Thread: Snowden thought leakers should be 'shot,' 2009 chat logs reveal

Snowden thought leakers should be 'shot,' 2009 chat logs reveal

Published June 27, 2013FoxNews.com

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  June 9, 2013: This photo provided by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, in Hong Kong. (AP/The Guardian)
  
  What a difference four years has apparently made for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who passed secret documents to journalists — but seemingly had nothing but contempt for those who leaked classified information in 2009.
  Snowden, while using the online handle “TheTrueHOOHA,” was particularly livid during a January 2009 chat about a New York Times article detailing secret negotiations between the United States and Israel regarding how best to address Iran’s suspected nuclear program.
  “Are they TRYING to start a war? Jesus Christ,” Snowden wrote, according to chat logs uncovered by Ars Technica, a technology news website. “They're like Wikileaks.”

“Those people should be shot in the balls.”

- Edward Snowden, using the handle 'TheTrueHOOHA'

When another chat room participant replied, “they’re just reporting, dude,” Snowden shot back: “You don't put that [expletive] in the NEWSPAPER.
“Moreover, who the [expletive] are the anonymous sources telling them this?” Snowden continued. “Those people should be shot in the balls.”
The messages by Snowden, who was 25 at the time and reportedly stationed in Geneva by the Central Intelligence Agency, are in sharp contrast to his more recent views regarding executive secrecy, which he claims prompted him to go public with the federal government's snooping tactics.
“I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars they just completely blew,” he continued, in reference to The New York Times. “It's not an overreaction. They have a HISTORY of this [expletive].”
But the logs of the Internet Relayed Chat (IRC) server associated with Ars Technica don't necessarily show a 180-degree shift in Snowden's worldview, according to an article that accompanied release of the logs.
“It's hardly a perfect parallel,” Ars Technica wrote in the article. “Snowden was upset about leaks over U.S. covert operations in Iran, which is different from the domestic spying and offensive cyberwar programs he felt compelled to make public.”
Snowden, who turned 30 last week and is believed to be encamped in a Moscow airport, last logged on to the chatroom in May 2009, Ars Technica reports. President Obama has said he won’t engage in negotiations to have Snowden extradited to the United States, rejecting suggestions that the Air Force consider forcing down a plane carrying Snowden from Russia to another country. Obama said the fact that Snowden obtained the secret documents shows significant NSA vulnerabilities.
Snowden has cast himself as a fierce defender of individual privacy and someone determined to expose vast U.S. surveillance powers.
“I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in a June 9 report, which revealed he was in Hong Kong at the time.
He said he became “hardened” later in 2009 as President Obama advanced “the very policies” Snowden thought would be curtailed.
By April of that year, a few months into his appointment in Switzerland, Snowden reported to the chatroom about his time in the country, saying it was like “living in a postcard” and that prostitution was legal.
“It's just nightmarishly expensive and horrifically classist,” Snowden continued, according to chat logs. “I have never, EVER seen a people more racist than the Swiss. Jesus god they look down on EVERYONE. Even each other.”
Snowden then told a user he liked the “friendly” Italians he had met during his travels. An unidentified user then commented how the United Kingdom did not have “ghettos,” prompting Snowden to respond forcefully.
“Sure you do,” he replied. “I went to London just last year … It's where all of your Muslims live … I didn't want to get out of the car. I thought I had gotten off of plane in the wrong country.”
Snowden said the experience was “terrifying,” adding the Muslims “just seemed awfully … orthodox.”
“I mean it wasn't like, ‘Hi, we're your friendly neighborhood Muslim community. welcome to our main street,” he wrote. “It was more like, ‘SUBMIT TO THE WILL OF ALLAH. SHARIAH REGULATIONS POSTED AT ALL CORNERS.’”
Some chatroom participants who were familiar with Snowden, meanwhile, told Ars Technica they recognized his username shortly after a Reuters profile revealed it.
"I remember that guy," one user wrote. "He was kind of a d---. But fair play to him for what he's done."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...#ixzz2XRPE2bob

Report: Snowden slammed leakers in online chats in 2009

William M. Welch, USA TODAY 1:59 p.m. EDT June 27, 2013

The NSA leaker criticized WikiLeaks and condemned articles based on classified material, according to the technology website Ars Technica.


Edward Snowden(Photo: Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, The Guardian)
Story Highlights

• Ars Technica says Snowden was a frequent participant in chats on its site.
• He used the online name "The TrueHOOHA."
• TrueHOOHA backed the gold standard, defended U.S. security interests and assailed Social Security.

The digital trail of Edward Snowden, the man accused of spilling the United States' electronic snooping secrets, appears to go through an online chatroom in which he said that he thought leakers "should be shot,'' the website Ars Technica says.
Snowden also suggested the United States should tie its currency to a gold standard, expressed dislike for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and was an enthusiastic short-seller of stocks.
Snowden, who is reported to be waiting in limbo at Moscow's airport as he seeks asylum in Ecuador, apparently was a frequent participant in online chats that are part of the technology website, Arstechnica.com, for several years ending in 2010, the site reported.
Ars Technica, which mounted an investigation of Snowden's activities on its chatrooms, said he went by the online name "TheTrueHOOHA.' The site said it had not archived the chatrooms but said other chatroom members had come forward with archived logs that showed "TheTrueHOOHA's" discussions with other members, who were identified only by a user number.
Reuters also reported that he used the online name "TheTrueHOOHA" while working as a web editor at the website Ryuhana Press when he was 18. The news agency said it located the now defunct Ryuhana Press website last week. The Atlantic Wire posted a link to what it says was an archive of the site with Snowden's purported profile page.
USA TODAY was unable to independently confirm that Snowden was the person posting under the name "TheTrueHOOHA.''
Within tech circles, Ars Technica is considered a generally reliable source of news and reviews. While it doesn't have a technical mechanism to vouch for the authenticity of its users, instances of impersonation are believed to be rare.
Ars Technica described its chat room as "#arsificial, a channel on Ars Technica's public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server'' that was not moderated and akin to the back room of a bar "occupied by drinkers who feel the front is just too stuffy for them'' and where crude comments are acceptable.
His online participation began in 2007, when he was 23 and stationed in Geneva with the CIA as an information technology specialist, it said, and his comments over the years suggested he had grown more worldly as he gained overseas work experience. After first arriving in Switzerland, he complained about the cost of hamburgers and bottled water and Europe's use of the metric system of measurement.
In 2008, during the presidential election campaign, he wrote that the U.S. dollar and British Pound "are both likely to go the way of the zimbabwe dollar.'' He used a vulgar description of Bernanke in complaining about the Federal Reserve's stimulus policies as "deciding to magically print 1.2T more dollars.''
In response, an undentified chat room user replied, "You actually like the gold standard you dumb baby.''
He was a strong defender of U.S. security interests, however, and in 2009 complained about a New York Times story about U.S. actions in Iran, which was based on unnamed sources.
"Are they trying to start a war?" he wrote, referring to the Times. "Jesus christ. They're like wikileaks''
Someone else interjected, "they're just reporting, dude.''
"They're reporting classified shit,'' TheTrueHOOHA replied. "...That shit is classified for a reason.... I am so angry right now. This is completely unbelievable.''
A bit later, TheTrueHOOHA says, "moreover, who the (expletive) are the anonymous sources telling them this? those people should be shot in the balls.''
He said of The New York Times, "Hopefully they'll finally go bankrupt this year.''
He displayed a lack of knowledge or perspective about his own agency, the CIA, complaining that President Obama had appointed a "(expletive) politician to run the CIA.'' When someone pointed out that before he was president, George H.W. Bush had been CIA director, TheTrueHOOHA replied, "Oh you mean 25 years ago? Dumbass."
In a 2009 exchange, the site said, the person believed to be Snowden made a statement suggesting the U.S. government was engaged in domestic spying. He dismissed Australia's government as "luddite technophobes'' compared to the U.S. government. "USA (expletive) YEAH... WE LOVE THAT TECHNOLOGY SHIT. HELPS US SPY ON OUR CITIZENS BETTER.''
On other subjects, he talked about his enthusiasm for short-selling stocks, which is making financial bets on a decline in a company's share values, and hoped the market would decline "because then I'l be filthy (expletive) rich.''
On another occasion he called for cutting or ending Social Security and expressed disdain for seniors collecting those checks.
"Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine,'' he wrote.
"they wouldn't be (expletive) helpless if you weren't sending them (expletive) checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day,'' he wrote.
Before the 2008 election, he said he liked the GOP nominee, John McCain. "Hillary Clinton, I think, would be a pox on the country,'' he wrote.
Ars Technica -- Latin for "technological art" -- is a news site created in 1998 to cover computer gadgets, science and tech policy. It was privately owned until May 2008, when it was sold to Conde Nast Digital, the online arm of the publisher Conde Nast Publications. Conde Nast acquired Ars Technica and two other sites for $25 million and added to its Wired Digital group, which includes Wired News and Reddit.
Ars Technica created controversy in 2009, when it temporarily prevented readers who used advertising-blocking software from viewing the site.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/06/27/snowden-participated-in-online-chats-nsa-leaks/2462461/