Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged James Bond

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gary Edwards

Who owns the Bank of England? |Dark Politricks - 0 views

www.darkpolitricks.com/...who-owns-the-bank-of-england

banksters Banksters-of-America Rothschild-Bank-of-England

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13
     
    "Who owns the Bank of England? A brief history of World Banksters By Dark Politricks First a few historical comments by people who helped create two of the worlds most famous central banks, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence The Bank of England was created in 1694 by a Scotsman William Paterson who famously said: The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. - William Paterson The history of the Bank of England and how it was taken over by one powerful family hundreds of years ago. Up until 1946 when it was nationalised the Bank of England was a private run bank that lent money it created out of nothing to the English government and was paid back with interest. A very famous story relates to the Bank of England and the infamous Rothschilds, that all powerful banking family. This story was re-told recently in a BBC documentary about the creation of money and the Bank of England. It revolves around the Battle of Waterloo in which Nathan Rothschild used his inside knowledge of the outcome and his faster horses and couriers to play the market by getting the result of the battle before anyone else knew the outcome. He quickly sold his English bonds and gave all the traders who looked to him for guidance the impression that the French had won at Waterloo. The other traders all rus
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

007 producers to make movie on Snowden book - Washington Times - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...-to-make-movie-on-snowden-book

surveillance state NSA Snowden James Bond movie

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The stewards of the James Bond franchise will use their talent for intrigue to produce a movie based on reporter Glenn Greenwald’s book about Edward Snowden’s leak of top-secret U.S. surveillance documents. Sony Pictures said Wednesday that EON Productions’ Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli will produce the film based on “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State.” The book was released for sale on Tuesday.
Paul Merrell

C.I.A. Officer Is Found Guilty in Leak Tied to Times Reporter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-convicted-of-espionage.html

tyranny chilling-speech Sterling criminal-convictions

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he told a reporter for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.The conviction is a significant victory for the Obama administration, which has conducted an unprecedented crackdown on officials who speak to journalists about security matters without the administration’s approval. Prosecutors prevailed after a yearslong fight in which the reporter, James Risen, refused to identify his sources.
  • On the third day of deliberations, the jury in federal court in Alexandria, Va., convicted Mr. Sterling on nine felony counts. Mr. Sterling, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1993 to 2002 and now lives in O’Fallon, Mo., faces a maximum possible sentence of decades in prison, though the actual sentence is likely to be far shorter. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court, who presided over the weeklong trial, allowed Mr. Sterling to remain free on bond and set sentencing for April 24.
  • The Justice Department had no direct proof that Mr. Sterling, who managed the Iranian operation, provided the information to Mr. Risen, but prosecutors stitched together a strong circumstantial case.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The trial was part Washington spectacle, part cloak and dagger. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified, as did C.I.A. operatives who gave only their first names and last initials, with their faces shielded behind seven-foot-high partitions. A scientist was referred to only by his code name, Merlin. His wife was Mrs. Merlin.Officials revealed their preferred strategies for persuading reporters not to run sensitive stories. Jurors learned that, at the C.I.A.’s office in New York, employees could easily walk out with classified documents and never be searched.
  • Mr. Sterling is the latest in a string of former officials and contractors the Obama administration has charged with discussing national security matters with reporters. Under all previous presidents combined, three people had faced such prosecutions. Under President Obama, there have been eight cases, and journalists have complained that the crackdown has discouraged officials from discussing even unclassified security matters.
  • While the administration has defended the crackdown, Mr. Holder said he believed it went too far at times when it targeted journalists. Under Mr. Holder, prosecutors seized phone records from The Associated Press, labeled one Fox News reporter a potential criminal co-conspirator for inquiring about classified information and tried to force another to testify before a grand jury.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Jan 15
     
    "Mr. Holder said he believed it went too far at times when it targeted journalists." What Attorney-General Holder actually meant was that he believed it went too far at times when it targeted journalists *who work for major publishers."* Mr. Holder has allowed prosecutions of journalists who do not work for major publishing firms to proceed, e.g., Barrett Brown. 
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia in Search of a New Course | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...abia-in-search-of-a-new-course

war & peace economic war Saudis oil-prices Syria

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, is experiencing serious financial problems. The ongoing plummeting of oil prices is forcing the Saudis to be more careful with money. Tens of billions of dollars invested abroad are making a return to the kingdom. In July 2015, Saudi Arabia’s authorities, for the first time in 8 years, issued governmental bonds worth $4 bn.
  • Bloomberg reports that Saudi Arabia has already withdrawn $50-70 bn, which it had previously invested worldwide through management companies. It is noteworthy that the country has been withdrawing funds for the past six months. For example, Saudi Arabia’s SAMA Foreign Holdings reached its maximum in August 2014, having amounted to $737 bn. But since then, the fund has been shrinking because oil prices have dropped more than twice in this period. Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit is forecast to reach 20%; however, reduction of expenditures still remains a sensitive topic. In the context of the continuous fall in oil prices, Riyadh has worked out a plan to gradually reduce public spending to cope with a sharp decrease in budget revenues caused by the slumping oil prices. For example, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance has issued an order prescribing all state companies to temporary stop hiring new employees and launching new projects until the end of the fiscal year. In addition, the government procurement of new cars and furniture has also been put on hold as well as the signing and approval of new lease agreements for state institutions and enterprises. The expropriation of plots of land for the purpose of the subsequent extraction of oil has also been suspended throughout the country. The Ministry of Finance has, at the same time, demanded an acceleration in the collection procedure of oil revenues.
  • “To prove that the country indeed has a sound fiscal discipline, the government has to take steps to cut expenditures in the 4th quarter. Subsequently Saudi Arabia will be compelled to find new ways to reduce expenditures and boost efficiency in order to assure there will be no budget deficit in 2016,” John Sfakianakis, Director of the Middle East Division of the Ashmore Group, said in his interview to Bloomberg. It should be pointed out in that regard that oil revenues comprise about 90% of Saudi Arabia’s budget, and the landslide of oil prices of over 40% within the last 12 months adversely affected the country’s financial standing. And, although the kingdom’s debt burden remains one of the lowest in the world (less than 2% of the GDP), the kingdom’s international assets have been consistently shrinking for the last nine months and reached a two year minimum. This situation directly influences the policy of OPEC since Saudi Arabia (which extracts almost 30% of the OPEC’s oil, positions itself as an extremely influential raw material supplier, maintains powerful military forces, and has its own global ambitions, immense resources and substantial diplomatic experience) de facto plays the role of the shadow leader of this organization. At times siding with the US, and then pursuing its own interests, the kingdom has assumed such an influential position in the international community that other countries revere its opinion, and as for the last oil crisis, Saudi Arabia is seen as its key player.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • And, based on the information provided by the international mass media, the Saudi leadership has split in their opinion on whether to continue funding Syria or to begin reducing their financial commitment. “Riyadh is facing a choice: to give more support to the moderate opposition or to look for a compromise,” an American expert on national security, James Farvell, wrote in The National Interest. The expert explained that if Saudis offer more support, that would trigger a confrontation with Russia, but if they side with Moscow, Russia’s regional influence might be reinforced and that might, in turn, challenge Saudi Arabia’s interests. Because of this dilemma, controversial information regarding Saudi’s decisions are appearing in the press. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia was one of the first to condemn Russia after the beginning of the Russian military operation in Syria on September 30. It accused Russia of bombing the troops of moderate opposition instead of ISIS. “These attacks resulted in the deaths of numerous innocent victims. We call for a stop it immediately,” demagogically and groundlessly said the representative of Saudi Arabia Abdallah al-Muallimi in the UN. Simultaneously 53 religious leaders signed an online appeal to support a jihad against the Syrian authorities as well as the presence of Russia and Iran in this country. They appealed to the countries of the Muslim world to render “moral, financial, military and political support to those who are called the ‘holy warriors of Syria’.” The authors of the appeal explicitly stated that if they fail, the other Sunni states in the region, and, first of all, Saudi Arabia will be the next victims.
  • With reference to a high-ranking Saudi official who wished to remain anonymous, the BBC stated that armed groups of the so-called moderate opposition would receive new, high-tech weapons, including tank destroyers. Jaish al-Fath, The Free Syrian Army and The Southern Front moderate opposition groups will also receive support. According to the source, it is quite likely that the “moderate opposition” in Syria will receive surface-to-air systems as well. Keeping in mind that Russia is carrying out air strikes across not only the facilities of ISIS, but also the above listed groups, a scenario when Saudis turn their weapon against Russian aviation is quite possible. On the other hand, a curious document, apparently a copy of the instructions issued for the embassies of Saudi Arabia in the Middle Eastern countries, has been uploaded to the Internet. The main idea of the documents is that all the diplomatic representative offices should gradually cease financial support of the armed Syrian opposition, apparently owing to the low efficiency of militants’ activities. The authenticity of the document raises certain doubts, as is always the case with such documents. However, specialists in the Arabic language concluded that the text was written by a native speaker, and that the document’s design conforms to the style adopted in Saudi Arabia. It shouldn’t be ruled out that the drying up of the source of funding, that militants used to receive from the Saudis, against the backdrop of a certain degree of success of the government troops as well as the increasing military and technical assistance to Syria on the part of Russia, have convinced many “oppositionists” to surrender and change masters. This process is expected to only accelerate in the future.
  • On Sunday, October 11, the Defense Minister, Mohammed bin Salman, visited Sochi. The search for common ground on the issues related to the situation in Syria was the main theme of the meeting held by the son of the Saudi king and Vladimir Putin. The parties also discussed the prospects of their economic cooperation. And, since Saudi Arabia is currently experiencing certain financial difficulties and is in the “clutches” of economic uncertainty, this topic was of a special interest. It was the second visit to the Russian Federation of the Saudi prince, who currently carries out sensitive missions related to the complex relations between the two countries. It should be noted that King of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has been admitted to hospital in a critical condition and is currently being kept in the intensive care unit of the King Faisal royal hospital in Riyadh.
Paul Merrell

MI6 gets off scot-free over rendition of suspected Islamists to Libya | World news | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...on-islamists-mi6-torture-libya

war & peace Libya UK CIA MI6 rendition torture

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • So after more than four years of Scotland Yard investigations, and months of agonising within the Crown Prosecution Service, ministers and MI6 are getting off scot-free over the abduction and subsequent torture of two suspected Islamists. Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi were enemies of Muammar Gaddafi delivered to Tripoli, courtesy of MI6 and the CIA, in 2004 when Tony Blair’s government was cuddling up to the Libyan dictator. Gaddafi had promised to abandon his nuclear and chemical weapons programme and as a reward for British friendship – including the secret rendition of his opponents – he agreed to huge and lucrative oil deals for BP.
  • In one of the deepest ironies in the history of British intelligence, clear evidence of British involvement in the rendition of Belhaj, Saadi and their families to Tripoli’s jails emerged in 2001. They were spelled out in a letter from Sir Mark Allen, then head of MI6 counter-terrorism operations, to Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, written in March 2004. In it, Allen trumpeted MI6’s role in the operation. The letter was found among documents in Moussa’s office destroyed by Nato bombs. Saadi accepted £2.2m compensation from the British government. Belhaj chose to fight on, demanding an apology. The supreme court is soon due to deliver judgment on his claim that Britain must take responsibility for his abduction. Lawyers for the government argue that British courts have no right to hear the case since the agents of foreign intelligence agencies – notably the CIA – were also involved in the operation. Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI5 – MI6’s sister service responsible for British security as opposed to spying abroad – was so angry with what MI6 had been up to, that, as the Guardian reported last week, she fired off a letter to Blair complaining about it, saying its actions may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants. Such was her fury that she ejected MI6 staff from MI5’s headquarters, Thames House.
  • After the Allen letter came to light, Blair said he had “no recollection at all” of the Libyan rendition. Jack Straw, then foreign secretary responsible for MI6, told MPs in 2005 – a year after the Libyan abductions – that “there is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop.” After the Allen letter emerged, Straw said: “No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time.” Government officials have insisted that the operation was in response to “ministerially authorised government policy”. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time, has said: “It was a political decision, having very significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to cooperate with Libya on Islamist terrorism.” Referring to MI6’s links with Gaddafi, Manningham-Buller has stated: “There are clearly questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.” Section 7 of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, sometimes described as the “James Bond clause”, protects MI6 officers from prosecution for actions anywhere in the world that would otherwise be illegal. They would be protected as long as their actions were authorised in writing by the secretary of state.
Paul Merrell

Wikileaks' Assange Hints Murdered DNC Staffer Was Email-Leaker, Offers $20k Reward For ... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...-leaker-offers-20k-reward-info

Auction 2016 Hillary DNC homicides

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • The mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of 27-year-old Democratic-staffer Seth Rich (shot multiple times, and not robbed, at 420am near his home in Washington D.C., where no homicides have been reported within 1500 feet) have stirred Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to offer a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. But it is Assange's comments during a Dutch TV interview that are most disturbing as he hinted that Rich - who was in charge of DNC voter expansion data - was the email-leaker and his death was a politically-motivated assassination.
  • As we detailed previously, the Clinton related body count so far this election cycle:  Five in just under six weeks - four convenient deaths plus one suicide... 1) Shawn Lucas, Sanders supporter who served papers to DNC on the Fraud Case (DOD August 2, 2016)   2) Victor Thorn, Clinton author (and Holocaust denier, probably the least credible on this list) shot himself in an apparent suicide. Conspiracy theorists at Mystery Writers of America said some guys will do anything to sell books. (DOD August, 2016)   3) Seth Conrad Rich, Democratic staffer, aged 27, apparently on his way to speak to the FBI about a case possibly involving the Clintons. The D.C. murder was not a robbery. (DOD July 8, 2016)   4) John Ashe, UN official who allegedly crushed his own throat while lifting weights, because he watched too many James Bond films and wanted to try the move where the bad guy tries to…oh, never mind. “He was scheduled to testify against the Clintons and the Democrat Party.” (DOD June 22, 2016)   5) Mike Flynn, the Big Government Editor for Breitbart News. Mike Flynn’s final article was published the day he died, “Clinton Cash: Bill, Hillary Created Their Own Chinese Foundation in 2014.” (DOD June 23, 2016) It must be coincidence, right?
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden: A 'Nation' Interview | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...wden-exile-exclusive-interview

surveillance state Snowden-interview

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Snowden: That’s the key—to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn’t matter what we say or think we have. It’s not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend. So when we think in the context of the last decade’s infringements upon personal liberty and the last year’s revelations, it’s not about surveillance. It’s about liberty. When people say, “I have nothing to hide,” what they’re saying is, “My rights don’t matter.” Because you don’t need to justify your rights as a citizen—that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or “I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights. You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You’ve converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.
  • From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there’s the political and the technical. I don’t believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives. And we do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power. We have a system of education that is really a sort of euphemism for indoctrination. It’s not designed to create critical thinkers. We have a media that goes along with the government by parroting phrases intended to provoke a certain emotional response—for example, “national security.” Everyone says “national security” to the point that we now must use the term “national security.” But it is not national security that they’re concerned with; it is state security. And that’s a key distinction. We don’t like to use the phrase “state security” in the United States because it reminds us of all the bad regimes. But it’s a key concept, because when these officials are out on TV, they’re not talking about what’s good for you. They’re not talking about what’s good for business. They’re not talking about what’s good for society. They’re talking about the protection and perpetuation of a national state system. I’m not an anarchist. I’m not saying, “Burn it to the ground.” But I’m saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest. And that cannot happen if we do not question the premises on which they’re founded. And that’s why I don’t think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators] Udall and Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.
  • The Nation: Explain the technical reform you mentioned. Snowden: We already see this happening. The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general. It’s OK if we wiretap Osama bin Laden. I want to know what he’s planning—obviously not him nowadays, but that kind of thing. I don’t care if it’s a pope or a bin Laden. As long as investigators must go to a judge—an independent judge, a real judge, not a secret judge—and make a showing that there’s probable cause to issue a warrant, then they can do that. And that’s how it should be done. The problem is when they monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there’s a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Nation: Every president—and this seems to be confirmed by history—will seek to maximize his or her power, and will see modern-day surveillance as part of that power. Who is going to restrain presidential power in this regard? Snowden: That’s why we have separate and co-equal branches. Maybe it will be Congress, maybe not. Might be the courts, might not. But the idea is that, over time, one of these will get the courage to do so. One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the Bush administration is the increased assertion of the “state secrets” privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU—which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention—from getting their day in court. The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen—in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case—that they have become markedly more skeptical. People at civil-liberties organizations say it’s a sea change, and that it’s very clear judges have begun to question more critically assertions made by the executive. Even though it seems so obvious now, it is extraordinary in the context of the last decade, because courts had simply said they were not the best branch to adjudicate these claims—which is completely wrong, because they are the only nonpolitical branch. They are the branch that is specifically charged with deciding issues that cannot be impartially decided by politicians. The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative. Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.
  • Since the revelations, we have seen a massive sea change in the technological basis and makeup of the Internet. One story revealed that the NSA was unlawfully collecting data from the data centers of Google and Yahoo. They were intercepting the transactions of data centers of American companies, which should not be allowed in the first place because American companies are considered US persons, sort of, under our surveillance authorities. They say, “Well, we were doing it overseas,” but that falls under a different Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn’t even authorized by law. It’s just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan’s signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers—sending hundreds of millions of people’s communications back and forth every day—were completely unprotected, electronically naked. GCHQ, the British spy agency, was listening in, and the NSA was getting the data and everything like that, because they could dodge the encryption that was typically used. Basically, the way it worked technically, you go from your phone to Facebook.com, let’s say—that link is encrypted. So if the NSA is trying to watch it here, they can’t understand it. But what these agencies discovered was, the Facebook site that your phone is connected to is just the front end of a larger corporate network—that’s not actually where the data comes from. When you ask for your Facebook page, you hit this part and it’s protected, but it has to go on this long bounce around the world to actually get what you’re asking for and go back. So what they did was just get out of the protected part and they went onto the back network. They went into the private network of these companies.
  • The Nation: The companies knew this? Snowden: Companies did not know it. They said, “Well, we gave the NSA the front door; we gave you the PRISM program. You could get anything you wanted from our companies anyway—all you had to do was ask us and we’re gonna give it to you.” So the companies couldn’t have imagined that the intelligence communities would break in the back door, too—but they did, because they didn’t have to deal with the same legal process as when they went through the front door. When this was published by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post and the companies were exposed, Gellman printed a great anecdote: he showed two Google engineers a slide that showed how the NSA was doing this, and the engineers “exploded in profanity.” Another example—one document I revealed was the classified inspector general’s report on a Bush surveillance operation, Stellar Wind, which basically showed that the authorities knew it was unlawful at the time. There was no statutory basis; it was happening basically on the president’s say-so and a secret authorization that no one was allowed to see. When the DOJ said, “We’re not gonna reauthorize this because it is not lawful,” Cheney—or one of Cheney’s advisers—went to Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, and said, “There is no lawful basis for this program. DOJ is not going to reauthorize it, and we don’t know what we’re going to do. Will you continue it anyway on the president’s say-so?” Hayden said yes, even though he knew it was unlawful and the DOJ was against it. Nobody has read this document because it’s like twenty-eight pages long, even though it’s incredibly important.
  • The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses. They thought, “No one trusts our products anymore.” So they decided to fix these security flaws to secure their phones. The new iPhone has encryption that protects the contents of the phone. This means if someone steals your phone—if a hacker or something images your phone—they can’t read what’s on the phone itself, they can’t look at your pictures, they can’t see the text messages you send, and so forth. But it does not stop law enforcement from tracking your movements via geolocation on the phone if they think you are involved in a kidnapping case, for example. It does not stop law enforcement from requesting copies of your texts from the providers via warrant. It does not stop them from accessing copies of your pictures or whatever that are uploaded to, for example, Apple’s cloud service, which are still legally accessible because those are not encrypted. It only protects what’s physically on the phone. This is purely a security feature that protects against the kind of abuse that can happen with all these things being out there undetected. In response, the attorney general and the FBI director jumped on a soap box and said, “You are putting our children at risk.”
  • The Nation: Is there a potential conflict between massive encryption and the lawful investigation of crimes? Snowden: This is the controversy that the attorney general and the FBI director were trying to create. They were suggesting, “We have to be able to have lawful access to these devices with a warrant, but that is technically not possible on a secure device. The only way that is possible is if you compromise the security of the device by leaving a back door.” We’ve known that these back doors are not secure. I talk to cryptographers, some of the leading technologists in the world, all the time about how we can deal with these issues. It is not possible to create a back door that is only accessible, for example, to the FBI. And even if it were, you run into the same problem with international commerce: if you create a device that is famous for compromised security and it has an American back door, nobody is gonna buy it. Anyway, it’s not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty.
  • The Nation: You really think that if you could go home tomorrow with complete immunity, there wouldn’t be irresistible pressure on you to become a spokesperson, even an activist, on behalf of our rights and liberties? Indeed, wouldn’t that now be your duty? Snowden: But the idea for me now—because I’m not a politician, and I do not think I am as effective in this way as people who actually prepare for it—is to focus on technical reform, because I speak the language of technology. I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what “digital rights” should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them? What I can do—because I am a technologist, and because I actually understand how this stuff works under the hood—is to help create the new systems that reflect our values. Of course I want to see political reform in the United States. But we could pass the best surveillance reforms, the best privacy protections in the history of the world, in the United States, and it would have zero impact internationally. Zero impact in China and in every other country, because of their national laws—they won’t recognize our reforms; they’ll continue doing their own thing. But if someone creates a reformed technical system today—technical standards must be identical around the world for them to function together.
  • The Nation: Creating a new system may be your transition, but it’s also a political act. Snowden: In case you haven’t noticed, I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change. I don’t want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement. But as inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying—as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.
  • The Nation: Some years ago, The Nation did a special issue on patriotism. We asked about a hundred people how they define it. How do you define patriotism? And related to that, you’re probably the world’s most famous whistleblower, though you don’t like that term. What characterization of your role do you prefer? Snowden: What defines patriotism, for me, is the idea that one rises to act on behalf of one’s country. As I said before, that’s distinct from acting to benefit the government—a distinction that’s increasingly lost today. You’re not patriotic just because you back whoever’s in power today or their policies. You’re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people of your country, your community and your family. Sometimes that means making hard choices, choices that go against your personal interest. People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy—one of the early charges leveled against me. But it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail. But you are also asked to take an oath, and that’s the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution—to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and former NSA director Keith Alexander did not. You raise your hand and you take the oath in your class when you are on board. All government officials are made to do it who work for the intelligence agencies—at least, that’s where I took the oath.
  • As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them—it does all of us—a disservice, because it “otherizes” us. Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes—even though what they have done is heroic—is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed, and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.
  • The Nation: Considering your personal experience—the risks you took, and now your fate here in Moscow—do you think other young men or women will be inspired or discouraged from doing what you did? Snowden: Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I’m still free. I talk to people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I’m able to participate in the debate and to campaign for reform. I’m just the first to come forward in the manner that I did and succeed. When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense. The charges they brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense. There were no whistleblower protections that would’ve protected me—and that’s known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.
  • The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized. Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage. At the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific damage that had been caused by the massive revelation of classified information. The charges are a reaction to the government’s embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities, or they would substantiate what harms were done. We’re now more than a year since my NSA revelations, and despite numerous hours of testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an ax to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government, has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that former NSA director Keith Alexander said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation. Some months after he made that statement, the new director of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said that, in fact, he doesn’t see the sky falling. It’s not so serious after all.
  • The Nation: We have a sense, or certainly the hope, we’ll be seeing you in America soon—perhaps sometime after this Ukrainian crisis ends. Snowden: I would love to think that, but we’ve gone all the way up the chain at all the levels, and things like that. A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they’re really sore—the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment—they’re the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don’t like that at all. The Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They’re afraid of death by a thousand cuts—you know, leaks and things like that.
  • The Nation: You also remind us of [Manhattan Project physicist] Robert Oppenheimer—what he created and then worried about. Snowden: Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people. It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused. When I was working in Japan, I created a system for ensuring that intelligence data was globally recoverable in the event of a disaster. I was not aware of the scope of mass surveillance. I came across some legal questions when I was creating it. My superiors pushed back and were like, “Well, how are we going to deal with this data?” And I was like, “I didn’t even know it existed.” Later, when I found out that we were collecting more information on American communications than we were on Russian communications, for example, I was like, “Holy shit.” Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.
  • The Nation: You’ve given us a lot of time, and we are very grateful, as will be The Nation’s and other readers. But before we end, any more thoughts about your future? Snowden: If I had to guess what the future’s going to look like for me—assuming it’s not an orange jumpsuit in a hole—I think I’m going to alternate between tech and policy. I think we need that. I think that’s actually what’s missing from government, for the most part. We’ve got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It’s just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven’t engaged with Washington until recently. They’re still playing catch-up. As for my personal politics, some people seem to think I’m some kind of archlibertarian, a hyper-conservative. But when it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue. As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production—year after year after year—some of that needs to be reinvested in society. It doesn’t need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be 
addressed.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14
     
    Remarkable interview. Snowden finally gets asked some questions about politics. 
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20▼ items per page