Apple, AOL, Facebook, Google, Linked In, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo have started a new website and have a five-part proposal. The first big three are (1) surveillance that is targeted, not bulk, and for a legal purpose; (2) oversight and accountability for surveillance organizations, and (3) transparency about what’s being requested. They’re also asking for world governments to create a treaty to standardize surveillance laws. Sounds reasonable to me. Here’s the website.
Obama on the Snowden Leaks
The mister and I made a big mistake last night: As we were gearing up to watch President Obama on Hardball, we decided to play a drinking game with shots consumed for every time Tweety interrupted the president or worked himself, Tip O’Neill, the Peace Corps and JFK into the conversation. The shots were of a particularly high alcohol content homemade cider.
Well! Tweety compelled the president (and us) to watch a clip of a JFK speech! Which meant we had to chug cider for the duration. Things got fuzzy after that. They’re STILL fuzzy. But I thought the above clip on the Snowden leaks had something for everyone. Cheers!
By Request
Someone in the last thread wanted more Snowden, so here’s the latest:
Top secret documents retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden show that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.
The documents are being reported exclusively by CBC News.
The briefing notes, stamped “Top Secret,” show the U.S. turned its Ottawa embassy into a security command post during a six-day spying operation by the National Security Agency while U.S. President Barack Obama and 25 other foreign heads of government were on Canadian soil in June of 2010.
The covert U.S. operation was no secret to Canadian authorities.
The reason this is a big deal is that the Canadian version of the NSA, the CSEC, is prohibited by law from spying on Canadians without a warrant, and also prohibited from tasking the NSA to do it. So it looks like some laws may have been broken Here’s the Globe and Mail’s piece on the CSEC.
The leaks came from Greenwald. I’ll save the haters some typing by linking to this:
“Greenwald is a Brazilian-based former porn industry executive, now assisting Edward Snowden leak national security information.”
Before turning his attention to writing books targeting the U.S. George Bush administration and Republican politicians, Greenwald owned sites such as Hairy Jocks and Hairy Studs. Greenwald is now the sole journalist with full access to Snowden’s document trove.
That’s from Canada’s answer to the NY Post, the Toronto Sun. The Sun is making hay over the fact that the CBC paid Greenwald $1,500 as a freelancer for access to Snowden’s story.
Interesting Wikileaks Development
Assange apparently will benefit from our somewhat deference to the press:
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.
The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.
The Obama administration has charged government employees and contractors who leak classified information — such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning — with violations of the Espionage Act. But officials said that although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them, something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.
Alright lawyers, what say you?
Long Read: “Who Killed Michael Hastings?”
It’s never simple, badly as we want it to be. Benjamin Wallace, in NYMag:
At the end of his life, Michael Hastings, like many of the progressive journalists he counted among his friends, felt besieged by an overreaching government. Hastings was living in Los Angeles, and at a Beverly Hills theater in April, he took part in a panel discussion about the documentary War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Interviewed in May on The Young Turks, a talk show on Current TV, Hastings railed against the Obama administration, which “has clearly declared war on the press”; the only recourse, he said, was for the press to respond: “We declare war on you.” On May 31, he dashed off an urgent tweet: “first they came for manning. Then Assange. Then fox. Then the ap.drake and the other whistle-blowers. Any nyt reporters too.” He attended screenings of his friend Jeremy Scahill’s film Dirty Wars, which seeks to expose “the hidden truth behind America’s expanding covert wars,” and when leaks about the NSA began appearing in The Guardian, and Edward Snowden was charged with espionage, Hastings was deeply troubled by the revelations and the Justice Department’s response. On June 7, his last post for BuzzFeed, where he was a staff writer, focused on “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” and at the time of his death, Hastings was working on a profile of CIA director John Brennan for Rolling Stone…
Sergeant Joe Biggs, who met Hastings in 2008, when the reporter, on assignment for GQ, was embedded with his unit in Afghanistan, hadn’t spoken to his friend in three months, but Hastings had BCC’d him on the June 17 e-mail to BuzzFeed colleagues. “I tried calling him when I got that e-mail,” Biggs says, “ ’cause I felt so fucking scared, because it didn’t seem like him.” Biggs e-mailed BuzzFeed, too. “They weren’t helpful at all. I kept e-mailing back, ‘What should we do? I’m not a journalist. I don’t know how to go about this stuff.’ They never responded to me.” Biggs tried contacting other media to let them know about the ominous e-mail; the only person who got back to him was a local L.A. reporter. “If that thing didn’t get released,” Biggs told me when I first called him, two weeks after Hastings’s death, “people would keep thinking it was an accident.”
Hastings lived as he died. On the small side, with blue eyes and scruffy good looks that suggested Jude Law’s little brother, he did everything fast: chain-smoking Parliament Lights, calling and e-mailing people late at night, speaking in a jittery torrent, churning out copy. (The first, long draft of his McChrystal article was a 48-hour production.) “The dude was exhausting,” Farwell says. “He just kind of vibrated energy. He had a deep well of moral outrage and sadness that I think goes back to a lot of the hypocrisy he saw and felt.”
After his death, there was an outpouring of grief. For all his abrasiveness, and sometimes because of it, he had endeared himself to a lot of people, and the posthumous adoration of Hastings’s colleagues was striking: Rachel Maddow attended his memorial service in Vermont; BuzzFeed established a national-security-reporting fellowship in his name; and last month, he was honored with the Norman Mailer Award for Emerging Journalist. His publisher, Blue Rider Press, recently announced that it will bring out a novel Hastings wrote some years ago, a roman-à-clef satire about his time working at Newsweek.
Most interesting was the viral fascination of strangers who, at a time when journalists rank lower than chiropractors in public opinion, saw Hastings as a valiant exception. What he stood for, to these people, was so important and rare that surely his death must hold more meaning than a senseless random event….
Long Read: “Who Killed Michael Hastings?”Post + Comments (48)
Another Perspective on the NSA Leaks
James Fallows gets a lot of good emails from insiders. Here’s one from someone he knows about last week’s NSA leaks concerning the infiltration of Google and Yahoo:
I obviously can’t be quoted by name on this … and indeed, since this email is being read (Hi guys!), I can probably get fired just for sending it, but let me just stress how shocking these NSA revelations are.
Look, I’m not a shrinking violet. I work for DoD. I support much of the war on terror. Some of these assholes out there just need killing. And gathering info on them that allows us to schwhack them is okay with me.
But there is law. And my view is that you have two choices. Either you change the law openly, publicly, or if that is impossible and you consider violating the law imperative, then you make a claim of “exceptional illegality.” The later is a tough case, but the best example is torture. I support the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I do not support the claim that such torture is lawful. But if I had been the responsible official, I would have ordered it and thrown myself on the mercy of the court.
But the thing about the NSA revelations is that this isn’t exceptional illegality. It is routine, somehow justified by legal opinions written by John Yoo-style hacks.
And worse, it is so routine that 29 y/o contractors have access to it.
There are a couple of other letters worth reading at the link.
We’re All Terrorists Now
This is how absurd things have become both here and over the pond:
British authorities claimed the domestic partner of reporter Glenn Greenwald was involved in “terrorism” when he tried to carry documents from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden through a London airport in August, according to police and intelligence documents.
Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was detained and questioned for nine hours by British authorities at Heathrow on August 18, when he landed there from Berlin to change planes for a flight to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
After his release and return to Rio, Miranda filed a legal action against the British government, seeking the return of materials seized from him by British authorities and a judicial review of the legality of his detention.
At a London court hearing this week for Miranda’s lawsuit, a document called a “Ports Circulation Sheet” was read into the record. It was prepared by Scotland Yard – in consultation with the MI5 counterintelligence agency – and circulated to British border posts before Miranda’s arrival. The precise date of the document is unclear.
“Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security,” according to the document.
“We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material the release of which would endanger people’s lives,” the document continued. “Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism…”
Anyone still want to mock Snowden for having the good common sense to flee to Hong Kong or Russia?