Congressional Report Claims Snowden In 'Contact With Russian Intelligence' (cnn.com) 185
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Edward Snowden has been in contact with Russian intelligence officials since arriving in Russia in 2013, according to a new report from Congress. "Since Snowden's arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services," the 33-page report, issued Thursday by the bipartisan House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked volumes of information on American intelligence and surveillance operations to the media, settled in Moscow after initially traveling to Hong Kong following his 2013 public disclosure of classified information. The Russian government granted asylum to Snowden shortly thereafter. Large portions of the pertinent section, entitled "foreign influence," are redacted, but one paragraph reveals the Russian link, saying that Frants Klintsevich, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's defense and security committee, "publicly conceded that 'Snowden did share intelligence' with his government." Snowden immediately took to Twitter following the report's release to dispute the accusations, writing "they claim without evidence that I'm in cahoots with the Russians." The report cites classified material in the section linking Snowden to Russian intelligence. The investigation also noted that Snowden left encrypted hard drives containing classified information in Hong Kong and that the CIA had refused to grant Snowden access to sensitive information years before he began working with the NSA, documenting numerous issues that Snowden had with supervisors and co-wokers during his various jobs in the intelligence community.
Just the US policy backfiring (Score:5, Insightful)
If you take everything from a whistle blower but the information they have, your enemies become the only ones they have anything to give in exchange for safety.
Extra confusing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what does Snowden have to do with Wikileaks, which released the emails leaked to them by the DNC insider and those phished from Podesta's gmail account?
And just what did they think would happen to an NSA whistleblower who got stuck in Russia after the USA cancelled his passport? It's doubly ironic when the NSA watchdog who said that Snowden should have come to him was fired for retaliation against whistleblowers [pogo.org].
This isn't exactly new. The fact that they had to dig up something this old to push tells you they've got nothing.
Re:Extra confusing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what does Snowden have to do with Wikileaks, which released the emails leaked to them by the DNC insider and those phished from Podesta's gmail account?
...The fact that they had to dig up something this old to push tells you they've got nothing.
It tells you the media is still going through the grief/straw grasping stages
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Sarah Harrison from Wikileaks helped get Snowden out of Hong Kong and then helped keep him alive when he was stuck in the Moscow airport. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Snowden has said on multiple occasions that he didn't want to give his NSA data to Wikileaks because they publish things indiscriminately. He worked with reporters and asked them to use their discretion in publishing only what was newsworthy.
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He worked with reporters and asked them to use their discretion in publishing only what was newsworthy.
Which is similar to what WikiLeaks used to do.
They used [wikipedia.org]
... El País (Spain), Der Spiegel (Germany), Le Monde (France), The Guardian (United Kingdom) and The New York Times (United States).
Then WikiLeaks folded due to inattention and gave leaks from DNC to the public. Assange stepped forward for the photo-op because he, too had become irrelevant.
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Wikileaks started out editing content to make it more inflammatory.
They started out as an inferior copy of Cryptome, then went downhill from there.
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WikiLeaks did not start out editing content.
In the beginning:
1.) WikiLeaks was a depository, only. They stated, clearly, that they had no way of knowing who had left leaks on their doorstep, and they had no way of tracing material back to the source.
Additionally, WikiLeaks assured the courts that they, themselves, were not hackers.
This was true, and it kept them out of court because they could prove they could not comply with requests to reveal its sources.
2.) WikiLeaks never published material. They gave s
Re: Extra confusing.. (Score:2)
If anyone flees an accusation for rape there would be an outcry. But when it. Is old Jules thespineless liberals cry foul.
Assange is a RAPIST. He sexually assaulted a woman.
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He sexually assaulted a woman.
A statement like that is true if/when we read the verdict of a court/jury.
You can't provide a citation of that finding because due process has not been applied.
Therefore, you are in error.
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Good decision not to give the stuff to Wikileaks. The email leaks right before the election proved how politically motivated Assange can be. He kept releasing batches of emails showing pretty much nothing, but promising that the good stuff was coming. Of course nothing really juicy ever came, but he managed to convince people that the leaks were devastating just by ramping up expectations before hand.
Good thing we can cook up conspiracy theories! (Score:2)
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and those phished from Podesta's gmail account?
purportedly phished. No connection has been shown between Snowden and the RF so far. And given that Podesta was throwing the primary to Hillary and using DNC resources to actively sabotage Sanders' candidacy, the idea that the info was leaked by a DNC insider is just as plausible.
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Bullshit. You can edit them to your heart's content while composing them, and then you get a chance to Continue Editing after hitting Preview. Once you are satisfied and you hit Submit, the paper goes to press. Do you think you can magically "edit" your column in a newspaper after it has been rolled out? Do you think you can "unsay" something after you have delivered a speech? Look, I know it takes a little discipline, and yes, I have embarrassed myself more than onc
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Slashdot isn't a printed periodical. It is pretty much the only online forum that doesn't let you edit comments.
Re:Extra confusing.. (Score:4, Informative)
Commenter A: Santa Claus does not exist!
Commenter B: You are a cad! Santa Claus most definitely does exist!
Commenter A: [after changing his post] Idiot! When did I ever say otherwise! Can't you read?!
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Places that do it properly, mark the post as edited, and provide a way to access the edit history.
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How is the quoted commenter supposed to refute a fake quote? Take a poll of everybody who happened to have read his "freshly published e-ink" prior to publication of the fake quote?
Or like our PEOTUS, simply deny that which is universally available on video and have his former campaign manager spin it for him?
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"Certainly, these are not the droids you are looking for."
And it almost works, but the spell snaps.
"No—wait just a minute!—actually, the arrow of tradition usually points the other direction.
Which reminds me, I just knew there was something funny about the 107-year-old man standing at the head of the overnight line to be the first person in his retirement home to get an iPhone 7.
Someone summon the Men in Black. The old guy in the r
Re:Extra confusing.. (Score:4, Informative)
> purportedly phished
At least for the Podesta emails, we have good reason to believe that. I've covered this several times previously in comments, but we have some pretty good evidence when you line things up with the timing of it:
* A spear phishing email to Podesta [wikileaks.org] conveniently dated not long before the dump ends.
* The stats page for the bit.ly phishing link [bitly.com] says the link was used twice in the right time frame.
Slashdot finally covered this story [slashdot.org] via thehill.com, some weeks after I had already dissected it in comments and in that they appear to admit to getting phished, blaming it on a "typo" (which is highly suspect, but whatever).
I'd write more submissions about this sort of thing, but there appears to be an organized effort going around marking anything they don't like as "SPAM" in the firehose (like this [slashdot.org]), as I've also seen happen abusively to other submissions on this site. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm tagging herbal viagra ads as 'binspam', not stories I disagree with. I'd much rather disagree with someone openly than sneak around and try to hide inconvenient facts. If the facts stop agreeing with me, I'd much rather start rethinking my positions than playing blame games.
Finally, for those having trouble keeping all the dumps straight, I left this comment [slashdot.org] some time ago that will help to clarify. There have been a lot of dumps and there are some people who like to confuse and conflate these issues.
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I just noticed your clarification below. On that, I agree--there's no good evidence regarding who performed the phishing attack on Podesta.
The domain of the phishing link is obscure, the fake phishing email itself claims there's hacking from the Ukraine, etc. I doubt that any of that information is true and you'll end up like Vizzini [youtube.com] if you decide whether or not the phishing emails claims regarding its own origin are factual or counter-factual.
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I think it's likely that Podesta fell for a phishing scam. If I remember correctly basically his entire gmail account was leaked. That's not the sort of thing multiple people would have access to. Who knows who was responsible for the phishing attack. The DNC on the other hand seems to me to be much more likely to be an inside leaker who had legal access to all the info.
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Exactly what does Snowden have to do with Wikileaks
The comment you replied to doesn't mention Wikileaks.
The article summary doesn't mention Wikileaks.
The article doesn't mention Wikileaks.
Why are you talking about Wikileaks?
which released the emails leaked to them by the DNC insider
Ahh, because you're trying to start a fight about Clinton and the DNC again.
Re:Extra confusing.. (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
"A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.
'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.' "
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I'm not a big fan of Wikileaks for the same reason the Snowden cites -- their failure to redact personal information of no public interest. Credit card numbers, passwords, etc from their releases. But surely the issue with the DNC eMails and similar data dumps -- the Pentagon Papers, the Climategate eMails, etc are their existence and authenticity. Who, other than folks who have been caught with their hand in a cookie jar, cares who leaked them?
And while I'm here, isn't a sad comment on American governan
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I'm not at all familiar with the Pentagon papers, but the Climategate ones were really overplayed. There's nothing juicy in there - no evidence of a cover-up or efforts to falsify data. Just scientists doing their science thing. There were a few quotes which sound incriminating when taken out of context, and that was enough for it to earn the gate-suffix: People saw what they wanted to see. Or read a re-blog of an opinion column that claimed to be revealing the truth of the vast UN-lead conspiracy to destro
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"I'm not at all familiar with the Pentagon papers, but the Climategate ones were really overplayed. There's nothing juicy in there
- no evidence of a cover-up or efforts to falsify data."
No. If anything it is underplayed.. Mann, Briffa et al deliberately, and inexcusably, obscured the fact that the tree ring proxie data they largely depended on shows Northern Hemisphere temperatures to have dropped since 1960. No one thinks that's true. That's called the "Divergence Problem" (see https://en.wikipedia.org [wikipedia.org]
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Media - all media - has a number of biases. Perhaps the biggest is sensationalism bias, and the quest for ratings. "Nothing of interest revealed" is not news. No-one buys a paper or watches a story for that.
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I care both as a US citizen and as a voter.
I care somewhat less that Wikileaks was the mechanism by which the stolen data was leaked, but they now appear to be affiliated with Russia so their
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Except that the RNC was not hacked. Period. Stop spreading fake news.
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http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/12/politics/gop-russia-hacking-trump/ [cnn.com]
Recent claims by RNC that a spam filter prevented them being hacked in the same way as the DNC do not prove that they were not targeted and successfully infiltrated, only that the single exploit mentioned apparently failed in that case.
It's pretty clear to all concerned at this point that Russia's intent was to smear Clinton and pump Trump.
You're quoting a rag... and a conspiracy loon. (Score:3)
Daily Mail is a tabloid.
But even that is better than the "usual media outlet" used by Craig Murray (and most of the right-wing blogs "reporting" his words) - Alex Jones Bitch! [infowars.com] Two days BEFORE the Daily Mail interview.
You know... the inter-dimensional baby-sacrificing lizard-men guy. [youtube.com]
Which is where that Craig Murray story started in that form - where it's a talk about him being center stage, claiming everyone else is wrong.
Back then they still had to cherry pick the actual Guardian article where Murray's stan
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But, let me guess: Democrats screeching "The Russians haxored us and stole the election for Trump" aren't conspiracy loons, right?
Wrong (in case you're still scratching your head).
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okay... first
dailymail monday to saturday is like the national enquirer.
dailymail sunday edition is a little more reliable.
Second contemporaneous analysis of the leaked documents showed russian language user names and hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic. The supposed romanian hacker couldn't speak romainian as a native. More details below along with hyperlink.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re... [vice.com]
July 25, 2016 // 08:55 AM EST
All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack
The metadata in the leaked documen
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Wikileaks themselves said so in multiple interviews and I believe on Twitter. So, it's on anyone who wants to contradict that to provide evidence to the contrary.
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The nice thing about "Conspiracy Theories" is that everything proves them to be true. WikiLeaks denying it is evidence of collusion with the Russians. Everything that contradicts the MSM Russian play is ... Russian Fabrications. IT is quite simple really.
He could end up like Seth Rich... (Score:2)
Here's the WLTaskForce [twitter.com] linking to the article you claim is debunked, so whether or not you believe that story, I was correct about them promoting it.
That said, your debunking is a bit off. How would they know it was an intermediary and not the original leaker if they'd never met them before that? He never said that was the only meeting, now, did he? In fact, it'd be damn stupid of the leaker to go about meeting him.
And thus, based on a lot of questionable assumptions, denzacar "decimated" them as you put
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Well, Wikileaks is controlled by Russia, and is used primarily as a Russian propaganda tool.
Citation needed.
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Maybe the fact that Wikileaks systematically leaked data supplied by Russia to throw the election to trump? Doesn't mean they are "controlled" by Russia, but certainly hand in glove with Russia.
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America's dominate political party
You mean the ruling minority.
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> Where are you getting that from? TFA doesn't mention Wikileaks nor does the Congressional report.
Thank you for helping make the point better than I did.
I just want to help everyone keep this news straight from all the other mentions of Russia, because it's easy to fall into a confirmation bias trap if we fail to.
Pieces are falling into place.... (Score:2)
See, this kind of bait would be far more effective if I hadn't read the CTR strategy sheets. I should have realized that when your boss called you "nerd virgins" [wikileaks.org], he was implying you came from Slashdot.
It's pretty obvious in retrospect, no?
For more, try reading about the CIA's history.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That evidence has been discussed and it's scant. That group was paid by the DNC to do this assessment. The evidence they present is:
* Some IPs are claimed as Russian / used in other attacks (why would Russian intelligence put the staging server in Russia and not some random hosting provider?)
* The RATs are claimed to be Russian (but other people point out that you can get them on various underground forums... something I don't believe they ever addressed).
* There was some other hack against some other government servers. As if independent hackers don't do such things. Because of course I'm not old enough to remember back when people were doing silly things like hacking NASA to look for evidence of aliens and whatnot.
Moreover, even if you somehow proved the hack part, that doesn't show us who Wikileaks' source is. They could've been owned by multiple parties, including insiders.
Finally, it simply doesn't matter. Frankly, I welcome any hacks that make it difficult for our leaders to conspire against the people.
Feel free to do the same in Russia. Helping them make the government less corrupt by exposing internal corruption is far more moral than shooting Russian diplomats and making ISIS hand signs and ranting about Aleppo. Russia seems to think that Saudi Arabia & Qatar stand to benefit from that one (coincidentally, both are big donors to the Clinton Foundation). Turkey thinks it's that cleric in exile in the USA who they blame for trying to start a coup there. Obama happened to vow revenge on Russia a few days before.
I really hope that's all just coincidental, but it feels like some serious crap is going on behind the scenes that we won't find out the true extent of until people read about it in history books 100 years from now.
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A) There's no real proof of Russian hacking.
B) The only thing done here was the exposure of U.S. government corruption (selling favors to SA & Qatar, using Clinton Foundation "charity" money on Chelsea's wedding, media manipulation & favor trading, rigging the primaries and debates, etc. etc. etc.). Feel completely free to do the same to Trump, as far as I'm concerned.
The entire point of Wikileaks is that it will get harder and harder to have government corruption the easier it is to expose it.
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The entire point of Wikileaks is that it will get harder and harder to have government corruption the easier it is to expose it.
And unfortunately it's having the opposite effect. We get barraged by so much we don't know what to believe, and we get numb to corruption.
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I believe evidence. Actual, verifiable evidence.
I believe the Wikileaks dumps because we can do DKIM validation on them. I can pull the keys off of Clinton's & Google's DNS servers (they're simple TEXT records, go read the RFC [ietf.org] if you want details). I believe in looking at cui bono (who benefits). It's normally hard to fake that, especially in things that are tightly contested where you can't afford to act against your own interests. I believe in looking at the timing of things, especially in those
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Sticking your head in the sand, claiming ignorance in the face of a deluge of facts, and rejecting the truth based on your own highly irrational partisan belief system is not "numb."
Not saying you are doing that, but many people in the collective "we" are.
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Like every overblown debating society, Congress is a cesspool of fucking up every single decision. I understand the merit of a brake on runaway gratuitous screwing around with goofy initiatives, but jesus, it's disappointing that it never improves. I guess that's just the natural way zoos work. Monkeys will always throw their own shit.
In other news, water is wet (Score:5, Informative)
The more telling part is that if it's true that the CIA actively refused to grant him access to information (ie, evaluated and made a choice, versus simply not granting access as the default policy) and he was later granted that access by the NSA as a different employer, then perhaps there needs to be better protocols for how the various agencies determine risk.
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Yeah, no shit! Do we think he has a choice? (Score:2)
When Russian intelligence says, "You will meet with us on Tuesday at 11 AM", Snowden says, "No, I have to get my pedicure then."
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Then, American 'intelligence officials' will take note, and feel duty-bound to suggest that there should be further investigation. Reporters, also taking notes, and Congressional investigators, ditto.
In other quasi-news, scientists say 'we need more research'. Details at eleven!
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>Snowden was granted asylum by the Russian Government.
Not quite.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-snowden-asylum-20140807-story.html
Accordingly, from Aug. 1, 2014, Edward Snowden has received a residency permit in Russia for three years,” he added. Under the terms of the permit, Snowden can move around Russia and pay visits of up to three months to other countries, "depending how he plans his time," Kucherena told reporters in Moscow.
The document carries a three-year extension option. However, Snowden had not been granted political asylum that would allow him to stay in Russia indefinitely.
Political asylum could only be granted by presidential decree and was a "completely different procedure," Kucherena said. Russia’s decision to give refuge to Snowden strained relations with the United States.
Unless Russia grants him another extension, he has a little over 7 months before his temporary residency permit is up and he has to leave the country.
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I'm trying to figure out how this is news. Snowden was granted asylum by the Russian Government. Naturally there will be some kind of interview process that includes intelligence officials even if such interviews are conducted in the least confrontational way possible. The more telling part is that if it's true that the CIA actively refused to grant him access to information (ie, evaluated and made a choice, versus simply not granting access as the default policy) and he was later granted that access by the NSA as a different employer, then perhaps there needs to be better protocols for how the various agencies determine risk.
Precisely. He lives in Russia, which hasn't been much of a free society since Putin took over, so it's obvious that he would be in contact w/ Russian intelligence.
Guess this is what passes for Congressional Intelligence these days. Trump would do well to conduct a purge of both the CIA and the FBI, and school the Congressional 'Intelligence' experts on the analysis of the obvious
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I'd expect he's been few a few weeks of grilling to extract every bit of information they can, including the things he doesn't know he knows. But it would probably be a polite grilling: Russian officials know that he is much more valuable to them if they treat him well, because by demonstrating their gratitude and willingness to shelter him they increase the temptation for any future leakers to follow in his footsteps, and he in turn must know this and recognise that full cooperation will lead to the best o
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This is why (Score:5, Insightful)
we will never be rid of fake news.
It's far too useful to some folks when they need to sway public opinion on something. The truth be damned.
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But this isn't fake, it's just "What kind of idiot didn't know he would be forced into contact with Russian Intelligence if he wanted to stay there?".
I'll agree, however, that this is published because "It's far too useful to some folks when they need to sway public opinion on something."
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Name one person with a still functioning and non-undead brain who wasn't pretty sure the moment snowden was in russia there was somebody cozied up and standing in his undies with him. Come on, there's no way any country would pass up that opportunity to get info from somebody, it's only how public will they be about it.
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we will never be rid of fake news.
It's far too useful to some folks when they need to sway public opinion on something. The truth be damned.
fake news [google.com]... What is it?
Is it a new thing entirely? Is it just a new word for propaganda or is it simply lies? Could it just be a more extreme form of the baseless "opinion piece"?
Whatever it is, I'm already getting sick about hearing it. If someone doesn't like a news story they label it as "fake news" regardless of whether it is or not. Once that happens, we're all fucked because nothing is true any more [theguardian.com]. As that writer succinctly points out — don't play chess with pigeons: even if you win the
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It's a PR campaign.
Sadly they'll get less easy to spot as they learn from their mistakes here.
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Pretty much as described: News that is fake. It includes, but is not limited to, propaganda. It usually refers to completely fabricated or distorted beyond recognition stories written to maximise revenue by drawing in readers - what happens when clickbait drops any attempt at honesty. It's been around forever (Feddie Starr ate my hamster!), but the internet made it a lot more common as such stories can go viral easily and cost almost nothing to produce. It doesn't have to be for political purposes, and even
Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Any soviet defector will be in contact with US intelligence aka FBI until the rest of his life, even if he never ever sees them or speaks to them
That's their fscking JOB to monitor former agents of another country. So Snowden has no influence whatsoever that he is under permanent surveillance of a counterintelligence agency. Snowden telling them "I was subcontracted to the NSA" is "intelligence", nothing surprising about that.
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In Soviet Russia, KGB is in contact with YOU!
I completely agree, there's very little difference between "having contact with" and "being interrogated by" intelligence agencies.
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Only in America do we allow foreign nationals with questionable pedigrees to run free throughout our country without oversight. Pretty much all other countries have rational and sane intelligence oversight of foreign nationals in their country.
Paging Captain Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Were they thinking that Russian intelligence agencies would forget Snowden was in their country, or that they wouldn't keep tabs on him.
Or were they thinking that someone granted asylum would casually blow off representatives of the country giving him asylum?
Or do they just think people are so stupid that they'll think this was somehow a shocking revelation?
Re:Paging Captain Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
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You can be certain that they *ARE* being influenced. This doesn't mean he's lying, but there are certainly things he isn't saying.
Snowden is a patriot (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, he's a traitor.
No. Whatever you want to call him, he is not a traitor.
As a matter of definition, a US citizen or person can only commit treason by giving aid or comfort to an enemy at a time of war declared by Congress. The US Congress has not declared war on anyone since 1942.
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Umm, no.
Article 3: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Note that the phrase "declared war" isn't included. Note that "adhering to their Enemies" IS included, and doesn't imply a state of war....
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We elected Trump. Putin is no longer an Enemy, but is now a Trusted Ally. We are no longer at war with Eurasia, we are now at war with Eastasia
Re:Snowden is a patriot (Score:5, Informative)
From this link: [thefreedictionary.com]
The Treason Clause applies only to disloyal acts committed during times of war. Acts of disloyalty during peacetime are not considered treasonous under the Constitution.
There are plenty of other examples. To commit treason, there must be an Enemy. For an Enemy to exist, war must be declared.
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The definition of "enemy" is "a hostile nation or its armed forces or citizens, especially in time of war". Exactly how is Russia "hostile" to the US? Not hostile to batshit-crazy figures in the US, mind you, but to the US.
Maybe you don't know what hostile is. You want hostile, how about a theocracy of geriatric warped crazies whipping up Iran against the Great Satan?
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The definition of "enemy" is "a hostile nation or its armed forces or citizens, especially in time of war". Exactly how is Russia "hostile" to the US? Not hostile to batshit-crazy figures in the US, mind you, but to the US.
Maybe you don't know what hostile is. You want hostile, how about a theocracy of geriatric warped crazies whipping up Iran against the Great Satan?
My point is that treason is an exceptionally serious crime -- the only crime defined in the US Constitution -- and as such, there must be a high bar for charging and convicting someone of it. That means you cannot just throw around the idea of who is an "enemy." There must be a crystal-clear definition of that term. And that is provided by a congressional declaration of war against said enemy.
In US constitutional terms, an enemy is someone you are formally at war against. It isn't just someone you don't lik
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Unfortunately it is a pretty predictable pattern, every few years they switch "enemies" to keep the public off balance
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
who else? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, if he was spilling his guts to Russia, you could hardly blame the guy since they are keeping him alive. If the US had any vestigial brains left they would give Snowden a pardon, even if only to shut him up.
Continued Smear (Score:5, Informative)
This is more from the smear report they released a few months ago.
Barton Gellman (one of the reporters that received the full Snowden Archive) investigated the report the first time and concluded it's full of provable lies and smears.
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/house-intelligence-committees-terrible-horrible-bad-snowden-report/
Typical govenment investigation (Score:5, Insightful)
First you decided the outcome then you sculpt the investigation to match all preconceptions.
So is the Russian POTUS (Score:2)
In fact, he's even retweeting RT tweets from Putin right now.
So?
Just in: "Mistakes were made" -- HPSCI (Score:5, Informative)
"Mistakes were made:" Less than 24 hours after releasing report claiming I lied, HPSCI is walking back its report. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/in-declassified-edward-snowden-report-committee-walks-back-claims-about-intentional-lying [usnews.com]
From that link:
In Declassified Edward Snowden Report, Committee Walks Back Claims About 'Intentional Lying'
The House Intelligence Committee in September issued a three-page document alerting the public that information from its two-year investigation of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had turned up evidence that Snowden was a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who exhibited a “pattern of intentional lying.”
It's only bad when whistleblower do it. (Score:2)
It's not like Snowden can tell the Russians to go fuck themselves.
This makes me think... (Score:2)
Longest ad-hominem ever (Score:3)
I believe it (Score:2)
what? (Score:2)
New policy is they have to have trash on you (Score:2)
I have a feeling that from now on no one gets promoted or any type of access until they do at least 5 illegal things themselves. The more of a company man you prove yourself the higher you go. Further the NSA actively works with other agencies to leverage(blackmail) people into being their spies. But I think we can assume from now on they will blackmail their own recruits to compel them into breaking the law as a way of initiation. Further they will engineer multiple scenarios where you must break the espi
Snowden is a Russian spy! (Score:4, Funny)
He is also a terrorist, a pedophile, a pirate, a Muslim and a Mexican.
(Did I miss anything?)
"Contact" means many things (Score:2)
Besides the initial interview, half of everyone he interacts with on a daily basis probably works for the intelligence service in some form or another.
I mean, it's not like he's Joe nobody.
He's a smart guy and probably knows that everyone he interacts with is working for someone or another. The $64k question is "is he actively working for and/or providing information to the Russians." There's no evidence that he's released anything to Russia that he hasn't released to anyone else, but you never know.
The goo
Re: (Score:2)
Snowden has said unequivocally, many, many times -- despite mainstream media and politicians with an axe to grind repeatedly 'forgetting' to mention it -- that he left Hong Kong with NO storage devices containing copies of the data he provided to Greenwald et al.
In their defense, Congress has no reason to take Snowden at his word. But, more broadly, not having information on him is not the same thing as not having the information within one's reach. All it takes is an encrypted blob in some Dropbox(TM) account and the info is accessible to anyone in the world, but only readable to him personally. I am sure someone like him could concoct a more sophisticated and more finely granulated information retrieval scheme from anywhere in the world which would depend on a
Re:Perhaps but considering his situation... (Score:4, Insightful)
How so? Snowden has shown himself to be more honest and ethical than the intelligence bureaucracy [washingtonpost.com] which is smearing him.
Re: (Score:3)
"Congress has no reason to take Snowden at his word."
How so? Snowden has shown himself to be more honest and ethical than the intelligence bureaucracy [washingtonpost.com] which is smearing him.
Because he was a contractor rather than a federal employee. A federal employee would have had swear an oath to protect and defend The Constitution of The United States. So there would be room to argue that this is what he did. As a contractor, he, without a doubt, had to sign an NDA. By making his revelations, he broke the terms of the NDA. And since Congress was paying his salary (which was pre-conditioned on his signing the NDA), he did willingly break the terms of a contract which he signed. So Con
Re: (Score:3)
Re:So, President Snowden? (Score:4, Insightful)
Trump didn't lose by 2.9 million votes either. He won by ~70 electoral votes.