Tag Archives: Glenn Greenwald

Civil Liberties, Edward Snowden, Opinion

Snowden: Remove The Government’s Ability To Interfere With Our Rights

6 Comments

In an ‘Ask Me Anything’ question and answer session on Reddit, Edward Snowden was asked: “What’s the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?”

Snowden replied:

This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.

At the same time, we should remember that governments don’t often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, “Data and Goliath”), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?

Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.

But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?

Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.

How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.

How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where — if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen — we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new — and permanent — basis.

Our rights are not granted by governments.

They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

We haven’t had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we’ll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they “can” do rather than what they “should” do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.

In such times, we’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.

Glenn Greenwald focused on how the issue did not break down along party lines:

The key tactic DC uses to make uncomfortable issues disappear is bipartisan consensus. When the leadership of both parties join together – as they so often do, despite the myths to the contrary – those issues disappear from mainstream public debate.

The most interesting political fact about the NSA controversy, to me, was how the divisions didn’t break down at all on partisan lines. Huge amount of the support for our reporting came from the left, but a huge amount came from the right. When the first bill to ban the NSA domestic metadata program was introduced, it was tellingly sponsored by one of the most conservative Tea Party members (Justin Amash) and one of the most liberal (John Conyers).

The problem is that the leadership of both parties, as usual, are in full agreement: they love NSA mass surveillance. So that has blocked it from receiving more debate. That NSA program was ultimately saved by the unholy trinity of Obama, Nancy Pelosi and John Bohener, who worked together to defeat the Amash/Conyers bill.

The division over this issue (like so many other big ones, such as crony capitalism that owns the country) is much more “insider v. outsider” than “Dem v. GOP”. But until there are leaders of one of the two parties willing to dissent on this issue, it will be hard to make it a big political issue.

That’s why the Dem efforts to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination without contest are so depressing. She’s the ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption, and no debate will happen if she’s the nominee against some standard Romney/Bush-type GOP candidate. Some genuine dissenting force is crucial.

Both make great points. We must remember that it is our duty to restore our rights and take away the power of the government to destroy those rights. But to do so means full spectrum cooperation.

Read the whole Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras Reddit AMA here.

International, Politics, US

Greenwald To Publish Full List Of Names Targeted By NSA Surveillance

23 Comments

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to expose deceitful United States surveillance practices, said that he plans to publish a full list of individuals that the NSA has actively spied on.

“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ Magazine regarding the upcoming revelations. “This will be the finale, a big missing piece.” Greenwald has been in the press promoting his new book “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State” and affirmed to The Sunday Times that the list of NSA targets will be the “biggest” disclosure yet.

“One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’” Greenwald mused to The Sunday Times. “Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists?”

Greenwald went on to belittle the NSA for its failure to intercept Snowden’s acquisition of nearly 2 million classified files, as well as its failure to stop Snowden from releasing the damning information, saying,

“Not only was he out there under their noses downloading huge amounts of documents without being detected but to this day they’re incapable of finding out what he took.”

Greenwald will publish the list on The Intercept, an independent online publication created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Follow Annabelle on Facebook and Twitter.

US

Spy Agency’s False Flag Operations Exposed by Snowden leaks

62 Comments

 

New Snowden leaks show how spy agencies disrupts, discredits dissent and sets up false flag operations.

In a new leaked document, journalist Glenn Greenwald exposes how the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) uses questionable tactics to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit voices the government doesn’t agree with.

The document, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations,” reveals shady practices like using “honey traps” that may start as Internet dating, but the PowerPoint also points to in-person meetings to discredit the subject.

Other findings include “false flag” operations (undertaking malicious actions and making it look like the work of a group they wish to discredit), the application of social sciences like sociology and psychology to disrupt and steer online activist discussions, lure targets into compromising sexual situations, deploy malicious software and virus and post lies about targets in order to discredit them.

According to NBC News, the British government, when asked about the document, would not confirm or deny the report: “All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework,” said the statement, “which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position.”

Greenwald points out in an article on The Intercept that targets of these aggressive actions did not have to be charged with — or convicted of — a crime.

One of those groups targeted by these tactics were members of Anonymous, the internet hacktivist collective.

As Anonymous expert Gabriella Coleman of McGill University told Greenwald, “targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent.”

Follow Joshua Cook on Facebook and on Twitter: @RealJoshuaCook

Gchq Online Deception

US

Clemency for Snowden? Greenwald calls out D.C. media in fiery debate – Video

14 Comments

 

After both The New York Times and The Guardian editorial boards published editorials asking for clemency or at least a deal for whistleblower Edward Snowden, the debate continues. Is Snowden a hero or a traitor?

This week, on CNN with host Jake Tapper, a fiery debate broke out between Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald controls the majority of Snowden’s leaked documents.

Marcus told Tapper that Snowden should have tested the constitutional system and taken his punishment instead of fleeing the country.

This did not sit well with Greenwald who fired back at Marcus and condemned the Washington media establishment.

“Ruth Marcus’ argument exemplifies everything that’s really horrible about the D.C. media … People in Washington continuously make excuses for those in power when they break the law,” said Greenwald.

“People in Washington who are well-connected to the government, like she is, do not believe that the law applies to them … That’s what people in Washington do. They would never call on someone like James Clapper, who got caught lying to Congress, which is a felony, to be prosecuted. They only pick on people who embarrass the government and the administration to which they are loyal like Edward Snowden. It’s not about the rule of law,” he added.

Greenwald stated that Snowden knew there was no way inside the system to make his fellow citizens aware of what their government was doing to their privacy.

General Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, said on Sunday’s Face the Nation that Snowden doesn’t deserve our adulation.

Hayden pointed out that Snowden, who he said was responsible for the “most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage,” has openly offered to leak additional information to the governments of Germany ​and Brazil in exchange for asylum. “I think there’s an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and that’s ‘treason,’” Hayden said.

In late November, clemency for Snowden was shot down by the White House and leading House and Senate intelligence officials. The Guardian reported that the Obama administrator was offering no deal; they wanted Snowden to return to the United States to face trial.

Despite the Obama administration’s position, there is a dramatic trend shifting in Snowden’s favor as new NSA revelations come out. A top Obama official, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department director of policy planning, said she agreed with an editorial in The New York Times that argued Snowden was “clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not.”

 

Follow Joshua Cook on Facebook and on Twitter: @RealJoshuaCook