Greenwald: Why the CIA Is Smearing Edward Snowden After Paris Attacks (latimes.com) 298
JoeyRox points out that Glenn Greenwald has some harsh words for the CIA in an op-ed piece for the LA Times. From the article: "Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity. Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden."
Good old fashioned crisis management... (Score:5, Interesting)
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
Aren't politics grand? Gotta further an agenda while the corpses are still warm. (You lose impact any other way, you see.) /s
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Re:Good old fashioned crisis management... (Score:5, Insightful)
The CIA needs to be dismantled and replaced with something a bit better than this
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I don't know... the Paris attacks showed that the CIA as an organization was not doing its job. Their response? Get everyone talking about encryption and Snowden instead of the CIA and their failed intel. And they still get the budget increase for next year.
Sounds to me like SOMEONE at the CIA's got brains.
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Gathering data has NO USE in prevention. Because algorithms CANNOT differentiate between keywords in sarcastic/trolling communication vs. serious. And in serious communications, the keywords would be replaced with mundane words. I mean, even in regular communications, when you don't want people around you to know the details, you will omit them or rephrase somehow that only relevant people understand. Perfect example is a discussion from Analyse This containing "that thing" and "the other thing".
Their gathe
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We'd maybe have to meet up face to face to set it up, but we could assign meanings to Shakespeare plays or Rush albums.
Nobody could know that when I say "Has anyone noticed that blah blah Cinderella Man yadda yadda act one of Othello" it means to blow up thâ'{;[. @
no carrier
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Sounds to me like SOMEONE at the CIA's got brains.
And that many, many people outside of it don't.
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No no no no no. They didn't use encryption because Snowden spilled the beans about it. If he'd kept quiet they'd have happily gone on using encryption which would have been much easier to break because ... ummmm ... look, over there! A brown person! I bet he's up to no good.
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Interesting. Totally irrelevant, but interesting.
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If you keep saying something, however impossible, eventually you'll get some people to believe you:
they strongly expect you to be shouted down if you're a liar.
This worked for Rob Ford (the druggie mayor of Toronto), and for two, maybe three, countries' rulers during WWII. So if you're a liar, don't stop lying! Redouble your efforts!
Re:Good old fashioned crisis management... (Score:5, Informative)
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
I see that quote a lot. But I never see a source for it. It sounds too on the nose to be believable. So this time I decided to check it out myself. Turns out that is not what he said. And to misquote him like that is to mislead. Here's the actual source:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week.
He elaborated: "Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
-- http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... [wsj.com]
As you can see, what he was talking about was work that had been postponed because it wasn't considered urgent enough. That's a completely different meaning than your version which boils down to tricking people while they aren't thinking clearly.
> Aren't politics grand?
Indeed it is. I hope you can recognize the role you just played. At best you were lied to and used to further someone else's agenda, at worst you deliberately set out to deceive in order to further your agenda.
Re:Good old fashioned crisis management... (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems to me it's closer to paraphrasing. On top of that, the elaborated sentence can also imply that if you know that a crisis exists and you postpone it for whatever reason(time/public backlash/money/others don't believe it's urgent/etc), you can then use that opportunity to implement things that you wouldn't be able to do so before. That also includes implementing things that the general public would find highly objectionable, but would allow in a crisis moment. Or to ram though legislation that would have failed previously.
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Under what circumstances would the CIA NOT want to smear Snowden? I see absolutely no situation where they would want to do anything else.
They have zero credibility.
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How someone implies that's a bad thing is beyond me. You don't let the crisis go to waste, you learn from it, and improve from what you learn.
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Follow the ISIS weapons supply chain and maybe we'll find out who has more blood on their hands
Or even who the US is supporting (e.g. Saudi Arabia and Qatar)
Where was the CIA, FBI and NSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
When Russia told the US about the Boston Marathon bombers?
When a flight instructor told the US about people who wanted to fly planes, but not land them before 9/11?
We have replaced credible human intelligence with signals intelligence. Making the hay stack bigger only makes the needles harder to find.
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So you are saying all this snooping is worthless? Because "intel" gotten by snooping is by its very definition a lot _less_ reliable than tip-offs like the ones in question.
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The only use is forensics. They worked out a detailed timeline and plan for the 9/11 hijackers after the fact. And, though they had all that data, until AI parses it for us, we'll never see the patterns in time to do anything about it.
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Indeed. And as the population is even dumber than usual (because they are kept in fear), nobody notices that forensics has no preventative value whatsoever and does make nobody any more secure. The problem is that forensics can also be used to discredit people. Example: Have a presidential candidate that want to cut NSA or CIA funding? Just see what you can dig up on them, and there always will be something.
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I completely agree.
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Indeed, very true. And I have zero doubts that his is being done.
Re:Where was the CIA, FBI and NSA... (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you know it was credible, besides through the benefit of hindsight? The CIA/FBI/police get 100 tip-offs per day that the stranger down the street must be a drug dealer/kiddie fiddler/international terrorist because he can't whistle 'Dixie'.
Strawman argument. The point is that there were several credible warnings of both an Al Qaeda attack and specific concerns with piloting students affiliated with them, some from foreign intelligence agencies; all these reports were not duly considered and discarded -- not because they were the moral equivalent of not being able to whistle "Dixie", but because of organizational and political dysfunction.
It was a failure -- specifically a failure to do something that was well within the government's power to do. I'm not saying that signals intelligence is not important, but it's an evasion of responsibility to claim our failure to take effective action was because we needed some technical capability that we lacked at the time. We had everything we needed to catch the 9/11 hijackers before they struck except for leadership.
Hero (Score:5, Informative)
Some people are too lazy to know right from wrong, so they let the state dictate morality for them. These people are going to hell.
By any objective standard, Snowden has been right on all accounts and the Empire has nothing to say except "TRAITOR!"
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And the empire still stands...
Because the CIA is evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the CIA is fucking evil. Next question?
Seriously, the CIA is responsible for the creation of Al Qaeda as a threat to America, you're welcome for 9/11. Then the CIA was responsible for torturing people and provoking new terrorist recruitment, running the drone killing campaign which spawns ten terrorists for every one it kills, and now we have ISIS which is a result of W. Bush's stupid illegal invasion of Iraq, which HIS OWN FATHER warned him would happen. But Bush and the CIA people annoyed his father didn't do it went ahead anyway, and look where we are now.
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I know what you're trying to say, but the GP is wrong. The CIA was not behind the creation of either the Taliban nor al Qaeda. They supported a different Afghan jihadi warlord by the name of Gulbudin Heqmatyar, and that too at the behest of Pakistan. Heqmatyar later had a fall-out w/ both Gen Zia as well as the CIA. When Benazir Bhutto came to power in Pakistan, she empowered the Taliban, and al Qaeda followed later.
There are some 'Hate America first' people on /., like the GP as well as Fust
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The invasion of Afghanistan was not any more justified than Iraq.
The Taliban was the de-facto government of Afghanistan at the time and they refused to hand over Bin Laden, the man behind the 9/11 attacks. That alone was justification for war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. You're either an idiot or a dishonest weenie if you cannot admit that.
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Don't be a fool.
Right back at you.
No one cared about Saddam's chemical weapons until it turned out he was never even close to having nuclear ones. The U.S. went into Iraq (for the second time) on the promise that Saddam Hussein had or would soon have a nuclear weapon and that he was likely to use it against the United States or one of it's allies. The information to justify this claim came from a single source, a drug-addicted Iraqi defector who basically said whatever his handlers wanted as long as kept him supplied wit
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No it wasn't, because UN inspectors had full run of the country for months prior to the war.
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There was never any strong evidence for WMDs regardless of what rumors may have been out there
You're actively pretending that Saddam didn't USE his chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. And you're completely mischaracterizing the UN inspection team's early observations of large caches of VX that could NOT be later accounted for (remember the huge, completely phony "documentation" dump provided by Saddam's people to the UN, followed by active blocking of UN inspectors whenever they asked for unplanned inspections of the very places they thought they might find such things?). Yes, I remember
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The reason why Saddam was under that disposal and inspection regime was *because* of those things
You mean, the things that didn't exist? What are you saying exactly? You're trying to have it both ways.
What Saddam did in the past and was under restrictions for is itself not a valid pretext for invasion.
Sure it is, because he refused to comply with the requirements that arose from everything that went before. And you're STILL pretending that his forces never ceased to target those protecting the no-fly zone, wasn't robbing from UN food and relief funds to buy more weapons, and so on.
Where was the evidence of WMDs? None.
I know, I know, you're trying to wish away the deaths of thousands of people killed with exactly those non-existent WMDs
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No, there were no WMDs in Iraq
Ok, so the WMDs in Iraq, used by Saddam to kill thousands of people in Iraq - those didn't exist? This sort of nonsense is supposed to make you sound credible? Who do you think your audience is - people just like you, but even dumber, who won't wonder if you paid any attention whatsoever to stacks of dead people killed with Iraq's chemical weapons? Man, it must be really annoying to be you, with reality being such a constant irritant like that.
Re:Because the CIA is evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked, the CIA wasn't beheading little girls.
Only blowing them up with drone strikes and bombs as "collateral damage". And supporting budding dictators who later behead little girls.
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We may be evil, but we are better than ISIS. Very quaint slogan, really.
the gun-banners use this tactic as well (Score:2)
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Yes its like the UK too, collect all for the UK gov but want the media to stop reporting that collection for the gov 24/7 is policy and routine.
"UK ISP boss points out massive technical flaws in Investigatory Powers Bill" (Nov 27, 2015)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]
"....which forbid ISPs from revealing what snooping is being carried out on their systems."
"The Home Office
Read the article comments (Score:5, Interesting)
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Slowly governments and nations can understand what having junk encryption for their political leaders is costing their trade and national development.
Allowing huge national contracts to be set over junk encryption with a few bidding nations listening in is slowly been fully understood locally.
A government with their top officials using smart phones
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People are generally stupid and have no clue about things they talk about that. Add fear to this and the stupidity gets amplified to epic proportions. The comments you refer to are just a textbook example of that effect.
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Fear is the first stop on the train to tyranny. A lot of people have already bought their boarding passes.
Anyone who does not board the train or tries to stop others from boarding are labelled as traitors and terrorists.
Some people don't understand the word "former" (Score:2)
The CIA's former acting director, Michael Morell... Former CIA chief James Woolsey...
These people are not from the CIA anymore, they have no right to talk on the behalf of the CIA and what they say are personal opinions, nothing more.
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You have obviously not the least clue how this works.
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You are right, I don't know how it works, but neither do you, otherwise you wouldn't be posting comments on Slashdot.
That the CIA would want to smear Snowden totally makes sense, it's a deduction anyone can make. However, for a serious newspaper, I expect an article backed by facts, like actual communication from the CIA, not ramblings by people who once worked for the CIA. I don't disagree with the idea behind the article, I just say that from a journalistic standpoint, it is of poor quality.
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You reasoning is faulty. This is not intelligence tactics. This is PR. (Also, I do not hold a security clearance, so I can post whatever my pertaining observations are, unlike the about 5 million US citizens that have been muzzled that way...)
It works like this: Have a known former employee or close associate to who you maintain close ties spread some information or statement. Most people will see it as coming from you, but if it causes a stir, it will just be their "private opinion".
Bravo, Glenn Greenwald. (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad he'll die in a tragic accident very soon and/or be completely discredited and/or found guilty of being in posession of child porn or illegal drugs or other contraband, and everything he had to say denied as false.
Not just the TLAs (Score:2)
The blood is on Snowden's (& Greenwald's) hand (Score:2)
Encryption or not, tying the hands of the intelligence services did some harm. The very things that are asked of intelligence services would only serve to help people avoid them.
For someone that aided and abetted a traitorous criminal, I'm not sure that Greenwald can explain this one away. They have yet to answer how intelligence agencies are supposed to work when they're supposed to give notice at the worst of times.
Events like Paris are enabled and amplified by the Snowden-caused damage caused to intelli
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the one in the Constitution, which would be, y'know, the legal one in his case.
Manipulation of Big Media is shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God Glen Greenwald pointed this out. I guess that's one thing I'm truly thankful for on this day!
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The fact that the media had to retract news that the attackers were using encrypted apps instead of unencrypted MMS shows how irresponsible journalism has become, so I agree with you. It's more like a 'shoot first and ask questions later' mentality and I think we know there's more than one group of people out there using that same tactic.
That the movie "Network" came out in the 70s shows how much the establishment was aware it was slowly decaying within... the Editor-in-Chief that usually gets the first dem
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Yup, I agree. Compare one negative with another negative and they get a positive. Kill two birds with one stone. Just like labeling conspiracy theorists into those with mental health issues. It's a psychological tactic that manipulative people use to control others that can't reason so well.
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What he's done is illegal, and he has been charged. (Whether or not it was a good thing is a separate question) It is not, however, treason, which is the only crime defined in the Constitution and is defined quite narrowly.
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Funny)
How are they smearing him, again? He's a traitor by any definition. He's lucky to not be executed.
Nice try CIA.
Re:Smearing? (Score:4, Insightful)
How are they smearing him, again? He's a traitor by any definition. He's lucky to not be executed.
Through false accusations, thats how. Did he break the law? Yes. The paris attacks were proven to have no relation to encryption. Smear him if you will, but smear him with what crimes he ACTUALLY committed.
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Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean he exposed the real traitors to the US constitution, AKA the US intelligence services?
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And most of congress.
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Informative)
> No relation to encryption isn't an issue. He attacked his country's intelligence services, at a bad time it turns out.
He exposed criminal behavior, both in the US and worldwide, and the waste of millions if not billions of dollars of intelligence efforts aimed at completely innocent people. Because it's proven so very fruitless, it was and remains a good idea to expose it.
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That's why I think Snowden is a hero whereas Assange is just an ass.
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Without Wikileaks, which Julian Assange helped found and maintain despite various forms of illegal political and economic abuse, many people like Edward Snowden would have far less safety reporting abuse and criminal activity. Snowden is a hero, but he's a one-shot hero. He's very unlikely to have another opportunity to reveal such abuses. As much as I may detest Assange's personal habits, and especially his treatment of women, Wikileaks has earned its reputation for verifying stories, protecting sources li
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you being serious?
Let's assume for a moment, that you aren't being a blatant troll here. With that in mind, here's why it is a smear.
1) The paris terrorists did not use encryption at all--
2) The French government, and the US government already had people warning them about the impending attacks.
3) Snowden's leaks centered around *ILLEGAL* intelligence gathering practices, and his leaks were carefully sanitized and redacted by reporters with journalistic integrity.
4) Unless you think Russia is somehow behind the paris attacks, there is nothing that ties Snowden with said attacks-- and even that is just supposition. (There is shit little Snowden has given Russia besides PR.)
The only connection here is that Snowden drew attention to the US's (and its allies') use of illegal data collection for intelligence purposes, which gave the US a black eye, (and a much needed one at that.) and the administrators behind those illegal data collection practices want to try to assert (falsely) that they could have stopped the paris attack, if it hadn't been for that meddling kid-- Erhm-- Edward Snowden.
This is bullshit-- as again, the terrorists were using unencrypted channels of communication, AND were already known about by intelligence agents/agencies-- who already knew the attack was going to happen.
So, why didn't they stop it? Oh-- yeah-- Because Edward Snowden somehow used whistleblower black magic to somehow make it so they couldnt act on the intelligence they had already collected.... Somehow.
All that said-- Seriously, go troll somewhere else.
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Informative)
4) Unless you think Russia is somehow behind the paris attacks, there is nothing that ties Snowden with said attacks-- and even that is just supposition. (There is shit little Snowden has given Russia besides PR.)
I posted before, Assange advised Snowden to go to Russia, and ignore concerns about the “negative PR consequences” of sheltering in Russia because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA’s influence did not reach. [theguardian.com]. Snowden himself, chose Latin America, but the consequences proved that Assange is right:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/e... [wired.com]
The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.
Bolivian President Aircraft was forced to take off for searching Snowden.
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I intent to write phrase "takeoff from Moscow", then I think it is not necessary. It would be "... aircraft was forced to land
Re:Smearing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day, before this sig-int shit got so big that everything else suffocates under it, back in the day, people in intelligence agencies had to read (and understand) newspapers, compile reports about articles, people, developments.
That also required a certain level of "intelligence", of course. Which means "able to think".
These days, it looks like that is actually a disqualification...
Why is this worrysome?
Because ISIS is real. And currently, the strategy to defeat them seems to be to get more brutal, more ruthless, more lethal with them. It's a "race to the bottom" we can't win - or only, if we turn ourselves into something that looks very similar to the enemy we want to win over.
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(in English)
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A new study from the University of Iowa finds that once people reach a conclusion, they aren’t likely to change their minds, even when new information shows their initial belief is likely wrong and clinging to that belief costs real money.
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Clinging to your beliefs by proving that the paper doesn't contradict them will cost you money. :-D
Re:Smearing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Traitor in the sense that he betrayed the various agencies involved in espionage, sure.
Traitor to the American people, and to a large extent citizens of the free nations of the world, that is an open question.
Unfortunately, it will remain an open question because there is virtually no possibility of him receiving a fair and open trial. Even if we ignore all of the cries for his execution, the laws that he allegedly broke ensure that he is tried by parties associated with the prosecution.
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No, preventing the Paris attacks would not have required even more intelligence ga
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If you live to be 500, you will never, ever be half the hero and patriot that Edward Snowden is.
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Next time it is Snowden's bday, declare proudly that you're staying offline and disconnect! ... or, declare it the day before or something.
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I just looked it up and his birthday is June 21. I'll have to try and remember to do something about it next year.
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I don't know who, but I have an idea how: Don't use anything connected: email, chat, connected-navigation; I would go even for phones and SMS, but I think that's a stretch (especially since they could be useful for meeting details). Basically what every Sunday SHOULD be: BBQ with family. This would be great icentive for sampling the unconnected world, as the current reccomandations do not have immediate or forseable goals, except for authors "trust me! it will be better for you".
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If we had a sane policy of spying on Muslims or people who were/might be Muslims, and filtering things from there, and if Snowden had blown the whistle on that policy, I'd agree w/ you. But we didn't. In order to avoid being called 'islamophobic', we adapted a policy of spying on everybody, and that's what he called out. And that's what is at issue here.
Snowden isn't the one responsible for the Paris attacks. Decades of allowing Muslims from North Africa to move into and settle in France, away f
Re: Snowden unquestionably hurt the intel communit (Score:5, Insightful)
That he hurry the Intel community isn't the point either. He showed them to be lying to Congress and operating illegally.
Re:Snowden unquestionably hurt the intel community (Score:4, Insightful)
So you think that dangerous and criminal enemies of the constitution should not be hurt at all but protected from the results of their despicable acts? Is that what you are saying?
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There is a book on the subject that details how Snowden negatively impacted US intelligence.
He certainly "negatively impacted" US intelligence, though it's a lot like how a police officer "negatively impacted" the criminal he just arrested. The US intelligence agencies did all the harm to themselves, and when you were made aware of their criminal activities, you chose to blame the messenger and the not the criminals.
Re:GG is owned by Sony (Score:4, Interesting)
And that's probably why Glenn Greenwald hasn't suffered a "fatal accident". Because he, along with Snowden, Poitras and others, have probably created a "dead man's switch" that releases everything if any of them die in suspicious circumstances.
That's what I'd do, anyway.
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Snowed himself has called that idea a "suicide switch". It would be idiotic. It means that anyone who wants those documents merely has to kill him, and boom, instant access to the whole deal.
He'd be a moron to do that, given how many non-US actors would quite literally kill to have that material.
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Which also gives the US incentive to make sure that nobody hurts a hair on his head.
Either way, I don't think Snowden's even been in control of those archives for years. There's a reason he turned them over to journalists and kept them somewhere that's even out of his own reach.
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Think back to all the Overseas interventions of the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The US gov and mil needs vast networks of free flowing cash, hardware support and propaganda globally to spread US policy around the world.
The ability to set, sell, then break weak standard encryption as a policy tool helps. Every call, fax, email, bank transaction, shipment, communication, draft report, database is open to US pol
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<title>Slashdot: news for nerds, stuff that matters</title>.
My second sixpack got in the way of my original whiney witty comment, however.
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Should I walk to the east and board an Elven ship to Valinor, for my time has passed?
Uh, the undying lands lie to the WEST. Cirdan waits for the elves on the Western shore so they can sail west! Unless you want to go hang out with the blue wizards, I don't know why you're heading east.
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Yeah, my bad. Those sixpacks messed up with my internal compass... or maybe Arda is round, and I chose the longest way :)
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Precisely, when you have supporters and opponents of this law on both sides and crossing party lines. While most GOP candidates seem to be for it, Ron Paul is not alone, and is supported at least by Ted Cruz here. What I want to know is that of the Dems, who opposes the wiretaps? Clinton? Obama? Bernie? O'Malley?
At the very least, Bernie [senate.gov]
"He has introduced S. 1168, the “Restore Our Privacy Act,” to amend the PATRIOT Act to curtail overly broad surveillance by the government."
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A/C - which CIA/NSA troll might you be ?