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Edward Snowden Says a Report Critical To an NSA Lawsuit Is Authentic (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: An unexpected declaration by whistleblower Edward Snowden filed in court [last] week adds a new twist in a long-running lawsuit against the NSA's surveillance programs. The case, filed by the EFF a decade ago, seeks to challenge the government's alleged illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of Americans, who are largely covered under the Fourth Amendment's protections against warrantless searches and seizures. It's a big step forward for the case, which had stalled largely because the government refused to confirm that a leaked document was authentic or accurate. News of the surveillance broke in 2006 when an AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the NSA was tapping into AT&T's network backbone. He alleged that a secret, locked room -- dubbed Room 641A -- in an AT&T facility in San Francisco where he worked was one of many around the U.S. used by the government to monitor communications -- domestic and overseas. President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to secretly wiretap Americans' communications shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Much of the EFF's complaint relied on Klein's testimony until 2013, when Snowden, a former NSA contractor, came forward with new revelations that described and detailed the vast scope of the U.S. government's surveillance capabilities, which included participation from other phone giants -- including Verizon (TechCrunch's parent company). Snowden's signed declaration, filed on October 31, confirms that one of the documents he leaked, which the EFF relied heavily on for its case, is an authentic draft document written by the then-NSA inspector general in 2009, which exposed concerns about the legality of the Bush's warrantless surveillance program -- Stellar Wind -- particularly the collection of bulk email records on Americans. "I read its contents carefully during my employment," he said in his declaration. "I have a specific and strong recollection of this document because it indicated to me that the government had been conducting illegal surveillance."
Much of the EFF's complaint relied on Klein's testimony until 2013, when Snowden, a former NSA contractor, came forward with new revelations that described and detailed the vast scope of the U.S. government's surveillance capabilities, which included participation from other phone giants -- including Verizon (TechCrunch's parent company). Snowden's signed declaration, filed on October 31, confirms that one of the documents he leaked, which the EFF relied heavily on for its case, is an authentic draft document written by the then-NSA inspector general in 2009, which exposed concerns about the legality of the Bush's warrantless surveillance program -- Stellar Wind -- particularly the collection of bulk email records on Americans. "I read its contents carefully during my employment," he said in his declaration. "I have a specific and strong recollection of this document because it indicated to me that the government had been conducting illegal surveillance."
Surveillance dates back to the 60s and 70s in the US, if not earlier. It just became expanded and more accepted after 9/11. People went from happy ex-hippies to scared suburbanite sheep in one day. Bleating... "anything to keeeeeep uuusssssss ssaaaaaaafe."
The Federal Government is corrupt beyond fixing. Which is why I joined thousands of others to concentrate our efforts â" the Free State Project. Itâ(TM)s also why I use Tor, Monero, Signal, and look forward to getting a Purism phone. They will try to surveil; we will encrypt and use open systems!
Snowden should be pardoned and welcomed home for the good deeds he did for us.
He broke the law because the law was being abused, and he revealed the ways that our government was boldfacedly betraying all of us and lying to us. He didn't weaken national security, he gave us the evidence we needed to call our government on their treachery.
IANAL, but the inability to cross-examine Snowden might well make this inadmissible.
(And that's without expressing my highly unfavorable opinion of the author.)
But what if they didn't, though? What if that perception of that particular public preference was just the symptoms of coordinated astro-turfing already, way back then? What if we all fell for it? I know I was one of the people clamoring against creating a giant creeping national security liability under the guise of national security. Weren't you, too? What if we all were? What if nobody wanted this except for a handful of rich and viciously evil traitors or foreign nationals? What if they tricked us into all blaming each other for it instead of taking action before it was too late?
It is the nature of governance that it corrupts. No government can ever be kept free of corruption, it's impossible.
The only thing we can do is keep it accountable. The more public their actions, the better behaved they are. Public accountability is the only thing we have that works.
Tools that allow us to sneak around unseen may help us to do things of which they disapprove (including completely legal things such as honest journalism and so forth), but it won't stop them from being corrupt nor from harming us with their corruption. A shadow state is not a free state; it is merely an anarchic one (which, as we all know, is inherently unstable and vulnerable to malicious criminal elements). There can be no "final victory" over corruption, not by means of encryption, not by any other means.
Apply political pressure towards the goal of keeping our leaders' actions visible and accountable. That is how we keep their evil in check, and endure.
Sadly, the average American DID turn into a scared lemming after 9/11 and was willing to accept a high level of inconvenience and surveillance just to be "saaaaafe."
The sea change for post-Vietnam American defensive-aggression came in 1979 with the Iran hostage crisis. I was there and saw it happen. The 9/11 attack was just a further and much greater escalation.
But you don't actually know that. You didn't talk to them each personally. Nobody did. You couldn't possibly have even got a reasonable sized sample set by now if you had tried.
This is why reading comprehension is important, folks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Then surveys wouldn't indicate that many, if not most, Americans support surveillance.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I really enjoyed that book when I was a kid. (Unfortunately, it's got rather a lot of magical thinking, around the nature of the weapons themselves.)
If there were a correlation between gun ownership and freedom, you'd expect the top 10 gun owning nations to largely overlap the top 10 most free nations. Oh well, correlation does not imply causation.
To think about it another way, and quoting some pop culture: "Culture eats Strategy for breakfast". Countries with a culture of democracy don't mind if their citizens have guns---Switzerland and New Zealand both have quite a few guns, but very strict laws about their ownership. Without the culture, giving your citizens guns doesn't make them democratic, it just makes more of them dead.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Project SHAMROCK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and Project MINARET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... show the domestic spying goes back generations with no protections against collect it all.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
https://www.fff.org/2014/09/12/remembering-the-criminal-conviction-of-the-director-of-the-cia/
Using that twisted logic you could argue with is more important in the constitutional pecking order. The CIA or whoever do not want black letter law interpretation to go to trial. A reasonable person would say doing a Helms is OK - if you had no jurisprudence awareness.
No, but I personally watched conservatives (the traditional check on this type of thing) quickly become pro mass surveillance.
And it wasn't until the Snownden leaks that anyone really seemed to care.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Do you have any citation for that?
I don't think Gallop polls elections, and the polls in general showed a very close race (and were about as accurate as any given year).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You are correct about the nature of the problem, so one option is a heuristic. If government is self-replacing, it never lasts long enough to corrupt.
A second option is to have no common vector. Have the second house be chosen at random from a meritocracy or a noocracy. Hybrids are stronger than pure systems. Fixed, single terms from a random population of achievers and thinkers mean all the attack vectors for a democracy don't work. There are new attack vectors, but they don't work on a democracy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If your Gallup Poll is based upon voter oppinions while your electoral results are based on jerymandering/collusion/vote rigging then those results make sense.
A constantly changing government of amateurs means the beurocracy runs the country. Experienced politicians are better at the job. Outlaw politicians taking money from anyone who can't vote for him/her. Have a cap on donations from a single person. Force politician to put their investments/company in a blind trust while in office. Adopt a Proportional Representation system, so you don't have a government that 2/3 of the voters voted against and voting third party isn't throwing away your vote.
That's why democracy is the best system we know for the long term. It surely isn't perfect, far from it, but it allows moderation of the corruption as long as the system is balanced.
For the legislative branch, make it like jury duty. Itâ(TM)s not like these fucking idiots know what the hell theyre doing. Didnâ(TM)t know anything about the shit they vote on. They go ask a few questions and talk to a few advisors. Anybody can fucking do that. The problem with people that of been in there so long is that they know where all the bodies are buried. They use that to get their way and thats part of the reason why they are corrupt. Someone like you or me should go to their mailbox, opened up, and then say shit I have senate duty this year.
Every time you Give examples of hypocrisy, for either fucking party, both the candidates and all their supporters rally to explain how it is not hypocrisy because they dont believe in such a word. Give examples of hypocrisy, for either fucking party, both the candidate and all their supporters ralley to explain how it is not hypocrisy because they dont believe in such a word.
And if you do not believe the media is purposely against you, think about the way they demonize the word nationalism. Doesnt the idea of country first also mean not putting our fucking nose in other countries business? But the media will make that into an evil evil idea. However will they sell newspapers if we are not always at each others throat?
For participating in helping the US gov spy on US citizens in many different ways, from email to financial transactions to listening in on phone calls after 9/11. It was thrown out by the judge.
The claim was the government was looking for terrorists but the fact of the matter is that is as insane as looking for a needle in a hay producing state. Given the fact that any terrorist group if using such vulnerable communication would simply use common phrases of which they would have different meaning among themselves but perceived by others as common. In a word or two, double speak. And we all know how well skilled politicians are at this.
Ultimately, the current lawsuit regardless if won or lost is not going to stop government unconstitutional spying on US citizens. How to know this: Understand the pentagon cannot account for 10's of trillion of US taxpayer dollars spent. Why? Because they have used it to develop and expand the Deep State spying facilities and technology as Snowden has referred to but without mention of where they got the funds from. What lead up to 9/11? The Trillion Dollar Bet world stock market draining South East Asia finances, Indonesia was hit hard and at that time it had, by CIA stats 88% Muslim. 9/11 a cover up of a massive theft? Building 7 contained the SEC investigation into the this stock market matter and the pentagon, it was the accounting department destroyed. Enron, Worldcom, etc, investors in the bet w/o telling their share holders what they were doing (embezzlement?) ?
Given such a buildup expansion of the deep state spying as Snowden has made the world aware of, who really thinks all this buildup is going to be dismantled?
Vault 7....