These are certain things that you will not easily find in U.S. media like Jimmy Carter declaring that we no longer have a functioning democracy in this country. Another is reading about Snowden as a whistleblower. The White House has been highly successful in telling media not to refer to Snowden as a whistleblower and enlisting various media allies to attack him as a clown and a traitor or mocking his fear of returning home. This week you had to read Moscow Times or other foreign sites (or a link on Reddit) to learn that Snowden has won this year’s Whistleblower Award established by German human rights organizations.
The award handed down by the Association of German Scientists (VDW) and the German branch of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) comes with a small financial reward that will be given to Snowden’s legal representatives. Such awards will bolster his claim for asylum.
While there is no evidence thus far of any motivation by Snowden except his desire to reveal an unconstitutional program, the media has largely complied with a demand of the White House that he not be called a whistleblower as Obama officials and members of Congress denounce him. The problem is that many Americans and foreigners view him as a whistleblower and some as a hero. Likewise, the effort to get Americans to embrace a new surveillance-friendly model of privacy has largely failed though most average Americans feel helpless in a system with a locked monopoly of power by two parties.
As I have noted before, it brings to mind the successful effort to convince media to call waterboarding “enhanced interrogation” in the media rather than “torture” as it has long been defined by courts. Snowden is a whistleblower in my mind. It is true that the Administration can argue that these programs were lawful to the Supreme Court’s precedent stripping pen registers of full constitutional protection in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). Many of us disagree with that ruling, but this is a new application of the precedent. While the government has long sought the information for individuals, the Administration is essentially issuing a national security letter against the entire population. Moreover, it does appear that violations have occurred in these programs.
Putting aside the legality issue, whistleblowers are defined more probably by public interest organizations. For example, The Government Accountability Project, a leading nonprofit handling whistleblowers, defines the term as “an employee who discloses information that s/he reasonably believes is evidence of illegality, gross waste or fraud, mismanagement, abuse of power, general wrongdoing, or a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. Typically, whistleblowers speak out to parties that can influence and rectify the situation. These parties include the media, organizational managers, hotlines, or Congressional members/staff, to name a few.”
Snowden clearly fits that more common definition of whistleblower, even if the government contests the application of statutory protections. Many can legitimately question Snowden’s chosen means for objecting to this program. However, the hostile and dismissive treatment by the establishment reflects an obvious fear of the implications of this scandal. We saw the same full court press in defining Julien Assange in a way that avoids calling him a journalist or a whistleblower. He is just an Assange. Well Snowden is just a Snowden in the view of U.S. media . . . until he can be called a prisoner.
Yeah, CNN and Jeffrey can not wait until Eric Stock Holder files a criminal complaint against Zimmerman. Then they can gin up the mobs and then the right wing will react with the Lee Atwater Southern Strategy and the RepubliCons will put up some new Ronnie Raygun type and sweep into the White House because the liberals will be fed up with the Democrats over FISA and other transgressions and CNN, FOX and NBC will be happy as Clowns. Its all fixed. The networks have bringing you this Zimmerman folly 24/7 to stir up the redneck backlash. Google: Lee Atwater and The Southern Strategy for the Grand Ol Gophers.
He is indeed a Whisteblower.
The US government is run by tyrants, thieves and traitors.
Revolution is the only answer that can insure their defeat and throw out the corruption.
Somewhere recently I read that the Russians have been amazed over time at how much more powerful and effective US media along with the television networks and Hollywood are in controlling American social behavior, not to mention thought than any methods the Russians have ever come up with. I can’t find the source for that so the statement has to stand on its own, but given the fact that so many in this country .believe, act and vote with amazing consistency against their own self interests, it struck me as perfectly plausible. Indeed, the fact that I still catch myself imagining that voting has any effect is perhaps another such supporting argument.
That said, I suspect the administration, and thus the obsequious – can’t lick it fast enough – media, are overplaying their hand at this point. People are catching on even if for most what little security they have left still outweighs taking action by quite a bit.
Is there anyone on the Blog old enough to recall the Saturday Night Live skits when they ridiculed Jeffrey Leonard? JEFFREY! That is what the dogpac barks when Toobin comes on television here at the marina on the CNN so called news. Who is the Clown? Its Jeffrey.
On day one, it was that schmuck on CNN named Jeffrey Toobin who called Snowden a Clown and a Traitor. Jeffrey Toobin purportedly has a law degree and purportedly worked as some assistant U.S. atty. Whistleblowers inside CNN, where he is mocked incessantly, say that he never tried a jury trial in his life. CNN puts this schmuck on the air each night and day to tell the viewer the “ins” and “outs” of the legal system.
CNN and Jeffrey never mention the fact that the government has a Sealed Affidavit attached to its Complaint filed in federal court against Snowden. The government wont tell us the name of the “enemy” to which Snowden revealed “secrets”. He did reveal that the NSA was spying on our ally Germany. The Germans did not know that we considered them enemies. Now they do.
It is time for Americans to demand the details in the Sealed Affidavit attached to the Complaint in the criminal case against Snowden which is sitting on a shelf in a federal district court in Virginia. So, readers, write your President and demand that he Show Us Your Papers! No, not the birthin papers. The papers which allege that Snowden is a traitor and which details who our enemies are. Inquiring Germans want to know.
Kafka’s America: Secret Courts, Secret Laws, and Total Surveillance
By John W. Whitehead
July 22, 2013
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/kafkas_america_secret_courts_secret_laws_and_total_surveillance
In a bizarre and ludicrous attempt at “transparency,” the Obama administration has announced that it asked a secret court to approve a secret order to allow the government to keep spying on millions of Americans, and the secret court has granted its request.
Late on Friday, July 19, 2013, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—a secret court which operates out of an undisclosed federal building in Washington, DC—quietly renewed an order from the National Security Agency to have Verizon Communications hand over hundreds of millions of Americans’ telephone records to government officials. In so doing, the government has doubled down on the numerous spying programs currently aimed at the American people, some of which were exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who temporarily pulled back the veil on the government’s gigantic spying apparatus.
…
The runaround and circular logic of the courts, Congress, the intelligence agencies, and the White House calls to mind Franz Kafka’s various depictions of bureaucracy gone mad, which have colored our civilization’s understanding of the shortcomings of a government which is only accountable to itself. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, “Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat.”
One of Kafka’s most famous novels, The Trial, tells the story of Josef K., an ordinary middle manager who one morning awakes to find himself accused of a terrible crime – a crime which is too awful for his accusers to speak of. While at times absurdly funny, The Trial is ultimately a frightening depiction of what it means to live under a regime which operates on a circular logic that prevents outsiders, including those subject to its rule, from understanding – let alone challenging – the rules of the game, and who is making them.
Legal scholar Daniel J. Solove has expounded upon this metaphor, pointing out that:
“The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor… are problems of information processing–the storage, use, or analysis of data–rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.”
Josef K’s plight, one of bureaucratic lunacy and an inability to discover the identity of his accusers, is increasingly an American reality. We now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted. Indeed, this is Kafka’s nightmare, and it is slowly becoming America’s reality.
TPM LiveWire
Poll: Americans Turn On Snowden, Majority Supports Criminal Charges
Tom Kludt
July 24, 2013
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/poll-americans-turn-on-snowden-majority-supports-criminal?ref=fpb
Amid reports that Edward Snowden has been granted permission to enter Russia, a poll released Wednesday found that American attitudes toward the National Security Agency leaker have shifted markedly in the last month.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post found that 53 percent of Americans are in favor of criminal charges being brought against Snowden, a jump from a poll in June that found a plurality of 48 percent opposed to charging the 30-year-old former government contractor with a crime.
Moreover, the latest ABC/WaPo survey found that 57 percent of Americans believe it’s more important for the government to investigate potential terrorist threats than for it to protect privacy rights. Nearly half of Americans — 49 percent — said that Snowden’s disclosures of top secret surveillance programs harmed national security either a “great deal” or “somewhat.”
A poll earlier this month from Quinnipiac University found that a wide majority of Americans considered Snowden a whistelblower and not a traitor. Reports out of Russia on Tuesday indicated that Snowden has been given documents to leave the Moscow airport, where he’s been staying for the last month.
IMO, I am not sure he can be defined as a hero. What did he hope to accomplish? Jail time for the rest of his life? Overthrowing our oligarchial government? Hoping other federal employees/contractor do the same? If he was aware of the consequences, then why not come home and ‘face the music.’ Or is there more to the story?
There will never be an end to the disproportionate influence a corporation has in government. There are examples of this influence contained, however. The problem is the collective ego of the American people. They will not look to other countries that have developed election processes that limit or disallow private or corporate funding of elections. In Canada and Great Britain, two countries that in no way match the economic might of the United States, there is to be found truer democracies. The elections are funded primarily through government dollars decided by the number of votes the candidate received in his or her last election, or how popular they are. With the government limiting the political campaigning, the exposure tends to be focused on the issues and not the bs one sees in the United States’ elections. There is not enough money to spread the lies that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the U S media spread. Canadians and Brits are not inundated by smear campaigns. Politicians are not held hostage by oligarchical groups such as the NRA, big oil, corporations that use the U S to fund global enterprises that do not benefit the citizens that pay for them. Our system, theoretically, is among the best in the world, however, it is broken, hopefully not beyond repair. When one sees judgeships, governorships, and other political seats purchased by two brothers-Koch-or other select and self important groups, on this scale, then it is time to revisit how we elect our representatives, or perhaps more correctly who elects their representatives.
If you go back thirty years you will see the installation of cameras all over the major cities in Europe. When France installed its new satellite phone system in the late 70’s and early 80’s they amalgamated several outdated system into one system that went directly from the phone to the satellite and to the phone, through a system that could be accessed by their security system. Great Britain, Germany, and other countries did the same. The US trailed behind in that technology but is now just like the European countries. This is not a new thing. The Constitution is also not a new thing. It is, however, highly interpretable depending on which way the wind blows. One way the wind has always blown is that if you are not a threat, not breaking the law, not conspiring to do harm to anyone and/or the country then what does it matter? Snowden violated the supreme basic tenant while working for the supreme caretaker of this country’s security. He screwed up due to the same megalomania that showed up in Zimmerman. He stepped out of his place as a citizen and smeared the hand that protected him. Unfortunately, this is a necessary part of our fabric, to bring to the attention of the citizens of the US, what is going on, just as Zimmerman brought it to the attention of the US how easy is is for someone as dangerous as he is to be able to carry a concealed weapon. The only difference is that there is nothing we can do about the secret service, they will simply take more care in not getting exposed and continue doing their job as they see it. With Zimmerman’s actions, taking a gun to a fist fight, well I suppose a lot more innocent people will have to die before LaPeter and the NRA and those that believe that guns come without social responsibility will be seen for who they are. This brings us to Carter’s comment and the NRA proves his point along with all of the other oligarchical aspects of our system of election. Politicians, judges, and other officials are elected through the media, the media costs money, the media allows lies and fabrication of the truth. There is virtually no limit on what can be spent to elect an individual. There is an industry designed to implement the connection of money to elections-Carl Rove for example. There is blatant proof Wisconson and the Koch Brothers, Diaz and his place on the supreme court of Mississippi, and practically every other important election in every state in this country including the federal government. We are not elected by the democratic system, unless you look at it this way. Americans are too complacent to oversee their system so as Aristotle said, I the citizen is too complacent to take care of their democratic system then they deserve to be ruled by tyrants. In this case it is oligarchs. The French population was bought off by cheap wine and tobacco in the last few decades of the monarchy. We are bought off by cheap flat screen tv’s and budweiser at less than a buck a bottle. One incredibly fantastic way to attack the increasing costs of health care would be to put a 10% ‘Crap Tax’ on alcohol, cigarettes, potato chips, twinkles, etc. Another would be to get rid of the parasitical health care insurance companies and move to a single payer two tier system. But the cheap booze and potato chips keeps the individual complacent and the health insurance companies are some of the oligarchs that run this country. So, what is more important, someone listening in on an innocent conversation or voting for someone because they smothered the media with lies and persuasion and you are too laid back sucking on a cheap beer watching a movie on a cheap tv made in China instead of here in the USA.
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/blog/post/wyden-on-nsa-domestic-surveillance
July 23, 2013
Wyden on NSA Domestic Surveillance at Center for American Progress
by Communications Office
On July 23, 2013, Senator Wyden’s gave remarks on NSA domestic surveillance and the PATRIOT Act at the Center for American Progress. In his speech Wyden warns that “if we don’t seize this unique moment in history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will all live to regret it.”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/155530126/Wyden-Speech-on-NSA-Domestic-Surveillance-at-Center-for-American-Progress
“So, my question to you is: by allowing the executive to secretly follow a secret interpretation of the law under the supervision of a secret, non-adversarial court and occasional secret congressional hearings, how close are we coming to James Madison’s “very definition of tyranny”? I believe we are allowing our country to drift a lot closer than we should, and if we don’t take this opportunity to change course now, we will all live to regret it.” -Ron Wyden
If you don’t want to hear it…. You’re a traitor….. If you are honest he’s a classic example of a whistleblower ….
Senator Slams Domestic Spying: ‘Secret Law Has No Place In America’
By Hayes Brown
Jul 23, 2013
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/23/2342801/wyden-nsa-cap/
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON, DC — Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) warned an audience at the Center for American Progress on Tuesday of the threat that the post-9/11 surveillance state could not only become permanent, but extend far beyond even its current reach.
Wyden was one of only ten senators to vote against the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act in 2006. And in March of last year, he and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) said Americans would be “stunned” to learn how the Executive Branch was interpreting certain provisions of the law to expand its surveillance power using programs such as the National Security Agency’s sweeping collection of metadata from cell phone and internet companies recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
At CAP’s event on Tuesday, Wyden claimed — as he did during the debate over drones earlier this year — that there’s a large gap between what the American people believe a law to be and how the Executive Branch interprets it. When it comes to the siphoning up of data from American citizens, “the public was actually misled,” Wyden said, in statements from top intelligence officials including NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
That secret interpretation of the law is upheld, Wyden said, through the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, which saw its powers expanded greatly after 9/11. While originally meant to rule on wiretap petitions against possible foreign agents under FISA, the Court has now become the source of broad rulings backing the gathering of information from broad swaths of Americans indefinitely. “There is no other court in America that has strayed so far from the adversarial process,” Wyden said, pointing out that since its rulings are secret, they’re almost impossible to appeal.
Reblogged this on euzicasa.
NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails
by Justin Elliott
ProPublica, July 23, 2013
http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-says-it-cant-search-own-emails/single#republish
Excerpt:
The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.
“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.
The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.
I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.
A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.
I reached out to the NSA press office seeking more information but got no response.
It’s actually common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees email as part of internal investigations or legal discovery.
“It’s just baffling,” says Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This is an agency that’s charged with monitoring millions of communications globally and they can’t even track their own internal communications in response to a FOIA request.”
Court: Chevron Can Seize Americans’ Email Data
In an almost unprecedented decision, a federal judge has allowed Chevron to subpoena Americans’ private email data—and said the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
—By Dana Liebelson
| Mon Jul. 22, 2013
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/chevron-ecuador-american-email-legal-activists-journalists
Excerpt:
Thanks to disclosures made by Edward Snowden, Americans have learned that their email records are not necessarily safe from the National Security Agency—but a new ruling shows that they’re not safe from big oil companies, either.
Last month, a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata—which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content—belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn’t violate the First Amendment because Americans weren’t among the people targeted.
Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans—a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and in cases involving Americans, courts have often quashed subpoenas seeking to discover the identities and locations of anonymous internet users. Earlier this year, a different federal judge quashed Chevron’s attempts to seize documents from Amazon Watch, one of the company’s most vocal critics. That judge said the subpoena was a violation of the group’s First Amendment rights. In this case, though, that same protection has not been extended to activists, journalists, and lawyers’ email metadata.
“torture” = “enhanced interrogation”
“whistleblower” = “traitor”
“Newspeak” = “English”
Chevron Gets Access to Private Data for Revenge Suit
13
By Tina Gerhardt, July 17, 2013
http://www.progressive.org/chevron-gets-access-private-data-for-revenge-suit
Excerpt;
On June 25, a federal judge approved a subpoena, to be served by Chevron to Microsoft, granting the oil company private Internet and phone data related to 30 email addresses, including those related to environmental nonprofits, activists, journalists and lawyers.
This information forms part of a larger fishing expedition by Chevron to go after those who won an $18 billion judgment against the company in Ecuador in February 2011 for dumping 18.5 billion gallons of highly toxic waste into the streams and rivers in the rainforests of eastern Ecuador.
In its retaliatory lawsuit, Chevron claims that “this judgment is the product of fraud.” And it is seeking the IP addresses of individuals involved in the suit over a nine-year period.
In particular, the subpoena calls for the production of all documents related to “the identity of the users of the email addresses, including ‘all names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, billing information, date of account creation, account information and all other identifying information.
The Snowden Effect, Continued
By Charles P. Pierce
7/23/13
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/chevron-gets-access-to-private-data-for-lawsuit-072313
Ultimately, the Snowden Effect is about personal data, and privacy, and who gets to know what about you, and how, and when. Most of the hootin’ and hollerin’ has been about the government getting to know what about you, and how, and when. However, given the way government and corporations are becoming more closely entwined here at the Stephen J. Field Memorial Cotillion, it was only a matter of time before the latter got into the act.
This information forms part of a larger fishing expedition by Chevron to go after those who won an $18 billion judgment against the company in Ecuador in February 2011 for dumping 18.5 billion gallons of highly toxic waste into the streams and rivers in the rainforests of eastern Ecuador. In its retaliatory lawsuit, Chevron claims that “this judgment is the product of fraud.” And it is seeking the IP addresses of individuals involved in the suit over a nine-year period. In particular, the subpoena calls for the production of all documents related to “the identity of the users of the email addresses, including ‘all names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, billing information, date of account creation, account information and all other identifying information.”
In brief, if the government — which, theoretically, at least, is us — decides to destroy the lives of whistleblowers, that will become the common currency of all centers of power, including the least accountable ones. If the government — which, theoretically, at least, is us — decides to pry into the private lives of citizens willy-nilly, that will become the accepted practice by all centers of power, including the least accountable ones. In a democracy — where, theoretically, at least, government is only that which we choose to allow — the government leads the way, including the development of a culture of informers. For all of his maladroit PR, that’s the thing against which Snowden is pushing back. It’s a fight worth having.
Here is the link to the VDW’s award website (in German)
Automatic Translation into the English Scroll down on the page for content.