Posts from — August 2013

Dr Cole gives his reaction to Obama’s press conference:

President Obama gave a news conference on Friday in which he addressed the controversy over Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding NSA spying on the American people.

This issue is a very difficult one for Mr. Obama, given that he came to it from civil libertarian position as a senator, but now is president. When you are president, you are president of the nearly one million NSA employees and contractors, who become your constituency– not to mention the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, much of the military, the Intelligence and Research Division of the State Department, etc., etc.
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Among the more shameful episodes in the Obama presidency has been his vindictiveness toward whistleblowers and his and Eric Holder’s eagerness to use the fascistic 1917 Espionage Act against them. Seymour Hersh, who provoked the last big reforms of US intelligence, would have been charged with espionage by Barack Obama and would either have been executed or would have been given life in prison. In this regard, Obama’s record is worse than Nixon’s.
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Mr. Obama at one point in his press conference called on Edward Snowden to come back to the United States and argue his case. I mean, really. This kind of disinformation and grandstanding can’t possibly be necessary, even given the constraints mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Mr. Obama knows very well that if Snowden returned to the US, we would never ever hear from him ever again. He’d go straight to a maximum security prison for the rest of his days on earth and die there.
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Mr. Obama is a very busy man and it is possible that he hasn’t read all of Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian articles on the Snowden revelations. He should. He is being briefed on this matter by people with a vested interest in keeping the surveillance programs going, and is not being given the whole truth.

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I’ve been thinking about the revelations about the Prism program, and have noted how this will impact the sale of Cloud services to foreign companies, as will the loss of secure e-mail services provided by companies like Lavabit and Silent Circle. Then it occurred to me that many US companies will be looking for those same services someplace else, because they have things they don’t want people to have access to, be they governments or hackers.

In ancient times all of the big corporations had their own IT infrastructure, but to increase profits more and more have out-sourced these functions. That means that ‘trade secrets’ and other confidential materials, like bids, are now subject to being hoovered up by NSA. If I’m in one of these companies and I see the government secrets that Snowden was able to access, I have to believe that there are probably people working for these contractors who might want to make a few extra bucks by selling my secrets to the highest bidder.

If you have ever had to deal with a Fortune 50 non-disclosure agreement, you would understand how concerned these corporations are. I will be able to talk freely about what I did at NSA at some point, but never about what I learned at certain clients, even who those clients were.

Zero thinks that he has a message problem, because people don’t believe him when he lies about spying on us. He wants us to believe that he is lying with our best interests at heart.

NPR has the transcript of today’s news conference.

Marcy was all over Zero’s failure to tell the truth.

Digby went after the mythical review that was going to take place, ‘real soon now’, the review that Mark Udall & Ron Wyden have been calling for for years, the review that Edward Snowden was in fact waiting for when he voted for Zero. To emphasize – Edward Snowden voted for Obama in the HOPE that Obama would CHANGE what was going on, and decided to leak when it became obvious that things were getting worse.

Zero’s plan obviously has to start with “a blue-ribbon panel” to study the issue. That is the standard stall of governments at every level when they are caught screwing up. But he is also talking about appointing a ‘civil liberties advocate’ to the FISA court, who will be in exactly the same box as Senators Udall & Wyden, knowing that evil is occurring but unable to say anything because it’s all classified. There is also going to be a ‘civil liberties watchdog’ at NSA who will have no one to watch as everything is being done at remote locations by contractors.

The American people got the real message from the documents that Edward Snowden provided – our government is spying on all of us, and the only message we want from the government is that the spying has stopped.

As the owner of Lavabit writes “This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

Juanita in comments alerted me to a story I found on the Beeb: Snowden link to encrypted email service closes

Two encrypted email services have closed down for reasons linked to US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.

Texas-based Lavabit service has shut down but said legal reasons prevented it explaining why.

Correspondents say Lavabit appears to have been in a legal battle to stop US officials accessing customer details.

In addition, secure communications firm Silent Circle has shut its email service because messages cannot be kept wholly secret.

[Note: I added the links to the companies’ announcements.]

According to TechDirt Silent Circle did something extra – they didn’t announce they were shutting down their e-mail server until after they had destroyed it, so that nothing was recoverable. After what happened to Lavabit, the company felt if they announced they were shutting down a court order might be issued before they could scrub everything.

They went on to say if the government orders them to install an sniffer on their systems, they will cease to operate. Their business is based on a guarantee of privacy, and if they can’t provide it, they don’t really have anything to sell.

So, having already trashed the US Cloud market, Zero has moved on to destroy the US privacy market. Pretty soon the Internet will be routed around us, the way many foreign airline routes already are.

Marcy pointed me to this wonderful take-down by Julia Ioffe: Dear Lawrence O’Donnell, Don’t Mansplain to Me About Russia.

Ms Ioffe is shrill, but with reason, i.e. she knows what she is talking about and has no illusions about anyone involved. The only thing that I would add is that Zero and Putin both have a lot in common with the Shrubbery – all three are much better at campaigning than governing. They want the office and power, but they aren’t all that interested in doing the job.

Update: Ms Ioffe has picked up kudos from Digby, Duncan, and Charley Pierce offered her a job.

Driftglass has decided that he is the ultimate authority on who is a whistleblower and has ruled that Glenn Greenwald is a liar because he claimed that Edward Snowden could spend the rest of his life in a Super-max if he returned to the US, rather than staying in Russia.

Driftglass uses the example of John Kiriakou, to show what ‘really happens to whistleblowers’ under the benevolent reign of Zero, noting that he was only sentenced to 30 months in prison.

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The Hermit At Rest

You looking at me?

[Editor: Hermit was the only one around when I had the camera out, but Tip and Weasel wandered by later. In my neighborhood we have had only one day without rain this month, so the cats are not out and about.]

Friday Ark

From the stand point of a former spook, one of the worst things that Ronald Reagan did while in office was his televised explanation of why we bombed Tripoli, Libya. He threw away a priceless intelligence capability for no discernible reason.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: the Libyans set off a bomb in a nightclub in Berlin that killed US personnel as well as local civilians. In retaliation the US bombed the Libyan capital and the Colonel’s personal compound.

Reagan went on the tube and told the world that we had intercepted the orders for the bombing from Libya to the Libyan mission in Berlin. That told the Libyans that their communications to their embassies weren’t secure, and they changed everything.

If Reagan had a decent National Security team, it would have been hinted that the information came from a source in Libya. So, instead of locking the US out of their diplomatic systems, the Libyans would have been looking for a traitor in their midst.

Well, Zero has done the same thing. Marcy Wheeler reports on the latest leaks: Behind Legion of Doom: Breaking “Encrypted Electronic Communications between High Level Al Qaeda Leaders”. It wasn’t just a conference call, it was an encrypted conference call that they now know we decrypted. All of the codes and procedures will be changed.

And these people have the gall to go after Snowden …

There has been a history of ‘plumbing’ in American politics. I put it down the reality that Washington DC used lead piping in its water system which has led to a lot of erratic thinking in the Village.

Of course, Tricky Dick’s merry band of mischief makers were known as ‘the Plumbers’, which was probably because they worked in the sewer of his paranoia.

Then in recent times there was another Republican icon, “Joe the Plumber”, who wasn’t actually named Joe, and wasn’t really a plumber, but Republicans aren’t really conservatives, so it all worked in their reality.

There was a real plumber named Joe, Joe Caldart, who showed BP how to cap the Well from Hell, but BP refuses to admit it, despite overwhelming evidence.

The latest mess is all about leaks, which is a major concern for plumbers. The government built this huge system to siphon off information from the “Tubes” and didn’t realize how easy it was for people inside their ‘sewage treatment plant’ to tap into the system.

When the government decided to privatize this collection process they guaranteed that there would be leaks. Every corporation involved is a new connection that will provide a new opportunity for leaks. When NSA was a true military/civil service operation, almost no one knew it even existed, much less what it did.

Marcy Wheeler et al. at Emptywheel are on a tear today.

Read Marcy’s posts: Who Will the Government Scapegoat Now on the Wuhayshi Leak? and What If the TOR Takedown Relates to the Yemeni Alert?, then consider Jim White’s question: Did Yemen Evacuation Cover Staging of JSOC Troops, Equipment for Attack?.

The leaks about the al Qaeda ‘conference call’ is a serious breach. This goes to a major method used to track actual terrorists. These revelations really will hinder our intelligence efforts. I cannot help but believe that this was supposed to justify the domestic spying program that Snowden revealed. Understand that this has nothing to do with the hoovering of domestic communications. This is what NSA is supposed to be doing. Only a very limited number of people would have the information that was revealed, and they are very senior members of the White House and the Pentagon.

Zero cleared out all of the embassies to prevent another ‘Benghazi’, so the Republican have shifted to complaining that it made the US look like cowards.

The Beeb reports that Zero is mad at Putin and isn’t going to talk to him at recess: Obama cancels Putin meeting over Snowden asylum.

The Russians see things differently: Russia “disappointed” bilateral talks with US cancelled

Russian foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday Russia was not to blame over the Snowden affair.

“This decision is clearly linked to the situation with former agent of US special services [Edward] Snowden, which hasn’t been created by us,” he said during a phone conference with the press.

“For many years, the Americans have avoided signing an extradition agreement,” Mr Ushakov said, “And they have invariably responded negatively to our requests for extradition of people who committed crimes on the territory of Russia, pointing at the absence of such agreement.”

“Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” Alternately, “What goes around, comes around.”

“What we have here is failure to communicate.” Zero is one of the worst negotiators I have ever seen which leads me to believe he doesn’t even understand the basic concepts involved. This process was escalated to the top way too quickly, and Zero was making demands before he even discovered what the Russians might want. Zero made it impossible for Putin to turn over Snowden without looking like he was caving in to US demands.

The leak that resulted in the US and UK pulling non-essential personnel from Yemen was a two-stage affair. Initially someone in the Obama administration leaked to the New York Times that the alert was the result of a high-level conversation among al Qaeda leaders.

McClatchy, who still has foreign correspondents, contacted Yemeni officials, and seeing that the White House was talking about it, one of them gave McClatchy the names of the people involved.

McClatchy reports that Yemen is annoyed with the US:

SANAA, Yemen — Yemeni officials on Tuesday sharply denounced the United States’ decision to evacuate some of its staff from its embassy in the country in the first sign of a split between allies over the Obama administration’s reaction to what U.S. officials say is one of the most specific terrorism threats in years.
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The closures were triggered, a Yemeni official told McClatchy on Sunday, by an intercepted message between the head of al Qaida, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the head of al Qaida’s Yemen-based affiliate, Nasir al Wuhayshi, in which Zawahiri issued a clear order for Wuhayshi to launch an attack.

This revelation is so bad that even John McCain and Lindsey Graham have figured out it was bad.

If, after Obama leaves office, Edward Snowden decides to return to the US for trial, this incident will be cited by his defense team. You have to go back to Ronald Reagan for leaks this bad.

I just saw an ad on a web site that indicates that my DSL provider, CenturyLINK, call their bundle of phone, TV, and ‘Net access, PRISM. Ah, guys, you might want to read the news and consider changing that name. I guess you could consider it a bit of corporate honesty, telling consumers what they are going to do with their data up front, but I doubt it.

The Beeb, along with the rest of the media, reports that Jeff Bezos, not Amazon, bought the Washington Post for $250 million, under 1% of his net worth.

If he would like to make some money, not that he needs to, he should start hiring some reporters to actually report the news, not the Village Conventional Wisdom, and fire most of the overpaid columnists on the paper’s editorial page who have been consistently wrong. People will pay to read the truth, and pundits who are right about what’s going on in the world.

Going digital won’t save a newspaper that no one wants to read. Fact checking, and the truth will make it worth reading, and worth paying for. You need reporters for that.

The Beeb also reports that the Bank of America is being sued by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling mortgage securities that it knew, or should have known, were bogus.

The Bank says the securities would have been fine if the housing market hadn’t crashed … [because of all the bogus securities that banks were selling].

No matter what the fine, BoA will get it back, probably by increasing fees on payday or food stamp debit cards, because that’s what they do.

Things Happen:

• 1538 – Bogotá, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada.
• 1777 – Revolutionary War: Battle of Oriskany.
• 1890 – At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.
• 1909 – Alice Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip.
• 1923 – Henry Sullivan swims the English Channel.
• 1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim across the English Channel.
• 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, “Little Boy”, is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 90,000 people were killed instantly.
• 1960 – Cuban Revolution: In response to a United States embargo, Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation.
• 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into United States law.
• 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web.
• 2001 – White House briefing entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. delivered to George W. Bush. This document foreshadowed the September 11, 2001 attacks.

People Are Born:

• 1809 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, English poet (d. 1892)
• 1861 – Edith Roosevelt, American First Lady of the United States (d. 1948)
• 1881 – Leo Carrillo, American actor (d. 1961)
• 1881 – Alexander Fleming, Scottish scientist, Nobel laureate (d. 1955)
• 1881 – Louella Parsons, American gossip columnist (d. 1972)
• 1891 – William Slim, British general (d. 1970)
• 1892 – Hoot Gibson, American actor (d. 1962)
• 1902 – Dutch Schultz, American bootlegger (d. 1935)
• 1908 – Will Lee, American actor (d. 1982)
• 1911 – Lucille Ball, American actress (d. 1989)
• 1917 – Robert Mitchum, American actor (d. 1997)
• 1928 – Andy Warhol, American artist (d. 1987)
• 1934 – Piers Anthony, English writer
• 1943 – Jon Postel, American computer scientist (d. 1998)

In Later Years Others Are Born:

• Steve Bates
• NTodd

I found the perfect theme song for what the government is doing to us.

You may have noticed that in drips and dribbles the government is leaking information to support their terror alert. I would note that some of what is being reported should be classified because it is real intelligence and the reporting is revealing real ‘sources and methods’, unlike what Snowden released which covered the illegal parts of the activities.

For those who don’t keep up on this stuff, al Qaeda has pulled off three large prison breaks in the last year in Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen. Interpol issued an alert based on the number of people who were released, which included criminals as well as, terrorists.

I would assume that those freed in Pakistan headed for the tribal areas; those from Iraq to Syria; while the Yemeni group probably rejoined their army in the on-going civil war.

It is strange that the super-atomic wonder system of NSA didn’t warn anyone about the prison breaks. I assume someone checked the date on the conversation of the ‘high-ranking al Qaeda members’ to be sure the ‘big thing’ wasn’t the prison break … right?