http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/12/snowden-tells-chinese-paper-yes-the-u-s-is-hacking-chinese-and-hong-kong-computers/

Snowden tells Chinese paper: Yes, the U.S. is hacking Chinese and Hong Kong computers

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON JUNE 12, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Via CNN, a perfect illustration of why even pols with deep libertarian sympathies insist onreserving judgment about this guy. The most amazing thing about it is how gratuitously self-destructive it is to Snowden’s credibility. No one doubts that the U.S. is cyberspying on China; if the feds are capable of putting something like PRISM together, they’re capable of exploiting Chinese security vulnerabilities. Confirming for a Chinese paper that we’re doing what everyone knows we’re doing doesn’t even qualify as a “leak.” His whole point in his Guardian interview with Greenwald, though, was that he’s not out to hurt American interests, merely to clue his fellow citizens into something the government’s doing to them that should concern them. Yakking to a Chinese paper about U.S. cyberespionage proves that that’s not quite true. He’s also out to embarrass the U.S. by revealing stuff that’ll raise tensions with other nations, even if the stuff he’s revealing is supported by most Americans.

Then again, we already had an inkling of that when the Guardian revealed a few days ago amid the FISA/PRISM bombshells that Obama had asked his natsec team for a list of potential overseas cybertargets. There’s nothing scandalous about that. Preparing for war contingencies is what the commander-in-chief and the country’s military do. But it’s embarrassing to the U.S. to have it revealed and it’ll cause diplomatic headaches with other countries, and evidently that’s enough for Snowden. The “best-case” scenario for him telling Chinese media that we’re spying on China is that he figures that inflaming local sentiment against the U.S. will make it harder for Chinese/Hong Kong authorities to extradite him. Which is to say, instead of gratuitously humiliating America, in this scenario he’s merely betraying state semi-secrets to protect himself. Somewhere Obama’s watching this CNN clip and smiling because he knows that, like it or not, he’s locked in a battle for public opinion with Snowden right now. And everyone who saw this segment this afternoon is now thinking the same thing: If Snowden’s willing to tell China this, what else is he willing to them that he knows? Advantage: Obama.

Actually, I spoke too soon in saying that he merely revealed something everyone knew in confirming that the U.S. spies on China. He was quite a bit more specific than that:

The Post said Snowden provided documents, which the paper described as “unverified,” that he said showed U.S. cyber operations targeting a Hong Kong university, public officials and students in the Chinese city. The paper said the documents also indicate hacking attacks targeting mainland Chinese targets, but did not reveal information about Chinese military systems…

“We hack network backbones — like huge internet routers, basically — that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” Snowden said, according to the paper. “Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer.”

And here’s what our freedom-loving, Ron-Paul-supporting hero said about Putin’s fascist kingdom, which is using the idea of granting him asylum to score its own cheap propaganda points against the U.S.:

“Asked if he had been offered asylum by the Russian government, he said: ‘My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power,’” the Morning Post reported.

If there’s anyone who appreciates standing up to great government power, it’s Vladimir Putin. Imagine how heroic Snowden will look to middle America if he ends up essentially defecting to Russia. Incidentially, while Snowden’s comments to the Chinese paper were breaking this afternoon, Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive was posting his findings after looking into Snowden’s claim that he began training to join Special Forces back in 2003. That can’t be true, says UJ:

The 18 X-ray program is a way to go directly from the street to the Special Forces course. You first would attend basic and advanced individual training and then airborne school. Upon successful conclusion of those you head to Bragg for some prep training and the Special Forces Assessment and Selection course. If you pass all of those, then and only then do you start Special Forces training.

Mr. Snowden wasn’t even eligible for this program as he didn’t even graduate from High School.

Either Snowden left the military before ever realizing that he was ineligible for Special Forces or he deliberately exaggerated his ambitions in his Guardian interview. Add that to the other mysteries surrounding him, like how an IT guy managed to lasso such a large and diverse collection of documents. That’ll be the White House’s strategy against him going forward, I think — claiming on the one hand that data-mining helps thwart lots and lots of terror attacks and emphasizing on the other that Snowden’s story has holes in it and that he seems to enjoy sharing state secrets with China. Stay tuned.

Update: A succinct summary of Snowden’s comments to the Chinese paper from Dave Weigel:

Snowden’s problem is larger than domestic spycraft. It’s a problem with spycraft, period. The people circling him and now and dreaming of a “treason” case against him have to notice that.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/inside_the_nsa_s_ultra_secret_china_hacking_group

( interesting timing as to how Snowden appeared on the scene just as the cyber attack issue became an issue with China ... )

Inside the NSA's Ultra-Secret China Hacking Group

Deep within the National Security Agency, an elite, rarely discussed team of hackers and spies is targeting America's enemies abroad.

BY MATTHEW M. AID | JUNE 10, 2013

This weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China's newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour -- cyber-espionage -- a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining. The media has focused at length on China's aggressive attempts to electronically steal U.S. military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed back at the "shirt-sleeves" summit, noting that China, too, was the recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected to mention is that he has his own hacker army, and it has burrowed its way deep, deep into China's networks.

When the agenda for the meeting at the Sunnylands estate outside Palm Springs, California, was agreed to several months ago, both parties agreed that it would be a nice opportunity for President Xi, who assumed his post in March, to discuss a wide range of security and economic issues of concern to both countries. According to diplomatic sources, the issue of cybersecurity was not one of the key topics to be discussed at the summit. Sino-American economic relations, climate change, and the growing threat posed by North Korea were supposed to dominate the discussions.

Then, two weeks ago, White House officials leaked to the press that Obama intended to raise privately with Xi the highly contentious issue of China's widespread use of computer hacking to steal U.S. government, military, and commercial secrets. According to a Chinese diplomat in Washington who spoke in confidence, Beijing was furious about the sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the meeting's agenda. According to a diplomatic source in Washington, the Chinese government was even angrier that the White House leaked the new agenda item to the press before Washington bothered to tell Beijing about it.

So the Chinese began to hit back. Senior Chinese officials have publicly accused the U.S. government of hypocrisy and have alleged that Washington is also actively engaged in cyber-espionage. When the latest allegation of Chinese cyber-espionage was leveled in late May in a front-page Washington Post article, which alleged that hackers employed by the Chinese military had stolen the blueprints of over three dozen American weapons systems, the Chinese government's top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, shot back that Beijing possessed "mountains of data" showing that the United States has engaged in widespread hacking designed to steal Chinese government secrets. This weekend's revelations about the National Security Agency's PRISM and Verizon metadata collection from a 29-year-old former CIA undercover operative named Edward J. Snowden, who is now living in Hong Kong, only add fuel to Beijing's position.

But Washington never publicly responded to Huang's allegation, and nobody in the U.S. media seems to have bothered to ask the White House if there is a modicum of truth to the Chinese charges.

It turns out that the Chinese government's allegations are essentially correct. According to a number of confidential sources, a highly secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. government's huge electronic eavesdropping organization, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People's Republic of China.

Hidden away inside the massive NSA headquarters complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, in a large suite of offices segregated from the rest of the agency, TAO is a mystery to many NSA employees. Relatively few NSA officials have complete access to information about TAO because of the extraordinary sensitivity of its operations, and it requires a special security clearance to gain access to the unit's work spaces inside the NSA operations complex. The door leading to its ultramodern operations center is protected by armed guards, an imposing steel door that can only be entered by entering the correct six-digit code into a keypad, and a retinal scanner to ensure that only those individuals specially cleared for access get through the door.

According to former NSA officials interviewed for this article, TAO's mission is simple. It collects intelligence information on foreign targets by surreptitiously hacking into their computers and telecommunications systems, cracking passwords, compromising the computer security systems protecting the targeted computer, stealing the data stored on computer hard drives, and then copying all the messages and data traffic passing within the targeted email and text-messaging systems. The technical term of art used by NSA to describe these operations is computer network exploitation (CNE).

TAO is also responsible for developing the information that would allow the United States to destroy or damage foreign computer and telecommunications systems with a cyberattack if so directed by the president. The organization responsible for conducting such a cyberattack is U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), whose headquarters is located at Fort Meade and whose chief is the director of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander.

Commanded since April of this year by Robert Joyce, who formerly was the deputy director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate (responsible for protecting the U.S. government's communications and computer systems), TAO, sources say, is now the largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA's huge Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Directorate, consisting of over 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers.

The sanctum sanctorum of TAO is its ultramodern operations center at Fort Meade called the Remote Operations Center (ROC), which is where the unit's 600 or so military and civilian computer hackers (they themselves CNE operators) work in rotating shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

These operators spend their days (or nights) searching the ether for computers systems and supporting telecommunications networks being utilized by, for example, foreign terrorists to pass messages to their members or sympathizers. Once these computers have been identified and located, the computer hackers working in the ROC break into the targeted computer systems electronically using special software designed by TAO's own corps of software designers and engineers specifically for this purpose, download the contents of the computers' hard drives, and place software implants or other devices called "buggies" inside the computers' operating systems, which allows TAO intercept operators at Fort Meade to continuously monitor the email and/or text-messaging traffic coming in and out of the computers or hand-held devices.

TAO's work would not be possible without the team of gifted computer scientists and software engineers belonging to the Data Network Technologies Branch, who develop the sophisticated computer software that allows the unit's operators to perform their intelligence collection mission. A separate unit within TAO called the Telecommunications Network Technologies Branch (TNT) develops the techniques that allow TAO's hackers to covertly gain access to targeted computer systems and telecommunications networks without being detected. Meanwhile, TAO's Mission Infrastructure Technologies Branch develops and builds the sensitive computer and telecommunications monitoring hardware and support infrastructure that keeps the effort up and running.

TAO even has its own small clandestine intelligence-gathering unit called the Access Technologies Operations Branch, which includes personnel seconded by the CIA and the FBI, who perform what are described as "off-net operations," which is a polite way of saying that they arrange for CIA agents to surreptitiously plant eavesdropping devices on computers and/or telecommunications systems overseas so that TAO's hackers can remotely access them from Fort Meade.

It is important to note that TAO is not supposed to work against domestic targets in the United States or its possessions. This is the responsibility of the FBI, which is the sole U.S. intelligence agency chartered for domestic telecommunications surveillance. But in light of information about widerNSA snooping, one has to prudently be concerned about whether TAO is able to perform its mission of collecting foreign intelligence without accessing communications originating in or transiting through the United States.

Since its creation in 1997, TAO has garnered a reputation for producing some of the best intelligence available to the U.S. intelligence community not only about China, but also on foreign terrorist groups, espionage activities being conducted against the United States by foreign governments, ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction developments around the globe, and the latest political, military, and economic developments around the globe.

According to a former NSA official, by 2007 TAO's 600 intercept operators were secretly tapping into thousands of foreign computer systems and accessing password-protected computer hard drives and emails of targets around the world. As detailed in my 2009 history of NSA, The Secret Sentry, this highly classified intercept program, known at the time as Stumpcursor, proved to be critically important during the U.S. Army's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, where it was credited with single-handedly identifying and locating over 100 Iraqi and al Qaeda insurgent cells in and around Baghdad. That same year, sources report that TAO was given an award for producing particularly important intelligence information about whether Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb.

By the time Obama became president of the United States in January 2009, TAO had become something akin to the wunderkind of the U.S. intelligence community. "It's become an industry unto itself," a former NSA official said of TAO at the time. "They go places and get things that nobody else in the IC [intelligence community] can."

Given the nature and extraordinary political sensitivity of its work, it will come as no surprise that TAO has always been, and remains, extraordinarily publicity shy. Everything about TAO is classified top secret codeword, even within the hypersecretive NSA. Its name has appeared in print only a few times over the past decade, and the handful of reporters who have dared inquire about it have been politely but very firmly warned by senior U.S. intelligence officials not to describe its work for fear that it might compromise its ongoing efforts. According to a senior U.S. defense official who is familiar with TAO's work, "The agency believes that the less people know about them [TAO] the better."

The word among NSA officials is that if you want to get promoted or recognized, get a transfer to TAO as soon as you can. The current head of the NSA's SIGINT Directorate, Teresa Shea, 54, got her current job in large part because of the work she did as chief of TAO in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the unit earned plaudits for its ability to collect extremely hard-to-come-by information during the latter part of George W. Bush's administration. We do not know what the information was, but sources suggest that it must have been pretty important to propel Shea to her position today. But according to a recently retired NSA official, TAO "is the place to be right now."

There's no question that TAO has continued to grow in size and importance since Obama took office in 2009, which is indicative of its outsized role. In recent years, TAO's collection operations have expanded from Fort Meade to some of the agency's most important listening posts in the United States. There are now mini-TAO units operating at the huge NSA SIGINT intercept and processing centers at NSA Hawaii at Wahiawa on the island of Oahu; NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Georgia; and NSA Texas at the Medina Annex outside San Antonio, Texas; and within the huge NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base outside Denver.

The problem is that TAO has become so large and produces so much valuable intelligence information that it has become virtually impossible to hide it anymore. The Chinese government is certainly aware of TAO's activities. The "mountains of data" statement by China's top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, is clearly an implied threat by Beijing to release this data. Thus it is unlikely that President Obama pressed President Xi too hard at the Sunnydale summit on the question of China's cyber-espionage activities. As any high-stakes poker player knows, you can only press your luck so far when the guy on the other side of the table knows what cards you have in your hand.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-surveillance-subverting-constitution

Snowden saw what I saw: surveillance criminally subverting the constitution

So we refused to be part of the NSA's dark blanket. That is why whistleblowers pay the price for being the backstop of democracy

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience.

Like me, he became discomforted by what he was exposed to and what he saw: the industrial-scale systematic surveillance that is scooping up vast amounts of information not only around the world but in the United States, in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution.

The NSA programs that Snowden has revealed are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind, in 2001. In the first week of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA's lead attorney. When I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said:

"The White House has approved the program; it's all legal. NSA is the executive agent."

It was made clear to me that the original intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional safeguards. "You don't understand," I was told. "We just need the data."

In the first week of October 2001, President Bush had signed an extraordinary order authorizing blanket dragnet electronic surveillance: Stellar Wind was a highly secret program that, without warrant or any approval from the Fisa court, gave the NSA access to all phone records from the major telephone companies, including US-to-US calls. It correlates precisely with the Verizon order revealed by Snowden; and based on what we know, you have to assume that there are standing orders for the other major telephone companies.

It is technically true that the order applies only to meta-data. The problem is that in the digital space, metadata becomes the index for content. And content is gold for determining intent.

This executive fiat of 2001 violated not just the fourth amendment, but also Fisa rules at the time, which made it a felony – carrying a penalty of $10,000 and five years in prison for each and every instance. The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation – the Fisa court, the congressional committees – is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is, they just want it all, period.

So I was there at the very nascent stages, when the government – wilfully and in deepest secrecy – subverted the constitution. All you need to know about so-called oversight is that the NSA was already in violation of the Patriot Act by the time it was signed into law.

Vast surveillance regime created by willful&deliberate violation 1st/4th/5th Amend N deepest of secrecy, intent 2 spy on all & 'own the net'

8:22 PM - 10 Jun 2013

When I was in the US air force, flying an RC-135 in the latter years of the cold war, I was a German-Russian crypto-linguist. We called ourselves the "vacuum-cleaner of the sky" because our capability to gather information was enormous at the time. But it was always outward-facing; we could not collect on US targets because that was against the law. To the US government today, however, we are all foreigners.

I became an expert on East Germany, which was then the ultimate surveillance state. Their secret police were monstrously efficient: they had a huge paper-based system that held information on virtually everyone in the country – a population of about 16-17 million. The Stasi's motto was "to know everything".

NSA - dystopian Stasi on Steroids that just wants "to know everything" about anybody, anytime, anywhere--regardless of any & all constraints

5:31 PM - 9 Jun 2013

So none of this is new to me. The difference between what the Bush administration was doing in 2001, right after 9/11, and what the Obama administration is doing today is that the system is now under the cover and color of law. Yet, what Snowden has revealed is still the tip of the iceberg.

General Michael Hayden, who was head of the NSA when I worked there, and then director of the CIA, said, "We need to own the net." And that is what they're implementing here. They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye.

I lived with that dirty knowledge for years. Before 9/11, the prime directive at the NSA was that you don't spy on Americans without a warrant; to do so was against the law – and, in particular, was a criminal violation of Fisa. My concern was that we were more than an accessory; this was a crime and we were subverting the constitution.

I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he's been following this for years: he's seen what's happened to other whistleblowers like me.

By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You're identified as someone they don't like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.

But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.

I reached a point in early 2006 when I decided I would contact a reporter. I had the same level of security clearance as Snowden. If you look at the indictment from 2010, you can see that I was accused of causing "exceptionally grave damage to US national security". Despite allegations that I had tippy-top-secret documents, In fact, I had no classified information in my possession, and I disclosed none to the Baltimore Sun journalist during 2006 and 2007. But I got hammered: in November 2007, I was raided by a dozen armed FBI agents, when I was served with a search warrant. The nightmare had only just begun, including extensive physical and electronic surveillance.

In April 2008, in a secret meeting with the FBI, the chief prosecutor from the Department of Justice assigned to lead the prosecution said, "How would you like to spend the rest of your life in jail, Mr Drake?" – unless I co-operated with their multi-year, multimillion-dollar criminal leak investigation, launched in 2005 after the explosive New York Times article revealing for the first time the warrantless wiretapping operation. Two years later, they finally charged me with a ten felony count indictment, including five counts under the Espionage Act. I faced upwards of 35 years in prison.

In July 2011, after the government's case had collapsed under the weight of truth, I plead to a minor misdemeanor for "exceeding authorized use of a computer" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – in exchange for the DOJ dropping all ten felony counts. I received as a sentence one year's probation and 240 hours of community service: I interviewed almost 50 veterans for the Library of Congress veterans history project. This was a rare, almost unprecedented, case of a government prosecution of a whistleblower ending in total defeat and failure.

So, the stakes for whistleblowers are incredibly high. The government has got its knives out: there's a massive manhunt for Snowden. They will use all their resources to hunt him down and every detail of his life will be turned inside out. They'll do everything they can to "bring him to justice" – already there are calls for the "traitor" to be "put away for life".

#Snowden chose 2 free darkside NatSec info as magnificent act of selfless civil disobedience 2 protect our liberty.  http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance …

3:41 PM - 9 Jun 2013

He can expect the worst; he knows that. He went preemptively overseas because that at least delays the prying hand of the US government. But he could be extracted by rendition, as he has said. Certainly, my life was shredded. Once they have determined that you are a "person of interest" and an "enemy of the state", they want to destroy you, period.

I am now reliving the last 12 years from what's been disclosed in the past week. I feel a kinship with Snowden: he is essentially the equivalent of me. He saw the surveillance state from within and saw how far it's gone. The government has a pathological incentive to collect more and more and more; they just can't help themselves – they have an insatiable hoarding complex.

Since the government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out. There's no room in a democracy for this kind of secrecy: it's anathema to our form of a constitutional republic, which was born out of the struggle to free ourselves from the abuse of such powers, which led to the American revolution.

That is what's at stake here: to an NSA with these unwarranted powers, we're all potentially guilty; we're all potential suspects until we prove otherwise. That is what happens when the government has all the data.

Latest NSA revelations: ppl must get clear & present danger of authoritarian totalitarianism via the Leviathan NatSec state & surveillance

11:14 AM - 9 Jun 2013

The NSA is wiring the world; they want to own internet. I didn't want to be part of the dark blanket that covers the world, and Edward Snowden didn't either.

We are seeing an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and truth-tellers: it's now criminal to expose the crimes of the state. Under this relentless assault by the Obama administration, I am the only person who has held them off and preserved his freedom. All the other whistleblowers I know have served time in jail, are facing jail or are already incarcerated or in prison.

That has been my burden. I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I didn't want surveillance to take away my soul, and I don't want anyone else to have to live it.

For that, I paid a very high price. And Edward Snowden will, too. But I have my freedom, and what is the price for freedom? What future do we want to keep?

http://news.yahoo.com/journalist-us-surveillance-case-more-come-050921834.html

( Glenn Greenwald states many more revelations ( dozens of stories ) yet to be unveiled regarding surveillance by NSA et al )

HONG KONG (AP) — The journalist who exposed classified U.S. surveillance programs leaked by an American defense contractor said Tuesday that there will be more 'significant revelations' to come from the documents.

"We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months," said Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.

Greenwald told The Associated Press the decision was being made on when to release the next story based on the information provided by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who has been accused by U.S. Senate intelligence chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California of committing an "act of treason" that should be prosecuted.

Greenwald's reports last week exposed widespread U.S. government programs to collect telephone and Internet records.

"There are dozens of stories generated by the documents he provided, and we intend to pursue every last one of them," Greenwald said.

Snowden's whereabouts were not immediately known on Tuesday, although he was believed to be staying somewhere in Hong Kong.

No charges have been brought and no warrant has been issued for the arrest of Snowden.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/edward-snowden-security-state

( This is an important comment.... )

Edward Snowden and the security state laid bare

Beyond the leaks themselves, Snowden has exposed how the US government enforces secrecy in the very act of spying on us

Edward Snowden supporters attend a rally at Union Square in New York. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Edward Snowden has given up almost everything in his previously comfortable life so that we could know at least some of the ways in which the US government is spying on us. So what will happen to him now?

The executive branch of the US government has never been fond of leaks or leakers, of course – Nixon's impeachment was, via Watergate, the end result of his "plumbers" going after Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers – but no administration has been as hostile to the public receiving insider information as Obama's. We probably won't kill him – even though the current administration has decided that it's OK to kill US citizens without a trial as long as we invoke "national self-defense" – but Snowden will face relentless pursuit and prosecution, for the foreseeable future. If the way the trial of Bradley Manning is being conducted is precedent, we can expect similarly opaque proceedings for Snowden, should he come to trial.

Snowden is one of a long line of whistleblowers warning the US public about the NSA's powers, from Bill Kinney to Mark Klein to Thomas Drake. All these people went public with roughly the same message – the NSA has a boundless appetite for surveillance, and has come largely unmoored from any significant oversight or limits – but it is Snowden's leak that seems to have kicked off a serious and widespread conversation about the appropriate limits of the US government's power to surveil its citizens. What is it about Snowden leak that is special?

It's not the contents of the leak itself. The information that Snowden leaked is fairly minor – a Powerpoint document detailing the Prism program, which seems to confirm what Klein and Drake said: namely, that the distinction between gathering information on particular targets of investigation and members of the general public has collapsed, while the loophole for gathering "incidental" information has expanded so broadly as to allow for wholesale acquisition and storage of electronic communications of any person anywhere, forever.

If Snowden had merely confirmed those earlier reports, his leak would probably have created a similarly muted reaction. What makes Snowden's leak different, though, and electrifying, was its particularity. By informing the public, via this newspaper, of a specific program, and of its widely used commercial targets like Facebook and Google, he has confirmed that the security state that exists inside the United States continues to metastasize – in a way that seems relevant to the lives of ordinary citizens. Oddly, the banality of the Powerpoint form, with its sentence fragments and terrible graphics, served to render the program much more real than hearing from an ATT employee that the NSA was recording American's phonecalls wholesale.

Snowden's leak also added force to earlier claims that the security apparatus run by the most powerful government in the world has broken almost completely free of the checks and balances needed in a democracy. Earlier this year, US District Judge Colleen McMahon, concluding that she could not compel the Obama administration to disclose its legal reasoning for the targeted killings of US citizens, said:

"The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me … I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

Similarly, Senator Ron Wyden, was reduced two years ago to saying, presciently but impotently:

"When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry … many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It's almost as if there were two Patriot Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters."

Neither the judicial nor legislative branches have been able to compel the executive branch to explain themselves to the American people. And into that breach stepped Edward Snowden.

Part of the reason the Obama administration will now go after him hard is to send a message to others with high security clearance but troubled by the legal implications of warrantless spying: don't get any ideas. Because if people who know what the government is doing in secret begin to behave as Snowden did, it will become much harder for the government to keep such secrets in the first place.

It seems crazy to have to spell this out, but it should be hard for a government to keep secrets from its own people. National secrets are a necessary evil, of course, but the necessary part should not blind us to the evil part. Deciding to try to keep any given piece of information secret should be difficult, and expensive, and prone to occasional failure.

Interviewed about Snowden's leaks, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence, Shawn Turner, said:

"Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law."

What such a sentiment doesn't get at is what someone should do when protecting classified information may mean breaking the law – in this case, not just any law, but but one of the core protections of the US constitution.

The spread of information from WikiLeaks and the hacker collective Anonymous has demonstrated that anonymity can be a powerful tool in defying government secrecy. But Edward Snowden knew, given his familiarity with the work of his previous employers, that after leaking the Prism document, he would be able to run, but not hide. And he did it anyway.

We may now decide, after the long-overdue conversation on civil liberties that is now beginning, that we want the NSA to have such powers. And it may be that if he is arrested, extradited or turns himself in, Snowden will get a fair trial and be convicted. But even those acts will serve to weaken the security state.

In the absence of any real limits on executive power imposed by the other branches of government, Snowden reminds us that resistance is still an option.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-10/will-obama-see-out-his-full-term

( Yes , he will fill out his full second term.... Of course , good kabuki will be provided for and by the right / left in tandem ! )

"Will Obama See Out His Full Term?"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/10/2013 22:32 -0400

Barack Obama

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Glenn Beck

It seems the question on many people's minds, as scandal after scandal crashes on the shores of Obama's White House is best summed up byThe Telegraph's Damian Thompson. Yet another non-US paper asks, will Obama last the duration of his second term in a surveillance context where what has been revealed is said to be worse than Watergate.

Via 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.

Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment.Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter:

Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden

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 timecan 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?"

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?

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-hunt-is-on-for-edward-snowden-2013-6

( Did Snowden have a plan ? Would he set off for Hong Kong ( rather than Iceland or Ecuador ) without having an exit strategy ? Was the Mira move just a head fake ? )

The Hunt Is On For Edward Snowden

Brian Jones | 49 minutes ago | 1,572 | 7

Wikimedia Commons

Snowden is believed to be somewhere in Hong Kong.

Edward Snowden’s face has been plastered on the front page of every major newspaper in the world. The Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe into his leak. The NSA’s security and counterintelligence team is on the hunt for him. He’s reportedly maxed out his credit card, and checked out of a Hong Kong hotel as of today.

And yet no one knows where he is — so what's his next move?

Upon perpetrating one of the greatest intelligence leaks in U.S. history, Snowden admitted to the Guardian that he had no good options for eluding capture.

“If they want to get you, they'll get you in time,” he said of the U.S. intelligence network.

At today’s daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked if the U.S. government knows of Snowden’s whereabouts. He declined to comment.

After sneaking classified documents out of the National Security Agency facility in Hawaii last month, and recently checking out of his hotel hideaway in Hong Kong, Snowden is on the lam.

There’s been a lot of criticism of his choice of refuge, most noting that because of a longstanding extradition treaty with Hong Kong, it probably isn’t the best choice. But Benjamin Carlson at GlobalPost revealed it may actually be a brilliant move:

“... there is at least one reason it could be incredibly shrewd: Hong Kong's asylum system is currently stuck in a state of limbo that could allow Snowden to exploit a loophole and buy some valuable time.”

The High Court in Hong Kong ruled in March that the region will not extradite anyone until it has a new procedure for reviewing extradition applications. This means that even if Snowden is apprehended and the U.S. appeals for him to be extradited, that would be a very long process.

When asked about his decision to hide in Hong Kong, Snowden said:

“Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech ... the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known ... I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading western governments.”

But the GlobalPost story suggests there may be more to it, that Snowden might just be a step ahead of everyone — the journalists covering the story and the intelligence networks looking to track him down.

The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake has written about the unit within the NSA who is now on the hunt for Snowden. The NSA’s Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence — called the ‘Q-Group’ — is charged with reining in Snowden. Lake writes that they have been searching for him since he disappeared from Hawaii several weeks ago.

“There is a complete freak out mode at the agency right now,” an unnamed former intelligence official told the Daily Beast.

It’s hard to believe that Snowden actually used a credit card to pay for his room if an elite security and counterintelligence unit was on his trail.

Nonetheless, the most reliable information we have is that he has so far eluded capture, that he has left his hotel in Hong Kong, and that he is still in the region — that according to Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who first broke the story.

The Independent reports that Snowden checked into the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong early this morning, only to check out a short while later. Given his short stay and that he used his real name just hours after he revealed himself, it may have been a move designed to throw people off of his trail.

Media consensus seems to be that the 29-year-old will seek refuge in a country willing to thumb its nose at the U.S. government, but for a whistleblower whose behavior has been anything but predictable, no one can say.

He did, however, reportedly tell the Guardian that he expects to be captured, that he believes U.S. authorities will eventually track him down.

“That's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life,” he said, “however long that happens to be.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-snowden-gone-hong-kong-hotel-20130610,0,6912122.story

( Snowden takes off.... )

Edward Snowden gone from Hong Kong hotel, whereabouts unknown

By Barbara Demick

June 10, 2013, 10:25 a.m.

BEIJING -- Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contractor identified as the source of leaks about the U.S. electronic surveillance program, apparently checked out of his Hong Kong hotel at midday Monday, his destination and whereabouts unknown.

"We know he was here until today," said Cosmo Beatson, a Hong Kong-based refugee activist who heads an organization called Vision First.

Beatson said Monday night it is possible that Snowden boarded a plane from Hong Kong -- since there is no warrant for his arrest -- or was smuggled onto one of the many illegal speedboats smuggling people and goods between mainland Chinese and Hong Kong. “He’s very mobile.”

Britain's Guardian newspaper videotaped an interview with Snowden at the Hong Kong hotel, and posted it on Sunday. Since then, Snowden may have discovered that Hong Kong’s unique geopolitics made it a poor choice for seeking asylum.

Unlike China, the semiautonomous territory of Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States that has been in place since January 1998. Although the treaty gives Beijing the right to veto an extradition on national security grounds, experts do not expect the Chinese government will want to confront Washington on Snowden’s behalf.

Neither the Hong Kong nor Chinese governments has made a formal comment about Snowden. But Regina Ip, a Hong Kong lawmaker and former security chief considered close to Beijing, told reporters Monday that the territory would be “obliged to comply with the terms of agreements” with the U.S. government.

"It's actually in his best interest to leave Hong Kong," she was quoted telling Singapore-based Channel News Asia.

In his interviews with the Guardian, Snowden said that he had chosen Hong Kong for its reputation as a bastion of free speech and human rights.

"Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech, but the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, or making their views known," said Snowden in the videotaped interview. "The Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other Western governments."

The videotaped interview sent Hong Kong-based reporters scouring the city’s hotels, analyzing the curtains and lamps that appeared in the backdrop. In the video, Snowden said he was down the street from the U.S. consulate, but that appeared to be a red herring: the $200-a-night Hotel Mira across the harbor in Kowloon later confirmed that Snowden had been registered until Monday under his own name.

There have been several high-profile cases in which suspects have been extradited from Hong Kong, although in more conventional criminal disputes. A man later convicted of raping his daughter was returned to the U.S. in 2007; Albert Hu, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, was returned in 2009 to stand trial for allegedly defrauding investors.

U.S. citizens can enter Hong Kong without a visa, but are usually given stays of only 90 days. After that, Snowden would face deportation or extradition.

Despite the handover to China in 1997, the former British colony still follows a common-law tradition system modeled on the United Kingdom's. It does not extradite in death penalty cases unless capital punishment is waived.

"There are very strong guarantees of political and civil freedoms in Hong Kong, but there is a limit to its autonomy under the 'one country two systems' model, especially with respect to national defense and security," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Human Rights Watch researcher based in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is a signatory to a 1992 U.N. convention that allows people subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment to apply for asylum. But according to Beatson, only four out of 12,500 claimants have been approved.

"This is a terrible place to seek asylum. Nobody really seeks Hong Kong as a destination. Usually they are on their way somewhere else," Beatson said.

Among Snowden’s options would be to flee to Iceland, where he has supporters, or to Ecuador, whose embassy in London is sheltering Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

In the video, Snowden didn’t directly answer a question about whether he was trying to defect to China, although some Chinese are suggesting as much, if only to give the United States its comeuppance.

"Snowden is a real human rights activist! He is now in China’s territory, we must protect him. We should contribute to the world's human rights by resisting the pressure from the U.S.," wrote Wang Xiaodong, a Chinese writer and nationalist scholar.

http://www.infowars.com/iceland-considers-offering-nsa-whistleblower-snowden-asylum/

Iceland Considers Offering NSA Whistleblower Snowden Asylum

Kurt Nimmo

Infowars.com

June 10, 2013

Edward Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer with a top-secret security clearance who leaked details of NSA surveillance, is welcome to seek asylum in Iceland, according to lawmaker Birgitta Jónsdóttir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the International Modern Media Institute, an organization dedicated to protecting whistleblowers.

Snowden is currently staying in a Hong Kong hotel. In an interview appearing in the Guardian, the 29-year old intelligence analyst said his “predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom.”

Hong Kong shares an extradition treaty with the United States. “The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me,” Snowden told Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian. “I have no idea what my future is going to be.”

“Over the last few days we at the International Modern Media Institute have watched alongside the rest of the world as the US government’s enormous encroachments on privacy and information security have been exposed in the media,” a statement issued by Jónsdóttir and McCarthy’ reads. “These exposures have verified our greatest fears about the state of global intelligence gathering, and yet again highlighted the need for strong privacy protections and government transparency.”

“Whereas IMMI is based in Iceland, and has worked on protections of privacy, furtherance of government transparency, and the protection of whistleblowers, we feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability,” the statement continues. “We are currently attempting to get in touch with Mr. Snowden to confirm that this is his will and discuss the details of his asylum request … and will over the course of the week be seeking a meeting with the newly appointed interior minister of Iceland, Mrs. Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, to discuss whether an asylum request can be processed in a swift manner, should such an application be made.”

Booz Allen released a statement stating it will work with authorities to investigate Snowden. “News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter,” the statement reads.

Meanwhile, authorities in the United States are preparing to go after Snowden. “Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law,” Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said on Monday.

Republican Rep. Peter King of New York promised to extradite Snowden. “If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date,” King said in a written statement. “The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence.”

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament representing the Citizens’ Movement, has appeared on the Alex Jones Show. She now represents The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament. She is a poet, writer, artist, editor, and publisher, and has worked as an activist and a spokesperson for a number of groups, including Wikileaks, Saving Iceland, Friends of Tibet in Iceland, and currently the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.

http://rt.com/news/intelligence-officials-nsa-leaker-452/

( Message received as Snowden bolts from Hong Kong Hotel today ? )

Alleged US security officials said NSA leaker, journalist should be 'disappeared' – report

Get short URL

Published time: June 10, 2013 10:46
Edited time: June 10, 2013 19:09

US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is pictured during an interview with the Guardian in his hotel room in Hong Kong Sunday. The 29-year-old NSA contractor revealed top secret U.S. surveillance programs. (Reuters/Ewen MacAskill)

Snowden on tweet: ‘I am a spy and that is how they talk’

The source behind the revelation of the top-secret NSA surveillance program, dubbed one of the most significant intelligence leaks in US history, was uncovered late last week. Snowden, a former CIA technical contractor and NSA consultant, had asked the Guardian to reveal his identity. He has fled to Hong Kong in a bid to escape retaliation by the US.

"The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” Snowden told the Guardian.

When asked for his reaction to the alleged comments that reporter Glenn Greenwald and the 29-year-old leaker himself should be "disappeared," Snowden told the newspaper: "Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that.' Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."

Snowden earlier explained that he had sacrificed his life and $200,000-a-year career out of his desire to protect "basic liberties" in order to “send a message to government that people will not be intimidated.”

The whistleblower leaked top-secret documents that revealed the existence of the US National Security Agency’s extensive Internet spying program PRISM, which records digital communications and allows for real-time online surveillance of US citizens. PRISM apparently gives US intelligence agencies direct access to files stored on the servers of major Internet companies – including Google and Facebook – in order to identify and target potential terror suspects.

http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2013/06/10/why-did-the-nsa-trust-snowden-with-our-data/

( Interesting to ponder how this guy got his jobs in the first place ? )

Why did the NSA trust Snowden with our data?

According to the Guardian, Snowden is a 29-year-old high-school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high-school equivalency degree—courses that he did not complete. His first job at the NSA was as a security guard. Then, amazingly, he moved up the ranks of the United States’ national security infrastructure: The CIA gave him a job in IT security. He was given diplomatic cover in Geneva. He was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contractor, which paid him $200,000 a year to work on the NSA’s computer systems.

Let’s note what Snowden is not: He isn’t a seasoned FBI or CIA investigator. He isn’t a State Department analyst. He’s not an attorney with a specialty in national security or privacy law.

Instead, he’s the IT guy, and not a very accomplished, experienced one at that. If Snowden had sent his résumé to any of the tech companies that are providing data to the NSA’s PRISM program, I doubt he’d have even gotten an interview. Yes, he could be a computing savant anyway—many well-known techies dropped out of school. But he was given access way beyond what even a supergeek should have gotten. As he tells the Guardian, the NSA let him see “everything.” He was accorded the NSA’s top security clearance, which allowed him to see and to download the agency’s most sensitive documents. But he didn’t just know about the NSA’s surveillance systems—he says he had the ability to use them. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities [sic] to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email,” he says in a video interview with the paper.

Read the Article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/10/nsa-spying-scandal-what-we-have-learned

( a quick overview.. )

NSA spying scandal: what we have learned

Key players and programmes in the National Security Agency's secret operation mining phone and internet data

Ian Black

guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 June 2013 14.48 EDT

A new NSA data centre sits beyond a residential area in Bluffdale, Utah. It will be the largest of several interconnected data centres spread throughout the US. Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images

Verizon

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been empowered by a secret order issued by the foreign intelligence court directing Verizon Communications, a mobile phone provider with 98.9 million wireless customers, to turn over all its call records for a three-month period.

The order is untargeted, meaning that the NSA can snoop on calls without suspecting anyone of wrongdoing. It was made on 25 April, days after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Under the order, the NSA only gains access to the "metadata" around calls – when they were made, what numbers they were made to, where they were made from and how long the calls lasted.

Obtaining the content of the calls, or the names or addresses of the callers would make the surveillance wiretapping, which would count as a separate issue legally. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the data collection of mobile phone records extends to AT&T (107 million users) and Sprint (55 million). Verizon's advertising catchphrase "Can you hear me now?" has become the butt of instant jokes on Twitter and other social media.

Prism

Internal NSA documents claim the top secret data-mining programme gives the US government access to a vast quantity of emails, chat logs and other data directly from the servers of nine internet companies. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple. The companies mentioned have all denied knowledge of or participation in the programme.

It is unknown how Prism actually works. A 41-slide PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Guardian – and classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme. Unlike the collection of Verizon and other phone records, Prism surveillance can include the content of communications – not just metadata.

President Barack Obama described the programmes as vital to keeping Americans safe and said the US was "going to have to make some choices between balancing privacy and security to protect against terror". The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

Boundless Informant

Prism is involved in the collection of data, but Boundless Informant organises and indexes metadata. The tool categorises communications records rather than the content of a message itself. A fact sheet leaked to the Guardian explains that almost 3bn pieces of intelligence had been collected from US computer networks in the 30-day period ending in March this year, as well as indexing almost 100bn pieces worldwide. Countries are ranked according to how much information has been taken from mobile and online networks, and colour-coded depending on the extent of the NSA's spying operation.

Users are able to select a country on Boundless Informant's "heat map" to view details including metadata volume and different kinds of NSA information collection. Iran, at odds with the US and Israel over its nuclear programme and other policies, is top of the surveillance list, with more than 14bn data reports in March. Pakistan came in a close second at 13.5bn reports. Jordan, a close US ally, as well as Egypt and India are also near the top.

The UK connection

Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping centre has had access to the Prism system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year, prompting controversy and questions about the legality of it. The prime minister, David Cameron, insisted that the UK's intelligence services operated within the law and were subject to proper scrutiny. The foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that "law-abiding citizens" in Britain would "never be aware of all the things … agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen or to stop a terrorist blowing you up".

GCHQ and the NSA have a relationship dating back to the second world war and have personnel stationed in each others' headquarters – Fort Meade in Maryland and Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

What is the fundamental issue here?

For many observers the key question is the exposure of a troubling imbalance between security and privacy, against a background of rapid technological change that now permits clandestine surveillance on a massive and Orwellian scale. Legal safeguards and political oversight appear to be lagging behind. The Guardian revelations have underlined the sheer power of electronic snooping in the internet era and have injected new urgency into the old debate about how far a government can legitimately go in spying on its own people on the grounds that it is trying to protect them.

Edward Snowden

The leaks have led the NSA to ask the US justice department to conduct a criminal investigation. The department has said it is in the initial stages of an inquiry. Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA employee, outed himself as the Guardian's source for its series of leaks on the NSA and cyber-surveillance. He is now in Hong Kong. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he told the Guardian.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-10/911-prismgate-how-carlyle-group-lbod-worlds-secrets

( Billions spent on security via private contractors - and we see how safe the secrets are - just one guy without a high school diploma blew these programs out of the shadows and into the sunlight .... Billions spent and the brutal truth is we aren't safer....)

From 9/11 To PRISMgate - How The Carlyle Group LBO'd The World's Secrets

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/10/2013 21:20 -0400

The short but profitable tale of how 483,000 private individual have "top secret" access to the nation's most non-public information begins in 2001. "After 9/11, intelligence budgets were increased, new people needed to be hired, it was a lot easier to go to the private sector and get people off the shelf," and sure enough firms like Booz Allen Hamilton - still two-thirds owned by the deeply-tied-to-international-governments investment firm The Carlyle Group - took full advantage of Congress' desire to shrink federal agencies and their budgets by enabling outside consultants (already primed with their $4,000 cost 'security clearances') to fulfill the needs of an ever-more-encroaching-on-privacy administration.

Booz Allen (and other security consultant providing firms) trade publicly with a cloak of admitted opacity due to the secrecy of their government contracts ("you may not have important information concerning our business, which will limit your insight into a substantial portion of our business") but the actions of Diane Feinstein who promptly denounced "treasonous" Edward Snowden, "have muddied the waters," for the stunning 1.1 million (or 21% of the total) private consultants with access to "confidential and secret" government information.

Perhaps the situation of gross government over-spend and under-oversight is summed up best, "it's very difficult to know what contractors are doing and what they are billing for the work — or even whether they should be performing the work at all."

First, Diane Feinstein's take on it all...

“I don't look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it's an act of treason,” the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters. The California lawmaker went on to say that Snowden had violated his oath to defend the Constitution. “He violated the oath, he violated the law. It's treason.”

So how did all this get started?... (via AP)

The reliance on contractors for intelligence work ballooned after the 9/11 attacks. The government scrambled to improve and expand its ability to monitor the communication and movement of people who might threaten another attack.

"After 9/11, intelligence budgets were increased, new people needed to be hired," Augustyn said. "It was a lot easier to go to the private sector and get people off the shelf."

The reliance on the private sector has grown since then, in part because of Congress' efforts to limit the size of federal agencies and shrink the budget.

Which has led to what appears to be major problems.

But critics say reliance on contractors hasn't reduced the amount the government spends on defense, intelligence or other programs.

Rather, they say it's just shifted work to private employers andreduced transparency. It becomes harder to track the work of those employees and determine whether they should all have access to government secrets.

"It's very difficult to know what contractors are doing and what they are billing for the work — or even whether they should be performing the work at all,"

... And to the current PRISMgate whistleblowing situation:

Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access "confidential and secret" government information, 1.1 million, or 21 percent, work for outside contractors, according to a report from Clapper's office.

Of the 1.4 million who have the higher "top secret" access, 483,000, or 34 percent, work for contractors.

...

Because clearances can take months or even years to acquire,government contractors often recruit workers who already have them.

Why not - it's lucrative!!

Snowden says he accessed and downloaded the last of the documents that detailed the NSA surveillance program while working in an NSA office in Hawaii for Booz Allen, where he says he was earning $200,000 a year.

Analysts caution that any of the 1.4 million people with access to the nation's top secrets could have leaked information about the program - whether they worked for a contractor or the government.

For individuals and firms alike.

Booz Allen has long navigated those waters well.

The firm was founded in 1914 and began serving the U.S. government in 1940, helping the Navy prepare for World War II. In 2008, it spun off the part of the firm that worked with private companies and abroad. That firm, called Booz & Co., is held privately.

Booz Allen was then acquired by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with its own deep ties to the government. In November 2010, Booz Allen went public. The Carlyle Group still owns two-thirds of the company's shares.

Or, a full-majority stake.

Curiously once public, The Booz Allens of the world still operate like a psuedo-private company, with extensive confidential cloaks preventing the full disclosure of financial data. But don't worry - we should just trust them. Via Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil.

Psst, here's a stock tip for you. There's a company near Washington with strong ties to the U.S. intelligence community that has been around for almost a century and has secret ways of making money -- so secret that the company can't tell you what they are. Investors who buy just need to have faith.

To skeptics, this might seem like a pitch for an investment scam. But as anyone who has been paying attention to the news might have guessed, the company is Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp.

...

"Because we are limited in our ability to provide information about these contracts and services," the company said in its latest annual report, "you may not have important information concerning our business, which will limit your insight into a substantial portion of our business, and therefore may be less able to fully evaluate the risks related to that portion of our business."

This seems like it would be adream arrangement for some corporations: Not only is Booz Allen allowed to keep investors uninformed, it's required to. I suppose we should give the company credit for being transparent about how opaque it is.

And while the media and popular attention is currently focused on who, if anyone else, may be the next Snowden struck by a sudden pang of conscience, perhaps a better question is what PE behemoth Carlyle, with a gargantuan $170 billion in AUM, knows,and why it rushed to purchase Booz Allen in the months after the Bear Stearns collapse, just when everyone else was batting down the hatches ahead of the biggest financial crash in modern history.

From Bloomberg, May 2008:

Carlyle Group, the private-equity firm run by David Rubenstein,agreed to acquire Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.'s U.S. government-consulting business for $2.54 billion, its biggest buyout since the credit markets collapsed in July.

The purchase would be Carlyle's biggest since it agreed to buy nursing-home operator Manor Care Inc. last July for $6.3 billion. Deal-making may be rebounding from a 68 percent decline in the first quarter as investment banks begin writing new commitments for private-equity transactions. Buyouts ground to a halt last year because of a global credit freeze triggered by record U.S. subprime-mortgage defaults.

The Booz Allen government-consulting unit has more than 18,000 employees and annual sales of more than $2.7 billion. Its clients include branches of the U.S. military, the Department of Homeland Security and the World Bank.

Carlyle, based in Washington, manages $81.1 billion in assets[ZH: that was 5 years ago - the firm now boasts $170 billion in AUM]. Rubenstein founded the firm in 1987 with William Conway and Daniel D'Aniello. The trio initially focused on deals tied to government and defense.

Carlyle and closely held Booz Allen have attracted high-level officials from the government.Carlyle's senior advisers have included former President George H.W. Bush, former British Prime Minister John Major, and Arthur Levitt, the ex-chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

R. James Woolsey, who led the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995, is a Booz Allen executive. Mike McConnell, the U.S. director of national intelligence, is a former senior vice president with the company.

...

Carlyle last year sold a minority interest in itself to Mubadala Development Co., an investment fund affiliated with the government of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

And in addition to the UAE, who can possibly forget Carlyle's Saudi connection. From theWSJ circa 2001:

If the U.S. boosts defense spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: Mr. bin Laden's family.

Among its far-flung business interests, the well-heeled Saudi Arabian clan -- which says it is estranged from Osama -- is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well-connected Washington merchant bank specializing in buyouts of defense and aerospace companies.

Through this investment and its ties to Saudi royalty, the bin Laden family has become acquainted with some of the biggest names in the Republican Party. In recent years, former President Bush, ex-Secretary of State James Baker and ex-Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci have made the pilgrimage to the bin Laden family's headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Mr. Bush makes speeches on behalf of Carlyle Group and is senior adviser to its Asian Partners fund, while Mr. Baker is its senior counselor. Mr. Carlucci is the group's chairman.

Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the family's $5 billion business, Saudi Binladin Group, largely with construction contracts from the Saudi government. Osama worked briefly in the business and is believed to have inherited as much as $50 million from his father in cash and stock, although he doesn't have access to the shares, a family spokesman says. Because his Saudi citizenship was revoked in 1994, Mr. bin Laden is ineligible to own assets in the kingdom, the spokesman added.

...

People familiar with the family's finances say the bin Ladens do much of their banking with National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia and with the London branch of Deutsche Bank AG. They also use Citigroup Inc. and ABN Amro, the people said.

"If there were ever any company closely connected to the U.S. and its presence in Saudi Arabia, it's the Saudi Binladin Group," says Charles Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington nonprofit concern that receives tens of thousands of dollars a year from the bin Laden family. "They're the establishment that Osama's trying to overthrow."

...

A Carlyle executive said the bin Laden family committed $2 million through a London investment arm in 1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. The fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. So far, the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return, the Carlyle executive said. But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the family's overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger. He called the $2 million merely an initial contribution. "It's like plowing a field," this person said. "You seed it once. You plow it, and then you reseed it again."

The Carlyle executive added that he would think twice before accepting any future investments by the bin Ladens. "The situation's changed now," he said. "I don't want to spend my life talking to reporters."

We can clearly see why. We can also clearly see why nobody has mentioned Carlyle so far into the Booz Allen fiasco.

A U.S. inquiry into bin Laden family business dealings could brush against some big names associated with the U.S. government. Former President Bush said through his chief of staff, Jean Becker, that he recalled only one meeting with the bin Laden family, which took place in November1998. Ms. Becker confirmed that there was a second meeting in January 2000, after being read the ex-president's subsequent thank-you note. "President Bush does not have a relationship with the bin Laden family," says Ms. Becker. "He's met them twice."

Mr. Baker visited the bin Laden family in both 1998 and 1999, according to people close to the family. In the second trip, he traveled on a family plane. Mr. Baker declined comment, as did Mr. Carlucci, a past chairman ofNortel Networks Corp., which has partnered with Saudi Binladin Group on telecommunications ventures.

As one can imagine the rabbit hole just gets deeper and deeper the more one digs. For now, we will let readers do their own diligence. We promise the results are fascinating.

Going back to the topic at hand, we will however ask just how much and what kind of confidential, classified, and or Top Secret information is shared "behind Chinese walls" between a Carlyle still majority-owned company and the private equity behemoth's employees and advisors, among which are some of the most prominent political and business luminaries currently alive. The following is a list of both current and former employees and advisors. We have used Wiki but anyone wishing to comb through the firm's full blown roster of over 1,000 employees and advisors, is welcome to do so at the firm's website.

Business

G. Allen Andreas - Chairman of theArcher Daniels Midland Company, Carlyle European Advisory Board

Daniel Akerson -CEO of General Motors, Board member at 7 companies, Managing director at Carlyle

Joaquin Avila - former managing director at Lehman Brothers, Managing director at Carlyle

Laurent Beaudoin - CEO ofBombardier (1979-), former member of Carlyle’s Canadian Advisory board

Peter Cornelius - Managing Director of Nielsen Australia.

Paul Desmarais - Chairman of thePower Corporation of Canada, former member of Carlyle’s Canadian Advisory board

David M. Moffett - CEO of Freddie Mac, Former Senior advisor to the Carlyle

Karl Otto Pöhl - former President of the Bundesbank, Former Senior advisor to the Carlyle Group

Olivier Sarkozy (half-brother ofNicolas Sarkozy, former President of France) - co-head and managing director of its recently launched global financial services division, since March 2008.

Political figures

North America

James Baker III, former United States Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, Staff member under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Carlyle Senior Counselor, served in this capacity from 1993 to 2005.

George H. W. Bush, former U.S. President, Senior Advisor to the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board from April 1998 to October 2003.

Frank C. Carlucci, former United States Secretary of Defense from 1987 to 1989; Carlyle Chairman and Chairman Emeritus from 1989 to 2005.

Richard G. Darman, Director of theOffice of Management and Budget in the Bush Administration; Managing director from 1993, later Senior Advisor

William E. Kennard, chairman of theFederal Communications Commissionfrom 1997-2001 and United States Ambassador to the European Union; Carlyle managing director from 2001-2009

Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the U.S.Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) under President Bill Clinton, Carlyle Senior Advisor from 2001 to the present

Luis Téllez Kuenzler, Mexican economist, former Secretary of Communications and Transportation under the Felipe Calderónadministration and former Secretary of Energy under the Zedilloadministration.

Frank McKenna, former Premier of New Brunswick, Canadian Ambassador to the United States between 2005 and 2006 and current Deputy Chairman ofToronto-Dominion Bank; served on Carlyle's Canadian advisory board.

Mack McLarty, Carlyle Group Senior Advisor (from 2003), White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1994.

Randal K. Quarles, former Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President George W. Bush, now a Carlyle managing director

Europe

John Major, former British Prime Minister, Chairman, Carlyle Europe from 2001–2004

Asia

Anand Panyarachun, former Prime Minister of Thailand (twice), former member of the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board until the

board was disbanded in 2004

Fidel V. Ramos, former president of thePhilippines, Carlyle Asia Advisor Board Member until the board was disbanded in 2004

Peter Chung, former associate at Carlyle Group Korea, who resigned in 2001 after 2 weeks on the job after an inappropriate e-mail to friends was circulated around the world

Thaksin Shinawatra, former Prime Minister of Thailand (twice), former member of the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board until 2001 when he resigned upon being elected Prime Minister.

Media

Norman Pearlstine - editor-in-chief of Time magazine from (1995–2005), senior advisor telecommunications and media group 2006-

and across the entire globe?

Here is Carlyle, straight from the horse's recently IPOed mouth, courtesy of its most recent public presentation:

Perhaps Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil sums it up best:

There's no easy solution here, aside from the obvious point that the government keeps way too many secrets.

So what happens when one corporation, owned and controlled by the same government's former (and in some cases current) top power brokers, potentially has access to all of the same government's secrets?

Catharsis Ours

Monday, June 10, 2013

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden leaves his Hong Kong Hotel - next destination China , Iceland , Ecuador ? Can he reach sanctuary or will he get " disappeared " ?