To which I can only say, good! Because HRW meets with violent jihadists and forms coalitions with some of their front groups in the name of combating torture. That may be necessary to defend human rights, but then, they can't cry foul when states legitimately watch them because they are meeting with violent jihadists and those in networks supporting directly violent jihadists. This isn't just a free speech issue. Here's a little twitfight with one of the Intercept "adversarial journalists" (Greenwald's organization funded by Pierre Omidyar).
Quite amazed to learn news orgs that exposed Prism (WaPo/Guardian) apparently still host their email w/ Prism companies (Microsoft/Google).
I could go into a long discussion about how Al Jazeera takes the side of the Palestinian authorities and Hamas and covers the Israel/Palestine conflict in biased fashion, but why wade through 3,000 of my words? This tweet from a journalist who used to work at Huffpo and now works at AlJazeera, praising a biased person like herself on CNN, says it all:
And there's lots more at all three news agencies where this one came from. To move the slider to say "resistance" -- some kind of legitimate fight back against supposed cruel oppression -- and skirt the glaring issues of Hamas terrorism all these years in so many places, not to mention the suppression of their own people means they are not trustworthy when the speak of "rights of news organizations."
A news organization can't cloak itself in the First Amendment and the Pentagon Papers and Art. 19 endlessly and use it to justify violence and jihad, which is antithetical to other civil and human rights.
I don't see that Intercept or Human Rights Watch or anyone has actually done due diligence to show that the actual US-Saudi Arabia collaboration has actually directly been used to harm the Saudi human rights lawyer Waleed Abu al-Khair. Maybe it has, and if so, terrible!
And, sure, that's horrible and our government being compelled to deal with this horror is an awful thing. That the US is forced into this situation because of all the other Arab states supporting terror is of course the backdrop for this situation that Intercept and HRW always conveniently ignore.
Of course, we're very far from the privacy beat for American citizens that Snowden claimed was his original motive and his beat. I have to wonder about the motivation for publishing this document -- and only now. Odd.
Why he has to expose necessary alliances like this to harm national and international security isn't clear, except that...it was never really about privacy. It's always been about using privacy as a cover to wage war on the US state -- and clearly in concert with, and on behalf of, real enemies of the US and freedom in general, such as Russia, China, Iran and others. Pretty despicable stuff.
You don't have to like Saudi Arabia to realize that it's part of a strategy in containing Assad in Syria and more.
So why this publication, at this time, when Russia is waging war on the US which has rightfully found it guilty of MH17?
There is sheer madness today as all the crypto-anarchists -- the avante garde of the Google lobby -- are bombarding the FCC's website to put comments in support of the ill-advised "net neutrality" policy.
They've already made the servers fall over, and they think this "flash-mobbing" is something "good," although it's a dangerous undermining of democracy.
The goofs at the FCC in the IT department, including the ideologue currently in charge, David Bray, thinks this is "the public" instead of a lot of hackers and Google executives and are cheering it on.
It's hard to know where to start in debunking this entire crazy enterprise, which I've done in bits and pieces over the years, but here's a place to start - just read these paragraphs:
3. Strengthen FCC’s IT Security Posture
The FCC IT’s highest priority is to provide a safe and secure environment for performing the Commission’s mission. With rising cyber-threats, the challenge nowadays is anything connected to the internet is inherently vulnerable to being compromised, no matter what defenses you apply. As such, we will improve the security of FCC’s networks and improve the protection of the privacy of user information by baking-in automated alerts, compartmentalized controls, and system resiliency at the code-level of our modular modernization updates.
The FCC has 200+ different systems, a surprisingly large number of systems for a Commission of only 1750-or-so people. We will modernize these systems by encouraging the Bureaus and Offices, as well as relevant FCC partners, to storyboard their desired “to be state” and then produce modular components for the systems tailored to the desired workflows, both internal and external to the FCC. Joint collaborations with our programmatic partners will help ensure that the priority modules we produce will make best use of the Commissions’ resources. These new system modules ideally will be cloud services, allowing us to reuse code for similar projects if the workflows are the same. We also are working on an “open source by default” policy at FCC for these modules and other IT efforts, to include hosting an expert panel to discuss this topic later this summer.
Leave aside the new-speak and hilarity of phrases like "storyboard their desired 'to be state'" (let me copyedit that for your -- desired 'to be' state -- do you have any doubt in your mind why Snowden could get away with what he did with goofs like these in charge of systems?
There's the sinister problem of "open source by default".
That's always a terrible sign of cultishness, and lack of reason and bottom-line common sense. It means they pick awful systems like Drupal merely because they are "open" and don't count the cost of endlessly tinkering with them. It means they don't think about the real security and customer service that can come with proprietary systems that could well be better for the job.
We went from people claiming there should be "choice" about "whether" to have open or closed source, to gliding -- not surprisingly -- to "open source by default".
That's because totalitarians always insist on "one way" and don't like choice -- and in this case, they disguise that oppression with the misleading word "open".
Does it make sense to try to file a comment against "net neutrality"? I did, despite the flash mob.
I'm very concerned about your bad practice here of inciting and inflaming flash mobs from the "net neutrality" cultists and the Google lobby -- which is undemocratic and alarmingly unfair. This matter should be voted on by congress, not decided bureaucratically in an agency with their Internet friends. Just because a bunch of geeks can flash-mob your site with 30,000 comments and make your servers fall over doesn't mean the "public" has spoken. We have elected representatives and appointed officials in a democratic government that should be deliberating on this without mobs shouting down discourse in Congress and other branches of the executive. It's also clear the FCC is overrun with people supporting the software cults and "net neutrality" madness. Look, bandwith is a scare resource. Stop thinking you can shift Google's business costs on to us, the real public via taxes. If companies need two tiers and metering to deal with costs, let them. Stop trying to destroy ISPs and cable companies, the only bastion we have against Google monopolization.
I don't know what it is about Twitter that makes some people feel as if they are in a prayer group where members are supposed to have come-to-Jesus moments, or in a self-criticism circle in the Soviet Union or China, but there it is -- pious finger-wagging and demands for soul-searching.
OK, I took a hard look, Noah, and I still don't believe in Snowden, I don't believe in the hack or its merits, and I don't believe this latest leak is the horror you imply. Not at all.
Let me explain my thinking on this.
Surveillance is Normal Law-Enforcement Activity Like the Cop on the Beat
For me, the NSA's surveillance activities mainly devoted to monitoring foreigners and mainly oneline are something like an old-fashioned cop on the beat in real life -- it's merely that all our lives are transposed online now, so people forget what materially made up the surveillance of the past and what it meant -- in cyberspace, it always seems more scary and amplified and "Orwellian" but it isn't.
As this real-life cop walks along, he looks at storefronts, homes, cafes, schoolyards, parks. He notices people who are always part of the scene who are "normal," he notices things out of the ordinary, he notices who is hanging out with whom, he notices double-parked cars or cars parked in no-tell motels or kids hanging out on stoops or whatever he notices. He doesn't need a search warrant for this surveillance; it's inherent in his job of walking the beat. He looks; it is his job to look and watch.
When he gets to some actual incident or complaint or crime going down, then he might need a warrant, or have to exercise judgement to act to the extent he can without a warrant. But he doesn't need a warrant for the glance at every little flower bed, dog, old lady, hooded teenager playing basketball, Muslim prayer hall. It's all part of the scenery; it's what goes against the usual pattern of activity that he knows from walking the beat that requires a greater look.
Let's say the government has to find out somebody's phone number in another city. In the old days, they'd take that city's entire phone book, get everyone's numbers, their street addresses and the other information of who lived next to whom, if they got into it. But they didn't need to look at all that tome of information to do the job of trailing the suspect.
Or let's say they got a warrant to tap a phone line of a suspect, say, a mafia don, or they got an informant to wear a wire. They might along the way hear from wives, girlfriends, kids, babysitters, grocers, doctors who would exchange information or numbers of "content" that would be irrelevant to the case. You could huff and puff and say all those green-grocers and psychiatrists and priests on the line with the mafia kingpin were having their privacy grossly violated, but the police didn't need to look twice at them; they weren't the target.
Manual vs. Automated Collection and Intent
Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, a prosecutor in a previous life (he worked with Rudolf Guiliani, of all people), notes this phenomenon in his argumentation in favour of Snowden -- that sure, prosecutors and detectives might get a lot of phone numbers and information as they pursue a suspect, but it's manual. It's not massive and not automated.
Except, to me, the distinction between manual or automated is not a material one that instantly speaks to intent or motivation -- as it does for Snowden and the Snowdenistas from Greenwald to Bruce Schneir on down -- because intent really does matter, and is not automatically confered by machine capacity.
If the government dragnets communications, I don't see that as an instant violation or fault by definition; first, seldom has the largeness of the "dragnet" claimed in these Snowden leaks ever been the case (and isn't with this story, either), and second, the government doesn't look.
But for the Snowdenistas, the hysterical hypothetical, the edge-case the "what if" is the violation, and they think capacity=action.
Yet the NSA doesn't act on the lion's share of this collected data.
That's important to me. They don't drill down and gratuitously make files and cases and pursue people mindlessly for no reason just because they are caught up in the net designed to pursue another suspect.
So these people with their anguished love lifes and baby pictures and weddings that Bart Gelman is so worried about in fact have had their privacy far more outed by him than the NSA. The NSA never said, "Hey, we have all these baby and wedding and high school graduation pictures, let's post them." They have, instead, files designed to pursue suspects. Along the way, the old lady crossing the street on the cop's beat, the doctor calling the mafiosi's wife in the prosecutor's example, and so on, are included in the files. It doesn't harm them because they are not targeted. It's not about them.
If these pictures and communications were on public social media, no harm no foul. If you don't like being slurped up by any entity out there, good or bad, don't put things on the Internet.
If they are from private emails or DMs, it's still no smoking gun of violation or proof of ill intent. Because the government doesn't look, doesn't pursue, doesn't randomly and arbitrarily go after people.
No, This is Not Like COINTELPRO
If we had COINTELPRO-like data, where we could see the government relentlessly targeting, say, all the girlfriends and wives, past and present, of the Tsarnaevs or some other suspect, trying to squeeze them or trying to set them against each other, we could take a look at it and say, this might be a violation of civil rights.
But is it? What is, and what isn't? Since when can you really expect exemption and a pass if you befriend or marry or have a relationship with a terrorist?
You can't! And it's not only unrealistic to expect otherwise; our national security might depend on something you in fact know about this person, and you should help. If you think the privacy of you and your baby pictures trumps the needs of other people to keep their legs attached to their bodies, I'm sorry, many people will believe otherwise. And so will the government -- no one but the Washington Post and the NSA knows any of these names, and unless Washpo leaks it, there's no case.
How Russian and American Surveillance Differ
And that's just it: the Russian version of these leaks always involve maximum, public damage not only for the target but anyone within striking distance. Unlike the NSA, the Russian kind of operation spies on opposition or Muslims or foreigners or anyone suspicious, then spills out their conversations in the state-run media to maximum ruinous effect. You don't know what Merkel said on her phone ostensibly bugged by the NSA; you do know what Toria Nuland said on her phone bugged by the FSB. Difference. And an important one.
Serious Reasons for NSA Surveillance!
What's extraordinary about this story of the solipsistic and sectarian Bart Gelman, is this:
He tells us about some really serious events:
o fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project
o double-dealing by an ostensible ally
o a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power
o and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Good Lord, those are all very serious things. All of them merit watching, and that means targeting suspects involved in them. If along the way, the photo of a toddler in a bathtub or a love poem from a girlfriend gets slurped up, it is set aside; so what? It is not looked at; it is not published; it is not used to blackmail. And that matters.
There is no evidence it was used to harm those people or violate their human rights. And there were valid, serious reasons for watching these events!
What was the COINTELPRO method repudiated in the past? Gathering that kind of info, then using it to extract confessions or cooperation from the original target. So if there was a mistress, it might be leaked to create stress and trouble with a wife, to disrupt the subject or get him to talk.
There is no evidence that any of this side information was used in any way to get anything out of the original targets, i.e. as blackmail or to sow confusion or make trouble with dirty tricks.
Bart Gellman -- and by extension Noah Schachtman -- seem to imply that the mere existence alone of a medical report or a kid's picture in this email snag is itself a wrong-doing. But it's not. It hasn't been used; it hasn't even been looked at likely until Snowden decided to try to play gotcha with it and the Washington Post wrote about it.
Turn-key Tyranny?
But oh, they say couldn't such passively collected data, not used now, be used at any time in the future? Isn't that the danger, they have a "collect 'em all" mentality and this will result in "turnkey tyranny" -- Snowden's cunning little term?
Well, no, because they can't demonstrate that this is happening. And if they are tracking a suspect involved in a secret nuclear project, sorry, but I think they get to keep the collection of wedding and graduation messages and pictures in case they do become relevant, even if nothing was relevant now. Because the matter is that serious.
My Boyfriend the Taliban
Now, let's look at the star of this story, the unfortunately lovesick woman who fell in love with an Afghan man who brought her tea in bed and made love to her despite the restrictions of their religion but who ran off to join the Taliban.
He then responded sternly to her lovesick messages and was going to marry her only if she agreed to get their families' approval and let him control her Facebook (!). And she's worried about the NSA having a passive stash of her messages when she has a future husband like that who is much more of a real problem?!
Come on people, let's get a grip here. This guy is joining a deadly movement who have killed most of the civilians in the war in Afghanistan, not to mention our troops. They have a deadly oppressive way of life in which women are mere chattel kept in sacks. We're supposed to worry about some pictures and emails when it comes to something like this? Why? I don't see any compelling reason.
This woman -- who now has a good job with the Australian government (!) is weeping that these files still remain with the NSA. I guess she found this out because Gellman told her? How else would she know? Well, that's what happens when you have the poor judgement first to try to get over your shattering divorce by suddenly converting to Islam, then falling in love with and pursuing a guy who is joining the terrorist organization of the Taliban, our enemy.
Sorry, I'm going to do the unthinkable and judge someone who has done that because the Taliban kills people.
If anything, she should have said to government agents, "How can I help?" That this doesn't even enter anyone's minds in this discussion is proof of how low civic culture has fallen or how shredded it is -- no one thinks that's the right thing to do, although the Taliban is a movement that not only kills our soldiers, it kills most of the civilians in the war and oppresses women, and there's a place where this woman's privacy fits -- which is not trumping the need to oppose such a deadly movement.
P.S. Given that we would never have heard about her were it not for Snowden and Washpo, whose the real eroder of her privacy now?
Again, could you remind me why we're worried about some love poetry or somebody's prescription when THAT is what is at stake? Murderous groups that kill people, including our soldiers? Why is there no sense of balance here?
Good Deeds That Result from Dragnets
I notice that once again, as with all Snowden stories, there is an extrapolation from this stash of stuff -- which involves X suspects and the Y larger circle around them as "everyone" and "the government in your email stealing your toddler tub pictures."
But it's not everybody, it's just those related to these suspects. Was this for a good cause?
So...Bart's going to be a swell guy and not leak the details of those worrisome affairs I just mentioned above, but then he says there are certain achievements from this program based on the "dragnet":
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
So, good! Sounds like the program does what it is supposed to -- catches bad guys! We're supposed to be upset that it has tens of thousands of irrelevant emails in the process? When was the last time you read all your email archives? The NSA hasn't read them, either.
Are We Losing Benjamin Wittes?
Sounds like the data it has to dredge on the way to that may be larger than what libertarians like Cathy Young are comfortable with -- she is re-tweeting Noah's pious admonition -- and who knows, we might lose Benjamin Wittes on this one, too, which would be sad, but he's wavered before on other issues so it stands to reason.
But realistically, I can't get too worried -- bad guys are caught, other bad guys are in the target sites, and the toddler pictures and the girls in skimpy shorts are set aside and marked irrelevant, obviously.
Did Snowden Know He Had Content and Did NSA "Lie"?
Now here's where Gelman and co. get particularly melodramatic, and this is what is being regurgitated now with great glee and faux alarm by Mother Jones and all the rest:
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
Well, the reason why anyone might reasonably suspect that Snowden didn't get content out of all his numerous files and slides about metadata and such is because, well, he himself never mentioned it nor did his scribes.
Therefore it's not necessarily that NSA officials are "lying" when they say they believed he didn't have access to this -- it's a perfectly normal and reasonable assumption. Because Snowden himself gave no indication of this.
The breathless and dramatic haste with which Gelman and others rush to say the government is "lying" is totally unseemly; they themselves are lying if they themselves misportayed this situation all this time. Gelman's disclaimer that "time was needed for analysis" doesn't explain why for a year, nothing was ever delivered on content.
These large numbers are supposed to scarify and alarm, although tens of thousands of discrete messages could resolve down to the 400-500 the NSA said it targeted in their recent "transparency report". Think of the hundreds and thousands of emails or IMs or DMs or texts you send in a day. It adds up. It might be necessary to grab that many pieces of communications to track someone. I don't see that large numbers in and of themselves constitute some smoking gun of abuse.
Again, a reminder: we don't see that any of this was used to harm people unrelated to targeted investigations, or used in dirty tricks against the suspects.
What Constitutes a Dirty Trick?
And frankly, I'd like to have a separate debate on what constitutes a dirty trick. The pious hacker set thinks only they have the right to hack, DDoS, spread information, and use social engineering on other people, and if *gasp* the government uses any of these methods, some in a gray area and some possibly illegal, why, that is such a horror.
This is moral quandary, of course, along these lines: which you rather risk bombing a country developing the nuclear bomb that it might use on its neighbours, or would you rather risk making a virus that would infect the software of the machines in the nuclear program that might then deter progress on development of that nuclear weapon. Life is about nasty choices, dealing with the nasty very real enemies we do have, and maybe that's justified.
I'm not certain it is, given everything, and I'd rather see more HUMINT methods used and more pursuit of defectors and help to opposition, but at the end of the day, it's a debate worth having, and not an open and shut case as the pearl-clutchers imagine who never cross the street to condemn Anonymous hacking the shit out of everything from corporations to newspapers, but who cluck at GCHQ or NSA doing the same back to Anonymous -- who commit real crimes for which they really go to jail.
So, sorry to disappoint, once again, I'm unimpressed and unmoved by a Snowden leak. I think there is nothing that justified this leak in civil rights or ethical terms because now the rough parameters of some serious incidents are indicated, and triangulating to figure what those were about is probably not too hard especially for the bad-willed.
Gelman has created a false proposition that we are to now lobby to end such collection in the belief that it doesn't stop terrorists anyway and violates civil rights. But his own piece explains who was indeed stopped, and does not show any violation of civil rights other than some hypothetical notion of what attaches to passively-held data.
Congress needs to move vigorously against these types of manipulations coming from the Snowdenistas and call their bluff. The NSA is once again shown doing its job properly, successfully, within a context of regulations, and no harm, no foul. No action is required due to this revelation.
And that means truly, no action. No amendments from Zoe Lofgren should be passed by the Senate about backdoors; if there are backdoors, they are needed to pursue suspects, this latest leak actually shows that care is taken in doing this, that collateral collection isn't massive, and such as it is, it has not been used in any way to harm or violate civil rights.
Congress needs to strike at the heart of the Snowdenista myth: that capacity of machines and capacity of collection equals the same thing as the ill intent to use it to harm or worse, the violation of civil rights.
It is neither, and Congress should stop accepting this manipulation put over by crypto-anarchists who are using these issues not for their own sake, but to try to take power.
Suddenly, there is a big swirl of activity on the secretive Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks operative, confidente of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who stayed close by Edward's side for those long, cold four months he was in Moscow, waiting to get asylum and get settled. Then she went to Berlin on Revolution Day, November 7, after arranging a meeting between leftist parliamentarians and Snowden, one of whom was the lawyer for the Red Army Faction in his day. She ostensibly couldn't return to London because she "knew too much."
Since that time, she's made herself scarce, although of course appearing at 30c3 to lovingly introduce Assange to the other chaos-makers, in tandem with Jacob Appelbaum.
Now, there seems to be a PR campaign to do several things:
o cut her loose from Assange, which of course, always has bad associations -- there is so much that is wrong with him, ranging from refusal to face the music on the rape questioning to having lured Snowden to his doom in Moscow to just being an all around asshole who instigated the largest hack of diplomatic documents in history and then engineered the largest hack of security files in history.
o make her appear independent of WikiLeaks the institution, which is basically a hollowed-out shell now run only by Assange's ego and his few loyal acolytes, including her and this fellow named Joseph we never hear from;
o make it appear that she is focused on larger issues but also loyal to Snowden
o make it appear that she is talented, dedicated, above reproach, etc.
So, a concerted PR campaign explains the sudden appearance of a highly positive fluff story on her in the Washington Post, which pre-empts anything bad about to be said of her.
Or anything bad about to happen, like, oh, you know, the sudden leakage of the entire Snowden stash (she could have a copy too, come to think of it, but somehow, I don't think so.)
And as I said, there's this other development, which is the much-ballyhooed news that she in fact broke with Assange last year. This is discussed on Wikileaks support forum, which is actually critical of Assange. They have news that Harrison met with Daniel Domscheit-Berg and his wife -- Assange's enemies and that she has broken with Assange supposedly (I think it's quite possible she was just gathering intel).
I'm not steeped enough in Assange lore as PGPBoard is to understand all this, but I think it's possible she is "pre-positioning" herself in case the huge leakage by WikiLeaks of all of Snowden does huge damage to her rep -- unless she's pre-repaired it. Or some other development.
I have my doubts about her actual breakage, knowing how cadre movements run -- given that she lovingly introduced Assange at 30c3 last year, together with Appelbaum, and just now appeared with him on a summer school program.
Although that was scheduled a while ago.
Of course, she may continue to be supportive of him in public for the sake of "the movement" and actually have broken with him, but I have to wonder. Not sure what all this means, but the bottom line is: there is a lot of activity now to spin Sarah as a positive figure, doing good works, and even breaking with Assange, and I think that isn't happening in a vacuum. I think it's pre-emptive.
So, which one of the Snowdenistas are going to leak the entire Snowden trove?
@cryptomeorg (John Young, who runs the hackers' site cryptome.org) has threatened to leak the entire Snowden stash this month -- possibly in conjunction with the Hackers of Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York (my theory). HOPE is where Jacob Appelbaum famously took Julian Assange's place as a speaker because ostensibly Assange was going to be arrested for WikiLeaks.
At this point, we have to realize there are probably dozens of people with copies of this entire stash, or big chunks of it.
That's because it has moved from journalists' tech helper to editors to other journalists to other tech helpers, and along the way, there's nothing to stop especially the tech helpers from helping themselves. That's what they always do first.
1. So, the first person to get and stash and entire set was likely Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) because he was the one first to help Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald to get, handle, move, hide, and later access again the stash of documents -- which could be 1.7 million or 1.5 million or 200,000, we don't know.
THAT these journalists and helpers do not know what they have is stunningly obvious now, if it weren't before, because of the latest expose about the NSA surveilling Tor (good!). Obviously, anything about Tor, were it available and visible before, would have been served up by Appelbaum by now -- because he's obsessed with his own baby. He chastised Greenwald and essentially broke with him and ceased to be his tech helper last year when GG didn't move fast enough to publish a Tor expose to suit Appelbaum. Back then, Appelbaum said he would dump the correspondence (and he implied, possibly the files, too) on this if it weren't published. These are nice people, truly. No honour among thieves, as they say.
So Jacob Appelbaum is my first candidate for a leaker -- he has the motivation (spite, extremism in political views) and the love of glory for being bad-ass.
2. The second candidate is Snowden himself -- having gone even more rogue than he already is. Snowden made a big show of saying he would be "incremental" and give journalists the documents so that their "judgement" would be part of the equation, but given that he chats with them everyday, sometimes in the form of a robot in the offices of the ACLU (I'm not kidding) that rolls around between desks, he's obviously continuing to press his views on them. He might have once said certain things shouldn't be leaked as a "professional" matter or a matter of "duty," but we don't know if that became eroded over time.
Snowden may have become upset at the monetarization of the files by Pierre Omidyaar, who bankrolled Greenwald, Snowden and others at Intercept, a news outlet that was going to keep dripping out the scary items on a non-profit basis, and then serve to spook us into buying privacy equipment that Pierre was going to sell on the side to make money. Great racket.
Or he might have simply gotten tired of what seem to him like half-measures of reform, laws on meta-data not passing as he wished, reform efforts watered down, bureaucracy, whatever.
He may seek the cleansing solution of a total, purifying leak now, and from his perspective, he might justify this.
3. The third candidate is Micah Lee -- he's Greenwald's new tech helper, replacing Appelbaum, and he's got a copy. I've asked him directly whether he would do this. He doesn't answer, but instead insults me. He may have seen that Greenwald is starting to get out of the business. Greenwald announced strangely that he is going to have his "grand finale," like fireworks do, and leak a document that finally, after a year of no cases and no real basis for claims, will produce COINTELPRO like names and faces and civil rights violations -- supposedly. Then he sort of walked back this cat on Fox News -- and it's not clear WHAT he'll do or why he is essentially "going out of business".
But an answer to that question might be this: because he knows that the entire trove will be leaked, and it's a fire-sale -- that devalues all his own monetarization of the files although knowing how these things work, he will probably have many happy and productive years on the talk show/lecture/book/article circuit serving as the expert on Snowden and the NSA and he can probably go on milking profits from this for a long while to come. I don't oppose milking profits as an activity, although there are likely ethical considerations about what it means to make millions of dollars off stolen state documents.
4. Another candidate for the Big Leaker is of course James Ball, the former WikiLeaks operative -- once WikiLeaks, always Wikileaks, like Occupy or Anonymous or the KGB. It's not like you reform hackers and crypto kids, they remain so even if they transform opportunistically into journalists. He is now at the Guardian. In that capacity, he muled the stash over to the New York Times when it became clear that Rusbridger was going to be seriously charged with aiding and abetting terrorism if he persisted in playing around with these Snowden documents. So the Guardian made the decision to palm off the stash to the New York Times, which has the protection of the First Amendment.
5. In addition to James, there's another tech guy with the NYT whose name escapes me at the moment who bragged about his trip to Radio Shack to buy more CDs to put the files on -- he's yet another candidate. See what I mean? There are a lot of fingers on this pie, and think of it as Vanity Fair, and the bonds trader who keeps a crumb from each slice he passes on? Except copies are weightless and often undetected, what with all the Tails/air gap/Tor/crypto kid stuff they do.
6. Ashkan, who is Bart Gelman's helper is yet another candidate, except I don't think Gelman ever got the full set, but he has a lot, anyway.
7. Bruce Schneier, the radical "security" guru who loves hackers might be another one who has a lot of the files as he has helped Greenwald. 8. There's all those characters at Der Spiegel who are part journalist and part hacker -- they may not have the whole deck, but they have some stuff and maybe some of them are that close to Appelbaum that they do have the whole deck in case something happens to him.
9. Remember Glenn Greenwald's partner who muled the files from Germany via London to Brazil -- and got stopped? Well, maybe he kept a copy, as insurance, who knows.
10. Laura Poitras. She has the whole set. Is she quite done with Greenwald and Appelbaum and Assange always hogging the limelight when she does all the work? Is she even more done with the lovely Sarah Harrison getting attention as the younger, more sexy operative when -- again -- Laura does all the work? Hell hath no fury -- and who says her politics are moderate and incrementalist? They aren't. She's more radical than Greenwald. And hey, what has she leaked lately? Nothing. Maybe they won't let her? So she'll show them!
11. The other question opened up by Jake's latest disclosure is whether there is a second Snowden, i.e. it's not that these are new previously unseen Snowden documents (Greenwald says he hasn't seen them, but that could be a protective legal maneuver), it's that there is a second mole. And that mole, possibly run by the Kremlin, or run by WikiLeaks which is infiltrated by the Kremlin or collaborating with known Kremlin operatives, gets more stuff, and then pretends that it is Snowden stuff so it's all on Snowden -- the Cuckoo's Egg scenario.
Cryptome went through various gyrations recently during their fund-raising telethon to make an approach to their enemy, WikiLeaks, and Assange, with whom they had broken years ago on ethnical grounds ostensibly (honour among thieves) because Assange ripped people's secreted Tor files and based WikiLeaks itself on that hack. Supposedly Sarah Harrison was going to arrange all this, but then the deal seemed to break down. Hmm. Given that Assange would likely be for leaking all the Snowden docs as a matter of principle, it's not clear why the relationship broke down based on technicalities of setting up the meet or hand-off, if they were really determined to make common cause in the face of a common enemy.
Once the Snowden docs are all leaked, will it matter?
Well, probably not, at first, it's July, people are on vacation, there are too many of them, and they are too technical. Cablegate only has 200,000 items, far less technical, accessible to anybody willing to sit down and learn about a region's issues even on a headline basis, yet most of the material has never been discussed. It never got the attention Assange thought it should, because he thought in his linear, binary way that all you had to do was leak everything, the US would be brought to its knees and force to become unlike itself, and therefore discredited as a democracy and thus defeated. Leaking was a technique to attack the US, not something that was a good in and of itself, which is why Assange himself never bothers to return to these files or any others he has leaked.
Leaking isn't about content, it's about having power over people; ditto encryption, which isn't about privacy, but about power over other people.
I believe the files would be damaging, in the way radiation can be damaging even if not immediately sensed or felt.
I suspect there's a bluff here, and it may be that as a bargaining position to get WikiLeaks to cooperate, Cryptome may have to appear to have these documents to leak, I don't know, it's murky.
Meanwhile, I think Admiral Rogers doesn't miss a trick, and has positioned himself to make it look like it doesn't matter anyway. It's what every girl does when she know she's going to get revenge-porned by her ex-boyfriend. "It doesn't matter."
I find it appalling, that he's willing to keep a straight face and say these leaks weren't damaging, because of course they were. I don't know what he's up to here. I'd like to think it was all part of a grand psy-war with Ed, in which they are trying to play down the crime and make it look like the time for it therefore may not be so bad, and Ed should come home. But I think that's not likely what's going on; I think what's going on is just institutional CYA spin.
I think in the Stockholm syndrome that the NSA has got to be in since this whole Snowden thing went down, one of the coping mechanisms is to keep telling themselves that it is not so bad, afterall.
And there's this, as I've noted before: they're not going to paint a big fat target on their backs, and say, "Hit us again, we admit we are weak and in disarray and this did terrible damage to us." No self-respecting agency would do that. So they are mum, or they mumble about how it is not so bad, or they are upbeat. Understood. That doesn't mean that it wasn't damaging, and that this Big Leak won't be even more damaging.
What I wish would happen is that more journalists would spring up taking an adversarial view of Snowden and the leaks so that they look criticially for their damages. I've pointed in the direction of what needs to be done -- matching world events that involve Russia and are in Russia's interest with the timing of the leaks. This isn't rocket surgery, but I don't have time for it. I wish someone did.
I'll point out that we have yet another strategic coincidence like this again: the news that a German spy who first tried to peddle his wares to Russia (ostensibly), and then decided to spy on Germany for America, and got caught. My hypothesis: he was working for the Russians all along, and deliberately staged the clumsy spying on Germany for America in order to get caught and ruin relations further. Seems pretty obvious to me, even if a tangled web. It's a provocation. The Russian spies excel at this.
Just at that moment, comes the NSA leak du jour at nearly 8 pm tonight on a holiday weekend -- you'd think they'd save it to get more attention next week but they also think they can get more people to read it if they are relaxing by the pool and not preoccupied with Iraq or birth control decisions.
Recent Comments