I just hope that your views are not widely held views in the U.S. Because if they are, then that's a very, very sad state of affairs. 'America, the land of the free.' What a fucking joke.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -australia '...you have four times the chance of being struck by lightning as you do from being killed by a terror attack. You are nine times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit; you are eight times more likely to die at the hands of a police officer than a terrorist. You are also something like a thousand times more likely to lose your life in a car crash than from a terror plot.'
Yet the U.S government has convinced it's citizens that it needs to spy on every single one of them, and carry out this spying program in total secrecy, with no transparency or accountability. And the American public nod their heads like obedient sheep.
~Carter~
You can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who can't forgive yourself, oh
makes much more sense to live in the present tense - Present Tense
...schedule 7 powers can only be used "for the purpose of determining" whether the detained person is a terrorist. The use of the power to detain and question someone who the examining officer knows is not a terrorist is plainly not for this purpose, so it would neither be within the spirit nor the letter of the law.
There is no suggestion that Miranda is a terrorist, or that his detention and questioning at Heathrow was for any other reason than his involvement in his partner Glenn Greenwald's reporting of the Edward Snowden story.
...Schedule 7 does not contain a power to detain and question journalists simply because the state thinks they should not be able to publish material because of the damage publication might do, or because they do not approve of where the information came from. The state has exceeded its powers in this case.'
'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
State-loyal journalists seem to believe in a duty to politely submit to bullying tactics from political officials
Beta
Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Wednesday 21 August 2013
'...the US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement. They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses." And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade.
But the minute anyone refuses to meekly submit to that, or stands up to it, hordes of authoritarians - led by state-loyal journalists - immediately start objecting: how dare you raise your voice to the empire? How dare you not politely curtsey to the Queen and thank the UK government for what they have done. The US and UK governments are apparently entitled to run around and try to bully and intimidate anyone, including journalists - "to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian", as Reuters put it - but nobody is allowed to send a message back to them. That's a double standard that nobody should accept.
If the goal of the UK in detaining my partner was - as it now claims - to protect the public from terrorism by taking documents they suspected he had (and why would they have suspected that?), that would have taken 9 minutes, not 9 hours. Identically, the UK knew full well that forcing the Guardian UK to destroy its hard drives would accomplish nothing in terms of stopping the reporting: as the Guardian told them, there are multiple other copies around the world. The sole purpose of all of that, manifestly, is to intimidate. As the ACLU of Massachusetts put it:
The real vengeance we are seeing right now is not coming from Glenn Greenwald; it is coming from the state."
But for state-loyal journalists, protesting thuggish and aggressive behavior from the state is out of the question. It's only when aggressive challenges come from those who are bringing transparency and accountability to the state do they get upset and take notice. As Digby wrote last night: "many elite journalists seem to be joining the government repression of the free press instead of being defiant and protecting their own prerogatives." That's because they believe in subservient journalism, not adversarial journalism. I only believe in the latter.
if this is true they where right to detain Miranda
Skeptical of anything the British government announces in this case, but it also would not surprise me if this is true. The Brits behaved very badly with the detention of Miranda. At the same time...why was he connecting through there anyway? Very strange episode all around.
if this is true they where right to detain Miranda
Skeptical of anything the British government announces in this case, but it also would not surprise me if this is true. The Brits behaved very badly with the detention of Miranda. At the same time...why was he connecting through there anyway? Very strange episode all around.
Skeptical as well, but the plot thickens!!!!
Surely there are other means to travel to Brazil aren't there? Maybe passing through London to pass of some work to Greenwalds editors?
I know it was the UK and likely wrong (unless there was credible suspicion or perhaps a tip was passed to Brit officials?), but it amuses me that a guy named Miranda was detained!!
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
if this is true they where right to detain Miranda
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said: “Mr Robbins makes a number of unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims in his witness statement.
“The way the government has behaved over the past three months belies the picture of urgency and crisis they have painted.”
He said officials in this country and the US had delayed contacting other organisations about GCHQ material, including the New York Times.
“This five week period in which nothing has happened tells a different story from the alarmist claims made by the government in their witness statement,” said Mr Rusbridger.
“The Guardian took every decision on what to publish very slowly and very carefully and when we met with government officials in July they acknowledged that we had displayed a ‘responsible’ attitude.
“The government’s behaviour does not match their rhetoric in trying to justify and exploit this dismaying blurring of terrorism and journalism.”
Gwendolen Morgan, Mr Miranda’s solicitor, said: “Given the vague doomsday prophesies which the police and Home Office have put before the court, our client decided that the full hearing in October was the better forum in which to argue these fundamental issues of press freedom.
“He hopes that - in open court - the defendants’ assertions will be fully tested.”
Mr Miranda said in a statement: “I am bringing this case because I believe that my rights have clearly been violated by UK authorities, and that basic press freedoms are now threatened by the attempted criminalization of legitimate journalistic work.”
Mr Greenwald said: “The UK Government is incapable of pointing to a single story we have published that has even arguably harmed national security.
“The only thing that has been harmed are the political interests and reputations of UK and US officials around the world, as they have been caught engaging in illegal, unconstitutional and truly dangerous bulk surveillance aimed at their own citizens and people around the world, all with little accountability or transparency - until now.
“The government’s accusation that we have been irresponsible with the security measures we took with the materials with which we are working are negated by their own admission that they have been unable to obtain access to virtually any of the documents they seized from Mr Miranda because, in the government’s words, those materials are ‘heavily encrypted’.”
if this is true they where right to detain Miranda
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said: “Mr Robbins makes a number of unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims in his witness statement.
“The way the government has behaved over the past three months belies the picture of urgency and crisis they have painted.”
He said officials in this country and the US had delayed contacting other organisations about GCHQ material, including the New York Times.
“This five week period in which nothing has happened tells a different story from the alarmist claims made by the government in their witness statement,” said Mr Rusbridger.
“The Guardian took every decision on what to publish very slowly and very carefully and when we met with government officials in July they acknowledged that we had displayed a ‘responsible’ attitude.
“The government’s behaviour does not match their rhetoric in trying to justify and exploit this dismaying blurring of terrorism and journalism.”
Gwendolen Morgan, Mr Miranda’s solicitor, said: “Given the vague doomsday prophesies which the police and Home Office have put before the court, our client decided that the full hearing in October was the better forum in which to argue these fundamental issues of press freedom.
“He hopes that - in open court - the defendants’ assertions will be fully tested.”
Mr Miranda said in a statement: “I am bringing this case because I believe that my rights have clearly been violated by UK authorities, and that basic press freedoms are now threatened by the attempted criminalization of legitimate journalistic work.”
Mr Greenwald said: “The UK Government is incapable of pointing to a single story we have published that has even arguably harmed national security.
“The only thing that has been harmed are the political interests and reputations of UK and US officials around the world, as they have been caught engaging in illegal, unconstitutional and truly dangerous bulk surveillance aimed at their own citizens and people around the world, all with little accountability or transparency - until now.
“The government’s accusation that we have been irresponsible with the security measures we took with the materials with which we are working are negated by their own admission that they have been unable to obtain access to virtually any of the documents they seized from Mr Miranda because, in the government’s words, those materials are ‘heavily encrypted’.”
Its not about them printing any info its that he was traveling with info of identities of british agents and was also carrying with that information an encryption for at least some of the documents.
Amazing how so little has changed. Watch this documentary from 1987 and read the parallels. The same lies. The same excuses - replace 'terrorism' with 'Communism'. The same deceit, and the same contempt for the Constitution and the American people. Also, take note of John Kerry at the beginning of this program saying that 'They were willing to put the Constitution at risk, because somehow they believed there was a higher order". Fucking hypocrite.
Interesting that the U.S government was prepared to enlist the help of former Nazi's and the Mafia to further its criminal activities.
Has he married that smoking hot redhed spy yet? It would be a fitting reward by Mr. Putin.
Why? He's not a spy, he's a whistle blower. But then you know that already.
Blowing whistles full of top secret info in China and the USSR. Yeah, I know that.
She proposed to him. Just wondering if he cashed in yet. It would be a nice upgrade from his past "professional" pole dancer girlfriend that he left in Hawaii.
I wonder if Putty has hooked him up with a classic Volga yet?
He's not a spy or whistle blower. He is a mental case who is slowly fading away. Most people don't even care what the guy has to say.
We need to be able to separate the information leaked from the leaker, especially in this case. The NSA story is important (although perhaps overblown). We would be foolish to ignore it.
The fact remains, however, that Snowden stole state secrets and fled with them first to China, then to Russia, where he is now their "guest". He is a complex figure and we should be able to push back against the myth making machine that has branded him a hero without ignoring the issue he brought to light.
He's not a spy or whistle blower. He is a mental case who is slowly fading away. Most people don't even care what the guy has to say.
We need to be able to separate the information leaked from the leaker, especially in this case. The NSA story is important (although perhaps overblown). We would be foolish to ignore it.
The fact remains, however, that Snowden stole state secrets and fled with them first to China, then to Russia, where he is now their "guest". He is a complex figure and we should be able to push back against the myth making machine that has branded him a hero without ignoring the issue he brought to light.
right , Snowden is NOT above the law he admits he broke, the same as the government isnt.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
He is a complex figure and we should be able to push back against the myth making machine that has branded him a hero without ignoring the issue he brought to light.
A complex figure? What? Are you gonna tow the line of the subservient elements within mainstream media and accuse him of being a narcissist? (Not very original, or clever, that one). Or are you privy to a new element of the ever-expanding, wacky psycho-babble, character assassination bullshit that you've been directed to swallow?
UN: press should not be 'intimidated into silence' over state secrets
Representatives criticise UK government following detention of David Miranda, and call for public debate over NSA surveillance
Josh Halliday and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, Wednesday 4 September 2013
Two senior UN representatives have warned the British government that the protection of state secrets must not be used as an excuse to "intimidate the press into silence" following the detention of David Miranda under the Terrorism Act.
Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, issued the caution as he called for a public debate on the mass surveillance revelations exposed by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
"The protection of national security secrets must never be used as an excuse to intimidate the press into silence and backing off from its crucial work in the clarification of human rights violations," said La Rue. "The press plays a central role in the clarification of human rights abuses."
La Rue and Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, have written to David Cameron's government requesting further information on the legality of Miranda's detention at Heathrow airport on 18 August.
Documents and electronic devices carried by Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, were seized by the Metropolitan police when he was held for questioning for nine hours under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.
La Rue said: "It is clear that the revelations on the extensive mass surveillance initiatives implemented by some governments needs to be widely debated.
"The intimidation of journalists and newspapers questioning alleged abuses by intelligence bodies is certainly not a contribution to the open debate that needs to take place. Under no circumstances, journalists, members of the media, or civil society organisations who have access to classified information on an alleged violation of human rights should be subjected to intimidation and subsequent punishment."
...He added: "The powers used in this case are currently under challenge in the European court of human rights. I urge the British authorities to review their operations to ensure that they comply fully with the UK's obligations under the European convention on human rights regarding the right to liberty and security, and the right to respect for private and family life."
Blowing whistles full of top secret info in China and the USSR. Yeah, I know that.
Yeah, keep spinning that bullshit. I can see you have nothing else up your sleeve in your desperate attempt to protect the reputation of your beloved government, who were found to be lying to you and spying on you.
Some people have a deep seated need to have faith in a superior entity, even one that treats them with utter contempt, whilst simultaneously bleating about their many 'freedoms'.
just fall into line, do what you're told by the glossy-lipped bouffant-haired bimbo on your t.v news channel, and remember to always condemn those who speak the truth to power, by labeling them spies and traitors.
He is a complex figure and we should be able to push back against the myth making machine that has branded him a hero without ignoring the issue he brought to light.
A complex figure? What? Are you gonna tow the line of the subservient elements within mainstream media and accuse him of being a narcissist? (Not very original, or clever, that one). Or are you privy to a new element of the ever-expanding, wacky psycho-babble, character assassination bullshit that you've been directed to swallow?
Um, no. Snowden took a job for the sole purpose of stealing state secrets. He then fled with those secrets first to China and then to Russia. These are irrefutable facts and they do preclude him from being realistically considered a hero.
He is a complex figure and we should be able to push back against the myth making machine that has branded him a hero without ignoring the issue he brought to light.
A complex figure? What? Are you gonna tow the line of the subservient elements within mainstream media and accuse him of being a narcissist? (Not very original, or clever, that one). Or are you privy to a new element of the ever-expanding, wacky psycho-babble, character assassination bullshit that you've been directed to swallow?
Um, no. Snowden took a job for the sole purpose of stealing state secrets. He then fled with those secrets first to China and then to Russia. These are irrefutable facts and they do preclude him from being realistically considered a hero.
Actually, many millions of people regard him as a hero. They regard him as a hero because he sacrificed a well-paid job and a life of material comfort and security in order to expose the lies and deceit of his superiors in the U.S government. And he gave nothing to the Chinese or Russians. As he himself said, if he was in such close cahoots with the Chinese authorities then why didn't he fly directly into Beijing? Though I understand why you need to keep insinuating and assuming that he gave sensitive material to the Chinese and Russians - because the truth is not on your side, so fantasies are your only recourse.
Um, no. Snowden took a job for the sole purpose of stealing state secrets. He then fled with those secrets first to China and then to Russia. These are irrefutable facts and they do preclude him from being realistically considered a hero.
Actually, many millions of people regard him as a hero. They regard him as a hero because he sacrificed a well-paid job and a life of material comfort and security in order to expose the lies and deceit of his superiors in the U.S government. And he gave nothing to the Chinese or Russians. As he himself said, if he was in such close cahoots with the Chinese authorities then why didn't he fly directly into Beijing? Though I understand why you need to keep insinuating and assuming that he gave sensitive material to the Chinese and Russians - because the truth is not on your side, so fantasies are your only recourse.
And many millions of people in this case are wrong.
Not a single fantasy anywhere in my posts. Not a one. He did take a job specifically to steal state secrets, he did steal those secrets, he did flee with them first to China and then to Russia. Those are his actions, those are facts, and that is not heroism.
And many millions of people in this case are wrong.
Conceited much? Rosa Parks broke the law by sitting at the back of the bus. I suppose in your scheme of things she was a criminal too, right? And the millions who regard her as a hero are wrong?
Not a single fantasy anywhere in my posts. Not a one. He did take a job specifically to steal state secrets, he did steal those secrets, he did flee with them first to China and then to Russia. Those are his actions, those are facts, and that is not heroism.
The fantasy you and Jason P keep spouting is that he gave his materials to China and Russia. You keep spouting that fantasy because you have nothing else with which to vilify him, in your unwavering support of your superiors in the U.S government - other than some lame character assassination psycho babble.
He risked everything to expose government lies and it's breaching of the Constitution. That makes him a hero.
US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet
• NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'
James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian, Thursday 5 September 2013
US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
This story has been reported in partnership between the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica based on documents obtained by the Guardian.
For the Guardian: James Ball, Julian Borger, Glenn Greenwald
For the New York Times: Nicole Perlroth, Scott Shane
For ProPublica: Jeff Larson
Read the New York Times story here
The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.
Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.
The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:
• A 10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made "vast amounts" of data collected through internet cable taps newly "exploitable".
• The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence" their product designs.
• The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods."
• The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".
• A GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
...Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".
"These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."
..."Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to heightened risk of data compromise." This is because the insertion of backdoors in a software product, particularly those that can be used to obtain unencrypted user communications or data, significantly increases the difficulty of designing a secure product."
This was a view echoed in a recent paper by Stephanie Pell, a former prosecutor at the US Department of Justice and non-resident fellow at the Center for Internet and Security at Stanford Law School.
"[An] encrypted communications system with a lawful interception back door is far more likely to result in the catastrophic loss of communications confidentiality than a system that never has access to the unencrypted communications of its users," she states.
Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.
The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.
Thanks to the hero Edward Snowden for allowing us to have this debate. Governments should not be allowed to operate in secrecy and violation of the law.
The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back
The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it
Bruce Schneier
The Guardian, Thursday 5 September 2013
Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.
By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.
Comments
Why would you fly into Britain otherwise if you we're a direct link with this case?
He met with the lady that snowden gave his stolen files to. And then tried to fly through england. Stupid is as stupid does.
Or this was a scam to justify releasing more files. That would be smart. Any other reason would be beyond dumb.
Why do they need any extra justification to release more files?
When did I call Americans sheep?
You can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who can't forgive yourself, oh
makes much more sense to live in the present tense - Present Tense
'The 2000 Terrorism Act, which I helped introduce, was not passed with people like David Miranda in mind...
...schedule 7 powers can only be used "for the purpose of determining" whether the detained person is a terrorist. The use of the power to detain and question someone who the examining officer knows is not a terrorist is plainly not for this purpose, so it would neither be within the spirit nor the letter of the law.
There is no suggestion that Miranda is a terrorist, or that his detention and questioning at Heathrow was for any other reason than his involvement in his partner Glenn Greenwald's reporting of the Edward Snowden story.
...Schedule 7 does not contain a power to detain and question journalists simply because the state thinks they should not be able to publish material because of the damage publication might do, or because they do not approve of where the information came from. The state has exceeded its powers in this case.'
bush, cheney, rumsfeld, rice, ashcroft, powell, wolfowitz walk free while being responsible for the committing of war crimes.
that the fuck is wrong with this picture???
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
State-loyal journalists seem to believe in a duty to politely submit to bullying tactics from political officials
Beta
Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Wednesday 21 August 2013
'...the US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement. They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses." And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade.
But the minute anyone refuses to meekly submit to that, or stands up to it, hordes of authoritarians - led by state-loyal journalists - immediately start objecting: how dare you raise your voice to the empire? How dare you not politely curtsey to the Queen and thank the UK government for what they have done. The US and UK governments are apparently entitled to run around and try to bully and intimidate anyone, including journalists - "to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian", as Reuters put it - but nobody is allowed to send a message back to them. That's a double standard that nobody should accept.
If the goal of the UK in detaining my partner was - as it now claims - to protect the public from terrorism by taking documents they suspected he had (and why would they have suspected that?), that would have taken 9 minutes, not 9 hours. Identically, the UK knew full well that forcing the Guardian UK to destroy its hard drives would accomplish nothing in terms of stopping the reporting: as the Guardian told them, there are multiple other copies around the world. The sole purpose of all of that, manifestly, is to intimidate. As the ACLU of Massachusetts put it:
The real vengeance we are seeing right now is not coming from Glenn Greenwald; it is coming from the state."
But for state-loyal journalists, protesting thuggish and aggressive behavior from the state is out of the question. It's only when aggressive challenges come from those who are bringing transparency and accountability to the state do they get upset and take notice. As Digby wrote last night: "many elite journalists seem to be joining the government repression of the free press instead of being defiant and protecting their own prerogatives." That's because they believe in subservient journalism, not adversarial journalism. I only believe in the latter.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... paper.html
if this is true they where right to detain Miranda
Skeptical of anything the British government announces in this case, but it also would not surprise me if this is true. The Brits behaved very badly with the detention of Miranda. At the same time...why was he connecting through there anyway? Very strange episode all around.
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
Fixed for you.
Surely there are other means to travel to Brazil aren't there? Maybe passing through London to pass of some work to Greenwalds editors?
I know it was the UK and likely wrong (unless there was credible suspicion or perhaps a tip was passed to Brit officials?), but it amuses me that a guy named Miranda was detained!!
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said: “Mr Robbins makes a number of unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims in his witness statement.
“The way the government has behaved over the past three months belies the picture of urgency and crisis they have painted.”
He said officials in this country and the US had delayed contacting other organisations about GCHQ material, including the New York Times.
“This five week period in which nothing has happened tells a different story from the alarmist claims made by the government in their witness statement,” said Mr Rusbridger.
“The Guardian took every decision on what to publish very slowly and very carefully and when we met with government officials in July they acknowledged that we had displayed a ‘responsible’ attitude.
“The government’s behaviour does not match their rhetoric in trying to justify and exploit this dismaying blurring of terrorism and journalism.”
Gwendolen Morgan, Mr Miranda’s solicitor, said: “Given the vague doomsday prophesies which the police and Home Office have put before the court, our client decided that the full hearing in October was the better forum in which to argue these fundamental issues of press freedom.
“He hopes that - in open court - the defendants’ assertions will be fully tested.”
Mr Miranda said in a statement: “I am bringing this case because I believe that my rights have clearly been violated by UK authorities, and that basic press freedoms are now threatened by the attempted criminalization of legitimate journalistic work.”
Mr Greenwald said: “The UK Government is incapable of pointing to a single story we have published that has even arguably harmed national security.
“The only thing that has been harmed are the political interests and reputations of UK and US officials around the world, as they have been caught engaging in illegal, unconstitutional and truly dangerous bulk surveillance aimed at their own citizens and people around the world, all with little accountability or transparency - until now.
“The government’s accusation that we have been irresponsible with the security measures we took with the materials with which we are working are negated by their own admission that they have been unable to obtain access to virtually any of the documents they seized from Mr Miranda because, in the government’s words, those materials are ‘heavily encrypted’.”
Its not about them printing any info its that he was traveling with info of identities of british agents and was also carrying with that information an encryption for at least some of the documents.
Interesting that the U.S government was prepared to enlist the help of former Nazi's and the Mafia to further its criminal activities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEG8mBNe9Io
Why? He's not a spy, he's a whistle blower. But then you know that already.
He's not a spy or whistle blower. He is a mental case who is slowly fading away. Most people don't even care what the guy has to say.
She proposed to him. Just wondering if he cashed in yet. It would be a nice upgrade from his past "professional" pole dancer girlfriend that he left in Hawaii.
I wonder if Putty has hooked him up with a classic Volga yet?
We need to be able to separate the information leaked from the leaker, especially in this case. The NSA story is important (although perhaps overblown). We would be foolish to ignore it.
The fact remains, however, that Snowden stole state secrets and fled with them first to China, then to Russia, where he is now their "guest". He is a complex figure and we should be able to push back against the myth making machine that has branded him a hero without ignoring the issue he brought to light.
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Ah, he's a mental case now, is he? I see.
A complex figure? What? Are you gonna tow the line of the subservient elements within mainstream media and accuse him of being a narcissist? (Not very original, or clever, that one). Or are you privy to a new element of the ever-expanding, wacky psycho-babble, character assassination bullshit that you've been directed to swallow?
UN: press should not be 'intimidated into silence' over state secrets
Representatives criticise UK government following detention of David Miranda, and call for public debate over NSA surveillance
Josh Halliday and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, Wednesday 4 September 2013
Two senior UN representatives have warned the British government that the protection of state secrets must not be used as an excuse to "intimidate the press into silence" following the detention of David Miranda under the Terrorism Act.
Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, issued the caution as he called for a public debate on the mass surveillance revelations exposed by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
"The protection of national security secrets must never be used as an excuse to intimidate the press into silence and backing off from its crucial work in the clarification of human rights violations," said La Rue. "The press plays a central role in the clarification of human rights abuses."
La Rue and Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, have written to David Cameron's government requesting further information on the legality of Miranda's detention at Heathrow airport on 18 August.
Documents and electronic devices carried by Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, were seized by the Metropolitan police when he was held for questioning for nine hours under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.
La Rue said: "It is clear that the revelations on the extensive mass surveillance initiatives implemented by some governments needs to be widely debated.
"The intimidation of journalists and newspapers questioning alleged abuses by intelligence bodies is certainly not a contribution to the open debate that needs to take place. Under no circumstances, journalists, members of the media, or civil society organisations who have access to classified information on an alleged violation of human rights should be subjected to intimidation and subsequent punishment."
...He added: "The powers used in this case are currently under challenge in the European court of human rights. I urge the British authorities to review their operations to ensure that they comply fully with the UK's obligations under the European convention on human rights regarding the right to liberty and security, and the right to respect for private and family life."
....
Yeah, keep spinning that bullshit. I can see you have nothing else up your sleeve in your desperate attempt to protect the reputation of your beloved government, who were found to be lying to you and spying on you.
Some people have a deep seated need to have faith in a superior entity, even one that treats them with utter contempt, whilst simultaneously bleating about their many 'freedoms'.
just fall into line, do what you're told by the glossy-lipped bouffant-haired bimbo on your t.v news channel, and remember to always condemn those who speak the truth to power, by labeling them spies and traitors.
There's a good boy.
Um, no. Snowden took a job for the sole purpose of stealing state secrets. He then fled with those secrets first to China and then to Russia. These are irrefutable facts and they do preclude him from being realistically considered a hero.
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
Actually, many millions of people regard him as a hero. They regard him as a hero because he sacrificed a well-paid job and a life of material comfort and security in order to expose the lies and deceit of his superiors in the U.S government. And he gave nothing to the Chinese or Russians. As he himself said, if he was in such close cahoots with the Chinese authorities then why didn't he fly directly into Beijing? Though I understand why you need to keep insinuating and assuming that he gave sensitive material to the Chinese and Russians - because the truth is not on your side, so fantasies are your only recourse.
And many millions of people in this case are wrong.
Not a single fantasy anywhere in my posts. Not a one. He did take a job specifically to steal state secrets, he did steal those secrets, he did flee with them first to China and then to Russia. Those are his actions, those are facts, and that is not heroism.
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
The fantasy you and Jason P keep spouting is that he gave his materials to China and Russia. You keep spouting that fantasy because you have nothing else with which to vilify him, in your unwavering support of your superiors in the U.S government - other than some lame character assassination psycho babble.
He risked everything to expose government lies and it's breaching of the Constitution. That makes him a hero.
US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet
• NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'
James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian, Thursday 5 September 2013
US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
This story has been reported in partnership between the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica based on documents obtained by the Guardian.
For the Guardian: James Ball, Julian Borger, Glenn Greenwald
For the New York Times: Nicole Perlroth, Scott Shane
For ProPublica: Jeff Larson
Read the New York Times story here
The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.
Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.
The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:
• A 10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made "vast amounts" of data collected through internet cable taps newly "exploitable".
• The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence" their product designs.
• The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods."
• The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".
• A GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
...Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".
"These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."
..."Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to heightened risk of data compromise." This is because the insertion of backdoors in a software product, particularly those that can be used to obtain unencrypted user communications or data, significantly increases the difficulty of designing a secure product."
This was a view echoed in a recent paper by Stephanie Pell, a former prosecutor at the US Department of Justice and non-resident fellow at the Center for Internet and Security at Stanford Law School.
"[An] encrypted communications system with a lawful interception back door is far more likely to result in the catastrophic loss of communications confidentiality than a system that never has access to the unencrypted communications of its users," she states.
Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.
The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... nsa-spying
The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back
The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it
Bruce Schneier
The Guardian, Thursday 5 September 2013
Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.
By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.