OMNI SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #1,
July 9, 2013. Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of
Peace and Justice.
My blog:
War Department/Peace Department
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
See
newsletters on National Security State (NSS), Pentagon, Secrecy, Surveillance,
and many more.
Index:
Contents #1 (in reverse
chron. order, bold type added by
Dick)
(Some entries offer contexts.)
Petitions
July 13: Ellsberg, Why Snowden Had to Flee US
July 8/15: Schell, Hero Snowden vs. End of Privacy
July 5:
Weisbrot, Helping Snowden
July 5: Pilger,
Morales’ Plane Forced Down
June 26: Blum, Dark History of US
June 24: Lindorff, Hong Kong ,
China , Russia
June 20: Pew Poll, US Public Majority Supports Prosecution
June 19: Greenwald, FISA Fails Oversight
June 13:
Greenwald, Snowden, Who Is He?
SIGN PETITIONS
Secret FISA Court Out of Control – Makes Violently
Anti-Constitutional Decision Giving up ALL Your Phone Records http://daviddilworth.com/pol/secret-fisa-court-out-of-control-makes-violently-anti-constitutional-decision-giving-up-all-your-phone-records/
Today, EPIC joined a coalition of
over 100 civil liberties organizations and Internet companies todemand that Congress initiate a full-scale investigation
into the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. In the letter sent
to Congress this morning, the coalition emphasized the need for public
transparency and an end to dragnet surveillance: "This type of blanket
data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom
and privacy." EPIC is also leading apetition to the NSA to suspend its program of
collecting information on all individuals in the United States . EPIC intends to
renew its request to the Agency every week until the NSA responds. For more
information see EPIC: NSA Petition.
EPIC, joined by leading privacy
experts including James Bamford, Whitfield Diffie, and Bruce Schneier,
has petitioned the National Security Agency to suspend
its domestic surveillance programpending public comment. EPIC's
petition states "NSA's collection of domestic communications contravenes
the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and violates
several federal privacy laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974, and the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as amended." EPIC's petition
further states that NSA’s domestic surveillance "substantively affects the
public to a degree sufficient to implicate the policy interests" that
require public comment, and that "NSA's collection of domestic
communications absent the opportunity for public comment is unlawful."
EPIC intends to renew its request each week until the NSA responds. For more
information and to join EPIC’s petition, see: EPIC: NSA Petition.
In a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman
Mignon Clyburn, EPIC urged the FCC to determine whether Verizon violated the
Communications Act when it released consumer call detail information to the
National Security Agency. In response to an unprecedented Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court order which focused on solely domestic communications,
Verizon released telephone customer information to the NSA, including telephone
numbers and time and call duration. Congress explicitly charged the Commission
with investigating unauthorized disclosures of consumer call detail
information. EPIC's letter stated that Verizon violated legal protections for
consumer phone records when it disclosed consumer information in response to a
facially invalid order. For more information, see EPIC: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, EPIC: Clapper v. Amnesty Int'l, and EPIC: USA Patriot Act.
Daniel Ellsberg testifies about the Pentagon Papers at a Senate subcommittee meeting on May 16, 1973. (photo: AP)
Snowden Was Correct to
Flee the US
By Daniel Ellsberg, The Washington
08 July 13
Daniel Ellsberg is the author of “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam
[Ellsberg, 1970s, leaking, US civil liberties,
functioning Bill of Rights, and free
press. –Dick]
any people compare Edward Snowden to me
unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing
trial as I did. I don't agree. The country I stayed in was a different
After
the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers - on June 15, 1971, the
first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. Hong Kong ) was to elude surveillance while
I was arranging - with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to
the FBI - to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other
newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that
period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a
"fugitive from justice."
Yet
when I surrendered to arrest in Boston
[Snowden, 2013, leaking, US intensified repression, damaged
Bill of Rights, secrecy, punishment, totalitarianism. –Dick]
There
is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial
could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant
that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon's era - and figured in his
resignation in the face of impeachment - but are today all regarded as legal
(including an attempt to "incapacitate me totally").
I
hope Snowden's revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but
he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance
that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance
that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he
would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.
He
would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the
more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment
before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur
for Torture described
Manning's conditions as "cruel, inhuman and degrading." (That
realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden
asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States
Snowden
believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40
years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks
remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the
Pentagon Papers and Snowden's leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power
corrupts.
In my
case, my authorized access in the Pentagon and the Rand Corp. to top-secret
documents - which became known as the Pentagon
Papers after I disclosed them - taught me that Congress and the American
people had been lied to by successive presidents and dragged into a hopelessly
stalemated war that was illegitimate from the start.
Snowden's
dismay came through access to even more highly classified documents - some of
which he has now selected to make public - originating in the National Security Agency (NSA). He
found that he was working for a surveillance organization whose all-consuming
intent, he told the Guardian's Glenn
Greenwald, was "on making every conversation and every form of
behavior in the world known to them."
It
was, in effect, a global expansion of the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security in
the Stalinist "German Democratic Republic," whose goal was "to
know everything." But the cellphones, fiber-optic cables, personal
computers and Internet traffic the NSA accesses did not exist in the Stasi's
heyday.
As
Snowden told the Guardian, "This country is worth dying for." And, if
necessary, going to prison for - for life.
But Snowden's contribution to the noble
cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution
is in his documents.
It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives
- still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or
his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served,
in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S.
I
hope that he finds a haven, as safe as possible from kidnapping or
assassination by U.S. Special Operations forces, preferably where he can speak
freely.
What he has given us is our best chance
- if we respond to his information and his challenge - to rescue ourselves from
out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive
branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America
[End Ellsberg]
America 's Surveillance Net - TheNation
Jonathan Schell - TheNation
June 19, 2013 | This article appeared in the July 8-15, 2013 edition of The Nation.
June 19, 2013 | This article appeared in the July 8-15, 2013 edition of The Nation.
There is a revolution afoot—one that is being carried out by the government against the fundamental law of the land. [A brief, excellent essay tracing the rise of repression in the
http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net#axzz2XBLcJHyq
A school of fish swims peacefully in the ocean. Out of sight, a net is spread beneath it. At the edges of the net is a circle of fishing boats. Suddenly, the fishermen yank up the edges of the net, and in an instant the calm, open ocean becomes a boiling caldron, an exitless, rapidly shrinking prison in which the fish thrash in vain for freedom and life.
Increasingly, the American people are like this school of fish in the moments before the net is pulled up. The net in question is of course the Internet and associated instruments of data collection, and the fishermen are corporations and the government. That is, to use the more common metaphor, we have come to live alongside the machinery of a turnkey tyranny. As we now know, thanks to the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has been secretly ordering Verizon to sweep up and hand over all the metadata from the phone calls of millions of its customers: phone numbers, duration of calls, routing information and sometimes the location of the callers. Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.
Surveillance of people on this scale turns basic liberties—above all the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure—into a dead letter. Government officials, it is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight. They tell us that although they could know everything about us, they won’t decide to. They’ll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults. But history, whether of our country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such assurances. What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what is left undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes.
The executive branch offers a similar assurance about its claimed right to kill American and foreign citizens at its sole discretion. But to accept such assurances as the guarantee of basic liberties would be to throw away bedrock principles of our constitutional order. If there is any single political idea that deserves to be called quintessentially American, it is the principle that government power must be balanced and checked by other government power, which is why federal power is balanced by state power and is itself divided into three branches.
The officials—most notably President Obama—have assured us that this system is intact, that the surveillance programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” in Obama’s words. But the briefest examination of the record rebuts the claim. In this matter, the interactions of the three branches are a cause not for reassurance but for deeper alarm. It’s not that the legislative and judicial branches are not involved; it’s that each, in its own way, has abandoned its appointed constitutional role.
The story
arguably begins with George W. Bush’s
end run around the legal system after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when, in
complete disregard of the law, he initiated warrantless domestic surveillance
by the NSA. So clearly illegal and extreme was this program that high-ranking
officials of his administration, including James Comey, deputy attorney
general, and Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, threatened to resign. Bush
backed off some of the measures, and the confrontation did not become known
until much later.
What
happened then? Did Congress check
this executive usurpation? Did it castigate Bush, forbid the crimes, hold his
officials accountable? It did not. It adopted the worst features of the Bush
program as law, in the Protect America Act of 2007 and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008; it also immunized from legal repercussions
corporations that had secretly knuckled under to Bush’s wrongdoing. Far from
correcting the abuses, Congress institutionalized them. At the same time, it
supported the executive branch’s cloak of secrecy over those abuses and the
classification of the legal opinions of the FISA court, whose rulings have
given legal protection to the new surveillance programs. The Obama
administration’s legal opinions on the practices are also classified.
As for the judicial branch, it happens that in
1979, the Supreme Court ruled that the sort of metadata collected from Verizon
is not covered by the Fourth Amendment. (In fairness, there is no sign that the
Court anticipated or meant to approve the sort of indiscriminate dragnet of
metadata now under way. Thus, a lawsuit recently brought by the ACLU to stop
this has a chance of succeeding.) The FISA court almost never refuses
government requests. James Bamford, an expert on NSA surveillance, has
characterized this institution as “a super hush-hush surveillance court that is
virtually impotent.”
Our system of checks and balances has
gone into reverse. The
three branches, far from checking one another’s power or protecting the rights
of Americans, entered one after another into collusion to violate them, even to
the extent of immunizing the wrongdoers. Balanced, checked power has become
fused power—exactly what the founders of this country feared above all else.
The political parties have been no more useful as checks than the branches of
government; their leaderships stand together protecting the abuses, though
individual senators, including Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, have proposed
sensible reforms.
Finally, even elections have proven ineffective:
the voters chose a president who taught constitutional law running on a
platform of stopping civil liberties abuses; but he has become the author of
new abuses. Even now, his soothing demeanor and reputation for liberalism
(“Change we can believe in”) confuses and thwarts those who otherwise would be
reacting with anger.
What should Americans do when all official channels are
unresponsive or dysfunctional? Are we, as people used to say, in a
revolutionary situation? Shall we man the barricades? The situation is a little
more peculiar than that. There is a
revolution afoot, but it is not one in the streets; it is one that is being
carried out by the government against the fundamental law of the land. That
this insurrection against the
constitutional order by officials sworn to uphold it includes legal opinions
and legislation only makes it the more radical and dangerous. In other words,
the government is in stealthy insurrection against the letter and the spirit of
the law.
What’s
needed is counterrevolution—an American restoration, returning to and
reaffirming the principles on which the Republic was founded. Edward Snowden, for one, knew what to do. He saw that
when government as a whole goes rogue, the only force with a chance of bringing
it back into line is the public. He
has helped make this possible by letting the public know the abuses that are
being carried out in its name. Civil disobedients are of two kinds: those
inspired by universal principles, and those inspired by national traditions.
Each has its strengths. Julian Assange
of WikiLeaks is the first kind; Snowden, the second. Asked why he had done what
he did, Snowden replied, “I am
neither traitor nor hero. I am an American.” He based his actions on the finest
traditions of this country, which its current leaders have abandoned but which,
he hopes, the current generation of Americans still share. In the weeks and
months ahead, we’ll find out whether he was right. Jonathan Schell
Read more: America's Surveillance Net | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net#ixzz2YBGEu6yK
Follow us: @thenation on Twitter | TheNationMagazine on Facebook
HELPING
SNOWDEN
The
"Edward Snowden Aviation Club" and Other Ways to Beat US Persecution
Friday, 05
July 2013 09:41 By Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian | Op-Ed (From David D)
(Photo: Mike Herbst / Flickr)Some countries have offered asylum but the NSA
whistleblower will need transport. How about concerned citizens raising money
for a private plane?
[Individuals sign petitions and raise money.
Country gives asylum and
other countries support it. –Dick]
With Edward Snowden stuck in
limbo in the Moscow airport transit space, many people in the United States
Actually
there is quite a bit that can be done by various people to help Snowden reach a
safe place where he can be free from persecution by the US
The
governments of Ecuador , Russia , and Venezuela US
The
problem is that these governments are reluctant to take the necessary steps to
get Snowden freedom because of possible US Washington
was angry with Hong Kong for about a day after
it rejected a request for extradition, and then it blew over. John Kerry's
warnings of "consequences" for Russia
and China US
And
there are things that other governments
could do to help this process along. First and easiest, the governments of
South America – perhaps through UNASUR or another regional body – can denounce Washington 's threats to cut off Ecuador UK 's threats to invade
Ecuador 's embassy in London
Second,
more governments can make statements
in support of what Snowden did, as politely as they prefer, and offer to
receive an application for political asylum – something that they are required
to do under international law in any case. The more governments that make such
statements, the more difficult it is for Washington
Third,
although Ecuador Washington
Then
there is the question of how he gets to a safe country. Here, any friendly
government could offer him a private plane – it is a minimal expense for a
government. Prominent citizens from the US
and other countries could offer to accompany Snowden, to reduce the chances of
risky behaviour by the US Cuba ,
if it carries Snowden, is re-routed so that it does not fly too close to the US
The
Russian government, if it is unwilling to offer Snowden a visa for its own
country, could provide transportation to the Ecuadorian or another government
embassy in Moscow, where Snowden could apply for asylum and then resolve the
travel document issue. From there, the Russians would be legally obligated to
offer Snowden safe passage to the country that had offered him asylum. (The
British government's confinement of Julian Assange in the
Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past year, after he has received asylum
from Ecuador
Finally,
there is the "second superpower", as global civil society was named
in 2003 when tens of millions of people hit the streets worldwide against the
planned US-led invasion of Iraq Moscow
Edward Snowden has performed a heroic
service to the people of the US and the world, by exposing widespread
government abuses that are a threat to freedom everywhere. It's up to everyone
who understands this to make sure he is not persecuted for doing so.
The Anti-Empire Report #118 by William Blum
www.killinghope.org (June 26 2013)
Official website of the author, historian, andUS
Edward Snowden
In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post (June 10) reported that "several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray national secrets".
Yes, there was a sign they missed - Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.
It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best - the most patriotic - of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what theUnited States was doing to the people of Vietnam
So what is a poorNational Security
State
Eavesdropping on the planet
The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2002). Here are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding Edward Snowden into perspective ...
Can people in the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all of history? If so, they merely have to wait for technology to catch up with their imagination.
Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex ... satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links ... voice, text, images ... captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by high-powered computers ... if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena ... if God has a phone, it's being monitored ... maybe your dog isn't being tapped. The oceans will not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping pods to deep underwater cables for decades.
Under a system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior partners inBritain , Australia ,
New Zealand , and Canada
Apart from specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every intercepted message - all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk, the birthday greetings - is searched for keywords, which could be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key words in the ECHELON "dictionary" - "He lives in a lovely old white house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes". Within limitations, computers can "listen" to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to be listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.
ECHELON is carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget - far from being greatly reduced - was increased, and the network has grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the Cold War was not a battle against something called "the international communist conspiracy".
The European Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion into the continent's affairs. The parliament's Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998 and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: "The European Parliament should reject proposals from theUnited
States Britain
Despite these concerns theUS
has continued to expand ECHELON surveillance in Europe ,
partly because of heightened interest in commercial espionage - to uncover
industrial information that would provide American corporations with an
advantage over foreign rivals.
German security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying inEurope . Victims
included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998,
Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to
generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. However,
when the company tried to market its invention in the United States US
In 1994, Thomson SA, located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based inBlagnac Cedex , France United States
German industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. "German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other's businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions", said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.
That same year,Germany
demanded that the United States
recall three CIA operatives for their activities in Germany US
radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich Washington
In their quest to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the FBI, and other components of theUS US
TheUnited States Washington 's
plans for controlling encryption software in Europe
had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with US industrial
espionage. The NSA has also dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to
snatch code books from foreign facilities in the United States
For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world's most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them - including primeUS
intelligence targets such as Iran ,
Iraq , Libya and Yugoslavia Washington
In 1986, because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing inWest Berlin , the Libyans began to suspect
that something was rotten with Crypto AG's machines and switched to another
Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of
suspicious circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion similar to Libya 's, and arrested a Crypto AG employee who
was in Iran
In September 1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys" into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym inNorth
Carolina US
In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration". The report stated that there had been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams". The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft's biggest client in the world.
Recent years have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion ofIraq in 2003, the United
States had listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq ,
and all the members of the UN Security Council during a period when they were
deliberating about what action to take in Iraq
It's as if the American national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world, stating that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone". And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: "Persons shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or alleged". {2}
The leading whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee
Before there was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake ... before there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack ... there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the most startling and important information aboutUS
Philip Agee spent twelve years (1957 to 1969) as a CIA case officer, most of it inLatin America .
His first book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 - a pioneering
work on the Agency's methods and their devastating consequences - appeared in
about thirty languages around the world and was a best seller in many
countries; it included a 23-page appendix with the names of hundreds of
undercover Agency operatives and organizations.
Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents ofMexico , Colombia ,
Uruguay , and Costa Rica
Agee's goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.
A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a "news" item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations inLatin America who would
disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station.
Some of these stories made their way back to the United States
Wooing the working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them.
In 1975 these revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first hint that American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school textbooks had told them nor what the New York Times had reported.
"As complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British 'case officer' operates ... All of it ... presented with deadly accuracy", wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There's no former CIA officer more hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee; no one's even close; due in part to his traveling toCuba
In contrast to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants from the nearly 400,000Iraq
In 1969, Agee resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who "long ago ceased to believe in what they are doing").
While on the run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company - at times literally running for his life - Agee was expelled from, or refused admittance toItaly , Britain , France ,
West Germany , the Netherlands , and Norway West Germany
Notes
{1} To read about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002)
{2} See Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, chapter 21, for the notes for the above.
Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.
Books by William Blum
America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Read more at http://williamblum.org/about/
To rescue an old man from the clutches of the capitalist imperialist meanies:http://williamblum.org/about/
Send comments, typos found, money, love notes, hate mail, death threats, letter bombs, and anthrax to bblum6@aol.com
www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer118.html
https://billtotten.wordpress.com/
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp
www.killinghope.org (June 26 2013)
Official website of the author, historian, and
Edward Snowden
In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post (June 10) reported that "several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray national secrets".
Yes, there was a sign they missed - Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.
It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best - the most patriotic - of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the
So what is a poor
Eavesdropping on the planet
The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2002). Here are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding Edward Snowden into perspective ...
Can people in the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all of history? If so, they merely have to wait for technology to catch up with their imagination.
Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex ... satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links ... voice, text, images ... captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by high-powered computers ... if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena ... if God has a phone, it's being monitored ... maybe your dog isn't being tapped. The oceans will not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping pods to deep underwater cables for decades.
Under a system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior partners in
Apart from specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every intercepted message - all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk, the birthday greetings - is searched for keywords, which could be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key words in the ECHELON "dictionary" - "He lives in a lovely old white house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes". Within limitations, computers can "listen" to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to be listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.
ECHELON is carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget - far from being greatly reduced - was increased, and the network has grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the Cold War was not a battle against something called "the international communist conspiracy".
The European Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion into the continent's affairs. The parliament's Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998 and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: "The European Parliament should reject proposals from the
Despite these concerns the
German security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying in
In 1994, Thomson SA, located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in
German industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. "German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other's businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions", said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.
That same year,
In their quest to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the FBI, and other components of the
The
For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world's most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them - including prime
In 1986, because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in
In September 1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys" into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in
In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration". The report stated that there had been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams". The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft's biggest client in the world.
Recent years have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion of
It's as if the American national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world, stating that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone". And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: "Persons shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or alleged". {2}
The leading whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee
Before there was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake ... before there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack ... there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the most startling and important information about
Philip Agee spent twelve years (1957 to 1969) as a CIA case officer, most of it in
Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents of
Agee's goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.
A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a "news" item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in
Wooing the working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them.
In 1975 these revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first hint that American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school textbooks had told them nor what the New York Times had reported.
"As complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British 'case officer' operates ... All of it ... presented with deadly accuracy", wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There's no former CIA officer more hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee; no one's even close; due in part to his traveling to
In contrast to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants from the nearly 400,000
In 1969, Agee resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who "long ago ceased to believe in what they are doing").
While on the run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company - at times literally running for his life - Agee was expelled from, or refused admittance to
Notes
{1} To read about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002)
{2} See Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, chapter 21, for the notes for the above.
Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.
Books by William Blum
America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Read more at http://williamblum.org/about/
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[End Blum]
 Dave Lindorff, Op-Ed,
NationofChange, June 24, 2013: Edward Snowden’s revelations
also exposed the
|
|
The public is divided over
whether the leak of classified information about NSA phone and internet
surveillance serves the public interest. But a majority says that former
government contractor Edward Snowden should be criminally prosecuted. Young
people are more likely than other age groups to think that the NSA leak
serves the public interest.
Reader Supported
News | 19 June 13
Glenn Greenwald | Documents Reveal Lack
of FISA Court Oversight
Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK Greenwald writes: "Top secret documents obtained by the Guardian illustrate what the Fisa court actually does - and does not do - when purporting to engage in 'oversight' over the NSA's domestic spying." READ MORE |
Reader Supported News | 09 June 13
BREAKER | Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind Revelations
of NSA Surveillance
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA."
READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/17852-breaker-edward-snowden-the-whistleblower-behind-revelations-of-nsa-surveillance
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA."
READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/17852-breaker-edward-snowden-the-whistleblower-behind-revelations-of-nsa-surveillance
John Pilger writes here: Germany
President Morales arrives back inLa
Paz , Bolivia
President Morales arrives back in
Forcing Down Evo Morales's Plane Was an Act of Air
Piracy By John Pilger, Guardian UK
05 July 2013 (from David D)
magine the aircraft of the president of
Imagine
the response from Paris Whitehall
to Washington , Brussels
to Madrid
The forcing down of Bolivian President
Evo Morales's plane - denied
airspace by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement
while Austrian officials demanded to "inspect" his aircraft for the
"fugitive" Edward Snowden - was an act of air piracy and
state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world
and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.
In Moscow US
The
French - having squealed about Washington
Those
paid to keep the record straight have played their part with a cat-and-mouse
media game that reinforces the Godfather's lie that this heroic young man is
running from a system of justice, rather than preordained, vindictive
incarceration that amounts to torture - ask Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantánamo.
Historians
seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe
might have been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the
true nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different, but the
Damocles sword over Snowden, like the casual abduction of Bolivia
Snowden's
revelations are not merely about privacy, or civil liberty, or even mass
spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the US
In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel prize in literature,
Harold Pinter referred
to "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He asked why
"the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities" of the Soviet
Union were well known in the west while America
This
hidden history - not really hidden, of course, but excluded from the
consciousness of societies drilled in American myths and priorities - has never
been more vulnerable to exposure. Snowden's
whistleblowing, like that of Manning and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,
threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing a vast Orwellian
police state apparatus servicing history's greatest war-making machine, they
illuminate the true extremism of the 21st century. Unprecedented , Germany
END SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #1
JULY 9, 2013
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