Nothing to hide

When sheep-imitative Americans tell you that they don't care about NSA surveillance because they have nothing to hide, ask why they have drapes over their windows.

The sheepish ones may not be doing anything of interest to the FBI now, but we have no idea what the future will bring. A government that seems acceptable now may turn oppressive later. The NSA has set up the infrastructure for an Orwellian nightmare, and then they tell us that this infrastructure will be used only against foreign terrorists (and Iranians). Maybe you can accept these assurances, but I think it's only a matter of time before totalitarianism seeps in.

We did not vote for this infrastructure. That massive facility in Utah was created without debate, without a public dialogue. The NSA says that everything they do has the approval of Congress, yet congressfolk complain that they can't get straightforward answers from the NSA.

And now, for those who aren't allergic to a bit of foil... In the past, I've mentioned an eccentric writer named Jon Rappoport. He impressed me in the Reagan era with some good reportage published in the L.A. Weekly, but in later times he...well, let's just say the dude got weird. Annoyingly weird.

His latest essays on the Snowden controversy are in this tradition of weirdness. Even so, I must confess that this stuff is dangerously intriguing. See here and here.

In short and in sum, Rappoport thinks that Ed Snowden has a suspicious bio. And let's face it: He does. Young Snowy segued into the heart of the American intelligence system with unnerving rapidity. No, he didn't go to the prom wearing a cloak and dagger -- but only because he was never formally graduated.

In 2003, at age 19, without a high school diploma, Snowden enlists in the Army. He begins a training program to join the Special Forces. The sequence here is fuzzy. At what point after enlistment can a new soldier start this training program? Does he need to demonstrate some exceptional ability before Special Forces puts him in that program?

Snowden breaks both legs in a training exercise. He’s discharged from the Army. Is that automatic? How about healing and then resuming Army service? Just asking.

If he was accepted in the Special Forces training program because he had special computer skills, then why discharge him simply because he broke both legs?

Circa 2003 (?), Snowden gets a job as a security guard for an NSA facility at the University of Maryland. He specifically wanted to work for NSA? It was just a generic job opening he found out about?

Also in 2003 (?), Snowden shifts jobs. He’s now in the CIA, in IT. He has no high school diploma. He’s a young computer genius?

In 2007, Snowden is sent to Geneva. He’s only 23 years old. The CIA gives him diplomatic cover there. He’s put in charge of maintaining computer-network security. Major job. Obviously, he has access to a very wide range of classified documents. Sound a little odd? Again, just asking. He’s just a kid. Maybe he has his GED by now. Otherwise, he still doesn’t have a high school diploma....

Sorry for such a lengthy quote, but Rappoport's right: Snowy is an oddity. He's a bit like David Lynch's Inland Empire: Admirable and inexplicable.

In a follow-up piece, Rappoport trots out his Big Theory that Snowden has always been a CIA employee, deep cover, and that he hopped on over to the NSA to ratfuck No Such Agency pursuant to an ongoing NSA-CIA turf war.

This was a covert op launched by the CIA against a chief rival, the NSA. NSA, the agency that’s far bigger than the CIA. NSA, the agency that’s been taking over intelligence gathering, that considers itself superior to everybody else in the intelligence field.

The CIA, of course, couldn’t be seen as the NSA leaker. They needed a guy. They needed a guy who could appear to be FROM the NSA, to make things look worse for the NSA and shield the CIA.

I'm not persuaded by this argument. Not at all. Still...

Still, Rappoport has one thing right: Ed is odd.

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Orwell cackles

Whether you admire or despise Ed Snowden, you must admit one thing: The guy gave up a lot to blow the whistle on shit like this. He said goodbye to a cushy job, a lovely girlfriend, and any chance of spending the holidays with his family again. And yet, as noted in an earlier post, Jeffrey Toobin called Snowden "a grandiose narcissist."

This has become an official media meme. Marc Davis of the Dallas Morning News calls Snowden "a self-absorbed traitor." Ralph Peters of the New York Post declares him vain -- "a spoiled brat" and "Kim Kardashian with stubble" who gave an "I-love-me interview." In HuffPo, former MI6 officer Matthew Dunn -- in a hilariously failed attempt at ESP -- posits that Snowden developed a "self-centered grievance" because life at the NSA didn't provide Jason Bourne-style thrills.

A week ago, Matt Taibbi wrote a fine piece about the Bradley Manning trial. In it, he quotes this hideous article in The Telegraph by Dr. Tim Stanley, who refers to Manning as an "egotist" and "a self-absorbed geek." Yes, Stanley actually dared to apply those words to a man who gave up his freedom and his life to expose atrocious acts committed by the American military.

Listen closely and you can hear the ghost of George Orwell cackling. Big Brother has changed the language on us again:

First "War is Peace" (the rationale for the Iraq invasion)...

...then "Freedom is Slavery" (the rationale for the NSA's assault on privacy)...

...and now...

Altruism is Narcissism.

Next time you see Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion, you can snicker and say: "What an egomaniacal jerk!"

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NSAaaaaaaAAARRRRGH!!!!

We have tons of NSA stories to talk about. Tons! Apparently, the polls are supportive of Snowden...

Roughly one in three Americans say the former security contractor who leaked details of top-secret U.S. surveillance activity is a patriot and should not be prosecuted, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday.

Some 23 percent of those surveyed said former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is a traitor while 31 percent said he is a patriot. Another 46 percent said they did not know.

Time has similar numbers, but...

But an almost identical number of Americans — 53 percent — still said he should be prosecuted for the leak, compared to 28% who said he should not. Americans aged 18 to 34 break from older generations in showing far more support for Snowden’s actions. Just 41 percent of that cohort say he should face charges, while 43 percent say he should not. Just 19 percent of that age group say the leak was a “bad thing.”

What fascinates me is the conservative/liberal breakdown of this story. You can tell that the rightwingers didn't see Snowden coming: Originally they embraced the Greenwald/WaPo revelations, because they fit into the larger "Obama scandals" meta-narrative. But now there has been a reversal, with liberals wanting investigations into NSA overreach and conservatives wanting Snowden in a noose. It took a while for the politics to shake out that way, but...here we are.

And yet -- looky here! Kooky old Glenn Beck and the Ron Paulies like Snowden. (Beck has promised some grand, earth-shaking revelation within the next ten days. Forgive my cynicism, but I doubt his abilities as a prophet.) In other words, leaders of the ultra-Libertarian wing of the conservative movement are actually allowing their actions to be governed by conscience, not by Roger Ailes or the RNC's line of the day.

Who'da thunk?

We're learning that the NSA's apparatus -- which would be extraordinarily helpful to anyone hoping to put and keep a tyranny in place -- has been woefully inadequate to the task of combating terror, the ostensible rationale for all of these electronic intrusions. 

Marcy Wheeler is doing her usual great work -- see here and here and here. The last link goes to an important revelation: According to DiFi (speaking about the Patriot Act's notorious Section 215, which provides the legal justification for all of this stuff)...

The Section 215 Business Records provision was created in 2001 in the PATRIOT for tangible things: hotel records, credit card statements, etcetera. Things that are not phone or email communications. The FBI uses that authority as part of its terrorism investigations. The NSA only uses Section 215 for phone call records — not for Google searches or other things. Under Section 215, NSA collects phone records pursuant to a court record. It can only look at that data after a showing that there is a reasonable, articulable suspicion that a specific individual is involved in terrorism, actually related to al Qaeda or Iran. At that point, the database can be searched....

I didn't know that "articulable" is a word. (Is there a synonym for "articulable"? If there is, I can't articulate it.) More importantly...

What's all this shit about Iran?

I know that the neo-cons, with whom Feinstein is far too chummy, would like us to go to war with Iran, but the fact is that we are at peace with that country. Since the hostage crisis of 1980, the worst thing Iran has done to this country was buy arms from Ronald Reagan. True, Iran has tossed money at Hamas and Hezbollah, but I was under the impression that Israel's problems are not our problems.

So if you have any linkage to Iran, DiFi wants you to be electronically naked to the NSA.

Well, there's much more to say, but no time to say it. I'm off to Utrecht -- the art supply store, not the city. After all, a house is not a home without a tube of Prussian Blue oil paint lurking around somewhere. But I'll be back soon. Never Say Adieu!

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Hey, Ed...let ME have a crack at it!

Of the 41 Prism images made available to the Guardian and the Washington Post, those two papers have published only four. As Mother Jones writes:

Given this, it would be helpful if the two of them wrote a little bit more about why they decided to hold back the bulk of the PRISM slides. If nothing else, it certainly suggests that they disagree with Snowden's judgment, and that's newsworthy all by itself.

On a second note, could Snowden really not find anyone who would publish the full PowerPoint deck? That's hard to believe.

Ed, if you're reading this, here's the deal: Just upload that stuff to one of those free online storage thingies, send me the URL, and I WILL publish the suckers. In toto. No questions asked.

In case you're curious, Ed -- Cannonfire's biggest scoop remains the "Bush bulge," as seen during the 2004 Bush/Kerry debates. Back then, I was getting 100,000 hits a day. This story may be even bigger.

C'mon, Ed. The sheer weirdness of publishing those documents in this humble forum must appeal to you.

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How do you solve a problem like MARINA?

Of all the NSA stories vying for your attention, the most interesting may be Marcy Wheeler's.

First, you must understand that Section 215 of the Patriot Act provides the legal justification for collecting cell phone metadata -- by which we mean the records of who called whom at which time. You may want to read Slate's short explanation of 215. You will also want to reference this very recent story from NBC:

The Patriot Act provision, known as Section 215, allows the FBI to require the production of business records and any other “tangible things” -- including “books, records, papers, documents and other items,” for an authorized terrorism or foreign intelligence investigation.

In contrast to standard grand jury subpoenas, material obtained under both Section 215 orders and national security letters must be turned over under so-called “gag orders” that forbid the business or institution that receives the order from notifying its customers or publicly referring to the matter.

The second thing you need to know is that the present scandal was all about an NSA project to collect this metadata daily.

Third: Marcy reminds us that the cell phone carriers already have this stuff. They store metadata in-house for years and years. In a sense, they've been doing the NSA's job all along.

So why would No Such Agency want daily updates? Why not leave the metadata on the servers of Verizon (or whomever), and ask for it as needed?

Well, they tried a system like that between 2002-2006.

A few years ago, there was a now-forgotten mini-brouhaha about that program, because the WP got hold of an Inspector General's report from 2007. The WP story prompted Marcy to write a few earlier posts, like this one.

Why did the 2002-2006 system go wrong? Because it was horribly abused.

The problems — that that we know about from the unclassified report (there are secret and TS/SCI versions which probably have bigger horrors) — include:

* FBI General Counsel had no apparent knowledge of 17% of the searches

* Thousands of searches never got recorded

* FBI lied to the telecoms about how urgent the information was to get the information

* FBI did an unknown number of sneak peeks into the data to see if there was something worth getting formally

Altogether, the unclassified IG Report described 26 abuses that should have been reported to then (and once again, since Chuck Hagel became Defense Secretary) inoperable Intelligence Oversight Board.

That includes the tracking of journalist call records in at least three cases (one of which I suspect is James Risen).

In short, it violated many legal principles. And that’s just the stuff that actually got recorded and showed up in an unclassified report.

In another piece, Marcy wrote:

Rather than using a subpoena or a National Security Letter to get phone records from them (both of which would have required a higher level of review), the FBI basically gave them a boilerplate letters saying it was an emergency (thus the “exigent”) and could they please give the FBI the phone data; the FBI promised grand jury subpoenas to follow. Only, in many cases, these weren’t emergencies, they never sent the grand jury subpoenas, and many weren’t even associated with investigations into international terrorism. In other words, FBI massively abused this system to get phone data without necessary oversight.

Marcy believes that the mess uncovered in 2006-2007 prompted the NSA to come up with a scheme to collect metadata silently, automatically and covertly. That way, there would be no need to worry about National Security Letters and all of that other difficult stuff.

Frankly, I'm not sure that Marcy has the chronology quite right.

This above-cited NBC story says that the FBI's use of 215 "exploded" after 2006. But a new problem arose: Though the feds were sending out tons of "National Security Letters" (requests for data), the telecommunication companies stopped co-operating.

Why? In large measure, methinks, because those corporations were being sued by various parties who were pissed off when they learned that private companies were turning over their records to Uncle. If you want to know more about those lawsuits, start with this data dump provided by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.

If you scan that data dump, you'll find that it takes us to the 2009-2010 period. At that time...

...the FBI was using the Section 215 requests to obtain a broad array of records. For example, a top-secret FISC order disclosed last week by the Guardian showed that the FBI had used a single Section 215 request to direct Verizon to turn over "all call detail records or telephony metadata" of its customers for a three month period, literally millions of records.

So now we have a new chronology.

And y'know what? I'm starting to think that this chronology also gets everything wrong. At this point, we need to step back and ask one simple question: Just when did the "collect all metadata" project truly begin?

You see, back in 2006, USA Today revealed this program was already in existence even then.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

Isn't it odd how everyone has forgotten this key news story, published seven years ago?

We now know that the database is called MARINA, which I hope was not named after Oswald's widow, because if there's one lady who doesn't need any more weird covert shit in her life, it's she.

In order to access the stored data sets, the NSA needs to have a real tangible reason. It's hard to believe this because the law seems to preclude them from collecting the data in bulk without a significant investigative purpose, but that law has been interpreted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to relate only to the way in which the data is used.

That is, the NSA can collect the data so long as there is a good chance that it might need it for some future investigation.

This brings us back to that old NSA dodge: They insist that merely collecting the information isn't wiretapping. By this logic, it's okay to steal a painting from a museum as long as you don't look at it.

So. How do you solve a problem like MARINA? It really is a will-o-the-wisp. You can't pin it down.

When did MARINA begin? 2010, 2006, 2001 -- or long before?

If MARINA existed in 2006 or earlier (as USA Today reported), then why was the FBI doing all of that abusive crap outlined in the 2007 IG report? Why was the FBI trying to pry information from the telecommunications companies at that time? Why didn't FBI agents just pop on over to Fort Meade, knock on the NSA's door, and ask for a cup of metadata? Odd thought: Did the FBI even know about MARINA? Why would you create a thing like MARINA if you aren't going to let the FBI make use of it?

This stuff's freakin' impossible for an outsider to get his head around...!

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A scene from my home...

Meet Miss Dundalk/Essex 2013, seen here officiating over the grand opening of our newest meth lab.

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Top ten ways to smear Ed Snowden

Twenty years ago, people called you paranoid if you said that the American media engages in smear campaigns. Now everyone acknowledges this fact. Douglas Rushkoff of CNN can already see the outlines of the "get Snowden" campaign...

His enemies have the full force of the machine -- every e-mail he's written and every phone call he's made -- to use against him. This won't be pretty. But before we decide that Snowden was smiling too much in his videotaped interview with The Guardian, earned too much money or somehow betrayed his lovely girlfriend in Hawaii in a personal vendetta against his former bosses at the intelligence agencies, let's take just a moment to consider his particularly human act of heroism.

In that light, I propose a contest: Let's predict the top ten ways our "independent" journalists will smear Ed Snowden. My list:

10. Two words: Dog sex!
9. When he was seven, he broke mom's favorite vase and said a bad word. And now the Los Angeles Times plans to devote a five-part series to "vase-gate."
8. Why is Snowden hiding his birth certificate?
7. He's growing a beard, which signifies a conversion to Islam -- just like Grover Norquist!
6. He has a family connection to (shudder!)...BALTIMORE! (He really does!)
5. He once called in to Whitley Strieber's radio show, claiming to be the result of a human/alien hybridization experiment.
4. "Edward Snowden" is an anagram for "Do News: RED DAWN" -- proof that he's a communist sleeper agent.
3. His girlfriend planned to dump him due to pimple-sized penis.
2. He was recruited by HUI (Higher United Intelligence), the same little-known Hawaiian Secret Society that gave us Barack Obama.
1. His great-grandmother was the secret offspring of...ALEISTER CROWLEY!

(See the post below for the more important implications of the Snowden story.)

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