NSA whistleblower reveals his identity

11 Comments

1. 

   on June 9, 2013 at 3:24 pm

   He recounted how his beliefs about the [Iraq] war’s purpose were quickly dispelled. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,” he said. After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged. […]

   “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,” he says. “I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”

   He said it was during his CIA stint in Geneva that he thought for the first time about exposing government secrets. But, at the time, he chose not to for two reasons.

   First, he said: “Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone”. Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary.

   He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in“, and as a result, “I got hardened.”

   Of course, Glenn Greenwald is one of the authors… But it is possible that Snowden really went through this process, and Greenwad is not putting words into his mouth.

2. 

   on June 9, 2013 at 5:07 pm

   Wikipedia already has an article on Snowden

   Both Daniel Ellsberg and Glenn Bcek have called him a “hero”. Obama is going to have a hard time coming across as the good guy here, to everyone but people like Booman.

   • 

     TarheelDem on June 9, 2013 at 7:12 pm

     Obama is going to have a hard time coming across as the good guy here, to everyone but people like Booman.

     Tis why I have been yammering about a new Church commission and about how the bubble of the White House has obscured the reaction to this.

     The White House staff needs to seriously get ahead of this and stop attacking the messenger.  Clapper and Gen. Alexander at the NSA have betrayed their Constitutional oaths.  And they have likely lied to Congress.

     Not only that but Booz-Allen-Hamilton is owned by the Carlyle Group, long affiliated with the Bush family.  And Poppy Bush has long meddled in Democratic administrations.

     • 

       on June 9, 2013 at 8:14 pm

       Here is the post from the diary that ask deleted that started the series of posts that became too blunt for her taste:

       EFF calls for new Church Commission

       A privacy scholar explains how the Fourth Amendment got trampled

       I must admit that I was surprised by how vehemently Obama defended PRISM today. I find him virtually indistinguishable from Dick Cheney now. (The only issue Obama is liberal on is gay rights–he opposes women being able to control their own bodies, because of his ridiculous position on Plan B–but Cheney is pretty liberal about that too, because of his Lesbian daughter.) With his total surveillance state, endless war, and drone strikes, Obama is the US president who perhaps most resembles Darth Vader. (Bush’s clownishness kept him from coming across as sinister as Obama does.)

       To quote from the first link:

       one thing is clear.  Congress now has a responsibility to the American people to conduct a full, public investigation into the domestic surveillance of Americans by the intelligence communities, whether done directly or in concert with the FBI.  And it then has a duty to make changes in the law to stop the spying and ensure that it does not happen again.

       In short, we need a new Church Committee.

       As for BAH, here’s a pertinent point by digby:

       the NSA, like all bureaucracies, wants more tools, more resources, more power to do its job. And they got them. But just because they think they need it, doesn’t mean they really do. And from what we can gather about the private contracting business that feeds all this surveillance technology, the personal incentives are obvious: there’s a lot of money to be made. If we have to give up one little archaic amendment to the bill of rights well — price of doing business, amirite?

       So what is driving this is bureaucratic mission creep, fueled by new technology, and the same drive for profits that has such an influence on “defense” spending. That all this is needed to “protect us from terrorists” is just the ex-post rationalization that is made by politicians like Obama and Dianne Feinstein. But as Marcy Wheeler points out, no one can actually point to a single terrorist act that was prevented by PRISM.

       Remember, what the first NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, exposed was the NSA wasting billions on a government contractor.

3. 

   on June 9, 2013 at 8:31 pm

   Haha, according to Wikipedia, Snowden was a Paulite. (He said he voted third party in 2008 and records indicated that he contributed to Ron Paul’s campaign.)

   • 

     esquimaux on June 9, 2013 at 8:42 pm

     lots of libertarians in high tech. Paul had far more bumper stickers here in silicon valley than any other Republican candidate.  

   • 

     TarheelDem on June 9, 2013 at 8:44 pm

     I guess the infowar command is now going to try to smear him with that fact.  To try to peel concerned Democrats away from the criticism.

4. 

   on June 9, 2013 at 9:19 pm

   so far.

   Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, comes forward

   [Snowden] is the reason our country has, in the last week, been having a conversation on privacy and the limits of domestic surveillance. That was overdue, and one wishes it had been prompted by self-examination on the part of the Obama Administration or real oversight by Congress. But both failed, and it came in the form of Snowden handing highly classified documents–a lot of them–to journalists. […]

   We […] learned that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, flat-out lied to the Senate when he said that the N.S.A. did not “wittingly” collect any sort of data on millions of Americans. And we were reminded of how disappointing President Obama can be. These were all things the public deserved to know.

5. 

   on June 10, 2013 at 5:42 pm

   Code name `Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risks

   To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source.

   I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when. (The Post broke the story two weeks later, on Thursday. The Post sought the views of government officials about the potential harm to national security prior to publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41 slides.)

   So much for Booman’s belittling of Snowden for his leak being “not much”.

   What’s in the Rest of the Top Secret NSA PowerPoint Deck?

   Julian Assange, tweeting from his haven in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, weighed in yesterday, and made it clear what WikiLeaks would do in this situation. “Snowden demanded all 41 pages of PRISM document be published but neither WaPo nor Guardian had the courage,” he wrote.

   It will be interesting to see whether Snowden gives the PowerPoint file to WikiLeaks. I also wonder whether Glen Greenwald will ever explain whether he himself didn’t want to publish more than the Washington Post did, or whether the Guardian is the one that restricted what got published.

6. 

   Oui on June 11, 2013 at 1:34 pm

   .

   Booz Allen fires Edward Snowden for ‘shocking’ violation of ethics code

   (TheHill) – In a statement, the company said Snowden was an employee for the firm for less than three months and was fired on Monday for “violations of the firm’s code of ethics and firm policy.” Booz Allen also noted that Snowden’s annual salary was $122,000, lower than the $200,000 figure reported by The Guardian.

   • How Did A Guy With A GED End Up With Top Secret Clearance At The NSA?
   • Senators push bill to declassify secret FISA surveillance rulings
7. 

   on June 11, 2013 at 8:21 pm

   The N.S.A.’s Chief Chronicler

   “The Shadow Factory,” Bamford’s rageful 2008 book about the N.S.A.’s current troubles, is probably the most relevant of Bamford’s books today. In it, he describes an agency that has become increasingly cavalier about what data it will collect, and from whom. As one official told Bamford, “It’s what the N.S.A.’s been doing since 9/11. They’re just sweeping the stuff up.” Hayden, by this time, has been made into “a three-star sycophant unwilling to protect the agency from the destructive forces of Cheney and [David] Addington,” Cheney’s chief of staff. Whereas “Body of Secrets” referenced Borges, “The Shadow Factory” alludes to Orwell.

   Particularly irksome is the suspicion that, as far as spy agencies are concerned, the N.S.A. just isn’t very good: Bamford said it has “failed badly” in preventing attacks since the Cold War, missing everything from the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 to the recent Boston Marathon bombing. That’s partly because, as the agency has been inundated with so much data, it has perhaps lost the ability to evaluate information in a timely manner. You need people to point out patterns, to say what is relevant and what is not. Or, as Bamford puts it in “A Pretext for War,” the “N.S.A. needs human intelligence sources to help tell it where, and to whom, to listen.” In the past, a rivalry with the C.I.A.–which is largely responsible for human intelligence, in contrast to the N.S.A.’s general focus on data–had prevented that sort of symbiosis.

   In other words, the bottom line is that the NSA is a boondoggle. Competent terrorists know that electronic surveillance exists, so they avoid electronic means of communication.