NSA Employees Get Off on Nude Pics Per New Snowden Interview

Not that it is any great surprise considering the level of corruption and abuse of power that permeates the entire American system these days but one of the fringe benefits of the NSA snooping programs is the ability to gather and drool over amateur pornography and naked pictures to take the edge off of a boring day at work. In a new exclusive interview conducted by The Guardian with former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the perusing of such personal and intimate material for fun is but one of the many bits of information discussed with the American hero. It is good to see Snowden actually getting the opportunity to speak at length in an honest forum unlike that over-hyped and heavily edited sit down with the state lackey Brian Williams of NBC back in May.

The interview, conducted in Moscow by Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill won't get any coverage in the USA!, USA!, USA! where the narrative has mostly already been set that Snowden is a "traitor" and "Russian spy" which at least among many who I know personally is taken as the immutable truth as if spoken by God himself. The Guardian however for the most part still manages to publish and report the truth (with the exception of how even this venerable institution has now been transmitting unchallenged the lies of the US and Kiev regimes about the downing of MH17) but is largely unknown to the US public who remain safely enclosed within their red, white and blue cocoons of ignorance and exceptionalism, I excerpt the following from the transcript of the Snowden interview but please go and check it out yourself and pass it around to others:

ON NUDE PHOTOS

Many of the people searching through the haystacks were young, enlisted guys and … 18 to 22 years old. They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says: “Oh, hey, that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.” And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. Anything goes, more or less. You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.

It’s never reported, nobody ever knows about it, because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. Now while people may say that it’s an innocent harm, this person doesn’t even know that their image was viewed, it represents a fundamental principle, which is that we don’t have to see individual instances of abuse. The mere seizure of that communication by itself was an abuse. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communication stream, from the intended recipient, and given to the government without any specific authorisation, without any specific need, is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in the government database?

I’d say probably every two months you see something like that happen. It’s routine enough, depending on the company you keep, it could be more or less frequent. But these are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions. 

[Kind of like the "fringe benefits" of government TSA goons feeling up little children at airport checkpoints]

ON HIS LEAKING OF THE NSA DOCUMENTS TO JOURNALISTS

Snowden wanted the revelations to be published as fast as possible.] So I was very concerned about all these delays. You’ve got to remember I knew nothing of the press. I’d never talked to a journalist … I was a virgin source basically.

It was a nervous period. You have no idea what the future’s going to hold and I was all right because I knew things would get out but I wanted them to get out in the best way, and that was [why] I didn’t want any mistakes. It was what I called the zero fuck-ups policy…

It’s that concept of herd immunity. They run cover for the others. And particularly once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it.

But as an engineer, and particularly as somebody who worked in telecoms and things like that on these systems, the thing that you’re always terrified of when you’re thinking about reliability is SPOFs – Single Point Of Failure, right?

This was the thing I told the journalists: “If the government thinks you’re the single point of failure, they’ll kill you.”

[Think about that statement “If the government thinks you’re the single point of failure, they’ll kill you” and it is as terrifying as anything else and the list of bodies of those who got too close to the truth before they published it is as long as it is evident that there are elements of the US government that engage in maintaining death squads for "wet ops"]

ON THE PROGRAMS THEMSELVES & THE US GOVERNMENT

I began to move from merely overseeing these systems to actively directing their use. Many people don’t understand that I was actually an analyst and I designated individuals and groups for targeting.

I was exposed to information about the previous programs like Stellar Wind [used during the presidency of George W Bush] for example. The warrantless wire-tapping of everyone in the United States, including their internet data – which is a violation of the constitution and law in the United States – did cause a scandal and was ended because of that.

When I saw that, that was really the earthquake moment because it showed that the officials who authorised these programs knew it was a problem, they knew they didn’t have any statutory authorisation for these programs. But instead the government assumed upon itself, in secret, new executive powers without any public awareness or any public consent and used them against the citizenry of its own country to increase its own power, to increase its own awareness.

We constantly hear the phrase “national security” but when the state begins … broadly intercepting the communications, seizing the communications by themselves, without any warrant, without any suspicion, without any judicial involvement, without any demonstration of probable cause, are they really protecting national security or are they protecting state security?

What I came to feel – and what I think more and more people have seen at least the potential for – is that a regime that is described as a national security agency has stopped representing the public interest and has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests. And the idea of western democracy as having state security bureaus, just that term, that phrase itself, “state security bureau”, is kind of chilling.

[The machine is fully out of control and there are no overseers in the government, only enablers and cover-up artists]

ON HIS EXILE TO RUSSIA COURTESY OF JOHN KERRY'S STATE DEPARTMENT

So this is the thing that nobody realises. They think there was some masterplan to get out safely and avoid all consequences. That’s what Hong Kong was all about. But it wasn’t. The purpose of my mission was to get the information to journalists. Once I had, that I was done.

That’s why I was so peaceful afterwards, because it didn’t matter what happened … Going to Ecuador and getting asylum there, that would have been great … And that would have just been a bonus. The fact that I’ve ended up so secure is entirely by accident. And as you said, it probably shouldn’t have happened. If we have anybody to thank, it’s the state department. The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.

And

I’m much happier here in Russia than I would be facing an unfair trial in which I can’t even present a public interest defence to a jury of my peers. We’ve asked [the] government again and again to provide a fair trial and they’ve declined. And I feel very fortunate to have received asylum. Russia’s a modern country and it’s been good to me so, yeah, I have a pretty normal life and I would absolutely like to continue to be able to travel as I have in the past. I’d love to be able to visit western Europe again but that’s not a decision for me to make, that’s for the publics and the governments of each of those independent countries.

ON GEORGE ORWELL

Contrary to popular belief I don’t think we are exactly in the Nineteen Eighty-Four universe. The danger is that we can see how [Orwell’s] technologies that are [in] Nineteen Eighty-Four now seem unimaginative and quaint. They talked about things like microphones implanted in bushes and cameras in TVs that look back at us. Nowadays we’ve got webcams that go with us everywhere. We buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets with us voluntarily as we go from place to place and move about our lives.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is an important book but we should not bind ourselves to the limits of the author’s imagination. Time has shown that the world is much more unpredictable and dangerous than that.

[I have often remarked that Orwell was an optimist and as Snowden points out - he was limited by his inability to fully anticipate the huge advances in technology that would make his Oceania a reality]

Edward Snowden is a patriot and a true American hero whose risk of everything has provided an invaluable service in helping to expose the nefarious criminal activities of an unaccountable and unconstitutional Deep State shadow government that operates with full impunity.  This anti-democratic nest of vipers uses the visible components of the US government as an exoskeleton, just a costume to trick the masses that all is still right until the day comes for the changes in policy (say a "terrorist" attack or world war) that will bring about the "turnkey totalitarianism" that will be the final evolution of the warfare state.

LINKS

Edited Transcript of Guardian Exclusive Interview

Video Teaser for Guardian Interview

Snowden: Brit Spying Law Could Have Been Written by NSA

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian former US government contractor turned heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden has commented on British leader David Cameron's new emergency surveillance bill to be rammed through parliament this week much like the USAPATRIOT Act was in the aftermath of 9/11. During the interview, conducted in Moscow to and be made available in its entirety later this week Snowden states that the law is comparable to the 2007 Protect America Act which the Bush administration similarly rushed into law.

According to a The Guardian story entitled "Edward Snowden condemns Britain's emergency surveillance bill":

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Moscow, Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. "I mean we don't have bombs falling. We don't have U-boats in the harbour."

Suddenly it is a priority, he said, after the government had ignored it for an entire year. "It defies belief."

He found the urgency with which the British government was moving extraordinary and said it mirrored a similar move in the US in 2007 when the Bush administration was forced to introduce legislation, the Protect America Act, citing the same concerns about terrorist threats and the NSA losing cooperation from telecom and internet companies.

"I mean the NSA could have written this draft," he said. "They passed it under the same sort of emergency justification. They said we would be at risk. They said companies will no longer cooperate with us. We're losing valuable intelligence that puts the nation at risk."

AND

During the interview, Snowden was taken aback on learning about the speed at which the British government is moving on new legislation and described it as "a significant change". He questioned why it was doing so now, more than a year after his initial revelations about the scale of government surveillance in the US, the UK and elsewhere around the world, a year in which the government had been largely silent.

He also questioned why there had been a move in the aftermath of a ruling by the European court of justice in April that declared some of the existing surveillance measures were invalid.

He said the government was asking for these "new authorities immediately without any debate, just taking their word for it, despite the fact that these exact same authorities were just declared unlawful by the European court of justice".

He added: "Is it really going to be so costly for us to take a few days to debate where the line should be drawn about the authority and what really serves the public interest?

"If these surveillance authorities are so interested, so invasive, the courts are actually saying they violate fundamental rights, do we really want to authorise them on a new, increased and more intrusive scale without any public debate?"

He said there had been government silence for the last year since he had exposed the scale of surveillance by the NSA and its British partner GCHQ. "And yet suddenly we're told there's a brand new bill that looks like it was written by the National Security Agency that has to be passed in the same manner that a surveillance bill in the United States was passed in 2007, and it has to happen now. And we don't have time to debate it, despite the fact that this was not a priority, this was not an issue that needed to be discussed at all, for an entire year. It defies belief."

Cameron of course is invoking as justification for the latest shoring up of the surveillance system of control the big, bad Muslim bogeyman and the impending risk of "terrorist" attacks on jolly old England - Hermann Goering once remarked "it works the same in any country" and at least in terms of using fear to bypass any sort of legitimate legislative process the former Nazi was spot on. While the authorities in The Homeland must tread a bit more carefully the British regime which is rapidly morphing into something that resembles the Norsefire government in the movie V For Vendetta and let's face it, the British people are spineless given their status as subjects of the Queen an the illicit royal family whose only qualification for power is to simply be born. The government there is obviously expecting some sort of uprising as it has been recently revealed that water cannons are being brought in for crowd control although since the word got out the decision has been temporarily delayed.

The US-UK surveillance colossus will not be constrained by anything as quaint as a constitution or the legitimate political process and will continue to consolidate power and increase snooping capabilities on political dissenters, journalists, bloggers, activists and any who threaten their illicit system of control. All of this was made possible when the authoritarian elements hit the jackpot with the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Pandora's Box of scare tactics was thrown open - it will never be closed without a mass uprising but the time for that grows short as the lists of those who would challenge the bastards grows longer. 

Russia Likely to Extend Political Asylum for Patriotic Snowden

At this point it is difficult to see the Obama administration, the warmongering neocons at the State Department and the constantly squealing authoritarian freaks in Congress getting any bigger bug up their asses than the one that they already have embedded there against Russian leader Vladimir Putin so it remains to be seen how much weeping and gnashing of the teeth will occur now that the word out of Russia is that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's asylum is likely to be extended. This would be great news for those of us in The Homeland and the larger world outside who value the great service that the patriot has already provided by outing the NSA as a smoother, more sophisticated version of the East German Stasi - although from the ongoing flurry of stories based on Snowden's leeks they are obviously far less competent. The Snowden leaks have allowed the post September 11, 2001 star-spangled fascist surveillance machine to be seen as exactly the menace to freedom that it is and the US establishment has been furious ever since he was able to elude capture by US goons in Hong Kong last June.

So much for the dishonest calls for Snowden to come home to argue his case that was floated by that pathologically dishonest bitch Hillary Rodham Clinton during her interview with The Guardian last week. Hillary may be able to successfully sell her bullshit that he would have a chance at a fair trial to many but that is just sucker bait for the rubes who don't have an inkling that the totalitarian dream that is the Espionage Act of 1917 precludes any potential defense that Snowden could be entitled to. Were he to return he would rapidly be thrown into some dank, brutal and cold hell on an undisclosed military base where he would be tortured and subjected to psychological torment because hey, that is just the way that we roll in the USA! USA! USA! anymore. The effeminate Skull and Bones pedigreed doofus John Kerry's demand that Snowden "man up" is just a less sophisticated taunt to get Snowden's goat - he is far too smart for either of the venal, immoral slimeballs who have risen to the apex of the Democratic party and Russia is as good as it is going to get until this filthy, corrupt power structure has been banished and driven back into the sewers where it belongs.

The momentum set off by Snowden - despite widespread propaganda, demonization and disinformation ops being waged in the corrupt state-corporate media - has continued despite every effort to quash it. Critical European ally Germany just hosted two pre-Snowden whistleblowers in William Binney and Thomas Drake to give official testimony on NSA abuses to a government committee. Then there are  Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman who continue to report on the abuse of the NSA programs that were said to only be necessary to combat "terrorism" in order to collect data on law abiding Americans including those who are targeted for their religious and political views and according to some reports there even may be another NSA leaker besides Snowden. The US establishment can no longer claim the moral high ground when it comes to conducting economic espionage and snooping on dissenters and this is a hugely important factor when it comes to exposing the criminal racketeers who run the government as their credibility suffers the death of a thousand cuts.

Outside of the sheep who choose to live within electronically reinforced cocoons of willful ignorance there is a rapidly growing number of people who are waking up to the scam, much like being freed from the pods in the classic metaphor-movie The Matrix and sooner or later there will be a tipping point reached. Revolutions are really never started by the majority but rather a dedicated vanguard of those who are informed and determined cast off those painful shackles of tyranny, it is history and it is most importantly OUR history as Americans. If you really believe that the Founding Fathers wouldn't be immediately hung as traitors by our current government just as Jesus Christ would be summarily thrown into a 4 x 6 cell at Gitmo were he to return to Earth tomorrow preaching the same message then you don't get it.

But every day people more do get it and the number continues to grow, thanks to Edward Snowden. The man should be brought home to parades and honors and awarded the Medal of Freedom if this country truly existed as it falsely promotes itself as being rather than the lawless, tyrannical bunting-draped banana republic that it has become.

Smearing of Snowden Begins after NBC Interview

The most hated man in America today, at least  by the unprincipled charlatans in the establishment is former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the lackeys of the corrupt National Security State and the polluted Obama regime have attacked him as they were a pack of mange crazed dogs. The running man managed to hit the big time - at least in America where television is the drug of choice - in an exclusive interview with NBC's Brian Williams. It was Snowden's big public relations opportunity after months of being kicked around by scum the likes of Peter King, Mike Rogers, Michael Hayden and on Wednesday Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry who is befitting to wear the crown of king of American assholes after his last nine or ten months on the job. Kerry hit the Wednesday morning television circuit to repeatedly and dishonestly trash Snowden as a "traitor" and a "coward" in much the same way that the angel of death Dick Cheney did to the 2004 version of Kerry himself. Seems like once a particular level is achieved in the American political class that a truly putrescent rottenness blooms and Kerry is resplendent as he practically glows with hypocrisy, moral debauchery and elitist decadence.

The massive smear job on Snowden started early yesterday, well before the airing of the interview based on a sneak preview segment (one wonders if NBC picked it out) where he made comments to the effect that he was trained as a spy. The usual suspects pounced on that to mock the top target on Obama's kill list as living in a fantasy world and other horseshit - the number one tactic of the pigs who run this star-spangled sty is to discredit and turn their vast propaganda apparatus loose. But really, considering what Snowden really said: “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not and even being assigned a name that was not mine”. While Snowden's official duty with the Central Intelligence Agency remains mysterious when one is working either directly for or as a contractor for the US government, under a fake name, at a fake business in a foreign country and conducting surveillance I would venture to say that such a person would in fact be a "spy" in the truest sense of the world. It is lost on millions of meat heads though but those really aren't the type of people that you really want to try to convince of anything anyway. As the old saying goes, "never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig".

But I digress...

After the exclusive NBC interview with the celebrity talking head Williams it was time to pile on Snowden and the attacks, while ridiculous and predictable were particularly nasty. NBC News has the Snowden interview on their website with the subtitle "Traitor or Patriot", the New York Times slyly floated the innuendo that Snowden was an agent of Putin (with special bonus points for kicking Glenn Greenwald in the balls as "smug and unreasonable") and the gaggle of vermin like Peter King, the unhinged terrorist supporter called the interview an "infomercial". On top of it all, after Snowden stated that he had attempted to use formal channels to report an NSA run amok the American Stasi came out today and released some bullshit email from Snowden as 'proof' that he never attempted to utilize the proper channels. According to a story in The Guardian the NSA stated that it was the only record it could find. This is the same agency that lies about everything and performs duties for a government that sends forth perjurers like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to lie to Congress about the unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining programs that the patriot Snowden exposed.

The deck is stacked in the US media, one who opposes Leviathan is never going to get a fair trial in the court of public opinion and over the next few days Snowden will be electronically lynched, likely culminating with an all star lineup of fascist scum on the Sunday morning 'news' show circuit. A truth teller will never get any sort of honest treatment in the US corporate-state media and while Snowden may be smart he is naive to have afforded a fully vested servant of the establishment such as Brian Williams serve as his Judas Goat.

More NSA Mischief: Purchased Products Intercepted and Tampered With

In another revelation  on still more NSA malfeasance that was published in the just released Glenn Greenwald book "No Place to Hide" the American Stasi has been intercepting computer hardware purchases and implanting spying tools before repackaging the product in the original wrapping. Not this should be a surprise to anyone who has been following the wanton criminality of Obama's out of control surveillance state and an earlier piece that was published in Germany's Der Spiegel back in December already had revealed the hijacking of laptop deliveries but the book adds it to the pile of damning evidence courtesy of heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden that is also available online here in a large file but one that is well worth the space. This story of what is basically theft of a customer's paid for item by government goons and which should be a felony along the lines of mail fraud is not going to go over well with American tech companies, one of which, Cisco Systems just published a stinging letter on exactly what is thought of such sleazy chicanery.

Other than the inclusion in "No Place to Hide" the story is getting increasing circulation as a caveat emptor to all who which to purchase US manufactured network hardware with the expectation that the product will arrive as promised and without surveillance mechanisms illegally implanted. The Guardian in a piece from Greenwald's book has the following in a story entitled "Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers" from which I excerpt the following:

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.

The drumbeat of American accusations against Chinese internet device manufacturers was unrelenting. In 2012, for example, a report from the House Intelligence Committee, headed by Mike Rogers, claimed that Huawei and ZTE, the top two Chinese telecommunications equipment companies, "may be violating United States laws" and have "not followed United States legal obligations or international standards of business behaviour". The committee recommended that "the United States should view with suspicion the continued penetration of the US telecommunications market by Chinese telecommunications companies".

AND

But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)".

Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same.

This by the way has not jack shit to do with "terrorism", the justification of this monstrous and ongoing invasion of privacy by a long out of control NSA and the trillion dollars of taxpayer subsidized bottom feeders that contribute to our Surveillance State Gomorrah. This is just plain and simple using a technological advantage as well as laws that have been hollowed out by the phony war on terror - which Obama and others paid homage to today at the grand opening of the obscenity that is the 9/11 Museum - to commit industrial espionage and gain unfair competitive advantage but hey that is the American way now in the land of fuck you, I got mine. The 9/11 Museum is just grotesque and sickening and only perpetuates the myth of the day that everything changed but that is a story for another time - be sure and get your T-shirts, coffee mugs, beer coolers and key chains at the gift shop. 

Greenwald is everywhere right now promoting the book and is getting the well deserved attention that he deserves as an investigative journalist, the careerist, power-sucking scum here in The Homeland would do well to take some lessons from the man who harkens back to the good old days of muckraking and non-celebrity journalists who shined a light on corrupted power like a blowtorch. Two great extended interviews of Greenwald were done by Amy Goodman at the liberal Democracy Now - here are the links (transcripts also available): May 13, 2014 and May 14, 2014 - check them out and pass them around to others. Now may be the last time that we have to really hit these bastards hard and put a choke chain on them while there is still a slim chance to do so.

I have always maintained that the only way that any serious restraint of the cancerous surveillance industrial complex can only be made possible by an alliance of American tech businesses (fuck the corrupt telecoms who are in on the con) to engage in awareness campaigns, implementing stronger encryption and pooling their vast resources to sue the hell out of the US government and fund the campaigns of political opponents of those that protect the NSA - like California's own Dianne Feinstein. If this is the case there is hope in the aforementioned Cisco Systems communique by Mark Chandler which I excerpt from at length:

Today’s security challenges are real and significant.  We want governments to detect and disrupt terrorist networks before they inflict harm on our society, our citizens, and our systems of government.   We also want to live in countries that respect their citizens’ basic human rights.  The tension between security and freedom has become one the most pressing issues of our day.  Societies wracked by terror cannot be truly free, but an overreaching government can also undermine freedom.

It is in this context that I want to offer some thoughts on actions by the US Government that in Cisco’s eyes have overreached, undermining the goals of free communication, and steps that can be taken to right that balance, and I do so on behalf of all of Cisco’s leadership team.

Confidence in the open, global Internet has brought enormous economic benefits to the United States and to billions around the world.  This confidence has been eroded by revelations of government surveillance, by efforts of the US government to force US companies to provide access to communications of non-US citizens even when that violates the privacy laws of countries where US companies do business, and allegations that governments exploit rather than report security vulnerabilities in products.

As a matter of policy and practice, Cisco does not work with any government, including the United States Government, to weaken our products. When we learn of a security vulnerability, we respond by validating it, informing our customers, and fixing it.  We react the same when we find that a customer’s security has been impacted by external forces, regardless of what country or form of government or how that security breach occurred.  We offer customers robust tools to defend their environments against attack, and detect attacks when they are happening. By doing these things, we have built and maintained our customers’ trust.  We expect our government to value and respect this trust.

This past December, eight technology companies expressed concern to the President of the United States and Members of Congress that the US government’s surveillance efforts are in fact harmful. They stated, in part, “We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight.”  We agree and support these positions – without customer confidence in the privacy and security of communications, the extraordinary steps toward freedom, productivity and prosperity that is the promise of the Internet can be lost.

This week a number of media outlets reported another serious allegation: that the National Security Agency took steps to compromise IT products enroute to customers, including Cisco products. We comply with US laws, like those of many other countries, which limit exports to certain customers and destinations; we ought to be able to count on the government to then not interfere with the lawful delivery of our products in the form in which we have manufactured them.   To do otherwise, and to violate legitimate privacy rights of individuals and institutions around the world, undermines confidence in our industry.

As our malignantly rotten Supreme Court has made evident: money is speech and there shall be no constraints on those who have a shitload of it. Silicon Valley has an abundance of it and in the best interests of not only keeping the internet free but for just the sake of ensuring that American business won't take another big hit due to crony capitalism and outright fascism should invest as much of it as possible to carpet bomb the corrupt Democrat and Republican criminals back to the stone age in 2014, 2016 and forever after in favor of pro-American, pro-civil liberties and pro-business libertarians and independents.

The War on Snowden Continues as Does NSA Spying

Given the amount of coverage churned out by the sycophantic gravy trainers in the US state-corporate media about the latest Republican Benghazi spectacle, the 24/7 Putin bashing, missing flight MH-370 and assorted celebrity driven swill the biggest story of the last year has been buried int he bullshit. The story of course are the startling revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of the massive domestic surveillance and data-mining programs being conducted against tens of millions of law-abiding Americans. Outside of the random drive by denunciations of Snowden as a "traitor" by the criminal political class there has been an absence of the sort of breaking stories of unconstitutional malevolence by the American Stasi, most of them the work of the award winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. That is about to change as Mr. Greenwald's long awaited book on Snowden and the NSA entitled "No Place to Hide" is due to come out on Tuesday.

Therefore the uptick in smearing Snowden is a predictable response by the rogue state and its foreign partners in crime and I have no doubt that this weekend's Sunday morning bloviation circuit will be filled with the most vile freaks that the US political system has to offer with all of them peddling the usual unproven horseshit that Snowden is a Russian spy. The point man in the coming attack is former NSA commandant General Keith Alexander, the man with the Star Trek fetish and a seething contempt for the US Constitution.  The now retired Alexander, who has previously called for the control and censorship of the media (and these pigs call Putin an authoritarian?) surfaced in an extended interview for the Australian Financial Review to launch the line of attack that Mr. Snowden is being manipulated by Russian intelligence. It is never mentioned thought that Snowden only ended up in Russia because the freedom loving Obama administration revoked his passport and was closing in on the man for one of those now as American as apple pie extraordinary renditions. Snowden fled Hong Kong and was holed up in Moscow's airport transit area for weeks until the demonized Russian leader offered him temporary asylum.

Rather than attempt to pick through Alexander's hogwash myself I excerpt from the fine piece on the Australian interview done by Greenwald over at The Intercept entitled "Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters":

The just-retired long-time NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, recently traveled to Australia to give a remarkably long and wide-ranging interview with an extremely sycophantic “interviewer” with The Australian Financial Review. The resulting 17,000-word transcript and accompanying article form a model of uncritical stenography journalism, but Alexander clearly chose to do this because he is angry, resentful, and feeling unfairly treated, and the result is a pile of quotes that are worth examining, only a few of which are noted below:

AFR: What were the key differences for you as director of NSA serving under presidents Bush and Obama? Did you have a preferred commander in chief?

Gen. Alexander: Obviously they come from different parties, they view things differently, but when it comes to the security of the nation and making those decisions about how to protect our nation, what we need to do to defend it, they are, ironically, very close to the same point. You would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions about how to defend our nation from terrorists and other threats.

The almost-complete continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama on such matters has been explained by far too many senior officials in both parties, and has been amply documented in far too many venues, to make it newsworthy when it happens again. Still, the fact that one of the nation’s most powerful generals in history, who has no incentive to say it unless it were true, just comes right out and states that Bush and The Candidate of Change are “very close to the same point” and “you would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions” is a fine commentary on a number of things, including how adept the 2008 Obama team was at the art of branding.

The fact that Obama, in 2008, specifically vowed to his followers angered over his campaign-season NSA reversal that he possessed “the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as president — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future” only makes that point a bit more vivid.

This underlines a point that I have spent endless hours of frustration attempting to convince my liberal friends of in that Obama is simply a more refined extension of Bush and that in reality very little has actually changed - except for the worse - since the pope of hope was elected. The warrantless surveillance continues, the Wall Street gamblers and connected corporate parasites continue to feed at the taxpayer funded trough, our civil liberties continue to be diminished and the war machine keeps running. Then there is also Obama's escalation of the drone assassination programs, the precedent set for the extrajudicial killing of a US citizen and not even Bush would be so vile as to not speak out in condemnation of that atrocity that took place in Odessa last week where US backed neo-Nazi militias ambushed and slaughtered a yet to be determined number of anti-austerity protesters then set the trade union hall in which it took place on fire.

I look forward to the Tuesday release of the Greenwald book once again putting a spotlight on the cockroaches at the mammoth nest in Fort Meade and the scumbags in Washington who provide cover for this most un-American of agencies and its ongoing fascist conduct.

Liar and Blowhard Mike Rogers a Perfect Fit for Talk Radio

Living in The Homeland of the post September 11, 2001 - the day when everything changed - era I can honestly say that very little really surprises me anymore. This is especially so when it comes to the plumbing of new depths by a now rotten to the last seed of the core and completely irredeemable political system. That was until this morning when I heard the news that uber fascist House Intelligence Committee overlord Mike Rogers was stepping down at the end of his current term. This deprived the Eighth Congressional District of the state of Michigan of yet another chance  to stick it to the rest of America by re-electing a man who is an enemy of the state, a pathological liar as well as an embarrassment to the constitutional form of government that has been stolen away by pigs like him. It also spared the rest of the country from that very district's enforced tyranny of the minority in that Rogers had become such a powerful figure, although as with the vast super-majority of US politicians a total reprobate.

The news as stunning as it was sudden and makes one wonder if Rogers finally crossed that line one time too many when he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press over the weekend to pull yet another whopper out of his fat ass with zero proof that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was collaborating with the evil Putin in regards to the annexing of Crimea Rogers may have gone a bridge too far when he stated that “No counter-terrorism official in the United States does not believe that Mr. Snowden…. is not under the influence of Russian intelligence services”. I guess that some times if you give someone enough rope that they will eventually hang themselves and it is wonderful to see Mr. Rogers hoisted upon his own petard and banished to the right-wing talk radio circuit for the rest of his working life. He will fit in well there given his proclivity for insane demagoguery.

Rogers also likely was involved in pushing through the shifty change in House procedural routine where the NSA "reform" bill that was being pimped by he and Democratic ally Dutch Ruppersberger  -who conveniently happens to represent the very Maryland district in which NSA Stasi headquarters is located - was to be routed through the intelligence rather than the judiciary committee. Whatever it was something happened this week to finally stop the renegade Rogers and his relentless rampage to destroy the Constitution for his intelligence industry cronies. It would be completely appropriate if there are hard questions asked on why a safely gerrymandered Congressman with one of the most powerful spots in Congress as well as a weekly national media platform chose to give up all of that power to become a right-wing talk radio host. There are likely serious ethics violations here but as in the absurd example of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's hand-picked investigative committee finding him not guilty of any knowledge or malfeasance in "Bridgegate" Rogers will be allowed to slither through that big government revolving door into a post government life of filling his pockets ala Michael Chertoff and thousands of other swindlers of the American taxpayers.

The neoconservative sewer that is the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, or as I like to refer to it: "The Gospel for the Moneychangers" is bemoaning the loss of Rogers with this sick lament:

Michigan Rep. Mike Roges’ decision to quit Congress this year is a loss for the adult wing of the GOP, which understands that the NSA is not the enemy and that Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot, Edward Snowden, is no hero.

Yes, of course there is  the bullshit Putin-Snowden connection. That unproven yet constant slander belched forth by the scumbag Rogers on Sunday after Sunday. When it really gets down to it the entire Obama-Neocon joint venture to stick it to Putin is at the same time all about Snowden and nothing about him. El Presidente has never gotten over being punked by Putin who spared the heroic former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower from being disappeared into one of America’s torture dungeons. Nor have the neocon propagandists ever been able to get over it, especially after Putin undermined their war on Syria and thew a monkey wrench into the years running plan to nuke Iran. Obama has now gone fully neocon with daily escalations in his anti-Russian rhetoric as the parasite of the PNAC ideologues are likely ecstatic to return to their Democratic party roots. 

As for Rogers, a fanatic who I recently compared to as an uncontrollable late stage manic pederast he will find a home among the packs of degenerates who have become wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of King Midas by lying to the masses of asses who are wallow in outrage. Granted that Rogers is a hell of a lot more articulate than the Big Kahuna of white populist cultural resentment Rush "Sex Tourist" Limbaugh as well as Michael "I have a mancrush on homosexual beat icon Allen Ginsberg" Savage but his fascist message will resonate with the dregs of American society as surely as that of Julius Streicher once did long ago and far away.

We should be happy to be rid of Rogers in a position of actual authority although given the rest of the warmongering and reprehensibly rotten swine that have hijacked our government his spot will be quickly filled while he now cashes in off of his suckling at the big government teat.

Americans sure as hell deserve better than this crap and need to start to say so - very LOUDLY.

Up Yours Rogers! Greenwald Wins Polk Award for NSA Reporting

That very nasty scowl that is permanently affixed to the fat face of Congressman and House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, the thug shoved down the entire country’s throats by voters in Michigan’s 8^th congressional district is about to get even worse. In breaking news today the “thief” Glenn Greenwald who is the target of Rogers’ latest vendetta just won the prestigious George Polk Award for his reporting on the Edward Snowden story.  Along with Greenwald fellow reporters who also worked on the stories of the former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower - Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras as well as the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman - were honored. This is a triumph for the now on life support concept of freedom of the press in the darkest days of Obama’s war on journalism. They along with Snowden himself have all done this country a great service by outing the criminal rats at Fort Mead Stasi headquarters along with their oath breaking enablers in the most corrupt Congress in the nation’s long history.

Rogers in particular has got to be furious over this and he and his fellow usurpers of the Constitution had better tread carefully if Greenwald chooses to "force the issue" and return to the U.S. to pick up his Polk come April. According to a recent "exclusive"piece in Salon he seems to intend to do such a thing:  “I’m going to go back to the U.S. for many reasons, but just the fucking principle is enough … On principle I’m going to force the issue”. God forbid that any serious journalist dare to have principles in these sorry days of careerism, sensationalism, panty-sniffing, celebrity worship, tabloid drivel, dead child stories and acting as stenographers for the same crooked government figures that the they are supposed to be holding to account per the First Amendment. Christ knows that we certainly couldn't have accountability in this collapsing lemming colony. 

It will be time for Rogers to put up or shut up since the state-corporate media refuses to call him on his bullshit about Snowden being a Russian spy and Greenwald being a thief. If Rogers and his ilk are able to push Obama and his ruthless hatchet man Eric Holder into actually going full fascist and arresting Greenwald it may finally be that tipping point that will trigger a chain reaction against this now thirteen year running coup d’etat that started with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. There is much sentiment for stringing Greenwald up by his heels in some dank CIA torture gulag and if that is allowed to occur then we might just as well abandon any idiotic babble about ‘freedom’ and ‘checks and balances’ because it will be a sign that Orwell was dead on about that “boot stamping on a human face.. forever”.

From the moment that he first revealed that meeting with Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room and then began writing on the material provided Mr. Greenwald was an enemy of the state. He had already incurred the wrath of the corrupt political class when he was targeted several years ago by corporate wet work artists HBGary Federal as a supporter of Wikileaks in aftermath of the Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning's whistleblowing, particularly of the huge embarrassment that was the "collateral murder" video that showed our imperial stormtroopers indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. Greenwald isn't easily intimidated and it is about damned time that someone who is a public figure took a principled stand against this scum. He has a king-sized chip on his shoulder which is what it takes when going up against Leviathan, a recent Rolling Stone magazine article  entitled "Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets" quotes Greenwald who is openly gay:

"I decided to wage war against this system and institutional authority that had tried to reject and condemn me," he says. "It was like, 'Go fuck yourselves. Instead of having you judge me, I'm going to judge you, because I don't accept the fact that you're even in a position to cast judgments upon me.'"

That is something for Mike Rogers to suck on as it will be his move if Greenwald indeed chooses to "force the issue". 

Congratulations to all of the Polk Award honorees for their courageous reporting on the Snowden material despite incurring the full fury of the U.S. and British power structure and their well paid presstitutes by daring to report on the truth of just how bottomless that the snakepit has become. 

(Image: The Guardian) 

Establishment Propaganda Organ Time Magazine Snubs Snowden

With the state-corporate in The Homeland being nothing more than a unceasing barrage of pro-establishment propaganda it is difficult to single out which forum is the worst. When it comes to making a list though, one would have to rank Time Magazine within the top ten and with the annual "Person of the Year" issue hitting the newsstands this week there is every reason why it is fully deserving of such lofty placement. Don't forget that it was this very publication that back in 2009 tabbed one Helicopter Ben Bernanke, the man who saved the planet for the dubious honor. The soon to be gone Federal Reserve chairman was quite the sensation back then, at the tip of the spear for the relentless public relations campaign by the greedy Wall Street banksters who blew up the economy and then fleeced the taxpayers to back their bad bets when the bearded one showed up on another high ranking propaganda organ CBS's 60 Minutes to lovingly introduce the focus group friendly term "green shoots" into the national lexicon. It was tough to follow-up the gag factor of last week's edition, the cover of which featured Carl Icahn, another one of the greedy bastards whose irresponsible gambling has created the current situation where the 2009 person of the year's employer has to now pump 85 billion dollars a month into the rigged markets to prevent another implosion. It was a typical hagiography by a long corrupt media in glorifying the amorality of the looter class in which the churning out of books, movies etc. exalting such degenerates as offshoring pioneer "Chainsaw" Jack Welch the noxious horse's ass Donald Trump. Time however managed to put the crowning cherry on the shit cake of 2013 with bestowing their enshrinement of Pope Francis as this year's 'winner'.

It would seem to be a bit odd to follow-up the slobbering homage to Icahn with a man who just issued the most blistering condemnation of capitalism since Karl Marx walked the Earth so it was already a done deal prior to the Pope's apostolic exhortation two weeks ago. Pope Francis was already an improvement over his predecessor Herr Ratzinger who was in his early years a member of the Hitler Youth but I have to admit that he was dead on with his remarks on the mutated form of capitalism that currently exists today: "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?".  Just that sentence alone sounds very strangely like Jesus, the one who actually chased the money changers from the temple rather than the Jesus V.2 who wields a mighty sword, hates gay people and whose true teachings about the evils of accumulated wealth have been washed away by some bastardized version of the bible known as the Prosperity Gospel. There is no question that greed and corruption have destroyed capitalism and the Pope had some stones to tell it like it is but I doubt that the Vatican will soon begin to divest itself of it's obscene wealth in order to minister to the poor and downtrodden. In America the Pope's remarks earned him the scorn of multi-billionaire gasbag Rush Hudson Limbaugh III who came out and called him a Marxist in the back to the future John Birch Society dialogue that is so prevalent today.

Had the Pope's slamming of bastardized capitalism come earlier the magazine would have had to come up with some other figure, perhaps Jodi Arias or some celebrity flake but what goes unspoken is that it had to be ANYONE OTHER THAN EDWARD SNOWDEN!  Let's face it, the "Person of the Year" is technically supposed to be awarded to one who has been most influential to domestic and world events and the zeitgeist. This is why some other former honorees were the likes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini and George W. Bush. Snowden has done one hell of a lot to roil the global waters with his revelations of an out of control Anglo-American surveillance machine that continues to grow exponentially, limited only by rapidly developing technology. Thanks to the former government contractor Booz Allen whistleblower the way that international relations, especially business will be changed forever and Snowden has bestowed the gift of a reason to distrust the unchecked power of the state to non-libertarians.

In a system not rigged and rotten Mr. Snowden would have been the winner but with the corrupt government and ruling establishment still reeling from the damage inflicted on their nefarious activities by his exposure the last thing that would be desired is for his face to adorn the cover. That could possibly inspire the sheep to get the idea that their enemy is domestic rather than the foreign bogeyman of the week and to actually try to do something about it. In fairness to Time they do mention Snowden but the story is buried inside the issue and as most of it's content is pretty mediocre. For a much better story on the real persons of the year check out Rolling Stone's year end issue and the story: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets. At least that is a magazine that has some integrity and a much better writing staff as well.