Wired State

HOW Snowden Came to Work with the Russians -- Via WikiLeaks and Tor

John Schindler, the former NSA officer, a Russia expert and now former professor at the Naval Academy, asks WHEN Edward Snowden came over to the Russians. THAT he is on the Russians' side now is obvious not only to anyone who is in the intelligence community, but anyone who has had to deal with Russia for years who is honest about the nature of the Kremlin's regime and not constrained by ideological blinders.

Glenn Greenwald and the other Snowdenista enablers always try to deflect this question by asking for "proof" -- one suspects that even if Snowden were to get on heavily pre-packaged Russian state TV, which he was happy to use to pitch his softball question to Putin, and even hold up a GRU identification card, and confess that he'd been recruited by the Russkies back at an anime convention in Ft. Meade when he was 20, no one would believe him.

Really, there is no proof that Greenwald would ever accept, so let's not worry about what he thinks because he's not the one you need to convince. It's journalists who are willing to be a bit more critical of Snowden than he is -- and there are more of them now as not only Business Insider and Newsweek have reported critically on Ed, but Daily Beast and Venture Beat.

To me, the question to study is HOW, because THAT is not at issue for me -- and those for whom it is are not easily pursuaded -- and WHEN is not something I can discover.

If you focus on the HOW and keep digging eventually the story will break -- that's my conviction. But it's the piece of the story journalists are most reluctant to tackle because they feel it will ding them or some civil right they cherish by casting a spotlight on radical groups whose civil rights to speech and association they want to protect. I agree with none other than Slate's Michael Kinsley that journalism is not an endlessly capacious and elastic concept that includes seriously undermining national security in a liberal democratic state with impunity. I think it's fine to ask that a line be drawn between civil rights and crime, you know, as  it was done with Occupy, where First Amendment protected speech was not elasticized to include months on end of overnight urban camping in a city park, spawning rapists, drug addicts and rats.

Schindler must know that by explaining that Snowden just can't walk in to a Russian consulate and be accepted as an agent on the spot, that in a way he is pouring water on the mills of the argumentation of lawyers Greenwald and the ACLU's Ben Wizner that he was never an agent (recruited long before Hong Kong). For Schindler, that set of facts only means you have to look harder at Ed's past, but for the Snowdenistas, it means they've been proven right. That's why examining the HOW becomes really important.

It's my thesis, spelled out in my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee, that WikiLeaks, Tor and Chaos Computer Club anarchists and hackers recruited Snowden so the Russians didn't have to.

Maybe at one time, in the Soviet era, the Russians were really strict about coalition work -- they wanted to fully control all the popular fronts or radical movements they worked with, if not create them out right themselves and run them.

Today, with budget cuts, confusing and debilitating in-fighting among Russian agencies, the receding of the Russian empire borders even though they are encroaching again right now in Crimea, Russian spies are more willing to do coalition work with anarchists or jihadists because in part, they can set a pot to boil and then let it boil over and cause mayhem without them and still gain overall by degrading the West.

WikiLeaks goes way back in their acceptance of Moscow as their vector, not only the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" concept -- they hate America and specifically the US and work aggressively against it by all available means. It's also their True North ideologically, whether you chose communism in the 1970s, as the Chaos Computer Club recruits did, or fascism today, as the later WikiLeaks collaborators did in selecting a creep like Israel Shamir to work with and continuing to avoid any authentic criticism of Putin.

WikiLeaks thinks they are being independent but opportunistic in collaborating with the Kremlin; the Kremlin is happy to let them go on feeding that delusion.

The WikiLeaks attempts to frustrate US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with leakages that hurt America and helped Russian interests didn't accomplish much, in part because they dumped the raw materials online and few people bothered to make sense of them.

So they were more strategic when they came to Cablegate in 2010, picking and choosing and tying cables to world events for maximum damage, and working with journalists -- well, up to a point, they ended up with quarelling with nearly all of them. Poitras remains in good relations with them -- but she's really an activist, not a journalist, although she does blackmail mainstream media into putting her by-line along with mainstream journalists -- in order to gain access to the Snowden documents.

At this point, Greenwald has distanced if not cut his ties to WikiLeaks, as the recent flap over the "fifth country" illustrated, although the issue of the Tor revelations already clinched it. Greenwald was done with Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks representative in the US, and Assange's stand-in at the hackers' HOPE conference in 2011, after that. He didn't even give him a mention in his book, reducing him to the term "tech helper" -- although he's likely the guy who sent him the FEDEX package per Poitras' instructions. [Update: Actually, it turned out that it was not Appelbaum, but Greenwald's tech guru at Intercept now, Micah Lee who is willing to take elaborate credit for this.]

WikiLeaks responded by committing the ultimate shun of modern times -- they unfollowed Greenwald on Twitter.

That WikiLeaks and Tor go together requires no special guessing, because not only is Appelbaum in both; so is Laura Poitras, and other characters like Runa Sandvik of Tor have never opposed WikiLeaks.  James Ball, both at WikiLeaks and the Guardian, can play both networks.

Whether WikiLeaks used its considerable network of anarcho-hackers and crypto kids to reach Ed in the US, Japan, or India (and then later set up his operation in Russia) can be explored -- in my book I follow the travels of both the WikiLeaks and Tor characters who go to all those countries when Ed is there. Ed has been to lots of places, including the UK, where Sarah Harrison was, and Bosnia, where anybody could be.

But to be more specific:

1. In 2012 or even earlier, WikiLeaks establishes a presence in Moscow where they can obtain visas for foreigners, funding, cars, permits of various sorts, etc. through Russkiy Reporter, a Russian news site close to the government whose reporter, Dmitry Velikovsky has visited Assange while under house arrest and who has maintained close ties with him.

This Russian journalist Velikovsky then helps a discredited journalist, Johannes Wahlstrom, the son of Israel Shamir, the notorious antisemitic provocateur who has long done business with Russian intelligence and writes for the pro-government press, to film a movie for WikiLeaks called Mediastan.

The media company that owns Russkiy Reporter is Ekspert or Expert. It is owned by an oligarch loyalt to Putin, Oleg Deripaska. Shamir has written for Pravda, Zavtra (ultranationalist paper), Izvestiya, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, which are all pro-government. He's also a regular contributor to Counterpunch.

The ostensible purpose of Mediastan was to discredit the US and any independent media in Central Asia that appear to have US help or which refuse to report the WikiLeaks cables for their country. But that despicable operation itself is, in my view, a cover for the setting up of the Snowden Operation, to get a visa and legend for Sarah Harrison, to get apartments, etc. needed for operations, and make it appear as if Snowden is a WikiLeaks freelance project, not scripted at the GRU/SVR/FSB.

2. Runa Sandvik, then at Tor Project, now -- to gain that critical distance -- just moved to Center for Democracy and Technology, was first beamed into a panel in Moscow in November 2012 with Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov at the Sakharov Center, but obviously her connections go back before that.

3. Greenwald ostensibly hears from Snowden the first time on December 1, 2012, according to his book, but he's told the story six different ways, one of which might have made that date as early as November 2012. Poitras also hears from Snowden in December 2012 or earlier, not January as she claims -- that story has also been changed or questions about it dodged.

4. Runa Sandvik travels deliberately to Honolulu, ostensibly "on vaction" and attends a Crypto Party organized by Cincinnatus, who is none other than Snowden, on December 11, 2012.  She finds out that he runs Tor nodes (servers through which Tor traffic can run) -- either right at the NSA or off campus in his own home, it's not clear. He tells her that he is recruiting other NSA agents (!) to run Tor nodes and that he needs a pack of Tor stickers as "incentive" to get them to do this. She mails him the pack of stickers later, she says.

5. Greenwald makes more serious contact with Snowden in March or April 2013, as he once admitted, and later changed his story about, and gets public keys with Poitras and Appelbaum and possibly one other NSA contractor to contact Snowden. When I later ask questions on an ACLU Facebook page of that NSA contractor what he was up to, the ACLU deletes the entire conversation.

6. Appelbaum claims he first begin communicating with Snowden in May to vet and interview him with Poitras, but more than likely he's been in touch long before that because he has long helped Poitras with comms. One possibility for direct contact for either or both or them or their cutaway friends is at the Spring Break of Code in late March-early April when Snowden could have plausible attended right before he flew to Ft. Meade for training.

These earlier contacts matter, because this is BEFORE Snowden steals some of his make documents (he began stealing in April 2012, we're told, and maybe earlier but some items date later like the Verizon court case documents would have to be stolen in April 2013).

7. Runa Sandvik goes to Hong Kong April 24-29, 2013.

8. Poitras, Greenwald, McCaskill and maybe Appelbaum (we can't rule out) go to Hong Kong to meet Ed on June 3, 2013 (or May 31 or June 1, there are multiple versions). His time-table has been misread or misreported numerous times so here's the most accurate version I can establish. He reveals his identity on June 5, 2013, the same day that Tor nodes in Russia found to be compromised and reporting to the Russian government show activity in Hong Kong.

9. By this time, Snowden has met with Russian diplomats and Russian enablers of some sort locally (journalists, human rights activists, lawyers of some kind) and of course Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks arrives in mid-June, just in case you forgot that it is WikiLeaks, not Glenn Greenwald running this op.

10. They leave for Moscow June 23, and supposedly stay in Sheremeytovo airport in a broom closet for 6 weeks, but Kommersant reports that they were picked up by diplomats from Ecuador, which has provided refuge to Assange in their embassy in London, and Venezuela. He is granted one year asylum in Russia. Harrison stays with him until Revolution Day November 7, 2013, comrades, and then goes to Germany as "she can't go home again."

11. Right before that, they are visited in Moscow by German leftists including the lawyer for the Baader Meinhof gang AKA Red Army faction, himself once jailed along with them. Yes, there are many fingerprints of the KGB's long-time coalition partners in this story, and German KGB enablers, including Putin, who served in East Germany when he worked for the KGB.

12. Greenwald and Appelbaum have an open falling out on Twitter over WikiLeaks' and Tor's challenge to Greenwald that he is sitting on Snowden revelations regarding the NSA's efforts to crack Tor. In fact, Greenwald is in the process of replacing Appelbaum temporarily with Bruce Schneir as his tech advisor, vetting the material and getting the Guardian to publish it. Greenwald leaves the Guardian over the same kind of accusations ultimately, because he now has Pierre Omidyar to fund him, but he never forgets being dissed publicly by Appelbaum.

13. Greenwald's book is scheduled to come out in April 2014, but is delayed until May. Meanwhile in April, some chapters are published and some people get copies of it. The fact that Snowden used the name Cincinnatus gets out, likely without the realization that it hooks up to the Crypto Party in Honolulu in December 2012 attended by Runa and in which Electronic Frontier Foundation is also referenced.

14. In April 2014, Runa Sandvik goes to Moscow.  Fortuitously, she tears the RFID off her Norwegian passport. She meets with Soldatov and human rights activists, but that's the cover, although by this time, Soldatov may be a witting facilitator. She likely meets with Snowden and discusses how they are going to deal with the fact that Greenwald's book outs not only Cincinnatus, but Sandvik, i.e. Tor. There may have been an effort to get this scrubbed from the Internet in time, but due to mirror sites and such, it couldn't be done. Greenwald may have leaked this to get back at Tor and WikiLeaks (Appelbaum) for calling him a presstitute when he supposedly "sat on" the Tor revelations and they didn't appear right away in the Guardian.

15. While in Moscow, in April 2014 Runa gives some press interview, but declines to answer slon.ru directly whether Snowden still runs those Tor nodes or works for Tor; she says they don't discriminate and lots of people contribute (!).

16. In May 2014, Wired publishes a sanitized and reworked story of Runa Sandvik's role in the Crypto Party by Kevin Poulsen that can accentuate Runa's innocence. It never mentions that she went to Moscow the month before, although Runa was careful to leave a very public trail of her trip to dispel any sense of secrecy. Even so, you can tweet about trips and still have secret meetings, i.e. with Snowden.

17. In May 2014, WikiLeaks also orchestrates the "outing of the fifth country as Afghanistan" to try to embarrass Greenwald, and also outs the role of Jared Cohen supposedly in getting telecom towers moved to US army bases where supposedly they are then opened up to the NSA to monitor everybody's conversations.

18. Soldatov (who hosted Runa twice, once via Skype and once in person in Moscow), publishes a critical review of Greenwald's book, in which he slams Edward Lucas, reiterates that he thinks NSA revelations of spying on people is a good thing, but says Greenwald isn't telling us anything about Snowden's Moscow adventures in his book. The purpose appears to be to slam Greenwald on behalf of, in concert with WikiLeaks,  while raising some questions about Snowden to appear plausible. Or perhaps the crypto-crypto kids are done with Snowden now, too.

Update:

2. Soldatov has written this sarcastic tweet, which I take to mean he does not wish to be called a WikiLeaks agent or a Russian agent and that heaven forfend, even to raise these questions is to engage in "conspiracy theory."

I've not called him either, of course, but since he seems to take objection to the "on behalf of" here, I'll cross that out, but I stand by "in concert with" - because it is. WikiLeaks is engaged in an avid campaign now to discredit Greenwald but preserve the value of Snowden. Soldatov thinks Snowden is just dandy for challenging Greenwald and starting the Internet debate in Russia. I disagree strenuously.

Soldatov has been a critic of WikiLeaks, i.e. here back in 2010, but in doing so, he's also conveyed his critique of Western journalism as "in a crisis" and his belief that American military reporting that Iran supplies Iraqi insurgents can't be trusted.

19. A privacy and security conference convened in Sweden demonstratively does not invite Assange, Appelbaum, Snowden or other Snowdenista, and they squeal about blacklisting. Carl Bildt is involved. Europeans are letting it be known that they will oppose the NSA, but not by joining ranks with the radicals of WikiLeaks and Tor.

20. Runa publishes in Forbes on May 28 a highly-viewed story about the sudden shut-down of TrueCrypt and warnings that it is no longer secure -- a story that was already racing across various nerd fora and social media -- ensuring maximum panic mode. TrueCrypt was Snowden's favourite program inside Tails, which he used on a USB to ensure that his encryption wouldn't be hacked by the NSA, or so he thought. He is famous for claiming:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

Well, not just endpoint security, Ed.

 21. UPDATE And my later discovery of another account very likely used by Snowden -- @OahuCryptoParty on Twitter, now "suspended" -- illustrates that Runa Sandvik, Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins and others all were speaking to Snowden in December 2012; in January 2013 and via the list serve for CryptoParty, even in May 2013.

So...what next?

If Greenwald leaked the Cincinnatus name so that Runa could be found by Cryptome or anyone, then he may be willing to do more to throw Tor and WikiLeaks under the bus. He may find it convenient even to let them appear to have wholesale recruited and deployed Snowden even with the Russians -- because it will no longer matter.

He may feel that if the outing of the Russian connection -- so blatant and so staring at us all this year anyway -- is the price he pays for discrediting WikiLeaks, so be it. He will have sequestered himself behind the wall of journalist privileges, and he can say "even if" WikiLeaks and the Russians worked to recruit and deploy Ed, so what? The main point is that revelations were made, and reforms, even if weak are being made, and it's all good.

In other words, I think the Russian role and the exploitation/collaboration with WikiLeaks will just keep seeping out like blood from a bandage, and soon it will be the least-kept secret and something "everyone knows" so that "everyone" doesn't care about it. Snowdenista resources will work overtime to make the point that NBC's star source of the year can't be wrong, and even if he worked with the Russians, so what, that's what it took. And besides, the Russians aren't so bad anyway.

We're all waiting for some big Philip Agee sort of confession or revelation on this story or thinking it's going to be a long-term but ultimately inevitable process like Alger Hiss. But in our modern times, everything is always online and always leaked and always visible, so it's more about the attention economy and good search capacity.

Eventually, it's all on Cryptome or WikiLeaks or even Twitter, and people put it together, but by then, it's been saturated into the background to denude it of its revelatory power.

Time and again, Greenwald and others have already set up this proposition: even if it turns out Snowden is a Russian agent now, it doesn't matter, he did a good deed. If it turns out that he was a Russian agent before, well, that reduces some of his support, but for many people, still doesn't undo the fact that he did a good deed. Many will continue to see Russia in the same "progressive" light that they saw the Soviet Union, despite its support for mass murder.

Here's the thing: This is not a game that will be won in the end merely by exposing Snowden as a Russian agent. Those who know such things knew that already, and those who aren't ideologically twisted get it soon enough.

It's rather a game of exposing the whole apparatus -- WikiLeaks, Tor, Foundation for Freedom of the Press, Electronic Frontier Foundation -- in their higher meta game in which Snowden is only one operation in the war for maximum encryption, a war that is only to their advantage, and not to that of liberal democracies -- and ultimately to Russia's advantage.

The arms war in encryption they have unleashed and continue to unleash through many rounds may be deterred by things like the feds shutting down Lavabits -- Ed's email, which he used under his own name and"Cincinnatus" -- and the shutting down of TrueCrypt -- one of the encryption programs he relied on -- possibly with a National Security Letter. Let's hope! Maybe Tor will be next (and it will be next).

But until society gets a grip on the war of encryption itself and what it means, we will see many more rounds of this.

 

Related articles

Wow! Cincinnatus in Honolulu -- Is This a Break in the Snowden Story?

Snowden, Greenwald, Appelbaum, WikiLeaks 'blacklisted' from Stockholm Internet Forum

Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

Silicon Alley Insider: WikiLeaks Threatens To Reveal Information That Glenn Greenwald Says Could Lead To 'Deaths'

So Snowden's Honolulu Crypto Party Girl @runasand, Goes to Moscow

Even if Greenwald Finally Does Name Names, It Will Not Persuade Me to Oppose the NSA

Two Top Cold War Spies Made The Same Troubling Prediction About Edward Snowden

So Snowden's Honolulu Crypto Party Girl @runasand Goes to Moscow

Runa Sandvik in Moscow at the Sakharov Center. Photo (c) by Sakharov Center.

So Runa Sandvik, who just left the staff of Tor Project (although she remains as a volunteer), who is now at the ill-named Center for Democracy and Technology, went to Moscow at the end of April.

Hello Moscow.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 29, 2014

In brief, I think it's more than likely she used the trip's ostensible purpose - to speak to human rights groups and journalists to help them with circumvention/encryption -- in fact to liaise with Snowden and coordinate various anarcho-crypto "movement" things with him -- the spinning of Glenn Greenwald's accidental leak about her own meeting with Snowden in December 2012 in Honolulu before he stole documents -- which was to come out May 21; and possibly -- big picture -- work on the take-over/compromise/control  of Tor nordes in Russia -- and also discrediting of Russian Internet crypto figures not under her group's control (e.g. Durov).

All in all, mission accomplished, I think.

Let's go over it:

This trip wasn't a secret, and she even mentioned it on her Twitter timeline, but I was busy and didn't notice it until I read the Sakharov Center's news in Moscow. She was there for only two or three days, April 29-May 1, that holiday that Workers of the World love, May Day. Hide in plain sight, you know. That's always best!

Her purpose was to give the poor Russian bloggers and human rights workers now facing Internet blockage by Roskomnadzor lessons in how to use Tor and other circumvention and encryption tools like TrueCrypt. Of course, Russia is a land of Internet nerds with nothing to do but code at their no-show state jobs and surf the Internet, so there's little she can actually teach them. No matter.

That was the cover story.

Just like that trip to give the Crypto Party talk in Honolulu was the cover story. And another trip to go to a crypto conference in Hong Kong, right before Snowden arrived.

It's funny that a) the Russian government let her in if her purpose was to help people defeat their censorship and b) the US authorities didn't question her at the border, given everything. She brags about this on Twitter, that no authorities have ever questioned her about her trip to meet Snowden on December 11, 2012 *after* he contacted Glenn Greenwald for the first time on December 1, 2012 (a date that has changed, but that's the one GG is now giving in his book. She just "happened" to have a vacation right at the same time!

 

Number of times I have been in contact with law enforcement regarding Snowden and the Honolulu CryptoParty: 0.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) May 23, 2014

The Crypto Party was likely the device for Snowden's helpers at Tor -- more important than his journalists, who are just scribes, really -- to make the real-life connections they required on the ground to exchange keys and create trust and manage verifications online later.

And here we all were, staring at the Spring Break of Code, which she assiduously kept trying to deny -- working overtime to deflect any questioning about Jacob Appelbaum's role there and his possible meeting of Snowden there to exchange encryption keys, USBs, whatever. Or to go through a third-party cut-out.

Funny, all that.

It illustrates what a duplicitous creature she is, because we were all asking if Tor had contact with Snowden before/during the period he stole documents, and they were all denying it - but then, here it is, leaked by Greenwald himself, possibly accidently. Or maybe he wanted to burn Tor. And this story in Wired about all this has chisel marks all over it because it's been instrumented to tell the story in the most distractive, deflective possibly way, to create an alibi.

But BEFORE this story came out on May 21, there was Runa's trip to Moscow April 28-30. Why? To coordinate with Snowden because it was known the leak was coming, or perhaps the Cinncinnatus info was already seen in early review copies some journalists got of Greenwald's book. (I don't believe he intended to leak this -- John Young of Cryptome picked up the name "Cincinnatus" used with a Lavabit email address, checked the public keys, and saw this related to Snowden.)

So the trip to Moscow was likely really designed to liaise with Snowden -- and the Russian authorities didn't have a problem with that because they are all about helping the Snowdenistas, you know? So even a cover story about "defeating" their censorship works for them.

So Sandvik first sprinkles herself with the holy water of the Sakharov Center, a group of impeccable Soviet-era dissidents and their apprentices who were colleagues of Andrei Sakharov, the patron saint of the dissident movement. To be sure, lots of events are held there, and groups pay a modest fee to help support the Center, because space where people can have free discussions is increasingly hard to find.

I would love to know the visa-support organization that invited Runa and gave her her visa. No foreigner comes to Moscow without:

o an organization or agency or business authorized to provide visa support to foreigners writing a letter of invitation with its official registered seal and a number

o approval at the Foreign Ministry of that letter and that status and that foreigner

o another layer of review at the Russian Embassy abroad, and check of all the documents submitted by the foreigner.

I don't know if the Sakharov organization invited her -- I'd be sad if it did, because it's one more example of how the hackers are invading the human rights movement to try to a) radicalize it and/or b) discredit it and hijack it.

In any event, in addition to possible coordination of how the leakage of the Cincinnatus story would work, other things are possible, like:

o coordination of Snowden's continued running of Tor nodes. Who said he stopped running them? Did he turn off those ones at NSA or get others to collude with him? And even if those servers were removed from his access (we hope) he could start new ones at any time -- and the Russian government will be only too happy!

o in the interview below, you see in fact that Sandvik has trouble denying that Snowden works for Tor -- in fact, she's basically admitting he does. That has several hypotheses that may go with it:

o Snowden is working with Russian intelligence knowingly to take over Tor essentially hollowing it out from the Navy's one-time control -- and please don't tell me bullshit about how the system can't be compromised. More on that below. We already had several dozen such compromised nodes

o At one time none other than Craig Pirrong, who was wildly harassing me for months on end over my simple criticism of his implausible theses, claimed strangely that Jacob Appelbaum went to Moscow to set up those compromised servers. I continue to maintain that that a) doesn't make sense and b) has no evidence because we can't place Appelbaum there. Plus, you don't have to go there to run these servers, given all the virtualization and remote technology out there, and it seemed to obvious.

o Now that we've placed Sandvik in Moscow it's possible in fact that's what they're up to -- busy "spoiling" The Onion Router (Tor) which is what the letters stand for, although it's also a word that means "throne" or "honored seating place in the yurt" in the Eurasian languages.

o And that means this could be a collaborative effort by Wired State types both in the US government and the Russian government who think they are above it all, beyond states, The Smart People Surrounded By Idiots, and all the rest. Or some configuration thereof. People who are too clever by half, who think they are overthrowing others who may have overthrown them.

What's the net effect of this trip? Well, several hypotheses:

o to destroy faith in Tor as compromised by the US and/or Russian intelligence agencies to diminish the ability of people to use it to get around censorship

o on the contrary, to add luster to its reputation and dissipate doubters so that it can then lure lots of people in, and then they can be compromised.

Much of what Runa and her little friends do is premised on the arrogant notion that Tor is unbeatable. So they really don't think (perhaps) that the Russians or Americans can snoop on them due to "math".

They should read my blog, and  not only the Swedish paper but Paul Syverson's paper in which he explains that within 3 months, watching the exits, they pretty much out everybody. The Russian government can see who uses Tor -- that was how Harvard was able to find a hacker who made a fake terrorist threat (and if it were up to Runa, he would have followed her good-housekeeping hints and hidden his tracks better.)

So they could simply close everyone down on that basis. Or they can compromise nodes or monitor servers through various intrusive gadgets or watch the exits. There aren't that many nodes now -- it's back down to 4,000, with the number in Russia small and highly visible. So...either or both of the Russians and the Americans and anybody else interested allow Runa to wander the world of crypto parties because she is like dye or radioactive, and then lights up what she touches. Maybe all her stickers she hands out have RFIDs -- like that one on her passport yuck yuck.

Oh, except, she tore the RFID off her Norwegian passport, funny, that. Runa also has a green card or work authorization for the US which she bragged about renewing -- I was surprised she did. No quality control at DHS I guess, especially given that Crypto Party! But she says she's been in London. Why did she leave Tor? Did she figure the axe would fall there soon? She is no longer a paid employee but just one of those evangelizing volunteers. She is also among the "technical advisory committee" at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which funds Snowden and has Snowden on its board.

FFP was started by John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation people. Appelbaum is also on that TAC, and still listed very robustly at Tor. Sandvik's interviews for the Russian media are important to look at, and I have them below, but first, study her timeline as its instructive as to how they are playing this whole ideological caper: First, before the trip, she drops a tweet to establish her street cred as a fighter for a free Russian internet:

VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, is said to be “under the complete control” of close allies of Putin: <ahref="http://t.co/cDwnlXDIeX">http://t.co/cDwnlXDIeX

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 22, 2014

 

But here's the thing. Runa's real attitude is one of moral equivalence -- if the US is "just like" Russia and Snowden, trapped in Putin's cage, asks the tyrant on state-controlled TV a prefabricated question, why that's "just like" a congressman in a democracy asking something of an appointed official under oversight -- sure.

 

Side-by-side comparison of Ron Wyden's question to James Clapper and Edward Snowden's question to Vladimir Putin: https://t.co/cxCFqCUdL1

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 18, 2014

 

Oh, and you see, the real problem isn't the Kremlin, it's those evil Western capitalist corporations:

 

Russia is using deep packet inspection technology from China, Canada, Israel and the US to monitor network activity in the country.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 24, 2014

 

That's how they play it -- make seeming criticisms of Kremlin policy, but then double back and make moral equivalence between the West and Russia, which then essentially undoes the criticism -- and then spin it around to make it really be about Western corporations. I've seen this technique used over and over again -- by Rebecca MacKinnon, by the Snowdenistas, by Soldatov and Sergei Makarov, another human rights activist (who wasted his personal meeting with Obama fretting about Snowden) and by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks in her "leak about Syria" which was really about the West.

It gets tiresome.

Then, Runa name-checks the leading Internet and censorship guru of Russia -- who, well, still lives in Russia:

 

Internet censorship initiatives in Russia provoke the rise of self-censorship among users, says @AndreiSoldatov: http://t.co/msixBAmkSc

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 25, 2014

 

Then, the day before her departure:

 

Heh, tried to remove a sticker from the front of my passport and accidentally removed the first "S" in "PASSPORT" and half of the RFID icon.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 27, 2014

 

Heh. I'll bet that was a TOTAL accident. Then, here's a tip that Tor is in fact heavily vulnerable -- on the eve of her trip to Moscow.

 

Modified #heartbleed scanner allows direct scanning of #Tor hidden services (via @Bike_E_Maker): https://t.co/oKiBCDOOs3

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 28, 2014

 

Now, on the day she travels to Moscow, this insight -- which is something about her comms there obviously, and this crypto kid is telling us this in public..why? To throw people off the scent, or something.

 

Turns out @twitter's two-factor authentication backup code is only good for one use. Good thing I have a backup-backup solution in place.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 29, 2014

 

While in Moscow, she has nothing to say that is critical of Putin, of course, but she has a cryptic message, in case you were waiting for her at the Cafe Pushkin!

 

Made it to the Red Square only to find that the area was closed off in preparation for a parade. And no luck finding Café Pushkin.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) April 30, 2014

Cafe Pushkin by Aleksandr Torchiev.

Oh, come now. Cafe Pushkin is right down on Tverskaya! Any smartphone would find it or just ask anybody. Oh, and now that I've noticed its salmon-coloured walls again and ornate paintings, I'm suddenly wondering if that's the location of the private dining room at the "hotel" where Snowden has met his various visitors. Surely Runa wouldn't miss a rendevous with Snowie!

Then for final good measure, she makes it appear if she's all about Internet freedom in Russia again:

 

Last week, @CenDemTech called on Russia to respect privacy and free expression rights of all Internet users: https://t.co/T9kYJcIGlg

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) May 2, 2014

 

and brags about her interview on an independent Russian news site:

 

While in Moscow, I spoke to a journalist at @ru_slon about censorship, online anonymity, and #Tor : http://t.co/BVvcuJ1gwr

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) May 16, 2014

 

So let's take a look at Slon. And the interview of her especially at Colt.ru, one of the best independent sites in Russia. Russian journalists are simply more used to Russian official obfuscation, lies and spin, so they ask Runa questions that she and her comrades never get asked (and should!) by the American media, which is bedazzled by Snowden:

Runa claims there are "a few thousand" Tor users in Russia but slon.ru says "100,000" because they've gone to check the open source statistics. Runa explained that a virus appeared that artificially increased the number of users (?!) Gosh, how does that work! And can we believe there are even a few thousand?

Tor gets grants based on proposals, and doesn't take instructions from governments, says Sandvik, when the Russian journalists at Colt.ru task her repeatedly.

"However, Tor never takes money in order to install a function which would reflect poorly on its reputation or on the security of the system." "

"But you can hardly agree with the fact that you can preserve your independence by taking money from the government," Colt persists:

Sandvik replies that by just publicizing sources, that should take care of any problem. That is, if you make cooperating with the government not a secret, then the problem goes away, see? Try telling that to Russians. She did!

Here she is, continuing to justify Tor (in reverse translation):

In fact, Tor was created by Naval Intelligence of American in order to protect the American government. But if you are the only user of Tor, then in fact you are easy to spot, because the Tor user is you. So they came to the opinion that in protecting everyone everywhere, you acquire an advantage for yourself, you create a system in which it is ipmossible to understand who this or that user is in America or Sweden. I think that is one of the reasons for the funding of Tor. Moroever, in the last few years, the purpse [of the American authorities] was to help users of the Internet in Iran.

Slon asks whether in fact Tor is really invincible and whether the NSA can break it, as she had claimed in her presentation. They asked in in fact if this was Snowden's leak. Runa said yes, Snowden had leaked many documents on this issue of Tor, that the NSA had tried and failed to break Tor and there was an article on this in the Guardian.

"Would you hire Snowden for the Tor team?" asks the impish slon.ru.

"Tor accepts any anonymous contributions, so anyone could take part in it," she says coyly.

Slon.ru presses further.

"But would you hire him for the job?"

"Hire for the job...I can't comment on that. Tor has funding for people who regularly help the project and work for it. I cannot imagine that Tor Project would discriminate against anyone," she dodges again. She doesn't want to be later caught in a lie, but...

That is, if you're a fugitive felon who has committed the worst heist against US national security in history, sure, send your resume, we're an equal-opportunity employer.

Slon continues to press -- does Tor help the government on crimes, i.e. drug deals, prosecution.

"How do you work with the government in those cases? Can it ask you to provide information about users?"

Runa answers with her usual mantra, "there is no one person, no one facility that could review the system and censor what users can do or not do. And in the same way there is no way for Tor to track users."

She uses the usual distractive rhetoric to deflect legitimate concern about Tor's enabling of criminality:

"On the one hand, for now this system makes it difficult to search for criminals, but on the other hand, it helps people, activists and human rights defenders. There are people in Tor who have spent a lot of time to help victims of domestic violence and have advised them, for example, how to visit sites so their abusers can't see this.

Of course, there are pluses and minuses in this but if you imagine, that someone in Tor tracks the visits of users of this or that site, then the question is raised: who should that person be? Can some project decide, whether users throughout the whole world can or cannot do online? If Tor had that ability, then perhaps one could ask the question, should he be paid from the American or another budget for fulfilling the censor's functions. But Tor has no functions of oversight which would enable it to remain free. For example, I have no special knowledge about the work of Tor, which is inaccessible to others. There is nothing secret in it, all of its work is absolutely open, and in order to know how it works, you just have to spend some time.

Slon presses even further -- they are so much smarter than American journalists!

"You said in your lecture that there is no system to check people who work at Tor. But can you imagine that the intelligence service, for example, or someone else wants to get involved in the project. Would they also not know anything?"

Runa claims there is no way to learn anything but IP addresses that the system is using and that there is "no way to know who is using Tor to visit certain sites." She ought to read the paper of Paul Syverson et. al. -- which no Torean has never committed on. Runa explains that Tor gets requests from the US, British, Norwegian, Polish, German governments asking them to help find criminals. They "explain how Tor works" and say they can't help. She claims she doesn't know if the Russian government has made a request.

Well, look then, US, British, Norwegian, Polish and German governments: if there is a perfect encryption tool that can evade all of your intelligence and law-enforcement, that is a weapon. It's a weapon that should not be in these unscrupulous hands.

Yeah, I get how hard it is to get it out of their hands now, you know, you can always copy on the Internet. But do try to think about the ramifications, here.

She admits Heartbleed was a big blow, and they had trouble getting all the people running nodes to upgrade. She said they lost 1000 out of 5000 servers because they couldn't reach people and ensure they had the patch.

Slon even asks if the staff of Tor could be bribed, and she says "no".

So what else was accomplished in this interview? What else was her purpose?

o To discredit Pavel Durov. She mentions Telegram, his mobile encryption program, and that it was made by "a guy who fled from Russia". Here are her damning comments:

"The creators of Telegram don't say much publicly how their app works, but they offer to pay you if you find a problem in their security system. I tried to ask them about their privacy policy. They assure us that they do not provide law enforcement agencies with information, but sometimes, after all it is impossible to refuse? Only if you are prepared to go to prison for the sake of your users.

Then I asked them under what jurisdiction they work, and they did not reply. Then I looked at how you can get in connect with them -- through a press service. And for that, you must load an app which automatically loads your contact list, every number and every name in the telephone. Although for users, that could be a convenience: when the system sees that your friends are using it, it offers you to become a user. The app in fact is becoming more popular."

So the purpose of that is in part just commercial sabotage -- she doesn't want anyone competing with Tor or Whispersystems, which is the mobile encryption program of her and Jake's friend Moxie Marlingspike. She even filed a FOIA on Telegram (!) -- and when the hackers asked her if she did that with all such software (because even they thought it was odd) she indicated she had plans to.

She doesn't want somehow making encryption software who isn't under the Snowdenistas' control or the control of the Russian government, I guess. Which is it? This is all a complicated chess game. There are feints and dodges and ruses. I leave it to you to figure out.

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Edward Snowden had Hawaiian 'crypto party' before his NSA leaks

Snowden's First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii

The US Government Is Looking For 'Co-Conspirators' Connected To Snowden's Email Accounts

Yes, Snowden Ran a Cryptoparty

Edward Snowden hosted a cryptoparty and ran a Tor exit node

Oh, So @Wikileaks Reveals Name of Fifth Country Afghanistan to Smear @JaredCohen

From the beginning, when WikiLeaks started this attention-getting tantrum of revealing the name of the fifth country not named by Glenn Greenwald at Intercept, I thought to myself, "This isn't about the country, but about some smaller entity or preson they want to get."

Why did I think that?

Because as I pointed out on Twitter, Greenwald slipped up and said "company" at one point, and not "country" when discussing this. A very common mistake I've made myself.

But what if he did mean "company," i.e. some telecom, perhaps even some Afghan-based company that the purist revolutionaries wanted to expose as a sympathizer or enabler? I was thinking that there was an American telecom company, or perhaps some kind of consulting firm funded by USAID or something.

And sure enough, it turns out to be worse than I thought.

It's not just that they've now named the country -- which many people guessed anyway and was accidently leaked by a slide anyway.

It's that they want to screw over Jared Cohen.

Why would that be?

Because Assange didn't like the way the interview Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen did with Assange turned out, because it made Assange look bad. Schmidt put it in his book.

It could be that simple. We are dealing with petty, childish, and deranged people here at WikiLeaks.

Just in case people had trouble putting together all the dots, WikiLeaks spells it out in a series of tweets:

Google Idea's director Jared Cohen was tasked with getting Afghan telcos to move towers to US bases when at DoS https://t.co/bwVvyXuMU4

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2014

More on #Google Idea's director Jared Cohen: http://t.co/ZxoVSQSmhG (and much more: http://t.co/YSAZxFokd6) #afghanistan

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2014

WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is #Afghanistan. https://t.co/vWwU4DJw0I #afpak

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2014

The WikiLeaks cable, which may only be released now, I don't know (does anybody) or maybe was there and nobody focused on it before, identifies Jared Cohen as the State Department staffer who enthusiastically worked to get cell phone towers put in US army bases in Afghanistan to help mobile communications in general, particularly for Afghan entrepreneurs.

WikiLeaks sees this as evil, because they see it as tacitly or even complicitly helping the NSA hack into cell communications for their "nefarious purposes".

I disagree because, as much as I don't  like Jared Cohen -- and I don't -- the cult of connectivity is at best commercial hype for Google's business interests and at worst an undermining of our civil liberties, Jared Cohen is:

o an official appointed in a liberal democratic government -- Obama is a democratically-elected president and the most liberal we'll ever have (I didn't vote for him the second time but he is the president, and I'd rather have him than Assange run the world);

o assigned to the job of promoting modernization, innovation, i-phones and Twitter and such -- he famously asked the devs at Twitter to move their maintenance down time so that the Iranian revolution could proceed;

o trying to do good in his various incarnations and programs -- which I disagree with, but concede to him;

o now at Google, which is a legitimate public company, in a program I don't like and whose goals I disagree with, but which also has some merit and is about doing good (peace, justice, human rights, etc);

and

o the NSA tapping into communications in Afghanistan is a legitimate measure for national security, i.e. our soldiers fighting the Taliban there.

By contrast, Assange does evil. Life is about choices.

What is it about that interview that got to Assange? Well, it makes him look extreme and deranged, in the end, not rational. I'll have to go over it again, but my hunch is that this is what it's all about.

Oh, and exposing the evil of America in Afghanistan, too. Right. But of course, I don't think it's really about that. For one, anyone with sense knows that the Taliban kill most of the people in Afghanistan, and fighting them is a good thing. You can disagree about how that fight has gone but that they need exposing and fighting rather than the US needing exposing and undermining shouldn't be a question.

WikiLeaks has really lost the plot with this one, but then, they were never about transparency and accountability, least of all for themselves, but about anarchist mayhem.

So why did Greenwald hold it back and talk about "deaths"? There are deaths anyway in Afghanistan, it's still a war zone.

Likely, as much as he likely doesn't care for Cohen's more centrist brand of liberal politics and the Clintons he represents, and doesn't care for Google (although he doesn't ever criticize them), he holds back at the idea of singling out one man, one name, and putting a target right on his back, so that he can't go to these countries (he travels all over the world) where he might be in danger.

It's really sick.

Appelbaum, of course, likely had personal dealings with Jared Cohen while Cohen was at State doing "innovation," because Tor Project, funded by the State Department's Deptartment of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Department of Defense (yes, go look at their web site), would have been thrilled with Tor as a "circumvention" salvation that leads to that cult of connectivity I mentioned above. Jared was probably one of those people at State that Appelbaum bragged was his friend even as others wanted him to be investigated by the Department of Justice over WikiLeaks (as well he should be).

So there may be a personal vendetta going on here from Appelbaum, it requires more research.

Related articles

WikiLeaks Reveals Afghanistan is Second Country Having All Phone Calls Monitored by NSA

When is the WikiLeaks Grand Jury Going to Indict? And Did You Know Assange Once Had an NSA Grant?

Assange threatens to release Snowden info that Greenwald says could endanger lives

So the Capitalist New York Times Fires Abramson, Won't Hire Socialist Guardian Editor Gibson -- Good!

(c) Beth Cortez-Neavel/Knight Center. Jill Abramson, at a conference organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Pierre Omidyar's Network was among the sponsors.

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I've been waiting to see what this whole Jill Abramson deal was all about. Now Politico has helped explain it better for me.

I thought perhaps it really was some kind of feminism thing -- this is a real issue and I've experienced it myself in different workplaces even at the most "progressive" outfits.  The number of perfect West Side liberals who deliberately pay women less in this town, and ask them intrusive and sexist questions like whether they plan on having any more children or not would make your hair curl. I do get that.

But I still felt as if there was something else "up" here in this story. After all, when we're in the half-million a year salary category, the numbers going up or down $50,000 aren't that big a deal -- it isn't fair to compare Phil Taubman with Abramson because Phil had served in foreign postings and had more seniority -- unless, of course, you call Washington, DC a foreign bureau. Abramson had never been abroad.

Like anyone close to journalism in New York, I had heard she was bitchy and also lefty. I worried after Bill Keller left because he held the line against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and wasn't uncritical of Snowden and was there when the Times did some critical reporting, with CIA sources, of Snowden's tenure in Geneva and later his seminar in India.

Then Keller left, and things changed for the worse. Charlie Savage, who went from a Manning critic to a Snowden booster, was allowed to run loose with the stories, all pro-Snowden, and some of which reprinted Foundation for Free Press press releases -- even though he is way too smart for that.

Not a single critical thing has been said about Snowden all this time, and glowing coverage is given to Greenwald's prizes (the prize really went to the Guardian, not him), his new book, etc. -- and worst of all the ombudsperson, Margaret Sullivan, who is supposed to be impartial, has absolutely gushed and fawned over the Snowdenistas.

There's a story in Glenn's book about how Sullivan privately apologized for an article that went out early in the Snowden affair in which two experts on China from the intelligence community were quoted as saying they thought it likely that Snowden's laptops had been copied by the secret police in Hong Kong. Greenwald bristled that there was "no proof" of this.

Well, what would he accept as proof? China is a police state and copies people's stuff all the time -- they hard-wire it into their computers for sale in the West. I'll never forget how the former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng once called out the West at the UN for selling the very equipment that enables China to do this surveillance better, too.

Not that they can't surveil on their own. I once watched in horror as Lenovo computers were gifted to all the winners of prizes one year at the Overseas Press Club. China hacks everything, including, BTW, the New York Times, whose people were threatened with expulsion. Of course anything Snowden had was copied, if nothing else, over that state-controlled wi-fi at his hotel and other means.  It doesn't matter if there was "nothing" on his laptop but the means by which he reached his stashed documents -- they still might get something. Greenwald has no proof that they didn't.

Although Sullivan was appalling on this incident conceding in a column that it wasn't fair reporting, and appalling in another one conceding that the extremist loon Kevin Gosztola had a point, it wasn't enough for Greenwald, he still knocked the Times for not completely removing the offending lines about the theory of Chinese penetration. Imagine! Unless the field is completely sanitized of wrongful thinking, the Snowdenistas are never satisfied.

To be sure, the relationship between the Guardian and the Times has been cosy, although not completely without some mysteries (such as why the Guardian stole away Robert MacKey, another tendentious "progressive", but then he abruptly quit soon after making the move -- whereupon he came back to the Times again.)

The Guardian gave the Times all their Snowden stache when the British authorities came calling with a buzz-saw to destroy all the stolen documents. The Guardian also collaborated on WikiLeaks.

Abramson may have thought she could pull off this Guardian-splicing maneuver without anyone noticing it if she just kept it on the down-low and eased Gibson in as an "innovator" who was going to fix the Times lagging digital edition -- but it was caught, and that compiled with other problems meant she had to go.

Seldom at a place like the Times is the issue of "socialism" versus "capitalism" ever actually debated out loud, with terms like "technocommunism" ever being discussed -- that would be absurd. These things have to be articulated in "the personal is political terms".

But it's clear as a bell to me. Sulzberger, a capitalist, and his various editors, are liberals who want certain socialist things, and backed Obama for that reason. But they don't want socialism completely for themselves, and don't want to be overthrown, obviously. They like Snowden because he helps batter away at a Washington that they feel still hasn't "reformed" enough and doesn't welcome them sufficiently, and he is for "transparency" which they as newsmen like in theory (although not about themselves). They like the whole anarchy thing because it's a useful tool to get rid of enemies.

Yet they're not going to go to the mat for the revolution -- for example when Natasha Leonard, an Occupy operative who got away with pretending to be a Times stringer for awhile, was outed when she got arrested for refusing to disperse at the Brooklyn Bridge, she was out of the Times in a New York minute. That's how it is, and that's a good thing, because Leonard is a vicious radical socialist ideologue -- as you can see where she is perched now, salon.com.

Perhaps this near-death brush with socialist revolutionaries will be a sobering experience for the Times. Maybe the coverage of Snowden will come back and I will subscribe to the digital edition again.

 

 

 

My comment at Politico, "under moderation":

Oh, I get it now! This isn't at all about feminism, glass cliffs, salary discrepancy, or even a bitch female management style that wouldn't rankle if a man had it.

It's about whether or not the Times, which is liberal and capitalist, is going to hire away the stage manager of the Snowden operation, Janice Gibson, from the radical and socialist British Guardian's American edition.

And the answer is: no.

Abramson thought she could wrangle this by not keeping people informed, by making it be about women or digital or something else.

But it's about radicalization of the Times, and the owner saw it for what it was, saw that it was being put over on him and their colleagues, and said "no".

And I'm glad he did because I don't want the Times to be the Guardian. Indeed, I stopped subscribing to the Times precisely because of their poor and uncritical Snowden coverage which is way too enthusiastic about this felon and hacker.

Had they brought in Gibson, who authorized and engineered the Snowden operation in Hong Kong with Greenwald and edited the stories, under the guise of "modernity" we would get even more horridly skewed news. No thanks.

Watch to see Abramson get picked up by Pierre Omidyar for his "Intercept" or related projects -- although really, she's likely too expensive and too high-class for that operation that has filled up with bloggers like Greenwald. I can see her going to some other mainstream liberal paper or news magazine, perhaps. On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler has abruptly quit Intercept, they don't have any other women except Laura Poitras who is a mouse, so maybe Pierre will step up.

 

Related articles

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New Yorker: Abramson fired as New York Times editor because she demanded equal pay

Jill Abramson's move to hire editor spurred termination from N.Y. Times

Jill Abramson's Exact Salary and What the New York Times Thinks Is Wrong with the New York Times

Two women editors ousted: badasses or just doing their job?

Abramson angered Baquet by trying to bring on a co-Managing Editor

Mighty Spin on "Spoiled Onion" of Tor -- From Several Quarters

I saw a huge propaganda piece in Business Week come out touting the suspect circumvention software Tor, about which I have written critically here, here and here.

I thought perhaps this giant love pat with an interview even of Paul Syverson himself was part of the overall Snowden Operation offensive in the last week, with Snowden getting loving attention from the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Verge, all publications that can ensure maximum snowing of key intellectuals in policy and tech. None of those "interviews" succeeded in asking even the most basic critical questions, as I've suggested asking in the past about Greenwald.

Then I saw a reason why the Tor devs are busy trying to counterspin their flawed project and immoral ideology that goes with it, i.e. which basically involves having the US military take digital human shields to protect its own spying, while tolerating even the undermining of national security, not to mention massive crimes like child pornography and illegal drug sales while it is doing this . That is the real lack of ethics at the root of the Snowden story, unlike the fake exposures of supposed lack of ethics in the NSA in much of the Snowden materia.

And that reason is a paper by Swedish academics giving us the important -- vital -- news that malicious exit nodes have been discovered in Russia. Gosh, surprise, surprise, the same place where not only Snowden is, but Russian hackers like those who perpetrated the massive Target hack came from.

Lots to study there, including the information about the use of Moxie Marlingspike's SSL strip attacks which he developed (of course, as open source tools they could be used by anyone, not just him). The chart in the paper shows a URL in -- of all places -- Hong Kong -- and -- on of all dates -- on June 5, the first day Glen Greenwald went public with his Snowden stories in the Guardian. Just a coincidence? Did the Russians get in early on spying on Snowden and his journalist friends? Or are they all in on it? All of this needs more study. The URL resolves to Sun Network Limited, a Hong Kong ISP. The map location is inside a large park, the Aberdeen Reserve. Look up the Mira Hotel, where Snowden stayed, on Google Maps. It's about 11 kilometers -- too long for a stroll, but not for a cab ride, and maybe this actor is Snowden's helper in Hong Kong, who was said to be Russian. (The Russian consulate in Hong Kon is 5.6 kilometers from the Mira Hotel. This is a Miru Mir Mirror as Nabokov might say.)

I've been very busy on Sochi Olympics material this last 10 days and haven't had time to read all the Twitter feeds. @LibertyLynx  and @streetwiseprof have been posting links to this material avidly.

A word on these two: a slam on me involving outrageously fake claims that I am Mr. X, a notorious character involved in Internet harassment, seems to have been removed. A post I tried to submit not only to counter this idiocy but the other nasty remarks on Pirrong's website was blocked, and so I see how these libertarians are playing this -- illiberally.

@libertylynx may be a mathematician and may know math, but he/she is not necessarily an expert on circumention software -- we don't know, because he/she is anonymous. Up to a point. Unless we discover what kind of derivatives he likes at Koch Industries.

But no matter, his/her identity isn't the point -- and as I've often had to explain to vicious non-entities like this, not only do I not  "need to know" who they are, but I do not advocate for everyone to be *forcibly* made to adopt real-life names -- and suffer things like attacks from the FSB (LL claims to have suffered them). Or their violent exes -- Tor often invokes the cause of helping domestic violence victims to cover its tracks and its radical agenda elsewhere. I'm not for forcing people to have to use anonymous social media *either* -- and that's what happens when you let in deluges of Anonymous and anonymous to any social media -- you can't tell the people in your Facebook group from real people whose names have accountability attached to them versus the secret police using nicks.

But I will say the obvious truth about anonymous  people -- they can poison the well easily in a community, and play havoc and destruction worthy of the best KGB-style wreckers and splitters -- and you may not be able to tell the difference between a psychopath and an actual agent. What's especially annoying is that if you disagree with their harsh methods and extreme libertarian notions and agenda (which is turning out to be more extreme than I thought), they denounce you and whip up their friends to denounce you like little Komsomol pukes. This just makes for so much annoying noise, and maybe it's deliberate.

@LibertyLynx's contribution to this debate basically has been to scream things like the people on Maidan should not use Tor. And indeed they shoudn't -- Tor is compromised in multiple ways, and is slow anyway. I don't know if people actually busy showing real-life solidarity on the street in person while fending off violent attacks from riot police have time to check their Twitters using clunky Tor but that's not the point -- somewhere they might have use for circumvention and they should find it elsewhere than Tor. Of course, the great thing about Maidan is that it shows just what a real revolution is -- people and solidarity, in person, not just social media, and Russians in particular as well as others can learn from this.

But LL's feed is also filled with shrill and crude invective against at Appelbaum and others castigating them for never mentioning dead journalists in Russia, or dead demonstrators in Ukraine -- and therefore implying that if only these types would balance their critique of West with East, all would be well. No matter that these types of loyalty tests are the least sort of thing @LibertyLynx or @Streetwiseprof -- himself under ideological attack from the New York Times right now -- would ever want practiced on themselves. Their methods really do self-discredit, and self-destruct eventually.

Now @streetwiseprof has a blog post up about this entire Tor issue, in which he also goes to extremes -- claiming that none other than Appelbaum himself could be running the malicious nodes in Russia.

This is where I begin to ask questions -- not because I'm uncritical of Appelbaum or Tor -- and not, as LL and SP say like taunting twelve-year-olds, because I will simply be contrarian to anything they say now after their vicious behaviour. No, I ask questions -- and give credit where it is due -- because I want it to be solid and for people to show their work. I want the critique of Tor, Appelbaum, and Snowden and all their works not to be written off as a hysterical Internet conspiracy.

Derp, I get it that Streetwise's August post about NASDAQ isn't a post dated this month. But the claim in it was the same as being implied now -- that every Russian hacker we turn up or every massive destructive act against the US will be related to these people around Snowden and Tor or could be, and we should always assume the worst. Maybe they are, but there so many different Russian-related bad actors that it's not necessarily the case.

And it could just be some opportunistic Russian hacker looking to slurp up what they can from Tor -- as none other than Julian Assange himself did once, as we all know who have been following this, thanks to Cryptome's expose. Or it could be the Russian government -- and with a name like Main Directorate (Glavnoye Upravelniye) it might well be -- or associated with government agencies of all types, including of course intelligence. We don't know. It has to be run down.

And that's where I start to ask what these two are really up to -- whether their purpose is to serve as radicalization agents to feign the anti-Putin shtick and attract a certain following but then discredit the cause of criticism of those who are either fellow travellers or not as zealous as they think people should be on the Cause.

This is all a very, very old story with the KGB and other intelligence services, even including our own, so you just can't be sure what is going on.

The sheer viciousness with which both of these online personas go about their business, however, seems that it is more likely they are just extremists all on their own, without any manipulative *intelligence* agenda, but only a manipulative agenda to create hard-core circles of "their own."

Here's the problem with taking up these extreme positions on the problems of Tor and Appelbaum: they make it easy to discredit all criticism of Tor and Appelbaum (and as I said, maybe that's idea).

So...Streetwise Professor claims that Appelbaum could have set up the malicious nodes in Russia. That will naturally be something that not only Appelbaum but his many fanboyz and fangirlz in and around Tor will viciously deride -- setting back the effort once again.

And there are arguments to be made against it, as follows -- and the task then is to go to the next, more sophisticated level with these people, not spout hysterical nonsense:

o The Swedish researchers, obviously fans of the world of encryption and Tor, seek to minimize the damage (and we don't know they are in good faith in doing this, but still, we have to look at it).  Not only in the paper, but in a follow-up post, they stress that the malicious nodes used little bandwidth. That means they were low-bandwidth sites, and the Swedes then claim that the system "routed around" this -- that it optimalizes and balances and seeks out the faster-running nodes with more bandwidth -- and given how notoriously slow Tor is, that seems plausible. In other words, we don't know if these malicious nodes really did any major damage. Given that Hong Kong location and date, all this needs a closer look -- but we don't know yet.

o While not an absolute requirement, given the Internet's great capacities for collaboration, setting up Tor nodes might be something the Tor freaks prefer to do in person, with personal (and safer) exchange of encryption keys, and establishment of trust levels that come with all the shared memes and ideological tics that these people possess. We have not placed Appelbaum in Russia ever. So how did he set up these nodes? Or how did he convince the Russians running them to turn them against the network and snoop?  What is the usual SOP for setting up Tor nodes -- it seems to me their close hacker friends usually are the ones to run them, and parties in their trusted circle -- although obviously, they want to obfuscate so that it doesn't become like the PGP early sign-up trust community being exposed.

o If you were running an operation that involved first robbing the NSA of its crown jewels, then spiriting that jewel thief away to Russia to the "loving arms of the FSB" as Congressman Mike Rogers aptly put it -- would you run malicious Tor nodes in Russia? I mean, wouldn't it be a good idea to cancel those way in advance, like your subscription to the Daily Worker? Why would you *keep* running them past June 2013, risking exposure, even by some routine check by some well-meaning person, let alone Swedish academics scrutinizing this intensely?

o Sure, there are plenty of WikiLeaks connections to Russia and no shortage of both obvious and hidden WikiLeaks operatives there to perform something like this. It doesn't have to be Appelbaum himself.

o These Russians don't seem to have used other Internet proxies or made it too easy to discover their use of Tor by these Swedish researchers. Really? The FSB doesn't know how to do this better? That suggests to me that more amateur hackers in a mafia or some corrupt business could be at work with this opportunistically, not necessarily the Party's Sword and Shield.

Streetwise Professor goes further:

And to loop back to Appelbaum one more time.  He, of course, is a confederate–co-conspirator, actually–of Snowden, who is in the grips of the FSB.  Which means that Appelbaum could be helping to bait a trap in Russia, using those 18 malicious relays.

Moreover, it means that via Appelbaum, the United States Navy is connected to Edward Snowden (and hence the FSB): who, by the way, has been photographed with Tor decals displayed prominently on his laptop.  This is a much closer connection than the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety.  If Obama has his way, the NSA will be limited to two “hops” to connect terrorists with American citizens.  The US Navy is two hops away from Edward Snowden, with Tor being the connection.  Navy->Appelbaum->Snowden/FSB.  With Tor providing the common link

The knowledge that Appelbaum and the Navy are connected doesn't require any sleuthing -- it's in the open. You would not have to expose malicious Russian Tor nodes to prove this.

And...A bait for what? Who actually went through those slow Russian nodes? Other Russians in remote parts of Russia going on Facebook? The Russian government is spying on its own people with its own SORM and other programs -- no doubt it exploits Tor, too, but are we certain that the same people who want to hide Snowden and his daily comms are happy to have their malicious nodes discovered? Again, this is likely other malevolent actors, of which there are no shortage.

As I've maintained since this began, those decals on Snowden's laptop aren't just something this NSA contractor, who supposedly wore the anti-NSA EFF hoodie, we're told by a Forbes source, got by mail-order from the Internet. And Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras, in their 40s, aren't really sticker-type people -- that's something younger people do. My guess is that either Jacob or some other younger Tor activist gave the stickers to Snowden, despite the pre-empive efforts by EFF to spin this and of Tor activists to ridicule it as tin-foil hattery. He always displays those stickers in every photo, and it's a meme and a taunt. He believes no one will ever trace thim. I've personally witnessed Appelbaum hand out stickers to people, and know that's just what he does -- and might have done it in Hong Kong or Hawaii or who knows...

As for these hops, there are mixed metaphors here, but as I've indicated, the Navy-Tor-Dingledine-Appelbaum connection is alive and well and proximate in real life, they are even invited to the same conference in -- where else, Germany.

But obviously these people feel very comfortable in their certitude that nothing will ever be made of this, that they not only have solid scientific alibis, but that they have the mighty Business Week to help them spin this.  This isn't just a tangled web, this is something that casual bloggers in Houston, TX -- regardless of Pirrong's academic credentials -- or New York, NY -- regardless of whatever credentials I have (which these two attempt to impugn) -- are not going to be able to get to the bottom of -- at least, not easily.

Appelbaum is still listed on the Tor web site as their "main" promoter or "evangelist," the term that the software cultists in Silicon Valley actually use for their religious product. And of course they wouldn't risk the extremism now associated with him at 30c3 -- openly calling on people in the US to sabotage their computers and leave their jobs in order to join the anarchists' revolution.

I won't be a bit surprised if we witness the shedding of Jacob Appelbaum from Tor which will be described by his long-time comrades as for the good of the cause. Won't be the first time revolutionaries have removed their own from the picture. On the other hand, the sheer bold certitude of these people in their own righteousness and unimpeachability lets me know they have powerful friends. They may do nothing because they don't have to.

Syverson's claim -- which the Tor evangelists always claim as if we're stupid and don't get systems philosophies -- is that the Navy "must" have a tool that even pornographers and NSA hacker fugitives can use because otherwise circumvention has "Navy" stamped all over its exit nodes.

Well, please. Tor is not the only circumvention software or community of developers -- there are a half dozen others. And there is nothing to stop the Navy from using, oh, farmer with barns in Iowa who don't rip off NSA files and sell drugs -- instead of the people they rely on for the nodes -- the trusted set of characters that Jake and his pals come up with -- which is to say, not people we should have to trust.

If you think people from farms in Iowa don't know sophisticated code and circumvention issues, think again. There is absolutely no reason in hell why Tor has to be run with these people, this way, with this track record -- and yes, the ethics of communities of developers matter.

 

 

 

 

And to loop back to Appelbaum one more time.  He, of course, is a confederate–co-conspirator, actually–of Snowden, who is in the grips of the FSB.  Which means that Appelbaum could be helping to bait a trap in Russia, using those 18 malicious relays.

Moreover, it means that via Appelbaum, the United States Navy is connected to Edward Snowden (and hence the FSB): who, by the way, has been photographed with Tor decals displayed prominently on his laptop.  This is a much closer connection than the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety.  If Obama has his way, the NSA will be limited to two “hops” to connect terrorists with American citizens.  The US Navy is two hops away from Edward Snowden, with Tor being the connection.  Navy->Appelbaum->Snowden/FSB.  With Tor providing the common link.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=8023#sthash.3OsWu5ky.kkMP9mrS.dpuf

 

And to loop back to Appelbaum one more time.  He, of course, is a confederate–co-conspirator, actually–of Snowden, who is in the grips of the FSB.  Which means that Appelbaum could be helping to bait a trap in Russia, using those 18 malicious relays.

Moreover, it means that via Appelbaum, the United States Navy is connected to Edward Snowden (and hence the FSB): who, by the way, has been photographed with Tor decals displayed prominently on his laptop.  This is a much closer connection than the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety.  If Obama has his way, the NSA will be limited to two “hops” to connect terrorists with American citizens.  The US Navy is two hops away from Edward Snowden, with Tor being the connection.  Navy->Appelbaum->Snowden/FSB.  With Tor providing the common link.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=8023#sthash.3OsWu5ky.kkMP9mrS.dpuf

Why I Oppose NSA Reform or Snowden Clemency Until Ten Other Important Issues are Decided

Look, short form:

Could we please have a different process and more kinds of people decide this great matter of national security than this guy:

(this was fake album cover art for a fake punk band Snowden dreamed up back in the day)

and these people (the Silicon Valley titans who met with Obama to make a deal as to what they will find acceptable in all this).

Photo by Pete Souza, The White House, December 17, 2013.

and this guy?

[picture of Glenn Greenwald in flip-flops and barking dogs and screaming monkeys in the trees if I had one]

There is a debate about clemency for Snowden, or what sort of punishmen is appropriate, and it's a sterile one, and one I think disingenuous. 

It distracts from the real issues of why does Snowden get to decide reform, why do his journalist activists get to decide reform, and why Obama has to be rushed into reforming something that in fact may not need reforming -- and wasn't democratically decided.

 I also don't think this very light and rushed "consultation" with these people such as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee is cutting it either. Why the rush? Just in time for Obama's State-of-the-Union Address?

The RUSH to reform the agencies in the US -- unseemly, given that only six months have passed since Snowden's hack -- is one I am not in favour of.

I don't see that the NSA needs reform. Sorry, I will buck the tide here. That is, I don't see that it needs reform through these methods which I find suspect.

I think there are ten other things that have to be decided first, conceptually. They are:

1. Is Obama destroying the state? Obviously, you wouldn't want to do a delicate and hard thing like fix the NSA if that's what Barry is really up to. The elements of the state that make up national security -- the Department of Defense (Pentagon), the military, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Attorney General's office, Homeland Security -- not to mention the NSA and CIA -- they all seem under terrible assault under Obama (see "Why is Our Military So Screwed Up?). I would submit in all clear seriousness not as a conspiracy theory that Obama is undermining all these bodies as institutions. Just by paying attention to everything from how Swartz's case undermined the justice system, not only Holder but liberal attorneys general; the cases of WikiLeaks, Snowden and Manning of course; Petraeus and all the rest; even things like failing to fill all the top posts at Homeland Security and now also making other controversial hires. Robert Gates new memoir seems to make something like this case.

I say it's not a conspiracy theory but a genuine investigation that has to be had. Obviously, there are all kinds of reasons why governments are undermined in our time -- the Internet, demographic booms of young people, the recession, global warming, bird flu -- whatever. I'm interested in examining closely what Obama is up to here.

I really think thoughtful journalists need to lay out a timeline of Obama's actions, starting from when he didn't do anything with the DoD and CIA and kept Bush's people at first -- as almost a feint and a dodge -- leading to the most methodical and destructive demolition of the armed forces I've seen since Stalin -- this is a post for another day.

So that's question number one. If we are not dealing with a sincere president but dealing with one who, for stealth socialist/ideological reasons, however sincere (and I don't think for a minute they are), then his "reform" efforts have to be looked at with a really weather eye.

2. Is a little commission of Obama's cronies, that is not good enough for Marcy Wheeler, nor me, even if for wildly different reasons, really the way you reform a giant, complex, wounded thing like the NSA, post-Snowden? I'm sorry, I don't think so. And yet, supposedly, that's our only process -- they rush out a really rather thin report, for all its length; Obama ponders it and rushes edicts? Why?

Reason: because when we reformed these agencies post-Clifford Case's revelations and all the rest in the COINTELPRO years, which, as the FBI itself admits, was opposd by Congress and the American people; we had CONGRESS do this. You know, those people we elected? I'm much, more more in favour of having them, through the democratic political process, do this. I don't care that you think Congress people aren't technical and don't understand the issues, that's bullshit, of course they do, Google has bought quite a few of them. They just don't always understand them your way. I don't care that you think Congress is irrelevant, or, as the Tor developer put it, "should go die in a fire" or should be "routed around" or is "broken". What geeks mean is that it is democratic in ways they don't like. I'm not for indulging their anarchic political monopoly here, I'd like to keep Congress as the pluralistic, representative thing it is, whatever it's flaws. I really don't think we can solve this with an app where only get to "like".

3. Should reform ever be undertaken by force? There are smug wags saying about the NSA, "Some people are born with openness, some acquire openness, and some have openness thrust upon them" and so we should just be grown-ups and proceed anyway. I disagree. I don't like the way any of this smells. It is not right. It is wrong.

I don't think Snowden "started a national conversation" and "raised important issues" because it was not done legitimately, openly and democratically -- liberally. It was done BY FORCE. By a handful of anarchist thugs and activist journalists with a huge beef with the US that in some cases just comes down to their personal sad childhoods without good fathers, and in other cases is very well organized subversion, maybe with some hostile help from Russia and others.

What kind of conversation is it, where we don't get to object? Where we can't say, hey, who are you, you haven't answered 100 questions about yourself and your flight to Moscow, who do you think you are?

Stealth socialists always talk about how so-and-so with his violent or anarchistm movment, in the SDS or Occupy, "started a national conversation" -- I've heard this phrase uttered in movement meetings for years. What they mean is that they presented forceful facts on the ground through coercion. When you try to change society that way, it doesn't work. There is resistance. And you yourself are thuggish and illegitimate.

4. We the people are not in charge of this process -- only a few anarchists and "progressive" politicians are. Snowden think's his mission is accomplished because he wanted to see if the American people would reform if he started this. Now he thinks they have. Why? Merely because he;

o started an international mass hysteria making everyone hate America and fear its intelligence operations

o got saturation media coverage by liberal and libertarians that pretty much define the media;

o got a few lefty Congress people like Ron Wyden to speak out and had a few hearings where the NSA people were grilled;

o got Obama to have this little crony commission  to discuss things;

o produced two contradictory judicial decisions under duress from law-farers of the extreme left and extreme right.

Um, what? That's not the American people. That's just Jameel Jaffe, Glenn Greenwald, Cass Sunstein, Ron Wyden, some truthers and some bloggers. It's not me, and it's not even you even if you disagree with me. This is not a public process. It is not democratic. It doesn't have ownership.

There have only been a few hearings on this subject, one of which produced -- under duress -- this supposed "lie" of James Clapper. I definitely support the way the NSA has responded to this -- that it is not an intentional misleading -- and I don't believe it is a lie.

My point is that this is not enough. We need more hearings. We need things even on why Tor is developed and allowed to be used by criminals to the damage of US security. LOTS more hearings. Congressional commissions. Other panels of distinction that aren't this crazy thing Obama put together.

In my view, the best thing Gen. Alexander, Michael Hayden and these sorts of people could do is not disappear from view, but fight. Make a think tank. Make a Committee for the Clear and Present Danger. And put forth their knowledgeable views.

5. We have not achieved agreement on what should be put under surveillance. To hear Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden helper and Tor developer, we should not have any spies. Glenn Greenwald might tolerate one small spy shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that just makes sure incoming missiles don't land on American territory from North Korea. So we need to have a debate -- and that starts with a really full and frank awareness that Snowden's operation is not about civil liberties, but damaging relations with allies, as this list helpfully explains from Jim Geraghty.

6. We have not achieved agreement on what is metadata or whether collecting it violates privacy. Extreme civil libertarians -- civil rights activists aren't really what they should be called anymore -- think the government shouldn't be able to collect data, under law, and then task it when looking for suspects, under a set of rules. I think they should. I'm immune to scare tactics by Glenn Greenwald who says that if I think that, I should give him my email archive. Nonsense. The government doesn't read my email archive -- let alone dox it on Pastebin like Glenn's little script-kiddy friends would. There's no comparison. The MIT nerds trying to make people think that reading headers and making social graphs from them with their scare program is the same thing are also incorrect. The government doesn't make massive social graphs and mine them indiscriminately for no reason. They follow suspects. Our names are in the telephone book. Unfortunately, our addresses and phone numbers, whether we like it or not, are on Spokeo. And our metadata is at the NSA. Too bad. That''s life in the big city.

7. We need to decide what signals are. In the old days, when the NSA got started in 1975, a signal that they should track was just a thing coming from a Soviet submarine, an enemy radio communications, foreign broadcasting, stuff like that. SIGINT wasn't HUMINT because humans, by and large, didn't emit signals.

It wasn't your teenager's Snapchat on Android phones or your IMs on your iPhone the way it is now. We are all now producing signals; before only governments and various broadcasting entities and various combatants and such produced signals. Now each and every one of us is a little telegraph station, broadcasting our me-shows 24/7.

Lenin said that the first thing to do in any revolution is to overthrow the telegraph station. And that's what Snowden and Greenwald and their shadowy helpers have done -- overthrown a lot of us with fear and confusion and crazyness. We have to get a grip. We are all signalling. But the government is not picking it all up, and when it does, it's for good cause. Let's define this, please, and stop the madness.

8. Courts are currently divided on this for a variety of reasons -- the specifics of the cases; the left versus the right bringing the suit; the DC libertarian Republicans versus the Democratic Machine in NYC appointing the judges; the more physically devastating experience of 9/11 in New York versus Washington; lots of things. It is what it is. It will go to the Supreme Court. But it will not be decided there, any more than ObamaCare was really decided there. So again, this is too big to be only about any one branch of government, all must be involved.

9. Media must investigate Snowden and his helpers far more than they have. Loud-mouthed and guilt-tripping Glen Greenwald has made it seem to liberals that they can never ask questions about "the indoor cat" in Russia. Why not? He's demanding nothing less than a coercive, thuggish, undemocratic overthrow of our government's vital national security agencies. Why can't we be a little more curious about that, guys? Outside a few journalists like Fred Kaplan at Salon and Michael Kelley at Business Insider, and a few bloggers like frankly me and very eloquently Benjamin Wittes, there's nobody going against the tide. And of course also Craig Pirrong (could the bizarre hugely visible attack underway on him over his Wall Street consulting and his views by the New York Times be related to his principled and persistent critique of Snowden? When I see what has happened with Craig, I feel as if I get a glimpse of what could happen to me.)

What we need is more information about those calling for this undemocratic change precisely because it is undemocratic and was started by them for murky motives. We need more glasnost. We need time for more newspapers, more TV shows like 60 minutes (which got nothing but shit from the "progressives" despite their SATURATION pro-Snowden coverge DOMINATING every single broadcasting media for months on end -- disgraceful). We need more blogs, like this guy's:

So when I hear people arguing about The New York Times editorial stance on Edward Snowden, or read civic-minded freakouts about the National Security Agency violating the civil liberties of "ordinary Americans," I turn away in frustration. 

Sure, we need to be concerned about the power we give to government. Duh. Glad we're finally having that conversation. 

But the public media freakout over NSA data collection misses the primary point of those systems entirely: The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.

Simple and straightforward, isn't it? And we have to shut down metadata collection entirely on the strength of one or two progs in Congress, a few progs in the media, and a prog Obama crony commission? Instead? Really? Why? This is America!

10. We have to consult with allies. After all, not only the five-eyes program, but just the interconnected world at large requires that the US not proceed in isolation -- nor be spooked into action by scare headlines manufactured by dubious people.

The Limits of Impunity for Activist Hacker "Journalism" and Jacob Appelbaum

 Jacob Appelbaum speaks at 30th annual congress of Chaos Computer Club December 2013. The official videos are here if you don't mind those hacker creeps getting your URL: 

Jacob Appelbaum's blockbuster talk at the aptly-named Chaos Computer Club's 30th annual Congress (#30c3) has stirred up a lot of interest in him which was missing before -- I guess it takes stepping on the Apple fanboyz tails to get them to focus.

Hackers Hack Apple Gadgets

Of course, this is not a new war story; those with short memories about these hackers may have forgotten how the CCC bragged that they had hacked into Apple's shiny new fingerprint-ID touch phone inSeptember.

Of course, when the CCC vandalizes products and accesses them in ways the manufacturer never intended -- that's called hacking, by the way -- it's only in the public interest for "privacy" and it's publicized only as a public safety bulletin, right guys? *Cough*.

But the Apple stuff tackled by the cosmically-named Appelbaum isn't really the news story here, although it guarantees that we'll see it through a few more news cycles for sure.

And the list of (now very outdated -- it was 2008, remember) used gadgets that the NSA supposedly has to spy on people -- which are now likely available on the international illegal arms black market for Bitcoins after Jake's talk -- aren't even the news although we can talk about that later. Like what hacking tools are in Jake's own tool box that are little different than these toys?

If Not from Snowden, then...From Whom?

The real news story of this talk as I already blogged here and here is that these are not confirmed Snowden documents. Nowhere in the Der Spiegel article are they claimed to be; Greenwald emphatically says on Twitter that they are not claimed to be and he didn't give them to Appelbaum. Later in his TL you can see him commenting with a knowier-than-thou remark to the effect that geez, everybody thinks hacking only gets done by Snowden, like he's the only one."

And maybe they are Snowden documents (an even closer reading of Greenwald indicates that he doesn't say they aren't Snowden docs; he just says he wasn't involved -- clever! and that they don't say they are Snowden docs) -- and  maybe they aren't. Maybe Jake has direct access to Snowden and maybe Snowden didn't give everything to Greenwald and maybe Snowden still leaks or maybe Appelbaum got their own set of documents from other hackers, maybe even in their midst. We may never know, but it pays to ask.

Jake Has His Own Source in the NSA

A shocking point in Jake's talk that no one seems to have noticed is that he claims to have his own source within the NSA and other intelligence agencies.

Gosh, the rot goes deep if that's the case -- that there are actually people in the NSA who aren't already working for the GRU willing to talk to Jacob Appelbaum. Of course, this isn't THAT far-fetched to conceive -- the Navy has still-employed developers that still work on Tor and even presented a paper on Tor's vulnerabilities (sorry kids) at the same conference in Berlin that Appelbaum gave a paper at and no doubt they talked (I haven't confirmed that they actually went and gave the paper but I'm trying to; they were listed on the program.) Tor is still getting 60% of its funding from the Department of Defense, even though it has snotty little employees who say things to me on Twitter like "Congress should go dire in a fire" and casually offer pro-tips and biz dev ideas for how Silk Road --one ofTor's biggest customers! -- should have better secured itself better from the feds.

We don't know if these are fresh and current contacts Jake claims to have in the NSA -- how could they be if the manual is from 2008, guys? We also don't know if in fact Russian intelligence is using the same caper they used in the CCC's old KGB collaboration case of the past, where they deployed their own moles within US intelligence to double track the German hacker they had coopted to check his work -- and also pin everything on him, one might add. Snowden could work that way too. But we can only get so far with this part of the story today, so let's press on to the other news value of this talk:

Anarchists Call for Sabotage, But is Someone Fighting Back?

The WikiLeaks/Snowden saga dynamics and Jake's claims of protection for his brand of "journalism" are an important part of this story -- for my money, more important than this or that claim about this or that gadget that might do this or that thing -- remember, one of the claims is that the NSA can transmit bursts of energy to zap people ("What if I told you that the NSA had a specialized technology for beaming energy into you...") . We're all doomed -- PS that zap is what killed Hugo Chavez.

And those dynamics, as we saw, in a separate appearance at 30c3, involved a Wizard-of-Oz like big-screen appearance from The One (Julian Assange), with properly reverant introductions from Appelbaum and Sarah Harrison (who spent nearly five months in Moscow with Snowden, then fled to Germany, remember, and says she can't go home to the UK for fear of questioning unde the anti-terrorist act).

Assange's purpose seemed to be to convince everyone he's still really behind everything, but since the video link kept cutting in and out (sabotage?) it sort of undermined his thesis. No matter, because there were two news pegs:

1) Assange, and Appelbaum, call on all systems administrators of the world to sabotage their networks which are all part of the mass surveillance security state with which Big IT is in bed (remember these people are anarchists; they are not "transparency activists"; they are not "privacy activists," they are anarchists. It's funny how Appelbaum's recruitment of people out of intelligence agencies to turn against their employees of last year at 29c3 (which worked great -- he got Snowden!) -- is never mentioned, and this even further call not just to hack and leave -- but sabotage too -- will also never get notice.

Jake in his own talk openly calls on programmers not just to leave the CIA or NSA, but to actively hack it -- "get the ball and bring it out" he says, to wild applause. Like it's a game of football.

2) Some wag in the audience (and "the Internet" will surely tell us who soon enough) asked him a provocative question:

"How did you get Snowden out of the US?"

Business Insider -- one of the few papers to be critical in covering the Snowden story -- was quick to pick up that odd locution which may have been a CIA-planted provocation, or maybe just a clueless git who didn't realize that Snowden was smuggled from Hong Kong, not the US; he got from Hawaii to Hong Kong on his own steam, without apparently Sarah doing his trip planning.

Assange didn't miss a beat and pronounced this a loaded question, and indicated that there legal questions related to answering it. Michael Kelley of BI seemed to think this was an indication of Assange's awareness of his culpability -- that Grand Jury inquiry into WikiLeaks is still open and running -- that if he were seen to move Snowden around here and there that might be booked as more than "journalism," especially if from the US -- but I think the reference is to *Snowden's* own legal protection -- Assange always likes to style himself as a big protector of sources. Of course, that didn't work for Chelsea Manning, and lots of other people he never redacted out of the cables.

The Thin Line Between Hackers and Journalists

There are lots of technical issues to pick over in Jake's talk, but let's come to where I think the really big challenge is, and the long-term news value that won't go away: a defiant bid for moving the goal posts even further for journalistic impunity in anarchist attacks on the US government.

Appelbaum puts forward a number of theses that Greenwald tries to style  -- in his approving tweets -- as great altruistic deeds that are a model for all those working with hacked materials.

Nonsense.

(BTW, it seemed that Appelbaum publicly broke with Greenwald when he accused him of sitting on stories from Ed -- stories that in fact later got published, but without Jake as the tech byline, and other tech specialists like Schneier as the byline. Oopsies. Jake also seemed to be in the WikiLeaks gang accusing Greenwald of selling out and commodifying Snowy's stash to millionaire ebay guy Pierre Omidyar. But nothing is ever what it seems with these people, and it may be that they patched things up, or Greenwald knows that Appelbaum is such a cunning reptile with such l33t skills that he is now praising him to keep on his good side. No matter.)

Real adults who care about the rule of law and liberal democratic states that aren't so open that they are enabling their own hacking to death by anarchists bent on their destruction have to begin asking some questions now about this so-called "journalism" which we are hearing so much about, especially from Jake, who is a hacker but tells you 10 times in this talk about his "investigative journalism" and his article that appeared (with two other people having to help write it) in Der Spiegel so as to invoke the journalistic "Pentagon Papers" cover.

Jacob Appelbaum, True American Patriot!

o Appelbaum says that he has "very large editorial process" redacted out the names of NSA spies and their home addresses and telephone numbers which were in this material [wild applause from the audience] (!). Gosh, thanks. (And don't think that wild applause is about his civic-mindedness it's that the NSA was pwned by this kid.)

o But he had a really, really hard time doing this because he didn't really agree that this was the right thing to do. "When we redact the names of people who engage in criminal activity in drone murder, we are not doing the right thing, but I think we should comply with law in order to continue to publish," he says. So look out! This is blackmail. Political blackmail. Thuggish coercion to try to impose an anarchist movement's will -- not for the good of society.

o Appelbaum also has the names of the alleged victims of the NSA's surveillance. But he won't let all those script kiddies who think they can get validated this way know if they're on the list (sorry to disappoint) just in case any of the targets are legitimate. This made him very uncomfortable (he assumes they are all innocent) but just in case there was that rare case of a terrorist the NSA legitimately pursues, "we didn't want to make that decision" to expose the fact that they were targets. Gee, thanks Jake.

To put these bursts of civic decency and generosity *cough* into perspective, I invite you to read this very interesting debate between Jeremy Duns, the author who has been critical of the Snowden case and confronted Appelbaum (@ioerror) on Twitter. He marvels -- as all decent people in the humanities of good will should marvel at the criminality of the machine-induced hacker mind should marvel -- at how casually Appelbaum rejects basic principles of civilization.

Here's one:

 

http://t.co/srQPSeHQqI A great piece on why, even though we need spies, we need better oversight of our spy agencies.

— Josh Myer (@xek) October 6, 2013

@xek @rezendi I read that and thought: wow, this guy still thinks we need spies? Doesn't he get that he can't have it both ways?

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) October 6, 2013

The utopian ideal that we should live in a world with "no spies" is presumably going to include him, and his friends, right? And his kit of surveillance tools which he uses to keep tabs on people he thinks are keeping him under surveillance, perhaps pre-emptively, right? And we're to unilaterally close down our spy shops even though Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Sudanese etc. intelligence aren't going to be doing this, let alone Al Qaeda.

So here's where I take a stand.

The Rights of Journalists Are Not Limitless

Many liberals and specifically liberal journalists are really scared of saying -- or even asking questions about! -- that anything that Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum --- and for that matter Bart Gellman and James Risen -- are doing is wrong ethically, let alone legally,  because then that might lead to what they view as a chill on free expression and free media, and even legal repercussions.

They also may fear the terrible backlash from activist-journalists and their anarchist hacker helpers who try to bully and shame and heckle and harass them to death if they raise an eyebrow about any of the ethical or legal ramifications of their facilitation of hacking.

So this very thin membrane has developed were the rules work like this: -- as long as you don't physically do the hacking, you are safe in journalism land (and note that "hacking" is a word that hackers themselves like to very narrowly define and dumb down so that it is never evil). Also, as long as you don't actually tell the hacker what would be useful to hack, you are safe in journalism land. As long as you don't get involved in moving those files around -- that after all, do contain the names of agents and their home addresses and phone numbers, and their victims and their identifying data, too, as Appelbaum confirmed -- you're also safe in journalism land too. Well, in the UK, were laws against terrorism are stricter and libel laws are stricter, you can't move and possess those files with impunity or you will be arrested like David Miranda was at the airport, or you will be questioned and told to destroy files like Alan Rusbridger was at the Guardian.

But you can spirit out those files to the US, where there is a looser interpretation -- at least so far -- about possessing the work files of your leaker that you ostensibly only need to do your journalism -- as long as occasionally you have lunch with an intelligence official and pretend you're cooperative.

If you threaten a dead man's switch -- that if you are put in jail someone will spill all these beans -- as Greenwald has definitely done although he denies to furiously -- then you are still safe in journalism land, although you might be branded finally as an activist journalism.

Stretching the Definition of Journalism to the Breaking Point

But what if you thin out this membrane even further, stretching it to the breaking point, by saying that you've kept to the letter of the law -- barely, for now -- but you really don't believe this law is just. Why should you keep private the names of people from a system that does drone killings? Why, isn't there a higher law that suggests you should name all these representatives of the Stasi-like mass surveillance state? (Notice how these hackers always speak of the Stasi, the now-defunct East German police, and never the KGB, whose agent is still head of Russia. Wouldn't want to hurt any feelings now, would we...)

Now, this is where I think you are not only firmly in activism land and far from the borders of ethical journalism, and not in a place called "ethical hacking" because it's not ethical to harm the intelligence agency of a liberal democratic state. That's my position.

And that's why I think your investigation, and even arrest and interrogation would be in order. You have gone too far. You can't keep hiding behind the cloak of journalism. You can't keep invoking the Pentagon Papers decision forever.  Crime is crime. Food Lion established that you cannot commit offenses -- lying on your employment application, trespassing, secretly videotaping without consent and so on -- for the supposed greater glory of your journalism. There are other cases.

The rights of journalists are really important to protect in a liberal democratic society under the rule of law. I'm a big believer and practitioner of the First Amendment and I think we have to go a long ways not to jail reporters. Glenn Greenwald, even with his talk of dead man switches and his aggressive adversarial stance to the US, does journalistic work protected by law.

But Jacob Appelbaum and others like him who show up at the CCC, which has openly hacked Apple products and has a history of KGB collaboration and an openly antagonistic stance of war against the NSA; who brag about their direct ties to NSA agents; who show manuals they got from who knows where of gadgets they claim (without proof) are used for some mass surveillance and not legitimate targeting; AND who say that they have names and information about agents and their supposed victims that they really think they should leak, but are kind enough not too for now -- I think they've gone too far.

I'm not afraid of the damage to press freedom to stake out that position because the ramification of letting it continue is that then we turn over press freedom to the whim of thugs -- and the aggressive heckling I am undergoing now by Appelbaum's hacker thug pals on Twitter now, threatening me with libel suits because I call out the criminality of Tor -- is proof enough of that harsh reality that deserves it's own Homage to Catalonia.

If we accept that hackers get to endlessly hack liberal states -- the Obama Administration is the most liberal state we've had in our history -- then we don't get to have liberal democratic states that we have chosen democratically, with checks and balance and separation of powers, with oversight by elected representatives and the courts. Instead, we have thuggish and brutal anarchists working by the Bolshevik "ends justify the means" to get their sectarian way.

Appelbaum thinks that by skating up against this very, very thin ice but not quite breaking through that he is a hero, and Glenn Greenwald and thousands of people wildly clapping in the CCC hall agree. I don't. I think it's beyond the boundary and it's time to call it.

What, you should depend on the good will of someone whose "Your Personal Army" Anonymous friends and hacker thugs on Twitter endlessly heckle bloggers like me and threaten us with libel suits for telling the truth about their lack of ethics and even criminality?

 

 

Are You Confused? Here, I Will Explain Everything to You About Politics!

Are you confused about who's on first?

Do you find it hard to understand what left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and libertarian mean any more?

Is Glenn Greenwald on the left or right? Libertarian (he used to consult for Cato) or communist (he has spoken before the Socialist Workers' Party annual meeting)?

How can it be that if Greenwald debates Ruth Marcus, a liberal Democrat and columnist in the liberal Washington Post, denounced by conservatives, he and his Twitter sock-puppets/cronies can accuse her of supporting the Bush Administration's torture? But wait, she agrees that James Clapper "lied" and "he should be ashamed of it" and "it's totally intolerable" -- so what's the difference between her anti-NSA statement and Greenwald's?! (well, he will settle for nothing less than a trial and punishment of this "lying" official, and Marcus points out to this lawfaring lawyer that perjury law is complicated and getting a judge to actually do this against an official merely doing his job as he saw fit would be quite hard to do).

Do you wonder how it is that Paul Carr, Mark Ames formerly of the Exile and Yasha Levine, all funded by Silicon Valley (they were bought out by Pando Daily) and technolibertarians of sorts (or are they?) can print trash about Snowden, and suddenly decide to bash Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, the NYU professor, for joining on to the new media enterprise First Look -- funded by the ebay millionaire Pierre Omidyar, who himself loves Greenwald...who speaks to the socialists? They're all about Big IT and Silicon Valley and technocommunism in the end -- why don't they get along?

How is it that Jacob Appelbaum, who still apparently gets Department of Defense funding and never really seems to scream about Obama the way Glenn Greenwald does, can be doing even more radical work revealing documents that aren't even from Snowden, but could even be -- who knows! -- from some GRU mole in the NSA merely using the Snowden flurries as a cover?

Well, if you look at this handy-dandy infographic chart I've made (sorry, I suck at Photoshopping), you will start to see how it all comes together -- or falls apart (and this chart helps explain why Omidyar and Greenwald will not last.)

Think of the four corners of our Metaverse as the extremes of thinking 1) Obama is a devil; 2) Obama is an angel; 3) Snowden is a traitor, or 4) Snowden is a hero. That's one level (think of the first horizontal X-axis in Second Life).

Then, think of people's attitudes towards capitalism and communism which really infuse everything (that's the Y-axis then, or a second horizontal layer). Everyone likes to pretend these categories and these ideologies don't exist anymore, but of course they do. Look, do you like Occupy Wall Street and want to shut down the stock market and jail the banksters? Then you're a communist. Do you think it's okay for Goldman Sachs and wealthy law firms to fund Obama's campaign along with Google, even though you're for that crazy unworkable socialist ObamaCare of his? Then you're a capitalist. Understood. Don't pretend these categories don't exist.

But there's more -- there's your attitude toward government -- think of this as yet another axis (like the vertical Z in Second Life if this were a 3D object which of course we could make in Second Life but I can't draw here).

There you might be an anarchist (no government), or a minarchist (for minimal government, but at least some); you might be for democracy, which means elected officials and separation of powers and the rule of law, or corporatocracy, which might be rule-by-law and emphasis on both private corporations and governments agencies.

Above the "democracy" line you will find those who like Obama -- he's president, after all -- and tend to think Snowden has done something wrong -- he's broken the law and gone against the democratc consensus that yes, we do need state secrets and agencies to keep them -- and find intelligence to keep us safe.

Or below the "democracy" line, you still might be in the Obama tank and loving Snowden, but you might be for oligarchy, which is where there is a state nominally affirming capitalism, or engaging in "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists called it -- but just as likely embracing many aspects of communism. This state still accords power to certain wealthy boyars -- as long as they support the state. You may even want to transform this state so that it is better for your business.

If you're under the anarchy line, you're for destroying government and running everything from the Internet and the IRC channel with your friends, maybe with a Drupal site and some Liquid Democracy Pirate Party "voting" scheme -- but fuck America, militaries, even roads.

Well, you get the idea. It's a grid -- and you can slide in any direction up or down or across or diagonally.

Naturally, I've put myself in the most perfect, centrist, democratic and good position, as any author would : )

But note what else is going on -- the attitiudes towards technology and how it will be used to pursue one's other values of anarchy or statism, communism or corporativism or statism.

Technocommunist as readers of this blog know is a belief that you can collectivize people online and use technology to redistribute wealth; the state withers away, as it is supposed to under communism and "every cook can rule the state". Of course, there's an avant-garde of the workers who know best (coders).

Technolibertarian can amount to "communism for thee but not for me" or a belief in social Darwinism, Randianism, meritocracy on steroids -- and no illusions that you will teach the homeless to code or even most kids in high school to do anything. Fuck 'em, you are going to have California secede from the United States.

Technoliberal means that you embrace technological innovation but you expect democratic government to maintain oversight over technology so that it does not harm liberal democracy itself.

Technoprogressive means that you believe in the transformative power of technology to change human nature and "make a better world" and you will make money in order to spend it on establishing socialism -- which will work better because of technology and distributive...stuff.

Technosocialist means that you would establish more limits on corporations in establishing your equitable society, except for the Big IT ones and those that provide you a paycheck. Distribution will be coerced. You're welcome.

Technostalinist means that you are for using technology to settle scores with your political enemies, and establishing some kind of state that can crush evil greedy oligarchs and capitalists.

And that's how we get the different boxes in this grid.

You could find Snowden a hero and think Obama is a devil -- and be a technolibertarian like Rand Paul for minimal government.

Or you could find Snowden a hero and not think much of Obama but not really pay attention to him, and be for anarchism and communism -- which you think you and your friends will implement just fine.

OR you could find Obama an angel and Snowden a traitor -- that would put you on the top of the box, with the majority of Americans, quite frankly.

Somebody like me who did not vote for Obama a second time is still in that box because Obama is,after all, the president, the result of a democratic election and therefore a figure of legitimate authority.  Looking at this box, you could additionally pin little pictures of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz into the boxes fairly easily -- I'd be on the Hillary side of the line.

Supportive readers of this blog will likely have no trouble finding MarkAmesExiled in the Technostalinist box. That's because he hates capitalism -- he loathes Obama as a sell-out to Wall Street -- and he is for hanging capitalists he hates from the lamp posts. He admires Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik, and he finds Snowden a traitor - but a traitor to...what, exactly? A powerful state that he imagines can be made a utopian state by ridding it of evil, corrupt capitalists? He's no anarchist, in fact, and he's no libertarian, because he imagines some mighty force that will be capable of punishing these big, evil oligarchs. There isn't any such force except Stalin.

Paul Carr, on the other hand, might slide more toward the technolibertarian box because he's more of a softy, but at the end of the day, his paycheck is still signed by the titans of Silicon Valley and he appreciates that.

Up in the love-Obama box is of course Jeff Gauvin, 18,000 followers, unfollower of me because I said something he didn't like once, hater of Greenwald, lover of Obama (his Twitter name is Jefferson Obama).  Jeff is actually Canadian, for all his American hero handles, and therefore tends toward the socialist as a national trait -- Canada is a country where a large percentage of the working population has jobs with the government or funded by the government.

Jeff is typical of a lot of tweeters who loathe Greenwald because he threatens their Obama and their progressivism with his...libertarian/communism or whatever it is. Note that I have Greenwald straddle the two categories because I think Greenwald just does what's best for Greenwald in the end, a powerful force that perhaps someday, may lead to contrition or at least turncoating.

John Schindler is more liberal than I am -- he's for reforming the NSA and I'm for leaving it absolutely untouched until other more profound issues are solved (more on that later) and until Obama is out of office, since I believe as a stealth-socialist, Obama is merely trying to destroy the capitalist state.

We may or may not get lucky and get Hillary back, in which case I will vote for her and so will John Schindler. If we get only Elizabeth Warren as a candidate because of powerful hate-Hillary forces gathering in quite a few of those boxes, I will definitely NOT vote for her; Schindler, I don't know.

Poor General Alexander I've put in the corporatocracy box merely as a kind of symbol. I have no idea what his personal views are. He may be a closet libertarian, for all I know. He may be a liberal Democrat struggling to reform this monster -- who knows.  I'm assuming that he's mad as hell at Snowden and I'm putting him very close to the "Snowden=traitor" box. I'm putting him in the same column with the "Obama as devil" because I have to figure Gen. Alexander feels like Obama threw him under the bus. I put him in the corporate box merely because the symbiosis between the military and the private corporate contractors makes up a state-within-a-state in some ways, although I am not a conspiracy monger and actually don't think there is something inherently wrong with military contracting in a free and capitalist society. It's just a tendency you want to watch and regulate and I'm for doing less contracting and having more paid, benefitted staff -- Manning and Snowden were contractors.

I actually think the most important thing Gen. Alexander could do is to form a think tank to fight for national security after he retires, responding to all the outrageous things that people are likely to do to the NSA.

Why don't I put myself up smack against the traitor box?

Well, I don't think that's a useful category to discuss Snowden, really; usually I'll call him "that little felon." To be a traitor, you would have had to show loyalty to you country first, and then betray it; I think for Snowden, the Internet is his country, he has absolutely no loyalty to anything like "homeland" or "government" and leans toward technocommunism or technolibertarianism if not technostalinism -- after all, he ran to first China, then Russia to help him in his struggle to smash the American state.

I think the issue is this: there are warring factions in government, and Snowden represents in fact a faction within the state -- the Wired State in the making, if you will, which is part old state, part oligarchs, part anarchists or Stalinists.

That's why I worry. Cory Ondreijka, formerly of the Navy and the NSA, represents just such a faction, too (more on him soon). While I'm generally supportive of the NSA as an institution, and I find it legitimate and necessary; I'm not supportive of some of the geek factions in government, including in the NSA, which I view as the enemy of liberal democracy (and they exist out of government, too, and are in a revolving door between government and Silicon Valley).

It used to be that people in government in the civil service and foreign service had their little factions, but they kept them to themselves, engaging only in minor skirmishes and minor sabotage; they more or less served the elected president.

They don't do that any more, since the wikification of government and social media gave them a lever and a voice to destroy government leadership they don't like.

So now people who are for friending Iran, despite the will of the Congress or the pragmatism of a compromising president, will deliberately leak, sabotage, undermine and present people with fait accomplis.

They'll make anonymous Twitter accounts and so damage there.

People who think the smart, hip thing to do is to dump on Israel as the problem for why America doesn't have good street cred in the world also leak, sabotage, undermine and create facts on the ground (like the botching of Syria and capitulation in Iran negotiations).

Well, you get the idea! See what you think and suggest ideas and changes. If anybody is better at Photoshop than I am, you're welcome to make this look better, just credit me for the idea!

No, Snowden Was Never "Forced" to Flee to Russia and WikiLeaks and He Chose to Go to Moscow

Updated 1/24/2014; 5/01/2014 and 5/31 with some additional links and background and a few corrections, following  publication of Luke Harding's and Glenn Greenwald's books.

I often find that people arguing on Twitter on behalf of Snowden use as one of their key arguments  the notion that he was "driven" into the arms of the Russians by the US revoking his passport.

Over and over again, as an argument against finding anything suspicious in his sojourn in Russia and possible cooperation with Russian intelligence, supporters invoke the idea that "he had no choice" because the US government ostensibly "blocked all his exits".

Today, WikiLeaks changed their narrative to admit that they advised Snowden to go to Russia where he would be "safe" (although not for the first time -- Assange has made this point before as Michael Kelley has pointed out).

Germany blocks #Snowden - why we advised #Snowden to take Russia. Not safe elsewhere: http://t.co/3U13BxOfbL donate: http://t.co/8gclJO08ey

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 1, 2014

@Wilson__Valdez Same thing Assange told Rolling Stone: "he would be physically safest in Russia." @Gus_802 @catfitz @bobcesca_go @bungdan

— Michael B. Kelley (@MichaelKelleyBI) May 1, 2014

 

In researching this story as it unfolds, I have to say that this is the weakest argument on Snowden's behalf on two legs, but most people never really bore down into the details to see why it ever got legs in the first place.

First, let's look at the complete timeline of events -- the accurate and actual timeline, and not the one that most people cherry-pick selectively or remember selectively:

May 1    Snowden and his girlfriend leave their rented house in Hawaii because the lease is up. The landlord confirms this to media.

May 1-19    Snowden goes to another rental house -- or so we're told from some news sources. At some point his girlfriend conveniently goes away on a trip, and Snowden is missing -- i.e. he is not placed anywhere reliably although likely he remains in Hawaii. At some point he tells his new employee of only about two months, Booz, Allen Hamilton that he needs to take unscheduled leave to treat his epilepsy. But he doesn't go to any hospital and his location during these long three weeks is not confirmed. Did he stay in the rental house? Did he go anywhere else during this period?

May 17  Snowden has his last day of work at Booz, Allen where he steals his last set of documents. Why doesn't he leave to go abroad on this day? What does he do on May 17 and 18 while his girlfriend is away on a trip evidently?

May 19 or 20    Snowden flies to Hong Kong, by his account. (The difference may be explained by the time difference.) He checks into the Mira Hotel, according to news reports -- but this is not confirmed. He is in touch with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras by their admission and likely Jacob Appelbaum about his stolen files. He insists Poitras and Greenwald come to Hong Kong.

May 30  A close friend of Appelbaum's sends a tweet about a Rubik Cube's party. She is one of the people attending the Spring Break of Code in Hawaii at the time both Appelbaum and Snowden were also known to be in Hawaii. Were they in touch earlier than they said?

May 31   Greenwald and Poitras (and Appelbaum?) travel to Hong Kong on this date (according to Greenwald's interview with Haaretz) or June 1 according to Guardian later. Which is it? They make contact with Snowden June 3rd using an agreed sign of recognition-- he is to be carrying a Rubik's Cube. Poitras films Greenwald, and also makes a written interview with him, both of which she later publishes with Appelbaum sharing the by-line.

June 3 According to Luke Harding, this is the date in fact when Greenwald and Poitras met with Snowden at the Mira Hotel. What were they doing for the other days if they in fact arrived earlier in Hong Kong? Which is correct? Greenwald himself then gives this date in his book, not June 1st, as the Guardian originally reported. Why the discredpancy?

June 5  Greenwald's first story about Verizon and meta-data appears in The Guardian.

June 8 Greenwald publishes his second story about "Boundless Informant".

June 9   Snowden decides to go public.

June 10 Snowden checks out of his Hong Kong hotel.

June 10 or?  Sarah Harrison leaves Melbourne, where she was on WikiLeaks business, at Assange's behest, to fly to Hong Kong to help Snowden because Greenwald and Poitras have ostensibly abandoned hm.

June 11 Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, offers Snowden to apply for asylum. Russia doesn't have many refugees and an invitation at the presidential level is as good as a granting of asylum because it's a political decision in this sort of case.

June 12 Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post publishes the first interview with Snowden outside the Guardian; he explains that he deliberately got employment at Booz, Allen in order to hack more documents better.

June 13 US opens up a criminal case on charges of espionage against Snowden and warn countries not to accept him.

June 14 The Home Office instructs airlines not to allow Snowden to board any flights to the UK.

June 15 -- British authorities bar his overflight and Iceland says it can only consider his application if he comes to their country.

June 16 -- Hong Kong authorities say they would review US extradition request re: Snowden.

June 20 -- US sends extradition request to Hong Kong.

June 20 Snowden arrives at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong -- or at the apartment of a Russian diplomat -- or at some safe house where he makes contact with Russians -- with a ticket to Cuba via Moscow already in hand. He stays overnight.

June 21  Snowden celebrates his 30th birthday in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, according to Kommersant, the Russian business daily.

June 21 Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica reports State Department as revoking Snowden's passport on Friday, June 21.

June 23 Snowden departs Hong Kong for Moscow.

June 23 Public statement is made about the revocation of his passport which has already occurred earlier.

June 24 Journalists get on a flight to Cuba based on reports that Snowden is on it; he isn't.

Snowden then goes on to ostensibly stay six weeks at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, although according to Russian media, he was met on the tarmac 23 June by the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan diplomats who wisked him away to one of their residences. Ultimately he is granted asylum just as Putin had indicated he would be back on June 11.

So once you see the time-table laid out, you have a number of questions you have to ask (if you didn't ask them before back in 2009 when Snowden was in Geneva, had his first clash with his bosses and his first adverse performance notice while working at the CIA.)

Number one: why didn't Snowden immediately flee to Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador or even Brazil, where Greenwald is based, immediately, starting May 1st or May 17 or whatever date he told his bosses he was going on unscheduled medical leave -- when he in fact decided to leave his job under a pretext and make the final break from his life as an NSA contractor?

At any time he could have simply fled to Latin America to any of those countries. He had just as much ease of doing this as he had in flying to Hong Kong three weeks later. He could have immediately fled to Cuba BEFORE revealing his identity even after meeting Greenwald and Poitras.

Any time during May or June he could have made this flight to any of these Latin American countries, particularly BEFORE he revealed his identity.

So why didn't he?

Claims that this would have triggered more alarms at his workplace or from NSA that kept employees routinely under surveillance don't wash -- a trip to Hong Kong suddenly is just as suspicious as a trip to Venezuela.

Claims that he "wasn't safe" in Latin America from supposed CIA abduction or extradition from governments supposedly too weak to withstand pressure just doesn't wash --after he revealed his identity, ostensibly to prevent just such a clandestine or overt development. The CIA isn't going to kidnap such a very public figure at that point and then look even more guilty of the crimes supposedly US intelligence is committing. Ecuador, which accepted Assange into their Embassy in London, is not going to just give up Snowden. Just not going to happen. Nor in the even more highly anti-American countries Cuba and Venezuela. Even Brazil, given the Rouseff claims and Greenwald's considerable clout, would be safe enough.

But there are more questions, obviously.

What did Snowden do during those three weeks in May? Was he busy shoveling 200,000 documents into cyber vaults with Appelbaum's help? Or what, exactly? Was he talking to the Chinese or the Russians? Was WikiLeaks, and then "helping" him -- without explaining they were talking to the Chinese and the Russians?

And once he got to Hong Kong and gave away the store, and was told that his hopes were dashed, that "China, which isn't our enemy" (as he claimed in his interview with Poitras) wasn't going to risk taking him for their own pragmatic reasons -- why didn't he immediately, on June 6 or even June 10th flee before the US had an extradition request out?

Because it didn't have the extradition request sent until June 20.

That's nearly two weeks when he could have fled somewhere, but didn't.

Where did Snowden go on June 10? Did his Hong Kong lawyers put him up? Did he in fact go to the Russian consulate then -- which accounts for why Putin issued this generous invitation to apply for asylum on June 11? Otherwise, why did Putin -- at his level! -- get involved so quickly? Putin claimed later he didn't "need" to "sheer this hairless pig".  So why even bother? Why does no one ever ask that question?

When the facts came out in the Russian media that Snowden had been in the Russian consulate on June 20-21, Putin himself confirmed this, admitting that it hadn't been mentioned before. This caused a funny thing to happen -- Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's lawyer who helped him with his asylum claim and who has close ties to the FSB, had at first lied and said that Snowden wasn't in the consulate to the media. Imagine how he must have felt when Putin himself contradicted him.

Does this show disarray in the Russian government or a war within Russian intelligence about what to do with Snowden? Or just the usual Russkaya khalatnost'? (incompetence and negligence).

Then there's this question to ask: when did Snowden buy his ticket, exactly?

According to Kommersant's source, he arrived with the ticket to Cuba already in hand in the Russian consulate on June 20, before the US revoked his passport, on the day that the US issued the extradition request (but had not yet revoked his passport).

Obviously, he couldn't have bought the ticket after this, with no valid passport; with the clock ticking on the extradition, and his Hong Kong lawyers telling him that China would not offer his asylum. Likely,  he had to buy it before -- on June 19th or earlier.

Why? Because you cannot buy a ticket board a plane to Cuba via Moscow without showing your passport. He likely knew or was informed by his Hong Kong lawyers that once the extradition request went out and Hong Kong had already told him that a) they would not give him asylum b) they had no objection if he left (according to Kommersant), then he would realize he had to get on a plane soon -- and without a passport, he would be blocked soon.

Russians and indeed most countries -- and hence most airlines! -- will insist on a show of a passport to get a visa and you must indicate your flights and travel plans on the visa application purchase a ticket -- and in the case of Russia, and Cuba, for Americans, you have to show a valid visa along with your passport to board the plane.  These are not countries where Americans can just pick up visas at the airport by paying a fee. They have to get those visas way in advance.

While Snowden could get by without a visa to Russia, if he were only supposedly transiting Russia to Cuba, he would still need a Cuban visa.

Note: updated to make it clear that a) if he used a travel agent (unlikely, as he wouldn't want to attract attention), *that agency* could have asked for his passport to buy his ticket and apply for his visa all at once. But he likely did *not* use a travel agency, ordered the ticket online, but still had to get a visa for Cub -- or some intercession from Russia.

Usually two weeks or more is what it takes; express visas still take 5 days often. So did Snowden in fact visit the Russian consulate BEFORE the 20th to get a visa? Or the Cuban consulate to get a visa? How was this done? When?

It's here that your typical Anonymous Twitter arguer claims that the US "bullied" Cuba into not accepting Snowden.  The State Department asked Cuba not to accept him -- but since when does Cuba do what the State Department tells them?!

And here we have Fidel Castro himself in an oped piece in the Guadian telling us that it's not true, Cuba most certainly did not buckle to this request.

So...why didn't Snowden go to Cuba on June 24th? Is Castro lying? Was Snowden going to stay in Russia the whole time anyway, and this was a distraction?

There's another date to pin down here, and that's the date the US actually revoked the passport. The announcement was made on June 23rd, but it was likely done on June 22nd; indeed Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica report it as revoked on the 22nd. It might have been made earlier, but not THAT much earlier because Snowden bought his ticket. Note:

“Such a revocation does not affect citizenship status,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson told Ars.

As explained, you cannot, as an American, buy a ticket to Havana or Moscow without showing a passport and a visa.

While it's possible "the system" didn't get the news flash that the passport was pulled right away, for something like this, you might think that all the red buttons would have been punched.  So that means it's most likely that Snowden bought the ticket with the passport still valid, before it was pulled, on the 20th or possibly even earlier, after the extradition notice was issued and his lawyers informed him that it was not likely it would be disobeyed. Why did he then delay his departure -- with the clock ticking? What deal was he trying to get...with which country? China or Russia?

He would have been able to buy the ticket a still-valid passport -- not pulled, and therefore not forcing him into any particular travel arrangement -- on the 20th.

You know, instead of sitting and partying with the Russians for two days, Snowden could have used the two days before his passport was revoked to go somewhere else -- anywhere else -- particularly Latin America.

See, it's this detail about how Russia and its old pupil Cuba work when it comes to controlling foreigners travelling to their countries that so stands out for us Russia-watchers.

That's why we can't believe that Snowden "decided on the fly" to go to Russia or stay in Russia after he got there.

He had to have gotten a visa; more to the point, so would Sarah Harrison, his WikiLeaks compansion and minder -- and perhaps she already had a multiple-entry visa to Russia due to her work on Mediastan for Wikileaks, or easily arranged an invitation, which is required by Russian law for foreigners to have longer stays.

The visit to the consulate on the 20th with the ticket already in hand might have been used to pick up a visa, but usually the way things work, that would have had to have been done before the purchase.

My bet is that with WikiLeaks help, Snowden dealt with the consulate much earlier -- but maybe hadn't gone in person, maybe Sarah Harrison did all the menial work of filling out applications, attaching photos and taking them over to the Russians. When did she arrive in Hong Kong? We only know from her statement covered in the Daily Mail that she went "in June". When? She isn't in the film or mentioned in the stories, but she is there, in the background performing these kinds of tasks obviously.

I think it's quite possible that even as early as May, again, there could have been chats with the Russians via Assange and Harrison or others  about Snowden coming to Russia.

Don't forget, WikiLeaks has quite a base of operations in Russia, as I establish here and here. When they released the film Mediastan recently, which they had working on for years, we realize that not only do they have Israel Shamir, the notorious pro-Kremlin provocateur and antisemite who has definitely performed work for WikiLeaks and represented its interests despite WikiLeaks denials  -- and whose idea it was to organize the airport meeting with Snowden -- but also his son Johannes Walstrohm, also a disgraced journalist and antisemite working for WikiLeaks directly -- about whom WL doesn't make any denials but instead credits him as the producer of their video Mediastan.

In addition, they have Russian Reporter and other film-makers, journalists, and assorted helpers in Russia, quite a crew to help out something like the care and feeding-- and the recruitment and tasking, too? -- of Edward Snowden.

So this is a story not only with just too many coincidences -- as John Schindler points out on his blog -- but too many holes and too many questions.

Snowden could have fled anywhere in the world before his identity was publicized; it was his call. He had weeks to make this decision, even if something spooked him into fleeing earlier than planned, i.e. a fear that someone at his job had already caught him. He could have gone to Latin American at any time during the weeks he hung out in Hong Kong, with a valid passport, and long before the US issued their extradition request -- which wasn't until June 20th -- a month after he arrived in Hong Kong!

So the idea that he was "forced"to go to Russia because "he had no choices" is as big a lie as any told in this entire caper, and it should help to unravel the entire false narrative.

 

Germany, Brazil, and the Hypocrisy and One-Sidedness of UN Privacy Resolutions

Colum Lynch -- a respected columnist and one of the few journalists to cover the UN and make it interesting -- has a scare headline posted today at Foreign Policy in The Cable:

Exclusive Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere

Oh, my.

My response:

I keep thinking how Brazil and Germany were never motivated to mount a resolution like this when the Russian opposition's cell phone conversations or the Belarusian opposition's cell phone and Internet conversations were put online by the secret police and a hundred other things like that even inluding the open Russian plan to capture all metadata during the Olympics to oppose terrorism but also any anti-Kremlin protest. None of that moved these diplomats before because they know the UN, and didn't want to go up against Russia or China.

The US is a softer target.

So hence this resolution, really opposing the US and nothing else.  By invoking it as a backlash against Snowden, they can get even Russia and China to tacitly agree because those authoritarians know that like all UN rights agreements, they have absolutely no intention of implementing them. And few countries -- least of all Germany or Brazil -- will ever have the guts to hold them to account around it, even though their privacy disruption is far worse.

Then there's the fact that the claims Snowden has made about the NSA have never been validated with actual cases and court decisions.

What I've been saying about the "Snowden revelations" and in particular the case of the alleged bugging of the Brazilian president's telephone conversations is that Rouseff should bring her case to the Human Rights Committee, the treaty body of the UN that actually already has plenty of privacy language to work with in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

She doesn't need a new resolution. Let her bring an actual case -- something that has been non-existent throughout the Snowden saga anywhere, in any venue (there is already one failed court case against the NSA run by the ACLU, which is having another run at it). And see if it could even be adjudicated! Merkel, too. Or, if they are concerned about never having had interstate complaints on the ICCPR (although there's no reason not to try one), let individual citizens of Germany or Brazil brings cases where they prove their privacy was eroded.

I wonder even with the tendentious review this might get in the HRC, if they could make their cases, given that...the content of their talks has never been revealed nor has it been confirmed that their calls were eavesdropped on in real time. No one has ever come up with a single case of an individual who can show his personal privacy was deliberately violated such as to harm his rights.

I'd love to be there when the HRC examines a case involving an indignant complaint that somebody listened in on...a Brazilian oil company -- the kind of oil company that NGOs usually scream about as a terrible violator of indigenous rights and environmental rights. Imagine, the HRC, at the UN, admitting that oil companies, of all things, have privacy rights. Go ahead, I'll wait, as they say...

As for the "global privacy right" -- I am hoping this isn't going to turn into a "global blasphemy law" which it could all too well become in the hands of certain UN members. As I wrote, be careful what you wish for, Germany...when you re-open freedom of expression language for negotiation at the UN.

No one would want extra-territorial *anything* nor making the US compelled to uphold it if it weren't for this anti-US campaign triggered by WikiLeaks and Snowden's hacker and activist-journalist friends. As we know, if they made an extra-territorial push for an end to reprisals for human rights advocates, as states at the Human Rights Council attempted to do yesterday, that would be killed by South Africa -- yes, South Africa! -- because they were mad at the ICC's "excessive attention" to Africa's mass murderers -- the ICC has tended to prosecute African tyrants rather than tyrants from elsewhere around the world. Maybe the others are harder to reach, i.e. like, oh, Russia, over its mass murder of Chechens and Dagestanis -- Russia, where Germany has vested business interests and a friendly foreign policy, or Iran, where a decided international lobby antagonistic to Israel wants to friend up this tyrant on the basis of promises, not performance.

(No, those countries haven't ratified the ICC statute, but then neither did some of the African states -- they got Security Council referrals that would be impossible on other regions of the world given the Russian and Chinese vetoes.)

Look, if you think this resolution is really in good faith, and really about privacy, you don't know how the UN works.

Germany has many other more effective ways of displaying its wrath, if it thinks its complaints about the encroachment by its long-time partner, the NSA, are founded. For example, yesterday we learned of the billions Germany has harvested in  Internet business - they had a banner year in sales. A good chunk of their revenue comes from amazon.de -- hey, an American company, with servers located in America, whose innovation and cost reductions due to scale they can utilize to make profits. You don't notice Germany shutting down amazon.de or demanding that Amazon suddenly place all servers with German data on German territory under German control -- or it may come to that, and even Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post and considerable lobbying clout may not stop it.

But nary a word, because that's business, and that's money, and Germany and the US are heavily intertwined there.

Instead, what we get is this ding at the UN, which "doesn't matter" in a sense that it is just rhetoric," even though people like Dianna PoKempner, who has decided to make Human Right Watch's crusade against the NSA an aggressive personal project, think this is "soft power" that NGOs can manipulate via international fora to get their way. That's because they might fail at more more mundane work through democratic institutions at home with factions that oppose their anti-Western positions and leniency  with tyrants like Russia and China.

BTW, I'm one of the human rights advocates who learned about these private negotiations before Lynch's article, but it didn't seem appropriate to leak the negotiating position of the US. Nowadays, there's a determined lobbying clique of NGOs starting with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, and other radical Internet activists who don't believe in private negotiations by states -- in fact, they don't much believe in states, period. They whined and whined about the secret negotiations of the TPP -- even after hackers got ahold of the secret documents somehow, we're not told -- either a bad-minded state party or leftist political party faction in a state leaked it, or it was actually hacked, we don't know.

But negotiations should be secret because that's how states can reach accommodations and compromises. The time to get your country to have a position you can support is before the international conference, at home, through the democratic process.

International negotiations, particularly those involving undemocratic states or states with very different positions, have to be done in secret to reach agreement. That's an axiom of international diplomacy that works -- and it works on the Disability Rights Treaty as much as the TPP.

It's ok to have secret negotiations in a hostile world where there are numerous enemies to basic universal human rights and values. The animus driving this issue about "secrecy" isn't really based on any value of transparency because it's more about anarchy -- these radicals do not accept that elected, legitimate liberal states like the US and Germany or even for that matter Brazil, whose record as a demoracy is not as good, should be able to negotiate in good faith on behalf of their citizens -- because they are elected.

The elected part bothers the anarchists because it goes against their brutal, nihilist grab for power themselves (anarchists who always oppose governments and try to make you think they are against big government and just for lovely little local collectives always forget to tell you the PS to the memo -- that in overthrowing others, they get in power, and are far less accountable or transparent themselves because they don't believe in voting or due process or democratic procedure -- they are all about coercive, collectivizing takeovers and pretend "consensus".)

At the UN, the leftist forces in Germany and Brazil in particular  -- where parliamentarians wear Snowden masks and Glenn Greenwald has safe haven -- have succeed in pushing the Snowden backlash into the complicated and dull procedures of UN committees.

This is actually a process that long preceded Snowden, as this same concerted claque that pushes the extreme "Internet freedom" agenda at the UN -- against copyright, against intellectual property, against trade, against sovereignty of states, against any criminal oversight of the Internet to oppose terrorism and crime -- has been very busy already trying to undermine what they see as an "unacceptable' historical US control over the Internet and force through various measures.

When Elaine Donahoe, the ebay president's wife, an Obama campaigner and fund-raiser, was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the UN Human Rights Council, these radical NGOs leveraged the obvious interest in Silicon Valley in defeating pro-copyright and anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) and under the guise of "Internt Freedom," got various measures put in -- here's the background on the "Internet Freedom" resolution. This let in dangerous wording that in fact brings in more state control under the invocation of the concept of "development" (i.e. in the technocommunist model, by states, or in the technolibertarian model, also by states they capture).

If this wife-turned-ambassador was getting her appointment in the Bush era, as a Bush fund-raiser, and her husband was the head of some less beloved Silicon Valley corporation, imagine the furor of the NGOs that business was using international fora to get its way in the marketplace. Not so when it's ebay -- as we're seeing about ebay founder Pierre Omidyar's support of Greenwald and others in a new radical media project.

There's a lot more boring background to this at the UN that few people have been paying attention to, which basically involves this same gang, with mainly Soros and other "progressive" funding, going to the UN to get language favourable to their ideological positions into various resolutions and mandates -- mainly because no one else bothers to show up and give some pushback to their blatantly sectarian maneuvers.

They have been particularly active at the international bodies that have aspirations to control the Internet -- the International Telecommunications Organization and the Internet Governance Forum. Brazil has pushed the latter heavily, just hosting the meeting, to get its own brand of socialist control over Internet affairs -- gathering all the usual anti-American fans in the process.

The IGF feigns support of what they call the "multi-stakeholder approach" -- as long as the stakeholder are things they like and control -- and it's important to note that ALL these NGOs are UTTER HYPOCRITES because FOR YEARS they've been in the Global Network Initiative with the likes of Google and even Facebook claiming to promote Internet rights. They were never, ever bothered by Google's massive data-vacuuming and Facebook's privacy-busting all those years. Instead, they sat by quietly while the GNI secretariat was mainly silent about things like the Internet being entirely shut down in whole countries or Internet journalists being jailed -- real freedom issues. Instead, they pushed for things like the right to keep a Youtube of a disabled boy being humiliated and bullied online in Italy despite a court action -- in the name of "freedom of expression" -- which was really a business issue for Google to keep their California Business Model intact (let everyon upload freely, chase over copyright or legal issues later, after the ad revenue is scoopd up). You don't hear so much about GNI anymore... in fact, EFF dramatically left it, funny...

This gang has promoted Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, through various Soros-funded evenings like this one at NYU, and its his decidedly anti-American antagonism which has driven the Internet resolutions at the UN seeking a) absolute encryption for non-state actors, regardless of whether they commit crimes  b) rejection of law-enforcement access to the Internet in the legitimate pursuit of crimes c) blessing of non-governmental human rights groups forever as never being involved in crime and worthy of such power -- a position that comes out of Frank's understandable but not universal experience of being a leftist activist lawyer in oppressive Guatemala in the 1980s.

Which brings us to Germany -- where Merkel, as I've said acidly a number of times, still hasn't gotten over the fact that the NSA didn't disclose the content of phone conversations that we have not verified they monitored.

Yes, it's hard to believe -- although CNN did ask the questions of the leftist German journalists who broke this story in the first place -- that this is not verified. We don't have any sample conversations. We don't know what she thought or what her position was internally on the even of important events like NATO summits. We haven't learned of any fact other than that her number was in a list of numbers held by the NSA which they may have scanned for meta data.

BTW, few noticed part two of the story of Norway, yesterday, where first Snowden's adversarial journalist-activist supporters Laura Poitras an Glenn Greenwald claimed there was a purported NSA scanning of millions of Norwegian phone calls (or phone transactions -- we never are told accurately if these "millions" in fact contain the thousands of back-and-forth "calls" that a person typically engages in during a week of texting, liking, sending links, etc. on his cell phone).  But...Come to find out even later in the day that it was Norway itself scanning its own conversations, then sharing them. Even the Kremlin's RT.com had to correct this. (Or, especially RT.com given that the anti-Norway campaign by Russia has gone on for awhile unrelated to Snowden, as part of a hate-on-the-West strategy).

But why wasn't the story *reported* from the get-go by journalists being skeptical of the usual Snowden Team active measure, and asking questions directly about it?! Is Richard Orange going to run a correction?

Norway -- let alone Germany -- were never moved to launch privacy resolutions at the UN over their own activity, all these years, including sharing with the NSA.

So here we all are. A tendentious portrayal of the US as some "killer" of privacy that Russia and even Germany and even Norway killed long ago, without a whimper from the NGO gotcha-gang all this time -- but suddenly, when WikiLeaks and their Russian supporters have an opportunity to exploit Snowden backlash even further in pursuit of their anti-American goals, they obviously seize it.