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Greenwald: Why the CIA Is Smearing Edward Snowden After Paris Attacks (latimes.com)
JoeyRox points out that Glenn Greenwald has some harsh words for the CIA in an op-ed piece for the LA Times. From the article: "Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity. Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden."
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
Aren't politics grand? Gotta further an agenda while the corpses are still warm. (You lose impact any other way, you see.) /s
Except for the one in the Constitution, which would be, y'know, the legal one in his case.
How are they smearing him, again? He's a traitor by any definition. He's lucky to not be executed.
Nice try CIA.
When Russia told the US about the Boston Marathon bombers?
When a flight instructor told the US about people who wanted to fly planes, but not land them before 9/11?
We have replaced credible human intelligence with signals intelligence. Making the hay stack bigger only makes the needles harder to find.
How are they smearing him, again? He's a traitor by any definition. He's lucky to not be executed.
Through false accusations, thats how. Did he break the law? Yes. The paris attacks were proven to have no relation to encryption. Smear him if you will, but smear him with what crimes he ACTUALLY committed.
Some people are too lazy to know right from wrong, so they let the state dictate morality for them. These people are going to hell.
By any objective standard, Snowden has been right on all accounts and the Empire has nothing to say except "TRAITOR!"
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
The level of manipulation of Big Media in the United States is shocking and should alarm anyone. The "news" was filled with stories about how there's now suddenly a big debate about encryption and how Silicon Valley is in the hot seat. Really?!? Completely manufactured bullshit brought to you by the oligarchy which very tightly controls Big Media, controls what the agenda is (and is not), and works overtime to manipulate the public to further its agenda of greed.
Thank God Glen Greenwald pointed this out. I guess that's one thing I'm truly thankful for on this day!
Are you being serious?
Let's assume for a moment, that you aren't being a blatant troll here. With that in mind, here's why it is a smear.
1) The paris terrorists did not use encryption at all--
2) The French government, and the US government already had people warning them about the impending attacks.
3) Snowden's leaks centered around *ILLEGAL* intelligence gathering practices, and his leaks were carefully sanitized and redacted by reporters with journalistic integrity.
4) Unless you think Russia is somehow behind the paris attacks, there is nothing that ties Snowden with said attacks-- and even that is just supposition. (There is shit little Snowden has given Russia besides PR.)
The only connection here is that Snowden drew attention to the US's (and its allies') use of illegal data collection for intelligence purposes, which gave the US a black eye, (and a much needed one at that.) and the administrators behind those illegal data collection practices want to try to assert (falsely) that they could have stopped the paris attack, if it hadn't been for that meddling kid-- Erhm-- Edward Snowden.
This is bullshit-- as again, the terrorists were using unencrypted channels of communication, AND were already known about by intelligence agents/agencies-- who already knew the attack was going to happen.
So, why didn't they stop it? Oh-- yeah-- Because Edward Snowden somehow used whistleblower black magic to somehow make it so they couldnt act on the intelligence they had already collected.... Somehow.
All that said-- Seriously, go troll somewhere else.
A new study from the University of Iowa finds that once people reach a conclusion, they aren’t likely to change their minds, even when new information shows their initial belief is likely wrong and clinging to that belief costs real money.
Traitor in the sense that he betrayed the various agencies involved in espionage, sure.
Traitor to the American people, and to a large extent citizens of the free nations of the world, that is an open question.
Unfortunately, it will remain an open question because there is virtually no possibility of him receiving a fair and open trial. Even if we ignore all of the cries for his execution, the laws that he allegedly broke ensure that he is tried by parties associated with the prosecution.
Go fuck yourself, you boot-licking scumbag. Snowden is a hero who told the American people about billions of felonies committed against us every day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Because the CIA is fucking evil. Next question?
Seriously, the CIA is responsible for the creation of Al Qaeda as a threat to America, you're welcome for 9/11. Then the CIA was responsible for torturing people and provoking new terrorist recruitment, running the drone killing campaign which spawns ten terrorists for every one it kills, and now we have ISIS which is a result of W. Bush's stupid illegal invasion of Iraq, which HIS OWN FATHER warned him would happen. But Bush and the CIA people annoyed his father didn't do it went ahead anyway, and look where we are now.
That he hurry the Intel community isn't the point either. He showed them to be lying to Congress and operating illegally.
A terrible time for the NSA, indeed.
4) Unless you think Russia is somehow behind the paris attacks, there is nothing that ties Snowden with said attacks-- and even that is just supposition. (There is shit little Snowden has given Russia besides PR.)
I posted before, Assange advised Snowden to go to Russia, and ignore concerns about the “negative PR consequences” of sheltering in Russia because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA’s influence did not reach.. Snowden himself, chose Latin America, but the consequences proved that Assange is right:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/e...
The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.
Bolivian President Aircraft was forced to take off for searching Snowden.
Since when have any of those people really cared about what the Constitution says?
but they've used it up.
Just like Liberals use school shootings to push gun grabbing laws and work to repeal the 2nd amendment. Nothing different here at all. Hell, even Obama went on TV before the bodies were cold in Oregon and disgustingly spoke of politics to push his and the rest of the Democrats agenda of gun grabbing. They do this all the time, fear mongering liberals. They even use those horrible incidents to attack the NRA, comparing them to "terrorists" in a grotesque and shallow display of arrogance and ignorance. There is NO DIFFERENCE in what they're doing. It's horrible and they should be held accountable for it, not put on a throne and praised by the ignorant and easily manipulated.
...including "Silicon Valley's privacy policies" in the list of pet peeves for the CIA/NSA. In fact, Silicon Valley IT giants have a steady stream of revenue from providing services to assist the NSA in their private personal data trawling. It's just business. The public rhetoric is simply PR and marketing to keep their share prices up. None of the IT giants are proposing anything that would actually prevent the NSA from bulk data collection and accessing their data warehouses, security certificates, and encryption keys. The greatest facilitators in the most intrusive and pervasive surveillance programme in history are the IT giants themselves. Let's not forget that.
You are a good example for this study:
http://now.uiowa.edu/2015/11/s...
The cited paper is behind a fucking paywall.
Damn, I meant aircraft takeoff from Moscow, while inserted the quote I forgot to delete the phrase!
Sadly the CIA is right wing as is the military, industrial complex. The one thing we know about the right wing is that they lie and lie and lie. For the CIA job security and advancement, all are related to seeing supposed, great threats to the US. If no threat exists they will create one. Further, wars make some people a lot of money when there are active conflicts,
You mean he exposed the real traitors to the US constitution, AKA the US intelligence services?
If you live to be 500, you will never, ever be half the hero and patriot that Edward Snowden is.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And that's probably why Glenn Greenwald hasn't suffered a "fatal accident". Because he, along with Snowden, Poitras and others, have probably created a "dead man's switch" that releases everything if any of them die in suspicious circumstances.
That's what I'd do, anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The comments on the article make for depressing reading. People seem to have swallowed the horror stories about encryption hook, line and sinker.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Re "What's the point? This detracts from their own goals of safety for USA."
Think back to all the Overseas interventions of the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US gov and mil needs vast networks of free flowing cash, hardware support and propaganda globally to spread US policy around the world.
The ability to set, sell, then break weak standard encryption as a policy tool helps. Every call, fax, email, bank transaction, shipment, communication, draft report, database is open to US policy makers in near real time.
Re "What is the ends here?"
To have and keep the 5 eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... nations in on every part of all telecommunications globally.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They care a great deal about what the constitution says. The problem is that they don't seem to care what the constitution means.
Snowed himself has called that idea a "suicide switch". It would be idiotic. It means that anyone who wants those documents merely has to kill him, and boom, instant access to the whole deal.
He'd be a moron to do that, given how many non-US actors would quite literally kill to have that material.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> No relation to encryption isn't an issue. He attacked his country's intelligence services, at a bad time it turns out.
He exposed criminal behavior, both in the US and worldwide, and the waste of millions if not billions of dollars of intelligence efforts aimed at completely innocent people. Because it's proven so very fruitless, it was and remains a good idea to expose it.
Found it.
<title>Slashdot: news for nerds, stuff that matters</title>.
My second sixpack got in the way of my original whiney witty comment, however.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
If we had a sane policy of spying on Muslims or people who were/might be Muslims, and filtering things from there, and if Snowden had blown the whistle on that policy, I'd agree w/ you. But we didn't. In order to avoid being called 'islamophobic', we adapted a policy of spying on everybody, and that's what he called out. And that's what is at issue here.
Snowden isn't the one responsible for the Paris attacks. Decades of allowing Muslims from North Africa to move into and settle in France, away from their North African hellholes - was what caused this. If France and other European countries had kept Muslims out after leaving Algeria and their other former colonies, it's unlikely that they'd have had a ghetto population today being inspired by fellow Muslims abroad to murder people they had been living beside all these years.
A lot more people have done a lot worse things than Snowden. We have 100s of murderers in our jails who'll have decades of legal battles of their death sentences. Snowden doesn't come anywhere near them. Even if one assumes the worst about Snowden - which I don't - the death of the Paris victims would have been an unintended consequence of his revelations, as opposed to the cold blooded murder of hundreds of people every day.
Which also gives the US incentive to make sure that nobody hurts a hair on his head.
Either way, I don't think Snowden's even been in control of those archives for years. There's a reason he turned them over to journalists and kept them somewhere that's even out of his own reach.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The CIA's former acting director, Michael Morell... Former CIA chief James Woolsey...
These people are not from the CIA anymore, they have no right to talk on the behalf of the CIA and what they say are personal opinions, nothing more.
My mentat computer has come out with conclusive results. It's not tomorrow. Don't get me wrong; something evil happens tomorrow. There will come a day, growing sooner now, when there will be a flash, brighter than the sun, brighter than anything you've ever seen. Tomorrow will be its opening ritual.
/. and other sources reported conclusively that the terrorists used simple unencrypted sms messaging to communicate/arrange their attack. But local media (in Canada that's CTV), still yelped that it was the 'encrypted' Playstation4 that was the handmaiden of the terrorists. And I heard the yelps about Edward Snowden too. And I thought "What the hell? That's a heck of a stretch!" And they repeated it and repeated it until the media started following their lead. And in my head the propaganda alarm went off. And they could have used 1000 other kinds of communication to coordinate. They could have used steganography on any of them and blabbed in the clear and the 5 eyes and the French DGSE, DGSI, and even the BGRE would not be able to pick it apart. And right now someone reading my post is shitting and saying "don't say steganagraphy!" And the security theater goes on. It includes the act that pushes "security by obscurity". But alas, university taught me that "Security by Obscurity is a Fallacy"(tm). But the fiction the 3 and 4 letter agencies like to push (the political show), doesn't like that reality to be told.
We need an Edward Snowden Day. How do you organise one of those things?
No, only spelling mistake. ...", but I was distracted when quoting from the news paper, only recognized after I posted.
I intent to write phrase "takeoff from Moscow", then I think it is not necessary. It would be "... aircraft was forced to land
And most of congress.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Should I walk to the east and board an Elven ship to Valinor, for my time has passed?
Uh, the undying lands lie to the WEST. Cirdan waits for the elves on the Western shore so they can sail west! Unless you want to go hang out with the blue wizards, I don't know why you're heading east.
Unlimited power from the sun
What does an established and widely tolerated or accepted domestic surveillance program do after Adolf Hitler wins the election?
Does that actually make sense in your head?
You get someone famous enough to declare it.
Nice to see someone unafraid to speak the truth, especially someone involved with the media.
Too bad he'll die in a tragic accident very soon and/or be completely discredited and/or found guilty of being in posession of child porn or illegal drugs or other contraband, and everything he had to say denied as false.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I don't know who, but I have an idea how: Don't use anything connected: email, chat, connected-navigation; I would go even for phones and SMS, but I think that's a stretch (especially since they could be useful for meeting details). Basically what every Sunday SHOULD be: BBQ with family. This would be great icentive for sampling the unconnected world, as the current reccomandations do not have immediate or forseable goals, except for authors "trust me! it will be better for you".
So you think that dangerous and criminal enemies of the constitution should not be hurt at all but protected from the results of their despicable acts? Is that what you are saying?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Next time it is Snowden's bday, declare proudly that you're staying offline and disconnect! ... or, declare it the day before or something.
No, preventing the Paris attacks would not have required even more intelligence gathering and breaking encryption. It would have required real persons to really look into matters, really follow the suspects, and catch them before they armed themselves and go for their killing spree. Instead the intelligence community sat there hoping that out of the data cloud a voice would tell them time and location of the attacks.
A/C - which CIA/NSA troll might you be ?
"dangerous and criminal enemies of the constitution"? Wouldn't that be the CIA and NSA? They clearly are dangerous, they commit a lot of felonies (including perjury before congress, purportedly supposed to control the services, and sabotaging the computers used by the committees supposed to look at their work), and they have a very dim view of the Bill of Rights.
Decades of allowing Muslims from North Africa to move into and settle in France, away from their North African hellholes - was what caused this.
Well, sure, but there are also millions that have escaped those hellholes and are thankful to Europe and France for it.
As a European I'm not going to close the doors in the face of millions of good people just because a couple of dozens are rotten.
And no, my family didn't recently arrive here, I can trace my ancestry back longer than the US has been around.
I noticed the instant anti-encryption spin as well. It was all over TV and in the NY Times as well, with virtually no opposing viewpoints expressed. And it happened so fast that you have to wonder if the FBI had a set of speeches ready to roll out at the next occurrence of a terror attack. It's especially embarrassing for these guys given the fact that it appears that the terrorists used SMS, and that metadata indicating who was communicating with whom was all available and the intelligence agencies still didn't manage to stop the attack. My suspicion is that the intelligence agencies collect lots of data but have no way of sieving through it to find actual useful information.
I read the summary of the book, and pretty much, it says that Snowden hurt the western alliance because it showed how the US was spying on its allies. That's like saying BLM activists are hurting race relations in the US by showing how often police actually murder black people who are doing nothing wrong. You're blaming the wrong actor. IOW, perhaps if we weren't spying on Angela Merkel, she wouldn't be pissed that we were spying on her. Only morons believe that secrets will stay secret forever.
Guys,
a curious European here.
If what he did was not illegal (treason or not) in US, how could US government prosecute him?
Why did he have to flee at all?
The "surveilance is evil" guys need to propose an alternative way for intelligence agencies to work.
As an example, there are about 1 million Syrian refugees in Europe.
About 13% of them are positive about ISIS.
http://www.clarionproject.org/...
Tell me, pretty please, how you are supposed to monitor 130'000 men.
Back in the day, before this sig-int shit got so big that everything else suffocates under it, back in the day, people in intelligence agencies had to read (and understand) newspapers, compile reports about articles, people, developments.
That also required a certain level of "intelligence", of course. Which means "able to think".
These days, it looks like that is actually a disqualification...
Why is this worrysome?
Because ISIS is real. And currently, the strategy to defeat them seems to be to get more brutal, more ruthless, more lethal with them. It's a "race to the bottom" we can't win - or only, if we turn ourselves into something that looks very similar to the enemy we want to win over.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Snowden has already been charged with espionage offences. The constitution wouldn't save him if he were to set foot somewhere he could be extradited from.
There is a book on the subject that details how Snowden negatively impacted US intelligence.
He certainly "negatively impacted" US intelligence, though it's a lot like how a police officer "negatively impacted" the criminal he just arrested. The US intelligence agencies did all the harm to themselves, and when you were made aware of their criminal activities, you chose to blame the messenger and the not the criminals.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
What he's done is illegal, and he has been charged. (Whether or not it was a good thing is a separate question) It is not, however, treason, which is the only crime defined in the Constitution and is defined quite narrowly.
Heck, they learned this from the gun grabbers who jump on every shooting and demand more laws, when by golly, the existing laws, if enforced, would do. (see for example, Fast and Furious, laws for gun-free zones, laws against murder no matter how you do it, and so on forever, already existing) Never let a crisis go to waste. Always consider the source...I think this behavior is ghoulish, personally. And when Ed Snowden "hurt" the TLAs, they have a lot of balls to say that hurt the USA - as if they alone were the USA - it helped the vast majority of actual citizens who, unlike them, do obey the laws of the land.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Yeah, my bad. Those sixpacks messed up with my internal compass... or maybe Arda is round, and I chose the longest way :)
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
If it's so easy to see, then it should be easy to show the rest of us using some actual evidence.
The so called intelligence community has been unable to find a single case where the methods revealed by Snowden has given any useful intelligence on US enemies.
And we are speaking about spying on the domestic population, there are no good reason why spying on American citizens or corporations would give the NSA any such intelligence.
All damaging material was documents about allies and leaking them slightly damaged those relationships, but they are still allies. And not enemies.
As long as you don't blow the whistle on the gub'ment.
"They never snitch on themselves, but they want you to snitch on YOU"
-Immortal Technique
That's why I think Snowden is a hero whereas Assange is just an ass.
I'm glad not to have mod points tonight because it means I can tell you that that was the most insightful comment I've read on /. ever
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
I don't think we need any gimmicky activity, all I'd like is recognition once a year that for a lot of people Snowden is a hero.
I just looked it up and his birthday is June 21. I'll have to try and remember to do something about it next year.
Without Wikileaks, which Julian Assange helped found and maintain despite various forms of illegal political and economic abuse, many people like Edward Snowden would have far less safety reporting abuse and criminal activity. Snowden is a hero, but he's a one-shot hero. He's very unlikely to have another opportunity to reveal such abuses. As much as I may detest Assange's personal habits, and especially his treatment of women, Wikileaks has earned its reputation for verifying stories, protecting sources like Edward Snowden, and publishing genuinely shocking material that deserves exposition. And it is an ongoing effort.
Assange is a flawed hero, but Wikileaks has been a heroic enterprise.
Interesting article here: http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
(in English)
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Where do you get this crap from, Fox? They are refugees because of Assad not ISIS. ISIS are bad, Assad is worse. Not helping them is an action of craven snivelling cowardice.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
How is it possible that the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been watching ISIS closely and were unable to capture non-encrypted communications from these terrorists? Since they didn't use encryption or other "evil" technology to hide what they were doing this should have been easy for the CIA and others to intercept communications and connect the dots that they are planning an attack in Paris. This is just another failure by the US intelligence community who could have connected the dots and warned French officials. In the Boston Marathon bombings they received warnings from Russian intelligence on one of the brothers and this brother even called his mom back home talking about attacking the USA but this didn't raise a single eyebrow in the US intelligence community. Snowden's revelations and encryption had nothing to do with this attack. This is an attempt by the US to use this tragedy to gain an upper hand in the war on encryption and pass legislation that they otherwise would be unable to do. Just like the Patriot Act and many other acts were passed right after the 9/11 attacks that again US intelligence failed to connect the dots even though intelligence sources warned that Al Qaeda planned some attack involving hijacked airliners and flight instructors expressed concern over students from the middle east taking flight lessons. If they connected the dots they could have stopped 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombings as well.
Encryption or not, tying the hands of the intelligence services did some harm. The very things that are asked of intelligence services would only serve to help people avoid them.
For someone that aided and abetted a traitorous criminal, I'm not sure that Greenwald can explain this one away. They have yet to answer how intelligence agencies are supposed to work when they're supposed to give notice at the worst of times.
Events like Paris are enabled and amplified by the Snowden-caused damage caused to intelligence collecting agencies.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You do understand that this stuff is classified. It can't just be released.
But what does that have anything to do with what I posted? Defeating strawmen makes you feel good or something?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I believe you mean they wipe their ass with the U.S. Constitution every time they take a shit.