Category: News

A new petition at the White House’s portal is calling for President Obama to immediately an unconditionally pardon Edward Snowden for leaking the truth about the NSA’s huge overarching surveillance of everyday Americans.

The US hasn’t charged Snowden yet, of course, but officials have made it clear they intend to, and have been throwing out works like “treason” for an action which, at its core, was simply about informing the American public of something they desperately needed to know.

Of course I’m not so naive as to think that Obama would actually pardon someone who revealed such gross violations of civil liberties under his watch – that’s not how these things work. At the very least, however, the petition would compel President Obama to make a comment on the matter, and would prevent him from passing the buck on the persecution/prosecution of Snowden and dodging responsibility for it.

The petition has already gotten 37,000 signatures in the first day, and a decisive victory for it will make it even harder for the administration to ignore.

The leaks about America’s ever growing (and already ridiculously large) surveillance state came with a handy list of nine companies that joined the program. Those companies are, per the NSA’s own leaked data, giving the NSA direct access to their servers and, according to officials, the PRISM Nine also went out of their way to redesign their systems to easier facilitate the NSA’s spying on Americans.

Microsoft was the first on the list, joining way back when PRISM was just getting started. We all know Microsoft, and with its creation of Bing and its acquisition of Skype (another of the PRISM Nine), it is a big player in this scandal.

Here’s where it gets even worse (as it always does). Microsoft is coming out with a new video game console later this year. It will cost $499. I like video games. I even own Microsoft’s current video game system. But then it dawned on me – this new system will:

1. Require a constant connection to the Internet to even function.
2. Require the new version of Kinect to be always connected, and it is always on.

Kinect, for those unfamiliar, is an array of high definition cameras that can track movement in three dimensions. It was conceived of as a “joystickless” way to control games. It also includes a microphone, and that is always on on the new Xbox One, nominally so you can say commands and the system executes them without needing a remote control.

Which means Microsoft wants to install a three-dimensional surveillance array into your home, and require you to keep it always on, always feeding data to the Internet. And this company is a known facilitator of NSA surveillance of individual Americans. See the problem?

Microsoft was never high up on my “trust” list in the first place, but I hope no one is stupid enough to pay them $499 for the privilege of installing always-on surveillance equipment in your home to watch you knowing, not suspecting, but knowing that they are passing that information on to the NSA.

Today Edward Snowden, a former computer analyst for the CIA recently employed at the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, voluntarily revealed his identity as the source of The Guardian and The Washington Post‘s massive scoops about the NSA’s PRISM program, as well as its system of logging the metadata from every single call made from Verizon phones (and Sprint and AT&T, turns out).

Snowden fled to Hong Kong on May 30, and was interviewed there on June 6 by Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. In the interview he is amazingly well-spoken about the principles surrounding his decision to leak top-secret documents.Until late last month, the 29-year-old seems to have had a comfy life in Hawaii with a girlfriend and a $200,000 a year job with Booz Allen. But the reported Ron Paul supporter who voted for “a third party candidate” in 2008, wasn’t interested in keeping that level of coziness while possessing information that he believed the public has a right to know.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” Snowden told Greenwald.

Snowden also seems eerily resigned to the likely consequences of his actions — namely that he may never see his home country again, and that government officials may come for him at any time.

So far the official response to this revelation has been limited. The White House didn’t comment. The NSA and Booz Allen were predictably outraged. Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) suggests that we prosecute Snowden “to the fullest extent of the law.” King, chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism, also said that no other countries should grant Snowden asylum. Predictable hawks such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have yet to comment, but the up-coming work week will no doubt bring about a smorgasbord of outrage.

Meanwhile, whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning continues his trial for 22 charges, including violation of the Espionage Act, with the potentially life sentence-bringing crime of “aiding the enemy.” Though Manning has garnered heartening amounts of support support for his actions, initially it seems that Snowden could be a more compelling case for whistleblowing as heroism. Manning messed with the military, and was a member of (and therefore a “traitor” to) the armed forces. He dumped massive amounts of documents in what some claim was a less-than-careful manner, and he shared them with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Contrast this with Snowden who claims to have combed through and made sure only to release things that were in the public interest, and who shared documents with reputable newspapers. (Though even officials have admitted that they can’t point to anyone in particular that Manning endangered with his releases, only a vague worry that he could have.)

Though the NSA and the CIA can be looked at as fighters in the war on terror (thereby counting as protectors of Americans), they don’t have the same cultural clout as do soldiers. There are no bumper stickers demanding that we all support NSA agents, no ribbons for them.. There’s that, and the unfortunate truth that most Americans care more about an injury to them (in the form of domestic spying) than they do about the ugly face of a war that their government started. Hell, it’s hard enough to get Americans to care about the surveillance state, getting them to object to war — especially when a soldier “betrays” his fellows is even harder. Manning is not the perfect everyman for this cause of transparency and antiwar activism (his tiny stature, his emotional difficulties even before his grim treatment in prison, and his sexual orientation unfortunately don’t help, either).

By all means, if people on the fence before re Manning decide that Snowden is speaking the truth, that’s great. Any catalyst for people joining in and saying enough is enough is a great thing. But if  Snowden becomes (and it’s very early yet, this is a lot of speculation) a better face for the noble art of whistleblowing, that doesn’t mean that Manning should be forgotten. Manning may have been impulsive and even reckless, but he acted in good faith, same as Snowden seems to have done.

Both men are heroes. They both risked their lives and their freedom to cast light into the nastiest, darkest corners of the powerful. And they’re both in serious trouble.

Please check out the full Greenwald/Guardian interview with Snowden, keep watching the Bradley Manning trial, and on Monday, when the usual suspects start howling about national security, don’t believe them.

And if you ever find yourself in possession of classified documents that show something wrong, leak them.  Be like Manning and Snowden, and leak them.

In 48 hours of leaks we went from the NSA collecting meta-data on practically every phone call in the United States to the revelation of an overarching Internet surveillance scheme called PRISM, which collects data wholesale from nine major US Internet content providers.

And I can’t say enough about how horrible that is. I mean, literally everyone reading this is certain to have some sort of data exchange with the PRISM nine. For me, I do some of my work on an Apple computer, and Apples in on it. I use linux for stuff too, but it doesn’t matter that this is secure because I do all of my email at Gmail, communicate with coworkers on AOL Instant Messanger, use Google as a search engine for research. All that stuff is still getting swept up.

Some of that stuff is just unavoidable too – if you stop using Google Search what are you going to use? Yahoo is in on this, and so is Microsoft (Bing). That’s pretty much it for competent English-language search engines in 2013.

As of last night though there was a lot of speculation surrounding the creepily specific denials of companies that they aren’t providing “direct access,” with Business Insider talking about broad eavesdropping as allowing them to get away with only “passive” compliance from these companies being the most plausible explanation.

Except it gets worse.

Turns out the Business Insider indirect data collection is a whole ‘nother series of programs the NSA is running, that are distinct from PRISM.

Guardian has leaked another (partially redacted) slide on the matter, and it turns out all those claims by Google, Facebook et al. of not giving the NSA direct access are something distinct from legalese. Something we can call, for the sake of clarity, flat out lies. Here’s what the NSA’s top secret document says:

PRISM
Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple

The partially redacted part talks about Upstream collection of data through the basic communications infrastructure of the Internet, listing four programs that do this (two are blacked out), and admonishes NSA analysts viewing the presentation “You Should Use Both.”

So the well, well over 90% of data that was being culled in PRISM wasn’t even the end of the story, and four other programs exist that are likely sweeping up likely most of the rest of it.

Big Brother would be lucky to be half this efficient, and its probably time to retire the term “Orwellian,” since that level of information awareness is starting to look quaint compared to the grim reality we’re now facing.

Suddenly members of the media (thanks to some heroic, anonymous leakers) are doing what we wish they did every day — they’re enthusiastically skewering the state, and reporting in outraged detail all that the government has done to violate the sacred rights of the people. Maybe we should back a federal media shield law, to protect brave journalists like Glenn Greenwald and the folks at The Washington Post, as well as their sources.

But first, check out a few of the supporters of such a bill. President Barack Obama is a fan of the idea. So is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). He co-sponsored the return of a dead 2009 law — the so-called Free Flow of Information Act — along with no-intervention-in-your-life-is-too-small Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Earlier this week Graham told a collection of reporters that he supported such a law, because it’s important to suss out who deserves protection from federal prosecution. Said the Senator:

“Is any blogger out there saying anything — do they deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times.”

Graham suggested that yes, media giants get that. But “So, if classified information is leaked out on a personal website or [by] some blogger, do they have the same First Amendments rights as somebody who gets paid [in] traditional journalism?”

Why wouldn’t they?

If there is any group dragging their foot more than traditional media over just who counts as the press, it’s lawmakers. In a world of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and kick-ass, semi-“official” bloggers of all stripes, it would be incredibly convenient (yet would look magnanimous) for government officials to decide that yes, of course The New York Times deserves some protection when they publish leaked documents, but your average scrappy blogger does not. And Julian Assange definitely does not, nor does Bradley Manning.

Atlantic Wire notes that the dead 2009 Federal law that Obama is keen on resurrecting would, by their own interpretation, cover bloggers. But we’re already past the age of the long-form blogger. The next big question is social media — Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr — all the ways millions of people now spread information without even the formality of blogging.

And are those who deserve added protection to be protected because they’re news reporters, or because they work for news organizations? Muses The Atlantic:

Let’s say that a person regularly shares news stories over Twitter. He looks for interesting articles, composes a summary and a link, tweets it out. One day, a friend who works for the government sends him a classified document. The person puts that up on a file sharing site and tweets a link with a description of the file. Does that person deserve protection as a journalist? If he posted it to his blog where he comments on news items, would he then? What if he worked for Fox News, but not as a reporter?

Another example: A woman who doesn’t usually tweet about the news shares a photo of the failure of a top secret weapon, sent to her by a friend in the military. Should she be protected? Is a person who stumbles onto something newsworthy a journalist?

And even within official outlets, there’s going to be a hierarchy. Huffington Post is official enough to warrant an invite to Eric Holder’s off-the-record chats about the press and the Department of Justice. But, what about student media? Or bloggers who have other jobs ? According to a U.S. A. Today, the House version[pdf] of the shield law wouldn’t protect either of those. They highlight the case of student journalist Josh Wolf who was jailed for 226 days when he refused to hand over protest footage he had taken.

Like any other institution, the press too often seems to feel that if everyone is the press, then it somehow diminishes their unique power and responsibility as gatekeepers of information.

Wall-Street Journal columnist James Taranto was a recent exception to this jealous rule, noting his deep discomfort with the prospect of government legally differentiating between “real” reporters or not. Fox News reporter James Rosen, Taranto notes, is currently in trouble because he is being accused of being a “co-conspirator” with his source, not because he was attempting to protect that source.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum also wrote that Graham — who at least Tweeted a follow-up clarification that yes, bloggers deserve free speech protection —  is still wrong about the First Amendment on a basic level. The press:

refers to a technology, not a profession or an industry. “The press,” like “speech,” is a means of communication that all citizens have an equal right to use, regardless of their occupation. Today the press should be understood to mean any medium of mass communication, including the Internet. Freedom of the press in this sense is not a special privilege that belongs only to officially recognized members of the Fourth Estate.

It’s hard to know what should be done about protecting dispensers of news, besides a futile prayer that the government stop haranguing those folks. But stronger protections for whistleblowers and distributors of information, period, would be a better solution than a limited, potentially dangerous law like this.

At least it pays to approach such feel-good legislation with caution. After all, it’s hawks and big government advocates clammering loudest to “fix”  the awful — but supposedly “limited” — Authorization for Use of Military Force; similarly, it’s power-hungry politicians touting a media shield law as the solution to (sometimes their own) spying on and harassment of the press.

FISA Court Chief Judge Reggie Walton objects to the characterization of his court as a “rubber stamp” that will approve literally anything. Even though they approved an order to spy on every goddamn phone call in the United States.

President Obama objects to the media calling PRISM a “secret” program, even though the Powerpoint presentation that finally revealed it’s existence, some 5 years after it started, is stamped “Top Secret.”

I object to the idea that either of these men was able to rise to a position above crossing guard on a not-too-busy street.