Page 30 of 59 FirstFirst ... 2026272829303132333440 ... LastLast
Results 291 to 300 of 582
Like Tree27Likes

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

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #291
    April
    Guest
    US will not seek death penalty for Edward Snowden, Holder tells Russia

    Reports this week claimed Snowden had applied for asylum in Russia because he feared torture if he was returned to US



    The US has been seeking Snowden's extradition to face felony charges for leaking details of US surveillance programmes. Photograph: Tanya Lokshina/AP

    The US has told the Russian government it will not seek the death penalty for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.In a letter sent this week, US attorney general Eric Holder told his Russian counterpart that the charges Snowden faces do not carry the death penalty. Holder added that the US "would not seek the death penalty even if Mr Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes".

    Holder says he sent the letter, addressed to Alexander Vladimirovich, Russia's minister of justice, in response to reports that Snowden had applied for temporary asylum in Russia "on the grounds that if he were returned to the United States, he would be tortured and would face the death penalty".

    "These claims are entirely without merit," Holder said. In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: "Torture is unlawful in the United States".
    "We believe that these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds for Mr Snowden's claim that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum, temporary or otherwise," Holder wrote.

    The US has been seeking Snowden's extradition to face felony charges for leaking details of US surveillance programmes. This week, Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said the whistleblower would stay in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo airport, where he has been in limbo since 23 June, for the short-term future.
    Kucherena spoke to press at the airport on Wednesday after reports that Snowden had been granted asylum and would be able to leave the transit area. The reports turned out to be incorrect, but Kucherena confirmed Snowden had applied for temporary asylum with a view to settling in Russia long-term.

    "[Snowden] wants to find work in Russia, travel and somehow create a life for himself," Kucherena told the television station Rossiya 24. He said Snowden had already begun learning the Russian language.
    Kucherena said a decision over Snowden's application for temporary asylum must be reached within three months, although he expected the issue to be resolved sooner.

    On Friday Germany's president, who helped expose the workings of East Germany's Stasi secret police, said whistleblowers like US fugitive Edward Snowden deserved respect for defending freedom.
    "The fear that our telephones or mails are recorded and stored by foreign intelligence services is a constraint on the feeling of freedom and then the danger grows that freedom itself is damaged," president Joachim Gauck said.

    The president's role is largely symbolic in German. The country's chancellor, Angela Merkel, has struck a more compliant tone and has assured the US that Germany would not shelter Snowden.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...snowden-russia

  2. #292
    April
    Guest
    The US has told the Russian government it will not seek the death penalty for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.In a letter sent this week, US attorney general Eric Holder told his Russian counterpart that the charges Snowden faces do not carry the death penalty. Holder added that the US "would not seek the death penalty even if Mr Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes".
    Right......when has Holder EVER told the truth....

  3. #293
    April
    Guest
    Snowden's father: Son better off now in Russia


    NSA leaker Edward Snowden during a press conference at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, July 12, 2013. / AP/Human Rights Watch


    McLEAN, Va. The father of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden said Friday his son has been so vilified by the Obama administration and members of Congress that he is now better off staying in Russia.
    Lon Snowden of Allentown, Pa., had been working behind the scenes with lawyers to try to find a way his son could get a fair trial in the U.S. Edward Snowden has been charged in federal court in Alexandria with violating the Espionage Act by leaking details of NSA surveillance.

    But in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, the elder Snowden said he has lost faith in recent weeks that his son would be treated fairly by the Justice Department. He now thinks his 30-year-old son is better off avoiding the U.S. if possible until an administration that respects the Constitution comes into office.


    "If it were me, knowing what I know now, and listening to advice of sage people like (Pentagon Papers leaker) Daniel Ellsberg ... I would attempt to find a safe haven," Snowden said.


    As a military analyst more than four decades ago, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam, to major newspapers.
    The elder Snowden said he thinks Russia is probably the best place to seek asylum because it is most likely to withstand U.S. pressure. Edward Snowden applied for temporary asylum in Russia last week.
    Lon Snowden, a Coast Guard veteran who has worked on national security issues in his career, said he has tremendous faith in the American people and in the Constitution. He said that in a more subdued environment he feels confident that his son could get a fair trial, and the leak would be considered in context of his son's desire to expose a surveillance program that he and others believe exceeds constitutional bounds.

    But he said the Justice Department's efforts to pressure other countries to turn over Snowden, coupled with silence from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in the face of denunciations leveled by members of Congress who have labeled Snowden a traitor, have eroded his hope for a fair trial.On NBC's "Today" show Friday, Lon Snowden said there's been a concerted effort by some members of Congress to "demonize" his son.

    Lon Snowden and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, released a letter Friday asking Obama to dismiss the criminal charges against Edward Snowden and to support legislation "to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed."
    The elder Snowden and Fein said they were disgusted by Holder's letter Friday to Russian officials promising that Snowden would not face the death penalty if he were extradited. They said it reflects a mindset that Snowden is presumed guilty and that a sentence of 30 years or life would be a reasonable punishment.
    In the phone interview with AP, Lon Snowden said he has had no direct contact with his son, and knows no more about his son's day-to-day life in Moscow, where he is reportedly staying at an airport transit zone, than anyone else.

    More broadly, he expressed frustration that the story has become so focused on his son and his whereabouts and U.S. efforts to get him extradited, while the issues surrounding his son's disclosures of extensive surveillance programs that he says disregard the Constitution have been swept aside.
    Lon Snowden said talking about the issues his son has raised allows him to connect to his son and keep the issues he raised in front of the American people. He and Fein are starting a nonprofit group called the Defense of the Constitution Foundation to promote those ideas.

    "In essence, he has passed on the torch of democracy," Lon Snowden said of his son.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-...now-in-russia/

  4. #294
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    South West Florida (Behind friendly lines but still in Occupied Territory)
    Posts
    117,696
    Noam Chomsky: ‘Snowden Should Be Honored’ for ‘Telling Americans What the Government Was Doing’

    from LeakSourceNews:



    Noam Chomsky speaking at the Geneva Press Club in Switzerland.

    http://sgtreport.com/2013/07/noam-ch...ent-was-doing/
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  5. #295
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    South West Florida (Behind friendly lines but still in Occupied Territory)
    Posts
    117,696
    The NSA Is Doing What King George Did to Colonial Americans

    Posted on July 13, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

    NSA Spying Is the Kind of Thing Which Caused the Revolutionary War Against King George

    Georgetown professor of constitutional law wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
    With the NSA’s surveillance program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has apparently secretly approved the blanket seizure of data on every American so this “metadata” can later provide the probable cause for a particular search. Such indiscriminate data seizures are the epitome of “unreasonable,” akin to the “general warrants” issued by the Crown to authorize searches of Colonial Americans.
    David Snyder provides a must-read historical summary at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
    The government’s ongoing violation of fundamental civil liberties would have been very familiar to the men who gathered in 1791 to adopt the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers battled an 18th century version of the wholesale surveillance that the government is accused of doing today – an expansive abuse of power by King George II and III that invaded the colonists’ communications privacy.
    Using “writs of assistance” [another name for "general warrants"] the King authorized his agents to carry out wide-ranging searches of anyone, anywhere, and anytime regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. These “hated writs”spurred colonists toward revolution and directly motivated James Madison’s crafting of the Fourth Amendment.
    [The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Stanford v. Texas: “Vivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans were those general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists.” And the Supreme Court said in Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property: “The Bill of Rights was fashioned against the background of knowledge that unrestricted power of search and seizure could also be an instrument for stifling liberty of expression.”]
    We’ve now come full circle. The president has essentially updated this page from King George’s playbook, engaging in dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.
    ***
    WRITS OF ASSISTANCE
    Writs of assistance gave the King’s men – customs officials generally, but not exclusively – carte blanche to search the homes, papers and belongings of anyone. They permitted officials to “enter and go into any House, Warehouse, Shop, Cellar or other Place” to seize contraband goods.Though similar in a very broad sense to search warrants, they bore little resemblance to the modern document. [Neither do the modern spying authorizations by the Fisa court.] They required no judicial oversight or probable cause – the evidence investigators must show before a judge will issue a warrant.
    ***
    Two events in 1760 led to the writs playing a starring role in the prologue to the American Revolution ….

    THE PAXTON CASE
    After the king’s death on October 25, 1760, Charles Paxton, the chief customs official in Boston, petitioned for new writs in Massachusetts Superior Court. A group of Boston merchants opposed the writs. James Otis, a prominent local attorney, represented the merchants in court, arguing that the writs were “the worst instance of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, that was every found in an English law book.” Otis asserted that new writs of assistance would “totally annihilate” the “freedom of one’s house.” The writs, Otis said, placed “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”
    John Adams, then 26 and recently admitted to the Massachusetts bar, was among those in the courtroom watching Otis’ performance. Adams later wrote that Otis’ argument against the writs “breathed into this nation the breath of life.”
    Adams further credited Otis’ oratory with lighting the spark that led to the fire of revolution: “Then and there was the first scene of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain,” Adams wrote. “Then and there the child Independence was born.
    [Adams also wrote of the crowd's reaction to Otis speech: “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistants,” Adams wrote.]
    In 15 years, namely in 1776, he grew to manhood, and declared himself free.”The U.S. Supreme Court in 1886 said the Paxton Case was “perhaps the most prominent event which inaugurated the resistance of the colonies to the oppressions of the mother country.”

    Otis and the merchants lost. The court granted the new writs. But the larger cause of resistance to the Crown’s power had only grown. The Crown continued issuing writs up to the eve of the Revolutionary War, and the writs continued to stoke the colonists’ anger.
    THE WILKES CASE
    Two years after Otis’s impassioned argument came the case of John Wilkes, an English newspaper publisher whose fight against a general warrant issued by the King made him a hero in both England and the American colonies. Though the entire Wilkes affair played out in England, the colonial press extensively covered it, and for most colonists, John Wilkes became a household name.
    Wilkes had criticized the King and other high officials in his newspaper, The North Briton. Officials issued a general warrant commanding authorities “to make strict and diligent search” for the authors, printers and publishers of the offending publication. In the process of their search, officials, broke down at least 20 doors and scores of trunks, and broke hundreds of locks.19 They dumped thousands of books, charts and manuscripts on the floor. In the end, a single warrant had allowed, in thirty hours’ time, the search of at least five houses and the arrest of 49 people, nearly all of whom were innocent.

    The press in England and the American colonies made the case a cause celebre, and the British courts ultimately condemned the general warrant, declaring it “totally subversive of the liberty of the [warrant’s] subject.”
    ***
    THE FOURTH AMENDMENT
    It is “familiar history,” the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Payton v. New York, that “indiscriminate searches and seizures conducted under the authority of ‘general warrants’ were the immediate evils that motivated the framing and adoption of the Fourth Amendment.”

    ***
    In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court in Katz v. United States affirmed that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures extends to telephone conversations captured on wiretaps. In recognizing that the principle that the Fourth Amendment prohibits indiscriminate searches regardless of the technology involved, the Court made it plain that advanced technology doesn’t clear the government of the duty to establish probable cause, and to receive a warrant, before rummaging through the private lives of Americans.
    Over the past few years our government has argued that the modern exigencies of national security have changed the rules of the game and that the niceties of judicial process simply no longer apply. Madison likely would have rejected this argument, but he wouldn’t have been surprised by it. “Perhaps it is a universal truth,” Madison wrote in a 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson, “that loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”
    (History buffs can read more here.)
    The ACLU notes:
    It’s clear as day that the NSA’s bulk collection orders, like the one Edward Snowden disclosed from Verizon, violate the principles James Otis laid out in his famous attack against the writs of assistance. These orders are not directed at any one of us, but instead sweep up records about all of our communications, violating both the letter and the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, which clearly states that the government cannot rummage through our personal effects absent specific, probable cause and a sworn affidavit.
    As Daniel Ellsberg points out, modern Americans face some affronts to liberty worse than those faced by the Founding Fathers under King George.


    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/...ng-george.html
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  6. #296
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    South West Florida (Behind friendly lines but still in Occupied Territory)
    Posts
    117,696
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  7. #297
    April
    Guest
    Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

    The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted


    While the press concentrates on the furore surrounding Edward Snowden's search for political asylum, it has forgotten the importance of his revelations. Photograph: Tatyana Lokshina/AP

    Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
    In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

    Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
    Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
    These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.
    As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

    The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

    Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

    Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."
    That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.

    They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.
    And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

    Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...th-of-internet

  8. #298
    April
    Guest
    Edward Snowden and the NSA files – timeline

    What has happened to NSA whistleblower who leaked files to Guardian since he decided to reveal his identity to the world and began his asylum battle
    Thursday 25 July 2013


    Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. Photograph: Guardian

    20 May Edward Snowden, an employee of defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton at the National Security Agency, arrives in Hong Kong from Hawaii. He carries four laptop computers that enable him to gain access to some of the US government's most highly-classified secrets.
    1 June Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill and documentary maker Laura Poitras fly from New York to Hong Kong. They meet Snowden in a Kowloon hotel after he identifies himself with a Rubik's cube and begin a week of interviews with their source.
    5 June The Guardian publishes its first exclusive based on Snowden's leak, revealing a secret court order showing that the US government had forced the telecoms giant Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans.
    6 June A second story reveals the existence of the previously undisclosed programme Prism, which internal NSA documents claim gives the agency "direct access" to data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. The tech companies deny that they have set up "back door access" to their systems for the US government.
    7 June Barack Obama defends the two programmes, saying they are overseen by the courts and Congress. Insisting that "the right balance" had been struck between security and privacy, he says: "You can't have 100% security, and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience."
    The Guardian reports that GCHQ has been able to see user communications data from the American internet companies, because it had access to Prism.
    8 June Another of Snowden's leaks reveals the existence of an internal NSA tool – Boundless Informant – that allows it to record and analyse where its data comes from, and raises questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
    9 June Snowden decides to go public. In a video interview he says: "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."
    10 June Snowden checks out of his Hong Kong hotel.
    12 June Hong Kong's South China Morning Post publishes the first interview with Snowden since he revealed his identity. He says he intends to stay in the city until asked to leave and discloses that the NSA has been hacking into Hong Kong and Chinese computers since 2009.
    14 June The Home Office instructs airlines not to allow Snowden to board any flights to the UK.
    16 June The Guardian reports that GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at the 2009 G20 summit.
    20 June Top secret documents published by the Guardian show how US judges have signed off on broad orders allowing the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.
    21 June A Guardian exclusive reveals that GCHQ has gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and is processing vast streams of sensitive personal information it shares with the NSA. The US files espionage charges against Snowden and requests that Hong Kong detain him for extradition.
    23 June Snowden leaves Hong Kong on a flight to Moscow. In a statement, the Hong Kong government says documents submitted by the US did not "fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law" and it had no legal basis to prevent him leaving. Snowden arrives in Moscow. In a statement, WikiLeaks said it was assisting him, in part by providing adviser Sarah Harrison as an escort, and said he was heading to a democratic country, believed to be Ecuador, "via a safe route".
    24 June Journalists board a flight from Moscow to Havana amid reports Snowden is about to board – but he doesn't.
    25 June Barack Obama vows to extradite Snowden while John Kerry, US Secretary of State, urges Russia to hand him over.
    25 June Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claims Snowden never crossed the border into Russia. But Putin later says Snowden is at Sheremetyevo airport and is free to leave Russia.
    26 June Putin says Snowden will not be extradited to America. He denies that his security services had contacted Snowden.
    26 June Ecuador warns that it may take months to decide whether to offer Snowden asylum, pointing out that it took two months to decide whether to do so in the case of Julian Assange.
    26 June Hong Kong claims, amid growing Sino-American tensions, that the US got Snowden's middle name wrong in documents submitted for his arrest.
    27 June Obama declares he will not spend much geopolitical capital on apprehending Snowden. He also claims that he hasn't spoken to Russia nor China about extradition.
    27 June Ecuador maintains its defiant stance, renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act it has with America. The country also offered the US $23m (£15m) for human rights training.
    28 June President Rafael Correa of Ecuador revokes Snowden's safe conduct pass amid irritation that Assange was taking over the role of the Ecuadorean government.
    29 June Correa reveals that US vice-president Joe Biden asked him to turn down Snowden's asylum request.
    1 July A consular official in Russia reveals that Snowden has applied for asylum there. WikiLeaks later reveal that he has applied for asylum in a further 20 countries, amongst them France, Germany, Ireland, China and Cuba.
    1 July Snowden releases a statement through the WikiLeaks website in which he claims that he left Hong Kong because "my freedom and safety were under threat". He says it is hypocritical of Obama to promise no "wheeling and dealing" but then instruct Biden to encourage other nations to deny him asylum.
    2 July Snowden retracts his request for Russian asylum after Putin says he must stop "bringing harm" to US interests. Meanwhile Brazil, India, Norway and Poland refuse Snowden asylum, while Ecuador, Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Switzerland say he has to apply from their countries.
    2 July Lon Snowden, Edward Snowden's father, and his father's attorney, Bruce Fein, pen an open letter to Edward Snowden praising him, comparing him to Paul Revere and noting the US supreme court decision that "statelessness is not to be imposed as a punishment for crime".
    2 July Bolivia throws its hat into the ring with president Evo Morales declaring on Russian television that he would "shield the denounced".
    Evo Morales at Vienna's airport after his plane, flying from Moscow, was inspected by Austrian officials. Photograph: Helmut Fohringer/AFP/Getty Images 3 July Morales's plane, en route from Moscow to Bolivia, is forced to land in Vienna after other European countries refused it airspace, suspecting that Snowden was on board. Bolivian vice-president Alvaro Garcia says Morales was "kidnapped by imperialism".
    3 July Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia denounce the treatment of Morales, who was held in Vienna airport for 12 hours while his plane was searched for Snowden. Bolivia files a complaint at the UN.
    3 July UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon says that Snowden misused his rights to digital access and created problems greater than the public benefit of disclosure.
    4 July Morales calls the rerouting of his flight an "open provocation" of "north American imperialism" and urges some European countries to "free themselves" from America.
    4 July Ecuador distances itself from Snowden saying that he is under Russia's authority and would have to reach Ecuador before being granted asylum. Correa said the Ecuadorean consul acted without authority when it issued Snowden a temporary travel pass.
    5 July The Washington Post, despite having published stories based on Snowden's leaks, now writes that he should be prevented "from leaking information that harms efforts to fight terrorism and conduct legitimate intelligence operations".
    6 July Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, says he has decided "to offer humanitarian asylum" to Snowden. Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega says he could accept Snowden's asylum request "if circumstances permit".
    7 July Alexei Pushkov, chair of the Duma's foreign affairs committee, tweets that Venezuela's asylum offer may be Snowden's "last chance" to avoid extradition to the US.
    8 July The Guardian releases the second part of its original video interview with Snowden. In this extract Snowden says he believes the US government "are going to say I have committed grave crimes, I have violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I have aided our enemies".
    10 July Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who has written many of the stories based on Snowden's information, says that Snowden maintains he didn't give classified information to China or Russia, following erroneous claims from the New York Times on 24 June that China had been "draining the contents of his laptop".
    Edward Snowden attends a meeting at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on 12 July. Photograph: Tanya Lokshina/AP 12 July Snowden sends a letter to human rights groups asking them to meet him at Sheremetyevo airport and claiming there is "an unlawful campaign by officials in the US government to deny my right to seek and enjoy... asylum". At the meeting he says he will be applying for temporary asylum in Russia while he applies for permanent asylum in a Latin American country.
    24 July Anatoly Kucherena, a lawyer advising Snowden, states that the NSA leaker's asylum status has not been resolved and he will stay at Moscow airport for now. Kucherena claims that Snowden "intends to stay in Russia, study Russian culture", implying perhaps that Snowden may live in Russia for good.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...files-timeline

  9. #299
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    South West Florida (Behind friendly lines but still in Occupied Territory)
    Posts
    117,696
    Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash

    By David Kravets0
    7.26.13 4:14 PM



    House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Howard McKeon, (R-California), speaks to reporters following a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, May 21, 2013.
    AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

    The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.

    That’s the upshot of a new analysis by MapLight, a Berkeley-based non-profit that performed the inquiry at WIRED’s request. The investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of a member’s vote on the Amash amendment than party affiliation. House members who voted to continue the massive phone-call-metadata spy program, on average, raked in 122 percent more money from defense contractors than those who voted to dismantle it.

    Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets. Lawmakers who voted to continue the NSA dragnet-surveillance program averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765.

    Of the top 10 money getters, only one House member — Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) — voted to end the program.



    Source: Maplight

    “How can we trust legislators to vote in the public interest when they are dependent on industry campaign funding to get elected? Our broken money and politics system forces lawmakers into a conflict of interest between lawmakers’ voters and their donors,” said Daniel G. Newman, MapLight’s president and co-founder.

    The Guardian newspaper disclosed the phone-metadata spying last month with documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
    The House voted 205-217 Wednesday and defeated an amendment to the roughly $600 billion Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2014 that would have ended authority for the once-secret spy program the White House insisted was necessary to protect national security.

    The amendment (.pdf) was proposed by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), who received a fraction of the money from the defense industry compared to top earners. For example, Amash got $1,400 — ranking him in the bottom 50 for the two-year period. On the flip side, Rep. Howard McKeon (R-California) scored $526,600 to lead the House in defense contributions. He voted against Amash.

    Of the 26 House members who voted and did not receive any defense financing, 16 voted for the Amash amendment.

    House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) voted against the measure. He ranked 15th in defense earnings with a $131,000 take. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) also voted against Amash. Pelosi took in $47,000 from defense firms over the two-year period.

    Ninety-four Republicans voted for the amendment as did 111 Democrats.
    The Amash amendment was in response to the disclosure of a leaked copy of a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion requiring Verizon Business to provide the National Security Agency the phone numbers of both parties involved in all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls.

    The government confirmed the authenticity of the leak and last week suggested many more, or “certain telecommunication service providers” are required to fork over the same type of metadata. The government says it needs all the data to sift out terrorist needles in a haystack. The program began shortly after the 2001 terror attacks.

    The vote list follows. (A “no” vote is a vote to continue the NSA’s phone spying.)

    Donation amounts from whom to whom at the page link:





    http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...oney-nsa-vote/
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  10. #300
    Senior Member Reciprocity's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    New York, The Evil Empire State
    Posts
    2,680
    The Bradley Manning Verdict and the Dangerous “Hacker Madness” Prosecution Strategy

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/0...ution-strategy



    Bradley Manning was convicted (PDF) on 19 counts today, including charges under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for leaking approximately 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. While it was a relief was that he was not convicted of the worst charge “aiding the enemy,” the verdict remains deeply troubling and could potentially result in a sentence of life in prison. The sentencing phase starts tomorrow, and a fuller legal opinion from the judge should also come soon.
    We will likely have a deeper analysis of the verdict later, but two things stand out as particularly relevant to—and especially frightening for—folks who love the Internet and use digital tools.
    First, the decision today continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the “hacker madness” strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge.
    In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning’s use of a standard, over 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique. Of course, anyone who has ever called up this utility on a Unix machine, which at this point is likely millions of ordinary Americans, knows that this program is no more scary or spectacular (and far less powerful) than a simple Google search. Yet the court apparently didn’t know this and seemed swayed by it.
    We’ve seen this trick before. In a case EFF handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with “a black screen with white font” as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the Judge was a programmer and sharply called them on it.
    But law enforcement keeps using this technique, likely based on a calculation that most judges aren’t as technical as ordinary Americans, may be even afraid of technology, and can be swayed by the ominous use of technical jargon and techniques—playing to media stereotypes of evil computer geniuses. Indeed the CFAA itself apparently was a response to President Ronald Reagan’s fears after watching the completely fictional movie War Games.
    Second, while the court did not convict on the "aiding the enemy" charge, the government's argument—that publishing something to the general public on the Internet can count as “aiding the enemy”—has strong digital overtones. The "aiding the enemy" charge is a breathtakingly broad military charge never before used against a leaker to the press. It is shocking that the government would even make this argument and that the judge didn't dismiss it outright. The prosecution argued that even if Manning never intended to aid the enemy, and even though the government did not need to prove the information published by WikiLeaks ever harmed the U.S., the mere fact it ended up on the Internet means he is guilty of a capital crime.
    This argument wasn’t actually confined to WikiLeaks—the government admitted during the trial that its claims would apply equally to the New York Times or other traditional media. But the reason this argument wasn’t laughed out of court, we suspect, is the digital environment. After all, Adolph Hitler certainly had access to American newspapers, as did Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Hồ Chí Minh or any other past enemy of America. The court tried to dress it up a bit, noting that Manning “trained in intelligence and received training on the fact that that enemy uses the internet to collect information about the United States,” as if this is something that only someone with specialized “Internet training” would know.
    But of course it’s not. Everyone (at least everyone who regularly uses the Internet) knows that the Internet is used by good people and bad people all over the world and that anything published is, well, published and available to all. This is a feature of the Internet, not a bug, yet here it played into distorting the “aiding the enemy” crime out of all proportion and may have played a role in the five other counts under Espionage Act claims that he was convicted of. Even without this claim, Manning still faces life in prisonment—no member of the press or public interested in more transparency about how our military works (or doesn't work) should rest easy with this verdict.
    Manning will appeal of course. And in the long run, these tactics will likely stop working as more people become familiar with technologies. In the meantime, real harm to real people happens through overreaction, over-prosecution, and over-penalization. And the harm also occurs to the public, which becomes less informed about governmental misconduct at home and abroad.
    Here’s hoping the military appellate court has a programmer or two on it and can see through the scare tactics and technophobia that the prosecution has been doling out. But we're not holding our breath.
    “In questions of power…let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” –Thomas Jefferson

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •