CIA and the Internet

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Mr. Carroll, if the Constitution was still in force, this gathering of private information without the legal authority of a warrant would have been declared unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Therefore...if the Fourth Amendment is null and void, why would the Fifth Amendment be upheld?

The legality of warrantless data collection is now before the courts, thanks to the ACLU.

I for one have yet to see a case in recent memory where someone was prosecuted a second time

for the same crime. I am quite certain that If prosecutors tried to pull that stunt they would be laughed out of court.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

I am quite certain that If prosecutors tried to pull that stunt they would be laughed out of court.

Blueford v. Arkansas is the most recent Supreme Court case I could find on double jeopardy.

Blueford's trial judge declared a mistrial, and the Supreme Court held that Blueford could be charged a second time for the same murder because:

"The jury in this case did not convict Blueford of any offense, but it did not acquit him of any either," the Supreme Court concluded.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/24/supreme-court-double-jeopardy-arkansas-murder-alex-blueford_n_1542396.html?ref=email_share

EDIT: I just found another recent Supreme Court case on double jeopardy, from a police website. Good to know that our guardians the cops keep up to date on double jeopardy. This case shows that even this conservative court, with the lone exception of Alita, is biased in favor of the accused and against the state.

In an 8-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed. Analyzing the precise meaning of acquittal, the Court drew a distinction between dismissals on procedural grounds and substantive rulings. An acquittal is an acquittal even if it is based on erroneous evidentiary rulings or interpretations of law:

“[O]ur cases have defined an acquittal to encompass any ruling that the prosecution’s proof is insufficient to establish criminal liability for an offense.”

http://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/6161334-How-the-Supreme-Court-defines-Double-Jeopardy/

Edited June 16, 2013 by J. Raymond Carroll

[Paul Rigby]

My Creeping Concern that the NSA Leaker Edward Snowden is not who he Purports to be…

By Naomi Wolf

Global Research, June 15, 2013

NaomiWolf.org

http://www.globalresearch.ca/my-creeping-concern-that-the-nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-is-not-who-he-purports-to-be/5339161

I hate to do this but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be.

This is in no way to detract from the great courage of Glenn Greenwald in reporting the story, and the gutsiness of the Guardian in showcasing this kind of reporting, which is a service to America that US media is not performing at all.

It is just to raise some cautions as the story unfolds, and to raise some questions about how it is unfolding, based on my experience with high-level political messaging.

Some of Snowden’s emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them.

a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps – which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101′ – are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates.

In the Greenwald video interview, I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points – again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points.

c) He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away; a real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.” Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice. That is why they are heroes, among other reasons. But a police state would like us all to think about everything we would lose by standing up against it.

d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’

e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded…

f) Snowden is in Hong Kong, which has close ties to the UK, which has done the US’s bidding with other famous leakers such as Assange. So really there are MANY other countries that he would be less likely to be handed over from…

g) Media reports said he had vanished at one point to ‘an undisclosed location’ or ‘a safe house.’ Come on. There is no such thing. Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it.

h) I was at dinner last night to celebrate the brave and heroic Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Several of Assange’s also brave and talented legal team were there, and I remembered them from when I had met with Assange. These attorneys are present at every moment when Assange meets the press – when I met with him off the record last Fall in the Ecuadoran embassy, his counsel was present the whole time, listening and stepping in when necessary.

Seeing these diligent attentive free-speech attorneys for another whisleblower reinforced my growing anxiety: WHERE IS SNOWDEN’S LAWYER as the world’s media meet with him? A whistleblower talking to media has his/her counsel advising him/her at all times, if not actually being present at the interview, because anything he/she says can affect the legal danger the whistleblower may be in . It is very, very odd to me that a lawyer has not appeared, to my knowledge, to stand at Snowden’s side and keep him from further jeopardy in interviews.

Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive – even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times – rather than the machine itself – that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests – why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times – unless we know about it?

[Douglas Caddy]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits?guni=Network front:network-front main-3 Main trailblock:Network front - main trailblock:Position2

[John Simkin]

Interesting theory by Naomi Wolf although the CIA would have been well-aware of these contradictions and would have been corrected if it was a CIA operation.

In the 1980s British students were frightened away from left-wing activity by "leaks" stating that British intelligence had created a "blacklist" that would stop stop them from getting jobs in the future. We now know that these lists really did exist. However, it was the "leaks" that actually reduced left-wing activism on the campus.

[Larry Hancock]

It's not a story I've been following in detail but it is interesting that he seems to be offering operational details about a range of operations from access to servers to other specific phone line monitoring activities

in Europe and Asia...not to mention hacking China, how does that match up to what his contracting job was supposed to be? How much do we really know about his purported day job?

In addition he has gone way beyond alerting Congress or the American public to monitoring American citizens...something he could have done via a Congressman or other whistle blower

alternatives that would have given him some legal protection rather than doing this all very publicly overseas. There is a great deal of drama attached to his approach including claims that

even after going public nobody knows here he really is....sort of unlikely actually. And speaking of drama, then there is his girlfriend.

He would not be the first to talk about tapping overseas communications though, even those of American allies; a couple of NSA employees defected to the Soviets and provided similar

information back during the Cold War.

[Paul Brancato]

In the lead up to the 2008 US presidential election Naomi Wolf spoke to a large crowd in Berkeley. Her theory at that time was that there was a coup in the works, and that Obama would never be allowed to win the election and take over the presidency. As it turns out she was wrong, but she was also wrong in her estimation that Obama was really a threat to the national security state. Unlike JFK, who stood for a real change in US foreign policy and who, in my estimation, was killed because he had the courage of his convictions, Obama has continued the foreign policies of his predecessors. I have read that whistleblowers are suffering as never before. Perhaps Mr. Snowden, realizing this, chose to attempt to keep himself out of the hands of the US government rather than put himself in harms way.

[Larry Hancock]

Paul, the U.S. government is a large and diverse entity and discussing "harms way" in respect to it would be beyond me at this point - but I would be interested in seeing sources on the whistle blower observation you made...including who the whistelblowers were and where they took their story and how they were treated. That would be educational.

-- Larry

Edited June 17, 2013 by Larry Hancock

[Paul Rigby]

NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s path from security guard to security clearance

Edward Snowden dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade, yet won high-paying positions that came with overseas travel and access to some of the world’s most closely held secrets.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/06/16/nsa_leaker_edward_snowdens_path_from_security_guard_to_security_clearance.html

He dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade, yet won high-paying positions that came with overseas travel and access to some of the world’s most closely held secrets.

He had a vivacious, outgoing girlfriend and boasted online about his interest in nubile, beautiful women, even as he secluded himself in a nightscape of computer games, anime and close study of the Internet’s architecture.

Edward Snowden, the skinny kid from suburban Maryland who took it upon himself to expose — and, officials say, severely compromise — classified U.S. government surveillance programs, loved role-playing games, leaned libertarian, worked out hard and dabbled in modelling.

He relished the perks of his jobs with the CIA and some of the world’s most prestigious employers. Yet his girlfriend considered it a major accomplishment when she got him to leave the house for a hike.

Snowden, 29, emerged a week ago from his status as an anonymous source for stories in The Washington Post and the Guardian, announcing to the world that he was prepared to be prosecuted for breaking his pledge to keep classified materials secret. But as quickly as he popped up in a fancy Hong Kong hotel, he vanished again Monday. He could not be reached for comment for this story.

For years, Snowden has sought to keep his online activities hidden, posting under pseudonyms even as a teen and hanging out on anime, gaming and tech sites, chatting with fellow webheads about how to be on the Internet without being traced.

“I wouldn’t want God himself to know where I’ve been, you know?” he wrote in 2003 on a bulletin board for the technically inclined.

Halfway through 10th grade, during the 1998-1999 school year, Snowden dropped out of Arundel High School, where he had made little impression.

Three years later, his parents divorced. He dipped in and out of course work over the next dozen years and was eventually certified as a Microsoft Solutions Expert — a gateway to tech jobs. But Snowden felt stuck in those first years of adulthood.

In 2004, he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit but less than four months later he was discharged.

Snowden struggled through a period of joblessness, spending long nights playing computer games and chatting online.

In 2006, Snowden made a remarkable leap from security guard at the University of Maryland to security clearance. His new position with the CIA put him on the path to extensive travel, a six-figure income and extraordinary access to classified material.

How he managed that jump remains unclear.

Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, had no idea her beau was going to leak classified data, according to a friend.

Snowden said last week that his “sole motive is to inform the public as to that which was done in their name and that which is done against them.”

He now presents himself as a reasoned protester, a conscientious objector of sorts, but he has also shown flashes of anger and even contempt for some aspects of American society. “Go back to your meaningless consumerist life,” he wrote four years ago in a comment on a YouTube video that poked fun at the ritual of high school reunions.

[John Simkin]

Edward Snowden is interviewed by the Guardian today. It includes the following:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower

US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

[Harry J.Dean]

I just watched President Obama's press conference from California

where he addressed questions about this program.

I have lived in America since June 1978 and I have never had concerns about the government

invading my privacy.

I have no doubt that the President is being truthful when he says

"Nobody is listening to your phone calls."

But even if the government is listening to my phone calls I have nothing to worry about.

EDIT[ Although I am a big fan of Obama, I am disappointed to see that Michelle Obama

is not attending the meetings with the Chinese leader and his beautiful and talented missus.

Jacqueline Kennedy would have been there.

EDIT[ If moderator Tom Scully is to be consistent, he will move this thread to another forum.

He did that to me once when he claimed that an innocent man convicted in Texas

was not relevant to the JFK inquiry.]

Carroll, dude

You are sounding canadianish with that subservant attitude that I still cannot forget, or forgive

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Carroll, dude

You are sounding canadianish with that subservant attitude that I still cannot forget, or forgive

So you don't like Canadians? Is that the message you want to convey?

[Paul Rigby]

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

NSA scandal: the deepest secret of the Ed Snowden operation

Jon Rappoport

Activist Post

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/06/nsa-scandal-deepest-secret-of-ed.html

Everyone wants to see a hero.

When that hero emerges from the shadows and says all the right things, and when he exposes a monolithic monster, he’s irresistible.

However, that doesn’t automatically make him who he says he is.

That doesn’t automatically exempt him from doubts.

Because he’s doing the right thing, people quickly make him into a spokesman for their own hopes. If he’s finally blasting a hole in the dark enemy’s fortress, he has to be accepted at face value. He has to be elevated.

When dealing with the intelligence community and their spooks and methods, this can be a mistake. Deception is the currency of that community. Layers of motives and covert ops are business as usual.

In previous articles, I’ve raised a number of specific doubts about Ed Snowden.

Here I want to replay four statements Snowden made and examine them.

"When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this [NSA]…over time that awareness of wrongdoing sorts of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem…"

This statement describes Snowden, an analyst working at NSA, chatting regularly to colleagues about his growing doubts over the morality of NSA spying. This is quite hard to believe.

As Steve Kinney, writing at the Centre for Research on Globalisation points out, Snowden would have raised all sorts of red flags about himself.

If he hadn’t been fired outright, he certainly would have come under serious scrutiny, which, at the very least, would have reduced his ability to hack documents out of NSA’s most secret recesses.

And yet, Snowden, an analyst, claims he had access to “full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.”

Really?

That stretches doubt far beyond the point of credulity.

Both The Guardian and the Washington Post supposedly vetted Snowden carefully. I’d really like to see the results of that vetting.

“Rosters of everyone working at the NSA [and] the entire intelligence community…” That’s untold thousands of people. That’s referring to many separate agencies.

Snowden doesn’t stop there. He maintains the security of NSA is not just a sieve, it’s also thousands of separate hunting parties, undertaken at the whim of any analyst:

"Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…"

Sure. NSA just opens the door to their own analysts, who can, on their own hook, launch spying episodes on anyone in the US. Boom. No operational plans, no coordination. A free-for-all.

“Hey, dig this. Nancy Pelosi was just talking to her hairdresser. I’m going to follow up on her. Think I’ll spy on Nancy and her husband, see what they’re up to. I’ll file reports as I go along…”

“A guy at Los Alamos just wrote to his boss about a new weapons system. Want to see what they’re planning?”

Finally, Snowden claimed he could “shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that’s not my intention.”

Not just spy on everybody in the US. Snowden asserts he could do that. But he could also make the entire spying apparatus of NSA (and even all other intelligence agencies?) go dark with a few hours of work—and he’d evade notice of his NSA bosses as he performed this herculean task.

No. Ridiculous. The very first thing an agency like NSA does is set up a labyrinth to prevent itself from being taken down.

Consider these four Snowden statements together, back up and think. These are propositions that cast the man into a deep pit of doubt.

Who is he?

What is his mission? Is that mission his own, or is he working for someone who wants to punch a hole in the NSA?

In another article, I’ve developed the hypothesis that Snowden is still actually operating for his former bosses at the CIA; people at the CIA, long engaged in a turf war with the NSA, are running him in this op.

Snowden didn’t steal anything from NSA. He couldn’t. People at the CIA could and did steal, and they handed him documents to use in his assigned op.

There are other possible explanations. None of them exonerates the NSA or what it is doing. Let’s be clear about that.

But how far would the CIA go in exposing the guts of the NSA? It’s clear that these intelligence agencies overlap in their efforts (crimes). Therefore, the CIA would be satisfied to smear the NSA without exposing too much.

If so, Snowden’s cache of documents won’t “go all the way.”

His documents won’t yield the longed-for holy grail, though Snowden implies he could unwrap it. I’m talking about the entire interlocking system of US and global surveillance and how it is built.

More than piecemeal exposures about PRISM, US hacks of China, and the G20 meeting in England, an account of the technical “architecture,” as John Young of Cryptome rightly calls it, would torpedo the underlying global Surveillance State.

If Snowden can do that, he hasn’t shown it so far. Right now, he’s put his work in the hands of several journalists, who will dole it out on their own inexplicable timetables.

Why make that move? Why hasn’t Snowden put up a dozen sites and laid everything he has on the line? Before those sites could be taken down, the material would have been copied and sent around the world thousands of times.

Snowden has already said he won’t endanger specific spies or operations that could actually prevent terrorists’ missions.

All right. Then give us everything else. Give us the whole shooting match. Let’s see how the watchers have built their edifice.

But so far, Snowden has shown himself to be a different kind of person, someone who makes claims that far exceed his reach.

Read his four statements again. The sub-text is:

I could complain, raise doubts, and criticize NSA openly at work. No one cared. It was a typical office you’d find in any company. It certainly wasn’t a super-controlled environment. Things were so loose, I could access the complete map of the entire NSA network. Names, places, operations. On a whim, any analyst could spy on anyone in the US. If I wanted to, I could shut down all of US intelligence in a few hours. Forget the popular image of NSA as a fortress with dozens of layers of protection. Forget the notion that I’d have to be granted elite privilege to all sorts of secret keys to get into the inner sanctum, or that, while navigating my way in, I’d be setting off alarm bells all over the place. It was a piece of cake.

Smear.

“NSA is an open book. A book written by idiots. It cost a trillion dollars, but anyone could waltz in there and read the whole thing. Use a thumb drive, and you can also walk out with the whole thing.”

If you set aside Snowden’s remarks about his motives, his morality, and his high mission, his explanation falls apart. It makes no sense.

His CIA handlers would now be telling him that. “Hey Ed, tone down the ‘child’s-play’ angle, okay? You’re making it sound too easy. Remember? You’re the ‘whiz kid genius.’ Yeah, we want to smear NSA, but it’s got to be credible. People have to think it took at least some ingenuity to access the most heavily protected data in the world. Get it?”

A common man of the people, serving the greater good, exposing ongoing crimes that threaten the very lifeblood of the Republic? Is Ed Snowden that hero?

Or is he an operator, an agent?

So far, he’s made himself seem like the agent.

Executives at the NSA are well aware of this. Sitting down with their counterparts at the CIA, they’d be getting an earful. CIA people would be saying:

“Of course Snowden is our boy. He worked for us in Geneva, and he’s working for us now. We told you, after 9/11, we didn’t like you clowns at NSA throwing all the blame on CIA for the Trade Center attacks. We didn’t like that at all. And in the intervening years, we haven’t liked you cutting us out of the spying game. We warned you. So now we’ve given you a taste of what we can do. We can do more. Either we play ball together, or we’ll put NSA in the dumper. Get it?”

Playing ball together. Harmonization.

A sharp reader has just pointed out to me that this is the op behind the op. The fallout from Snowden will be used as the reason for more and better global sharing of spying and surveillance data.

Separate Surveillance States, which already share mountains of data, will come together to coordinate their efforts in an even tighter Surveillance Planet.

The US NSA won’t be tolerated as the pompous king of the hill any longer. It will have to play well with others.

After all, Globalism means the whole globe.

And “we’re all in this together.”

“We” meaning the elites who want to track every move made by every person on Earth, 24/7, in order to predict and control in the new paradise, where the sun rises every day on …compliance.

That’s the takeaway from the Snowden affair. That’s why the secret surveillance/spying at the G20 meeting in England was exposed.

“Gentlemen, we’re all rational here at the table. This is ridiculous. We’re all spying on each other. This can’t go on. It’s counterproductive. We want to work together. So let’s do it. We all want the same thing. A planet under control. The way to achieve that goal is to cooperate. We’ll spy on those who need to be spied on: the population of the planet. We’ll do it together. The primary violator of cooperation is that cowboy outfit in America, the NSA. They have to be brought into line. They have to learn they’re only part of the Whole. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

[Paul Brancato]

Thanks for this post. His points appeal to my conspiracy mind. It makes a lot of sense.

[Larry Hancock]

Very useful information...

"And yet, Snowden, an analyst, claims he had access to “full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.”

-- as you say, this just does not happen and is virtually inconceivable as are several of his other elaborations.

However, there is a third option. He may be a sincere, idealistic young man who did something impulsive over something he objected too and is now trapped in an escalating spiral of hypebole to make his

case and defend his action.

Impossible to say at this point but we also have to consider "stupid" and "impulsive" right along with "conspiracy"...grin.