Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Greenwald: NSA Stories Also Reveal Perilous State of Mainstream Journalism


Journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via satellite to hackers in Hamburg, Germany. (Screen grab)Journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via satellite over the weekend to an international audience gathered in Hamburg, Germany for the Chaos Computer Club meeting, an annual convention for the global hacker community.
In the nearly hour long keynote speech Greenwald confessed the importance of those committed to online freedom and the democratization of the internet. He spoke glowingly of his colleague and fellow journalist Laura Potrais—"without her, none of this would have happened"—and the whistleblower Edward Snowden who risked his life of freedom to reveal the scope of the surveillance network of the US National Security Agency.
"It is really hard to put into words what a profound effect his choice has had on me, and on Laura, and on the people with whom we've worked directly, and on people with whom we've indirectly worked, and then millions and millions of people around the world," Greenwald said of Snowden. "The courage and the principled act of conscience that he displayed will shape and inspire me for the rest of my life, and will inspire and convince millions and millions of people to take all sorts of acts that they might not have taken because they've seen what good for the world can be done by even a single individual."
He also took time to focus on the way the NSA revelations made possible by the leaked documents have helped expose the complacency of mainstream journalists too often willing to accept the government line as opposed to acting as an adversarial force against state and corporate power.
"It really is the central view of, certainly, American and British media stars," declared Greenwald, "that when, especially people with medals on their chests, who are called generals, but also high-ranking officials in the government, make claims, that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence, and that it's almost immoral to call them into question, or to question their veracity."
Video of the speech:
Greenwald's complete remarks, as transcribed at GitHub, follows:
Thank you everybody, for that warm welcome, and thank you as well to the Congress organizers for inviting me to speak.
My reaction, when I learned that I had been asked to deliver the keynote to this conference, was probably similar to the one some of you had, which was, "wait, what?"
[audience laughs]
And the reason is that my cryptographic and hacker skills are not exactly world-reknowned. You know, the story has been told many times of how I almost lost the biggest national security story in the last decade, at least because I found the installation of PGP to be insurmountably annoying and difficult.
[audience applauds]
There's another story, that's very similar, that illustrates the same point, that I actually don't think has been told before, which is: prior to my going to Hong Kong, I spent many hours with both Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden, trying to get up to speed on the basics of security technology that I would need in order to report on this story. They tried to tutor me in all sorts of programs, and finally concluded that the only one, at least at that time, for that moment, that I could handle, was TrueCrypt.
They taught me the basics of TrueCrypt, and when I went to Hong Kong, before I would go to sleep, I would play around with TrueCrypt. I kind of taught myself a couple of functions that they hadn't even taught me and really had this sort of confidence.
On the third or fourth day, I went over to meet both of them, and I was beaming with pride. I showed them all of the new things that I had taught myself how to do on TrueCrypt, and pronounced myself this Cryptographic Master. That I was really becoming advanced.
I looked at both of them, and I didn't see any return pride coming my way. Actually, what I saw was them trying, really hard, to avoid rolling their eyes out of their heads at me, to one another.
I said, "Why are you reacting that way? Why isn't that a great accomplishment?" They sort of let some moments go by. No one wanted to break it to me, until finally Snowden piped in and said, "TrueCrypt is really meant for your little kid brother to be able to master. It's not all that impressive."
[audience laughs]
I remember being very deflated, and kind of going back to the drawing board. Well, that was six months ago. In the interim, the importance of security technology and privacy technology has become really central to everything it is that I do. I really have learned an enormous amount, about both its importance and how it functions. And I'm far from the only one. I think one of the most significant outcomes of the last six months, but one of the most underdiscussed, is how many people now appreciate the importance of protecting the security of their communications.
If you go and look at my inbox from July, probably 3-5% of the emails I received were composed of PGP code. That percentage is definitely above 50% today, and probably well above 50%. When we talked about forming our new media company, we barely spent any time on the question. It was simply assumed that we were all going to use the most sophisticated encryption that was available to communicate with one another.
And I think, most encouragingly, whenever I'm contacted by anyone in journalism or activism, or any related fields, they either use encryption, or are embarrassed and ashamed that they don't, and apologize for the fact that they don't, and vow that they're soon going to.
It's a really remarkable sea-change, even from the middle of last year, when I would talk to some of the leading national security journalists, in the world, who were working on some of the most sensitive information, and virtually none of them knew what PGP or OTR or any other of the leading privacy technologies were, let alone how to use them. It's really encouraging to see this technology spreading so pervasively.
I think that this underscores an extremely important point, one that gives me great cause for optimism. I'm often asked whether I think that the stories that we've been learning over the last six months, the reporting and the debates that have arisen will actually change anything and impose any real limits on the US surveillance state.
Typically, when people think the answer to that question is yes, the thing that they cite most commonly is probably the least significant, which is that there's going to be some kind of debate, and our representatives in democratic government are going to respond to our debate, and they're going to impose limits with legislative reform.
None of that is likely to happen. The US government and its allies are not going to voluntarily restrict their own surveillance powers in any meaningful way. In fact, the tactic of the US government that we see over and over, that we've seen historically, is to do the very opposite, which is that when they get caught doing something that brings them disrepute and causes scandal and concern, they're very adept at pretending to reform themselves through symbolic gestures, while at the same time, doing very little other than placating citizen anger and often increasing their own powers that created the scandal in the first place.
We saw that in the mid-1970s, when there was serious concern and alarm in the United States, at least as much as there is now, if not more so, of the US government's surveillance capabilities and abuse. What the US government did in response was that they said, "Well, we're going to engage in all of these reforms, that will safeguard these powers. We're going to create a special court that the government needs to go to to get permission before they can target people with surveillance.
That sounded great, but then they created the court in the most warped way possible. It's a secret court, where only the government gets to show up, where only the most pro-national security judges are appointed. So this court gave the appearance of oversight, when in reality it's the most grotesque rubber stamp that is known to the Western world. They almost never disapprove of anything. It simply created the appearance that there was judicial oversight.
They also said they were going to create Congressional committees. The intelligence committees that are going to have as their main function overseeing the intelligence committees, and making certain that they no longer abuse their power. What they did instead was immediately install the most servile loyalists of the intelligence committees as head of this "oversight committee".
That's been going on for decades, and today we have two of the most slavish, pro-NSA members of Congress as the heads of these committees who are really there to bolster and justify everything and anything the NSA does, rather than engage in real oversight. So, again, it's designed to prettify the process while bringing about no real reform.
This process is now repeating itself. You see the President appoint a handful of his closest loyalists to this "independent White House panel" that pretended to issue a report that was very balanced and critical of the surveillance state, but in reality, introduced a variety of programs that, at the very best, would simply make these programs slightly more palatable from a public perspective, and in many cases, intensify the powers of the surveillance state, rather than reining them in in any meaningful way.
So the answer to whether we're or not going to have meaningful reform definitely does not lie in the typical processes of democratic accountability that we're all taught to respect. But they do lie elsewhere. It is possible that there will be courts that will impose some meaningful restrictions by finding that the programs are unconstitutional.
It's much more possible that other countries around the world who are truly indignant about the breaches of their privacy security will band together and create alternatives, either in terms of infrastructure, or legal regimes that will prevent the United States from exercising hedgemony over the Internet or make the cost of doing so far too high. I think, even more promising is the fact that large private corporations, Internet companies and others will start finally paying a price for their collaboration with this spying regime.
We've seen that already, when they've been dragged into the light, and finally now are forced to account for what it is that they're doing, and to realize that their economic interests are imperiled by the spying system, exercising their unparallelled power to demand that it be reined in. I think that all of those things are very possible as serious constraints on the surveillance state.
But I ultimately think that where the greatest hope lies is with the people in this room and the skills that all of you possess. The privacy technologies that have already been developed: the Tor Browser, PGP, OTR, and a variety of other products are making real inroads in preventing the US government and its allies from invading the sanctity of our communications.
None of them is perfect. None of them is invulnerable, but they all pose a serious obstacle to the US government's ability to continue to destroy our privacy. And ultimately, the battle over Internet freedom, the question of whether or not the Internet will really be this tool of liberation and democratization and whether it'll become the worst tool of human oppression in all of human history will be fought out, I think, primarily, on the technological battlefield.
The NSA and the US government certainly knows that. That's why Keith Alexander gets dressed up in his little costumes, his dad jeans and his edgy black shirt and goes to hacker conferences.
[audience applauds]
And it's why corporations in Silicon Valley, like Palantir Technologies, spend so much effort depicting themselves as these kind-of rebellious, pro-civil-libertarian factions, as they spend most of their time in secret working hand-in-hand with the intelligence community and the CIA to increase their capabilities, because they want to recruit particularly younger brainpower onto their side, the side of destroying privacy and putting the Internet to use for the world's most powerful factions.
What the outcome of this conflict is, what the Internet ultimately becomes really is not answerable in any definitive way now. It depends so much on what it is that we, as human beings, do. One of the most pressing questions is whether people like the ones who are in this room, and the people who have the skills that you have, now and in the future, will succumb to those temptations, and go to work for the very entities that are attempting to destroy privacy around the world, or whether you will put your talents, skills and resources, to defending human beings from those invasions, and continuing to create effective technologies to protect our privacy. I am very optimistic, because that power does lie in your hands.
[audience applauds]
I want to talk about another cause for optimism that I have, which is that the pro-privacy alliance is a lot healthier and more vibrant. It's a lot bigger and stronger than, I think, a lot of us, even who are in it, often appreciate and realize. Even more so, it is rapidly growing. And, I think, inexorably growing.
I know, for me, personally, every single thing that I have done, over the last six months, on this story, and all of the platforms I've been given, like this speech and the honors that I've received, and the accolades that I've been given, are ones that I share completely with two people who have been critically important to everything that I have done.
One of them is my unbelievably brave and incomparably brilliant collaborator, Laura Poitras.
[audience applauds]
You know, Laura doesn't get a huge amount of attention, which is how she likes it, but she really does deserve every last recognition, honour and award because although it sounds cliche, it really is the case that without her, none of this would have happened.
We have talked every single day, virtually, over the last six months. We have made almost every decision, certainly every significant one, in complete partnership and collaboration. Being able to work with somebody who has that high level of understanding about Internet security, about strategies for protecting privacy, has been completely indispensable to the success of what we've been able to achieve.
And then, the second person who has been utterly indispensable and deserves every last accolade, and to share in every last award, is my [? 14:46] of sorts, Edward Snowden.
[audience applauds]
It is really hard to put into words what a profound effect his choice has had on me, and on Laura, and on the people with whom we've worked directly, and on people with whom we've indirectly worked, and then millions and millions of people around the world. The courage and the principled act of conscience that he displayed will shape and inspire me for the rest of my life, and will inspire and convince millions and millions of people to take all sorts of acts that they might not have taken because they've seen what good for the world can be done by even a single individual.
[audience applauds]
But I think that it's so important to realize, and to me, this is the critical point, is that none of us, the three of us, did what we did in a vacuum. We were all inspired by people who have done similar things in the past. I'm absolutely certain that Edward Snowden was inspired in all sorts of ways by the heroism and self-sacrifice of Chelsea Manning.
[audience applauds and cheers]
And I'm quite certain that, in one way or another, she (Chelsea Manning) was inspired by the whole litany of whistleblowers and other people of conscience who came before her to blow the whistle on extreme levels of corruption, wrongdoing and illegality among the world's most powerful factions. They in turn were inspired, I'm certain, by the person who is one of my greatest political heroes, Daniel Ellsberg, who did this forty years ago.
[audience applauds]
Even beyond that, I think it is really important to realize that everything that has been allowed to happen over the last six months, and I think, any kind of significant leak and whistleblowing of classified information in the digital age, both past and future, owes a huge debt of gratitude to the organization which really pioneered the template, and that's WikiLeaks.
[audience applauds]
You know, we didn't completely copy, to the letter, the model of WikiLeaks. We modified it a little bit, just like WikiLeaks modified what it has decided it's best tactics and strategies, as it went along and I'm sure people who come after us will modify what we have done to improve on what we have done and to avoid some of our mistakes and some of the attacks that have actually been successful. But I think the point that is really underscored here, and it was underscored for me, probably most powerfully, when Edward Snowden was rescued from Hong Kong, from probable arrest and imprisonment for the next thirty years by the United States, not only by WikiLeaks, but by an extraordinarily courageous and heroic woman, Sarah Harrison.
There's a huge network of human beings, around the world, who believe in this cause, and not only believe in it, but are increasingly willing to devoote their energies and their resources, and their time, and to sacrifice for it. There's a reason that that's remarkable, and it kind of occurred to me in a telephone call that I had with Laura, probably two months or so ago. Although we've communicated every day, we've almost never communicated by telephone. One of the few exceptions was we were going to speak at an event at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and we got on the phone the night before to sort-of talk about what ground she would cover, and what ground I would cover.
What she said to me is, "You know, it's amazing if you think about it." She went through the list of people who have devoted themselves to transparency and the price that they have paid. She said Edward Snowden is stuck in Russia facing thirty years in prison, Chelsea Manning is in prison, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. People like Jeremy Hammond and Barret Brown are the subjects of grotesquely overzealous prosecutions by virtue of the acts of transparency they've engaged in. Even people like Jim Risen, who is with an organization like the New York Times, faces the possibility of prison for stories that he's published.
Laura and I have been advised by countless lawyers that it is not safe for us to even travel to our own country, and she said, "It's really a sign of how sick our political future has become, that the price for bringing transparency to the government, and for doing the job of the media, and the Congress, that they're not doing, is this extreme form of punishment."
You know, she was right, and she had a good point. I had a hard time disagreeing with the thing that anybody would. But I said, you know, there's actually another interesting point that that list reveals. The thing that's so interesting to me about that list is that it actually keeps growing, as long as it is. The reason why that's so amazing to me is because the reason the people on that list, and others like them, pay a price, is because the United States knows that it's only hope for continuing to maintain its regimen of secrecy, behind which it can engage in those radical and corrupt acts, is to intimidate, deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they would be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
[audience applauds]
It's an effective tactic. It works for some people, not because those people are cowardly, but because they're rational. It really is the case that the United States and the British government are not only willing, but able to essentially engage in any conduct, no matter how grotesque, no matter how extreme, no matter how lawless, with very little opposition that they perceive is enough to make them not want to do it. So there are activists who rationally conclude that it's not worth the price for me to pay in order to engage in that behaviour. That's why they continue to do it. But the paradox is that there are a lot of other people, I think even more people, who react in exactly the opposite way.
When they see the US and the UK government showing their true face, showing the extent to which they're willing to abuse their power, they don't become scared or deterred, they become even more emboldened. And the reason for that is that when you see that these governments are really capable of that level of abuse of power, you realize that you can no longer, in good conscience, stand by and do nothing. It becomes an even greater imperative for you to come forward and shine a light on what they're doing, and if you listen to any of those whistleblowers or activists, they'll all say the same thing.
It was a slow process to realize that the acts in which you engage are justified but they were finally convinced of it by the actions of these governments themselves. It's a really sweet irony, and I think it calls for serious optimism that it is the United States and its closest allies who are sowing the seeds of dissent, who are fuelling the fire of this activism with their own abusive behaviour.
[audience applauds]
Now, speaking of the attempt to intimidate and deter, and the like, I just want to spend a few minutes talking about the current posture of the United States government, with regard to Edward Snowden. It's become extremely clear, at this point, that the US government, from the highest levels on down, is completely committed to pursuing only one outcome. That outcome is one where Edward Snowden ends up spending several decades, if not the rest of his life, in a small cage, probably cut off, in terms of communication, with the rest of the world. And the reason why they're so intent on doing that is not hard to see. It's not because they're worried, that society needs to be protected from Edward Snowden, and from him repeating these actions. I think it's probably a pretty safe bet that Edward Snowden's security clearance is more or less permanently revoked.
[audience laughter]
The reason they're so intent on it is because they cannot allow Edward Snowden to live any sort of a decent and free life because they're petrified that that will inspire other people to follow his example, and to be unwilling to maintain this bond of secrecy when maintaining that bond does nothing but hide illegal and damaging conduct from the people who are most affected by it.
And what I find most amazing about that is not that the United States government is doing that, that's what they do. It's who they are. What I find amazing about it is that there are so many governments around the world, including ones that are capable of protecting his human rights, and who have been the biggest beneficiaries of his heroic revelations, who are willing to stand by and watch his human rights be crushed, him be imprisoned for the crime of showing the world what's being done to their privacy.
[audience applauds]
It has really been startling to watch governments, including some of the largest in Europe, and their leaders, go out in public and express intense indignation over the fact that the privacy of their citizens is being systematically breached, and genuine indignation when they learn that their privacy has also been targeted.
[audience laughs, applauds]
Yet, at the same time, the person who sacrificed in order to defend their basic human rights, their rights to privacy, is now having his own human rights targeted and threatened in recrimination. And I realize that for any country like Germany or France, or Brazil, or any other country around the world, to defy the dictates of the United States, that there's a cost of doing that. But there was an even greater cost to Edward Snowden to come forward and do what he did in defence of your rights, and yet he did it anyway.
[audience applauds]
I think that what's really important to realize is that countries have the legal and the international obligations, by virtues of the treaties that they've signed, to defend Edward Snowden from political persecution, and prevent him from being in a cage for the rest of his life, for having shone a light on systematic abuses of privacy, and other forms of abuses of secrecy. But they also have the ethical and moral obligation as the beneficiaries of his actions, to do what he did for them, which is to protect his rights in return.
[audience applauds]
I want to spend a little bit of time talking about one of my favorite topics, which is journalism. When I was in Hong Kong, with Laura and Ed Snowden, and I've been reflecting on this a lot in the course of writing a book that I've been writing over the course of the past couple of months about everything that's happened, one of the things I realized in looking back on that moment and also in talking to Laura about what took place there was that we spent at least as much time talking about issues relating to journalism and a free press as we did talking about surveillance policy. The reason is that we knew that what we were about to do would trigger as many debates over the proper role of journalists vis a vis the state and other power factions as it would the importance of Internet freedom and privacy, and the threat of the surveillance state.
We knew, in particular, that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies on which we were reporting, and who we were trying to expose, but also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the United States and British media.
[audience applauds]
And so we spent a great deal of time strategizing about it, we resolved that we were going to have to be very disruptive of the status quo. Not only the surveillance and political status quo, but also the journalistic status quo. And, I think, one of the ways we can see what it is we were targeting these and the behaviour of the media over the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost entirely without them and despite them.
One of the more remarkable things that has happened to me is I gave an interview, three weeks or so, or a month ago, on BBC, it was on this program called Hard Talk, and I, at one point, thought I had made what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversial observation, that the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and to get their agenda advanced, and that the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial to those people in power, and that the pronouncements that this interviewer was citing about how these government programs are critical to stopping terrorists should not be believed unless there's actual evidence shown, that they're actually true.
[audience applauds]
When I said that, he interrupted me, (and I'm sorry, I don't do pompous British accents well, so you'll just have to transpose it into your own imagination onto what I'm saying), and he said, "I just need to stop you, you have said something so remarkable!" He was like a Victorian priest scandalized by seeing a woman pull up her skirt a little bit above her ankles.
[audience laughs]
He said, "I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the United States and British government, are actually making false claims to the public! How can you possibly say something like that?"
[audience laughs, applauds]
And that is not abberational. It really is the central view of, certainly, American and British media stars, that when, especially people with medals on their chests, who are called generals, but also high-ranking officials in the government, make claims, that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence, and that it's almost immoral to call them into question, or to question their veracity.
Obviously, we went through the Iraq war, which those two very sane governments specifically and deliberately lied, repeatedly, to their people, over the course of two years, to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million people. But we've seen it continuously over the last six months as well. The very first document that Edward Snowden ever showed me was one that he explained would reveal unquestionable lying, by the senior national intelligence official of President Obama, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. That was the document that revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing a secret court to [? 32:47] phone companies to turn over, to the NSA, every single phone record, of every single telephone call, local and international, of every single American, even though that National Security official, James Clapper, before the Senate, just months earlier, was asked, "Does the NSA collect whole data about the communications of Americans?" and he answered, "No, sir," what we all now know is a complete lie.
There are other lies that the NSA and the US government's top officials have told. And by 'lie' I mean, advisedly, things they know to be false that they're saying anyway to convince people of what they want them to believe. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, repeatedly said that they are incapable of accounting for the exact number of calls and emails that they intercept from the American telecommunications system, even the program that we ended up exposing, Boundless Informant, counts with exact mathematical precision, exactly the data that he said he is incapable of providing. Or the NSA and the GCHQ, which have repeatedly said, that the purpose of these programs is to protect people from terrorism, and to safeguard national security, and that they never, unlike those evil thieves, engage in spying for economic reasons.
And yet, report after report that we revealed, from spying on the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras, to the spying on [? 34:19 -> 34:22] American states at economic summits where economic accords were negotiated, to energy companies around the world in Europe, Asia and Latin America, just completely negate these claims, prove that they are lies. And then we have President Obama, who repeatedly says things like, "We cannot, and do not, spy on the [? 34:41 -> 34:42] communications of Americans without warrants, even though the 2008 law that was enacted by the Congress, of which it was a part, had [? 34:49 -> 34:50] the US government to ease up on American [? 34:53] without warrants.
And what you see here, is real lying. And yet, at the same time, the same media that sees it acts scandalized if you suggest that their claims should not be taken at face value, without evidence, because their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight.
[audience applauds]
Just one more point on that, which is to understand just how the American and British media function. You can pretty much turn on the TV, at any moment, or open an Internet website, and see very brave American journalists calling Edward Snowden a criminal and demanding that he be extradited to the United States, and prosecuted and imprisoned. They're very very brave when it comes to declaring people who are scorned in Washington, and who have no power, and have become marginalized. They're very brave in condemning them, standing up to them, and demanding that the rule of law be applied to them faithfully. "He broke the law, he must pay the consequences."
And yet, the top national security official of the United States government went to the senate and lied to their faces, everybody now knows, which is at least much of a serious crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of.
[audience applauds]
You will be very hard pressed to find even a single one of those brave, intrepid journalists, ever thinking about, let alone expressing the idea that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper ought to be subject to the rule of law and be prosecuted and imprisoned for the crimes that he committed because the role of the US media and their British counterparts is to be voices for those with the greatest power, and to protect their interests and serve them.
Everything that we've done over the last six months, and everything that we've decided over the last month about forming a new media organization, is all about trying to subvert that process and reanimate, and reinstill the process of journalism for what it was intended to be, which was as a true adversarial force, a check against those with the greatest power.
[audience applauds]
So I just want to close with one last point, which is, the nature of the surveillance state that we've reported over the last six months. Every time I do an interview, people ask similar questions such as, what is the most significant story that you have revealed, or what is it that we have learned about the last story that you just published. And what I've really begun saying is that there really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed.
And that is, and I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama, it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative, it is literally true, that the goal of the NSA, and its Five Eyes partners in the English-speaking world: Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK, is to eliminate privacy globally. To ensure that there can be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance network.
They want to make sure that all forms of human communication, by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities, are collected, monitored, stored, and analyzed by that agency, and by their allies. That means that to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state. You don't need hyperbole to make that point, and you don't need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little crevice on the planet where some form of communication might take place without their being able to invade it.
One of the stories that we're working on now (I used to get in trouble when I was at The Guardian for previewing my stories, I'm not at The Guardian anymore so I'm going to do it anyway), is: the NSA and the GCHQ are being driven crazy by the idea that you can go on an airplane and use certain cellphone devices or Internet services and be away from their prying eyes for a few hours at a time. They are obsessed with finding ways to invade the systems of online, onboard Internet services and mobile phone services. The very idea that human beings can communicate, even for a few moments, without them being able to collect, and store, analyze, and monitor what it is that we're saying, is simply intolerable. That is their institutional mandate.
And when I get asked questions, when I do interviews in different countries, well, "Why would they want to spy on this official?" Or, "Why would they want to spy on Sweden?" Or, "Why would they want to target this company here?" The premiss of that question is really flawed. The premiss of the question is that the NSA and the GCHQ need a specific reason to target somebody for surveillance. That is not how they think. They target every form of communication that they can possibly get their hands on. And if you think about what individual privacy does for us, as human beings, let alone what it does for us on a political level, that it really is the thing that lets us explore boundaries and engage in creativity, and use the mechanisms of dissent without fear. When you think about the world in which privacy is allowed to be eliminated, you're really talking about eliminating everything that makes it valuable to be a free individual.
The surveillance state, by its necessity, by its very existence, breeds conformity, because when human beings know that they're always susceptible to being watched, even if they're not always being watched, the choices that they make are far more constrained, are far more limited, cling far more closely to orthodoxy, than when they can act in the private realm, and that's precisely why the NSA and GCHQ, and the world's most powerful [? 41:49] throughout history now, always as their first goal, have the elimination of privacy at the top of their list, because it's what ensures that human beings can no longer resist the decrees that they're issuing.
[audience applauds]
Well, thank you, once again very much.
_________________________________
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Shopping for Spy Gear:Catalog Advertises NSA Toolbox


By Jacob Appelbaum, Judith Horchert and Christian Stöcker
Entering through the back door: A State Trooper truck is seen in front of the Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters of the National Security Agency. Zoom
DPA
Entering through the back door: A State Trooper truck is seen in front of the Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters of the National Security Agency.
After years of speculation that electronics can be accessed by intelligence agencies through a back door, an internal NSA catalog reveals that such methods already exist for numerous end-user devices.
Editor's note: This article accompanies our main feature story on the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit. You can read it here.

When it comes to modern firewalls for corporate computer networks, the world's second largest network equipment manufacturer doesn't skimp on praising its own work. According to Juniper Networks' online PR copy, the company's products are "ideal" for protecting large companies and computing centers from unwanted access from outside. They claim the performance of the company's special computers is "unmatched" and their firewalls are the "best-in-class." Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off -- the United States' National Security Agency.
ANZEIGE
Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company's digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry -- including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.
A 50-Page Catalog
These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives -- from computing centers to individual computers, and from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA's specialists seem already to have gotten past them.
This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets' data. The catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000.
In the case of Juniper, the name of this particular digital lock pick is "FEEDTROUGH." This malware burrows into Juniper firewalls and makes it possible to smuggle other NSA programs into mainframe computers. Thanks to FEEDTROUGH, these implants can, by design, even survive "across reboots and software upgrades." In this way, US government spies can secure themselves a permanent presence in computer networks. The catalog states that FEEDTROUGH "has been deployed on many target platforms."
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Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

By SPIEGEL Staff
Photo Gallery: A Powerful NSA Toolbox Photos
Google Earth
The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.
In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.
ANZEIGE
In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States' foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA's radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again. It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA's work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
On-Call Digital Plumbers
One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years -- the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA's top operative unit -- something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.
According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.
The unit is "akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community," says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. "Getting the ungettable" is the NSA's own description of its duties. "It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important," one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen." The unit, it goes on, has "access to our very hardest targets."
A Unit Born of the Internet
Defining the future of her unit at the time, she wrote that TAO "needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations," and that it must "support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations." To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire "pervasive, persistent access on the global network." An internal description of TAO's responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit's tasks. In other words, the NSA's hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries -- nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.
Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry's BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a "sustained TAO operation," one document states.
This TAO unit is born of the Internet -- created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world's population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning -- to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.

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Jobless Benefits Cut For 1.3 Million, Despite Highest Long-term Unemployment Since World War II

democracynow democracynow


   



Published on Dec 30, 2013
http://www.democracynow.org - On Saturday, 1.3 million Americans lost their last lifeline from the federal government: an emergency unemployment insurance program. Although long-term unemployment is still at its highest level since World War II, Congress failed to renew the program in the budget deal it passed just before adjourning for winter recess. The program provided up to 47 weeks of supplemental unemployment insurance payments to jobless people looking for work. Now, just a quarter of unemployed Americans will receive jobless benefits -- the smallest proportion in half a century. Allowing the program to sunset is expected to have wide-scale ramifications for the economy at large, axing job growth by around 300,000 positions next year and pushing hundreds of thousands of households to the brink of poverty. We are joined by Imara Jones, economic justice contributor for Colorlines.com.



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Monday, December 30, 2013

Fast and Furious: FBI Now Linked to Murder of U.S. Border Agent

The New American

Written by 

In the latest explosive twist to the Obama administration’s deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal, one of the key whistleblowers has now identified the FBI as a crucial player in the infamous 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. According to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Special Agent John Dodson, the criminals responsible for murdering border agent Terry were actually working for the two FBI operatives at the center of the Obama administration’s deadly plot to arm Mexican drug cartels.
As The New American and other sources reported in early 2011, the ATF was linked to Terry’s murder almost from the start. Indeed, two of the weapons found at the murder scene in Peck Canyon were traced back to Fast and Furious. The slaying of the elite federal border agent, who was killed near the U.S.-Mexico border by drug-cartel operatives armed by the Obama administration via the ATF, was the last straw for some of the officials involved in the scandal.
After learning that the murder weapons were from Fast and Furious — and that disgraced Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department was engaged in an attempted cover-up — brave federal agents knew it was time to go to Congress and the press to blow the whistle. Now, Special Agent Dodson, a key figure who helped expose the administration’s gun-running scandal, has added even more scandalous revelations to the mix: The bandits who shot Terry were likely working for two FBI operatives at the time.Of course, it has been common knowledge since at least early 2012 that the two Fast and Furious “drug lords” supposedly being “investigated” by the Obama administration were working for the FBI all along. Official documents revealed that the FBI operatives, who were using U.S. taxpayer funds to purchase weapons for cartels, were considered “national security assets,” “off limits,” and “untouchable.” In all, thousands of high-powered American guns were provided to cartels by the administration through the deadly scheme.
The latest revelations suggest the rabbit hole goes even deeper. According to allegations made by Dodson in a recent interview with the Arizona Republic, Terry’s killers — employed by the FBI operatives in question — were sent to the border for a “drug rip-off” mission based on “intelligence” from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The alleged goal of helping the FBI’s men steal the large drug shipment was supposedly to increase their clout among the duo’s fellow criminals, the whistleblower argued.
“I don’t think the [FBI] assets were part of the rip-off crew,” Dodson told the newspaper, echoing accusations made in his new book about blowing the whistle on Fast and Furious, dubbed The Unarmed Truth. “I think they were directing the rip crew.” (Emphasis added.) In his book, which the Obama administration unsuccessfully tried to censor by blocking publication, Dodson also argues that the DEA had and shared information on the massive drug shipment going through Peck Canyon the night Terry was killed.
In fact, the whistleblower says, the federal drug agency may have even orchestrated the shipment, an allegation unlikely to surprise analysts who follow the issues. The DEA — investigated by Congress last year for laundering Mexican cartel profits — also allegedly shared the information it had on the shipment with its counterparts at the FBI. Then, Dodson suggests, the FBI proceeded to tip off its own operatives with news that the drugs would be “theirs for the taking.”
“Stealing such a shipment would increase the clout of the FBI informants in the cartel organization they had penetrated,” Dodson argues in his book, “and thus lead to better intel for them in the future.” All of the agencies implicated in the scandal have refused to comment thus far. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been working furiously to unlawfully conceal documents and evidence from congressional investigators.
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  Guardianlv

Operation Fast and Furious Twist, DOJ Involvement Deeper Than ATF


Among the many serious scandals that have plagued Barack Obama’s presidency and for which nobody in charge has ever been held accountable, Operation Fast and Furious was one which the White House had hoped was forgotten, but the original ATF whistleblower has revealed a new twist. Attorney General Eric Holder, who previously lied to Congress about his knowledge of the botched illegal gun-running scheme, cannot escape the obvious fact that he is still responsible, ultimately, for the entire tragic and criminal enterprise.
Fast and Furious was an ATF sting operation that allowed associates of Mexican drug cartels to enter the United States and make straw purchases of firearms in US gun stores, before returning to Mexico with the weapons and selling them to the cartels. The stated objective was to track and apprehend senior cartel members but this never happened; the weapons were not tracked effectively – if at all – and most of them disappeared; some being recovered later at the scenes of numerous murders.
Since an ATF agent blew the whistle on the operation – which began in 2009 – congressional hearings have failed to reach any actionable conclusions; the Justice Department (DoJ), of which the ATF is a branch, has refused to hand over most of the documentation relating to this criminal enterprise. The Attorney General himself lied to Congress when he told the hearing that he had known nothing about the operation until just a couple of weeks before the hearings. The oversight committee later acquired internal documents that proved Holder had known about the operation much earlier.


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Obama False on Fast & Furious: Wrongly Claims Operation Started Under Bush

oversightandreform oversightandreform








Published on Sep 21, 2012
Learn More at http://www.FastandFuriousInvestigatio...

In a Univision interview, President Barack Obama discusses Operation Fast and Furious and Attorney General Eric Holder's role in the operation. Obama falsely states that Operation Fast and Furious started under the Bush administration. A recent report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice reveals that 14 top officials in the DOJ and ATF were involved in the gunwalking operation, and 2 officials resigned following the release of the Inspector General report.

9-17-12 Univision interview with President Barack Obama
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ATF tries to block whistleblowing agent’s Fast and Furious book

1st Amendment battle over ‘gun-walking’ expose

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The Washington Times

EXCLUSIVE:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is blocking the main whistleblower in the Fast and Furious case from publishing a book, claiming his retelling of the Mexico “gun-walking” scandal will hurt morale inside the embattled law enforcement agency, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times.


ATF’s dispute with Special Agent John Dodson is setting up a First Amendment showdown that is poised to bring together liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and conservatives in Congress who have championed Mr. Dodson’s protection as a whistleblower.
The ACLU is slated to become involved in the case Monday, informing ATF it is representing Mr. Dodson and filing a formal protest to the decision to reject his request to publish the already written book, sources told The Times, speaking only on the condition of anonymity.
The battle also could have repercussions on Capitol Hill, where the two lead investigators who helped uncover the Fast and Furious scandal, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, Calif. Republican, had written a foreword to the book, the sources said.
ATF Special Agent John Dodson warned his superiors of the Fast and Furious investigation, "I think it's going to end bad. Are you prepared to go to an agent's funeral?" He tells the story in a newly published book. (Associated Press)
ATF Special Agent John Dodson warned his superiors of the Fast and ... more >
ATF officials declined Sunday night to discuss Mr. Dodson’s specific matter, citing personnel privacy. But the officials said it was possible for an agent to be rejected for publishing a book for pay but get permission to publish it for free. No manuscript for any Fast and Furious book has received approval for unpaid publication, however, the officials said.
A source famiiiar with Mr. Dodson’s book request told the Times that ATF officials never inquired whether he was seeking to publish the book for pay or free, and that the rejection came only after his superiors in Washington and Arizona asked to read the manuscript.
Mr. Dodson was the first ATF special agent to go public in 2011 with allegations that his supervisors had authorized the flow of semi-automatic weapons into Mexico instead of interdicting them, touching off a scandal that toppled most of the top leadership of ATF in Washington and Phoenix. The controversy also led to angry recriminations in Mexico, which dealt with a wave of violent crime linked to the weapons, and high-profile congressional hearings that embarrassed the Obama administration.



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On Defensive, JPMorgan Hired China’s Elite



JPMorgan Chase's offices in Hong Kong. The bank and its rivals have hired well-connected employees in China.

Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times JPMorgan Chase’s offices in Hong Kong. The bank and its rivals have hired well-connected employees in China.
In a series of late-night emails, JPMorgan Chase executives in Hong Kong lamented the loss of a lucrative assignment.
“We lost a deal to DB today because they got chairman’s daughter work for them this summer,” one JPMorgan investment banking executive remarked to colleagues, using the initials for Deutsche Bank.
The loss of that business in 2009, coming after rival banks landed a string of other deals, stung the JPMorgan executives. For Wall Street banks enduring slowdowns in the wake of the financial crisis, China was the last great gold rush. As its economy boomed, China’s state-owned enterprises were using banks to raise billions of dollars in stock and debt offerings — yet JPMorgan was falling further behind in capturing that business.
The solution, the executives decided over email, was to embrace the strategy that seemed to work so well for rivals: hire the children of China’s ruling elite.
“I am supportive to have our own” hiring strategy, a JPMorgan executive wrote in the 2009 email exchange.
In the months and years that followed, emails and other confidential documents show, JPMorgan escalated what it called its “Sons and Daughters” hiring program, adding scores of well-connected employees and tracking how those hires translated into business deals with the Chinese government. The previously unreported emails and documents — copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times — offer a view into JPMorgan’s motivations for ramping up the hiring program, suggesting that competitive pressures drove many of the bank’s decisions that are now under federal investigation.
The references to other banks in the emails also paint for the first time a broad picture of questionable hiring practices by other Wall Street banks doing business in China — some of them hiring the same employees with family connections. Since opening a bribery investigation into JPMorgan this spring, the authorities have expanded the inquiry to include hiring at other big banks. Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have previously been identified as coming under scrutiny. A sixth bank, UBS, is also facing scrutiny, according to interviews with current and former Wall Street employees. Neither JPMorgan nor any of the other banks have been accused of wrongdoing.
Still, the investigations have put Wall Street on high alert, said the current and former employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Some banks, they said, have adopted an unofficial hiring freeze for well-connected job candidates in China.
The investigation has also had a chilling effect on JPMorgan’s deal-making in China, interviews show. The bank, seeking to build good will with federal authorities, has considered forgoing certain deals in China and abandoned one assignment altogether.
The pullback comes just as JPMorgan had regained a significant share of the Chinese market. Its deal-making revived a few years after it escalated the Sons and Daughters program in 2009, an analysis of data from Thomson Reuters shows. In 2009, JPMorgan was 13th among banks winning business in China and Hong Kong. By 2013, once other banks had scaled back their Chinese business, it had climbed to No. 3. Other data shows that the bank was eighth in 2009 and — after losing market share in 2011 and 2012 — is now No. 4 in deal-making. While the hiring boom coincided with the increased business, the data does not establish a causal link between the two.
Yet the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, which are leading the JPMorgan inquiry, are examining whether the bank improperly won some of those deals by trading job offers for business with state-owned Chinese companies. The S.E.C. and the prosecutors, which might ultimately conclude that none of the hiring crossed a legal line, did not comment.
JPMorgan, which is cooperating with the investigation, also declined to comment. There is no indication that executives at the bank’s headquarters in New York were aware of the hiring practices. The six other banks facing scrutiny from the S.E.C. declined to comment on the investigations, which are at an early stage.
Economic forces fueled the hiring boom by Wall Street banks.
An era of financial deregulation in Washington coincided with a roaring economy in China, enabling questionable hiring practices to escape government scrutiny. The hiring became so widespread over the last two decades that banks competed over the most politically connected recent college graduates, known in China as princelings.
Goldman’s employee roster briefly included the grandson of the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. And Feng Shaodong, the son-in-law of a high-ranking Communist Party official, worked with Merrill Lynch.
In recent months, though, federal authorities have adopted a tougher stance toward Wall Street firms suspected of trading jobs for government business. The S.E.C. and the Brooklyn prosecutors have bolstered enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which effectively bans United States corporations from giving “anything of value” to foreign officials to gain “any improper advantage” in retaining business. JPMorgan would have violated the 1977 law if it had acted with “corrupt” intent.

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