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This seems like a BFD. I've included some things below about a set of public hearings being planned by the European parliament too, in which they may call on other NSA whistleblowers who were essentially ignored by our Congress and were persecuted or prosecuted when they used the chain of command for their whistleblowing. The current plan is for 12 public hearings, possibly starting in September. But for now, Germany's backpedalling on the merits of the surveillance machine thwarting attacks will erode Keith Alexander's claims about how Big Brother is keeping us safe.
Germany backs away from claims NSA program thwarted five attacks
BERLIN — German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is backing off his earlier assertion that the Obama administration’s NSA monitoring of Internet accounts had prevented five terror attacks in Germany, raising questions about other claims concerning the value of the massive monitoring programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs – which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts – had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week. But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, “It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn’t occur.” And on Wednesday, he was publically referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA’s surveillance programs.
The questions about the programs’ value in thwarting attacks in Germany come as some members of the U.S. Congress have told Obama officials that the programs exceeded what Congress authorized when it passed laws that the administration is arguing allowed the collection of vast amounts of information on cellphone and Internet email accounts.
Judge Lind did not dismiss the "aiding the enemy" charges yesterday. So basically, any whistleblower in the future could be accused of aiding the enemy, because any materials leaked are going to end up on the internet. It's an absurd claim. What about whistleblower information that ends up on CNN? Is that not the same thing? Terrorists watch TV too along with reading the internet. It's just bizarre, and aiding the enemy carries a possible death penalty.
How Today's Ruling in the Bradley Manning Case Could Adversely Affect Journalists and Whistleblowers
UPDATE: The judge ruled today she would not dismiss the 'aiding the enemy' charge. Manning can still be found not guilty.
Today, the military judge overseeing the court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has admitted to giving government documents to WikiLeaks, is expected to rule on the prosecution’s charge of “Aiding the Enemy.” The charge, which is akin to treason and is punishable by death, is separate from the charges that Manning has already pled guilty to — that he leaked sensitive documents to people unauthorized to receive them. The government’s inclusion of this charge raises enormous problems, and a conviction of Manning in these circumstances would be unconstitutional.
The key to the government’s case is this simple claim: that posting intelligence information to the internet aids Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda has access to the internet.*
The implications of the government’s argument are breathtaking. To understand why, it helps to recall the experience of another soldier. In December of 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a town-hall style meeting for troops who were preparing to deploy to Iraq. Following his remarks, Rumsfeld was confronted by an Army specialist who complained about the inadequacy of the combat equipment provided by the military.
European Parliament Wants Snowden, NSA Chief to Testify on Spying
The European Parliament is gearing up to launch an investigation into the recently revealed NSA surveillance programs—and lawmakers are drawing up an interesting list of witnesses who they want to invite to interview about the snooping.
In September, the parliament is set to begin a series of hearings as part of the inquiry, which was established following the exposure of sweeping spy efforts that extend across the world. Now, members of the parliament are putting forward names for individuals they want to call in to answer questions. Among those suggested so far are a series of high-profile figures at the center of the surveillance revelations, including Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who leaked the secret documents on the spying; NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander; and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was passed the documents by Snowden and has published several scoops based on them in recent weeks.
In the United States, the reaction to the surveillance leaks has primarily focused on the vast domestic phone records database, first revealed by the Guardian last month. But in Europe, the outrage has been over the PRISM Internet surveillance program, which reportedly enables the NSA to collect data on foreigners from major U.S. companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Politicians across Europe have also responded furiously to allegations that the U.S. government has been bugging European embassies and missions in apparent violation of a 1961 convention on diplomatic relations. And there has been a particularly strong outcry in Germany over reports that the NSA is collecting metadata on half a billion phone calls and emails across the country every month.
This was published in the WaPo, so usually I apply a grain of salt, but Jameel Jaffer sent out a tweet about it, and says "Lots of hard work by @KevinBankston and @CenDemTech to organize this excellent letter" so that lends it a lot more credibility. I'll excerpt the intro but this should be read in full. This is an extraordinary situation we have. It signals real change, a rarity these days. However the executive branch and its secrecy has, imho, unprecedented power. A lot of credible people think that no real change on this is possible, that things have just gone that far, or that the the corporate state will just take it underground and continue the surveillance and lie about it. Or that Congress will cave in when it comes time to legislate. I don't recall seeing this kind of movement forming, one which includes such a range of political ideologies and includes so many mainstream organizations, perhaps in my lifetime. Maybe it rivals Watergate or Iran Contra, or the later opposition to the war in Iraq, but this is a rarity. Some of them are no doubt just covering their asses and were complicit until the Snowden files. But still.
Tech firms, civil liberties groups to demand more sunlight on NSA surveillance data
A coalition of technology companies and civil liberties groups on Thursday will call on President Obama and congressional leaders to dramatically expand the amount of information reported publicly about U.S. government surveillance efforts.
The request, to be made in a letter with more than 50 signatories, is the most sweeping and cohesive push to bring more accountability to electronic government eavesdropping in the aftermath of revelations about the National Security Agency’s collection of user data.
The letter will call on the government to remove restrictions that keep companies from reporting the number of surveillance requests they receive from U.S. officials citing national security grounds. Several companies already produce regular “transparency reports” listing information when the requests relate to criminal investigations.
The expected signatories, including Microsoft, Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also will call on the government to issue its own regular reports offering an overall account of the information it is gathering from telecommunication and technology companies, which have been stung by portrayals of their cooperation with NSA data requests.
ACLU & CCR Lawsuit: American Boy Killed By U.S. Drone Strike
Boston Magazine released some photos of the final moments before Tsarnev was detained. There is some blood, but not too graphic. The pictures were released by a tactical photographer with the Mass. State Police, who is furious with Rolling Stone for putting a photo of Tsarnev on their cover.
The Real Face of Terror: Behind the Scenes Photos of the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Manhunt
In response to the controversial Rolling Stone cover, new photos of Tsarnaev’s capture emerge.
We all remember the day of the manhunt, when Governor Patrick and law enforcement officials decided, in essence, to shut Boston down. Throughout it all, Murphy, alone in his assignment behind police lines, was capturing images of the day’s events—the high-level conferences, the mobilization of law enforcement, and the dramatic capture. Because the whole thing was televised live, everyone knows that the day ended with a wounded Tsarnaev being taken into custody. What few people have seen, because Murphy’s photos from that day have never been made public before, is the condition Tsarnaev was in at the time of his capture—and, indeed, exactly how he was captured. Murphy wants the world to know that the Tsarnaev in the photos he took that night—defeated and barely alive, with the red dots of sniper rifles lighting up his forehead—is the real face of terrorism, not the handsome, confident young man shown on the magazine cover. Following are a number of his photos from that day. A more complete collection will appear in our September issue.
I don't want to get into a big discussion about the cover of the Rolling Stone. I think the outrage is a bit ridiculous. But I did notice a comment on this Boston magazine story that I thought was worth sharing. In as much as I have any opinion on it, this guy probably speaks for me
Boston Magazine comment by Aaron K Kraus
Aaron K Kraus •
If your objection is that the cover photo glamorizes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and presents him as an enticing role model to young readers because of his looks then you’re rightly concerned about something that has nothing to do with Rolling Stone.
If your objection is that the cover photo humanizes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and presents him as a multi-demensional -- even sympathetic -- figure, well you have just confronted one of humanity’s starkest truths: that we are all humans, endowed with a tremendous capacity for both evil and empathy. Again, your concern has nothing to do with Rolling Stone.
If your objection is that the cover photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev disrespects the victims of his alleged crimes because it focuses on the criminal rather than the crimes then you’re arguing for such a narrow view of journalism and journalistic priorities that the end product would probably do little to educate, enlighten, and engage readers.
If your objection is that Rolling Stone’s intention is to drive sales with sensational cover photos, well, yeah.
Then again, see the photos above, linked online, to drive traffic.
DSWright is not buying it.
Treasury Secretary Lew Says Too Big To Fail Should Be Over By Year’s End
The threat posed by too-big-to-fail banks should be eradicated by year’s end, and if not, more restrictive measures targeting large financial groups may be necessary, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Wednesday…
“It’s unacceptable to be in a place where too-big-to-fail has not been ended,” Lew said. “If we get to the end of this year and we cannot, with an honest, straight face, say that we have ended too-big-to-fail, we are going to have to look at other options.”
[...]
Aye there’s the rub. No one in the markets believes the government. They believe, with considerable evidence, that in the final analysis the government will intervene to save the TBTF banks. One of the results of this perception is that the Too Big To Fail banks get more favorable treatment in the market than other banks.
And, of course, if the banks believe they are Too Big To Fail they have every incentive in the world to be reckless. Like the kind of recklessness that created the 2008 financial crisis.
An Open Letter to the Media – #Snowden and Latin America
Yves here. This letter from Chicago Public Media (hat tip martha r), signed by a number of prominent scholars and Latin American professionals, sets out to correct the record of the American media’s depiction of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in their discussion of Edward Snowden’s situation. I hope our readers south of the border will be able to add to this discussion.
An Open Letter to the Media:
The supposed “irony” of whistle-blower Edward Snowden seeking asylum in countries such as Ecuadorand Venezuela has become a media meme. Numerous articles, op-eds, reports and editorials in outletssuch as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and MSNBC havehammered on this idea since the news first broke that Snowden was seeking asylum in Ecuador. It was apredictable retread of the same meme last year when Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorianembassy in London and the Ecuadorian government deliberated his asylum request for months.
Of course, any such “ironies” would be irrelevant even if they were based on factual considerations. The media has never noted the “irony” of the many thousands of people who have taken refuge in the United States, which is currently torturing people in a secret prison at Guantanamo, and regularly killscivilians in drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries. Nor has the press noted
the “irony” of refugees who have fled here from terror that was actively funded and sponsored by the U.S. government, e.g. from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and other countries.
But in fact the “irony” that U.S. journalists mention is fantastically exaggerated. It is based on the notionthat the governments of Venezuela under Chávez (and now Maduro) and Ecuador under Correa have clamped down on freedom of the press. Most consumers of the U.S. media unfortunately don’t know better, since they have not been to these countries and have not been able to see that the majority of media are overwhelmingly anti-government, and that it gets away with more than the U.S. media doeshere in criticizing the government. Imagine if Rupert Murdoch controlled most U.S media outlets, ratherthan the minority share that his News Corp actually owns – then you’d start to have some idea what the media landscape in Ecuador, Venezuela and most of Latin America looks like.
[...]
Good to see James Risen writing about the surveillance state. DoJ is still trying to get to him, retaliate, and to get him to reveal his sources. You have to wonder how he feels about this whole Snowden thing. Risen would have been the logical journalist for Snowden to go to. But he didn't, most likely because of Risen's employer, the NY Times, who sat on the surveillance story for a year at the Bush admin's request, and sat on it until after Bush's reelection.
The last three paragraphs of this article are interesting. The tech companies are not so much concerned about civil liberties. Surprise, they are concerned about money/profit and their reputation. And they should be concerned about that. They really, really blew it by not fighting harder against the surveillance state. Huge American tech companies who had the advantage over everyone else for all these years have just opened the door to a whole new wave of competitors who most likely would not have been able to touch them before this. It will take time, a lot of time, but they and the Bush and Obama administrations may have dealt a very bad blow to one of the last industries that America dominates. Bravo, assholes. Also, Franken is introducing legislation for more disclosure, but he looks pretty damned bad too and did a lot of damage to his reputation as well.
Bipartisan Backlash Grows Against Domestic Surveillance
While prominent Internet companies are pushing for fuller disclosure, some of the nation’s largest telecommunications firms were not willing to sign on, according to several people involved in the coalition. Some of those businesses have previously received legal immunity from Congress for their involvement with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, and have close and longstanding ties to the N.S.A.
But the Silicon Valley Internet firms that did sign did so because they are increasingly concerned that the N.S.A. controversy that erupted in the wake of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures could damage their credibility, particularly with customers overseas.
“The commercial issue is whether people around the world are going to trust American Internet companies with their data,” said Andrew McLaughlin, the chief executive of Digg, a social news Web site, and a former White House Internet policy adviser in the Obama administration. “If you are in the government in Germany, you might think twice about using an American company as your cloud partner. You might see American companies not winning those kinds of contracts.”
Well how about that? Just after I wrote the paragraphs above and mentioned that DoJ is still after James Risen, I saw this post by emptywheel.
DOJ’s News Media Policies Reserved the Authority to Force James Risen to Testify
They argue his testimony is “essential to a successful prosecution,” precisely one of the reservations DOJ included in their policies.
I’m not saying this is what the policy should be or that Risen’s testimony really is essential. I am saying DOJ seems to have included language that, according to them, at least, excludes Risen from protection.
I also am saying that journalists who celebrated these policies for their improvements in some areas have overestimated the degree to which DOJ really wants to change its approach to journalists involved in leak investigations.
A must watch.
Glenn Greenwald: Growing Backlash Against NSA Spying Shows Why U.S. Wants to Silence Edward Snowden
http://www.democracynow.org - As Congress holds its second major public hearing on the National Security Agency's bulk spying, we speak with Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations. The NSA admitted their analysis of phone records and online behavior far exceeded what it had previously disclosed. "The fact that you now see members of both political parties increasingly angry over the fact that they were misled and lied to by top level Obama administration officials, that the laws that they enacted in the wake of 9/11 -- as broad as they were -- are being incredibly distorted by secret legal interpretations approved by secret courts, really indicates exactly that Snowden's motives to come forward with these revelations, at the expense of his liberty and even his life, were valid and compelling," Greenwald says. "If you think about whistleblowing in terms of people who expose things the government is hiding that they shouldn't be, in order to bring about reform, I think what you're seeing is the fruits of classic whistleblowing."
Glenn Greenwald Responds to Carl Bernstein over Edward Snowden Controversy
Watch the full interview with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now! at http://owl.li/.... Greenwald, who has published a series of articles revealing the extent of sweeping National Security Agency surveillance, responds to criticism from veteran reporter Carl Bernstein about his purported statements on Edward Snowden's ability to harm the U.S. government. Bernstein said Greenwald was "out of line" for reportedly saying that Snowden had the capacity "to cause more damage to the U.S. government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States." Greenwald says he was misquoted while trying to make the opposite point: that if damaging the U.S. was Snowden's goal, he could have done so already.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I think the way that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein went from being aggressive adversarial reporters against the government to insider Washington defenders of the government is a nice illustration for what happened to the U.S. media. My criticism of him was that he relied on a Reuters summary of what I said, rather than taking the time to go read the actual interview. The Reuters summary was a complete distortion of what I said. I made the exact opposite point, that the criticism of Mr. Snowden for being reckless or harming the U.S. is based in complete fantasy, given that what he has could be damaging if he released it, if that were his goal, and yet he has safeguarded that very responsibly to make sure that only what the public should know is learned and that nothing harmful has been released. But it was a 36-hour media frenzy attacking him, attacking me, based on a complete distortion by Reuters. And Carl Bernstein and others were just too lazy to look into what was actually said.
Pat Lang says: "This is exquisite in its ironic grandeur. pl" about this article by Pepe Escobar.
Meet a moderate Syrian insurgent
Hi, my name is Mostafa and I'll be your moderate insurgent today. I'm addressing you all because we badly need your help. We could have started a Facebook page, like We Need Your Weapons or something, or ask the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights to make a YouTube video, but I prefer to speak straight to your heart.
Our Supreme Commander, the blessed General Salim Idriss, has acknowledged we are now receiving many new weapons from many friendly Arab countries, which helped us "destroy more than 90 armored vehicles" of the Syrian regime. And Amrika helped us to get the guns, of course. But we need more.
Your President Mr Obama told the Blessed King of Saudi Arabia last Friday that he is committed to providing more support for us. Your Secretary of State Mr Kerry said on Saturday there must be more support for us "in order to have an impact on the ground". Your CIA said they will make sure only moderate insurgents get the weapons, and not the bad guys.
But your Congress is blocking our weapons. Oh people from Congress!
This is a really interesting case.
Ex-CIA station chief in Milan detained in Panama
A former station chief with the CIA has been detained in Panama after being on the run from Italian police for more than a decade.
Robert Seldon Lady, 59, was reportedly brought into custody early Thursday after surfacing in the Central American country. An Italian court convicted him in 2009 in absentia of abducting an Egyptian terror suspect from the streets of Milan, and he was sentenced in early 2013 to nine years in prison. Only now, however, has he been caught, according to a statement made Thursday by the Italian justice ministry.
[...]
"I'm not guilty. I'm only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors," Lady told Italy’s Il Giornale newspaper in 2009.
So this is going to be all over the US news media now, right? Special breaking news graphics and theme music, etc. Right?
‘America has no functioning democracy’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA
Former US President Jimmy Carter lambasted US intelligence methods as undemocratic and described Edward Snowden’s NSA leak as “beneficial” for the country.
[...]
"America has no functioning democracy at this moment," Carter said, according to Der Spiegel.
Snowden sparks NSA overhaul: Sensitive data to be treated like nuclear weapons
The US is overhauling intelligence access, introducing new measures meant to prevent another mega-leak similar to the one carried out by Edward Snowden from happening again, according to Pentagon’s top officials.
A “two-man rule” is being introduced at the NSA as means of tightening access to top-secret data, according to the agency’s chief Keith Alexander, who was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Thursday.
"We'll close and lock server rooms so that it takes two people to get in there," Alexander said.
The practice is taken from the way nuclear weapons are handled, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter explained, adding it is a wise thing to do to protect the system from “some aberrant individual”.
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