statement essentially accepting his own and Putin's characterization of him as a human rights activist by implying that he had legitimately uncovered wrongdoing.
Seeing where this was headed, the US Embassy called Tanya Lokshina, a representative of HRW in Moscow and a researcher on the North Caucasus, and asked her to convey a message to Snowden (since he refused to meet with Embassy representatives) and made clear their attitude. Later, the White House issued a statement that Snowden was "not a human rights activist" -- a statement I heartily support -- and later Carney quipped acidly that Russia should "allow human rights activism not only in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo, but throughout the country," i.e. not only when it suited them for an anti-American intelligence coup, but for their domestic critics, who are in the process of being raided, inspected, closed, harassed, even beaten and jailed as "foreign agents" under a new law declaring that anyone who engages in non-profit work with foreign aid that is deemed "political" must register as a foreign agent or face prosecution.
While Human Rights Watch staff have protested Putin's anti-NGO campaign, they have not been very aggressive; they hope to keep their own office in Moscow open (a policy I strenuosly disagree with); in any event, in the pantheon of HRW concerns around the world, as always, concerns about Russia are very muted and opportunities like US-Russian summits are not used to mount press campaigns criticizing Putin (a letter to Russian officials on the back pages of the website that no one bothers to get on the wires doesn't count.)
HOW IS YURY ORLOV DIFFERENT THAN GENNADY ZAKHAROV AND HOW IS GENNADY ZAKHAROV DIFFERENT THAN EDWARD SNOWDEN?
Twenty-seven years ago, I went to the JFK airport to meet Yuri Orlov and his wife Irina -- as a result of a dramatic international incident in which the Moscow-based US journalist Nick Daniloff had been arrested during the height of Soviet oppression before the Gorbachev era. The US and the Soviet governments agreed to a prisoner exchange. In exchange for releasing Orlov, founder of the citizens' Helsinki movement, and a widely admired physicist and human rights campaigner, and Daniloff, a critical American reporter with Russian roots, the US would turn over an arrested Soviet spy, Gennady Zakharov.
Dick Combs of the State Department got off the airplane and turned Orlov over to Jeri Laber, then director of Helsinki Watch, and me, research director, who served as Orlov's translator. We went to a press conference that was crowded but orderly. Dick urged me to speak loudly to be heard over the scrum of reporters shouting questions. What a different press conference that was at JFK then the one yesterday in Moscow! How low has HRW sunk! While it wasn't beyond my imagination that HRW would some day have an office in Moscow, and that Ludmila Alexeyeva, the exiled representative of Moscow Helsinki Group with whom I worked closely, would one day return and resume her work in her homeland, what I could never have expected is that my long-time colleagues in HRW would greet a figure like Snowden -- surely more like Zakharov than Orlov.
The leaders of what was to be later named Human Rights Watch, and was then Helsinki Watch, didn't have any problem then understanding the difference between human rights activity and independent reporting of the sort Orlov and Daniloff did, and the spying and illicit garnering of military information by spies like Zakharov. Nobody was shedding any tears for Zakharov or wringing their hands about his rights -- which of course were not going to be observed in the oppressive Soviet Union in any event.
There were some complaints in the media and some politicians that equivalency like this -- making it seem as if the legitimate activity of human rights reporting and critical journalism were the same as espionage and sabotage -- were handing too much of a propaganda coup to the Soviets and undermining our values. As one paper wrote with the headline "US Yielded on Basic Principle in Exchange" said at the time that Secretary of State George Shultz's claim that "this was not an exchange" and that "the Russians blinked" was not credible, and the original claim that the US would never swap Zakharov had obviously been dropped. It's true that this political deal was messy, and the optics suspect, but at the time, human rights activist felt the truth of the differences between activism and espionage would stand out so clearly, that no one would have a problem.
In these pre-Internet days, it's fascinating to see what Zakharov was up to -- he could have been a soul brother to Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden in the news report of 1986:
Gennady Zakharov, snooping around the colleges of Queens, bribing a student to steal library cards on robotics and computer science, is no bit player. He is a shock-trooper on the front lines of Soviet war to maintain itself as a world industrial power.
Russia has no equivalent to Silicon Valley. It is only beginning to let its young people tinker with personal computers. Freedom of inquiry would endanger the system, and the system must at all costs be preserved.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH TAKES SNOWDEN'S SIDE
Fast forward to our era, and now these distinctions between human rights and espionage, and between "openness" on the Internet and espionage aren't so clear in the minds of Human Rights Watch, although they should be.
HRW has taken Snowden's side -- not merely invoking the standards of international law for asylum-seekers which in fact do not apply to those charged with "serious non-political crimes," but endorsing his claims to be a whistleblower and claims to have exposed wrong-doing. They have done this despite having found no facts about the alleged abuses, and shockingly, while remaining silent about the information Snowden has also exposed about US programs to counter China's hacking and the implications for exposing the US to the enemy (Russia and others as well).
Disturbingly, HRW has no comment on what possibly might have transacted between Snowden and the masters of the territory of the airport lounge -- who are in the Kremlin, the GRU (military intelligence), the FSB (domestic intelligence), or the SVR (foreign intelligence) or any other body. Simon Shuster of Time magazine has made a pretty educated guess about what might have transpired. Glenn Greenwald, the blogger who has championed Snowden, has furiously edge-cased and Fisked the efforts of Walter Pincus and others at the Washington Post to ask challenging questions about when Snowden began to cooperate with WikiLeaks and who convinced him -- and how -- to go to Moscow. That fury lets me know that he may be feeling that journalists are getting too close to the truth.
A MEETING WITH LAWYERS OR A MEDIA CIRCUS?
Some might argue that HRW was "doing its job" by "monitoring" the case of Snowden. But this isn't monitoring; this is embrace.
Cunningly, Snowden and his handlers -- and we have zero transparency about who they are and Shuster talks about how Snowden was accompanied by a couple of goons yesterday -- didn't opt to hold an open and transparent press conference on the record, as you would think such hacker champions of openness and "information-wants-to-be-free" would do.
Instead, Snowden insisted that there be no still or video filming, and that he meet only with hand-picked lawyers and human rights workers -- and of course, some of them quite dubious like Olga Kostina, advisor to the head of the FSB and head of the public council for the Russian Interior Ministry Main Directorate who has her own human rights organization. Some human rights activist!
Normally, when you go to visit a person seeking asylum, you don't take cameras and recorders and journalists with you in order to protect your client's safety and privacy -- that went out the door quickly, however, when the HRW staffer couldn't resist snapping a photo and sharing it instantly on Twitter, where it was instantly picked up by The Atlantic and other media. Anyone would do the same thing; that's because this stage-managed circus felt like a press conference, even if it was a pretend consultation of lawyers.
Snowden seemed to be even skinnier than usual, as Russia's human rights ombudsman Lukin noticed -- although he commented that he had a cool haircut. Yes, somebody made sure Snowden had a stylish haircut after his weeks of travel hardship.
He haltingly read a statement about what he believed was wrongdoing, interrupted by the famous three-toned bell of the announcements at SVO, and the dulcet murmurs of "Vnimaniye passazhiram vyletayushim..."
HRW ESSENTIALLY DECLARES SNOWDEN A HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER
Meanwhile, HRW re-issued a fuller statement today than the one posted June 18, which was not very much promoted -- they were low-key in the weeks leading up to Malinowski's nomination and didn't make a full-court media and advocacy campaign out of Snowden and the related issues.
There are a number of troubling points in this carefully-crafted document. It would be one thing if HRW merely stated the classic human rights position that all asylum-seekers who believe they have a well-founded fear of persecution should be enabled to make their case in front of a court of law, and that no country should return such persons if they have a reasonable grounds to believe that they will face torture. Some will say that the possibility of the death penalty in the US would constitute such torture, although legal opinion can disagree about this. No matter -- HRW went far beyond this standard position held by the international groups and the UN for decades.
But that's not what this is. HRW has gone far beyond the standard positions about asylum held by international groups and the UN for decades; it has taken the side of a radical hacker. HRW said that Snowden had uncovered wrong-doing by the National Security Agency although it can't know that. HRW hasn't found facts, has not proved this, and hasn't even attempted to report on it. I suspect there aren't experts on the HRW staff who grapple with these intricate Internet technology issues, but let's not let the hacksters obfuscate what are really basic and accessible points here: the US does not monitor and seize the correspondence of private persons; that is not what has emerged from this NSA scandal. As has already been amply discovered, the original claims by Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had direct access to all the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and the platforms of Google turned out to be erroneous; there is no direct tap of this nature.
If the US government monitored phone calls, then we would not see prosecutors, lawyers, defendants, and the general public struggle for weeks on end with great acrimony in parsing the last telephone conversation of the black teenager Trayvon Martin who was shot to death by a vigilante, as his flustered teenage friend, under pressure of the events and media circus, has changed her story and tried to convey her impressions. But...The US doesn't monitor or tape or have the routine ability to monitor calls in real time, which is why we're all guessing about Trayon's last moments in court. Hello!
When the government has probably cause, law-enforcers get a warrant. If there are cases when no warrant was obtained and laws were violated, we haven't been told it and HRW hasn't come up with it. That's what is wrong with this picture; the absence of a classic human rights and legal approach based on solid cases, and its replacement with sweeping ideological generalizations based on radical politics of an antagonistic attitude toward any state, even the most liberal one in history and in the world.
HRW CLAIMS FALSELY TO HAVE FOUND FACTS ON PRIVACY
In its troubling statement, HRW claims that it already knows that Snowden has found facts of human rights violations and that it endorses them:
Snowden has disclosed serious rights violations by the US. But US law does not provide sufficient protection for whistleblowers when classified information is involved. The US has charged Snowden, among other things, with violating the Espionage Act, a vague law that provides no exceptions or defenses to whistleblowers who disclose matters of serious public importance.
What are these "serious rights violations" and who determined them and how? Who gets to decide what constitutes a matter of public importance? HRW, with its positions going soft on Islamists and the Kremlin? Hackers who are happy to overthrow even liberal states and replace them with their own whims?
HRW's position that whistleblowers are not given sufficient protection is pretty abstract and sterile; maybe if the spate of "whistleblowers" we have seen from the hackers' movement, ranging from Julian Assange to Aaron Swartz to Jacob Appelbaum to Edward Snowden in fact followed legal procedures for whistleblowing, and weren't swathed in extreme ideologies about the need to smash the state and public institutions in the name of radical politics, we might find their claim more persuasive. When these hackers steal classified information, indiscriminately blast it, and insist on maximum secrecy and impunity for themselves -- never even giving any attention to the ostensible subject of their original concern -- we need to be very skeptical. This is not human rights activism; it's anarchy.
And I say that not as some backward reactionary who clings to their country right or wrong, which is how the suave sorts in the HRW camp think everyone who disagrees with them needs to be seen. My concerns are wholly dictated by a real dread for the state of human rights under these hackers, under their rules; they are antithetical to human rights and the liberal democratic society that makes rights protection possible, as I have seen for the last 10 years of my close study of these movements.
Edward Snowden long ago forfeited his right to have us take him seriously at his claim that he "wishes the US to succeed" and "isn't anti-American" by hooking up with the crafty state-smasher Assange, who wrote frankly and said many times on the air that he forced openness on the US in order to have it become unlike itself, and be forced to grow more secretive, and then become discredited and fail. "The worse, the better." He is not a hero; he is not a whistleblower; he is a nihilist.
MACHINE-SCANNING OF METADATA VERSUS HUMAN SURVEILLANCE OF PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS
Just as worrisome, given his propensity for minimizing terrorism and maximizing the policing approach to terrorism, Ken Roth does not believe there has been any efficacy from a program involving the capturing of metadata from phone systems or social media, and the matching of this information to terrorists. In a tweet, he indicated that two cases of captured terrorists weren't enough to justify the sweeps that may have led to them -- an argumentation he bases on his own experience as a prosecutor when he scooped up phone numbers related to suspects, and which he extrapolates is now "out of control" given that the scooping process is now automated.
One wonders just what Ken would accept as lawful law-enforcement scrutiny, especially given that the clients he has now so closely associated himself with -- Snowden and his comrades -- believe that the state should have maximum transparency and therefore weakness and pliability by any passing anarchist, and anarchists should have maximum encryption and unaccountability.
They seek a world with darknets where their communications are absolutely off limit from anybody -- even other hackers who might have some qualms about their notorious records of bad behaviour snooping on others; harassing others; bullying others; disclosing their privacy; and engaging in crimes ranging from piracy to child pornography to credit card theft to drug sales. That's after all, what Tor users are known for.
WHEN METADATA SCANNING DOES TURN UP TERRORISTS
I gave Ken a very clear-cut case in addition to the two he came up with: Jamshid Muhtorov. I believe that the classified portion of his trial based on a FISA court in fact must involve such a meta-data discovery. Of course, it's secret and we don't know and may never know, but I don't think that the Muhtorov case involves a neighbour or an emigre complaining to the FBI about a fellow emigre who grew a beard and began reading the Koran. As we know from this and other cases like the Tsarnaev brothers, in fact, having a Youtube page of radical and jihadist videos celebrating terrorism isn't enough to get you arrested in this country, however much the people without legs right now and many others wish it were.
There might be a debate about what the sliding scale is of how much data is captured and whether it's worth it to get a sea of people's proximity data that might compromise their privacy if someone was reading it with human intelligence and applying it -- but that is not as debate we can have because Snowden and his comrades have foreclosed it -- above all by portraying the technical processes tendentiously, hysterically and falsely in service of political aims. They have forcibly heisted the data and published it along with data harming US national security in general against its enemies in China and Russia and elsewhere. That's a hell of a way to have a national conversation, by force and fiat and with water poured on the mills of tyrants. Hey, welcome to how life will be under these people. Don't say I didn't warn you.
HEY, WHO'S RUNNING THE MOSCOW SHOW, ANYWAY?
In her account of the day's tumultous events, Tanya Lokshina says that she was invited by an email to attend a meeting at SVO, and right when she got to the airport she got a call: "It was airport security giving me further details and asking for my passport number."
That tells us who was controlling the setting and admission to this meeting: not WikiLeaks, not the lovely transparency movement, but Russian intelligence and border security. In a Facebook post, Lokshina added that it was natural for HRW to be interested in this kind of case and to want to ascertain if the individual was being treated properly by all parties, and that she took her pictures before the announcement was made by the organizers of the press conference (and their shadowy controllers) that no pictures would be allowed. She added that she felt she had to convey the words of the US Embassy -- that Snowden was viewed not as a human rights defender but a law-breaker.
That doesn't make HRW an adjuct to American state power, although the radicals that go beyond even the radicalism of WikiLeaks and HRW itself now make that silly claim. She merely took the position that more information about positions of the party was better than less -- say, aren't we all supposed to be for transparency here?
MEDIA CIRCUS SCRIPTED BY THE USUAL SUSPECTS
When she got to the airport, Lokshina described a "frenzy" -- it wasn't a quiet, private meeting of a victim with his legal helpers and concerned activists, but a media circus. Snowden who "looked like a kid" in Lokshina's words, said he felt he "had" to ask for asylum as he had no other options (although he said nothing of Putin's conditions -- that he could no longer keep leaking but, you see, I would add, leave all his secrets for the use of the Russian intelligence agencies exclusively) and that he'd preferred to keep his sojourn in Moscow temporary and move on to a Latin American country.
Regrettably, Ken Roth has also picked up the victimology ploy carefully crafted by Assange through his own long sojourn -- and picked up by Snowden likely with Assange's help, although Glenn Greenwald, the advocate for these hackers, strenuously denies that Snowden had any help in editing his forlorn message.
That ploy involves first committing the acts of espionage obvious to all -- exposing US plans to the Chinese and Russians and making emotional and wild claims that the government has placed everyone under surveillance worse than China or Russia -- then doubling back and whining that Obama is "bullying" and "threatening" the miscreant with serious prosecution and jail time or "bullying" other countries with demands for extradition -- as if a computer professional who not only signed a pledge of confidentiality and ethics in working with national secrets, but deliberately sought employment at Booz, Allen to gain access to troves of these secrets, then gets to leak them without any consequences. And as if you don't have to serve the time if you do the crime.
In the days of Daniel Ellsberg and the Berrigan brothers, people committing civil disobedience and direct action understood the social contract: they committed their acts as statements of protest, then peacefully held out their hands to be cuffed and went to jail meekly as an act of conscience. They did their time.
But today's hipsters whine that they are victims of gross human rights abuse after they've provoked an obvious state backlash from their direct action; this is merely Leninist "the worse, the better" politics where oppression is provoked so that the activist can turn around and say "see how awful this state I've provoked is.". It's also lawyerly edge-casing not only in search of a plea bargain but exoneration of their clients, and not through due process and the finding of facts but unleashing of flash mobs to pressure courts -- even by hacking the Supreme Court's servers as Anonymous has done in retaliation against the Swartz case.
KREMLIN SEQUENCED BEFORE WHITE HOUSE
Bizarrely, Roth has demanded that the US sequence Snowden's petition to the Kremlin first, then demand his extradition:
The US may seek Snowden’s extradition to face charges in the US. While seeking extradition is within a state's discretion, the asylum claim should be heard first, before a decision on extradition is made
That means that the Kremlin -- which itself routinely sends Uzbek suspects back to certain torture and even death -- is being blessed as a greater arbiter of what is and isn't a crime versus a human rights protest of conscience -- and the White House be damned.
Under these circumstances, senators examining the nomination of Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch must ask him whether he believes that America should let the authoritarian KGB chief ruling oppressive Russia decide what constitutes human rights and human rights defenders, or follow our own and international norms for these definitions. They should also ask whether he thinks that hackers who expose America's secrets as part of a radical transnational movement to undermine even liberal states should be allowed to decide what constitutes human rights for us all.
"HRW said that Snowden had uncovered wrong-doing by the National Security Agency although it can't know that. HRW hasn't found facts, has not proved this, and hasn't even attempted to report on it. I suspect there aren't experts on the HRW staff who grapple with these intricate Internet technology issues, but let's not let the hacksters obfuscate what are really basic and accessible points here: the US does not monitor and seize the correspondence of private persons; that is not what has emerged from this NSA scandal. As has already been amply discovered, the original claims by Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had direct access to all the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and the platforms of Google turned out to be erroneous; there is no direct tap of this nature."
NSA defenders clings to all these pathetic fig leafs:
1) That scooping up the 'metadata' from billions of calls a day is a-ok because of a 1979 SCOTUS ruling prior to the invention of cellphones which offer vastly more data including locations and websurfing habits than did old analog landline phones. Might as well use horse and buggy jurisprudence to determine a case involving Formula One cars. Furthermore NSA defenders insist metadata itself cannot be used to blackmail members of Congress or the Supreme Court or 'out' people having affairs like General Petraeus when the evidence is overwhelming much of D.C. is blackmailed. See the bloodshot eyes photograph of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. And the testimony of NSA whistleblower Russ Tice that you, Pirrong, @LibertyKittyCatBootlicker and all the other groupies have singularly ignored.
2) Private investigator Doug Hagmann (www.homelandsecurityus.com) has filed a sworn affidavit in Pennsylvania swearing that he overheard a recorded NSA log on his telephone after a DOMESTIC phone call to another journalist/investigator. This of course came after months of Hagmann inquiring as to the Constitutional eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama to hold his office, as well as where Obama was during the crucial hours of the Benghazi attack and the CIA's involvement in trafficking MANPADs and other dangerous weapons from eastern Libya to the Syrian jihadists including Al-Qaeda affiliated groups on and before September 11, 2012. Hagmann has also reported on the DHS arms and propaganda buildup against Constitutionalists, conservatives, libertarians, veterans and outspoken Christians.
The Hagmann case of course, cannot be dismissed out of hand because we already know this corrupt Eric Holder led Justice Dept. shopped warrants before two federal judges before finding one that would issue a warrant that read more like an indictment against Fox News' James Rosen for doing his job.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/56374
3) While you neocon fanatics continue to tut tut about how journalists get killed in Russia (and indeed many were several years ago) you ignore the stupefying cover up of Michael Hastings death in LA...despite physical evidence of a car bomb (i.e. the engine block being blown over a hundred feet away) and the implausibility that a Mercedes Benz would simply explode in flames just because it hit a tree at high speed. In other words, OUR GOVERNMENT OR CORRUPT ELEMENTS WITHIN IT MURDER JOURNALISTS AND SPY ON DISSENTERS AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS!
4) Meanwhile you pretend that this massive sprawling NSA surveillance complex is somehow safely firewalled from an Obama Administration that has already completely politicized the Justice Dept. and used it to stir up racial strife, an IRS that interrogates pro-lifers as to the contents of their prayers and otherwise engages in the type of intimidation you denounce against Russian NGOs right here on American soil, and a Department of Homeland Security that has standing contracts to purchase 2 billion rounds of ammunition and hundreds of armored vehicles and drones.
5) Catherine you are basically bewailing the fact that dissident Americans are now fleeing into the arms of a corrupt successor to the old Evil Empire, while failing to acknowledge that Washington is now widely seen around the world as the new repressive Evil Empire. A state that forces its homosexualist agenda, abortion and sterilization, and blanket surveillance through spying pacts on the entire planet. A nation that will be judged by Almighty God, in this life or the next, but rather sooner in my estimation.
No wonder you and Pirrong and Naval War College Prof. John Schindler are all terrified of being called to the carpet by the libertarian Right. You HATE being reminded that your gods in the NSA may have all the data. But they don't have all the guns!
Posted by: Mr. X | July 13, 2013 at 03:22 PM
"In the days of Daniel Ellsberg and the Berrigan brothers, people committing civil disobedience and direct action understood the social contract: they committed their acts as statements of protest, then peacefully held out their hands to be cuffed and went to jail meekly as an act of conscience. They did their time." Which is why Ellsberg is praising Snowden and even defending him after he fled abroad?
Pathetic Catherine, truly pathetic. Ellsberg only escaped years rotting in prison because Nixon's plumbers got caught and the media/FBI complex hated Nixon's guts. Not like now when we have a completely state run media that has super special meetings where the Daily Caller isn't invited to issue talking points. And where Karl Rove and the boys at Palantir tell Pirrong, Schindler, and others what to think giving them daily marching orders. Oh yes Catherine a professor at the Naval War College spent at least ten if not fourteen hours on Twitter on my TAXPAYER DIME trolling Wayne Madsen:
https://twitter.com/WMRDC/status/353511395628810240
BTW Schindler's partisan activities defending Obama while being paid by the taxpayers to educate naval officers violates the Hatch Act.
At the end of the day, you may whine and moan about the 'hacktivists' and 'griefers'. But we know it's the patriots and Constitutionalists waking up and taking back this government and having the States ARREST and RESIST your gods in the three letter agencies that makes people like you and Pirrong soil yourselves.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323823004578593591276402574.html
THE BOOTS YOU LICK CATHERINE HAS THE DATA BUT WE HAVE THE GUNS AND THE RIGHT ON OUR SIDE.
Posted by: Mr. X | July 13, 2013 at 03:28 PM
PS Pirrong ('I'ma good ole' boy cuz I live in Houston and have losta guns') -- your beloved 'checks and balance' rubberstamping, blank check warrant signing FISA court judges apparently know about as much about the 2nd Amendment as they do about the 4th: which is to say nothing.
http://www.examiner.com/article/fisa-head-judge-doesn-t-understand-gun-rights-either
Still think these judges you pretend are a check on D.C. fascism are going to give a rat's ass about your gun rights when Texas is 'in insurrection'?
Tread carefully. You're surrounded by 'bitter clingers' who won't take kindly to your bootlicking for their oppressors in the near future.
Posted by: Mr. X | July 13, 2013 at 08:44 PM