Appeals court can't guarantee Snowden safe travel to Norway

Source: AP

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — A Norwegian appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit seeking a legal guarantee to allow Edward Snowden to travel to Norway without risk of being extradited to the United States.

The Borgating court upheld Wednesday a ruling by a lower district court saying it cannot issue such a guarantee for someone who isn't present in Norway.

An Oslo law firm filed the lawsuit in April on behalf of the former National Security Agency contractor and the Norwegian chapter of PEN that had invited Snowden to receive its Ossietzky Prize in November. The literary group had appealed the Oslo district court June ruling.

Snowden, who is currently in Russia, faces U.S. charges that could land him in prison for up to 30 years for leaking details of a secret U.S. eavesdropping program.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/6b9fb9e4681c4c6faba3b45cb51949e1

MH17 missile 'came from Russia', Dutch-led investigators say

Source: BBC

International prosecutors investigating the downing of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 say the missile that hit the plane was fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed rebels.

They said the missile launcher was brought into Ukraine from Russia.
All 298 people on board the Boeing 777 died when it broke apart in midair flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Relatives told the BBC that prosecutors said they would investigate about 100 people over the incident.

"They told us how the Buk was transported [and] how they came to that evidence from phone taps, photo, film material, video," Robby Oehler, whose niece was killed in the crash, told the BBC.

The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) consists of prosecutors from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37495067

The Real Ed Snowden Is a Patsy, a Fraud and a Kremlin-Controlled Pawn

I’ve closely followed the saga of Edward Snowden from the moment the former CIA and NSA IT contractor grabbed the global limelight with both hands back on June 12, 2013 by appearing in the Chinese media, exposing American government secrets on a scale nobody had ever done before.

I insisted from the outset that Snowden was not the whistleblower he claimed to be, rather an attention-seeking narcissist, and that certainly once he landed in Moscow on June 23, 2013—and quite possibly before—he was in bed with Russian intelligence. Moreover, Snowden’s 1.5 million stolen documents were nearly all about NSA foreign intelligence and Pentagon military matters—not domestic surveillance. In short, the Snowden saga as presented to the public by Ed and his media enablers was a fantasy.

Now, more than three years later, my position—which garnered me criticism and epic amounts of social media trolling—has been vindicated by several sources, including the U.S. Congress. Oliver Stone’s apologia-as-film about Snowden has just opened, to decidedly mixed reviews, and its premiere has been marred by the overdue intrusion of reality on this Moscow fable. Stone has a long history of making “truthy” movies based on Kremlin propaganda, and his latest sticks with that dubious pattern.

I’ve taken the Snowden debacle personally, in no small part because when I worked in NSA counterintelligence, it was obvious that something like Snowden was bound to happen. By ignoring basic security, by outsourcing core missions to greedy defense contractors, by allowing the security clearance process to fall apart—and above all by oversharing sensitive information with people who had no “need to know” as the spies say—NSA and our whole Intelligence Community created the circumstances that made Snowden possible.

None of this is to deny the traitor’s agency: Ed did all this, willfully. Yet NSA is every bit as culpable as Snowden for this historic debacle, for ignoring years of warnings about security that predicted exactly what came to pass when Snowden stole grandly and fled to China, then Russia, where he remains. I, along with others, warned NSA years ago that it was flirting with counterintelligence disaster, and the agency was “just one asshole away” from the security abyss. Eventually that asshole was going to show up. He did, as actuarially he was bound to. His name just happened to be Ed Snowden.

http://observer.com/2016/09/the-real-ed-snowden-is-a-patsy-a-fraud-and-a-kremlin-controlled-pawn/

Game, set, match

Either Edward Snowden Is Lying—or His Former Boss Is

Either Edward Snowden is lying or his former boss is. That’s one way to read contradictory statements from the two men about whether Snowden actually knew that much about one of the most controversial surveillance programs that he exposed to the world three years ago.
It’s a program that gives the National Security Agency access to data from the world’s biggest technology companies, including Facebook and Google, and it features prominently in the new Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” which premieres Friday and portrays its namesake as a genius hacker who saw first-hand how the NSA abused its formidable powers. That movie has renewed a long-simmering battle between Snowden and his critics. And it’s revealing new information about the biggest leak from the U.S. intelligence community in decades.

For the first time, the man who hired Snowden as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii said Snowden actually didn’t have any access to that program, known commonly as PRISM. What’s more, Steven Bay said, Snowden failed to understand the regime of oversight and legal scrutiny in place to prevent unauthorized spying on Americans.

“He asked me two or three times on how to get access to what essentially was the PRISM data—we didn’t call it that internally, but that’s kind of what everyone knows it is,” Bay told the national security publication The Cipher Brief this week.

“That’s one of the interesting things about his story is that people don’t realize,” Bay continued, “he never actually had access to any of that data. All of the quote domestic collection stuff that he revealed, he never had access to that. So he didn’t understand the oversight and compliance, he didn’t understand the rules for handling it, and he didn’t understand the processing of it.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/17/either-edward-snowden-is-lying-or-his-former-boss-is.html

At least the "hero" myth is officially dead...

The Leaky Myths of Snowden

Oliver Stone’s Snowden is a bad movie, stuffed with myth, short on drama. Stone has always been a tendentious writer but he was once a terrific director. JFK ranks among the most exasperating movies of all time for portraying Jim Garrison, one of the battier Kennedy-assassination conspiracy-mongers, as a truth-telling hero. But it was still rollicking, spooky fun—so crazy entertaining, I could almost excuse its crazy script. In Snowden, Stone has another self-styled hero on his hands, but this time he dispenses with the high-flying style and instead spends two hours shrouding his protagonist with the aura of a holy martyr.

The story, as Stone tells it, matches the portrait put forth by Edward Snowden, his lawyers, and his celebrators for some time: A patriotic young man goes to work for the CIA, then the NSA. Gradually disillusioned by what he sees, he smuggles out thousands of documents that reveal the NSA’s vast scale of domestic surveillance. He flees to Hong Kong, where he gives the material to a pair of trusted, rebellious reporters, so the American people will know what’s being done in their name at the price of their liberty.

The fact is, many of Snowden’s documents bore no resemblance to whistleblowing as the phrase is broadly understood. Judging from Snowden-inspired stories in the Washington Post and the Guardian, they revealed details about the NSA’s interception of email and cellphone calls by the Taliban in Pakistan’s northwest territories; an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; intelligence assessments inside Iran; and NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong. None of this is noted in Stone’s film.

Whatever one’s views of U.S. foreign policy in those parts of the world, these activities are legitimate aspects of the NSA’s charter, which involves intercepting communications of foreign powers. They have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or spying on allies. Exposing these intercepts is not whistleblowing: It’s an attempt to blow U.S. intelligence operations. And while Snowden has since acknowledged that other countries do this sort of thing too, not least China and his host at the moment, Russia, he never leaked documents revealing their hacking programs even though, in his job at the NSA, he would have had access to reports (and possibly raw data) about them as well.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/09/what_snowden_gets_wrong_about_its_hero.html

It's almost like he's been reading me on DU the past three years...

All right -- Whose kid was this?

The history of Trumps birther tweets:

Why Glenn Greenwald relentlessly attacks Hillary Clinton — even if it helps Donald Trump

Glenn Greenwald thinks something weird and dangerous happens to the American media during a presidential election.

“Things get way more polarized than they typically are. And way more tribalistic. Everything gets interpreted through this lens of, ‘Which side are you helping, and which side are you on?’” says Greenwald, a co-founder of the investigative news site the Intercept who is best known for breaking Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency, in an interview.

Greenwald’s fear of a polarized press bubbled to the surface earlier this month during a bitter debate about the correct amount of scrutiny owed to the Clinton Foundation. After a handful of mainstream news outlets devoted huge amounts of time and resources to covering the foundation, a slew of liberal writers reacted in disgust. To them, the barrage of negative press about Clinton and the foundation wasn’t just misleading — it was actively dangerous, wrongly implying that Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest were remotely as worthy of our attention as Donald Trump’s endless parade of horribles. (The New York Times’s Paul Krugman articulated this perspective in a widely shared column titled “Hillary Clinton Gets Gored.”)

Greenwald is not a fan of Donald Trump. But he is a dogged critic of Hillary Clinton, a more than occasional defender of Trump from charges that he’s a Russian cat’s paw, and deeply skeptical of the liberal conventional wisdom that the mainstream press has done too little to put Trump under a microscope. He and his colleagues at the Intercept are sufficiently relentless in these stances that to many liberals who used to cheer his excoriations of the Bush administration, he may even look like he’s rooting for Trump.

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12853236/glenn-greenwald-trump-clinton
https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/776623679664971776

Way too charitable on Glenn, but brings up some critical points...

As Russia reasserts itself, U.S. intelligence agencies focus anew on the Kremlin

U.S. intelligence agencies are expanding spying operations against Russia on a greater scale than at any time since the end of the Cold War, U.S. officials said.

The mobilization involves clandestine CIA operatives, National Security Agency cyberespionage capabilities, satellite systems and other intelligence assets, officials said, describing a shift in resources across spy services that had previously diverted attention from Russia to focus on terrorist threats and U.S. war zones.

U.S. officials said the moves are part of an effort to rebuild U.S. intelligence capabilities that had continued to atrophy even as Russia sought to reassert itself as a global power. Over the past two years, officials said, the United States was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s aggression, including its annexation of Crimea, its intervention in the war in Syria and its suspected role in hacking operations against the United States and Europe.

U.S. spy agencies “are playing catch-up big time” with Russia, a senior U.S. intelligence official said. Terrorism remains the top concern for American intelligence services, the official said, but recent directives from the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have moved Russia up the list of intelligence priorities for the first time since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/as-russia-reasserts-itself-us-intelligence-agencies-focus-anew-on-the-kremlin/2016/09/14/cc212c62-78f0-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html


About time someone started waking up...

Nooooooooo OMG WTFH who would ever create such a thing?