Big Brother Running Amok: NSA/GCHQ Hack Huge SIM Card Producer

Stories of the NSA drive to in the words of retired boss General Keith Alexander “Collect It All”, have lately gone the way of “Deflategate” in the mainstream media but Big Brother never sleeps. We all need to understand that we live in the waning days of having any expectation of privacy and it is only a matter of time until big government is trying to get at what is inside our skulls too. This week there were two major reports of what the secret police have been up to yet the domestic media has largely stayed focused on the political rat race and various and sundry celebrity tales. This failure to engage in serious investigative journalism is exactly why guys like Brian Williams are able to land multi-million dollar jobs as the gatekeepers in the McNews industry.

The story with the most far reaching consequences is the allegation that the NSA and their counterparts across the pond in jolly old England - GCHQ - hacked into the world’s largest provider of SIM cards. Those are those little things inside everyone’s smartphones that allow for the protection of private data when communicating and engaging in financial transactions. Billions of cellphones worldwide could possibly be affected by this massive breach of encryption - maybe even yours.

As reported by Reuters in the story “NSA, British spies hack Gemalto to tap mobile calls: Intercept”:

Digital security company Gemalto NV was hacked by American and British spies to steal encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications, news website Intercept reported, citing documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The hack by the National Security Agency (NSA) and UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) allowed the agencies to monitor a large portion of voice and data mobile communications around the world without permission from governments and telecom companies, according to the report.

A GCHQ spokesperson said the agency did not comment on intelligence matters. NSA could not be immediately reached for comment.

Gemalto makes smart chips for mobile phones, bank cards and biometric passports and counts Verizon and AT&T Inc among its 450 wireless network provider customers around the world.

The hack story was broken by the website The Intercept in a huge expose entitled “The Great SIM Heist:  How Spies Stole The Keys To The Encryption Castle” which is a long and detailed piece that is well worth the time spent reading it. Many will of course dismiss this out of hand because the documents about the hacking were provided by former government contractor turned NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden who is a controversial figure to put it mildly. However, in the days of a rogue government and the Obama regime’s ongoing war on journalists and whistleblowers it takes bold action to expose the scale of government criminality.

The other story, which is easily dismissed because it can simply be denounced as Putin propaganda is that of Russian computer security firm Kaspersky identifying the ability to embed spyware deep inside computer hard drives. According to the Reuters story “Russian researchers expose breakthrough U.S. spying program”:

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.

Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.

The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.

A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky's analysis was correct, and that people still in the intelligence agency valued these spying programs as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines declined to comment.

These stories are perfect examples of how the surveillance industrial complex has run amok and will continue to do so until lawmakers do their jobs. Our elected 'representatives' should subject the NSA to the type of rigorous oversight needed to prevent the ongoing digital rampage. The spooks and data vampires whose activities are funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars are not only gutting the Constitution but doing immense and irreparable damage to American tech businesses, especially in the new era of cloud computing.

Silicon Valley high-rollers understand this too and have been highly critical of the potential financial damage to their industries and have taken their concerns directly to Emperor Barack Obama himself. But Obama is a defender of the status quo and there will be no effort to reign in the data grabbers and snoopers on his watch. Don't look for it from Jeb Bush either if he is the next one to sit on the throne, especially since he just defended his brother's mass surveillance programs that "keep us safe".

One day Americans will be made to face the consequences of their complicity in allowing the wolves to be the ones charged with guarding the hen house and that day is rapidly approaching.

Nicely Timed CENTCOM Social Media Hacking Smells Like a Rat

Today’s latest  installment in the National Security State’s relentless drive to implement even more surveillance and invasions of the privacy of law-abiding Americans comes courtesy of the military. Media hysteria is spiking today with a story that the social media accounts of the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) have been infiltrated and taken over by ISIS operatives. Pretty convenient if you have an onerous new cybersecurity bill that is ready to be crammed down the throats of Americans. This also comes on the heels of last week’s savage murders of ten members of French newspaper Charlie Hebdo and two cops by Islamist extremists that is being hyped 24/7 by the fear mongers in the media.

The Washington Post is reporting that “U.S. military social media accounts apparently hacked by Islamic State sympathizers”:

Social media accounts for the U.S. military’s Central Command appeared to have been hacked on Monday, with the command posting threatening messages on Twitter and YouTube to American troops.

The first rogue tweet was posted about 12:30 p.m. It appeared to come from sympathizers of the Islamic State militant group. The Central Command has orchestrated the U.S.-led airstrike campaign against the militants in Iraq and Syria and is beginning to train Iraqi troops to respond to the threat in the region.

The background and profile photo of the Centcom account were both changed to show an apparent militant and the phrases “CyberCaliphate” and “i love you isis,” using one of the acronyms for the militant group.

In a statement, the Central Command confirmed that its Twitter account had been “compromised” and said it “is taking appropriate measures to address the matter.” The statement did not elaborate on the extent or seriousness of the hack or who may have been responsible. The account was disabled by Twitter around 1:10 p.m.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the Obama administration is “examining and investigating the extent of the incident.”

You can bet that they are “investigating” it alright as in investigating how best to fold it into Emperor Barack Obama’s big pre-State of the Union address sales pitch for even more invasive surveillance laws - wrapped in the cloaking of cybersecurity and that Sony hacking.  Hell, Obama might as well just take to the podium before Congress next Tuesday, roll out a portable shredder and proceed to feed the U.S. Constitution into it on national television.

The Washington Post reports that “this story is developing”.  What all of this hacking and demagoguery by the federal government is really "developing" is an overwhelming stench of bullshit. It is getting to be pretty sad when anything that comes out of the government must be treated with pure skepticism but when the lying by high officials is the first – if not only – resort such is the level that we have descended to in this once great country.

Obama Pimps Cybersecurity Bill and Further Gutting of the Constitution

Despite his enduring historic infamy at least Adolf Hitler was somewhat upfront with the Germans as he sowed the seeds of the destruction of their country. This is not the case with Emperor Barack Obama, a peerless con artist and snake oil salesman with as much an aversion to the truth as he has contempt for the Constitution. Obama was always hailed as a Constitutional law professor by the flacks, shills and propagandists who sold the schmucks on hope and change and his Harvard pedigree would seem to back that. However, given the ongoing dismantling of our no longer quite so free country it isn’t that much of a reach to consider that his expertise was sought for a reason. That reason being that he knows the weak points and blind spots to attack in order to complete the job of undermining a once vibrant democracy and is vigorously doing so.

In a story that will thrill the fascists in the government who have declared total war on the American people since 9/11, Dear Leader is now hard at work pushing the latest assault on privacy rights. As Reuters reports in a story entitled “Obama turns focus to Internet security, privacy”:

President Barack Obama will highlight plans next week to protect American consumers and businesses from cyber threats, a month after the most high-profile hacking attack on a U.S. company.

Internet security became a national focus after a cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blamed on North Korea. The attack and subsequent threats of violence against theaters prompted Sony to scale back its release of "The Interview", a comedy film that depicts the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

A White House official said on Saturday Obama would announce legislative proposals and executive actions that will be part of his Jan. 20 State of the Union address and will tackle identity theft and privacy issues, cybersecurity and broadband access.

On Monday, Obama will present plans "to improve confidence in technology by tackling identity theft and improving consumer and student privacy" in a visit to the Federal Trade Commission, the official said, on condition of anonymity.

Obama will host members of Congress from both parties on Tuesday to discuss common goals for the economy and national security, the official said, as the Democratic president prepares a speech that will be his first to the U.S. Congress since Republicans won the Senate in November elections.

This coincides with the reintroduction of the 4th Amendment destroying CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) by Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger of Ft. Meade, MD last week. Despite the stunning revelations of the mass surveillance of Americans by the NSA Stasi, the feds, the whores in Congress and the trillion dollar surveillance state Gomorrah that keeps them elected are more determined than ever to invade the privacy of Americans. There will sadly be no resistance from a fearful and dumbed down public – there never is anymore.

There was no way that the United States of America would ever be conquered by a foreign force despite the horseshit that is always preached by the charlatans in order to keep the cash cow that is the Global War on Terror (GWOT) alive. The only way that America was ever going to fall was from within and the termites within the bureaucracy of the federal government - led by Obama - continue to chew away at the pillars.

NSA Partners With Saudis in Classic Deal With the Devil

In another astounding piece of evidence of the insane levels of corruption that have metastasized throughout the US government a new story reveals that the NSA Stasi has entered into a partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the debauched land of the brutal monarchy from which fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers hailed from. In the latest story by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald based on documents that were obtained by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has entered into a cooperative relationship with the savage Saudi Ministry of the Interior, the brutal intelligence and torture arm of the vile House of Saud. The piece, published at the new online magazine The Intercept cites a 2013 top secret memo that depicts exactly how low the bar on morality has been set in this once great country.

Greenwald's piece is entitled "The NSA’s New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia’s Brutal State Police" from which I excerpt the following:

The Saudi Ministry of Interior—referred to in the document as MOI— has been condemned for years as one of the most brutal human rights violators in the world. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that “Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse,” specifically mentioning a 2011 episode in which MOI agents allegedly “poured an antiseptic cleaning liquid down [the] throat” of one human rights activist. The report also notes the MOI’s use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents.

But as the State Department publicly catalogued those very abuses, the NSA worked to provide increased surveillance assistance to the ministry that perpetrated them. The move is part of the Obama Administration’s increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime; beyond the new cooperation with the MOI, the memo describes “a period of rejuvenation” for the NSA’s relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Defense.

AND

The Saudi Ministry of Defense also relies on the NSA for help with “signals analysis equipment upgrades, decryption capabilities and advanced training on a wide range of topics.” The document states that while the NSA “is able to respond to many of those requests, some must be denied due to the fact that they place sensitive SIGINT equities at risk.”

Over the past year, the Saudi government has escalated its crackdown on activists, dissidents, and critics of the government. Earlier this month, Saudi human rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abu al-Khair was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a so-called “terrorist court” on charges of undermining the state and insulting the judiciary. In May, a liberal blogger, Raif Badawi, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes; in June, human rights activist Mukhlif Shammari was sentenced to five years in prison for writing about the mistreatment of Saudi women.

The partnering with the Saudis is vintage hypocrisy by a political class that wallows in it. It also shows just how phony all horseshit is that is being pumped out by the Democratic National Committee about the Republican war on women. Obama’s regime can rail against the mean-spirited tactics of some of the radical elements of the GOP party base and their politicizing of abortion as a mobilizing tactic but when you throw in with a primitive, misogynistic royal family (outside of the whores that they regularly boink during sex orgies on their fleets of yachts) you have zero credibility. Note the picture of Barry sitting next to that obscenely rich, robed, multi-chinned toad with that big shit eating grin of his. Granted that the bar for moral decency has been set very low in the White House ever since Bubba Clinton was getting his crooked knob polished by that chubby little trollop Monica Lewinsky but where is the limit to just how low a US President will go?

Given the Saudi Ministry of the Interior's abysmal human rights abuses, especially when it comes to dealing with political dissidents the NSA is a perfect partner and much of the cruelty inflicted upon those "terrorist" suspects who are rounded up has the seal of approval from good old Uncle Scam. Given the NSA's Constitution destroying rampage that is ongoing in America with the conducting mass warrantless surveillance, data-mining and storage of mega amounts of data in secret facilities like the one in Bluffdale, Utah the assistance of such slimy and repressive foreign regimes is pretty much just beta testing until the conditions are right and the system goes live here. You need to look no further than the state's targeting of political groups including those of the so-called Tea Party by the IRS and the Occupy Movement by the coordinated efforts of federal and local authorities to understand where this is all going.

What Americans fail to understand is that in the eyes of the rogue government - everybody is a "terrorist" now - the police state has been constructed, armed and the rights that once set America aside as what Ronald Reagan once referred to as that "shining city on the hill" has been twisted into some bastardized and dirty thing referred to as The Homeland. Obama has been critical in the expansion of the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties, his touted experience as a Constitutional law professor increasingly looks as though given his expertise he has known exactly were to undermine that great and enduring document created by our Founding Fathers.

But the hypocrisy in throwing in with the torture state in Riyadh is only one aspect of the moral rot of this deal with the devil. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after all had some involvement in the 9/11 attacks - at least some elements of it did and after all, three quarters of the men who hijacked those four jetliners hailed from that country. There has always been a stench about Saudi involvement in "the day that changed everything" and whatever was in that 2002 report of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry of 9/11 that to this day - 28 redacted pages of it - is still being covered up by the US government. The cover-up transcends two presidential administrations, one Republican and one Democrat and is ongoing. While there has been some increased attention to this report with a couple of members of the US House of Representatives pushing for the release of the information it still remains one of those matters of "national security" the bipartisan catch-all invocation that is used to cover up the rampant corruption of the US government.

Sharing intelligence with a country that is a known - and active - sponsor of extremist jihadist groups such as those who ended up in ISIS is a recipe for disaster and potentially that next terrorist attack that will be even worse than 9/11 that the greatest war criminal in United States history Dick Cheney has been talking about.

When you lie down with wolves do not surprised if you wake up one day with your throat ripped out.

Executive Order 12333: The Root of All Evil

The cornerstone of the post-September 11, 2001 new order of unaccountable mass surveillance, data-mining and the transformation of the United States of America into a land of war and woe called The Homeland truly began on December 4, 1981 with then President Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12333. Long before the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through a cowardly Congress in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks with no legitimate debate there was 12333 or "twelve-triple-tree" as insiders refer to it. With the continuing unveiling of different aspects of what is now obviously a "turnkey totalitarian" fascist state lurking just below the surface of the increasingly thinner outer veil that is the public government by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake - as well as others who are still working anonymously (according to recent stories on NSA documents not provided by Snowden) we are on the precipice of losing even the pretense of freedom and democracy.

Executive Order 12333, which gave the intelligence apparatus a blank check to operate with impunity, to the point where it is arguable that it essentially created a shadow government  has been getting some long-deserved attention as of late. A story in McClatchy last year entitled "Most of NSA’s data collection authorized by order Ronald Reagan" is where the highly secret circumvention of the US Constitution broke out of the darkness and a recent follow-up editorial was published in the Washington Post entitled "Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans" further shedding light on this most anti-American of diktats.  That 12333 was unleashed by Reagan, whose administration served as an incubator for the neocons who would resurface during the Bush-Cheney years after 9/11 was used as both a political cudgel to batter critics of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as to implement new NSA domestic surveillance programs that far exceeded the legitimate governing principles of the US. Reagan's administration also spawned the Iran-Contra cowboys, in particular Lt. Colonel Oliver North who facilitated covert arms and drug sales to finance extremist right-wing militias in Nicaragua.

North also had a fetish for surveillance, notable a program called REX 84 that was a prototype for martial law in America and dabbled with the advanced PROMIS software to spy on political dissidents and under a vaguely defined "national emergency" would suspend the constitution and put the control of the government under FEMA. Several years back journalist Christopher Ketcham did an outstanding piece entitled "The Last Roundup" which addressed the metastasizing cancer of the authoritarian surveillance-police state and the lists that were then being compiled for potential internment when that "national emergency" was declared. I excerpt the following from Ketcham:

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run

state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist looks downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

12333 was very fortuitous for the opportunist North, a traitor if there ever were one and the rest of his Iran-Contra cabal who are to this day turning up in positions of influence as the Obama regime relentlessly targets that longtime neocon object of hatred Russia. Reagan's executive order is now even more dangerous given the ridiculous criteria that the US government is using to place law-abiding citizens on an ever expanding "terorist" watch list as was just documented in a huge story by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux at The Intercept entitled  "Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist" where the secret Obama administration enhanced rulebook was published. What we have here is absolute power with absolutely no accountability and with the courts and congress being weaponized against the people no realistic chance to effect any meaningful reform of these out of control agencies and programs.

While it is somewhat encouraging that "twelve-triple-three" is finally getting noticed and according to a story that was published yesterday in The Guardian entitled "US warned: surveillance reform hinges on change to Reagan executive order" the same former State Department official who wrote the Washington Post editorial on 12333 is pushing for awareness that any serious reform must start with the rollback of this crown jewel of the fascist state. I excerpt from The Guardian piece:

Like Snowden, Tye means to spark a debate on the proper boundaries of NSA authorities. His focus is on an obscure, Reagan-era executive order that serves as a foundational set of rules for the intelligence apparatus. The order, known as Executive Order 12333, renders the current surveillance debate hollow, he said, even as it shows signs of traction in the Senate.

"Without reform of activities under 12333, changes to the 215 program won't address the major challenges to Americans' privacy from the NSA," Tye, who until April worked on promoting internet freedom issues at Foggy Bottom, told the Guardian, using legal shorthand for the domestic phone data collection.

Without recourse to the trove of documentation Snowden disclosed to journalists – and speaking somewhat obliquely to underscore his stated refusal to discuss classified information – Tye said that 12333 provides NSA with a pathway to collect and retain Americans' data without a warrant, routing around laws intend to restrict and control both.

Tye is correct but the clock is ticking and time is rapidly running out. With half the world ablaze with war and social unrest - largely due to a deranged US foreign policy - and Obama and Kerry hellbent on starting World War III to avenge personal slights by Putin we very well are nearing that "national emergency" that Lt. Colonel North was setting up a response for. Any "terrorist" attack - either legitimate or that promised Dick Cheney special will firmly lockdown this country forever and all of that data that has been mined will be used to generate the pickup lists. If you are even reading this there is a damned good chance that you will be on one.

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

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.

Just Like Torture: NSA Spying is Legal

Just like the crushing of a child's testicles can be interpreted to be "legal" within the context of the dictatorial power of the unitary executive as former Bush-Cheney lawyer John Yoo once infamously declared but now all of that NSA mass surveillance and data-mining is "legal" now too.  In a resounding endorsement of the unconstitutional abuses of the American Stasi the "independent"  Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board - which happens to reside within the executive branch  and was formed in 2004 after 9/11 or 'the day when everything changed' has issued a report that is being touted by defenders of the corrupt US power structure as vindication for the programs that NSA whistleblower revealed. George Orwell was definitely an optimist in that he never could have foreseen his grim visions of a savage totalitarian society so meshed with the circus maximus that is the USA!, USA! USA!

According to a story from The Guardian entitled "Some NSA data collection is 'legal and effective', says independent board" , I excerpt the following:

An independent board has declared a set of National Security Agency data collection programs both "legal and effective in protecting national security", despite expressing concern about "intrusions" into individuals' privacy.

As the NSA's troves of ostensibly foreign emails and Americans' international communications come under heavy scrutiny, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board dealt the NSA a victory on Tuesday night by calling the information reaped "valuable". It pointedly rejected similar claims for the bulk collection of US call data in a January report.

Under the so-called "702 program" – named after section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 – the NSA can harvest large amounts of ostensibly foreign digital information, including Americans' international communications.

AND

In another vindication for the NSA, the PCLOB assessed that the NSA's massive amounts of data collected under section 702 is not "bulk" collection, describing itself as "impressed with the rigor" of government surveillance targeting.

The NSA defends its Prism and "upstream" communications troves long after it has accepted divestiture of US phone records. Representatives from the intelligence agencies and the Obama administration sternly defend both the legality and the wisdom of retaining those content and metadata databases as a measure to defend the US against terrorism, espionage and even crime.

The PCLOB is "independent" alright - in the same way that a Tony Soprano ordered internal audit of the Bada Bing Club conducted by Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti would be and this is just pure damage control, pails of whitewash being applied to our nearly fully evolved fascist state and indicative of a concerted effort to make all of the NSA bad publicity just go away.

The rogue establishment is riding high too, especially after at least temporarily quashing that much heralded Glenn Greenwald piece, conducting a mafia style knee-capping on the journalist while he was busy doing his victory lap after the Polk Award, the Pulitzer Prize and his best-selling book on the Snowden revelations "No Place to Hide". There are probably high-fives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Fort Meade NSA Stasi HQ and throughout the national surveillance state, tax-dollar eating great parasite after Greenwald was forced by the government (and likely his billionaire boss Pierre Omidyar whose money funds neo-Nazi atrocities in Ukraine) to pour water over the "fireworks". The preemption of the Greenwald story is likely going to be a mortal wound to the fledgling website The Intercept as well as his long-term reputation itself. This is a shame because the man had stones in standing up to Uncle Scam and his murderous machine of plunder and oppression but you can really only push things so far if you are working within the establishment.

So the state-corporate media will continue to trumpet the "legal" NSA surveillance just as they covered up the same sort of torture techniques that had members of the Nazi command and the Japanese Empire hanged after war crimes trials at the end of World War II - the end of a bygone era when there was actually some moral clarity in this country.

And the "legalization" comes just in time for those patriotic Fourth of July BBQ's where Americans will drink beer, ingest Pink Slime laced hamburgers and dance the slow grind to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" as though it were our own equivalent of "The Horst Wessel Song". 

They will also be enjoying the fireworks - too bad that they won't be the ones that Glenn Greenwald promised. 

NSA Reform is Dead: Tech Companies Must Act to Protect Us Now

Not that it is surprising that the NSA Stasi is protected by a firewall of entrenched and corrupt members of our pathetic excuse for a legislative branch - the US Congress remains the number one enemy of the American people - and that any sort of effective reform in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks has always been dead on arrival. The USA Freedom Act seemed to be a perfect counterpart to the fascist USAPATRIOT Act when it was introduced, with the backing of US Representative James Sensenbrenner who was largely responsible for the latter monstrosity but as the establishment stalled enough time had passed for it to be gutted. The intelligence committee chairpersons of the House and Senate, respectively the right-wing talk radio bound fanatic Mike Rogers and the always ghastly Dianne Feinstein would be there to protect the warrentless mass surveillance and data-mining in all of its Constitution trashing glory because the protection of criminality is the main reason why the got their gigs in the first place.

The USA Freedom Act, in its watered down version which prolific security blogger Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel has brilliantly pegged as the USA Freedumber Act not only preserves the powers of the NSA but now provides them with official cover. The Freedumber Act is the Obama administration's wet dream as it would allow the narcissistic one to present himself as a champion of the American people by fixing the system and the business of getting all of the phone calls, financial data, images, book purchases, associations, family information, political affiliation, blog traffic, internet searches, sexual orientation, religious preferences, text messages and thousands of other data points to sock away in their massive storage facilities like the one out in Utah. Then Obama can get about the business of avenging the injury to his ego when Vladimir Putin prevented a war in Syria and Russia provided asylum to Snowden saving him from a US torture chamber and starting a new cold war which will ensure that military contractor money rolls in for the next election cycles.

Barring the promised bombshell revelations from journalist Glenn Greenwald - which are taking forever and making many (although not myself, at least not yet) nervous that he sold out to billionaire Pierre Omidyar and that the real stuff is never going to see the light of day - are so shocking as to make serious reform possible the great hope at this point is having to hope that Silicon Valley will come to the rescue. The NSA rampage has permanently tarnished the image of American big tech to the point that the only rational thing - at least from a business standpoint and these area after all businesses - is to improve their own security in order to prevent or at least make int more difficult for the government goons to penetrate their networks and customer communication activity.

This is currently in process and will continue to evolve as the US government has chosen to continue the programs rather than lose precious time between now and the day that the order comes down to use the data to go after those who are deemed to be threats to state power. According to a New York Times article entitled "Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies" that was published on Friday:

Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.

As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.

After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.

Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.

A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.

AND

Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.’s own behavior invited the new arms race.

“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.

“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.

There is naturally the standard fear-mongering by the US government and the implied threat of terrorist attacks is tech companies do not allow the NSA to proceed with impunity. The NYT piece cites an Obama administration official who invokes the 9/11 card once again:

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.

 “Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.

In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”

Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.

BINGO on that last statement - the government to this day has yet to fire anyone who was on the job and failed to protect the nation on the morning of September 11, 2001 - why is that? Power will not be surrendered willingly and at this point, as there is ZERO chance for legitimate and serious reform of the unconstitutional practices of the NSA within the government it is incumbent on the tech companies to do what they can to go into a defensive mode and internet users to look into getting some serious encryption software installed.