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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."

22 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Good old fashioned crisis management... by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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

    1. Re:Good old fashioned crisis management... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

      I see that quote a lot. But I never see a source for it. It sounds too on the nose to be believable. So this time I decided to check it out myself. Turns out that is not what he said. And to misquote him like that is to mislead. Here's the actual source:

      You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week.

      He elaborated: "Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
      -- http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

      As you can see, what he was talking about was work that had been postponed because it wasn't considered urgent enough. That's a completely different meaning than your version which boils down to tricking people while they aren't thinking clearly.

      > Aren't politics grand?

      Indeed it is. I hope you can recognize the role you just played. At best you were lied to and used to further someone else's agenda, at worst you deliberately set out to deceive in order to further your agenda.

    2. Re:Good old fashioned crisis management... by Jack+Griffin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In fact raising Snowden makes me even more worried because it demonstrates the people supposedly with the "intelligence" are as dumb as planks.
      The CIA needs to be dismantled and replaced with something a bit better than this

  2. Re:Smearing? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He's a traitor by any definition.

    Except for the one in the Constitution, which would be, y'know, the legal one in his case.

  3. Re:Smearing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    How are they smearing him, again? He's a traitor by any definition. He's lucky to not be executed.

    Nice try CIA.

  4. Where was the CIA, FBI and NSA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Smearing? by GreatKhalCaleb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Hero by anarkhos · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  7. Manipulation of Big Media is shocking by meadow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  8. Re:Smearing? by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Smearing? by jcr · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."
  10. Because the CIA is evil. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Because the CIA is evil. by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Last I checked, the CIA wasn't beheading little girls.

      Only blowing them up with drone strikes and bombs as "collateral damage". And supporting budding dictators who later behead little girls.

  11. Re: Snowden unquestionably hurt the intel communit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That he hurry the Intel community isn't the point either. He showed them to be lying to Congress and operating illegally.

  12. Re:Smearing? by guestapoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:Smearing? by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since when have any of those people really cared about what the Constitution says?

  14. Re:Smearing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean he exposed the real traitors to the US constitution, AKA the US intelligence services?

  15. Read the article comments by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!
  16. Re:Smearing? by pellik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They care a great deal about what the constitution says. The problem is that they don't seem to care what the constitution means.

  17. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  18. Re:Smearing? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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.

  19. Re:Smearing? by rainer_d · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Turns out, the head of the group who ran the Paris attacks even gave an interview to a radical Islamic publication back in February, where he got as close to announcing the attacks as you can get without giving a date.

    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