Snowden supporters are number one in line for blame. They are the ones who curse nameless civil servants for trying to protect.
It’s too easy to blame the big, bad gu’mint. That’s teahad shyte.
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This is so helpful! And other governments, too! They should not have secrets. I TELL YOU WHAT, YOU BE THE LEADER!
Stop USA and the 200 other countries from having secrets! Win valuable prize!
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Just think if all the NSA apologists, Greenwald Haters, and Snowden Bashers that dwell here could be transported back in time. They would have the opportunity to attack MLK and all manner of civil rights leaders. Whoopee! Cuz the Government is always good!
Newly-declassified documents reveal that the National Security Agency targeted one of America’s most revered civil rights icons.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University released the information Wednesday, showing that Martin Luther King Jr. was on the agency’s watch list during the 1960s. Also mentioned as targets in the report were fellow civil rights leader Whitney Young, boxer Muhammad Ali, and two prominent members of Congress, Sens. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee). The program was also viewed by some officials as “disreputable if not outright illegal,” the report adds.
According to the report, knowledge of King as an NSA target first emerged in the 1970s, but Wednesday’s release marks the first time that the documents were classified. The FBI had him as a wiretap target shortly after the 1963 March on Washington, thanks to worries over his connections to chief adviser and former Communist Party member Stanley Levison.
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I don’t have time to read all that, I’ll just get the short version over at RT.
I learned today that Russian hackers have stolen something like a billion usernames and passwords, the other day I read about an anarchist group that posts white supremacists’ details like place of employment, phone numbers etc. in the hopes of getting them fired, and yesterday I read that Google turned a pedophile in when they found kiddie porn while scanning his email.
All these scary stories by the Intercept are written with an anti-government slant which detracts from an honest conversation about what the government should be doing.
It reminds me of the quote “Certain elements on the Left hungrily eat up this cheap and easy caricature.”
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The ‘new Snowden’ headline clouds the story from the get-go. Never mind who the leaker might actually be and what the leaks might actually disclose.
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Classic TPM style, eh? - go straight for the gossipy back-story and cat-fights while ignoring the elephant in the room.
Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category—280,000 people—dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.
The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000—surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush.
“If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent. The watchlisting system, he adds, is “revving out of control.”
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How many of those six hundred and eighty thousand people are US citizens?
I think you are confused. The “scary stories” are about a corrupt and out-of-control agency engaging in constitutional invasions of American’s right to privacy, as well as engaging in illegal activities well outside their stated mission outside the US - the NSA. To suggest that the stories are “anti-government” is ridiculous on it’s face.
But you knew that. What’s really comical is you invoking “scary stories”…and then giving us just that…“scary stories” about Russian hackers, anarchist groups, and kiddie porn!
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Yes, those are the kind of scary stories I’m referring to. I think you’re confused.
“These agencies see terrorism as a winning card for them. They get more resources. They know that they can wave that card around and the American public will be very afraid and Congress and the courts will allow them to get away with whatever they’re doing under the national security umbrella.”
Same as it has always been.
Some people are easily frightened, especially after 9-11. These are the people willing to compromise our rights for the promise of safety.
So many Scary Stories, so little time to quiver under the bed waving a white flag at the NSA.
Take it away, Hermann!
…voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Sorry but the definition of “unreasonable” isn’t subject to arbitrary opinion. It is defined in legal statute as passed by act of Congress.
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So where do you draw the line between privacy and security? Or are you like One Track Greenwald who was security-focused during the Bush debacle yet obsessed with transparency now?
Is there a privacy advocate who even acknowledges the need for security and how best to achieve privacy without quoting verbatim their pocket Constitution like it’s a one stop shop for due process?
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Traitors to our Dear Leaders you mean.
“Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.”
–George Orwell
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“security-focused during the Bush debacle?” What planet was that on?
Here’s Glenn on Bush. It’s titled:
The criminal NSA eavesdropping program
The court’s ruling yesterday was a scathing repudiation of the Obama DOJ’s Bush-copying tactics
While torture and aggressive war may have been the most serious crimes which the Bush administration committed, its warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens was its clearest and most undeniable lawbreaking. Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday became the third federal judge — out of three who have considered the question — to find that Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program was illegal (the other two are District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor and 6th Circuit Appellate Judge Ronald Gilman who, on appeal from Judge Taylor’s decision, in dissent reached the merits of that question [unlike the two judges in the majority who reversed the decision on technical “standing” grounds] and adopted Taylor’s conclusion that the NSA program was illegal).
That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush’s NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA). That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense. The law really does say that. Just click on that link and you’ll see. It’s been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law — committed felonies — in spying on Americans without warrants.
You can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.
That article is from April 1, 2010.
Here’s what Greenwald said in 2005.
Ever since he took office, Bush has refused to play by many of the long-standing rules of the Washington game. He doesn’t fire his cabinet secretaries and aides when editorial boards and other politicians demand that he do so. The appearance of as-yet-unproven scandals doesn’t cause him to dump whomever is said to be associated with them. He doesn’t abandon or soften his positions when polls begin to show an increasing public unrest with those positions or when pundits begin insinuating that weakening political support makes those positions untenable.
And, most significantly, he doesn’t go out of his way, Clinton-like, to make sure that reporters – or anyone else – feel that their opinions are listened to and cherished. If anything, the opposite is true: Bush has never tried to hide that he has very little regard for the opinions of the Washington media establishment; that he could not care any less about winning their approval; and that the tried-and-true pressure tactics which they have used for decades to force White Houses to change course have no effect on Bush, unless it’s to make him dig in even deeper.
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/bush-v-washington-media.html
LOL. I knew Doremus would drag out some dingy yellow scrap of newsprint to wave around. It’s reliable as rain.
As if what GG said 9 years ago before he was even politically active, much less a journalist - undercuts everything he has done since. Asinine.
Here’s from a book review written in 2006
By D. Books on May 23, 2006
Format: Paperback
How Would A Patriot Act? is, primarily, about the radical claims of total presidential authority made by the Bush Administration’s radical lawyers, with the ostensible aim of fighting terrorism and the effect of discarding the Constitution.
As Greenwald clearly sets out, America defeated the Communist threat from the Soviet Union without losing sight of the Constitution; fewer sacrifices will be necessary to defeat a few disorganized Islamists.
So why has Bush’s Administration been allowed to get away with torturing prisoners to death, “disappearing” and detaining American citizens without trial, and Big Brother-like surveillance of telephone calls and internet traffic (in violation of countless laws and the 4th Amendment?) Why has the Republican controlled Congress failed to assert its powers of oversight?
At the core of these failures, Greenwald argues, is fear. While Franklin Roosevelt told us “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Republican leaders have stoked our fear of another 9/11, in part out of cowardice, and in part for political expediency.
Yup. Greenwald was a Big Bush Fan. And he totally, TOTALLY looked the other way until the day Obama showed up.
Screw this old book review…
Let’s get really current… Here’s one at Amazon about GG’s latest tome that you will no doubt accuse the critic of being someone within the intelligence community for pushing back on GG’s work.
—begin citation—
AmishRakeFight (Boulder, CO)
This review is from: No Place to Hide:
May 14, 2014
Before you purchase this book, allow me to save you some time and money: “The U.S. Government already possesses the power to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants.” (h/t […]). For more reasons why you should not buy this book, read on.
Greenwald once harshly criticized Bill Keller and the New York Times for holding off on publishing a story on President Bush’s warrant-less wiretapping program for a year. He cites this as a prime example of establishment media subservience.
And yet with this book, Greenwald commits the same deplorable act: withholding vital information from the public for nearly a year for his own selfish gain. Please don’t support Greenwald’s profiteering from the Snowden leaks by purchasing this book.
Indeed, Greenwald has quite adeptly risen in wealth and prestige in the last several months, all thanks to Snowden giving him sole custody of public documents detailing crimes against the global public, which Glenn happily treated as his intellectual property, instead of information the public had a right to know. He has now received funding from one of the richest men in the world, and the ink had barely dried on their contract before Glenn was busily lying for and whitewashing his crony billionaire funder’s past, including Omidyar’s culpability in the financial stranglehold of Wikileaks.
When Greenwald tells the story of Snowden, there’s a critical part he leaves out. From the first video interview where Snowden’s identity is revealed, Snowden compared himself to Chelsea Manning (the Cablegate whistle-blower) is a dishonest way that cast an unfavorable view on Manning.
Rather than repudiate this, Greenwald repeatedly engaged in similar dishonest comparisons at Manning’s expense - all at the critical time when Manning was in trial and facing decades in prison. Since the initial comments, Greenwlad has also dishonestly and unfavorably compared the tactics of Snowden/Greenwald to Manning/Wikileaks. Of course, this goes unmentioned in the book as Greenwald is too busy placing Snowden on the highest pedestal possible, while Chelsea Manning sits in a prison cell.
The bottom line is that Greenwald’s priority since he first received the leaks has been to profit off of them and raise his own status. Helping activists combat the spying practices of the NSA, using the leaks to damage the entire surveillance state establishment, protecting Chelsea Manning at a very vulnerable moment - nah, there’s no time for these subtleties in Glenn’s mind. After all, one doesn’t win Polk Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, get fabulously wealthy, get interviews on the Today show, and get funding to start a new media enterprise by actually threatening the surveillance state, now do they?
Ask yourself, do you really need to buy Glenn’s book so he can tell you things you already know/suspect, and thus further enable his profiteering from the leaks and reward his deplorable behavior?
—end citation—
~OGD~
There should be no Snowden to support or oppose. It should be Mission Impossible difficult to download a laptop full of classified information for easy handoff to a reporter, independently of whether the government had any right to possess the information in the first place. We already know the NSA is incapable of keeping random, untargeted people’s love affairs and nervous breakdowns secret, so we certainly shouldn’t expect the Washington Post or any other private company to do a better job.