There are many strange things about the Edward Snowden story of course -- why he ran off first to Hong Kong and then to Russia when he could have leaked everything calmly from Venezuela or Ecuador or even Brazil or Iceland. Something made him hurry and flee earlier than planned, it seemed.
And of course we know that he deliberately took the job at Booz, Allen Hamilton to access certain documents there more easiliy with his top-level view as an "information architect analyst".
Everything about this story has always seemed "off" to me.
Let's start with that wonky first story. Metadata in business phone records at Verizon? Huh? What the hell is that? If you're trying to win over the public with a story, would you really lead with *that*? It's so weird. And so not compelling. And so unrelated to the average Joe (and they've never gotten to the average Joe and his email and Facebook, although they've made some hypotheticals tangentially related to various other findings about collection of data).
Why would they start with *that*? I mean, that's not even the best they got. It's not because the hacker was in place, throwing stuff quickly hand over fist, like "Deep Throat" in his day. No, all the hacking was done already and the hacker fled -- and more hastily than planned.
So why that story? And why the PRISM story? And why this or that? (Look at the lists of hacked stuff).
It's always jogged my mind and I'm always looking for an answer when I read stories about Snowden.
Then quite by accident, I found a hypothesis: maybe Snowden was operating with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation list, especially the failed cases they lost that left them with a sense of grievance.
From my experience earlier in the last decade in Second Life with its many copyright and copybot issues and EFF's scornful take on them, I tended to think of EFF as litigating endlessly to erode copyright and exonerate pirates, but in fact they have done a lot of work on privacy and even on the NSA.
Yes, they've litigated against the NSA on the Verizon metadata issue and other telecom information collection practices -- in 2009, long before Snowden surfaced. Funny coincidence, eh?
It isn't so funny if you construct a hypothesis: that this is the work of John Perry Barlow, one of the most destructive individuals I've ever had the misfortune to meet and even debate, wanted to do more than just defeat legislation or win individual court cases, but started to develop a desire to really take down the system substantially and replace it with his ethics-free vision of an Autonomous Realm in Cyberspace (remember his manifesto? What a grudge he had over it?)
Barlow is co-founder of EFF and is also on the board of the Free Press Foundation, a much newer organization founded specifically to fund-raise for "investigative journalism" and impact litigation on the cyber issues -- and essentially pay for the Snowden caper. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are also on the board. They worked obviously to create the organization and its mission and get its funding long before it was announced in December 2012, which is coincidentally when Snowden contacted Poitras with his hacked files from the NSA, and when Jacob Appelbaum openly recruited US computer coders who were government employees in the intelligence agencies to "leave the dark side" and come over to the "light side" (i.e. actually the dark side of him and his cronies in the crypto parties and Chaos Computer Club and the darknets).
Funny, that.
They raised the money to fund WikiLeaks -- which is most likely how Snowden's flights to Hong Kong and Moscow (along with the lovely Sarah's) and his stays in hotels were paid for -- or at least coordinated with various helpful individuals who like what WikiLeaks does.
Of course, that makes it a little, well, self-serving to pay for the guy who hacked stuff and the gal who filmed him, then award them for their hacking expertise against the security state -- as EFF did in giving them "pioneer" awards tonight. But who cares? These people are all intertwined and cover each other and celebrate themselves. Who is to watch or stop them? Certainly not their boards, which all overlap.
My hypothesis has always been that these people met before they said they did, and that they tacitly or even explicitly gave wish lists or guided the hacking of Snowden, especially when he went to work for Booz Allen to get the best of his trove. I think they could have met at the Spring Break of Code in Hawaii in March 2013 in person -- which is why I think we hear some people talking about Snowden "speaking in public" -- when...he's never done that, ever, except very briefly in the Moscow airport and in the staged and edited film Poitras made.
They may have even met before that, as both Appelbaum and Snowden were in Hawaii in 2012 at the same time. Naturally, with the IRC channels, they don't have to meet, but for a sensitive operation like this, real-world meets are hugely important. Laura spins a story about meeting Edward in a cafe where he signals to them that it's him by holding a Rubik's cube. Maybe that story is Aesopian; maybe it occurred at another time, who knows.
But when I see that list of subjects EFF litigated on, and the list of Snowden's leaked documents as brought to us by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, well, they kinda match.
Now, there are other explanations for this beside a sinister one -- perhaps they'll say that they are the litigations that "anybody" would do if they are fighting that "security state" they believe exists (so secure that...a disgruntled 20-something private on her way to dishonorable discharge can hack hundreds of thousands of documents and bring the State Department to its knees and a narcissistic ideologue who didn't graduate from high school and was a new contractor could bring the intelligence community to its knees).
So thinking about that funny early story from Snowden and some of the other odd stories...What if these litigators and their "hacktivists" swarms were in such a bubble, that they actually thought the Verizon metadata story was some "big deal"? Then they'd get a hacker with the access Snowden had to get *that* document because it was so important to them, and they had a grudge because they lost the case. And so on down the line of other cases, like trying to get Google to have privacy safeguards and so on.
They wouldn't even realize that for the wider public, these stories aren't convincing or even comprehensible. After all, there isn't any major public panic to leave social media -- most people didn't budge from their emails or Facebook, and only a tiny percentage began to use PGP or Tor.
Of course, we all know that these people in EFF and related propaganda operations are not dummies and while zealots and arrogant extremists, aren't stupid or careless. That's why in the 1990s, they could succeed in minimizing the criminalization of phreakers, and stopping Clipper Ship, the effort to institutionalize back doors in the software and early Internet industries consciously, under the Clinton Administration, which they defeated (and it might have been better if it had been allowed to proceed in organized fashion, in fact, just like it might have been better if CISPA had passed.)
So they know the game - they have to pretend that journalists, not hackers, are the ones at stake here -- that's why they put so much emphasis on the phreakers writing newsletters or designing games and having creative intellectual property seized by the feds although they also dangerously undermined the security of telephone companies especially their ability to deal with national emergencies.
They've now perfected that art, converting Appelbaum, an under-educated hacker controversial even among his chums in the crypto world into a "journalist" and of course bringing in Poitras, who used to be a cook before she got into anti-government filming.
So John Perry Barlow or his staff or his cut-aways are all likely careful not to look like they directed Snowden, or told Snowden what to hack, or gave him wish lists, or held his hand as he hacked, or let him know in a "wink wink know what I mean say to more" kind of way what was needed.
Or maybe they weren't. Maybe they slipped. Maybe that's how federal investigators might bring them down, and maybe that's why Greenwald, Poitras, and Appelbaum all stay abroad nowadays, making themselves out to be victims of the security state -- they're afraid that if they came home, they'd be arrested -- and more to the point, they're afraid that their claim that they're only journalists, and just recording "a first draft of history" will crumble if they are shown to be colluding, conspiring, plotting -- making wish lists, or coordinating litigation lists with documents sought.
If you lost a case against the NSA, wouldn't you just die to have their internal memos and strategies about this, and the real details of their programs so you can try another round of gotcha in your litigation? Would you be so eager for this that you could get careless and put in a request to Snowden that could be your undoing? Does some investigator know that already?
I'm sketching this out broadly now merely as a line of inquiry that has to be pursued, mindful that they already have tight alibis and that even raising the issue means they hide any evidence that might be there. Maybe there's a Hawaiian bus boy in a restaurant, like the one who brought down Romney's campaign with the help of Jimmy Carter's grandson and David Corn of Mother Jones, who can positively identify Edward Snowden meeting with Jacob Appelbaum - and he's saved the napkin showing the jots of the wish list (LOL). But I doubt it. Life isn't fair, and then we die.
Still...my sense is that the entire Snowden narrative has its holes and its vulneraiblities and eventually these will crack and the truth will spill out.
I keep coming back to this:
How can you have a "whistleblower" without cases? Without individuals actually harmed, as they were in the days of COINTELPRO? How can you have "whistleblowing" without concrete facts of violations -- and not just hypotheticals?
So over and over again, I've asked for the cases. Where are the people who are innocents, but wrongly surveilled? Or perhaps criminals in the end, but their due process rights nevertheless harmed? Or perhaps even people wrongfully arrested? And all they've come up with is either to claim that out of the 2700 or so mainly technical errors there might be people harmed -- but we don't have names or circumstances -- despite stealing these secret documents that claims the NSA peruses
I mean, at one level, Edward Snowden's hack isn't even as good a hack as a common script kidde in 4chan or Anonymous might have mounted. When the skiddies wanted to get Sarah Palin's email to embarrass her and show her they could do it, they got it and exposed it. When more malevolent hackers in LulzSec wanted to "take down the security state," they went after the contractor HBGary and got Stratfor's private emails that at least had some stuff they would up conspiracy theories around. Nothing really seemed to come of these, despite WikiLeaks claim that they are "sensational," but my point here is this: Edward Snowden doesn't have anybody's emails. He didn't hack the NSA and find a program of wrong-doing and evil, and then prove that it was doing wrong by fishing out somebody's stuff -- somebody wrongfully tailed or tapped or even detained.
He didn't find a Gen. Petraeus kind of story. Instead, it's all "plumbing" as Michael Hayden explained it.
Where's the beef?
The only thing he's mentioned is the "suspected hacker's girlfriend" whose phone was allegedly tapped while she was in Europe. A friend of Jacob Appelbaum's? Quinn Norton, former girlfriend of Aaron Swartz? No one ever answers me. But if we had that name, we could then get the goods. *Did* they tap her? And maybe they had good and lawful reason to? Is that why he won't tell us?
So yesterday, all the Twitterers were abuzz over FOIA files on FISA cases obtained by EFF, and frantically discussing the phone metadata issue again.
So I asked @emptywheel if she found any cases. First, she retweeted my query, which is what she does every time I ask that. It's her way of thinking she's gotten rid of me by seeming to concede a point. All she's really doing, however, is getting her more rabid followers to attack me because she doesn't want to bother.
Finally she did answer but only to rave and rant and claim I hadn't read the documents.
But the reason I asked is because I did read her blog summary and points about them, and glanced at them -- nobody could sit and read hundreds of pages all at once. Indeed, I had trouble even getting these documents to load. I argued with Jonathan Stray about them too, and he insisted there were 2000 plus cases mentioned.
But wait, the narrative shifted here. It's not that anybody found 2000 cases of innocent people with warrantless and/or suspicionless searches in leaked NSA documents; what they have is EFF's claims of such things that they've litigated about. And that's different -- that's whats they say, not a "gotcha" found with the document (as far as I can tell).
I'm quite happy to say I could be wrong in understanding these issues -- they are complex with a lot of moving parts and I don't have all day to study them, I have work and family obligations. But then if you are sincere and operating in good faith, what you say to a questioner like me, then is, but here's the case: it's X or Y. Or you say, truthfully, no, we didn't really find a smoking gun case in the trove of NSA stuff, but we believe we will eventually given the system's flaws. Or you say, but this metadata really does invade privacy and here's how (I don't buy that, and will return to that point in another post).
Instead, I get screeching from someone who is actually quite intelligent and does diligent work, and I get called a "Stasi" -- i.e. that I'd just love to have a state like the old East Germany. (Note that "Stasi" is now the preferred term to describe what the NSA does, supposedly. The left once again slides away from condeming such practices by calling them "KGB" -- they never, ever do that. It's like they call certain police state practices "Maoist" or even "fascist," but save for progressivism the Soviet Union itself.)
No time to put in links now, but if anyone needs them, ask.
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