Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy




Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless





The US National Security Agency threat operations centre in Fort Meade, Maryland, in 2006. Photograph: Paul Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Eben Moglen
Tuesday 27 May 2014 06.00 EDT


In the third chapter of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon gave two reasons why the slavery into which the Romans had tumbled under Augustus and his successors left them more wretched than any previous human slavery. In the first place, Gibbon said, the Romans had carried with them into slavery the culture of a free people: their language and their conception of themselves as human beings presupposed freedom. And thus, says Gibbon, for a long time the Romans preserved the sentiments – or at least the ideas – of a freeborn people. In the second place, the empire of the Romans filled all the world, and when that empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world was a safe and dreary prison for his enemies. As Gibbon wrote, to resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly.
The power of that Roman empire rested in its leaders' control of communications. The Mediterranean was their lake. Across their European empire, from Scotland to Syria, they pushed roads that 15 centuries later were still primary arteries of European transportation. Down those roads the emperor marched his armies. Up those roads he gathered his intelligence. The emperors invented the posts to move couriers and messages at the fastest possible speed.
Using that infrastructure, with respect to everything that involved the administration of power, the emperor made himself the best-informed person in the history of the world.
That power eradicated human freedom. "Remember," said Cicero to Marcellus in exile, "wherever you are, you are equally within the power of the conqueror."
The empire of the United States after the second world war also depended upon control of communications. This was more evident when, a mere 20 years later, the United States was locked in a confrontation of nuclear annihilation with the Soviet Union. In a war of submarines hidden in the dark below the continents, capable of eradicating human civilisation in less than an hour, the rule of engagement was "launch on warning". Thus the United States valued control of communications as highly as the Emperor Augustus. Its listeners too aspired to know everything.
We all know that the United States has for decades spent as much on its military might as all other powers in the world combined. Americans are now realising what it means that we applied to the stealing of signals and the breaking of codes a similar proportion of our resources in relation to the rest of the world.
The US system of listening comprises a military command controlling a large civilian workforce. That structure presupposes the foreign intelligence nature of listening activities. Military control was a symbol and guarantee of the nature of the activity being pursued. Wide-scale domestic surveillance under military command would have violated the fundamental principle of civilian control.
Instead what it had was a foreign intelligence service responsible to the president as military commander-in-chief. The chain of military command absolutely ensured respect for the fundamental principle "no listening here". The boundary between home and away distinguished the permissible from the unconstitutional.
The distinction between home and away was at least technically credible, given the reality of 20th-century communications media, which were hierarchically organised and very often state-controlled.
When the US government chose to listen to other governments abroad – to their militaries, to their diplomatic communications, to their policymakers where possible – they were listening in a world of defined targets. The basic principle was: hack, tap, steal. We listened, we hacked in, we traded, we stole.
In the beginning we listened to militaries and their governments. Later we monitored the flow of international trade as far as it engaged American national security interests.

Last century we desperately fought and died against systems in which the state listened to every telephone conversation

The regime that we built to defend ourselves against nuclear annihilation was restructured at the end of the 20th century. In the first place, the cold war ended and the Soviet Union dissolved. An entire establishment of national security repurposed itself. We no longer needed to spy upon an empire with 25,000 nuclear weapons pointed at us. Now we spied on the entire population of the world, in order to locate a few thousand people intent on various kinds of mass murder. Hence, we are told, spying on entire societies is the new normal.

In the second place, the nature of human communication changed. We built a system for attacking fixed targets: a circuit, a phone number, a licence plate, a locale. The 20th-century question was how many targets could be simultaneously followed in a world where each of them required hack, tap, steal. But we then started to build a new form of human communication. From the moment we created the internet, two of the basic assumptions began to fail: the simplicity of "one target, one circuit" went away, and the difference between home and abroad vanished too.
That distinction vanished in the United States because so much of the network and associated services, for better and worse, resided there. The question "Do we listen inside our borders?" was seemingly reduced to "Are we going to listen at all?"
At this point, a vastly imprudent US administration intervened. Their defining characteristic was that they didn't think long before acting. Presented with a national calamity that also constituted a political opportunity, nothing stood between them and all the mistakes that haste can make for their children's children to repent at leisure. What they did – in secret, with the assistance of judges appointed by a single man operating in secrecy, and with the connivance of many decent people who believed themselves to be acting to save the society – was to unchain the listeners from law.
Not only had circumstances destroyed the simplicity of "no listening inside", not only had fudging with the foreign intelligence surveillance act carried them where law no longer provided useful landmarks, but they actually wanted to do it. Their view of the nature of human power was Augustan, if not august. They wanted what it is forbidden to wise people to take unto themselves. And so they fell, and we fell with them.
Our journalists failed. The New York Times allowed the 2004 election not to be informed by what it knew about the listening. Its decision to censor itself was, like all censorship and self-censorship, a mortal wound inflicted on democracy. We the people did not demand the end at the beginning. And now we're a long way in.

Women working on the Manhattan Project at a secret plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the second world war – when the enemy was clear. Photograph: Ed Westcott Our military listeners have invaded the centre of an evolving net, where conscriptable digital superbrains gather intelligence on the human race for purposes of bagatelle and capitalism. In the US, the telecommunications companies have legal immunity for their complicity, thus easing the way further.
The invasion of our net was secret, and we did not know that we should resist. But resistance developed as a fifth column among the listeners themselves.
In Hong Kong, Edward Snowden said something straightforward and useful: analysts, he said, are not bad people, and they don't want to think of themselves that way. But they came to calculate that if a programme produced anything useful, it was justified.
It was not the analysts' job to weigh the fundamental morality for us.
In a democracy, that task is given by the people to the leaders they elect. These leaders fell – and we fell with them – because they refused to adhere to the morality of freedom. The civilian workers in their agencies felt their failure first. From the middle of last decade, people began to blow whistles all over the field. These courageous workers sacrificed their careers, frightened their families, sometimes suffered personal destruction, to say that there was something deeply wrong.
The response was rule by fear. Two successive US administrations sought to deal with the whistleblowers among the listeners by meting out the harshest possible treatment.
Snowden said in Hong Kong that he was sacrificing himself in order to save the world from a system like this one, which is "constrained only by policy documents". The political ideas of Snowden are worthy of our respect and our deep consideration. But for now it is sufficient to say that he was not exaggerating the nature of the difficulty.
Because of Snowden, we now know that the listeners undertook to do what they repeatedly promised respectable expert opinion they would never do. They always said they would not attempt to break the crypto that secures the global financial system.
That was false.
When Snowden disclosed the existence of the NSA's Bullrun programme we learned that NSA had lied for years to the financiers who believe themselves entitled to the truth from the government they own. The NSA had not only subverted technical standards, attempting to break the encryption that holds the global financial industry together, it had also stolen the keys to as many vaults as possible. With this disclosure the NSA forfeited respectable opinion around the world. Their reckless endangerment of those who don't accept danger from the United States government was breathtaking.
The empire of the United States was the empire of exported liberty. What it had to offer all around the world was liberty and freedom. After colonisation, after European theft, after forms of state-created horror, it promised a world free from state oppression.
Last century we were prepared to sacrifice many of the world's great cities and tens of millions of human lives. We bore those costs in order to smash regimes we called "totalitarian", in which the state grew so powerful and so invasive that it no longer recognised any border of private life. We desperately fought and died against systems in which the state listened to every telephone conversation and kept a list of everybody every troublemaker knew.

Snowden spied on behalf of the human race. As he said, only the American people could decide if his sacrifice was worth it.

But in the past 10 years, after the morality of freedom was withdrawn, the state has begun fastening the procedures of totalitarianism on the substance of democratic society.

There is no historical precedent for the proposition that the procedures of totalitarianism are compatible with the system of enlightened, individual and democratic self-governance. Such an argument would be doomed to failure. It is enough to say in opposition that omnipresent invasive listening creates fear. And that fear is the enemy of reasoned, ordered liberty.
It is utterly inconsistent with the American ideal to attempt to fasten procedures of totalitarianism on American constitutional self-governance. But there is an even deeper inconsistency between those ideals and the subjection of every other society on earth to mass surveillance.
Some of the system's servants came to understand that it was being sustained not with, but against, democratic order. They knew their vessel had come unmoored in the dark, and was sailing without a flag. When they blew the whistle, the system blew back at them. In the end – at least so far, until tomorrow – there was Snowden, who saw everything that happened and watched the fate of others who spoke up.
He understood, as Chelsea Manning also always understood, that when you wear the uniform you consent to the power. He knew his business very well. Young as he was, as he said in Hong Kong, "I've been a spy all my life." So he did what it takes great courage to do in the presence of what you believe to be radical injustice. He wasn't first, he won't be last, but he sacrificed his life as he knew it to tell us things we needed to know. Snowden committed espionage on behalf of the human race. He knew the price, he knew the reason. But as he said, only the American people could decide, by their response, whether sacrificing his life was worth it.
Listening devices used at Bletchley Park during the second world war. Photograph: Martin Argles So our most important effort is to understand the message: to understand its context, purpose, and meaning, and to experience the consequences of having received the communication.
Even once we have understood, it will be difficult to judge Snowden, because there is always much to say on both sides when someone is greatly right too soon.
In the United States, those who were "premature anti-fascists" suffered. It was right to be right only when all others were right. It was wrong to be right when only people we disagreed with held the views that we were later to adopt ourselves.
Snowden has been quite precise. He understands his business. He has spied on injustice for us and has told us what we require in order to do the job and get it right. And if we have a responsibility, then it is to learn, now, before somebody concludes that learning should be prohibited.
In considering the political meaning of Snowden's message and its consequences, we must begin by discarding for immediate purposes pretty much everything said by the presidents, the premiers, the chancellors and the senators. Public discussion by these "leaders" has provided a remarkable display of misdirection, misleading and outright lying. We need instead to focus on the thinking behind Snowden's activities. What matters most is how deeply the whole of the human race has been ensnared in this system of pervasive surveillance.
We begin where the leaders are determined not to end, with the question of whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive surveillance into which the United States government has led not only its people but the world.
This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
For almost everyone who lived through the 20th century – at least its middle half – the idea that freedom was consistent with the procedures of totalitarianism was self-evidently false. Hence, as we watch responses to Snowden's revelations we see that massive invasion of privacy triggers justified anxiety among the survivors of totalitarianism about the fate of liberty. To understand why, we need to understand more closely what our conception of "privacy" really contains.
Our concept of "privacy" combines three things: first is secrecy, or our ability to keep the content of our messages known only to those we intend to receive them. Second is anonymity, or secrecy about who is sending and receiving messages, where the content of the messages may not be secret at all. It is very important that anonymity is an interest we can have both in our publishing and in our reading. Third is autonomy, or our ability to make our own life decisions free from any force that has violated our secrecy or our anonymity. These three – secrecy, anonymity and autonomy – are the principal components of a mixture we call "privacy".
Edward Snowden during an online Q&A. Photograph: ITAR-TASS/Barcroft Media Without secrecy, democratic self-government is impossible. Without secrecy, people may not discuss public affairs with those they choose, excluding those with whom they do not wish to converse.
Anonymity is necessary for the conduct of democratic politics. Not only must we be able to choose with whom we discuss politics, we must also be able to protect ourselves against retaliation for our expressions of political ideas. Autonomy is vitiated by the wholesale invasion of secrecy and privacy. Free decision-making is impossible in a society where every move is monitored, as a moment's consideration of the state of North Korea will show, as would any conversation with those who lived through 20th-century totalitarianisms, or any historical study of the daily realities of American chattel slavery before our civil war.
In other words, privacy is a requirement of democratic self-government. The effort to fasten the procedures of pervasive surveillance on human society is the antithesis of liberty. This is the conversation that all the "don't listen to my mobile phone!" misdirection has not been about. If it were up to national governments, the conversation would remain at this phoney level forever.
The US government and its listeners have not advanced any convincing argument that what they do is compatible with the morality of freedom, US constitutional law or international human rights. They will instead attempt, as much as possible, to change the subject, and, whenever they cannot change the subject, to blame the messenger.
One does not need access to classified documents to see how the military and strategic thinkers in the United States adapted to the end of the cold war by planning pervasive surveillance of the world's societies. From the early 1990s, the public literature of US defence policy shows, strategic and military planners foresaw a world in which the United States had no significant state adversary. Thus, we would be forced to engage in a series of "asymmetric conflicts", meaning "guerrilla wars" with "non-state actors".
In the course of that redefinition of US strategic posture, the military strategists and their intelligence community colleagues came to regard US rights to communications privacy as the equivalent of sanctuary for guerrillas. They conceived that it would be necessary for the US military, the listeners, to go after the "sanctuaries".
Then, at the opening of the 21st century, a US administration that will go down in history for its tendency to think last and shoot first bought – hook, line and sinker – the entire "denying sanctuary", pervasive surveillance, "total information awareness" scheme. Within a very short time after January 2002, mostly in secret, they put it all together.
The consequences around the world were remarkably uncontroversial. By and large, states approved or accepted. After September 2001, the United States government used quite extraordinary muscle around the world: you were either with us or against us. Moreover, many other governments had come to base their national security systems crucially on cooperation with American listening.
By the time the present US administration had settled into office, senior policymakers thought there was multilateral consensus on listening to other societies: it could not be stopped and therefore it shouldn't be limited. The Chinese agreed. The US agreed. The Europeans agreed; their position was somewhat reluctant, but they were dependent on US listening and hadn't a lot of power to object.
Teenagers during their induction to the Korean People's Army in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photograph: Eric Lafforgue/Barcroft Media Nobody told the people of the world. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a gap opened between what the people of the world thought their rights were and what their governments had given away in return for intelligence useful only to the governments themselves. This gap was so wide, so fundamental to the meaning of democracy, that those who operated the system began to disbelieve in its legitimacy. As they should have done.
Snowden saw what happened to other whistleblowers, and behaved accordingly. His political theory has been quite exact and entirely consistent. He says the existence of these programmes, undisclosed to the American people, is a fundamental violation of American democratic values. Surely there can be no argument with that.
Snowden's position is that efforts so comprehensive, so overwhelmingly powerful, and so conducive to abuse, should not be undertaken save with democratic consent. He has expressed recurrently his belief that the American people are entitled to give or withhold that informed consent. But Snowden has also identified the fastening of those programmes on the global population as a problematic act, which deserves a form of moral and ethical analysis that goes beyond mere raison d'état.

Hopelessness is merely the condition they want you to catch, not one you have to have

I think Snowden means that we should make those decisions not in the narrow, national self-interest, but with some heightened moral sense of what is appropriate for a nation that holds itself out as a beacon of liberty to humanity.

We can speak, of course, about American constitutional law and about the importance of American legal phenomena – rules, protections, rights, duties – with respect to all of this. But we should be clear that, when we talk about the American constitutional tradition with respect to freedom and slavery, we're talking about more than what is written in the law books.
We face two claims – you meet them everywhere you turn – that summarise the politics against which we are working. One argument says: "It's hopeless, privacy is gone, why struggle?" The other says: "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?"
These are actually the most significant forms of opposition that we face in doing what we know we ought to do.
In the first place, our struggle to retain our privacy is far from hopeless. Snowden has described to us what armour still works. His purpose was to distinguish between those forms of network communication that are hopelessly corrupted and no longer usable, those that are endangered by a continuing assault on the part of an agency gone rogue, and those that, even with their vast power, all their wealth, and all their misplaced ambition, conscientiousness and effort, they still cannot break.
Hopelessness is merely the condition they want you to catch, not one you have to have.
So far as the other argument is concerned, we owe it to ourselves to be quite clear in response: "If we are not doing anything wrong, then we have a right to resist."
If we are not doing anything wrong, then we have a right to do everything we can to maintain the traditional balance between us and power that is listening. We have a right to be obscure. We have a right to mumble. We have a right to speak languages they do not get. We have a right to meet when and where and how we please.
We have an American constitutional tradition against general warrants. It was formed in the 18th century for good reason. We limit the state's ability to search and seize to specific places and things that a neutral magistrate believes it is reasonable to allow.
That principle was dear to the First Congress, which put it in our bill of rights, because it was dear to British North Americans; because in the course of the 18th century they learned what executive government could do with general warrants to search everything, everywhere, for anything they didn't like, while forcing local officials to help them do it. That was a problem in Massachusetts in 1761 and it remained a problem until the end of British rule in North America. Even then, it was a problem, because the presidents, senators and chancellors were also unprincipled in their behaviour. Thomas Jefferson, too, like the president now, talked a better game than he played.
This principle is clear enough. But there are only nine votes on the US supreme court, and only they count right now. We must wait to see how many of them are prepared to face the simple unconstitutionality of a rogue system much too big to fail. But because those nine votes are the only votes that matter, the rest of us must go about our business in other ways.
The American constitutional tradition we admire was made mostly by people who had fled Europe and come to North America in order to be free. It is their activity, politically and intellectually, that we find deposited in the documents that made the republic.
But there is a second constitutional tradition. It was made by people who were brought here against their will, or who were born into slavery, and who had to run away, here, in order to be free. This second constitutional tradition is slightly different in its nature from the first, although it conduces, eventually, to similar conclusions.

We face two claims. One says: 'It's hopeless, privacy is gone, why struggle?' The other: 'I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?'. These are actually the most significant forms of opposition we face.

Running away from slavery is a group activity. Running away from slavery requires the assistance of those who believe that slavery is wrong. People in the United States have forgotten how much of our constitutional tradition was made in the contact between people who needed to run away in order to be free and people who knew that they needed to help, because slavery is wrong.

We have now forgotten that in the summer of 1854, when Anthony Burns – who had run away from slavery in Richmond, Virginia – was returned to slavery by a state judge acting as a federal commissioner under the second fugitive slave act, Boston itself had to be placed under martial law for three whole days. Federal troops lined the streets, as Burns was marched down to Boston Harbor and put aboard a ship to be sent back to slavery. If Boston had not been held down by force, it would have risen.
When Frederick Douglass ran away from slavery in 1838, he had the help of his beloved Anna Murray, who sent him part of her savings and the sailor's clothing that he wore. He had the help of a free black seaman who gave him identity papers. Many dedicated people risked much to help him reach New York.
Our constitutional tradition is not merely contained in the negative rights found in the bill of rights. It is also contained in the history of a communal, often formally illegal, struggle for liberty against slavery. This part of our tradition says that liberty from oppressive control must be accorded people everywhere, as a right. It says that slavery is simply wrong, that it cannot be tolerated or justified by the master's fear or need for security.
So the constitutional tradition Americans should be defending now is a tradition that extends far beyond whatever boundary the fourth amendment has in space, place, or time. Americans should be defending not merely a right to be free from the oppressive attentions of the national government, not merely fighting for something embodied in the due process clause of the 14th amendment. We should rather be fighting against the procedures of totalitarianism because slavery is wrong. Because fastening the surveillance of the master on the whole human race is wrong. Because providing the energy, the money, the technology, the system for subduing everybody's privacy around the world – for destroying sanctuary in American freedom of speech – is wrong.
Snowden has provided the most valuable thing that democratic self-governing people can have, namely information about what is going on. If we are to exercise our rights as self-governing people, using the information he has given us, we should have clear in our minds the political ideas upon which we act. They are not parochial, or national, or found in the records of supreme court decisions alone.
A nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, enslaved millions of people. It washed away that sin in a terrible war. Americans should learn from that, and are called upon now to do so.
Knowing what we know, thanks to Snowden, citizens everywhere must demand two things of their governments: "In the first place," we must say to our rulers, "you have a responsibility, a duty, to protect our rights by guarding us against the spying of outsiders." Every government has that responsibility.
It must protect the rights of its citizens to be free from intrusive mass surveillance by other states. No government can pretend to sovereignty and responsibility unless it makes every effort within its power and its means to ensure that outcome.
In the second place, every government must subject its domestic listening to the rule of law. The overwhelming arrogance of the listeners and the foolishness of the last administration has left the US government in an unnecessary hole. Until the last administration unchained the listeners from law, the US government could have held up its head before the world, proclaiming that only its listeners were subject to the rule of law. It would have been an accurate boast.
For almost nothing, history will record, they threw that away.
Card indexes of the former East German Stasi secret service are seen in Berlin. Photograph: Jan Bauer/AP To the citizens of the United States, a greater responsibility is given. The government is projecting immensities of power into the destruction of privacy in the world's other societies. It is doing so without any democratic check or control, and its people must stop it. Americans' role as the beacon of liberty in the world requires no less of us.
Freedom has been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe has been bullied into treating her like a stranger and Britain would arrest her at Heathrow if she arrived. The president of the United States has demanded that no one shall receive the fugitive, and maybe only the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, wants to prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
Political leaders around the world have had much to say since Snowden began his revelations, but not one statement that consisted of "I regret subjecting my own people to these procedures". The German chancellor, though triumphantly re-elected with not a cloud in her political sky, is in no position to say, "I agreed with the Americans to allow 40m telephone calls a day to be intercepted in Germany; I just want them to stop listening to my phone!"
The US listeners are having a political crisis beyond their previous imagining. They do not like to appear in the spotlight, or indeed to be visible at all. Now they have lost their credibility with the cybersecurity industry, which has realised that they have broken their implicit promises about what they would not hack. The global financial industry is overwhelmed with fear at what they've done. The other US government agencies they usually count on for support are fleeing them.
We will never again have a similar moment of political disarray on the side that works against freedom. Not only have they made the issue clear to everybody – not only have they created martyrs in our comrades at Fort Leavenworth, at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and at an undisclosed location in Moscow – not only have they lit this fire beyond the point where they can piss it out, but they have lost their armour. They stand before us in the fullness of who they really are. It is up to us to show that we recognise them.
What they have done is to build a state of permanent war into the net. Twelve years into a war that never seems to end, they are making the net a wartime place forever. We must reimagine what a net at peace would look like: cyberpeace. Young people around the world now working on the theory of cyberpeace are doing the most important political work of our time. We will now have to provide what democracies provide best, which is peace. We have to be willing to declare victory and go home. When we do, we have to leave behind a net that is no longer in a state of war, a net which no longer uses surveillance to destroy the privacy that founds democracy.
This is a matter of international public law. In the end this is about something like prohibiting chemical weapons, or landmines. A matter of disarmament treaties. A matter of peace enforcement.

What if every book for the past 500 years had been reporting its readers at headquarters?

The difficulty is that we have not only our good and patriotic fellow citizens to deal with, for whom an election is a sufficient remedy, but we have also an immense structure of private surveillance that has come into existence. This structure has every right to exist in a free market, but is now creating ecological disaster from which governments alone have benefited.

We have to consider not only, therefore, what our politics are with respect to the states, but also with respect to the enterprises.
Instead we are still at a puppet show in which the people who are the legitimate objects of international surveillance – namely politicians, heads of state, military officers, and diplomats – are screaming about how they should not be listened to. As though they were us and had a right to be left alone.
And that, of course, is what they want. They want to confuse us. They want us to think that they are us – that they're not the people who allowed this to happen, who cheered it on, who went into business with it.
We must cope with the problems their deceptions created. Our listeners have destroyed the internet freedom policy of the US government. They had a good game so long as they could play both sides. But now we have comrades and colleagues around the world who are working for the freedom of the net in dangerous societies; they have depended upon material support and assistance from the United States government, and they now have every reason to be frightened.
What if the underground railroad had been constantly under efforts of penetration by the United States government on behalf of slavery?
What if every book for the past 500 years had been reporting its readers at headquarters?
The bad news for the people of the world is we were lied to thoroughly by everybody for nearly 20 years. The good news is that Snowden has told us the truth.

Our secrets in their hands: one of four server rooms at the Facebook data centre in North Carolina. Photograph: Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Edward Snowden has revealed problems for which we need solutions. The vast surveillance-industrial state that has grown up since 2001 could not have been constructed without government contractors and the data-mining industry. Both are part of a larger ecological crisis brought on by industrial overreaching. We have failed to grasp the nature of this crisis because we have misunderstood the nature of privacy. Businesses have sought to profit from our confusion, and governments have taken further advantage of it, threatening the survival of democracy itself.
In this context, we must remember that privacy is about our social environment, not about isolated transactions we individually make with others. When we decide to give away our personal information, we are also undermining the privacy of other people. Privacy is therefore always a relation among many people, rather than a transaction between two.
Many people take money from you by concealing this distinction. They offer you free email service, for example. In return, they want you to let them read all the mail. Their stated purpose is advertising to you. It's just a transaction between two parties. Or, they offer you free web hosting for your social communications, and then they watch everybody looking at everything.
This is convenient, for them, but fraudulent. If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide email service to you for free as long as it can all be read, then everybody who corresponds with you is subjected to this bargain. If your family contains somebody who receives mail at Gmail, then Google gets a copy of all correspondence in your family. If another member of your family receives mail at Yahoo, then Yahoo receives a copy of all the correspondence in your family as well.


If someone in your family uses Gmail, then Google gets a copy of all your correspondence.
Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA Perhaps even this degree of corporate surveillance of your family's email is too much for you. But as Snowden's revelations showed, to the discomfiture of governments and companies alike, the companies are also sharing all that mail with power – which is buying it, getting courts to order it turned over, or stealing it – whether the companies like it or not.
The same will be true if you decide to live your social life on a website where the creep who runs it monitors every social interaction, keeping a copy of everything said, and also watching everybody watch everybody else. If you bring new "friends" to the service, you are attracting them to the creepy inspection, forcing them to undergo it with you.
This is an ecological problem, because our individual choices worsen the condition of the group as a whole. The service companies' interest, but not ours, is to hide this view of the problem, and concentrate on getting individual consent. From a legal perspective, the essence of transacting is consent. If privacy is transactional, your consent to surveillance is all the commercial spy needs. But if privacy is correctly understood, consent is usually irrelevant, and focusing on it is fundamentally inappropriate.
We do not, with respect to clean air and clean water, set the limits of tolerable pollution by consent. We have socially established standard of cleanliness, which everybody has to meet.
Environmental law is not law about consent. But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool ourselves.

We've lost the ability to read anonymously. Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of mind, there's literally slavery

What is actually a subject of environmental regulation has been sold to us as a mere matter of bilateral bargaining. The facts show this is completely untrue.

An environmental devastation has been produced by the ceaseless pursuit of profit from data-mining in every legal way imaginable. Restraints that should have existed in the interest of protection against environmental degradation have never been imposed.
There is a tendency to blame oversharing. We are often told that the real problem of privacy is that kids are just sharing too darn much. When you democratise media, which is what we are doing with the net, ordinary people will naturally say more than they ever said before. This is not the problem. In a free society people should be protected in their right to say as much or as little as they want.
The real problem is that we are losing the anonymity of reading, for which nobody has contracted at all.
We have lost the ability to read anonymously, but the loss is concealed from us because of the way we built the web. We gave people programs called "browsers" that everyone could use, but we made programs called "web servers" that only geeks could use – very few people have ever read a web server log. This is a great failing in our social education about technology. It's equivalent to not showing children what happens if cars collide and people aren't wearing seat belts.
We don't explain to people how a web server log captures in detail the activity of readers, nor how much you can learn about people, because of what and how they read. From the logs, you can learn how long each reader spends on each page, how she reads it, where she goes next, what she does or searches for on the basis of what she's just read. If you can collect all that information in the logs, then you are beginning to possess what you ought not to have.
Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist who said reading was the pathway from slavery to freedom. Photograph: J R Eyerman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there is literally slavery. Reading was the pathway, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, from slavery to freedom. Writing his memoir of his own journey, Douglass recalled that when one of his owners tried to prevent him from reading, "I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty – to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man."
But what if every book and newspaper he touched had reported him?
If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is surveilling every single moment you spend there. Moreover, much more importantly, every web page you touch that has a Facebook "like" button on it which, whether you click the button or not, will report your reading of that page to Facebook.
If the newspaper you read every day has Facebook "like" buttons or similar services' buttons on those pages, then Facebook or the other service watches you read the newspaper: it knows which stories you read and how long you spent on them.
Every time you tweet a URL, Twitter is shortening the URL for you. But it is also arranging that anybody who clicks on that URL will be monitored by Twitter as they read. You are not only helping people know what's on the web, but also helping Twitter read over everybody's shoulder everything you recommend.
This isn't transactional, this is ecological. This is an environmental destruction of other people's freedom to read. Your activity is designed to help them find things they want to read. Twitter's activity is to disguise the surveillance of the resulting reading from everybody.
We allowed this system to grow up so quickly around us that we had no time to understand its implications. By the time the implications have been thought about, the people who understand are not interested in talking, because they have got an edge, and that edge is directed at you.
Commercial surveillance then attracts government attention, with two results that Snowden has documented for us: complicity and outright thievery.
The data-mining companies believed, they say, that they were merely in a situation of complicity with government. Having created unsafe technological structures that mined you, they thought they were merely engaged in undisclosed bargaining over how much of what they had on you they should deliver. This was, of course, a mingled game of greed and fear.
What the US data-mining companies basically believed, or wanted us to believe they believed until Snowden woke them, was that by complicity they had gained immunity from actual thievery. But we have now learned their complicity bought them nothing. They sold us out halfway, and government stole the rest.
The headquarters of the US National Security Agency. Photograph: Trevor Paglen/Rex They discovered that what they had expected by way of honesty from the US listeners, the NSA and other agencies, they hadn't got at all. The US listeners' attitude evidently was: "What's ours is ours, and what's yours is negotiable. Unless we steal it first."
Like the world financial industry, the great data-mining companies took the promises of the US military listeners too seriously. That, at any rate, is the charitable interpretation of their conduct. They thought there were limits to what power would do.
Thanks to Snowden, for the data-miners, as for the US listeners, the situation is no longer politically controllable. They have lost their credibility, their trustworthiness, before the world. If they fail to regain their customers' trust, notwithstanding how convenient, even necessary, their services may seem to us, they are finished.
Environmental problems – such as climate change, water pollution, slavery, or the destruction of privacy – are not solved transactionally by individuals.
It takes a union to destroy slavery. The essence of our difficulty, too, is union.
Another characteristic of the great data-miners is that there is no union within or around them.
They are now public corporations, but the union of shareholders is ineffective in controlling their environmental misdoing. These companies are remarkably opaque with respect to all that they actually do, and they are so valuable that shareholders will not kill the goose that lays the golden egg by inquiring whether their business methods are ethical. A few powerful individuals control all the real votes in these companies. Their workforces do not have a collective voice.
Snowden has been clear all along that the remedy for this environmental destruction is democracy. But he has also repeatedly pointed out that, where workers cannot speak up and there is no collective voice, there is no protection for the public's right to know.
When there is no collective voice for those who are within structures that deceive and oppress, then somebody has to act courageously on his own. Before Augustus, the Romans of the late republic knew the secrecy of the ballot was essential to the people's right.
In every country in the world that holds meaningful elections, Google knows how you are going to vote. It's already shaping your political coverage for you, in your customised news feed, based upon what you want to read, and who you are, and what you like. Not only does it know how you're going to vote, it's helping to confirm you in your decision to vote that way – unless some other message has been purchased by a sponsor.
Without the anonymity of reading there is no democracy. I mean of course that there aren't fair and free elections, but much more deeply than that I mean there is no such thing as free self-governance.
And we are still very ill-informed, because there are no unions seeking to raise ethical issues inside the data-miners, and we have too few Snowdens.
The futures of the data-miners are not all the same. Google as an organisation has concerned itself with the ethical issues of what it does from the very beginning. Larry Page and Sergey Brin [the founders of Google] did not stumble randomly on the idea that they had a special obligation not to be evil. They understood the dangerous possibilities implicit in the situation they were creating.
It is technically feasible for Google to make Gmail into a system that is truly secure and secret, though not anonymous, for its users.
Mail could be encrypted – using public keys in a web of trust – within users' own computers, in their browsers; email at rest at Gmail could be encrypted using algorithms to which the user, rather than Google, has the relevant keys.
Google would be forgoing Gmail's scant profit, but its actions would be consistent with the idea that the net belongs to its users throughout the world. In the long run it is good for Google to be seen not only to believe, but to act upon, this idea, for it is the only way for it to regain those users' trust. There are many thoughtful, dedicated people at Google who must choose between doing what is right and blowing the whistle on what is wrong.
Mark Zuckerberg wants privacy for his family. Photograph: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa US/Rex The situation at Facebook is different. Facebook is strip-mining human society. Watching everyone share everything in their social lives and instrumenting the web to surveil everything they read outside the system is inherently unethical.
But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labelling. We need no rules, no punishments, no guidelines. We need nothing but the truth. Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does.
It should say: "We watch you every minute that you're here. We watch every detail of what you do. We have wired the web with 'like' buttons that inform on your reading automatically."
To every parent Facebook should say: "Your children spend hours every day with us. We spy upon them much more efficiently than you will ever be able to. And we won't tell you what we know about them."
Only that, just the truth. That will be enough. But the crowd that runs Facebook, that small bunch of rich and powerful people, will never lean in close enough to tell you the truth.
Mark Zuckerberg recently spent $30m (£18m) buying up all the houses around his own in Palo Alto, California. Because he needs more privacy.
So do we. We need to make demands for that privacy on both governments and companies alike. Governments, as I have said, must protect us against spying by other governments, and must subject their own domestic listening to the rule of law. Companies, to regain our trust, must be truthful about their practices and their relations with governments. We must know what they really do, so we can decide whether to give them our data.

The president must end this war in the net, which deprives us of civil liberties under the guise of depriving foreign bad people of sanctuary

A great deal of confusion has been created by the distinction between data and metadata, as though there were a difference and spying on metadata were less serious.

Illegal interception of the content of a message breaks your secrecy. Illegal interception of the metadata of a message breaks your anonymity. It isn't less, it's just different. Most of the time it isn't less, it's more.
In particular, the anonymity of reading is broken by the collection of metadata. It wasn't the content of the newspaper Douglass was reading that was the problem – it was that he, a slave, dared to read it.
The president can apologise to people for the cancellation of their health insurance policies, but he cannot merely apologise to the people for the cancellation of the constitution. When you are president of the United States, you cannot apologise for not being on Frederick Douglass's side.
Barack Obama: the president has the only vote that matters concerning the end of the war on privacy. Photograph: Sipa USA/Rex Nine votes in the US supreme court can straighten out what has happened to our law. But the US president has the only vote that matters concerning the ending of the war. All the governmental destruction of privacy that has been placed atop the larger ecological disaster created by industry, all of this spying is wartime stuff. The president must end this war in the net, which deprives us of civil liberties under the guise of depriving foreign bad people of sanctuary.
A man who brings evidence to democracy of crimes against freedom is a hero. A man who steals the privacy of societies for his profit is a villain. We have sufficient villainy and not enough heroism. We have to name that difference strongly enough to encourage others to do right.
We have seen that, with the relentlessness of military operation, the listeners in the US have embarked on a campaign against the privacy of the human race. They have compromised secrecy, destroyed anonymity, and adversely affected the autonomy of billions of people.
They are doing this because they have been presented with a mission by an extraordinarily imprudent US administration, which – having failed to prevent a very serious attack on civilians at home, largely by ignoring warnings – decreed that it would never again be put in a position where it "should have known".

The UK government must cease to vitiate the civil liberties of its people. It must cease to deny the freedom of the press

The fundamental problem was the political, not the military, judgment involved. When military leaders are given objectives, they achieve them at whatever collateral cost they are not explicitly prohibited from incurring. That is why we regard civilian control of the military as a sine qua non of democracy. Democracy also requires an informed citizenry.

About this, Snowden agrees with Thomas Jefferson [the chief author of America's Declaration of Independence], and pretty much everybody else who has ever seriously thought about the problem. Snowden has shown us the immense complicity of all governments. He has shown, in other words, that everywhere the policies the people want have been deliberately frustrated by their governments. They want to be protected against the spying of outsiders. They want their own government's national security surveillance activities to be conducted under the independent scrutiny that characterises the rule of law.
In addition, the people of the United States are not ready to abandon our role as a beacon of liberty to the world. We are not prepared to go instead into the business of spreading the procedures of totalitarianism. We never voted for that. The people of the US do not want to become the secret police of the world. If we have drifted there because an incautious administration empowered the military, it is time for the people of the United States to register their conclusive democratic opinion.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, should focus less on her mobile phone and more on whether it is right to deliver all German calls and text messages to the US. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters We are not the only people in the world to have exigent political responsibilities. The government of the UK must cease to vitiate the civil liberties of its people, it must cease to use its territory and its transport facilities as an auxiliary to American military misbehaviour. And it must cease to deny freedom of the press. It must stop pressuring publishers who seek to inform the world about threats to democracy, while it goes relatively easy on publishers who spy on the families of murdered girls.
The chancellor of Germany must stop talking about her mobile phone and start talking about whether it is OK to deliver all the telephone calls and text messages in Germany to the US. Governments that operate under constitutions protecting freedom of expression have to inquire, urgently, whether that freedom exists when everything is spied on, monitored, listened to.
In addition to politics, we do have lawyering to do. Defending the rule of law is always lawyers' work. In some places those lawyers will need to be extremely courageous; everywhere they will need to be well trained; everywhere they will need our support and our concern. But it is also clear that subjecting government listening to the rule of law is not the only lawyers' work involved.
As we have seen, the relations between the military listeners of the United States, listeners elsewhere in the world, and the big data-mining businesses are too complex to be safe for us. Snowden's revelations have shown that the US data-mining giants were intimidated, seduced, and also betrayed by the listeners. This should not have surprised them, but it apparently did. Many companies manage our data; most of them have no enforceable legal responsibility to us. There is lawyers' work to do there too.
In the US, for example, we should end the immunity given to the telecommunications operators for assisting illegal listening. Immunity was extended by legislation in 2008. When he was running for president, Barack Obama said that he was going to filibuster that legislation. Then, in August 2008, when it became clear that he was going to become the next president, he changed his mind. Not only did he drop his threat to filibuster the legislation, he interrupted his campaigning in order to vote for immunity.
We need not argue about whether immunity should have been extended. We should establish a date – perhaps 21 January 2017 – after which any telecommunications operator doing business in the US and facilitating illegal listening should be subject to ordinary civil liability. An interesting coalition between the human rights lawyers and commercial class action litigators would grow up immediately with very positive consequences.

The people of the United States are not ready to abandon our role as a beacon of liberty to the world. We are not prepared to go instead into the business of spreading the procedures of totalitarianism

If non-immunisation extended to non-US network operators that do business in the United States, such as Deutsche Telekom, it would have enormous positive consequences for citizens of other countries as well. In any country where de facto immunity presently exists and can be withdrawn, it should be lifted.

The legal issues presented by the enormous pile of our data in other people's hands are well-known to all systems of law. The necessary principles are invoked every time you take your clothes to the cleaners. English-speaking lawyers refer to these principles as the law of "bailment". What they mean is, if you entrust people with your stuff, they have to take care of it as least as well as they take care of their own. If they fail, they are liable for their negligence.
We need to apply the principle of trust in bailment, or whatever the local legal vocabulary is, to all that data we have entrusted to other people. This makes them legally responsible to us for the way they take care of it. There would be an enormous advantage in treating personal data under the rules of bailment or its equivalent.
Such rules are governed by the law where the trust is made. If the dry cleaner chooses to move your clothes to another place where a fire breaks out, it doesn't matter where that fire happened: the relevant law is the law of the place where they took the clothes from you. The big data-mining companies play this game of lex loci server all the time: "Oh we are not really in country X, we're in California, that's where our computers are." This is a bad legal habit. We would not be doing them a grave disservice if we helped them out of it.
Nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll: the US and USSR eventually agreed to ban such tests. Photograph: US air force Then there is lawyering to be done in international public law. We must hold governments responsible to one another for remedying current environmental devastation.
The two most powerful governments in the world, the US and China, now fundamentally agree about their policy with respect to threats in the net. The basic principle is: "Anywhere in the net there is a threat to our national security, we're going to attack it."
The US and the Soviet Union were in danger of poisoning the world in the 1950s through atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. To their credit, they were able to make a bilateral agreement prohibiting it.
The US and the government of China could agree not to turn the human race into a free-fire zone for espionage. But they won't.

In any country where de facto immunity presently exists and can be withdrawn, it should be lifted

We must pursue legal and political redress for what has been done to us. But politics and law are too slow and too uncertain. Without technical solutions we are not going to succeed, just as there is no way to clean up the air and the water or positively affect global climate without technological change.

Everywhere, businesses use software that secures their communications and much of that software is written by us. The "us" I mean here is those communities sharing free or open source software, with whom I have worked for decades.
Protocols that implement secure communications used by businesses between themselves and with consumers (HTTPS, SSL, SSH, TLS, OpenVPN etc) have all been the target of the listeners' interference.
Snowden has documented their efforts to break our cryptography.
The US listeners are courting global financial disaster. If they ever succeed in compromising the fundamental technical methods by which businesses communicate securely, we would be one catastrophic failure away from global financial chaos. Their conduct will appear to the future to be as economically irresponsible as the debasing of the Roman coinage. It is a basic threat to the economic security of the world.
The bad news is that they have made some progress towards irremediable catastrophe. First, they corrupted the science. They covertly affected the making of technical standards, weakening everyone's security everywhere in order to make their own stealing easier.
Edward Snowden in Moscow after revealing the scale of state surveillance. Photograph: AP Second, they have stolen keys, as only the best-financed thieves in the world can do. Everywhere encryption keys are baked into hardware, they have been at the bakery.
At the beginning of September when Snowden's documents on this subject first became public, the shock waves reverberated around the industry. But the documents released also showed that the listeners are still compelled to steal keys instead of breaking our locks. They have not yet gained enough technical sophistication to break the fundamental cryptography holding the global economy together.
Making public what crypto NSA can't break is the most inflammatory of Snowden's disclosures from the listeners' perspective. As long as nobody knows what the listeners cannot read, they have an aura of omniscience. Once it is known what they cannot read, everyone will use that crypto and soon they cannot read anything any more.
Snowden has disclosed that their advances on our fundamental cryptography were good but not excellent. He is also showing us that we have very little time to improve our own cryptography. We must hurry to recover from the harm done to us by technical standards corruption. From now on, the communities that make free software crypto for everyone else must assume that they are up against "national means of intelligence". In this trade, that is bad news for developers, because that's the big leagues. When you play against their opposition, even the tiniest mistake is fatal.

It's as though every factory in our society had an advanced fire safety system - while everybody's home had nothing

Second, we must change the technical environment so it is safer for ordinary people and small businesses. This is largely about spreading technologies big businesses have been using for a decade and a half. Far too little has so far happened along these lines. It's as though every factory in our society had an advanced fire safety system – smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, sprinklers, high pressure hoses, fancy fire extinguishers – while everybody's home had nothing.

We must commoditise personal uses of the communication security and privacy technologies that businesses have already adopted. This has to be as simple as installing a smoke detector, hanging a fire extinguisher on the wall, talking to your kids about which door to use if the stairs are burning, or even putting a rope ladder in a second-floor window. None of this solves the problem of fire. But if a blaze breaks out, these simple measures will save your child's life.
There are many software projects and startup companies working on these measures. My FreedomBox is one such non-profit project. But I am particularly delighted to see we are beginning to have commercial competition. Businesses are now aware: the people of the world have not agreed that the technology of totalitarianism should be fastened on every household. If the market offers them good products that make this spying harder, they will buy and use them.

We must commoditise personal uses of the communication security and privacy technologies that businesses have already adopted. If the market offers them good products that make this spying harder, they will buy and use them.

Snowden's courage is exemplary. But he ended his effort because we needed to know now. We have to inherit his understanding of that fierce urgency.
Our politics can't wait. Not in the US, where the war must end. Not around the world, where people must demand that governments fulfil the basic obligation to protect their security.
We need to decentralise the data. If we keep it all in one great big pile – if there's one guy who keeps all the email and another guy who manages all the social sharing – then there isn't really any way to be any safer than the weakest link in the fence around those piles.
But if everyone is keeping her and his own, then the weak links on the outside of any fence get the attacker exactly one person's stuff. Which, in a world governed by the rule of law, might be optimal: one person is the person you can spy on because you've got probable cause.
Email scales beautifully without anybody at the centre keeping all of it. We need to make a mail server for people that costs five bucks and sits on the kitchen counter where the telephone answering machine used to be. If it breaks, you throw it away.
Decentralised social sharing is harder, but not so hard that we can't do it. For the technologically gifted and engaged around the world this is the big moment, because if we do our work correctly freedom will survive and our grandkids will say: "So what did you do back then?" The answer could be: "I made SSL better."
Snowden has nobly advanced our effort to save democracy. In doing so he stood on the shoulders of others. The honour will be his and theirs, but the responsibility is ours.
It is for us to finish the work that they have begun.
We must see to it that their sacrifices have meaning. That this nation, and all the nations, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.
• This essay is built from the "Snowden and the Future" talk series
delivered at Columbia Law School, which is available at snowdenandthefuture.info. It
is released under the CC-BY-SA licence.

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...eats-democracy

Greenwald to publish list of U.S. citizens NSA spied on



Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA.

“One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer,” Mr. Greenwald told The Sunday Times of London.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ens-nsa-spied/

Edward Snowden: breaking law was only option, says whistleblower

Snowden tells NBC it was his duty to reveal sprawling NSA surveillance and going home would be 'walking into a jail cell'






Highlights of Edward Snowden's NBC interview.

One year after revealing himself as the source of the biggest intelligence leak in US history, Edward Snowden appeared in a long network television interview on Wednesday to describe himself as an American patriot and to make the case that his disclosures were motivated by a desire to help the country.

In his most extensive public comments to date Snowden sought to answer critics who have said his actions damaged US national security or that the threat from the secret government surveillance he revealed was overblown. Snowden was interviewed by the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who travelled to Moscow for the meeting.

Snowden defended his decision to leak documents to the press, instead of restricting his complaints to internal channels, and explained why he had decided for the moment not to travel back to the United States to face criminal charges.

“If I could go anywhere in the world that place would be home,” Snowden told Williams. “I’ve from day one said that I’m doing this to serve my country … I don’t think there’s ever been any question that I’d like to go home.”

Snowden said he had not second-guessed his decision, however, to release an estimated 1.7m top secret government documents. “My priority is not about myself,” Snowden said. “It’s about making sure that these programs are reformed – and that the family that I left behind, the country that I left behind – can be helped by my actions.”

The interview, which took place at Kempinski Hotel in Moscow last week, followed months of negotiations between the news network and representatives of Snowden. The conversation, which was held in a library and lasted more than four hours, was billed as Snowden's first interview with a US television network.

Snowden has regularly participated in interviews over the last year, although never on such a large stage, or on one as likely to bring his words – and his argument – into American living rooms. NBC Nightly News, which ran clips from the interview, drew about 8.4m total viewers per night in May.

On Wednesday Snowden, 30, described for the first time his experience of the 9/11 terror attacks and talked about his views on the threat of terrorism.

“I’ve never told anybody this,” he said. “No journalist. But I was on Fort Meade [Maryland] on September 11th. I was right outside the NSA. So I remember – I remember the tension of that day. I remember hearing on the radio the planes hitting. And I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it.

“I take the threat of terrorism seriously. And I think we all do. And I think it’s really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort of scandalize our memories, to sort of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our constitution says we should not give up.”
Snowden said he did not consider himself blameless. “I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout history where what is right is not the same as what is legal,” he said. “Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law.”

In a Pew Research poll of Americans earlier this year 57% of 18 to 29-year-olds said Snowden’s leaks had served the public interest but respondents 65 and over disagreed. A majority of respondents in older age groups supported prosecuting Snowden, while the 18-29 group split 42-42% on the question.
As much as he wanted to return home, Snowden said, he did not plan “to walk into a jail cell”. He repeated a view explained elsewhere by his legal counsel that the charges he faces under the 1917 Espionage Act would not allow him to mount a defense that he had acted in the public interest.

“These are things that no individual should empower himself to really decide, you know, ‘I’m gonna give myself a parade,’” Snowden said in reply to a question about how he judged his actions. “But neither am I going to walk into a jail cell, to serve as a bad example for other people in government who see something happening, some violation of the constitution, and think they need to say something about it.”

In the year he has lived in Russia as a fugitive from US law, Snowden said, he had not met President Vladimir Putin. “I have no relationship with the Russian government at all,” he said.

NBC News said it had confirmed “with multiple sources” that before he took the story to the press Snowden had raised a concern about possibly illegal surveillance on at least one occasion with intelligence agency superiors. Snowden said he had advanced his concerns on multiple occasions, even sending emails to the office of the NSA general counsel, and that the NSA would have a paper trail. The NSA has denied Snowden took such steps.

Snowden said he remained comfortable with the decision he made.

"I may have lost the ability to travel but I've gained the ability to fall asleep at night and know I've done the right thing and I'm comfortable with that.”

• This story was amended on 29 May to clarify that Snowden did use internal government channels to raise his concerns.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-whistleblower

Bilderberg at 60: inside the world's most secretive conference

Topics on the agenda for the three-day summit first held on 29 May 1954 will include: does privacy exist?

George Osborne is among those attending the high-powered summit. Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

It's been a week of celebrations for Henry Kissinger. On Tuesday he turned 91, on Wednesday he broke his personal best in the 400m hurdles, and on Thursday in Copenhagen, he'll be clinking champagne flutes with the secretary general of Nato and the queen of Spain, as they celebrate 60 glorious years of Bilderberg. I just hope George Osborne remembered to pack a party hat.
Thursday is the opening day of the influential three-day summit and it's also the 60th anniversary of the Bilderberg Group's first meeting, which took place in Holland on 29 May 1954. So this year's event is a red-letter occasion, and the official participant list shows that the 2014 conference is a peculiarly high-powered affair.
The chancellor, at his seventh Bilderberg, is spending the next three days deep in conference with the heads of MI6, Nato, the International Monetary Fund, HSBC, Shell, BP and Goldman Sachs International, along with dozens of other chief executives, billionaires and high-ranking politicians from around Europe. This year also includes a visit from the supreme allied commander Europe, and a return of royalty – Queen Sofia of Spain and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, the daughter of the Bilderberg founder Prince Bernhard.
Back in the 1950s, when Bernhard sent out the invitations, it was to discuss "a number of problems facing western civilization". These days, the Bilderberg Group prefers to call them "megatrends". The megatrends on this year's agenda include: "What next for Europe?", "Ukraine", "Intelligence sharing" and "Does privacy exist?"
That's an exquisite irony: the world's most secretive conference discussing whether privacy exists. Certainly for some it does. It's not just birthday bunting that's gone up in Copenhagen: there's also a double ring of three-metre (10ft) high security fencing. The hotel is teeming with security: lithe gentlemen in loose slacks and dark glasses, trying not to kill the birthday vibe. Or anyone else.
Already, two reporters have been arrested trying to interview the organisers of the conference in the Marriott hotel bar. It's easy enough to keep your privacy intact when you're employing so many people to guard it.
There's something distinctly chilling about the existence of privacy being debated, in extreme privacy, by people such as the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, and the board member of Facebook Peter Thiel: exactly the people who know how radically transparent the general public has become.
And to have them discussing it with the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, and Keith Alexander, the recently replaced head of the National Security Agency. And with people such as the head of AXA, the insurance and investment conglomerate – Henri de Castries. Perhaps no one is more interested in data collection and public surveillance than the insurance giants. For them, privacy is the enemy. Public transparency is a goldmine.
Back in 2010, Osborne proudly launched "the most radical transparency agenda the country has ever seen". However, this transparency agenda doesn't seem to extend to Osborne himself making a public statement about what he has discussed at this meeting. And with whom.
We know, from the agenda and list, that Osborne will be there with the foreign affairs ministers from Spain and Sweden, and the deputy secretary general of the French presidency. And from closer to home, the international development secretary, Justine Greening, and fellow Bilderberg veteran and shadow chancellor, Ed Balls.
We know that he's scheduled to discuss the situation in Ukraine with extremely interested parties, such as the chief executive of the European arms giant Airbus, Thomas Enders. Not to mention the chief executive and chairman of "the defence & security company" Saab: Håkan Buskhe and Marcus Wallenberg. And billionaire investors including Henry Kravis of KKR, who is "always looking to sharpen" what he calls "the KKR edge". Helping Kravis sharpen his edge is General David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, now head of the KKR Global Institute – a massive investment operation.
The Bilderberg Group says the conference has no desired outcome. But for private equity giants, and the heads of banks, arms manufacturers and oil companies, there's always a desired outcome. Try telling the shareholders of Shell that there's "no desired outcome" of their chairman and chief executive spending three days in conference with politicians and policy makers.
Try telling that to the lobbyists who have been working so hard to push the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal that is being negotiated. Bilderberg is packed to the gills with senior members of powerful lobby groups. Will members of BritishAmerican Business's international advisory board, such as Douglas Flint and Peter Sutherland, express BAB's fervent support of TTIP when discussing "Is the economic recovery sustainable?" Or will they leave their lobbying hats at the door?
MP Michael Meacher describes Bilderberg as "the cabal of the rich and powerful" who are working "to consolidate and extend the grip of the markets". And they're doing so "beyond the reach of the media or the public". That said, every year, the press probes a little further behind the security fencing. Every year the questions for the politicians who attend, but remain silent, get harder.
They can try to laugh it off as a "talking shop" or a glorified knees-up, but these people haven't come to Bilderberg to drink fizzy wine and pull party poppers. It's possible that Reid Hoffman, the head of LinkedIn, has turned up for the birthday cake. But I doubt it. This is big business. And big politics. And big lobbying.
Bilderberg is big money, and they know how to spend it. From my spot outside, I've just seen three vans full of fish delicacies trundle into the hotel service entrance. I always thought there was something fishy about Bilderberg. Turns out that for tonight at least, it's the rollmops.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ive-conference

EFF: On 6/5, 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn’t Know a Year Ago

June 5, 2014 by Electronic Frontier Foundation

This post, written by Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Nadia Kayyali and international rights director Katitza Rodriguez, originally appeared on EFF’s website on June 5.
It’s been one year since The Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations — from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits — has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago:
1. We saw an example of the court orders that authorize the NSA to collect virtually every phone call record in the United States — that’s who you call, who calls you, when, for how long and sometimes where.
2. We saw NSA PowerPoint slides documenting how the NSA conducts “upstream” collection, gathering intelligence information directly from the infrastructure of telecommunications providers.
3. The NSA has created a “content dragnet” by asserting that it can intercept not only communications where a target is a party to a communication but also communications “about a target, even if the target isn’t a party to the communication.”
4. The NSA has confirmed that it is searching data collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to access American’s communications without a warrant, in what Senator Ron Wyden called the “back door search loophole.”
5. Although the NSA has repeatedly stated it does not target Americans, its own documents show that searches of data collected under Section 702 are designed simply to determine with 51 percent confidence a target’s “foreignness.’”
6. If the NSA does not determine a target’s foreignness, it will not stop spying on that target. Instead, the NSA will presume that target to be foreign unless the target “can be positively identified as a United States person.”
7. A leaked internal NSA audit detailed 2,776 violations of rules or court orders in just a one-year period.
8. Hackers at the NSA target sysadmins, regardless of the fact that these sysadmins themselves may be completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
9. The NSA and CIA infiltrated games and online communities like “World of Warcraft” and Second Life to gather data and conduct surveillance.
10. The government has destroyed evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s cases against NSA spying. This is incredibly ironic, considering that the government has also claimed EFF’s clients need this evidence to prove standing.
11. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress when asked directly by Senator Ron Wyden whether the NSA was gathering any sort of data on millions of Americans.
12. Microsoft, like other companies, has cooperated closely with the FBI to allow the NSA to “circumvent its encryption and gain access to users’ data.”
13. The intelligence budget in 2013 alone was $52.6 billion. This number was revealed by a leaked document, not by the government. Of that budget, $10.8 billion went to the NSA. That’s approximately $167 per person in the United States.
14. The FISC has issued orders that allow the NSA to share raw data — without personally identifying information stripped out — with the FBI, CIA, and the National Counterterrorism Center.
15. Pursuant to a memorandum of understanding, the NSA regularly shares raw data with Israel without stripping out personally identifying information about U.S. persons.
16. The Snowden disclosures have made it clear the Barack Obama Administration misled the Supreme Court about key issues in American Civil Liberties Union’s case against NSA spying, Clapper v. Amnesty International, leading to the dismissal of the case for lack of standing.
17. The NSA “hacked into Al Jazeera‘s internal communications system.” NSA documents stated that “selected targets had ‘high potential as sources of intelligence.’”
18. The NSA used supposedly anonymous Google cookies as beacons for surveillance, helping it to track individual users.
19. The NSA “intercepts ‘millions of images per day’ — including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images’” and processes them with powerful facial recognition software.
20. The NSA facial recognition program “can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location.”
21. Although most NSA reform has focused on Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and most advocates have also pushed for reform of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, some of the worst NSA spying happens under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which Obama could repeal or modify today.
22. The NSA collected Americans’ cellphone location information for two years as part of a pilot project to see how it could use such information in its massive databases.
23. In one month, March 2013, the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide, including 3 billion pieces of intelligence from U.S. computer networks.
24. The NSA has targeted Tor, a set of tools that allow Internet users to browse the Internet anonymously.
25. The NSA program MUSCULAR infiltrates links between the global data centers of technology companies such as Google and Yahoo. Many companies have responded to MUSCULAR by encrypting traffic over their internal networks.
26. The XKEYSCORE program analyzes emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals anywhere in the world.
27. NSA undermines the encryption tools relied upon by ordinary users, companies, financial institutions, targets and non-targets as part of BULLRUN, an unparalleled effort to weaken the security of all Internet users, including you.
28. The NSA’s Dishfire operation has collected 200 million text messages daily from users around the globe, which can be used to extract valuable information such as location data, contact retrievals, credit card details, missed call alerts, roaming alerts (which indicate border crossings), electronic business cards, credit card payment notifications, travel itinerary alerts and meeting information.
29. Under the CO-TRAVELER operation, the U.S. collects location information from global cell towers, Wi-Fi and GPS hubs, which is then information analyzed over time, in part in order to determine a target’s traveling companions.
30. A 2004 memo entitled “DEA-The ‘Other’ Warfighter” states that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the NSA “enjoy a vibrant two-way information-sharing relationship.”
31. When the DEA acts on information its Special Operations Division receives from the NSA, it cloaks the source of the information through “parallel construction,” going through the charade of recreating an imaginary investigation to hide the source of the tip, not only from the defendant, but from the court. This was intended to ensure that no court rules on the legality or scope of how NSA data is used in ordinary investigations.
32. The fruits of NSA surveillance routinely end up in the hands of the Internal Revenue Service. Like the DEA, the IRS uses parallel construction to cloak the source of the tip.
33. Even the President’s handpicked Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended that the government end Section 215 mass telephone records collection, because that collection is ineffective, illegal and likely unConstitutional.
34. The NSA has plans to infect potentially millions of computers with malware implants as part of its Tailored Access Operations.
35. The NSA had a secret $10 million contract with security firm RSA to create a “back door” in the company’s widely used encryption products.
36. The NSA tracked access to porn and gathered other sexually explicit information “as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches.”
37. The NSA and its partners exploited mobile apps, such as the popular “Angry Birds” game, to access users’ private information such as location, home address, gender and more.
38. The Washington Post revealed that the NSA harvests “hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans.”
Many of the Snowden revelations have concerned the NSA’s activities overseas, as well as the activities of some of the NSA’s closest allies, such as the its UK counterpart Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Some of these have been cooperative ventures. In particular, the “Five Eyes” — The United States, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada — share citizen data among themselves, providing loopholes that might undermine national legislation.
39. The NSA paid its British counterpart GCHQ $155 million over the past three years “to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes.”
40. The Guardian reported: “In one six-month period in 2008 alone, [GCHQ] collected webcam imagery — including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications — from more than 1.8-million Yahoo user accounts globally.”
41. GCHQ used malware to compromise networks belonging to the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom.
42. Major telecommunications companies including BT, Vodafone and Verizon business have given GCHQ unlimited access to their fiber-optic cables
43. GCHQ used distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other methods to interrupt Anonymous and LulzSec communications, including communications of people not charged with any crime.
44. GCHQ’s Bude station monitored leaders from the EU, Germany and Israel. It also targeted non-governmental organizations such as Doctors of the World.
45. The NSA’s partners Down Under, the Australian Signals Directorate, has been implicated in breaches of attorney-client privileged communications, undermining a foundational principle of our shared criminal justice system.
46. Australian intelligence officials spied on the cellphones of Indonesian cabinet ministers and President Susilo Bambang.
47. In 2008, Australia offered to share its citizens’ raw information with intelligence partners.
48. The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) helped the NSA spy on political officials during the G-20 meeting in Canada.
49. CSEC and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) were recently rebuked by a Federal court judge for misleading him in a warrant application five years ago with respect to their use of Five Eyes resources in order to track Canadians abroad.
Ironically, some of the NSA’s operations have been targeted at countries that have worked directly with the agency in other instances. And some simply seemed unnecessary and disproportionate.
50. NSA documents show that not all governments are clear about their own level of cooperation with the NSA. As The Intercept reports, “Few, if any, elected leaders have any knowledge of the surveillance.”
51. The NSA is intercepting, recording and archiving every single cellphone call in the Bahamas.
52. The NSA monitored phone calls of at least 35 world leaders.
53. The NSA spied on French diplomats in Washington and at the U.N.
54. The NSA hacked in to Chinese company Huawei’s networks and stole its source code.
55. The NSA bugged EU embassies in both New York and Washington. It copied hard drives from the New York office of the EU, and tapped the internal computer network from the Washington embassies.
56. The NSA collected the metadata of more than 45 million Italian phone calls over a 30-day period. It also maintained monitoring sites in Rome and Milan.
57. The NSA stored data from approximately 500 million German communications connections per month.
58. The NSA collected data from more than 60 million Spanish telephone calls over a 30-day period in late 2012 and early 2013 and spied on members of the Spanish government.
59. The NSA collected data from more than 70 million French telephone calls over a 30-day period in late 2012 and early 2013.
60. The Hindu reported that, based on NSA documents: “In the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place.”
61. The NSA hacked into former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s official email account.
62. The Guardian reported: “The NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians.”
63. The NSA monitored emails (link in Portuguese), telephone calls and text messages of Brazilian President Dilma Roussef and her top aides.
64. Germany’s intelligence agencies cooperated with the NSA and implemented the NSA’s XKeyscore program, while NSA was in turn spying on German leaders.
65. Norwegian daily Dagbladet reported (link in Norwegian) that the NSA acquired data on 33 million Norwegian cellphone calls in one 30-day period.
There’s no question that the international relationships Obama pledged to repair, as well as the confidence of the American people in their privacy and Constitutional rights, have been damaged by the NSA’s dragnet surveillance. But one year later, both the United States and international governments have not taken the steps necessary to ensure that this surveillance ends. That’s why everyone must take action: Contact your elected representative, join Reset the Net and learn about how international law applies to U.S. surveillance today.

http://personalliberty.com/eff-65-65...know-year-ago/

Exclusive: High-Level NSA Whistleblower Says Blackmail Is a Huge – Unreported – Part of Mass Surveillance


Submitted by George Washington on 07/23/2014 13:52 -0400

It is well-documented that governments use information to blackmail and control people.
The Express reported last month:

British security services infiltrated and funded the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange in a covert operation to identify and possibly blackmail establishment figures, a Home Office whistleblower alleges.

***

Whistleblower Mr X, whose identity we have agreed to protect, became a very senior figure in local government before retiring a few years ago.

***

He has given a formal statement to that effect to detectives from Operation Fernbridge ….

***

“And he said [the pedophile group] was being funded at the request of Special Branch which found it politically useful to identify people who were paedophiles….”

Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 made gross indecency a crime in the United Kingdom, which included male gay sex. The Amendment was so frequently used to blackmail gay Brits that it was dubbed the “Blackmailer’s Charter“.
There is widespread speculation that Pope Benedict resigned because of sexual blackmail.
And the American government has a long history of blackmailing people – including high-level officials- with knowledge of their sexual peccadilloes.
Wikipedia notes:

The Lavender Scare refers to the fear and persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s in the United States, which paralleled the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism.

Because the psychiatric community regarded homosexuality as a mental illness, gay men and lesbians were considered susceptible to blackmail ….

Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson has written: “The so-called ‘Red Scare’ has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element . . . and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals.”

FBI head Hoover was famous for blackmailing everyone … including politicians. The New York Times reports:

J. Edgar Hoover compiled secret dossiers on the sexual peccadillos and private misbehavior of those he labeled as enemies — really dangerous people like … President John F. Kennedy, for example.

Alfred McCoy – Professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – provides details:

Upon taking office on Roosevelt’s death in early 1945, Harry Truman soon learned the extraordinary extent of FBI surveillance. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman wrote in his diary that May. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail.”

After a quarter of a century of warrantless wiretaps, Hoover built up a veritable archive of sexual preferences among America’s powerful and used it to shape the direction of U.S. politics. He distributed a dossier on Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s alleged homosexuality to assure his defeat in the 1952 presidential elections, circulated audio tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philandering, and monitored President Kennedy’s affair with mafia mistress Judith Exner. And these are just a small sampling of Hoover’s uses of scandal to keep the Washington power elite under his influence.

“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” recalled William Sullivan, the FBI’s chief of domestic intelligence during the 1960s, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter…’ From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.” After his death, an official tally found Hoover had 883 such files on senators and 722 more on congressmen.

***

With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far.

After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C. To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans — an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet.

***

In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover’s FBI once did. In September 2013, the New York Times reported that the NSA has, since 2010, applied sophisticated software to create “social network diagrams…, unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible…, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner.”

***

By collecting knowledge — routine, intimate, or scandalous — about foreign leaders, imperial proconsuls from ancient Rome to modern America have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies. The importance, and challenge, of controlling these local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the U.S. colonial regime subdued contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal. And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s.

***

According to James Bamford, author of two authoritative books on the agency, “The NSA’s operation is eerily similar to the FBI’s operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to ‘neutralize’ their targets.”

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer has warned that a president might “ask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist, or human rights activist. The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be naïve to think it couldn’t use its power that way in the future.” Even President Obama’s recently convened executive review of the NSA admitted: “[I]n light of the lessons of our own history… at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking.”

Indeed, whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of actually conducting such surveillance. In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian people, he wrote, “They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.” If Snowden is right, then one key goal of NSA surveillance of world leaders is not U.S. national security but political blackmail — as it has been since 1898.

Today, the NSA tracks people’s porn-viewing habits in order to discredit activists. The NSA also gathers and keeps nude and suggestive photos of people in order to blackmail them.
The Associated Press notes:

The stockpiling of sexually explicit images of ordinary people had uncomfortable echoes of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” where the authorities — operating under the aegis of “Big Brother” — fit homes with cameras to monitor the intimate details of people’s home lives.

***

The collection of nude photographs also raise questions about potential for blackmail. America’s National Security Agency has already acknowledged that half a dozen analysts have been caught trawling databases for inappropriate material on partners or love interests. Other leaked documents have revealed how U.S. and British intelligence discussed leaking embarrassing material online to blacken the reputations of their targets.

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds alleged under oath that a recently-serving Democratic Congresswoman was secretly videotaped – for blackmail purposes – during a lesbian affair. (Other Congress members have been blackmailed as well.)
Edmonds tells Washington's Blog that judges who are too "squeaky clean" are often not approved for nomination ... while ones with skeletons in their closets are. And she says that high-level FBI managers have publicly confirmed this blackmail process.
There have been allegations of blackmail of gay activities within the U.S. armed forces for years.
And even the raw data on American citizens collected by the NSA is shared with Israel. This likely includes Congress members and other politicians, as well.
Bill Binney – the NSA’s senior technical director and head of the agency’s global digital information gathering program – told Washington’s Blog:

Bulk collection of everything gives law enforcement all the data they need on every citizen in the country. And, it gives NSA all that info on everyone too. Makes them akin to a J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids.

Binney explained to us the importance of this story:

Being able to blackmail people is one major aspect of bulk/mass collection that has not been talked about. E.g., they could use this data to blackmail members of governments around the world. But, surely just to get them to do what they wanted them to do. Just like J. Edgar Hoover did.

This is on top of the ability to do world-wide industrial espionage.

Indeed, Binney tells us that the NSA’s blackmail tactics are the same as those used by the KGB and Stasi:

This is just one of the ways to make controlling people possible. Standard KGB/Stasi tactics.

(Binney told the Guardian recently: “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”)
And Binney tells Washington’s Blog that NSA surveillance allows the government to target:

• “[CIA head] General Petraeus and General Allen and others like [New York State Attorney General] Elliot Spitzer”

• “Supreme Court Judges, other judges, Senators, Representatives, law firms and lawyers, and just anybody you don’t like … reporters included”

NSA whistleblower Russell Tice (a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping), also says:

• The NSA is spying on and blackmailing its overseers in Washington, as well as Supreme Court judges, generals and others

• The agency started spying on Barack Obama when he was just a candidate for the Senate

And senior NSA executive Thomas Drake explains to Washington’s Blog that the NSA can use information gathered from mass surveillance to frame anyone it doesn’t like.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...0%93-part-mass-

The NSA Nation Moves To The Next Level

July 31, 2014 by The Dollar Vigilante

THINKSTOCK

This article by Wendy McElroy was published on The Dollar Vigilante.
The social sciences in America have been militarized to produce tools that assist the government in understanding and suppressing dissent. Anthropology, linguistic analysis and sociology now serve the police state.
One program is called the Minerva Initiative after the Roman goddess of war. A June 12 article in The Guardian explained, “A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies.” [Note: Minerva funding is typically channeled through less controversial agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.] Established in 2008, Minerva was budgeted to fund approximately $75 million worth of behavioral research over a five-year period. It is now six years later. In 2014 to date, Minerva has distributed approximately $17.8 million.
A typical project: Over the next three years, Cornell University will model “the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.” The university will locate the tipping point in uprisings such as the revolution in Egypt of 2011. Then the data can be extrapolated to make observations about uprisings in general. The Minerva site states:

The Department of Defense is interested in better understanding what drives individuals and groups to mobilize to institute change. In particular, models that explain and explore factors that motivate or inhibit groups to adopt political violence as a tactic will help inform understanding of where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how one might circumvent its spread.

In practice, Minerva makes little distinction between violent and nonviolent dissent. In 2013, one of the funded projects asked and answered the question: “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” The primary researcher, associate professor Maria Rasmussen of the Naval Postgraduate School, described the project’s mission: “In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”
In other words, a person who is sympathetic to the justice of a violent group’s goals is an integral part of terrorism even if he is a pacifist. A belief, not an action, is what makes him a terrorist supporter. For example, a weaponless writer could sympathize with gun owners who defend the 2nd Amendment by drawing weapons on their own property. A commentator might argue for the release of free speech activists who are imprisoned for resisting arrest. To sympathize with dissent and to argue against authority suddenly become part of political violence.
Nafeez Ahmed, a journalist on international security, wrote the June 12 article in The Guardian. He asked Rasmussen why nonviolent activists were lumped together with violent ones and precisely which people were investigated. One of his questions: “Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why?”
No reply. Finally, the programming director of Minerva sent what amounted to a form letter from the press office that used many words to say nothing.
Minerva is not the first program to militarize social scientists. The Human Terrain System (HTS), for example, was launched in 2005. Through it, social scientists provide the military with an understanding of a population and culture with which they are interacting. Roberto J. Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, is a prominent critic of HTS. He traced the origins of the project back to “the perceived threat of the Black Panthers and other militant groups.” In short, it sprang up from a perceived need for domestic social control.
Last month, Ars Technica reported on the Social Media in Strategic Communications project run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which seeks to chart how ideas spread in social media. Another project went further. Funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, the study “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” explicitly aimed at manipulating the “end” toward which ideas flow electronically. Ars Technica explained, “The research demonstrates that the mathematical principles used to control groups of autonomous robots can be applied to social networks in order to control human behavior. If properly calibrated, the mathematical models developed by Dixon and his fellow researchers could be used to sway the opinion of social networks toward a desired set of behaviors…”
These and other programs will almost certainly be applied domestically, if that is not happening already. On the Civil Arab site (June 18), human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan commented: “This research is unlikely to be limited to understanding uprisings and large-scale protests overseas, in some distant corner of the planet. In a post-9/11 world, the borders and contours of US national security are more fuzzy and fluid. Activists in the US, or those who support progressive change, ought to expect that they will fall under Minerva’s radar whenever they share a Facebook posting on Palestine or tweet a catchy little diddy on Twitter supporting other political activists in Syria, Egypt, or Iraq.”
The drift toward social and ideological control is inevitable. In fact, that has been a key goal of Minerva since it was first established. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates signaled it in an April 2008 speech in which he announced Minerva. “[E]ventual success in the conflict against jihadist extremism will depend less on the results of individual military engagements and more on the overall ideological climate within the world of Islam. Understanding how this climate is likely to evolve over time, and what factors — including US actions — will affect it thus becomes one of the most significant intellectual challenge [sic] we face.”
Minerva will also be used to impose unpopular political agendas against which the public might revolt. For example, in 2013, a three-year $1.9 million project with the University of Maryland was tasked to assess the risk of civil unrest in the event of climate change. People do not rebel because of a rise in temperature; they rebel against government measures that “respond” to climate change.
The Verge

Government officials will never admit Minerva is being used or will be used domestically and for social control; they will deny it, as the NSA did with its mass recording of average Americans. They will do so until denial is no longer possible. And, even then, they will continue to hide the scope of their attempt at thought control. They will do so because their fear is mounting.
On July 18, Vice President Joe Biden spoke to a conference in Detroit about the social crisis sparked by the Barack Obama Administration’s cynical use of illegal immigrants, especially children. (That wasn’t Biden’s take on the situation, of course.) Addressing the perceived problem of immigrants stealing jobs, he paid faux homage to the middle class, which was “the glue that has enabled us to be the most stable political and stable social system in the world.” From praising social stability, Biden immediately pivoted toward the possibility of civil unrest in America. “When that [the middle class] begins to fray, much more will fray than the loss of economic opportunity.”
Biden is correct to fear. Americans are increasingly aware that politicians are the enemy and widespread revolt is becoming more likely. But rather than change their own behavior, the rulers want to change how and what people think… one dissident at a time.
Wendy McElroy is a regular contributor to The Dollar Vigilante and a renowned individualist anarchist and individualist feminist. She was a co-founder, along with Carl Watner and George H. Smith, of The Voluntaryist in 1982, and she is the author/editor of 12 books, the latest of which is The Art of Being Free. Follow her work at www.wendymcelroy.com.


http://personalliberty.com/nsa-nation-moves-next-level/

he message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ¶ ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.
Edward Snowden, June 13, 2014. Platon

I am staying at the Hotel Metropol, a whimsical sand-colored monument to pre-revolutionary art nouveau. Built during the time of Czar Nicholas II, it later became the Second House of the Soviets after the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. In the restaurant, Lenin would harangue his followers in a greatcoat and Kirza high boots. Now his image adorns a large plaque on the exterior of the hotel, appropriately facing away from the symbols of the new Russia on the next block—Bentley and Ferrari dealerships and luxury jewelers like Harry Winston and Chopard.
I’ve had several occasions to stay at the Metropol during my three decades as an investigative journalist. I stayed here 20 years ago when I interviewed Victor Cherkashin, the senior KGB officer who oversaw American spies such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And I stayed here again in 1995, during the Russian war in Chechnya, when I met with Yuri Modin, the Soviet agent who ran Britain’s notorious Cambridge Five spy ring. When Snowden fled to Russia after stealing the largest cache of secrets in American history, some in Washington accused him of being another link in this chain of Russian agents. But as far as I can tell, it is a charge with no valid evidence.
I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries.




But in all my work, I’ve never run across anyone quite like Snowden. He is a uniquely postmodern breed of whistle-blower. Physically, very few people have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow’s airport complex last June. But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage—not only as a man without a country but as a man without a body. When being interviewed at the South by Southwest conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles down from jumbotron screens. For an interview at the TED conference in March, he went a step further—a small screen bearing a live image of his face was placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled wheels, giving him the ability to “walk” around the event, talk to people, and even pose for selfies with them. The spectacle suggests a sort of Big Brother in reverse: Orwell’s Winston Smith, the low-ranking party functionary, suddenly dominating telescreens throughout Oceania with messages promoting encryption and denouncing encroachments on privacy.
Of course, Snowden is still very cautious about arranging face-to-face meetings, and I am reminded why when, preparing for our interview, I read a recent Washington Post report. The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.
I do my best to avoid being followed as I head to the designated hotel for the interview, one that is a bit out of the way and attracts few Western visitors. I take a seat in the lobby facing the front door and open the book I was instructed to bring. Just past one, Snowden walks by, dressed in dark jeans and a brown sport coat and carrying a large black backpack over his right shoulder. He doesn’t see me until I stand up and walk beside him. “Where were you?” he asks. “I missed you.” I point to my seat. “And you were with the CIA?” I tease. He laughs.

Snowden is about to say something as we enter the elevator, but at the last moment a woman jumps in so we silently listen to the bossa nova classic “Desafinado” as we ride to an upper floor. When we emerge, he points out a window that overlooks the modern Moscow skyline, glimmering skyscrapers that now overshadow the seven baroque and gothic towers the locals call Stalinskie Vysotki, or “Stalin’s high-rises.” He has been in Russia for more than a year now. He shops at a local grocery store where no one recognizes him, and he has picked up some of the language. He has learned to live modestly in an expensive city that is cleaner than New York and more sophisticated than Washington. In August, Snowden’s temporary asylum was set to expire. (On August 7, the government announced that he’d been granted a permit allowing him to stay three more years.)
Entering the room he has booked for our interview, he throws his backpack on the bed alongside his baseball cap and a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks thin, almost gaunt, with a narrow face and a faint shadow of a goatee, as if he had just started growing it yesterday. He has on his trademark Burberry eyeglasses, semi-rimless with rectangular lenses. His pale blue shirt seems to be at least a size too big, his wide belt is pulled tight, and he is wearing a pair of black square-toed Calvin Klein loafers. Overall, he has the look of an earnest first-year grad student.
Snowden is careful about what’s known in the intelligence world as operational security. As we sit down, he removes the battery from his cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden’s handlers repeatedly warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an NSA microphone. Knowledge of the agency’s tricks is one of the ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he’s out in public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him. “Shh,” Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a finger to his lips.

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/

Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them

Platon

If the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, it’s not because of Edward Snowden’s attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSA’s most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files he’d copied.
In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents he’d smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed. Those hints, he says, were intended to make clear his role as a whistleblower rather than a foreign spy, and to allow the agency time to minimize the national security risks created by the documents’ public release.
The fact that NSA officials have told the press that his haul may have been as large as 1.7 million documents, says Snowden, is a sign that the agency has either purposely inflated the size of his leak or lacks the forensic skills to see the clues he left for its auditors. “I figured they would have a hard time,” Snowden tells WIRED, describing the agency’s attempts to reverse-engineer his leak. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”
In a speech late last year, NSA director Keith Alexander said that Snowden had given reporters “between 50,000 and 200,000 documents.” But in later statements to the press, NSA officials have said only that Snowden “accessed” 1.7 million documents, without specifying how much of that access was part of his authorized NSA duties. And Alexander also admitted in an interview after his resignation that the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of Snowden’s leak. Indeed, an agency official said in a 60 Minutes interview that its post-leak investigation removed from the NSA’s classified network every computer Snowden could have ever accessed, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, for fear that he might have planted spyware on the machines for future data collection.
That image of Snowden as a stealthy spy contrasts sharply with Snowden’s own depiction of his leaking actions. As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in his book No Place To Hide, Snowden claims he could have left no trace on the NSA’s network due to its lack of audit controls. But he said he instead left behind some “footprints” to show NSA investigators that he had acted alone and to prevent suspicion of his coworkers.
Snowden’s new claims go further: That he intended those footprints to outline exactly what he’d taken. In addition to shedding light on his motives, Snowden says he meant the clues to allow the NSA to avoid collateral damage from his leaks, changing codenames and plans to anticipate the release of some of its most sensitive secrets.
The repetition of the 1.7 million number by political figures and the press is at least partly intended to mischaracterize Snowden’s intentions, argues his lawyer Jesselyn Radack, who is also national security director for the whistleblower-focused Government Accountability Project. “I think they probably didn’t spot the bread crumbs,” she says of the NSA’s investigators. “Even if they did get them, I think this [1.7 million] number is manufactured out of whole cloth to give the impression of a wholesale data dump. In fact, Ed very carefully selected exactly what he wanted to turn over and why.”
When WIRED asked an NSA spokesperson to comment on Snowden’s new claims or its internal estimate of the size of his leak, spokesperson Vanee Vines responded with this statement: “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the U.S. Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”
In a followup inquiry through his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, Snowden wouldn’t offer any more details on how exactly he left his network bread crumbs for the NSA or the real total number of documents he took. In forensic analyses of a typical computer network, a leaker’s behavior could be found in everything from logs kept by network monitoring tools to changes in operating system files like Windows’ system registry, which can be analyzed to show what documents a user has opened.
Despite his early intention to make the NSA aware of the scope of his data theft, Snowden may have good reason to now keep the extent of his leaks secret. That knowledge could serve as an important bargaining chip if Snowden seeks to return to the U.S. and negotiate a plea deal, an option he’s hinted at exploring.
In the meantime, Snowden tells WIRED—perhaps with a certain amount of schadenfreude—that the government’s overestimation of the size of his leak has left it to imagine the worst. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/snowden-breadcrumbs/