omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

Well, this is just precious:

That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistle-blower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.

“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.

“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edward-snowden-dead

no news there rlly

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”

guess the civil war never happened, huh?

Charles Pierce:

Balls. COINTELPRO. CISPES. The McCarran Act. The Plumbers. Mossadegh. Arbenz. The "U.S. intelligence agencies" were anchored in nothing but their own arrogance. The president should be ashamed to base his arguments in such plainly ahistorical balderdash.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-nsa-speech-011714

no news there rlly

It is a helpful story because it makes very explicit the degree to which our intelligence agencies imagine themselves to be sovereign states, answerable to no law but their own interests. They throw a thin disguise over this attitude by speaking as if their own interests were always absolutely identical to US interests, when in reality they are the tail that thinks it ought to wag the dog.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116253/edward-snowden-glenn-greenwald-julian-assange-what-they-believe

the fuck is up with that guy

Willentz sounds Deeply Saddened that these two men don't believe in Democratic states.

Snowden, it seems, mostly engaged in postadolescent banter about sex and Internet gaming—and occasionally mused about firearms. “I have a Walther P22,” he wrote. “It’s my only gun, but I love it to death.” The Walther P22, a fairly standard handgun, is not especially fearsome, but Snowden’s affection for it hinted at some of his developing affinities.

A response:

That New Republic article is just crazy. I don't give two flips what sort of ideological mess of pottage Snowden or Assange might carry around in their brains or what self-contradictory views they may hold about various leftist sacred cows. Exposing government corruption and overreach are non-ideological good deeds, unconnected to whatever beliefs motivated them.

yeah i would love to read a good greenwald takedown but man that thing is nowhere near it.

wilentz is pretty useless when he's not writing about 19th century history.

I saw Obama on Jay Leno and Obama noted in response to Leno mentioning how Daniel Ellsberg didn't flee, that yes we have whistleblower protection here in the US. Of course there was no discussion of how Obama's Justice Department has gone after whistleblowers more than any administration in history, and how Ellsberg supports what Snowden has done.

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/blog/maybe-the-most-orwellian-text-message-ever-sent

Wow. Must admit I have not been following the recent Ukraine govt vs protestors events

amazing

not amazing actually, just yikes

yurp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/independent-review-board-says-nsa-phone-data-program-is-illegal-and-should-end/2014/01/22/4cebd470-83dd-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html?hpid=z4

But Prez and many others don't care what this board majority thinks, alas

At risk of dog piling even more info into this thread, the sessions from from the recent Chaos Communication Congress are of exceedingly high quality:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CCCen

If you only watch one, watch Paglen's "Seeing The Secret State" presentation. HFS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56s46e97Lo

I spent a fruitless half day getting the friend of a certain Rolling Stone writer to recant her addled definition of "traitor" as it applied to Snowden.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/snowden-denies-stealing-passwords-to-access-secret-files/2014/01/23/d1f7d9e4-8472-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-disagrees-with-watchdog-groups-conclusion-that-nsa-phone-program-is-illegal/2014/01/23/7a945564-8464-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html

One more thing to read that I haven't read yet http://www.salon.com/2014/01/23/glenn_greenwalds_heroism_standing_up_to_our_new_orwellian_police_state/

got into it on twitter with cathy fitzpatrick today as she insisted that snowden, greenwald, the EFF, and anyone who wants useful encryption are secret anarchists plotting "anarchy, where anarchists are in charge"

that was fun

Uh, who is she?

kinda thinking someone who thinks anarchy is 'where anarchists are in charge' is prob terminally confused about what words mean in general

Uh, who is she?

― curmudgeon, Friday, January 24, 2014 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

historian/"human rights activist"/weirdo loved on the right for her writing about the USSR's large body count, with apparently a sideline in the technical details of encryption.

lol, looked her up and immediately found a horrified tweet from her about how 'there really is a magazine called JACOBIN!'

lmao

Just read a good NYROB piece on Snowden-Manning-Assange. Not up yet, unfortunately.

love "where anarchists are in charge"

dreamt last night i was at a party w all my high school friends + snowden; we went out for beer but he convinced me to help raid some vague government facility on our way back and i got beaten up by a russian(?) soldier, then it turned into some weird body horror thing w parasites on my wounds, glad to be awake

Following President Barack Obama's reelection in November, 2012, Fitzpatrick penned an entry on her own blog in which she alleged that Republican challenger Mitt Romney's campaign's "ORCA" digital operation had failed because Targeted Victory, the company responsible for much of its online and digital strategy had employed African-American developers who she alleged to have favored the Obama campaign and whose politics was somehow deliberately reflected as bugs left in their work.

black people bug like this

first mistake was calling it ORCA not MOBY

was going to write something else making light fun of her but christ what a vile person, fuck her

yeah i hadn't wiki'd her prior to politely engaging on twitter and being met with derision, she's so deep in the black hole of dumb i didn't even want to follow her down to potshots

U.S. Willing to Hold Talks if Snowden Pleads Guilty
By STEVE KENNY NY Times
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did not specify the guilty pleas the Justice Department would expect before it would open talks with Mr. Snowden's lawyers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/us/on-childrens-website-nsa-puts-a-furry-smiley-face-on-its-mission.html

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090819011825/lossimpson/es/images/9/9c/Poochie.png

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTM4ODYwNDY3NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjYxNjEzMQ@@._V1_SY317_CR6,0,214,317_.jpg

Talking about that for years over here:

Kids section of websites by professionally paranoid or otherwise creepy organizations

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-intelligence-director-calls-on-snowden-to-return-nsa-documents/2014/01/29/7bd9c9ee-88f7-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html?hpid=z1

Clapper focused his opening remarks on Snowden, delivering a blistering stream of criticism in which he described the former contractor for the National Security Agency as a hypocrite who has severely undermined U.S. security.

Clapper said the documents exposed by Snowden have bolstered adversaries, caused allies to curtail cooperation with the United States, enabled terrorist groups to alter the ways they communicate, and put lives of U.S. intelligence operatives at risk.

versus Senator Wyden

At one point, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) decried what he described as a “culture of misinformation” among U.S. intelligence officials, cataloguing misstatements and falsehoods that had been exposed by Snowden.

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

Meanwhile Mike Rogers reminds us why we need a Bill of Rights in the first place.

He and Clapper have deleted the first and 4th amendments now

he's gonna force the issue- on principle

Surely the Bill of Rights was never intended to tie the government's hands.

it's not a suicide pact, u kno