“Edward Snowden Blows It Big Time”: Crossing A Major Line To Further His Own Self-Aggrandizement
While it was inevitable that there would be those who support and those who condemn the initial disclosures of Edward Snowden—the 29 year-old former NSA contractor who disclosed the agency’s telephone and electronic communications surveillance programs—the tide of public opinion may be rapidly turning against Snowden…and with very good reason.
Spilling the beans to his fellow Americans over the depth of surveillance being carried out by the National Security Agency within the borders of the United States is one thing—disclosing the nation’s covert activities involving spying on other nations is something else entirely.
Last week, Snowden turned over documents to the South China Morning Post revealing that the United States has been hacking into Chinese computers—a revelation that came at a particularly embarrassing moment for the U.S. President who was busy castigating his Chinese counterpart for China’s constant intrusions into our own computer banks for various purposes, including the theft of American intellectual property. If that wasn’t enough, the Guardian newspaper followed up with a report provided by Snowden revealing that the Americans and British spied on various delegates attending the G20 conference in 2009, choosing to disclose this bit of information right before the start of this year’s G8 conference held in the U.K.
Anyone think much got accomplished at the G8 after that little gem was brought into the light?
Even more disturbing is what appears to have motivated Snowden to expand his leaking beyond the borders of the United States and into the world of foreign espionage.
Despite making a pretty good living for quite a few years through his employment as a small cog in the gears of government surveillance activities, Snowden declared, during a live chat with the Guardian on Monday, that he believes that “all spying is wrong.” And because it is Snowden’s personal judgment that all spying is wrong, he also believes it appropriate that he reveal our covert activities to affected foreign governments without a shed of concern for what the rest of his fellow Americans might think about this.
I don’t recall there being an election where I voted to assign my proxy to Edward Snowden so that this 29 year-old guy—who I never heard of before two weeks ago—could determine, on my behalf, what this country should or should not be doing when it comes to its covert, overseas spying program.
So, how is it that Mr. Snowden has decided that it is appropriate to appoint himself the arbiter of judgment and morality when it comes to such issues? How is it that Snowden has determined that he is providing me with some patriotic service when I neither asked him to do so nor agree that disclosing information on foreign spying is, in any way, a service to his nation or to me personally?
With his decision to move beyond informing his countrymen of surveillance activities that allow the government to track our telephone calls and emails, Edward Snowden not only crossed a major line but gave us all reason to feel considerable concern about his motives and purposes.
In discussing the rationale for his disclosures on foreign spying, Snowden said:
“When NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries — the majority of them are our allies — but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the ‘consent of the governed’ is meaningless.”
There appears to be no shortage of logic fails in Snowden’s remarks.
If the public knows the details of what our government is doing when it comes to spying on foreign governments—as Snowden suggests is necessary—then it wouldn’t be covert spying activity, now would it? Spying is not particularly effective when everyone knows the target and nature of such a program.
And while Ed Snowden may have decided that all spying is wrong, I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of Americans would very much disagree with his assessment and might appreciate his not complicating our lives in furtherance of his own self-aggrandizement and the soothing of whatever crisis of conscience he may be experiencing.
What should further concern us all is not just that Edward Snowden has decided that we must now live with his judgments and moral determinations when it comes to how we conduct foreign policy, but that those judgments are based on a shocking degree of naiveté as Snowden doesn’t seem capable of grasping that in the world in which we live, our allies are not always our friends.
Snowden also appears to have missed civics class on the day when it was explained that the United States is a Republic where we elect people to make decisions on these matters and then judge the effectiveness of those decisions by deciding who we will keep in office and who we will turn away.
The bottom line here is that I really don’t care if Ed Snowden thinks all spying is wrong and neither do most Americans. This being the case, I have considerable difficulty with his decision to disclose the nation’s secrets to foreign governments just because he could.
I do care what the President thinks about our foreign spying operations just as I care about what Congress and the Judiciary think. It is their opinions and practices that I can either support or reject when I show up to vote. And while I may appreciate Mr. Snowden’s decision to inform his countrymen of surveillance programs involving spying on Americans, there is no claim nor evidence that spying on foreign entities crosses any legal lines and, therefore, it is incredibly wrong for Snowden to reveal data involving our spying programs outside the country .
Until I cast a vote for Edward Snowden to make such determinations for me, I would very much appreciate it if he would shut up and get over whatever psychological complexes are driving him to make these decisions on my behalf. He is doing neither me nor the country any favors.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, June 20, 2013
“Little Evidence”: On Civil Liberties, Comparing Obama With Bush Is Easy, And Mostly Wrong
Nearly a dozen years after the passage of the PATRIOT Act — rushed through Congress in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation — informed debate over the balance between liberty and security is long overdue. That includes a public examination of how widely and deeply the National Security Agency (and other elements of the “intelligence community”) may monitor Americans’ telecommunications without violating the Bill of Rights.
But that needed discussion isn’t enhanced by hysteria or the partisan opportunism it encourages. As others have noted already, the supposed revelation that the NSA is collecting metadata on telephone use in this country isn’t exactly startling news. The fugitive ex-CIA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents concerning that program to the London Guardian and the Washington Post, may yet unveil more startling revelations from his peculiar refuge in China. But anyone paying attention has known about this program since 2006, when USA Today first disclosed its existence.
The most important difference today is that Americans are no longer too frightened by the constant “terror alerts” of the Bush administration to consider the boundaries of surveillance and security. Rather than hyping the terrorist threat, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, President Obama has repeatedly framed a calmer — if equally resolute — attitude toward Islamist extremism.
So while facile comparisons between the Obama and Bush administrations now appear every day in the media, they are quite misleading. Uttered by Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox News, such arguments are hypocritical as well.
Consider the single most important surveillance controversy of the Bush era, namely the warrantless wiretapping undertaken on the president’s orders. In December 2005, the New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to monitor phone calls and emails originating in U.S. territory, without obtaining warrants as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. (That’s why it was called “warrantless.”) For the first time since Watergate – and the intelligence reforms resulting from that true scandal — the U.S. government had eavesdropped on Americans’ conversations without seeking the permission of a judge.
Only months before, Bush had claimed publicly that he was a steward of civil liberties and that his agents always got a court order before implementing a wiretap. But his administration had been using warrantless wiretaps ever since the 9/11 attacks.
Those trespasses against liberty went considerably further than the collection of metadata by the NSA. No reports indicate that the Obama administration violated existing law to eavesdrop on any American — or listened to any calls without the sanction of the special FISA court.
Yet reaction to the recent stories about the NSA’s policies has been far more intense than eight years ago. Pundits and politicians have compared Obama unfavorably with Richard Nixon, berating him as a tyrannical betrayer of civil liberties. A few prominent Republicans even seem determined to ruin the NSA, solely because they wish to embarrass the president – a motive that other Republicans attribute to Snowden, whom they vilify as a traitor.
Not a peep was heard from Republicans on Capitol Hill when Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney, and their lawyers were practicing and promoting the theory of the “unitary executive,” under which any act ordered by the president in wartime, including warrantless wiretapping, is deemed inherently legal and exempt from judicial review. What exercised the Republicans in those days was the temerity of the Times in revealing what Bush had done.
As for Obama, the complicated truth is a mixed record on civil liberties. He tried and failed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and he supported the renewal of the PATRIOT Act without changes. But he also substantially reformed the use of military commissions and abolished the use of torture, renditions, and secret prisons. In ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has rejected the “permanent war” ideology, which the Bush regime deployed as a political weapon against dissent.
So far there is little evidence that Obama shares the dangerous theories of Bush and Cheney – but no president should enjoy the kind of exemption from congressional scrutiny that his predecessors exploited. Whatever Snowden’s intentions may be, he has inspired members of Congress to provide stricter oversight of the government’s gargantuan data-gathering efforts, which are inherently prone to overreach even under the most responsible supervision. At the very least, Congress and the public need to know how the government wields its powers under the PATRIOT Act – an interpretation that remains classified and thus precludes democratic oversight.
The president’s response to that question will test his commitment to the Constitution he swore to uphold.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 14, 2013
“This Is Not The18th Century”: Fourth Amendment Purists Are Living In A Dream World
Spy work holds deep allure for many people. My own career as a secret agent began as an outgrowth of training beagle hunting dogs. See, I needed new antennas for the little radio transmitters in the animal’s collars—which combined with a directional antenna and multi-channel receiver helped me bring the little rascals home alive at day’s end.
You wouldn’t believe some of the scrapes those dogs could get into. One time, we found three beagles inside a beaver dam fighting a cornered raccoon. Had we not intervened, he’d probably have drowned them.
So anyway, I called customer service at Wildlife Materials, Inc. to order the antennas. Ever the subversive, I made a joke about buckling a tracking collar to the bumper of my wife’s car.
Long, painful silence.
“Um, air, we’re not supposed to talk about that.”
Oh well.
Of course these days, that technology’s way out of date for marital espionage. You can’t make a beagle carry a cellphone, but most wives cling to theirs 24/7. With the right software and a wi-fi connection, you can track her whereabouts in real time from your friendly neighborhood tavern, and even message her at the No-Tell Motel to say you’re stuck at the office.
Unless she’s also tracking you, in which case all bets are off.
Of course, my own wife’s phone is lost half the time. I sometimes wish the National Security Agency weren’t too busy monitoring guys calling 1-900-HotVirgins over in Yemen to help her find it.
But let’s get halfway serious about this NSA business. First, where has everybody been since 2006, when USA Today first revealed the existence of large scale NSA telephone data mining? That was objectionable in two big ways: the Bush White House acted unilaterally, without the court supervision required by law, and it was also indulging in warrantless wiretaps.
Congress fixed that in 2008, permitting statistical analysis of telephone traffic, but requiring both ongoing FISA Court oversight and search warrants for actual eavesdropping. After his customary tap-dancing, Sen. Barack Obama supported the bill. Hearing no announcement that the Obama White House had canceled the program, a person would have to be awfully naïve to imagine NSA had gone out of business.
The court order produced with a great flourish by Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian mainly confirmed that the system appears to be working as designed. So why the hyperventilating? The way some people are carrying on, you’d think the KGB or East German Stasi had set up shop in the White House—which definitely isn’t how people would act if they really feared tyranny.
Greenwald himself rather specializes in hyperventilation. It’s a rare terrorist attack that isn’t immediately followed by a Greenwald essay pointing out that Norwegian civilians or off-duty British soldiers are no less legitimate targets than Pakistani children — true enough in an abstract moral sense, but of vanishing political usefulness.
However, when a reporter begins a profile by praising his own work as “one of the most significant leaks in US political history,” a skeptic is apt to wince. Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t have taken Edward Snowden (or any single source) at face value. There are plenty of clues even in The Guardian hagiography that not everything may be exactly as it seems. Running to China seeking freedom?
China?
Then there’s this: Any NSA analyst “at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere,” Snowden said. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.”
Now me, I don’t think NSA computer tech can wiretap a Federal judge any more than I think a bank teller can transfer the judge’s bank account to her boyfriend without getting caught. Sure enough, Robert Dietz, a former CIA and NSA lawyer, told the Los Angeles Times the claim was “complete and utter” falsehood.
“First of all, it’s illegal,” he said. “There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired.”
Which is basically where we came in. Fourth Amendment purists are living in a dream world. Neither cellphones nor lunatics using airliners as weapons existed in Ben Franklin’s day. If you want privacy as defined in the 18th century, it’s easy: no phones, no Internet (and certainly no Facebook or Twitter) no credit cards or bank accounts, no EZ-Pass, no nothing.
But if you want government to have any chance to defeat mass-casualty terror attacks, surrendering raw phone data isn’t much of a concession. Besides, there are far more efficient ways of targeting enemies of the state than trying to make something of who they’ve talked to on the phone.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 12, 2013
“Access Granted Vs Access Gained?”: Did Edward Snowden Overstate Claims On National Security Agency Leaks?
Security experts questioned Monday how, three years after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded a trove of secret material, low-level computer specialist Edward Snowden was able to copy documents that are far more sensitive and walk them out of his National Security Agency workplace in Hawaii.
After Manning released hundreds of thousands of classified documents — for which he is now being court-martialed — government officials vowed to curtail the broad access to intelligence that came into being after the Sept. 11 attacks. But Snowden appeared to have access to far more sensitive secrets, including the first order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to be leaked in its 35-year history.
“I do think it raises questions about how good our controls are on our system,” said Stewart Baker, a former general counsel for the NSA. “Because anything that he was able to move to a thumb drive to exfiltrate could also be exfiltrated by Russian or Chinese hackers.”
Snowden is almost certainly facing serious charges related to espionage and the conveyance of national defense information, said a former senior FBI official who would not be quoted by name because of the sensitive subject matter.
The FBI is interviewing Snowden’s family members, as it would in any similar investigation, to “gain insight into his motivation and mind-set, to include communications, emails, phone calls, writings,” and also to determine whether he was communicating with a foreign power or had been recruited by an intelligence service, the former FBI official said. He said Snowden’s choice of Hong Kong as a refuge raises questions about possible cooperation with China.
After acquiring a government security clearance when he worked for the CIA, Snowden moved into a contractor job with his clearance still active. Most recently, before decamping for Hong Kong, he was working for government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii.
“The question that a lot of people are asking is why did the CIA grant him a clearance,” said a former senior government official who demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case.
Snowden described himself to the Guardian newspaper in London, which first published details of a massive telephone-data collection program, as a computer systems administrator who performed technical rather than operational functions. His job, however, gave him access to a wide swath of secrets.
Baker pointed out that computer network maintenance jobs “are self-taught jobs in some respects, and the guy is clearly an impressive autodidact.”
But analysts said that Snowden seems to have greatly exaggerated the amount of information available to him and people like him.
Any NSA analyst “at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere,” Snowden told the Guardian. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.”
Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the NSA and CIA, called the claim a “complete and utter” falsehood.
“First of all it’s illegal,” he said. “There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired,” he said.
NSA analysts who have the authority to query databases of metadata such as phone records — or Internet content, such as emails, videos or chat logs — are subject to stringent internal supervision and also the external oversight of the foreign surveillance court, former NSA officials said.
“It’s actually very difficult to do your job,” said a former senior NSA operator, who also declined be quoted by name because of the sensitive nature of the case. “There are all these checks that don’t allow you to move agilely enough.”
For example, the former operator said, he had go through an arduous process to obtain FISA court permission to gather Internet data on a foreign nuclear weapons proliferator living abroad because some of the data was passing through U.S. wires.
“When he’s saying he could just put any phone number in and look at phone calls, it just doesn’t work that way,” he said. ” It’s absurd. There are technical limits, and then there are people who review these sorts of queries.”
He added, “Let’s say I have your email address. In order to get that approved, you would have to go through a number of wickets. Some technical, some human. An individual analyst can’t just say, ‘Oh, I found this email address or phone number.’ It’s not simple to do it on any level, even for purely foreign purposes.”
The former senior government official said that as a computer expert, Snowden could have gained access on the NSA computer network to some of the documents he purportedly leaked. But other documents he claims that he provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, such as the FISA order, are in theory supposed to be kept more tightly held, he said.
One of the issues investigators will be examining is “what access was he granted and what access did he gain” himself in order to obtain the documents, the former official said.
By: Ken Dilanian and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, Washington Bureau, June 10, 2013
“Edward Snowden’s Grandiosity”: A Classic Rorschach Test, How You See It Depends On What You Bring To The Seeing.
Edward Snowden was appalled.
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the then-anonymous Snowden told reporters as his leaks first emerged.
Well, so can Google. And Facebook. And most companies’ internal networks. Creepy? You bet. Calamitous? Not so clear.
Snowden hoped to go to Iraq at 19 when he joined the Army because he “felt like he had an obligation as a human being to help free other people from oppression.”
Commendable, if a bit grandiose. But Snowden’s superiors couldn’t measure up to his ideals. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,” he said in his coming-out interviews.
That doesn’t describe officers I know who spent years risking their lives trying to help Iraqis forge a better destiny.
Then even a president failed him. It was no single thing President Obama did, you understand. “It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” Snowden said.
It’s staggering to contemplate. In the old days, when the scales fell away from the eyes of one callow Rand Paul donor, the result might have been a few beers at the dorm as everyone lamented how compromised adult life really is. Today, a disappointed young libertarian contractor with a security clearance can blow the lid on lawful intelligence methods thousands of Americans spent billions of dollars developing.
The Snowden case is a classic Rorschach test. How you see it depends on what you bring to the seeing. Do you empathize more with those who govern — and who, in this case, are charged with protecting us? Or has the history of abuse of power, and the special danger from such abuses in an age in which privacy seems to be vanishing, leave you hailing any exposure of secret government methods as grounds for sainthood?
There are people I respect who say Snowden is a hero. I think they’re dead wrong.
Thinking about “big data” is a little like imagining how things look to God (assuming God exists). God may love you personally, but she’s a little too busy to worry about whether you get that raise you deserve. The National Security Agency (NSA) may have access to every bit and byte in the land, but the unfathomable river of information their algorithms must mine means no one’s focusing on the text you sent to that guy in accounting.
(To test Big Brother’s reach, my daughter and I e-mailed on how to work with a Chechnyan rebel group to develop weapons for an attack on U.S. soil, as part of a “play” we’re writing based on recent events. No knock at the door. Yet.)
Is there potential for abuse? Of course. An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.
The conversation would be entirely different today if we’d had a series of attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page (with which I don’t usually nod in agreement) wrote, if the nation suffered another 9/11 or an attack with weapons of mass destruction, “the political responses could include biometric national ID cards, curfews, surveillance drones over the homeland, and even mass roundups of ethnic or religious groups.” Practices like data mining, the Journal added, “protect us against far greater intrusions on individual freedom.”
But because vigilance and luck have left us safe thus far from more massive attacks, Snowden felt entitled to indulge the call of his precious conscience. Has any leaker ever been armed with more perfectly crafted sound bites as “the architecture of oppression” and “turnkey tyranny”?
I’ve been spied on continuously by private-sector firms as I’ve written this column. As I typed “Snowden” on Gmail, I got ads for new mortgage rates. My search for “secrets” drew ads for Secret deodorant. My behavior has been fed into algorithms and sold to advertisers. At least the NSA isn’t getting rich tracking my every move.
Daniel Ellsberg says Snowden is a “hero.” Let me suggest a different prism through which to view that term. Somewhere in the intelligence community is another 29-year-old computer whiz whose name we’ll never know. That person joined the government after 9/11 because she felt inspired to serve the nation in its hour of need. For years she’s sweated to perfect programs that can sort through epic reams of data to identify potential threats. Some Americans are alive today because of her work.
As one security analyst put it this week, to find a needle in a haystack, you need the haystack. If we’re going to romanticize a young nerd in the intelligence world, my Unknown Coder trumps the celebrity waiting in Hong Kong for Diane Sawyer’s call any day.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 11, 2013
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