Wired State

What Has Hillary Clinton Accomplished as Secretary of State? I'll Tell You

Here's what I wrote quickly off the top of my head for the comments on this article in the National Review which was reciting a mantra I hear from my GOP friends now all over. If I worked at it more or was a professional foreign policy wonk in good faith, I probably could come up with more. But here's a start.

I find lately the "Hillary accomplished nothing" meme is just a mindless mantra of Republicans and Hillary-haters and I'd challenge those regurgitating this meme to tell us what they think Bush accomplished, seriously. Or Obama in his first term. Mainly, all American leaders are in reactive damage control mode because most of the world's forces, whether tyrants like Putin or mass-murderers like Assad or terrorists just aren't under their control and they have little affect on them.

But here are some accomplishments one can book to Hillary:

o Worked with then-President Medvedev to get concession from Iran in 2009, which included the Russian moratorium on selling S-300s. To be sure, Putin is undoing all this now, but it held while Hillary was in office. Someone might prefer to book this to Obama, but it's Hillary and her staff that had to slog through this so it counts.

o Ran the Russian reset -- I personally don't think this is an accomplishment and I think we shouldn't have had it, and should have had deterrence, but part of the theory of getting Russia to help on Iran and getting progress there was to reward Russia with "reset" detente, which had a certain run for awhile in exchanges and such - before again, Putin undid it.

o Getting most of the OSCE members to sign the digital freedom act which Russia opposed -- which of course Snowden undid by hacking the NSA and making the hoax that the problem in the world is US intelligence instead of Russian hacking and the evils of Russia and its allies. But to her credit, Hillary backed the OSCE, which paid off in that it was available and robust enough to come and monitor the war in Ukraine. This is far from perfect, but it has actually been important for emergencies from MH17 to monitoring the ceasefire and the world is better with OSCE than without it.

o Dealing with Karzai and Afghanistan, personally travelling there and dealing with the surge. Again, the surge isn't something everyone supports and I have my own doubts about it but it's there as an accomplishment in some sense.

o Dealing with the Central Asian governments that the US was forced to bring on as partners with the Northern Distribution when Pakistan blocked access to ground logistics for the war in Afghanistan. And she had to do this right after WikiLeaks which revealed her ambassadors' very frank and critical reports on these tyrants. She extracted a few human rights concessions, she advanced some American business in this region like the GM plant, and she tried to gain cooperation from this collection of autocrats. Nothing spectacular, but good enough. By contrast, John Kerry has been absolutely uninterested in this vital part of the world and even messed up the name of one of the countries, a gaffe that would have been endlessly ridiculed in the leftist/liberal press if he hadn't been a Democrat.

o Benghazi is something many will blame on Hillary, but I think the problem goes higher/deeper which starts with Obama's mea-culpa in the Cairo speech and also frankly ends with Amb. Stevens himself not leaving the area after the UN convoy was shot at in which Ian Martin, the experienced UN official, was travelling. It was a belief that technocratic solutions to these countries, US good will and language knowledge, would "fix things" instead of relentless deterrence. "Engagement." Hillary partakes of some of that culture too, but to blame Benghazi solely on her is not to understand how the State Department works and to refuse to admit that the State Department, whatever its problematic USAID culture, bends to what the current president wants most of all.

o Hillary is able to deal with the UN, which like it or not, is important for getting some things done in the world. She headed the delegation to the Beijing conference on women's rights and had a record of promoting women's rights and opportunities around the world. She had numerous dealings with UN leaders and the Security Council; obviously the State Department's IO section deals with UN headquarters and other UN agencies. On Hillary's watch, the US came back to the UN Human Rights Council, which was the right thing to do, because despite the presence of tyrants and thugs there, you have to be in it to win it.

o Hillary has traveled to most of the countries of the world -- that counts. A lot of the world's workings are behind-the-scenes, and as I started out saying, having to do with reacting, putting out fires, maintaining. This counts. Having to start fresh with Rubio or some other GOP candidate with no experience or very little experience overseas outside of Cuba/Latin America for example, will be awful. Hillary has been there, done that.

o Hillary does stand up to the Russians because she gets them in a very basic way that Obama, with his youthful pro-Soviet DSA ideological constraints could never get. She quite rightly pointed out that the Russian Eurasian Customs Union is largely fictional and so far only has 2 former Soviet republics willing to join it -- others dominated by Russia won't join because they don't want to reassemble the Soviet Union. I think experience and practice with Russians is vital because they are a primary evil actor in the world -- they back Assad in Syria; they back Iran; they back the anti-American third-world movement wherever they can; they do not support international institutions like the ICC, which the US does more of not even being a signatory; they undermine and destroy OSCE, UN HRC, etc. and I think Hillary grasps this and can hold the line.

o Under Hillary, gay rights also became an official part of US foreign policy and were promoted internationally in every way.

Do these items not sound like world-burners? Does this list seem like a lot of hollow bureaucratic achievements that matter only to insiders in the world's civil servant class? Well, perhaps, but they matter. This is how the world works -- holding the line, advancing American interests incrementally, getting along with other countries, being professional about managing disputes because they will never be resolved.

By contrast, I can't think of anything that Kerry has accomplished, because I don't think undermining our national security with the Iran deal is an accomplishment, I think it's an alarming disaster. Contrast what Hillary got -- a moratorium on S-300s out of Medvedev -- with what Kerry got -- Putin selling them to Iran the very next day.

I also think his handling of the relationship with Israel -- and Obama's hatred of Israel is back of that -- has been disastrous. Again, say what you will about Hillary -- she does not hate Israel and does not hate the Jews. That is a plus. I value that, and you should too.

Now on domestic issues, what's very important about Hillary is that she isn't a socialist and you will never hear from her socialist "you didn't build that" rhetoric as you do from Warren. That counts for a lot with me; say what you will about the Clintons, but they aren't hostile to business and that matters. I think they represent the difference between socialism and *social justice* which is different -- and a distinction you will not get out of the hard left/"progressives" of the Democratic Party who should just leave and form a Socialist Party with Bernie Sanders and see who shows up. That will not be me.

I notice a number of people whining that Hillary has increased her own wealth. This bothers me not in the slightest, although I am a poor person myself. What on earth is wrong with increasing wealth?! This hasn't been done illegally nor in some way that his harmful to the environment with oil spills or something. There really is no *good* ideological reason for slamming this other than spleen and free-floating hatred of the rich that belongs at The Nation, not this magazine.

 

Why Apple Should Not Be Allowed to Build Invincible Encryption Blocking Government and Why Ron Wyden Must be Stopped

Here we go again with Senator Ron Wyden claiming that "Congress" may do something even though it's only it's just him and possibly a handful of crypto warriors and Google water-carriers in Congress that are going to oppose the federal government's request not to create invincible encryption and enable criminals on cell phones and other communication devices.

Wyden always stumps for the copy-leftist and crypto-kid position -- anti-SOPA, anti-CISPA, anti- anything that curbs Internet lawlessness or attempts to make the Internet the same kind of highway under the rule of law as any real-life highway.

And so it's no surprise that he's picked up the sectarian view of the ACLU's Chris Soghoian, Trevor Trimm of the Foundation for Freedom of the Press and all the Snowdenistas that if the government has a "back door" into phones this will somehow mean the end of the world for freedom and privacy.

Let me point out that the very use of the term "back door" delegitimizes the act of government monitoring of communications -- which should not be delegitimized when it is lawful pursuit of criminal suspects.

The companies should provide "front doors," and their failure to do so is part of a general crypto-war hysteria which will lead us right here soon enough, and has already.

Why isn't reason being used on these hysterics?

Of course for as long as there has been telephones and other communication devices in America, the government "had a backdoor." The feds or police could get a warrant and put a wiretap on a phone. Nobody fretted about "back doors" and "criminals being able to do this,  too." Of course there were taps without warrants too, and the case could be made for these in some instances.

Now, even with a warrant they will not be able to access suspects' phones because they have uncrackable locks on them to ensure privacy --  privacy that even trumps crime control.

The "back door" always is portrayed as something sinister, but the government's ability to wiretap phones is not sinister, it is lawful and moral in a country under the rule of law in order to fight crime and terrorism. The extremists are not conceding that; Wyden is leading the charge now.

This is worrisome, because by his own admission he led the one-man-band against SOPA, and merely because Google and related NGOs could stampede the tech media and the tech-savvy cool kids, Congress rolled over, fearful of appearing uneducated about technology.

There wasn't a case against SOPA, but it was hard to be heard over the noise of Google needing free, uploadable content always and everywhere to sell its ads with.

This case might be easier to make morally and legally but Congress better have its wits about it or Wyden will undemocratically win again.

His arguments are the ones that crypto guru Bruce Schneier and others have made for years using the open-source cult perspective of "privacy for me and not for thee." The crypto kids get to have maximum encryption to do whatever, including running anarchist movements to overthrow the government, aiding terrorists and thug governments such as Russia and Iran have. Meanwhile, free and liberal states like the US have to have maximum transparency under this coercive scenario, and if they don't provide it, Manning and Snowden will hack the hell out of them and provide the world's bad actors with classified documents. Nice work if you can get it -- and they do, easily, because of the Wikification of Everything.

Wyden cites the same bad argumentation the sectarians have for years -- and watch it go mainstream now that a mainstream paper like the Christian Science Monitor has picked it up. That notion is that "the bad guys" will be able to find and exploit these "back doors" so it is better not to have them at all.

Of course, this is specious and binary thinking. You can't design a system based only on the hypothetical that a bad guy might decrypt it. You don't say "the bad guys might rob houses so let's not have locked doors with keys." You design a system to deter and work as best as it can and be flexible about continually fending off the inevitable challenges of spoofs and hacks that every single digital thing on earth has to face. That is the nature of software and there is no pretending otherwise. What would you rather have, the unplanned hacking of the inevitable vulnerabilities in supposedly invincible software, or a planned program where tech companies and the government cooperate in chasing criminals?

There's an essential intellectual contradiction here. Cryptos can endlessly create "math" and generate random sequences of numbers to foil decrypters and make decryption even invincible. Yet those attempting to keep out hackers can't use the same math principles, somehow, to keep out hackers by devising ways to change the keys. That's not logical. The ISPs shouldn't have data in one box anyway that any hack would get at the entire identity and contents -- compartmentalizing, "hashing" and "salting" and such -- are the way these systems are set up or should be set up. Therefore this hypothetical of a "bad guy" getting at the same key that a law-enforcer is entrusted to by a tech company to tap communications is only a theory.

I think the problem we're seeing now is what happens with a lot of tech and Interpret propositions. A tiny sect of ideologues imposes a notion on the entire public by invoking "technology". Well, let's hear from technologists outside of the sect. Really, you're going to make a box nobody open, not even your own company? Even though in the past you ran systems that eliminated obvious things like child pornography in customer content? You're sure that's a good idea and you're sure that you can't figure out a way to have sequences of numbers integrate with a changing key? Why?

Like every other online system in the universe, the companies will have to use a combination of encruption, obfuscation, social engineering and reiteration to fight the constant challenges of hackers that are a built in problem of an Internet that Tim Berners-Lee and other technocommunists deliberately created as a copyable, permeable thing for "sharing" and "science," never imagining that ordinary people might need it for "making a living" and "keeping secure". That other Internet that serves people and not sharer scientists with collectivist ideologies still is being built but the 'net routes around, and it will route around its misguided pioneers as well, fortunately.

But meanwhile, Apple can't be allowed to build boxes the government can't pry open even with a warrant and this sect that Wyden champions has to be exposed as what they are: enablers of crime, and worse, enables of anarchy to change liberal democratic systems.

One solution is having two-factor cooperation which is "complicated to build." OK, but that's better than creating unopenable boxes that drug dealers, terrorists and child abusers can thrive in.

And there is another solution to the problem Wyden is creating which he will hate, too, but too bad -- bring back CISPA. Yes, the government and ISPs and tech companies can have organic cooperation in order to control the tech monster that the Internet has begun. Imagine that. Not ever transaction has to be the totalitarian oppression that geek hysterics like to pretend it is. Just as you could have perfectly well blocked pirate sites just the way you block malware sites, the government and tech companies can cooperate to stop piracy and stop terrorism while they're at it by opening up the boxes that need to be opened for this purpose when and as needed.

Wyden and whatever comrades he gins up for yet another run at law and order has to be confronted with the obvious points here: crime, terrorism, mayhem. Just what is the good senator's plan for enabling law-enforcement to catch criminals? How are they to do this without the ablility to get into phones with a warrant? They're supposed to be driven back into the last century and become mere gumshoes personally tailing people again? What is the plan?

In other words, Wyden's invocation of a worst-case hypotheses for the "back doors" has to be thrown right back at him as a real case, not a hypothetical -- the bad guys will use encryption for crime *as they already have done, numerous times*. This we've seen amply in the exploitation of Tor and Tails for Silk Road, the drug mart, for child predators, and for anarchists.

The CSM invokes the "sweeping surveillance programs that collected the communication records of tens of millions of Americans." But the CSM, like so many boosters of Snowden, have never come up with a single case where they could say any of those millions of Americans actually were harmed, had their privacy busted, or were wrongly tracked by the NSA, by having, say, a Taliban boyfriend - a legitimate reason for surveillance .

Why is the CSM opposing FB Director James Comey and NSA Chief Adm. Mike Rogers? And oppose them they do when they give Wyden a loudspeaker in an article like this featuring his argumentations prominently and not enough air time to others with very reasonable counter charges. Indeed, Wyden spoke at a breakfast the CSM sponsored.

The CSM reports:

In response, senior officials including FBI Director James Comey and NSA chief Adm. Mike Rogers have demanded a secure channel to access encrypted data – which they say is necessary for law enforcement and intelligence to track criminals and terrorists.

Does the CSM think this is NOT necessary, and could they care to prove that?

They don't. Instead, they have one of these meme-quotes from Wyden:

What takes my breath away,” Senator Wyden said at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor on Friday, “is that these are some of the most cutting-edge companies in our country. They pay workers good wages. They’re doing important research. Their brand is on fire around the world. And the federal government is going to say, on the front pages of the paper, it’s going to require them to build weaknesses into their products?”

Um, no, Ron. They're not going to require them to "build weaknesses in their product" -- certainly a tendentious characterization of what is needed. They're going to ask them to open up on demand, which means having a process and a system through which the feds can jack in. They can do this on copper-wire phone lines of the old-fashioned type, and the modern equivalent must be created for modern cell phones. There is no logic except sectarian Internetism to explain why it should be otherwise.

Remember the little sticky with the smiley-face? No one at Google every validated that it was true that the NSA broke into their servers at all. A former Google employee claimed this; there was other talk. It wasn't the CEO or founders of Google; it was programmers who didn't speak formally for the company. If Google, to protect its brand, has now made a big theatrical show of crypting its cloud and so on in response to Snowden-induced phobia, understood, but then what is THEIR plan for a society that has to fight crime and terrorism? Will they be sponsoring it with their products?

Why is it that Google, essentially an ad company with a free search loss-leader, so determined to support Snowden? I think on the whole, it's just Internetism (which is like Islamism), where anything that gets in the way of these big Internet companies being the ones to scrape data instead of anyone else is simply to be hated.

I think this has to do with the more exotic issue of founder Sergei Brin espousing a kind of one-worldist utopian government -- or non-government -- idea that is common among Soviets/Russians/tech people, and that there should be "no parties" and "no religion, too" as the John Lennon song "Imagine" has it. Brin wants just online likes or algorithms to decide things not parties, elections, and voting. So anything that means a state -- like keeping secrets that Snowden hacked -- isn't really in Brin's vision. That's my understanding of it, and if you have a better one, let me know.

I think in keeping with the California Ideology and left-libertarian ethos, Google naturally falls into a place where it wants encryption for non-state actors particularly itself and no decryption for states.

The current Apple phone encryption and related crypto issues is the third wave in a long-standing crypto war. The first was over Clipper Chip, when the industry -- or really, a few extremists like Mitch Kapor and other comrades whip-sawed companies and the government on this -- refused to have a chip that would enable the government to access devices. So they didn't, the Internet emerged, and more and more crime spread online.

The second was over PGP which the government wanted to classify as a weapon -- a very good idea for something that claims invincible encryption meaning it can be used by bad actors. The government didn't want this exported -- yet its makers wanted to conquer more territory. Eventually, the government lost this round, freeing PGP up to go on causing mayhem unchallenged.

This can't be allowed to happen in round three.

The alternative is the crypto horror scenario actually predicted in the 1990s and which is already largely here.

Does Google Web Cache Backdate If You Backdate on Your CMS?

This is a test of the broadcasting system.

To research the strange story of the appearance on Peacekeeper, the Ukrainian web site, of two entries for people who were murdered, I'm going to see what happens if you backdate your blog and then post it, then delete it, then hunt for it in Google cache. Here goes.

Soldatov's Interview On Snowden, Nemtsov's Murder, the White House Hack and Tamerlan Tsarnaev - Further Questions

My colleague Michael Weiss has a an interview with Andrei Soldatov at the Daily Beast from which we can get the following important take-homes:

1. The murderers of Boris Nemtsov were highly-trained because the assassination operation was complex and sophisticated and most likely it was Russian intelligence behind it, not the Russian mafia or returning Russian fighters from the war in Ukraine;

2. Edward Snowden is acting strangely and one obvious thing is his failure to give a single interview to a Russian journalist and to admit that he is under heavy guard.

3. The Russians didn't really help on the Tsarnaevs and the Boston Bombing investigation and the FSB (Federal Security Service or domestic intelligence) don't really want to cooperate with the FBI.

4. The Russians who hacked the State Department and the White House were sophisticated and may have had inside knowledge and might be the same ones who hacked opposition leaders in Russia.

All of these things might seem "obvious" but it's important when they are validated by Russians and put in print.

These are all important messages that we seldom get from the run-of-the-mill coverage of all these topics in the US or Russian press but that's why it's worth picking them apart.

1. The Murder of Nemtsov was Done By Skilled Intelligence Operatives

First, the Russian press -- the in-bed-with-the-secret police press like LifeNews; the more-or-less-free press like RBK.ru and Ekho Moskvy and Novaya Gazeta; and the state loyalist press like Komsomolskaya Pravda have all put out various version of the Nemtsov murder, but more often than not -- even with the independent press -- it works like this:

o an FSB agent or an Investigative Committee investigator or a "law-enforcer close to the investigation" calls up his journalist/regular drinking buddy/curated agent of influence and tells a story;

o the journalist takes out his steno pad and copies it down or -- more likely -- uses ctr-v and ctr-c (the Cyrillic keyboard equivalents) to cut and paste the story directly from a private email into his news story. Walla.

Very few stories have gotten fancier than that, truly. There has been a wide variety of crazy claims about the murder made from officials to semi-officials to conspiracy sites but they've settled down along two lines: a) these Chechens related to Kadyrov did it, but they are just the trigger men/direct perpetrators, the real organizers are their commanders/their relatives/somebody big in a Chechen crime family or b) they don't look like these Chechens and maybe it's the guy Viktor/Yevgeny who is the witness himself or maybe some other people.

None of these stories are very deep, and none of them ever consult experts to see if any of this fits. Russian media has long since learned how to put a range of experts on to news stories, so, for example, if it is a gas pipeline story there will be experts from this or that think tank or if it is a budget story this will be this or that economist but on Nemtsov's murder, there's no experts at all. Either they don't exist, or they aren't talking. The only thing faintly approximate is the effort of former Kremlin aide Andrei Illarionov taking the known weather camera video footage of the murder from Moscow municipal TV (TVTsentr) and matching it up with the LifeNews narrative - and guess what, it doesn't match. Then some other bloggers did the same thing with the recycling of this same witness later by Kommersant -- and also found that it still didn't match up.

So Soldatov's learned hypothesizing about the murder is definitely worth something because no one else has really done that. However, we're left with some questions.

In an interview with Valentin Baryshnikov of RFE/RL on March 2 (just days after the February 27 murder), and in the Daily Beast interview, Soldatov makes the reasonable point that the murder required precise timing and skill, and therefore the people committing it were likely highly trained.

That means they weren't just random people driven by a crime of passion, or semi-skilled returnees from the war in Ukraine, maybe from some ultranationalist group, with a beef with the "fifth columnists" they saw vilified in the press. Or even the GRU, Soldatov tells us in the RFE/RL interview.

But who said anything about the GRU? The GRU takes care of military intelligence and foreign intelligence related to military security and wouldn't be expected to be the agency that would perform a domestic hit. So why mention them?

In the RFE/RL interview, the GRU isn't eliminated because it's not the "appropriate" agency for a domestic hit, it's eliminated because "it doesn't have sufficient training". Huh? Since when does the GRU not have sufficient training to assassinate people?

Russian agents abroad killed the Chechen Umar Israilov in Vienna and Zelimkhan Yanderbiyev in Qatar, for example. That wouldn't be the FSB, as they operate domestically. It might be the GRU if the Russian state reasoned that Chechens are a military threat, say, with Al Qaeda, and need to be eliminated. Could it be the SVR? Or these hits on Chechens abroad could be done by Kadyrov's own personal loyal troops in the Interior Ministry -- in which case they are way outside their legitimate operation zone, but then, Uzbek Interior Ministry are said to do the same thing, and in Kadyrov's case, it might make sense. After all, these "Interior Troops" are the ones fighting in the war in Ukraine abroad -- at the Donetsk Airport, for example, where they were killed -- which is how people learned it was they who were involved.

But the claim that the "GRU doesn't have the training" doesn't make any sense to me, even if it might make no sense for the GRU per se to be involved with the murder of Nemtsov -- although again, perhaps it was by contriving a rationale that Nemtsov was involved with Ukrainians, Russia is at war, at least covertly with Ukraine, and therefore it became a matter of "military intelligence." Stretched, but not impossible.

In the Daily Beast interview, Soldatov discards the reference to the GRU, but still speaks about people who are trained at a higher level than the people who we might imagine to be doing this.

One of the first versions was that Nemtsov could have been killed because of his position on Ukraine by some rogue elements of separatist groups, but I don’t think these sort of people have the training to organize such a sophisticated operation, and the Chechens with military experience also have no such training. Let me explain: The best of them could be close to the level of Spetsnaz [Russian Special Forces], and the average Spetsnaz do not carry out these kinds of operations. As far as I know, the Spetsnaz units have a list of the kinds of operation they’re trained to do—ambushes and military-style assaults and so on. But they are not trained to plan these kinds of sophisticated hit jobs in a major city. It means that the level of coordination present in Nemtsov’s attack excludes veterans of Spetsnaz and people who got a similar training or below—i.e. all kinds of veterans, say, of the conflict in Ukraine or the Chechen Wars. They could only be used as executors of a plan but not as the planners themselves. For this, you need intelligence people trained at a level higher.

So who has the training to plan and orchestrate a murder like this?

Well, we can say two things: Such a high-profile assassination would either be carried out by the mafia or by intelligence agencies. Since there were no high-profile mafia assassinations [in Russia] for many years—the last one occurred in 2004, when a guy on a bike put the bomb on the roof of a car in Moscow—then the version about an intelligence service looks more plausible.

The question remains: Who could be involved in planning of such a sophisticated operation? Some people in the security services are trained to do these things as the Russian secret services since 2006 have been authorized to conduct the assassinations of terrorists abroad. There have been a number of operations, some skillfully executed, for instance when some Chechens were killed in Istanbul in 2008-2009. That’d be the natural choice. 

What are the Trained Troops?

But then wait, does that mean that these Chechens currently in custody couldn't be the perpetrators because they aren't trained?

How does that work, exactly?

And why aren't spetsnaz trained to kill people? I mean, isn't that what you do in the army, kill people? To be sure, killing combatants in an armed conflict isn't like making a hit on a civilian, but there are some similarities, and we need to get precise here.

Which exact secret services are authorized since 2006 to conduct assassinations abroad -- and might do them at home, too? A certain branch of the FSB? What?

Chechens in the Interior Troops in fact hunt down rebels or terrorists and kill them in villages and forests. Sometimes they do this the easy, untrained way, by waiting until they are inside their houses with their family, then surrounding them with overwhelming firepower and even armored vehicles and shooting them until they die. Sometimes they let the women and children come out first, then shoot them.

But other times they stalk them into villages and woods and kill them in ambushes. Sometimes there are drive-by hits or rammings of cars and shootings, but usually it's the terrorists/militants who do that to each other/the police rather than the other way around.

So what's different about the urban hit? No trees for cover? That pavement isn't as springy under your feet and you need sneakers?

To me, aside from this elusive question of "training" -- which I want to hear more about from people who have actually been in this training or are familiar with its actualities -- there are three things required of an assassin in Russia:

1. The willingness to kill somebody. That's not an ordinary capacity, and killing someone on a contract or for an ideological reason requires overcoming the normal moral code, so it already takes a criminal-minded person or someone very ideologically motivated or cynical.

2. The ability to shoot a gun. Not everyone even who has been in the army for 18 months is going to know how to do this properly when it comes to shooting and killing a person in the wild on the run, on the spot, as distinct from target practice.

3. The ability to procure the weapon and ammunition, organize the getaway car, and get out of town without getting caught.

Obviously it's on no. 3 that the current suspects --- if they are the real perpetrators -- were not so well trained -- not as trained as the killers of, say, Israilov, who got away and weren't caught.

Of course, on top of these three things, there are the "organizers". These are the people who get guns that aren't so easy to get in Russia as they are in the US; who get money; who get cars; who provide safehouses. Particularly in the area of safehousing that the "organs" would be expected to excel. And yet the houses were all discovered -- if we are to believe these are the real perpetrators.

And that's the disconnect -- on the one hand, Soldatov tells us that the murder as it was executed was very skillful, and yet on the other hand, we have this gang-who-couldn't-shoot-straight who have been caught mainly because of surveillance cameras and the traffic police scanners which are more intrusive than people may realize.

How is it that people who were skilled enough to pull off a finely-timed operation on the bridge in the rain in the dark to kill a man on the fly without tripping the local cops on the beats or the FSO protective squads around the Kremlin or some other forces? Yet weren't skilled enough to get their getaway car and safehouses lined up right?

So either these people aren't the killers at all but are completely accidental -- and some of them are producing alibis -- or there are still "masterminds" somewhere. Except, what did their masterminding consist of, exactly? Hey, if they were such masterminds, couldn't they hide the car better? We're told that the killers bought it from a woman in a Moscow suburb and didn't even bother to change the registration from hers -- although they racked up a lot of parking tickets and that didn't seem to raise any red flags, either, for months before the killing. Does that sound like masterminding?

We're told by the police reports leaked to the press that there are two kinds of bullets at the scene and that creates the impression of amateur-hour -- "they had to scrounge through their pockets" to get the bullets, said one investigator -- because normal, equipped, planned, sophisticated killers would have one of those nice fresh boxes of ammunition with the crisp straw the way Givi at the Donetsk Airport has always had throughout the war in Ukraine.

They also haven't found the gun, and hilarious (or creepily), three guns found in the Moscow River under the bridge so far aren't the gun that used those bullets that killed Nemtsov.

The Feud Between the FSB and Kadyrov

Soldatov also notes that he doesn't buy this supposed feud between the FSB and Kadyrov, that the FSB needs Kadyrov because he gives them leads about ISIS which they are very hepped up about.

All that's true, but it's like the way the US needs Russia for Iran, and then has sanctions against it over Magnitsky and of course Ukraine. The relationship can be...complicated.

I agree it's far too pat the way it's been portrayed, because it's explained to us (in Novaya Gazeta and RBC.ru and Kommersant) as a high-stakes game where either the FSB prevails and reins in Kadyrov and prosecutes the killers or Kadyrov literally gets away with murder.

But it might be more muddled than that.

Certainly so far, however, we'd have to say that the FSB is not winning -- nor is the Investigative Committee. These are the data points for that:

o Bortnikov has not spoke about the murder since March 7. That's a long time ago. Only FSB agents leaking to the press have provided actually very contradictory stories -- some saying it's Kadyrov's people related to Ruslan Geremeyev, and others saying no, it's anti-Kadyrov Chechens run by Adam Osmayev, who is fighting on the side of Kiev. That's quite a diapazon, as they say in Russian.

o the Investigative Committee sent agents to Grozny and they weren't able to interrogate Geremeyev. Indeed, they required Kadyrov's reluctant intercession even to speak to Demlikhanov.

o the suspects are saying they confessed under torture and have alibis.

So, if the theory is that Kadyrov did this as a favor to Putin -- but also as a way to rein in Putin by essentially pinning this on him like it or not, he's winning so far. Only lower-level people are in jail and the real masterminds aren't.

But this in fact may suit the FSB, especially if they're the ones who did it after all.

And that's where I keep coming back to this "training" issue. Isn't the FSB trained in assassinations? Perhaps they haven't been able to keep up their skill set as they did in the good old days of the KGB and NKVD but it's not as if there are no dead Dagestanis or Chechens, you know? And other assorted people who may have gone to their reward via the organs' skills.

But to play the devil's advocate for a moment -- are we absolutely sure that this is a skilled operation? After all, Boris was a big, lumbering target with no bodyguards, right out in the open. While one leaker said that Nemtsov's habits were erratic and it was hard to follow him, that's actually hard to believe. He saw the same opposition friends and went to the same places like Ekho Moskvy, where he gave an interview right before his murder. He had the same apartment and same office where he worked with colleagues. He probably like most people went to the same favorite restaurants and when his girlfriend visited, perhaps in particular had the same favorite haunts. There was only one way for him to walk home to his house from that restaurant. So maybe it was not so hard.

All the spotter had to do was follow him, then call the killer who was idling in a car below the bridge in a parking lot. Yes, the timing had to be precise, but as Nemtsov and Duritskaya were walking slowly up the bridge, it was fairly obvious.

Except here are two important points that we get from the weather tape (if we are to believe the analysis of it):

o The killer did not shoot from the car, but seemed to come out from behind the street cleaner, possibly even jumping off the street cleaner, and then get into the car; he did not disappear down the steps (as was reported initially) -- there is no one on the stepsm

o The street cleaner blocks the view of this right at the time of the shooting -- but only from the perspective of the TVTsentr camera, not from the perspective of cameras right on the lamp posts on the scene.

Could the street cleaner guy be in on it? This is one theory, especially as he had large debts and quit his job after the murder -- so he might have a motivation to be paid off. After one interview on LifeNews, not to be trusted, he disappears from the story. Indeed, timing a murder with the route of a street cleaner takes the cleverness of Yury Kuryakin of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. - so...FSB?

There's another angle that hasn't been worked very well and which I think is an obvious question for Soldatov who will know more than most about the FSO, although this wasn't addressed.

Viktor Zolotov Combines the Interior Ministry Troops (the Chechens' Boss) and the FSO

Could an FSO agent be the murderer? Yes, the job of the FSO is to protect and serve, and not stalk and kill. But surely, to protect leaders of state, they have to learn how to shoot and kill targets. What exactly is the training of those 20,000 troops in the FSO? And we don't know the narrative that people in the Kremlin tell themselves.  Maybe they convince themselves that the "fifth columnists" really are a threat and they argue backward from that to justify having agents do thing they don't do normally.

Could Viktor Zolotov, who combines the job of commander-in-chief of the Interior Troops -- the ultimate boss of even Kadyrov's personal army, you know? The ultimate boss of Ruslan Geremeyev? -- AND has the FSO background -- be the ideal person to arrange this, out of loyalty to Putin, for whom he has served virtually as a bodyguard all these years? Is that why he disappeared when Putin did soon after Nemtsov's murder -- he had a cooling off period? Or some other forces challenged him/Putin/the MVD/something?

A rumor was even spread that Zolotov was dead when Putin disappeared -- but then he turned back up alive and well.

The SVR defector Sergei Tretyakov talks about Zolotov and others as discussing plans to kill Putin's enemies.  Zolotov was even rumored to say "there are too many to kill." But did they get started on "the list" anyway?

The murder seems to have been committed in the FSO zone, but no one has confirmed that because it's secret information -- so we need a defector to tell us this - but in fact Nemtsov himself, who may have known this information in his capacity as deputy first prime minister said that the area on the other side of the square was in the FSO zone when he discussed the lone picketer arrested by the FSO. Nemtsov called the FSO "stupid" in a Facebook post.  Could that have provided some extra incentive to kill him?

No one knows these answers to these questions because there are no fresh defectors nor leakers who might have heard something inside the FSB or other intelligence agencies.But few are asking questions.

The "Not Dadayev" Killer Claimed by Witness on the Bridge

For example, LifeNews and Kommersant leak the story of Viktor or Yevgeny, but then they don't match it with the weather video; and those analyzing the video don't have access to Viktor/Yevgeny to challenge his story. He says the person identified as the killer isn't Dadayev, and yet his description of a man in a black hoodie with an elastic waistband with wavy hair with jeans possibly a size too big in fact exactly matches pictures of Dadayev where in fact his hair does look wavy, he's in a black hoodie with a wasteband and his jeans are a bit big. He also doesn't look that tall.

So basically what's needed here are some other sources who have actually gone through spetsnaz training -- whether in the MVD or GRU or anywhere (a variety of agencies have things called "spetsnaz" or "osnaz" which is also a kind of "special") to say whether they learned how to kill people in a timed, organized kind of way. And we need some others to analyze whether the killing -- at least as it has been described -- was sophisticated or not, and if so, why it was that these people were so easily caught within a week.

If the FSB planned it, couldn't they have given sufficient bullets, and bullets of one type? or did they deliberately recruit some Chechens at loose ends to involve so they could pin it on Kadyrov? Now that takes planning -- making a killing look like people who aren't the real masterminds did the job.

2. Snowden is Acting Odd and Won't Talk to the Russian Press

Now let's look at what's said about Snowden. Yes, it is completely odd that he is never allowed to speak to Russian journalists, even the most loyal, controlled state types, let alone independent reporters.

And that's because any Russian, even a total myrmidon, is going to ask questions a bit more savvy than Americans -- all of whom seem to have developed either amnesia about how the KGB works or whose curiosity about Snowdens' guards has been chloroformed. One can understand that it might be a condition of the very interview not to ask Snowden questions about his guards or his security arrangements. But John Oliver didn't even tell us about the car with the tinted windows and the circuitous routes he took, which is what we got out of some of the Snowdenistas in the past.

Why?

It's good Soldatov is highlighting once again the glaring fact that Russian journalists can't meet him -- and that strange interlude with the "Snowden awards" is also mentioned - which occurred after Snowden was featured asking a pre-fabbed question of Putin on a talk-show -- an act he justified even after his own handlers were face-palming.

It's here Soldatov should be reminded of his own enthusiasm about what a "breakthrough" this was at the time for the domestic lobbyists for privacy and against surveillance -- he implied that now a "national conversation" could be opened up in Russia because Snowden has publicly challenged Putin, and Putin had essentially lied in his answer.

Except, from the get-go it was clear that this was going nowhere, and represented nothing at all but a disinformation smoke-and-mirrors, because there can't be any conversation with a president who says there is no spying. It's not like Snowden is going to champion the cause inside Russia, and the Russian Internet technology community is too timid -- Putin caused Yandex to lose millions of dollars of share value just by implying they weren't very loyal because they had a foreigner on their board, and implying the Internet as a whole was an untrustworthy business because "The CIA invented it." Imagine, there's Yandex, the Russian answer to Google, and instead of building it up and taking pride in it, Putin is causing it to lose millions. That's not exactly a setting for a national conversation. I might add that Snowden's "opening of the national conversation" took place just as the FSB was asking Pavel Durov to hand over VKontakte's user data and he was preparing to leave Russia.

Jeremy Duns was all caught up in this chimera at the time; Robert Mackey even blogged about it as a "thing". Of course I eviscerated this because I couldn't believe how people got snowed by it. Now it's all clear it wasn't any breakthrough. Some admission of that would be in order.

Runa Sandvik in Moscow

I still remain with the question I had last year that nettled Soldatov, which is what he knows about Runa Sandvik. After all, he is the one who invited her to take part in programs in Moscow, twice. The first time was in November 2012, just weeks before she actually met Edward Snowden at the Oaha Crypto Party in Hawaii. The second was in April 2014, shortly before Greenwald's book came out, in which he outed the fact that Snowden was the "Cincinnatus" behind the organization of the Oahu Crypto Party and Sandvik had met with him.

A number of us suspected that the crypto kids taking part in the "Spring Break of Code" in Hawaii met with Snowden because they could have overlapped and because Jacob Appelbaum himself brought up the coincidence as a thing that looked suspicious and meant that he couldn't go back to the States or he might be questioned (?!). We were all ridiculed for taking this seriously and probing it extensively although the fact is, Runa Sandvik -- one of the Tor developers along with Appelbaum -- did meet with Snowden in December 2012 before anybody, before Laura Poitras was in contact with him and before Greenwald!

And that's precisely why lots of questions begin to be asked about this -- especially when she turns up again in Hong Kong two weeks before Snowden arrives.

It's my theory that she got an early leak of Greenwald's book, which was floating around, saw that it was going to reveal the Oahu Crypto party identity that would lead to her, and realized she had to wire down a plausible story with Snowden ("a limited hangout") and had to meet with him in person about this and possibly other issues we just don't know about.

Her going to Moscow was certainly an odd thing to be doing as it wasn't exactly in her Tor Project job description nor in the Center for Democracy and Technology description where she briefly worked -- except, oh, Soldatov needed a speaker for a privacy panel. She had come via Skype before; now she came in person.

Did she meet with Snowden? Soldatov hasn't answered if she did or not, although he himself continues to say he personally hasn't been allowed to meet with Snowden, just like other Russian journalists.

Here's another odd thing I'll note for the record -- in the last week, three people have independently contacted me with detailed and even hostile questions about the Jacob Appelbaum story and how it relates to Snowden and details about Snowden's time in Hong Kong. It's as if the Russians -- or some German faction? Or WikiLeaks? -- are trying to see just exactly what people know or don't know so they can tighten up their alibis.

I've even heard some goofs claim that the reason Snowden doesn't speak to the Russian press is because Putin had promised from the get-go that he wouldn't do anything to "sheer this hairless pig" to supposedly harm his "partner" the US. This is utter balderdash. Especially now, with the war in Ukraine and sanctions and the Russians even intercepting our jets. Snowden was never so hairless and the reason he isn't featured may have to do with another practical consideration: his message resonates too much with the Russian surveillance state.

Snowden and his journalist friends don't have a single valid case where the NSA surveilled people wrongfully. But in Russia, there are tons of such cases, starting with Nemtsov, whose cell phone was hacked and spilled over LifeNews to discredit him, and who was going to be featured on NTV, just like other opposition leaders who were trailed with surveillance cameras. When the FSB bugs your phone, it ends up on YouTube, as it did for Victoria Nuland and the Estonian Prime Minister. When the NSA bugs Merkels phone -- if they did so at all, and we only have Appelbaum's word for it! -- we don't know what the hell she said! Difference.

3. The Russians are in the State Department and White House Servers

Which brings me to the White House hack. Yes, it's a hack, and Soldatov, like so many others of the hacker and Internet guru mindset, tries to invoke the specialist's understanding that it "isn't really a hack" because "a server wasn't touched." Oh, nonsense. The definition in the CFAA of a hack is "unauthorized use of a computer." Just because someone uses social engineering to get you to click on something as if "you did it to yourself" doesn't mean it isn't a hack. Of course it's a hack because it is unauthorized access that you didn't wish someone to have. This is basic, and the sophistry that geeks persist with here is just criminally-minded, I'm sorry. It is a hack. It is hacking.

How do they now it's the Russians? Well, they do, but they aren't going to tell you. That's how it works. When you're hacked, you don't tell what you know about the hacker so that you can prevent/catch him better. Usually in these cases Russians give themselves away either by actual Cyrillic letters, or stilted English in the patterns Russian speak, or Russian names, or Russian URLs.

Here, Soldatov -- as with the Nemtsov murder -- tells us on the one hand that it is a very sophisticated operation, maybe even by groups who knew what would work from inside knowledge -- he mentions pro-government youth groups although it's not clear if he means such people were in exchanges in the US -- but on the other hand, those people who hacked the opposition were just wannabees. when he invokes the hack of the opposition, he can't bring himself to say it's the FSB. Here he says that it's kids -- maybe paid for by some government organization -- and script kiddies who are unsophisticated so they write "FSB Squad" on their messages.

Except...if a government organization paid for it, it's still a government-orchestrated hack. And what government organization is interested in hacking the White House? Intelligence, of course, not the United Russia Party which is kind of a concoction anyway. The real FSB is not beyond setting up skiddies in a meta way to say "FSB Brigade" to look like they aren't, really, you know?

4. The Russians have not told us everything about the Tsarnaevs.

Really, the most interesting thing in Soldatov's interview is this:

The first thing we need to understand is that the FSB never tried to tip off the FBI about these guys. The FSB actually requested information from the FBI and the CIA but they failed to provide the reasons for their information requests so the intelligence cooperation went nowhere. Then, after the bombing happened, everybody started to say it’s all about warnings and intelligence sharing. But the Americans saying this fail to realize that the FSB is not very keen to provide any kind of intelligence to foreign services. As far as I remember, only once, in 2003, just after FSB and FBI directors signed a special memorandum of understanding, did the two services conduct a joint investigation. It was a sting operation, in fact. The FSB provided a fake surface-to-air missile launcher to a guy who was caught, but the whole thing was very low-level and unimpressive. It was fake missile launcher. This became a showcase for FSB and FBI cooperation, but it was meaningless.

Do the U.S. and Russia work effectively together on anything intelligence-related?

To be frank, we had some progress in only one field—organized crime. That was more about FBI and the Interior Ministry of Russia. The problem now with the FSB specifically is that they fail to divide their jurisdictions. It would be much more useful to have FSB’s department of counterterrorism to deal directly with the FBI. That’d be much easier and understandable. Instead, there is no division of labor. The main contact person in the FSB provided for FBI to help with the investigation of the Boston bombers, for instance, was Sergei Beseda, the same guy who a year later was exposed by the Ukrainian security services as a Russian FSB general who was in Kiev on February 20-21, 2014, during the Maidan Revolution. This was the same guy put in charge with talking to the Americans about terrorism!

Also, there was a spy story in May 2013 when an U.S. diplomat, Ryan Fogle, was accused of trying to recruit a FSB officer inside the counterterrorism department.  It just doesn’t help, and there’s no trust between the agencies.

The FSB allowed the FBI to travel to Dagestan to investigate the Tsarnaevs. But this was politically motivated. The FSB wanted desperately for the Americans to provide support for the upcoming Sochi Olympics. And it worked. Russia got support from the U.S., and from Britain, which offered technical support for security measures in Sochi.

When the FSB is interested in getting international support, they’re happy to do these things, but it never lasts. No one is interested in developing a relationship with the American security services because that could ruin your career if there’s a major rift in relations—such as with Crimea and Ukraine.

Let's fill in some dots here:

o the Dagestani anti-terrorism center leaked information to Novaya Gazeta which I translated last year in which they said Tamerlan met with people who were assassinated by Russian anti-terrorist agents. When were they going to tell the FBI that?

o The FBI chief at the time, Robert Mueller, came to Moscow to investigate the Boston bombers. Ryan Fogle was on the delegation that went to Dagestan. They didn't get very far there evidently. When Fogle tried to follow up with his counterpart on this case, he found himself set up in this ridiculously fake way in which there were a number of odd things. So -- no cooperation.

In sum, there's a lot we don't know about these four serious issues -- Snowden and his guards, the White House hack, the Nemtsov murder, and Tamerland Tsarnaev's time in Dagestan -- and they may come together in one agency or not, we don't know, and more research and probing has to be done on all these topics to shed more light on these subjects. So far, what we have is a lot of admixtures to the topics and it is not clear why.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Think John Oliver is Not 'Hard-Hitting' with Snowden and His Interview is Actually Sinister

I realize "everybody" is saying John Oliver is "hard-hitting" and "asked tough questions" in his interview with Snowden and that it is very hard when the Daily Beast says Oliver made Edward "squirm" and Tom Nichols thinks Snowden's handlers -- and that includes Moscow -- really "flubbed" things when they let him talk to the savvy Oliver (See where he has weighed in on  the American Federalist). The cool kids have concluded that Snowden's image has been tarnished (as they did before when he went on a Russian state talk show to ask a pre-fabbed question of Putin) and they feel as if their concerns about Snowden have actually been served.

I wish I could believe that -- but the success of the ill-advised "Net Neutrality" campaign led by John Oliver lets me know that I need to take a far more weather eye to this latest cultural concoction.

So let's look over the shoulder of those critical Snowden watchers and look at the mission really accomplished here with Oliver's "savvy" interview.

I vehemently disagree that the Snowden cause has been dinged here -- and the real mission accomplished is not only to elevate the tech lobbyist John Oliver -- I view him as a lobbyist for the Silicon Valley cause and not a mere comedian -- is to campaign against the Patriot Act. This interview elevates the credibility of John Oliver as "faux critical" and instills primordial fear in males that their dick pictures will be seen or displayed by the government.

 

First, many people are suckers for the British accent of authority, and the Monty Python accent of satire which they take for critical analysis of America.

 

I don't suffer from these problems.

 

For years, Monty Python and the British counterculture it represents have been very popular and beloved by a certain cultural segment.  It is so beloved that its admirers think it is universal and would portray anyone who didn't get in line to love Monty Python as hopeless reactionaries who think every sperm is sacred or think the parrot isn't dead.

 

Young men and middle-aged techie men who loved Monty Python are particular suckers for this accent. That's why John Oliver is so popular and unstoppable. This is a wealthy, aggressive, influential demographic and few people can get in its way without suffering not only withering scorn but actual sexist attack and harassment on the Internet.

 

He doesn't appeal to me because I don't like Monty Python and I don't like British socialism. This is a cultural and age thing but I don't care -- it frees me up to see what John Oliver is really up to.

 

You will recall John Oliver was deployed with vicious intentionality to get "Net Neutrality" passed -- which is Google's business goal so it doesn't have to pay for the last mile.

 

I oppose Net Neutrality not only because I truly believe it is socialism and "ObamaCare" for the Internet  -- I've studied it for years and know the agenda of the players -- I'm not for government agencies like the FCC deciding law, but the Congress deciding law.

 

This is a Columbia university professor's extremist vision (Tim Wu) coupled with Obama's socialist vision, and I find it deadly on many levels. It will end badly and already has, as it erodes the telecoms' power, which is our only bastion against Google hegemony. *John Oliver's shtick worked*. That's the scary part. This isn't just comedy or commentary; this is lobbying in an information war *and it works*.

 

John Oliver emerged (he wasn't noticed much before that) for that express lobbying purpose on Net Neutrality, and now he is taking on another very definite lobbying agenda which is to end or change the Patriot Act -- he demonstratively marks the date when the issue will come to vote in the Congress on June 1.

His episode with Snowden starts with this and mentions it a number of times. I oppose his agenda because I'm for keeping the Patriot Act. I don't like terrorists who kill 140 students in Kenya and I personally believe this was made easier by Snowden's hack in so many ways, literal and philosophical. Whatever "reforms" need to be made to intelligence gathering shouldn't be made under the duress of Snowden's hack and shouldn't be made without a public indictment and crystalline clarity about Snowden's criminality. We haven't gotten that from the Obama administration which is why I oppose all reforms, full stop. I'm not like @20committee (John Schindler) on this.

 John Oliver's goal here, like any British socialist with an agenda is to address the lingering doubts about Snowden by taking them "head on" -- which is of course a feint and a dodge to achieve the goal of making the Snowden cause and its supporters more popular.

 

His goal is to get people to oppose the Patriot Act by saying "yes, I understand there's this critique of Snowden but..."

He never ONCE mentions Russia or the fact that Snowden is under guard or that he meets him in a hotel and not a home or office and that's it's all very murky. We're to pretend not to notice that.

 

His interview is filled with jumps and cuts which result from Snowden not approving things and we're to pretend not to notice that.

 

He ONLY challenges him on two things -- the issue of "not reading all the documents" but that's lame. We already knew that Snowden could hack but not read 1.7 million documents, and the way they've been leaked and the timing lets us know that Greenwald and Appelbaum have discovered things they didn't know they had in June 2013 when they started. But so what? Snowden's answer is that he hacked categories of documents in certain divisions that are relevant to "privacy". Snowden's comeback is impervious -- he gave the documents to the journalists, take your concerns to them.

 

That it's not all about privacy is easily established and even John Oliver pretends to take this on by raising the Mosul thing -- the leak of that info by the Times on a slide using his leak.

So now comes John Oliver's moment when GASP he tells Snowden he should "own" the leak of sensitive information that happened because the journalists messed up. Guess what? Snowden doesn't own it, and no male techie watching this show will feel he needs to own it because they will conclude that journalists are non-technical chumps who should let techies be the reporters instead of them. Mission accomplished.

 

Not a confrontation -- in fact, a chance to give the hacker Snowden a star turn.

 

So what is the main message of John Oliver? THE GOVERNMENT IS LOOKING AT YOUR DICK PICS.

 

That is designed to strike horror into the hearts of all those males who are the demographics for Monty Python and John Oliver, even if in fact they show their dick picks, as all too many of them do online.

 

And you know what else it's designed to do ? Ensure that Snowden's biggest critic, John Schindler, never, ever says anything about that part of it. Mission accomplished?

 

That's why I view this as sinister. It's extremely cunning and evil. Schindler could make the point that it was first, poor judgement on his part -- not the government -- that made it possible for dick pics to be displayed. Then next in line is Twitter -- not the NSA -- which enabled it to be displayed for long periods by not taking them down, or that it was a spurned lover who took revenge (who I continue to view, wittingly or unwittingly (likely the latter) as part of an operation against Schindler with sinister origins in Russian intelligence) -- and that Snowden has never been able to show a) that the government has any actual dick pics b) that they've used their possession of said hacked picks to harm people by pressuring them a la COIN. So it's bullshit.

 

Indeed, Tom Nichols picks up that very salient point in his American Federalist piece:

 

Except, of course, there is no evidence (as Snowden admits) that this is actually happening. Snowden’s explanation showed how far the government would have to go, and how much data it would have to sift, to find such pictures, read texts, and match phone calls. His entire case rests, as it has always rested, on what could happen if someone with evil intent were to try to seize control of a massive bureaucracy and bend it to the goal of finding out whether a random guy in New York sent his girlfriend a picture of Mr. Happy. (Which, as a random guy in New York admitted to Oliver on camera, he did.) In trying to generate more outrage, Snowden inadvertently made the case for calming down.

 

But no one would listen to this more subtle point because the larger message of THE GOVERNMENT IS LOOKING AT YOUR DICK PICS   will drown this out.

 

If the vast population of mainly male techies and their fanboyz on the Internet -- the Snowdenista demographic -- was capable of absorbing this subtle critique of Snowden, they would have already last year when not a single one of Snowden's leaks produced an actual case.

 

WE find it a compelling argument but THEY do not.

 

The fear of having the government monitor your sex life -- and expose it -- is understandably high and that trumps reason. The fact that the government has not done this in a single case -- unlike Glenn Greenwald who revealed a woman's affair with a Taliban soldier or the porn habits of Muslim leaders in Pakistan -- is completely lost on this demographic.

 

The last time Snowden leaked something about sex cams (Yahoo) was the day of the Crimean invasion. I believe that was deliberate to create distractions in the media. So I have to wonder what awful thing Russia is planning next with this.

 

I realize I'm the only person in the universe with these views but I don't care. I'm 180% convinced of them.

 

So what's the most interesting part of this interview, one that hasn't been mentioned? The news isn't that "people don't know who Snowden is." Those who are lobbyists in the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for a Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Ron Wyden's office, etc. all know perfectly well who Snowden is and are unchanged by this John Oliver show showing the kind of clueless chumps that Jimmy Fallon shows on Times Square.

 

If anything, they know the mission has been accomplished -- utter, irrational fear has been struck into the hearts of people that the government really does have your dick pics and might show them at any moment -- because of course, the edge case, the hypothetical always trumps reality for the tech binary mind.

 

Recently at a tech expo in New York, I happened to see a both displaying the very robot communications device that Snowden uses to appear in the ACLU office and interact with people and project his "telepresence" elsewhere. I asked the young woman -- a "booth babe" in the techie parlance -- if she had ever heard of Snowden or that he used this telepresence device. She hadn't heard of him at all. She didn't have a clue.

 

But...the news is that the American people aren't as stupid as you think they are. To a man and a woman, they associated Snowden with WikiLeaks. One even said he was "in charge" of WikiLeaks -- at which Snowden did an exaggerated double-take for the camera.

 

Indeed, Snowden is a product and creature and operation of WikiLeaks. They helped him go to Hong Kong and Moscow, where they had already established connections for years, and they continue to help. They were the ones who convinced him to go to Russia - and he himself has a defined pro-Kremlin stance and has even accepted payments from Russian state propaganda TV, RT.com.

 

That the focus has gone on the journalists Greenwald and not WikiLeaks' North American representative Jacob Appelbaum, in exile from the US grand jury's probe in the Manning case in Germany, doesn't matter. Somehow, the real truth of the WikiLeaks connection has seeped through. It's amazing how you just can't hide things like that, as much as they all try to spin this.

 

I'd like to believe, truly I would, that John Oliver has "pantsed" Snowden. But that hasn't really happened. What's happened is that once again, the NSA is "pantsed" as "grabbing and holding your dick picks." That will have a powerful impact on the vote on the Patriot Act, because, you know, American privacy on the Internet should trump everything, including the lives of Kenyans or the security of Europe or deterrence against the war-mongering Russia.

 

PS. Think I'm wrong about this? Read how TechCrunch, likely the leading online tech news publication owned by AOL now, spins the Oliver interview to see it as a plus for reforming the Patriot Act. I warned you.