Edward Snowden

Meet CISA – Dianne Feinstein’s Latest Attack on Privacy, Civil Liberties and the Internet

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Screen Shot 2014-07-15 at 1.16.27 PMThere’s not much good you can count on Congress to accomplish, but when it comes to introducing and passing oligarch protecting, civil liberties destroying legislation, our “representatives” are absolutely relentless in their determination. Unsurprisingly, the only “distinctly native American criminal class,” as Mark Twain described Congress, is at it again when it comes to institutionalizing spying and attempting a legal run around the Bill of Rights.

One thing that has become crystal clear since the Edward Snowden revelations, is that much of Congress has no problem at all with unconstitutional spying. Rather, they are primarily upset it was exposed and are dead set on making sure no other whistleblower can ever do the same. Enter CISA, or The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act.

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NSA Whistleblower Speaks: “The Ultimate Goal is Total Population Control”

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At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.

– NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney

Long-time readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will be no strangers to Bill Binney, one of the earliest NSA whistleblowers. Well before anyone had ever heard of Edward Snowden, in July 2012, I posted the following: NSA Whistleblower: U.S. Government Creating Dossiers on Millions of Citizens. In it, I noted:

Bill Binney is no joke. He worked for the NSA for 30 years before resigning because of concerns he had regarding illegal spying on U.S. citizens in 2001. It seems that the claim I and many others have made for years, that the “War on Terror” is a gigantic fraud used to instill fear and further the creation of an unconstitutional surveillance state in America is absolutely true. The “terrorists” they have declared war on are the American people themselves. 

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Is the U.S. Government Trying to Stop Glenn Greenwald from Publishing His “Biggest Story?”

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Screen Shot 2014-07-01 at 12.19.04 PMIn May, I highlighted an excellent interview of Glenn Greenwald by GQ Magazine in the piece: Glenn Greenwald on the 2016 Elections – “They’ll Probably Have a Gay Person After Hillary.” There’s so much good stuff in that piece, I strongly suggest you go back and read it if you haven’t, but the relevant part to today’s post is the following exchange:

GQ: How much more is there to release—and what burden do you feel to get it out there?

Greenwald: We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

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The Obama Administration is Forcing Local Cops to Stay Silent on Surveillance

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Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 2.39.47 PMThe criminality of the Obama Administration is at this point almost beyond description. Earlier this week I highlighted a shocking discovery in my post titled: The Obama Administration is Trying to Cover up the VA Scandal by Issuing Subpoenas to Whistle-Blower Sites. In that piece, it was noted that:


Instead, it’s lawyers from the President Barack Obama administration employing the power of the administrative subpoena in a bid to siphon data from POGO’s encrypted submission portal. POGO’s site encourages whistleblowers to use Tor as the gateway and has garnered more than 700 tips about abuse and mismanagement at the US Veterans Administration after less than a month of operation.

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The Obama Administration is Trying to Cover up the VA Scandal by Issuing Subpoenas to Whistle-Blower Sites

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Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 11.55.02 AMOne of the most significant realizations to emerge since the Edward Snowden revelations, is the understanding that we need more secure tools for would be whistle-blowers to more easily provide sensitive information in a secure and anonymous manner. As such, we have seen the deployment of encrypted drop boxes by several media outlets. I highlighted one of these a little over a year ago called Strongbox, which was a project announced by the New Yorker and was what Aaron Swartz was working on just before his death.

Recently, the Washington Post and the Guardian have released something similar called SecureDrop. The Washington Post described it as such:

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The NSA Claims it is “Too Big to Comply” with a Court Order

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Screen Shot 2014-06-10 at 11.35.48 AMThe fact that that the NSA is now claiming it is “Too Big to Comply” with a court order is an extremely important revelation since it further proves that the super rich and super powerful are in no way shape or form subject to the same laws as the rest of us. The mega banks are “Too Big to Fail,” multi-national corporations are “Too Big to Pay Taxes” and the government is just “Too Big to be Useful.” The rule of law no longer exists in America (remember Jon Corzine), which in turn means there is no longer a functioning society. This may not be obvious to most people at the moment, but it will become painfully clear to everyone in time unless these trends are reversed.

The specific incident I have chosen to highlight to demonstrate this point today relates to the NSA’s claim that it cannot comply with a court order because it’s essentially too complex and compliance will damage “national security.”

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Congress Guts Anti-NSA Spying Bill Beyond Recognition; Original Cosponsor Justin Amash Votes No

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It’s shameful that the president of the United States, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the leaders of the country’s surveillance agencies refuse to accept consensus reforms that will keep our country safe while upholding the Constitution. And it mocks our system of government that they worked to gut key provisions of the Freedom Act behind closed doors.

– Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, original cosponsor of the USA Freedom Act

In what will come as no surprise to any of you, there are very few members of Congress I have even the slightest degree of respect for. However, Justin Amash is one of them.

Rep. Amash is 34 years old and was first elected to Congress in 2010. He has been on my radar screen for several years now as one of the few elected representatives who act more like statesmen than politicians. He has been on the right side of many civil liberties related issues, including his opposition to the NDAA’s provision that allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens without a trial. More recently, last summer he authored an anti-NSA amendment known as the “Amash Amendment,” which was defeated by establishment authoritarians in both political parties. I covered that story in my post: NSA Holds “Top Secret” Meeting to Stop Powerful Anti-Spying Amendment.

Being the fighter that he is, Amash regrouped and came back with an anti-NSA spying bill with some teeth to it: The USA Freedom Act. This bill concerned the establishment to such a degree that Senator Feinstein launched her own competing bill, which believe it or not, intended to codify the NSA’s unconstitutional practices into law.

In the end, what the status quo did was water down the once robust USA Freedom Act into oblivion. Don’t take my word for it, Justin Amash wrote the following on his Facebook page:

Today, I will vote no on ‪#‎HR3361‬, the ‪#‎USAFREEDOMAct‬.

I am an original cosponsor of the Freedom Act, and I was involved in its drafting. At its best, the Freedom Act would have reined in the government’s unconstitutional domestic spying programs, ended the indiscriminate collection of Americans’ private records, and made the secret FISA court function more like a real court—with real arguments and real adversaries.

I was and am proud of the work our group, led by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, did to promote this legislation, as originally drafted.

However, the revised bill that makes its way to the House floor this morning doesn’t look much like the Freedom Act.

This morning’s bill maintains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program. It claims to end “bulk collection” of Americans’ data only in a very technical sense: The bill prohibits the government from, for example, ordering a telephone company to turn over all its call records every day.

But the bill was so weakened in behind-the-scenes negotiations over the last week that the government still can order—without probable cause—a telephone company to turn over all call records for “area code 616” or for “phone calls made east of the Mississippi.” The bill green-lights the government’s massive data collection activities that sweep up Americans’ records in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

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Glenn Greenwald on the 2016 Elections – “They’ll Probably Have a Gay Person After Hillary”

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Glenn Greenwald is not one known for pulling punches, and in this excellent interview with GQ Magazine titled, The Man Who Knows Too Much, he is in particularly rare form. Credit must be given to the interviewer, who asked a wide range of very interesting questions that allowed Greenwald the opportunity to discuss a lot more than merely his Pulitzer Prize winning journalism on the Edward Snowden documents. From the fact that the biggest NSA stories have yet to be published, to thoughts on the 2016 elections, this interview really has it all.

Here are some of what I thought were the most interesting and informative excerpts. From GQ:

How much more is there to release—and what burden do you feel to get it out there?

We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

What do you think would happen if Snowden were to fly from, say, Moscow to New York today?

I think it would be a huge media circus, and then he would be instantly arrested and probably rendered incommunicado for the entire duration of his judicial proceeding on the grounds that he has classified information that could damage the United States. The prosecutors would say he would have to be kept away from media. He would just be disappeared. Rendered completely invisible and mute.

When Daniel Ellsberg was on trial [for leaking the Pentagon Papers], he was allowed to speak out and defend himself.Which is why Ellsberg wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last July saying Snowden was absolutely right to flee, because America has changed so drastically. Snowden would never be released on bail and would never get a fair trial.

Yeah, like the incident you quote in the book about Bill Keller [former executive editor of The New York Times] on the BBC…

Yeah, where he’s boasting about the fact that they don’t publish things without the government being happy with what they’re doing. And it obviously has resulted in the suppression of all kinds of important stories, which is the most inexcusable thing that can happen in journalism. And that has happened repeatedly at the Times. I think they’ve essentially become this mouthpiece for those in power, perhaps not consciously. When I make this critique, people at The New York Times are offended, because they actually don’t believe that it’s happening. And they’re not lying. It’s a more subtle dynamic than the government marching in and issuing memos to the Timesabout what they should and shouldn’t publish. It’s just a cultural approach to the news that basically says that the parameters of what can be discussed and viewed as reasonable are the ones that are endorsed by the most powerful financial and political factions in New York and Washington. They’re reflecting the mind-set of those elite groups rather than challenging them or confronting them. Obviously there are exceptions. There’s some good journalists there; they do some good journalism; they’ve done some adversarial journalism. It’s not an absolute, pure, constant, all-consuming formula. But in general, that’s become the posture of the Times.

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The Guardian’s Deputy Editor Claims the UK Government Threatened the Paper with Shutdown

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Mr Johnson said the whole attitude in the UK was that national security trumped press freedom and that the newspaper should not publish a word…We were threatened that we would be closed down. We were accused of endangering national security and people’s lives. It left us in a very difficult position.

– Paul Johnson, deputy editor of The Guardian

As if you didn’t already recognize the serious threat to press freedom in the UK following authorities holding Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda for eight hours under “terrorism” laws as he transferred through London’s Heathrow airport. It’s not just the traditional press at risk in the UK either, the government is hard at work censoring the internet itself via ridiculous filters.

Now we find out from the Irish Times that:

The Guardian newspaper was threatened with closure by the British government over the Edward Snowden spying affair, the Radiodays Europe conference has been told.

The paper’s deputy editor Paul Johnson said Britain’s intelligence agencies visited them and told them they would be closed if they persisted in printing Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance involving the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK. Mr Snowden is now in Russia, where he has temporary asylum. He is wanted by the US authorities on espionage charges.

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Here’s What the Richest Man in the World Thinks About Snowden and NSA Surveillance

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So Bill Gates recently gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine. The vast majority of the interview focused on his philanthropic efforts, with a particular focus on poverty and climate change. However, several questions were brought up on illegal NSA surveillance in general, and Edward Snowden in particular.

His answers reveal one of the biggest problems facing America today, which is the fact that the billionaire class as a whole does not question or rock the boat whatsoever. They criticize only when it is convenient or easy to do so, never putting themselves at risk for the sake of civil liberties and the Constitution.

In mosts cases, this is due to the fact that they themselves are the characters pulling the strings of the political class in Washington D.C. So when it comes down to it, their policies ultimately become our policies.

It is also important to note that Microsoft was a particularly eager participant in NSA spying from the very beginning. For example, according to the following PRISM slide provided by Edward Snowden, we see that Gates’ company was the first to become involved. In fact, they were participating a full six months before Yahoo!, while Apple didn’t join until a year after Steve Jobs died.

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What a tangled web we have weaved. Now from Rolling Stone:

Question: When people think about the cloud, it’s not only the accessibility of information and their documents that comes to mind, but also their privacy – or lack of it.

Gates: Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it. There’s a general view there that it’s not used to invade privacy in some way. Yet in an American city, in order to take advantage of that in the same way, you have to trust what this information is going to be used for.

Do they really catch terrorists because of it in London? Because in the U.S., the NSA chief already admitted that the entire spy program has stopped essentially zero terrorist attacks. It certainly didn’t stop the Boston bombings. So what are we giving up our privacy for exactly?

Question: Thanks to Edward Snowden, who has leaked tens of thousands of NSA documents, we are. Do you consider him a hero or a traitor?

Gates: I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero. If he wanted to raise the issues and stay in the country and engage in civil disobedience or something of that kind, or if he had been careful in terms of what he had released, then it would fit more of the model of “OK, I’m really trying to improve things.” You won’t find much admiration from me.

Sorry Billy boy, but we have had many whistleblowers in the past who went through the system and they ended up in jail or their lives were ruined. For example, the only person imprisoned for torture in the USA is the guy who exposed the torture program, John Kiriakou.

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