Here's the internal email from Snowden that the NSA has just revealed today to expose Snowden's lie on NBC that he "used the appropriate channels" for his "whistleblowing.
A lot of people looking at it took it at face value, saw him as merely asking a know-it-all-question from an instructor about his training, and saw it as merely as exposing him as a liar in just that simple fashion -- i.e., he didn't complain about any violations or expose any wrong-doing in this email.
As soon as I read it, I realized "where he was going with this" as that he was in the "meta" mode of all the hacker anarchists and technolibertarians, trying to play "gotcha" with literalisms to entrap his superior into saying that "yes, executive orders are supposed to be equal to federal statutes, therefore, gosh, I guess the president went AWOL there on some national security directive."
That's what it was really all about -- and in his megalomania, he imagines he's doing heroic legal work and establishing that authority has run amok and the Rule of Law Must be Restored. Except...he doesn't really believe in the rule of law or he would use proper procedures and also not harm national security.
As you can see from not only this post, but my time-line filling up with heckling idiots, hackers love to get away with hacking and then try to get it blessed as "not" hacking. They want to be the ones to define the word, and they insist it means what they say it does.
In that, they're like Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen and some of the other Alice-in-Wonderland characters. Remember this?
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Through the Looking Glass.
or
“There is no use trying, said Alice; one can't believe impossible things. I dare say you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
or
"The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
In each one of these examples, language and meaning are being perverted -- the rule of law -- and some arbitrary pernicious misrule and chaos is put in its place -- arbitrary tyranny. That is what Snowden wants -- he and his friends decide what words mean.
Hackers inhabit this world of perversion of language naturally and almost obliviously. At some level, they do know what they are doing is wrong -- you can see that implied when they brag about their exploits which they admit are exploits -- but they are always trying to get away with murder.
Snowden is the quintessential case of this. He keeps trying to speak things into being just by lowering his voice and taking on a knowier-than-thou attitude -- in that swaggering macho tone of the slight, thin nerd boy so well captured by a Second Life blogger who said early about Snowden -- "He probably deliberately lowers his voice because he thinks it impresses women."
He never went through the proper whistleblowing channels, and what he's doing now is prevaricating -- pretending that some literalist email he sent trying to play gotcha with some NSA instructor over the levels of legal authority in the US -- is "whistleblowing". He pretends merely by invoking and referencing this meta concept that he has "done what is right".
I predicted that within hours of Snowden getting punked with this NSA revelation, Marcy Wheeler would appear -- like the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty -- and claim that the thing meant what she meant it did. Sure enough, she did.
The Guardian told the story the same way.
As did Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake Dissenter.
As did Bart Gellman of the Washington Post. All the inner sanctum. According to the same script.
The usual suspects.
Marcy is the most famous concern troll of the blogosphere. As a lefty, she really could care less if a CIA agent's name was revealed. The "progressives" and left are the LAST people to care about how well intelligence agencies do!
In fact, if it were up to her, if a CIA person's name was revealed in some war zone, she'd be glad because she'd say the US was illegitimate and the war was unlawful and therefore the "higher law" prevailed. She has no basic concern for protecting the CIA, which she scorns.
But WHEN she can turn a CIA name leakage into a club to beat liberals or conservatives not of her political camp, why, then she suddenly becomes gravely concerned about what it means to have revealed Valerie Plame's name. Suddenly, it's of world-historical importance because she needs to show that the people she hates are *like the thing they hate*. (Saul Alinsky method -- and before him, Leninist method) They are the real ones to care about the CIA and worry about leaking -- they are for the security state and she is not.
So if she can catch them out in leaking the name, why, she's undermined their credibility. This legalistic gotcha is what it's all about, and it gets dull and annoying quickly because it's not a substitute for insight or analysis.
Marcy, who isn't a lawyer and has a Ph.D. in literature with a focus on the feilleton, then spent years flogging the Plame story -- and similar stories -- although as we know from her celebration of Snowden and her failure to condemn Jacob Appelbaum's threats to reveal agents, she cares not one whit about exposure of intelligence services. That's why all this is so fake.
So not surprisingly, like the Guardian and Kevin Gosztola at Firedog, she has a "legal analysis" as to why Snowden's seemingly mundane quiz question -- pretending to be a suck-up student while really attempting to create a gotcha paper trial -- is actually "whistleblowing."
As I point out, these issues she thinks constitute legal violations have never been found as such by a court of law, to my knowledge.
Maybe they will be, but they haven't been. Separation of powers and the rule of law matter, and of course if the government violates our own laws and sanctions torture, you want the policy to change, the legal interpretations that sanctioned this to be repudiated, and those responsible punished.
Except, Marcy is stuck in third gear on this and has been for 20 years. She wants to kep showing that the law is always violated, the powers never separated and executive power and agencies are always evil. You wonder when the end state will come. What perfect state would arrive for her where separation and balance of powers would exist?
In fact, for a lot of people who read and retweet @emptywheel revolutionary executive power in anarchist movements is actually what they seek, nothing like a complex and fluid and dynamic separation and balance of powers. Too complex for them.
I'll say it again: Snowden, for all his fetishizing of the Constitution, and keeping it on his desk, in fact deeply scorns the Constitution.
In his book, Glenn Greenwald quotes a telling email from Snowden where he perverts the quotation from Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson said this:
Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Snowden said this:
Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of encryption.
That's awful. That means "code is law" for Snowden -- as it is for all in the hacker tribe -- and it means encryption -- which is a weapon -- might makes right -- is to be used in favour of having the rule of law over the government -- and frankly coders and pretentious "whistleblowers" as well who imagine that they have to do the work of the courts and Congress because they "aren't doing their jobs".
Worse, while Jefferson had in mind human nature -- which isn't perfectable -- and the need for laws to guide the individual man, Snowden is revising this to imply that the state is by nature mischievious and individual men need to have maximum encryption to hide from this ostensibly unruly state. See how perverse this gets?
Really, pay attention to this because it's vital. Encryption is force -- math used to keep law-enforcement out. That's it's actual usage by the crypto-anarcho movement. They are overthrowing man for machine here -- because encryption is self-executing code concretizing the will of the coder. When you have the Constitution, you don't have self-executing code, you have a system which provides for a constitutional court which interprets the law by a set of premises of the rule of law. The rule of law is over man.
With code, you have the rule of some men over other men, using code -- it's a very definite premise. Code is force, only; it's not law -- it's primitive sets of 0s and 1s meant to execute like a weapon, every time. That's not what the Constitution is, which is more organic and works by reason and logic, not just logic.
Again, this is hortatory. Snowden, again and again, thinks he can exhort things into being by just appearing on TV and pronouncing them. He needs to be a spy to appeal more to the Germans to get asylum, why, then he'll be a spy, even though he was really only a sysadmin. He keeps his hosts mesmerized in these cases, but people need to break the spell.
If there is some executive order that trumped a federal statute when it was supposed to be subordinate to it, then let a court decide if this is the case. I would hope this would be done lawfully and not tendentiously or in a politicized manner. But this wasn't proved yet.
And perhaps laws have to be changed, you know? Hackers are all for changing laws their way, but if you point out that maybe we need to revise the law that makes Americans who are communicating with terrorist suspects abroad as somehow exempt from surveillance due to their First Amendment rights and such, that infuriates them because they want "freedom". Here's the thing: it has to be debated, and not imposed as a fait accompli by hacking.
As a brilliant fellow noted on Twitter, Snowden stole all those documents -- whether 200,000 or 1.7 million -- a lot! -- yet he didn't take out copies of his own exonerating email? What??? That's crazy. Most people who have a beef with a company keep a "crime file" and bring it out with them when they leave.
I suspect that the reason he can't give these names is because some of those people might be accomplices.
Recent Comments