kpete
kpete's Journal*There is a difference between those who obtain leaks and those who obtain official leaks.
TribesOver the years I've come to the conclusion that most "national security" journalists - you know, people who cover the pentagon, state, surveillance state agencies - identify strongly with their sources and the viewpoints of those agencies. That doesn't make them bad people, necessarily, just something to keep in mind.
*Obviously there's a difference between those who obtain leaks and those who obtain official leaks. You get the point.
by Atrios at 08:00
(*brilliant statement, mho)
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2013/08/tribes.html
But Then It Was Too Late...
This is a chilling quote taken from the book "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer, about life in Nazi Germany:
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice itplease try to believe meunless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted, that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures that no patriotic German could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesnt see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You dont want to act, or even talk, alone; you dont want to go out of your way to make trouble. Why not?Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. Thats the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shockedif, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in 43 had come immediately after the German Firm stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in 33. But of course this isnt the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying Jewish swine, collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live inyour nation, your peopleis not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
from:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
GUARDIAN Editorial: "It Is NOT The Role Of Politicians To Determine The Limits Of Public Discussion"
Surveillance and the state: this way the debate goes onThanks to Edward Snowden, the world now has a debate about the dramatic change in the contract between state and citizen
The Guardian, Friday 23 August 2013 18.58 EDT
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Secrecy and openness
Thanks to Mr Snowden they have now got a debate ? one that is rippling around the world. President Barack Obama says he welcomes that debate. That much is encouraging, even if it seems unlikely to be true because it is not going to be a comfortable debate for any government ? nor for those in intelligence, nor for anyone running a major technology or telecommunications company. The world was simpler when the law could be used to prevent any meaningful and informed discussion of what was involved. The laws crafted before and during the first world war (the Espionage Act in the US, the Official Secrets Act in the UK) saw to that.
Secrecy and openness must collide. Governments and spies will place the greater emphasis on security: that is inevitable. Individuals who treasure free speech, an unfettered press, the capacity for dissent, or an individual's rights to privacy or protection against the state, will have equal, or greater, concerns.
...............
Civil liberties and security
These are words that should be heeded by the British government official who told us that the Guardian had "had our debate" and that there was no "need" to write any more. It is not the role of politicians or civil servants to determine the limits of public discussion. Nor should the debate be circumscribed by attempting to criminalise the act of journalism ? without which, in this instance, there could be no debate.
Citizens of free countries are entitled to protect their privacy against the state. The state has a duty to protect free speech as well as security. Fundamental rights, as we say, collide. Journalists have a duty to inform and facilitate a debate and to help test the consent of people about the nature of any trade-offs between civil liberties and security. A democratic government should seek to protect and nourish that debate, not threaten it or stamp it out.
BRAVO!!!!
read the rest:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/surveillance-state-debate-goes-on
Jill Abramson, NYT Executive Editor: “my cell phone is not a secure line”
Now the Times or an agent for the paper, too, appears to have carried digital files from the United Kingdom across international lines into the United States. Discussions of how to partner on the documents were carried out in person between top Guardian editors and Times executive editor Jill Abramson, all of whom declined to comment on the movement of documents. But it appears likely that someone at one of the two papers physically carried a drive with Snowdens GCHQ leaks from London to New York or Washington exactly what Miranda was stopped at Heathrow for doing.
Abramson declined, in a brief telephone interview from Boston, to comment on any of that, and stressed that she would not discuss the subject on her mobile telephone because my cell phone is not a secure line.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/new-york-times-guardian-snowden
Lavabit founder: 'My own tax dollars are being used to spy on me'
Lavabit founder: 'My own tax dollars are being used to spy on me'Since shuttering his email service, which was used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Ladar Levison has been stuck in a Kafkaesque legal battle and that's about all he can say
.................
Levison first heard of Snowden when he revealed himself in the Guardian in June. The first he knew about Lavabit's involvement was when Snowden used a lavabit.com account to announce a press conference at Moscow's airport, where he was left in limbo following his flight from Hong Kong.
"It's not my place to decide whether what Snowden did is right or wrong," said Levison. "I understand the need for secrecy. I understand that the government needs to keep the names of people they are currently investigating and doing surveillance on secret. I am wholly opposed, and find it contrary to our way of life, for the government to keep the methods that they use to conduct that surveillance a national secret. What they are really doing is using that secrecy to hide un-American actions from the general public," he says.
The extent of government surveillance illustrated by Snowden's leaks shows that the Obama administration is willing "to sacrifice the privacy of the many so they can conduct surveillance on the few", Levison said.
As his legal woes mounted he and his lawyer, Virginia-based Jesse Binnall, set up a fund in the hope of raising some cash. "If there's one thing the government has it's no shortage of lawyers. My own tax dollars are being used to spy on me," he says. "If you took all the people we currently have employed as peeping toms and turned them into school teachers, we'd have a much smarter country," he said.
.........
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/22/lavabit-founder-us-surveillance-snowden
Pentagon is making the initial preparations for a Cruise missile attack on Syrian government forces
Source: CBS
@CharlieKayeCBS : BREAKING. @CBSNews has learned that the Pentagon is making the initial preparations for a Cruise missile attack on Syrian government forces
19 mins ago 329 retweets
Read more: Link to source
Whoa: NYT Now Has Snowden Docs Carried By Secret Courier into the US
The New York Times is in the Snowden game.
And get this:
Now the Times or an agent for the paper, too, appears to have carried digital files from the United Kingdom across international lines into the United States. Discussions of how to partner on the documents were carried out in person between top Guardian editors and Times executive editor Jill Abramson, all of whom declined to comment on the movement of documents. But it appears likely that someone at one of the two papers physically carried a drive with Snowdens GCHQ leaks from London to New York or Washington exactly what Miranda was stopped at Heathrow for doing
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/new-york-times-guardian-snowden
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/23/1233373/-Whoa-New-York-Times-Now-Has-Snowden-Docs-Carried-By-Secret-Courier-into-the-US
The New York Times can always be counted on to do the right thing after it has exhausted all other options.
That reporter is not James Risen who of course broke the original NSA story with Eric Lichtblau. It is not Charlie Savage who had an important story based on the Snowden leaks already.
It is Scott Shane.
The Timess Charlie Savage and other reporters have chased the NSA story aggressively, despite Snowdens choice to go to fillmmaker Laura Poitras, theGuardians Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman, who has written about the documents for the Washington Post. Snowden said he did not go to the Times because the paper bowed to Bush Administration demands to delay a story on warrantless wiretapping in the interest of national security; he was afraid, he said, the paper would do the same with his revelations.
Now, Times reporter Scott Shane is at work on a series of stories expected to be published next month jointly with the Guardian, a source familiar with the plans said. The source said the internal arrangement has also been the cause of some tension in the newsroom, as other national security reporters working on the NSA story Savage and James Risen, among others are not centrally involved in stories based on the Guardians documents.
Scott Shane has an increasingly consistent ability to tell grand tales that serve the interests of The Powers that Be. And somehow his stories about extremely sensitive subjects like drones dont get chased for leaks.
- See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/23/how-to-get-the-government-to-ease-up-involve-scott-shane/#sthash.SUr1gc4B.dpuf
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/23/how-to-get-the-government-to-ease-up-involve-scott-shane/
and why we should worry:
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/05/29/when-nyt-accused-jim-comey-of-approving-torture/
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/04/12/scott-shane-defends-the-commander-in-chiefs-language/
Chelsea Manning Turned Down Lesser Sentence To Not Sell Out Julian Assange
Just don't know how to confirm this source, so take it easy with this info (& let me know what you hear):
Part of that would be to cooperate in testifying, so obviously we didnt do that, said Coombs at a press conference. If the Department of Justice got their way, they would get a plea deal in this case, and my client would be named as one of the witnesses to go after Julian Assange,
http://www.carbonated.tv/news/bradley-manning-turned-down-lesser-sentence-to-not-sell-out-julian-assange
NSA used against Kim Dotcom in NZ copyright battle
Here's the NSA, part of the United States military, doing the bidding of large international corporations who howl about intellectual property. Not military threats, not terrorism, not violent crime, perhaps not even a crime at all:
A blog postby New Zealand-based Keith Ng http://publicaddress.net/onpoint/ich-bin-ein-cyberpunk/ spills the beans. New Zealand's intelligence agency is the GCSB, the Government Communications Security Bureau. Ng reports, based on a redacted government document, how GCSB worked with NSA's PRISM program.
Once the GCSB's lawyer had a look at it, the Police provided a list of "selectors" to the GCSB (we now know from the PRISM documents that "selectors" is the term used to describe the search terms used to make PRISM requests):
...
The email from the GCSB then described "traffic volume from these selectors": i.e. This secret system was capturing live traffic.
...
What does this mean? It means that GCSB assistance is NSA assistance. It means that government agencies can tap into these powers as part of bread-and-butter law enforcement.
So the PRISM program is not only collecting information on terrorists, it's collecting information used in a criminal investigation of copyright violation. True, it was "overseas", but it was a US long-arm operation against a business not located in the US with the help of a compliant government.
MORE:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/23/1233379/-NSA-used-against-Kim-Dotcom-in-NZ-copyright-battle
"I am secretly a citizen of Ethiopia." -- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), quoted by the Houston Chronicle
"I am secretly a citizen of Ethiopia."-- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), quoted by the Houston Chronicle, poking fun at the flap over his citizenship issues.
http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2013/08/ted-cruz-i-am-secretly-a-citizen-of-ethiopia/
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