The NSA War on Privacy Rages On as Tor Project Users Targeted

With Glenn Greenwald's spectacular fireworks show having been quashed by the US government mere hours prior to publication on the increasingly suspect website The Intercept, we have been deprived - at least for now - of really big and shocking revelations but that doesn't mean that stories of the rampage of the NSA aren't getting out through other forums. In the most recent non-shocking disclosure of the war on privacy by the American Stasi anyone who attempts to use encryption and privacy tools in order to circumvent their prying eyes is on the ever-growing list of suspects. In a story from the German websites Das Erste and Tagesschau (you will need Google Translate) that is cited in stories on the blog Boing Boing and on libertarian financial website Zero Hedge the criteria that is used by the hive of scum and villainy at Fort Meade to cull the herd for those meriting the most attention via the XKeyscore program that was exposed by Greenwald based on documents provided to him by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden last year.

According to the German stories, in which the deep packet inspection rules as revealed by authors Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz specifically target internet users who search for and utilize privacy tools such as the Tor Project browser and the Tails operating system. According to the story on Boing Boing, entitled "If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance":

Since the start of the Snowden story in 2013, the NSA has stressed that while it may intercept nearly every Internet user's communications, it only "targets" a small fraction of those, whose traffic patterns reveal some basis for suspicion. Targets of NSA surveillance don't have their data flushed from the NSA's databases on a rolling 48-hour or 30-day basis, but are instead retained indefinitely.

The authors of the Tagesschau story have seen the "deep packet inspection" rules used to determine who is considered to be a legitimate target for deep surveillance, and the results are bizarre.

According to the story, the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails -- like this one that we published in April, or this article for teens that I wrote in May -- or Tor (The Onion Router, which we've been posted about since 2004). Anyone who is determined to be using Tor is also targeted for long-term surveillance and retention.

AND

One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.

Goats and sheep - how apropos, considering the overwhelming number of the latter the NSA's job will be much easier, these are the sort of low-information, self-centered, living in denial ignoramuses whose standard reply to the unprecedented scale of domestic surveillance is usually "I don't care if they are spying on me because I am doing nothing wrong" who can be pretty much eliminated in that they gobble up the state supplied bullshit biscuits and therefore are low maintenance. Goats on the other hand - and I include myself as well as all of you readers in that particular group - are very dangerous in that they are able to understand the grave violations of the Constitution and extrapolate into the future of star-spangled totalitarianism that is coming soon.

Let's face it, the Goats have the ability to make life difficult for the criminal classes and their fascist protectors in agencies like the NSA and therefore they need to be identified and tracked very closely to prevent them from organizing, gaining popularity or penetrating the propaganda system and gaining the crossover appeal that could rapidly trigger the tipping point. The Goats have very sensitive bullshit detectors and fully understand that the apple pie authoritarianism won't resemble the classical fascist and totalitarians of the past. 

I have always agreed with the comments of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (he was played by Kevin Costner in the Oliver Stone movie JFK) from a 1967 Playboy Magazine interview from which I excerpt:

Over the years, I guess I've developed a somewhat conservative attitude --- in the traditional libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right --- particularly in regard to the importance of the individual as opposed to the state and the individual's own responsibilities to humanity. I don't think I've ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political philosophy, but at the root of my concern is the conviction that a human being is not a digit; he's not a digit in regard to the state and he's not a digit in the sense that he can ignore his fellow men and his obligations to society.

I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't German phenomenon; it's a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man.

What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.

In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.

I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

Garrison was absolutely right, fascism has come to America in the name of national security and the NSA serves as that all-seeing eye at the top of they pyramid and from it flows all of the information that drives the machinery of the police state. Ironic that today as I write this it is the Fourth of July, the day of an orgy of excess of blindly-obedient flag-sucking and worship of the fascist state. The sheep will gather at their celebrations of the glories of their red, white and blue Leviathan swilling beer, stuffing their faces with hamburgers and hot dogs and flying high off of the jingoism and subservience to a system that they have no inkling of what it really stands for, its true history of murderous wars, suppression and imposition of corporate friendly dictators upon those who were once identified as Goats but had the misfortune of living in a country policed by graduates of the School of Americas.

In a way it is hard to fault them for their "American Insouciance", the indoctrination of the exceptional people has been drilled into their brains since their formative years when they were taught to stand with their hand over their hearts and to pledge allegiance to the flag. Such a thing has no place in a free society but neither does massive warrantless surveillance nor paramilitary police shock troops.  It is just easier not to think and just watch the fireworks displays though rather than tax the brains of lemmings with existential questions that contradict their false belief systems. 

NSA Reporting Wins Pulitzer Prize to Dismay of Fascists

Fanatical Long Island Congressman Peter King, a supporter of the terrorist wing of the Irish Republican Army erupted on Monday in yet another of his trademark mouth-foaming tirades. Congressman King, the pride of New York's Second Congressional District - whose residents insist on screwing America by returning this lunatic piece of crap to office - threw a temper tantrum directed at that hated concept of freedom of the press in denouncing the Pulitzer Prize being awarded for reporting on the unconstitutional rampage of the NSA Stasi. Launching into a Twitter frenzy, King called the prize bestowed upon The Guardian and the Washington Post (most definitely not the neocon oped page sewer of idiocy) a "disgrace" and practically spat upon the "Snowden enablers" whose work revealed this cancer on democracy.  In referring to the famous and now fully vindicated former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in such a manner of derision obscures the fact that the real "enablers" of the true American hero are King, Mike Rogers, Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the criminals in high places who have constantly and consistently violated their oaths to office in providing cover to the illegal NSA mass surveillance and data-mining programs as well as a myriad of other anti-American activities - such as torture.

It must be one big nasty bug crawling up King's big fat ass especially since former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald -who he and assorted other fascist swine like the right wing talk radio bound Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers. perjurer James Clapper and that fiendish little twerp former NSA/CIA head Michael Hayden have denounced as a traitor, a thief and other such terms that more accurately fit themselves - called their bluff and returned to the USA to accept his George Polk Award on Friday. Not a good day for those who continue to betray Americans but the best thing is that there isn't a thing that they can do about it other than to just eat shit. The scum is losing - at least in the court of world opinion although such a triumph of the freedom of the press is largely lost on an American populace immersed in the local crime story of a man blowing away his girlfriend in fucking South Africa and an underwater airplane. The honor is however progress and hopefully will only offer encouragement to others who will descend into the gutter where the scum like King and his minions wallow in order to fight them.

Honored along with Greenwald in his triumphant return to The Homeland were fellow journalists on the rogue state hit list Laura Poitras as well as Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. Now if he can just get to writing about the really good stuff like industrial espionage, blackmail, money laundering and other dark functions of "The Octopus" which the NSA is an integral part of as well as the private contractors that provide both a dodge from governmental accountability as well as plausible denial.

In an interview with Amy Goodman on the liberal news program Democracy Now,  broadcast today Greenwald and Poitras discussed both their ordeal as well as future plans. I excerpt from the transcript:

GLENN GREENWALD: We weren’t so worried that we weren’t willing to get on the plane. I mean, if we were really worried, we wouldn’t have come. There was no need for us to come. But we knew, certainly, that it was a risk.

I mean, I think the important thing to realize about this is that American national security officials and other officials in the government have deliberately created an environment where they wanted us to think there was a risk. They have very deliberately and publicly suggested that the journalism we were doing was a crime. They have advocated that we be arrested. They have had their favorite media figures openly speculate about the possibility that we would be. They detained my partner for nine hours. They announced that there was a terrorism investigation pending in the U.K., and they refused to give my lawyers any information at all about whether there was a grand jury investigation, whether there was an indictment under seal—very unusual behavior when dealing with these lawyers, in particular, who say that they can always get at least something.

So they wanted us to have this kind of uncertainty about whether or not they would take action upon our return to the U.S. That’s very clear. And it’s easy, I guess, to say it doesn’t seem likely that it will happen, but when those threats are being directed at you, you take them seriously. And so we did, but then, obviously, assessed that the risk was low enough, mostly because we didn’t think that they would be so counterproductive or self-destructive to do it, and were willing, therefore, to get on a plane and come back.

REPORTER: And those conversations about the indictment, how long—or if there was an indictment or grand jury out, how long did those conversations go on?

GLENN GREENWALD: We’ve been trying to get information from the government about whether or not we could safely return to the U.S. for at least four to five months. And originally, the government said that they were willing to have conversations about what that might entail, and then, ultimately, I guess, decided that they weren’t willing to have those conversations, because they just stopped returning calls and stopped giving any information. And so, they just expressly refused to say whether or not there were—whether there was a pending indictment under seal or whether or not we were the targets of a grand jury investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Your trip isn’t over. It doesn’t just have to happen at the airport. What are you concerned about, for both Glenn and Laura? And, Laura, if you could describe how your experience coming through the airport today compared with your previous experiences?

LAURA POITRAS: Sure. I mean, you know, the other risk that I think that we face as journalists right now are the risk of subpoena, where the government subpoenas our material to try to get information about our source. And we know that the government has been using the border as a sort of legal no man’s land to get access to journalists’ materials. I mean, I’ve experienced that for six years, where I’ve been detained, interrogated and had equipment seized at the border, and never told, you know, for what reason that’s happening. So—

AMY GOODMAN: How many times have you been stopped?

LAURA POITRAS: You know, I’ve asked the government to answer that question, and they won’t tell me. I think close to 40 or more. I’ve got FOIAs out, and soon as I can get a precise count, I’ll certainly publish it. So, I mean, the risks of subpoena are very real. And as—you know, as you indicate, I mean, the fact that we’re here is not an indication that there isn’t a threat. We know there’s a threat. We know there’s a threat from what the government is saying in terms how they’re talking about this journalism, the journalism that we’re doing. And, I mean, the reason we’re here is because we’re not going to, you know, succumb to those threats.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans for the United States? Will you be staying here long? Glenn, will you be moving back? Laura, will you be moving back?

 GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, I think—you know, I think that this first step—I mean, since we didn’t know what today held, we haven’t been doing a lot of long-term thinking, because we had no idea what the outcome would be of our deplaning. But I think that once we got on the airplane this morning, it was a commitment not just to come back for this one time, but to come back whenever we want, which is our prerogative as American citizens. And it ought to be our right, not just to come back, but to come back without fear of that kind of harassment, to even have that enter our thought process.

So I don’t know what Laura’s long-term plans are, I mean, but for me, you know, I have a book coming out next month, and I want to be able to come to the U.S. to talk about the issues that it raises. I have a lot of journalistic colleagues here with whom I’m working. I want to be able to freely travel to work with them and work on stories in the United States and to talk about the things I think we need to be talking about. So I do think this sort of presages more visits to the U.S. for me.

Greenwald will continue to challenge the illicit authoritarian power structure, he has a book coming out soon that is entitled "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" and if I were him I would use the opportunity to promote the book as heavily as possible and further dare the Obama-Holder regime to arrest him as the screeching from big government loving, warmongering Republican neocons grow louder as the 2014 midterm elections near. 

Maybe Americans can get lucky and that terrorist supporting sack of shit Peter King will have an aneurysm between now and November 4th.