So Glenn Greenwald is now blustering that he will "name names" and this will be like the "finale" of the fireworks -- you save the best for last.
Hey, does that mean he will stop leaking our national secrets?!
I've been dogging this point for an entire year, pointing out that Greenwald and the Snowdenistas never, ever name names of specific people -- specific victims of this "massive surveillance" they claim is going on. It's always a hysterical hypothetical. That really undermines their credibility. And they know that.
No, LOVEINT doesn't count, as that is an aberration, a job discipline issue, not a systemic issue. And no, extremist Muslims monitored for their porn habits is not the "individuals" smoking gun, either, because their Islamism created the need to monitor them and there is no evidence their rights are violated if efforts are made to neutralize their influence in this fashion. Better that than a terrorist attack.
Bring the suit if you think you've got it, good luck. And anecdotal stories about Doctors without Borders or Human Rights Watch being monitored in the field utterly fail to move me: these groups consciously, deliberately deal with armed movements, terrorists, Al Qaeda, you name it, for the sake of their humanitarian work or human rights monitoring goals, and therefore they have to accept that they will be monitored along with the terrorists whose rights they are concerned about.
HRW is particularly arrogant in this regard just like Snowden, thinking they are above the morality of the common man and can form coalitions and collaborations because of the ostensibly higher issue of documenting torture. That they could do this and still condemn the violations of rights terrorists themselves commit never seems to occur to them.
So that doesn't count. Nor does the complaining of a law firm doing business with an authoritarian country with a terrorist problem like Indonesia. Sorry, no go.
The ACLU knows this, because when I challenged their representative at a panel at NYU Law School last year, they conceded it -- and bemoaned the lack of individual victims that would help "personalize" the Snowden case and "build the movement". Sigh.
They worry that the American people aren't upset enough about Snowden's revelations because there isn't any Martin Luther King, Jr. who has been spied on...like COINTELPRO.
But this isn't a movement that cares about individuals. Like the communists, the anarcho-hackers only care about the masses, the crowds, the hypothetical, not the real person. Supposedly Manning was "converted" to join "the movement" by seeing Iraqis unfairly imprisoned, and yet, he never saw to it that those documents got leaked via WikiLeaks; Assange dismissed them as unimportant (!).
Maybe because they wouldn't show what he claimed, i.e. maybe they had used or advocated violence and weren't the innocents believed. We can't know until we see them. Snowden was the same way -- never any care for any individual except that one story about "the hacker's girlfriend" who is probably somebody like Quinn Norton or a friend of Jacob Appelbaum's who was rightly examined by the authorities. Let's have the name, and let the public judge!
My guess is that Greenwald will leak the names of people already in their inner circle -- the Snowdenistas themselves. They've been trying to make themselves victims the whole time - and it doesn't fly because whereas once they'd be questioned at borders, and even pretended they couldn't come home again, when it came to a prestigious journalism award that will help them keep their cover as "journalists" and not activists and bloggers, they were willing to come back. And they weren't questioned. Whoops, no victimhood.
Then they weren't questioned. Probably because they are already followed. Good! They should be. Anyone helping Snowden should be a subject of investigation and this won't prove any wrong-doing for me. not at all.
If Jacob Appelbaum, for example, is on the list of persons under surveillance by the NSA, I can only approve. People who threaten to reveal the names of agents; people who have already leaked a catalogue spy gadgets used to spy on enemies and keep them in check -- such persons SHOULD be under surveillance, and how! The NSA wouldn't be doing its job otherwise. If the point is that only the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security should do this job of investigating American suspects, I could say, sure, except...Appelbaum has readily collaborated with Germans -- and Russians! -- in WikiLeaks, not to mention the Australian Assange and the Brit Sarah Harrison, so he's a legitimate target of foreign surveillance because he's in touch with foreigners undermining security. The list goes on through their entire inner circle.
Micah Lee, a college drop-out and hacker who helps Greenwald manage and hide the Snowden trove should be interrogated. He is an accomplice, not to journalism but to espionage.
And the lines that Greenwald would draw more broadly away from criminal prosecution aren't trustworthy, either. Michael Kinsley is absolutely right to question whether journalists should be this special class of people who get to determine national security for us undemocratically, arrogantly, and dangerously. They shouldn't. Nor should hackers.
But wait, what if the names on Greenwald's list were my fellow church members, merely working on immigration for Latin Americans? Or what if they were my fellow human rights colleagues, merely critical of Guantanamo? I wouldn't want them to be targeted by NSA surveillance, would I?
Possibly not, but given how, over the years, I have seen people like this, seemingly such innocent church ladies, helping the murderous Communist Party of El Salvador through its front groups, or the murderous Soviet regime even directly, or given how I've seen them gloss over and dismiss some of the very real problems of terrorists let out from Gitmo who commit terrorism -- I'd have to say, sorry, but live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak. Justify violence and help those who are violent because of some other goal (liberation theology or revolutionary or socialism or whatever), then face the fact that you will be under surveillance. Whining doesn't cut it for me.
But wait. What if my name is on the list? Won't I care then? After all, I've been critical of the US prostration before Central Asian tyrants over the NDN; I've been critical of the war in Iraq and the Obama Administration's disgraceful Russian "reset". Shouldn't I be on the watch list?
Well, I'm fine if I am on the list, and if part of watching the terrorist organization, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, means watching some of their offshoots and fronts that I might have written about or even met -- watch away, NSA, do your job.
It's at this point the Internet warrior usually tells you snottily, "Oh, you people who say you don't care if you're watched, you have nothing to hide. How would you like it if I leaked all your email online? You say you don't care if the NSA snoops."
To which I can only say:
But the NSA, unlike YOU, hackers, unlike Anonymous, doesn't leak emails on line. In fact, these gentlemen may read other people's mail; they don't dump it online like WikiLeaks or the Russians.
Here's the difference between the Kremlin and the FSB/GRU/SVR and other intelligence agencies of Russia, and our side:
When the Kremlin orders the conversations and meetings of opposition leader Alexey Navalny to be monitored, they are spilled online on TV or in the news. Giant billboards even go up to vilify him around town.
When the Kremlin monitors Victoria Nuland's conversation with the US ambassador to Kiev, it is leaked online, and harms US foreign policy and embarasses the US in its delicate relations with Ukraine -- to the Kremlin's advantage.
When the Kremlin monitors the EU's Catherine Ashton or the Estonian Foreign Minister discussing Ukraine, it goes up on Youtube and spreads like wild-fire through the old Soviet press and NGO networks that still make the left today -- and discredits Ukrainians.
Compare and contrast what happens when the NSA monitors Merkel's phone.
Crickets.
Do you know what Merkel ever said on that phone?
You don't. In fact, we can't be sure - as it is the duplicitious Appelbaum who has told us! -- that anything more than having her number in a list as a potential "watch" was the case -- and with good reason, given Germany's craven relationship with Putin.
None of these people who have been described as "watched" by the NSA, whether lovers of employers, Human Rights Watch, or Muslim extremists, has had their email leaked on line, you know, the way Gen. Petraeus email was. Oh, wait. It wasn't. Just the fact of it's penetration by the FBI was reported. Wasn't that the case?
So bring on the names -- because we know that you will either a) only be trying to advertise your own selves once again as "victims" to escape accountability; b) not have the content to go with them or c) may have it, but will be too embarassed about what the public might actually think of people fraternizing with enemies and undermining security.
You still won't have a case.
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