Second Source of Surveillance State Leaks is Big Trouble for Obama

A new story that was published yesterday by the online magazine The Intercept  has the potential of being big trouble for President Barack Obama and the national surveillance state. The piece, by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux is entitled "Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System  by the Numbers" and expands on their earlier piece "The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist". The latest set of leaked secret documents come from 2013, after former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had fled Hawaii with his cache of information. The timing makes for a very nice birthday present for Mr. Transparency, especially since the massive expansion of the terrorist watchlist and the TIDE database has taken place on his watch.  TIDE is an acronym for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.

According to Scahill and Devereaux "Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group" and the story quotes a former FBI special agent as saying that “If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism”. This is the point when one realizes that tracking potential "terrorists" is only a cover for a massive expansion of government surveillance and the compiling of detailed dossiers on millions of law-abiding Americans. The targets are people whose grave offense is in having views that are not compatible with those of  the criminals who are running the show. What do you think that massive NSA storage facility in Utah is for? 

With technology continuing to advance in condensing the amount of physical space that is needed to store more and more data, a facility of that size is not needed to house only that of suspected "terrorists". The phony war on terror has always been a war on Americans themselves. It is only a matter of when the conditions are right for the official government policies to be changed and the contingency plans implemented. It could be a massive financial collapse (which is coming), a war with Russia, another 9/11 style of terrorist attack as former Vice President Dick Cheney has predicted or a wild card like an Ebola virus outbreak.

CNN has confirmed that there is now a second leaker. In a story published on Tuesday entitled "New leaker disclosing U.S. secrets, government concludes" from which I excerpt:

The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.

Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden's leaks.

The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.

The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter "it seems clear at this point" that there was another.

Government officials have been investigating to find out that identity.

Those who trivialize the surveillance as being largely directed towards Muslims are short-sighted and living in denial. This is not the only government database or tracking system, there are other more secret ones buried deep within the bowels of the alphabet soup agencies. Take for example "Main Core" which was revealed in 2008 by Christopher Ketcham in his story for Radar Magazine, "The Last Roundup" about a top secret U.S. government database that targeted political dissidents in a time of "national emergency". "Main Core" is in all probability housed within some component of the massive Department of Homeland Security. I strongly encourage readers to check out the Ketcham story as it offers the context missing in the stories based on the Snowden leaks. I excerpt briefly from "The Last Roundup":

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Given the uproar from conservatives over the apparent targeting of political groups, primarily the so-called Tea Party by Obama's IRS Gestapo, it is both surprising and dismaying that there isn't similar outrage over the NSA surveillance programs. Liberals are also largely silent, when it is their guy who is running amok everything is fine but they would have been shrieking for George W. Bush's head on a platter for something like this.

This is a time when Americans need to be made aware of the massive abuses of power of the Executive Branch under Obama who is able to get away the expansion of the surveillance-police state in ways that no other U.S. President ever has before.

Is There a Second NSA Leaker in Addition to Edward Snowden?

A very interesting question has come out regarding a story on the NSA's targeting of those who utilize internet privacy tools, specifically the browser Tor (The Onion Router) and portable Linux based operating system Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) as potential "terrorists" and "extremists". The question being is that the copy of the XKeyscore code published by German website Das Erste apparently was not a part of the collection of NSA documents procured by whistleblower Edward Snowden but may actually have come from a second leaker. If true this would be a bombshell as well as a game-changer that could reverberate throughout the world and shake the US national surveillance state to its very roots.

The big story which is written by Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz originally broke in Germany's Tagesschau (you will need Google Translate) and cites the NSA targeting of a German student and internet privacy activist named Sebastian Hahn who is involved with the Tor Project. The NSA has determined that anyone who even searches for information on internet encryption and privacy tools is deemed to be an "extremist". They are then flagged for a higher level of monitoring, data-mining and retention of content instead of the limited hangout of only the metadata. This goes far beyond what has been openly admitted to by the Obama administration and the array of national intelligence goons - even if they did manage to retroactively legalize their snooping as divulged in the report by that independent executive branch internal oversight office the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

This is where it begins to get really scary now that NSA has been outed for officially crossing over into thought crime. Internet privacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called out NSA for infringing upon the First Amendment "Dear NSA, Privacy is a Fundamental Right, Not Reasonable Suspicion":

Learning about Linux is not a crime--but don't tell the NSA that. A story published in German on Tagesschau, and followed up by an article in English on DasErste.de today, has revealed that the NSA is scrutinizing people who visit websites such as the Tor Project's home page and even Linux Journal. This is disturbing in a number of ways, but the bottom line is this: the procedures outlined in the articles show the NSA is adding "fingerprints"--like a scarlet letter for the information age--to activities that go hand in hand with First Amendment protected activities and freedom of expression across the globe.

The EFF also encourages the continued use of Tor and Tails:

One question that is sure to come up is whether this means people desiring anonymity should stop using Tor or Tails. Here's the bottom line: If you're using Tor or Tails, there is a possibility that you will be subject to greater NSA scrutiny. But we believe that the benefits outweigh the burdens.

In fact, the more people use Tor, the safer you are. That's why we're continuing to run the Tor Challenge. The ubiquitous use of privacy and security tools is our best hope for protecting the people who really need those tools--people for whom the consequences of being caught speaking out against their government can be imprisonment or death. The more ordinary people use Tor and Tails, the harder it is for the NSA to make the case that reading about or using these tools is de facto suspicious.

My personal take on this is that if you are currently using these tools or otherwise engaged in fighting the surveillance state then you are already on their list so just f*ck the NSA. At this point activists and those who challenge the system still have a relative degree of freedom to do exactly that so why retreat into the sheep pack when you have a vested interest in challenging the bastards - especially when that vested interest is in saving one's own skin. If someone is already on the pickup list, the primary objective is to do everything possible to keep the black vans from rolling on that day when it becomes politically acceptable to give the order - such as the next "terrorist" attack like the one that Dick Cheney has promised.

The key aspect of this story - anyone who gets it has understood for a long time that the NSA is lying their asses off and has been using their surveillance systems to build electronic dossiers on journalists, activists, bloggers, political dissidents and anyone who may one day pose a threat to the gangster state - is that the code apparently did not come from Mr. Snowden. According to a piece at the blog Boing Boing, written by Cory Doctorow and entitled "If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance" I except the following:

I have known that this story was coming for some time now, having learned about its broad contours under embargo from a trusted source. Since then, I've discussed it in confidence with some of the technical experts who have worked on the full set of Snowden docs, and they were as shocked as I was.

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.

Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that's true, it's big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency's cavalier attitude to the law and decency.

Doctorow then cites security expert Bruce Schneier (who has worked with Glenn Greenwald) who writes at the blog Schneier on Security who has stated in his recent post "NSA Targets the Privacy-Conscious for Surveillance" that "And, since Cory said it, I do not believe that this came from the Snowden documents. I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there." Greenwald himself seems to acknowledge this possibility in a Tweet.

That would be huge - particularly now that Greenwald's big story -that promised "fireworks show" - has been shut down by the US government which has gotten to either the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist himself or to the decision makers at the abysmal (at least to this point anyway) Pierre Omidyar backed venture The Intercept. The prospect of a second NSA leaker - who if he/she is smart, will avoid outing themselves and then being subjected to the concerted campaigns of media and establishment demonization and vilification - must send cold chills up the spines of the American Stasi high command over at Ft. Meade and the rotten to the core political class that protects it from any form of oversight.

It would be even better if there were more than two and with the website Cryptome having alluded to the coming release of all the Snowden material nothing could make for a bigger and better party than a couple of wild cards floating around out there with more seriously explosive evidence like the set of XKeyscore instructions that shows the lengths to which this monstrous surveillance colossus is prepared to go in order to lock down its gains.