◼ Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations - Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong
guardian.co.uk VIDEO INTERVIEW at the link
◼ Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn't seem overblown. And I do wonder: can a president who's presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term? - Damian Thompson/The Telegraph
"They could pay off the Triads," says Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower interviewed by the Guardian in his Hong Kong hideout. Meaning: the CIA could use a proxy to kill him for revealing that Barack Obama has presided over an unimaginable – to the ordinary citizen – expansion of the Federal government's powers of surveillance over anyone....
Snowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:
NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible… Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and its stores them for periods of time … While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…I do not see how Obama can talk his way out of this one. Snowden is not Bradley Manning: he's not a disturbed disco bunny but a highly articulate network security specialist who has left behind a $200,000 salary and girlfriend in Hawaii for a life on the run. He's not a sleazy opportunist like Julian Assange, either. As he says: "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
It will be very difficult for the Obama administration to portray Snowden as a traitor. For a start, I don't think US public opinion will allow it. Any explanations it offers will be drowned out by American citizens demanding to know: "So how much do you know about me and my family? How can I find out? How long have you been collecting this stuff? What are you going to do with it?"
◼ EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE N.S.A. LEAKER, COMES FORWARD - Amy davidson/New Yorker
“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail,” Edward Snowden told the Guardian. Snowden is twenty-nine; he had worked in a technical capacity for the C.I.A. and then, by way of his employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, as a contractor for the N.S.A. He is the reason our country has, in the last week, been having a conversation on privacy and the limits of domestic surveillance. That was overdue, and one wishes it had been prompted by self-examination on the part of the Obama Administration or real oversight by Congress. But both failed, and it came in the form of Snowden handing highly classified documents—a lot of them—to journalists.
He did so, he said, because he had seen “abuses”—the framework for an “architecture of oppression”—and had come to “realize that these things have to be decided by the public, not someone who is hired by the government.” Snowden, of course, is someone hired by the government, and will be asked why he thought the decision to expose secrets was his. He offered, in his interview, several answers: one is that the normal processes were broken. The second was that he is willing to come out in the open himself. Saturday night, the N.S.A. asked for a criminal investigation into the leaks. As we learn more about him, in the next days, those answers are worth evaluating seriously.
All of the talk about not specifically targeting Americans should not be reassuring: “The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for a period of time.”
And why should this bother us? Snowden:
It’s getting to the point, you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they could use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.As he must know, that scrutiny will now be applied to him.
◼ Edward Snowden, NSA Contractor, Claims to Be Source of Surveillance Program Leaks - ABC
Edward Joseph Snowden, 29, knew full well the risks he had undertaken and the awesome powers that would soon be arrayed to hunt for him. Pseudonyms were the least of his precautions as we corresponded from afar. Snowden was spilling some of the most sensitive secrets of a surveillance apparatus he had grown to detest. By late last month, he believed he was already “on the X” — exposure imminent.
“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end,” he wrote in early May, before we had our first direct contact. He warned that even journalists who pursued his story were at risk until they published.
The U.S. intelligence community, he wrote, “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information.”
I did not believe that literally, but I knew he had reason to fear.
A series of indirect contacts preceded our first direct exchange May 16. Snowden was not yet ready to tell me his name, but he said he was certain to be exposed — by his own hand or somebody else’s. Until then, he asked that I not quote him at length. He said semantic analysis, another of the NSA’s capabilities, would identify him by his patterns of language.
“You can’t protect the source,” he wrote, “but if you help me make the truth known, I will consider it a fair trade.” Later, he added, “There’s no saving me.”
I asked him, at the risk of estrangement, how he could justify exposing intelligence methods that might benefit U.S. adversaries.
“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”...
