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Brazil-based US journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said Brazilian media is owned by a few families that have a clear political interest in pushing President Rousseff out by “inciting street protests.”

“What makes Brazil so different in terms of its media is that the largest media organizations are almost entirely owned by a very small number of families. It was for a long time. Three, four, now it is five,” Greenwald told RT’s agency Ruptly during an event in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday.

“They all have the same interests, they have very close ties to the political class, they have clear political interests that are not the interest of the overall population. There is very little inhibition about using the media outlets for political activism.”

Thus, he said, it is not surprising that the majority of Brazil’s media coverage was one-sided and supported President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment from the start. In fact, the media has been “inciting street protests” against Rousseff, he said.

“There was a recording released just last week from the senior senator on the opposition and a new minister in which he said that the media was insisting on Dilma’s removal and her exit so I don’t think there is any question that the media has been almost entirely on one side of the debate at the expense of actual journalism here in Brazil.”

When it came to US involvement, Greenwald could not confirm anything specific, but referenced the alleged role in the Brazil’s coup in 1964. He pointed out that the US has a record of staging coups and not taking responsibility for them for years, adding that apparently, American politicians are benefiting from the current situation in Brazil.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Edward Snowden Demonstrates How To “Go Black”

May 29, 2016

Edward Snowden Demonstrates How To “Go Black”

When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden first exposed the world tojust how easily the government could compromise their technology and spy on them, many immediately sought ways to secure their data and protect their gadgets.

But, as Wired.com reports, Snowden is here to help. “‘Going Black’ is a pretty big ask,” he tells VICE’s Shane Smith, but not impossible, as Snowden shows how to “make sure your phone works for you… instead of working for someone else.”

Average:

The Intercept is Broadening Access to the Snowden Archive. Here’s Why.

May 18, 2016

THE INTERCEPT IS BROADENING ACCESS TO THE SNOWDEN ARCHIVE. HERE’S WHY

FROM THE TIME we began reporting on the archive provided to us in Hong Kong by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we sought to fulfill his two principal requests for how the materials should be handled: that they be released in conjunction with careful reporting that puts the documents in context and makes them digestible to the public, and that the welfare and reputations of innocent people be safeguarded. As time has gone on, The Intercept has sought out new ways to get documents from the archive into the hands of the public, consistent with the public interest as originally conceived.

Today, The Intercept is announcing two innovations in how we report on and publish these materials. Both measures are designed to ensure that reporting on the archive continues in as expeditious and informative a manner as possible, in accordance with the agreements we entered into with our source about how these materials would be disclosed, a framework that he, and we, have publicly described on numerous occasions.

The first measure involves the publication of large batches of documents. We are, beginning today, publishing in installments the NSA’s internal SIDtoday newsletters, which span more than a decade beginning after 9/11. We are starting with the oldest SIDtoday articles, from 2003, and working our way through the most recent in our archive, from 2012. Our first release today contains 166 documents, all from 2003, and we will periodically release batches until we have made public the entire set. The documents are available on a special section of The Intercept.

The SIDtoday documents run a wide gamut: from serious, detailed reports on top secret NSA surveillance programs to breezy, trivial meanderings of analysts’trips and vacations, with much in between. Many are self-serving and boastful, designed to justify budgets or impress supervisors. Others contain obvious errors or mindless parroting of public source material.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

May 4, 2016

Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

“I’VE BEEN WAITING 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What’s Been Legalized

April 4, 2016

A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What’s Been Legalized

FROM THE START of the reporting based on Edward Snowden’s leaked document archive, government defenders insisted that no illegal behavior was revealed. That was always false: Multiple courts have now found the domestic metadata spying program in violation of the Constitution and relevant statutes and have issued similar rulings for other mass surveillance programs; numerous articles on NSA and GCHQ documented the targeting of people and groups for blatantly political or legally impermissible purposes; and the leak revealed that President Obama’s top national security official (still), James Clapper, blatantly lied when testifying before Congress about the NSA’s activities — a felony.

But illegality was never the crux of the scandal triggered by those NSA revelations. Instead, what was most shocking was what had been legalized: the secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless spying in human history. What was scandalous was not that most of this spying was against the law, but rather that the law — at least as applied and interpreted by the Justice Department and secret, one-sided FISA “courts” — now permitted the U.S. government and its partners to engage in mass surveillance of entire populations, including their own. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer put it after the Washington Post’s publication of documents showing NSA analysts engaged in illegal spying: “The ‘non-compliance’ angle is important, but don’t get carried away. The deeper scandal is what’s legal, not what’s not.”

Yesterday, dozens of newspapers around the world reported on what they are calling the Panama Papers: a gargantuan leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm that specializes in creating offshore shell companies. The documents reveal billions of dollars being funneled to offshore tax havens by leading governmental and corporate officials in numerous countries (the U.S. was oddly missing from the initial reporting, though journalists vow that will change shortly).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chilling Effect’ of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says

March 17, 2016

Chilling Effect’ of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says

Thanks largely to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, most Americans now realize that the intelligence community monitors and archives all sorts of online behaviors of both foreign nationals and US citizens.

But did you know that the very fact that you know this could have subliminally stopped you from speaking out online on issues you care about?

Now research suggests that widespread awareness of such mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public.

A paper published last week in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that “the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.”

“What this research shows is that in the presence of surveillance, our country’s most vulnerable voices are unwilling to express their beliefs online.”

The NSA’s “ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of US citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly” and “can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse,” the researcher found.

The paper is based on responses to an online questionnaire from a random sample of 255 people, selected to mimic basic demographic distributions across the US population.

Participants were asked to answer questions relating to media use, political attitudes, and personality traits. Different subsets of the sample were exposed to different messaging on US government surveillance to test their responses to the same fictional Facebook post about the US decision to continue airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mass surveillance programs futile in fighting terror – Snowden

March 15, 2016

Mass surveillance programs futile in fighting terror – Snowden

Bulk data gathering programs used by US intelligence have no effect in combating terrorism and have failed to prevent any attacks in their 10 years of operation, whistleblower and former NSA contactor Edward Snowden, claims in a recent interview.

“In the wake of the revelations of mass surveillance the [US] president [Barack Obama] appointed two independent commissions to review the efficiency of these [surveillance] programs, what they really did and what effect they had in combating terrorism. [The commissions comprised] the highest priests of these programs, they found these programs had never stopped a single terrorist attack and never made a concrete difference in a terrorist investigation,” Snowden told Spanish TV channel Sexta.

The whistleblower went on saying, that “they [the NSA, CIA] violated the constitution and the rights of 330 million Americans for 10 years. We have to ask ourselves: was it ever worth it?”He also stated that despite being justified by preventing terrorist attacks, surveillance programs are more often used for completely different purposes.

“It was diplomatic manipulation, economic spying and social control. It was about power, and there is no doubt that mass surveillance increases the power of the government.”

Snowden stressed that bulk data collection is “more aggressive and invasive today than it was before. Law enforcement and intelligence structures do not any longer bother to pick up a suspect and hack his cell phone, they cut in into all lines and communications […] at the heart of the society.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Year after Snowden Warning, How Canada Has Changed

March 9, 2016

One Year after Snowden Warning, How Canada Has Changed

Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s sold-out talk on the power, promise and peril of big data hits a Queen Elizabeth Theatre screen April 5 in Vancouver.

A year ago this month, world-famous whistleblower Edward Snowden issued a warning to Canada. Via livestream, he told us our country has one of the weakest spy oversight frameworks among western intelligence agencies around the world.

That observation, years after his first leaks shook the western state security establishment, stoked fears that the Harper government’s anti-terrorism law would further erode Canadians’ digital privacy as the controversial Bill C-51 pressed through Parliament. The repercussions of Snowden’s data collection findings are still being felt as Canada’s new government revisits flimsy oversight provisions.

Meanwhile, journalists have been covering security issues with renewed vigilance, and civil liberties organizations have found new support from the public. Corporations, embarrassed by revelations that they co-operated with security agencies to sell out their customers’ privacy, have tried to rebuild their reputations with public statements and new privacy measures.

Simon Fraser University communications professor Catherine Murray has studied these shifts since Snowden’s warning to Canada, and sees big data as an opportunity for journalists and civil liberties organizations to push back against spy powers. Her talk on mobilizing data in democratic discourse is part of the same lecture series that brings Snowden via web-link to a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Theatre crowd in Vancouver April 5.

Ahead of these speaking events, The Tyee asked Murray about what shape spy oversight and privacy reform might take in Canada, and how journalists’ treatment of security has changed since Snowden’s historic revelations.

What did Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 reveal about Canadian spying activity?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada Cuts Off Some Intelligence Sharing With U.S. Out of Fear for Canadians’ Privacy

January 29, 2016

Canada Cuts Off Some Intelligence Sharing With U.S. Out of Fear for Canadians’ Privacy

Canada’s CBC network reported Thursday that the country is slamming on the brakes when it comes to sharing some communications intelligence with key allies — including the U.S. — out of fear that Canadian personal information is not properly protected.

“Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan says the sharing won’t resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place,” CBC reported.

Earlier on Thursday, the watchdog tasked with keeping tabs on the Ottawa-based Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Jean-Pierre Plouffe, called out the electronic spying agency for risking Canadian privacy in his annual report.

Plouffe wrote that the surveillance agency broke privacy laws when it shared Canadian data with its allies without properly protecting it first. Consequently, he concluded, it should precisely explain how Canadian citizens’ metadata — information about who a communication is to and from, the subject line of an email, and so on — can and can’t be used.

“Minimization is the process by which Canadian identity information contained in metadata is rendered unidentifiable prior to being shared,” Plouffe wrote in his report. “The fact that CSE did not properly minimize Canadian identity information contained in certain metadata prior to being shared was contrary to the ministerial directive, and to CSE’s operational policy.”

Defense Minister Sajjan said in a statement that the data sharing in question was the result of “unintentional” errors and didn’t allow for specific Canadian individuals to be identified.

The concern for Canadian metadata began shortly after disclosures made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

Plouffe’s predecessor told then-Defense Minister Rob Nicholson that the other countries in a secretive surveillance pact called the Five Eyes Alliance — the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia — might not be sheltering Canadians’ telephone data the way they should.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off — in Secret

January 28, 2016

Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off — in Secret

The House Judiciary Committee will hold its first hearing next week on two of the NSA spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden that vacuum up domestic content despite being ostensibly targeted at foreigners: PRISM and Upstream.

But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability groups who wrote an angry letter to committee leaders on Wednesday, the public is not invited. The entire hearing is classified, and closed.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which has been cited as the legal authority for those two programs, lapses next year.

The debate over whether to reauthorize it is expected to be the most substantive public examination of the NSA’s surveillance regime since Congress’s decision to end NSA’s collection of bulk metadata of U.S. phone calls.

Kicking off that debate with a closed hearing sets the wrong tone, groups including openthegovernment.org and the ACLU wrote in their letter. “It continues the excessive secrecy that has contributed to the surveillance abuses we have seen in recent years and to their adverse effects upon both our civil liberties and economic growth.”

The authors of the letter reminded the committee that discussions over the original passage of the FISA Amendments Act in 2008 “happened largely in open session,” and that matters of national security are often discussed in open hearings, with classified briefings reserved for specific questions.

Specifically, they wrote, “In the case of Section 702 implementation oversight, a completely closed hearing is unnecessary to provide members with an adequate understanding of how the law is currently implemented by the executive branch and whether that exceeds Congress’s original intent.”

The two programs that run under Section 702 vacuum up hundreds of millions of online messages and voice communications, including emails, Skype calls, and Facebook messages, that involve “targeted” suspects overseas and the people they talk to.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

December 28, 2015

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

The irony of the phrase “may the odds be ever in your favor” is not lost on the readers of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels or the film adaption. Despite the grimness of the story, over 65 million copies of the books have been sold. The total box office take so far has exceeded $1.4 billion for the four movies. The dystopian series tackles real issues like severe poverty, starvation, torture, oppression, betrayal and the brutality of war. It doesn’t fit into the standard film making success recipe of feel good fluff, politically correct storylines and happy endings. Each film in the series gets progressively darker, with the final episode permeating doom and gloom. The books and the movies capture the deepening crisis mood engulfing the world today. And they realistically portray the world as a place where there are no good guys in positions of power. The ruling class, in all cases, is driven by a voracious appetite for supremacy, wealth, and control.

An Ambiguous, Confusing, Dangerous World

The world is a morally ambiguous place where those in power and those seeking power utilize the influence of media propaganda and PR campaigns built around “heroes” and “icons” to psychologically control the masses, while enriching themselves and their crony capitalist sponsors. Endless war against the latest “bad guys” further enriches the arms dealers and their political lackeys who joyfully use faux patriotism and nationalistic fervor to insist upon more boots on the ground, drones in the air, bombs dropped, and missiles launched.

War is good for business and keeps the masses distracted, while the Wall Street financiers harvest the wealth of the citizens.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CISA Is Now The Law: How Congress Quietly Passed The Second Patriot Act

December 18, 2015

CISA Is Now The Law: How Congress Quietly Passed The Second Patriot Act

Back in 2014, civil liberties and privacy advocates were up in arms when the government tried to quietly push through the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, a law which would allow federal agencies – including the NSA – to share cybersecurity, and really any information with private corporations “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” The most vocal complaint involved CISA’s information-sharing channel, which was ostensibly created for responding quickly to hacks and breaches, and which provided a loophole in privacy laws that enabled intelligence and law enforcement surveillance without a warrant.

Ironically, in its earlier version, CISA had drawn the opposition of tech firms including Apple, Twitter, Reddit, as well as the Business Software Alliance, the Computer and Communications Industry Association and many others including countless politicians and, most amusingly, the White House itself.

In April, a coalition of 55 civil liberties groups and security experts signed onto an open letter opposing it. In July, the Department of Homeland Security itself warned that the bill could overwhelm the agency with data of “dubious value” at the same time as it “sweep[s] away privacy protections.” Most notably, the biggest aggregator of online private content, Facebook, vehemently opposed the legislation however a month ago it was “surprisingly” revealed that Zuckerberg had been quietly on the side of the NSA all along as we reported in “Facebook Caught Secretly Lobbying For Privacy-Destroying “Cyber-Security” Bill.”

Even Snowden chimed in:

Edward Snowden ✔@Snowden

Shameful: @Facebook secretly backing Senate’s zombie #CISA surveillance bill while publicly pretending to oppose it. https://boingboing.net/2015/10/24/petition-facebook-betrayed-us.html …

5:43 PM – 25 Oct 2015

Following the blitz response, the push to pass CISA was tabled following a White House threat to veto similar legislation. Then, quietly, CISA reemerged after the same White House mysteriously flip-flopped, expressed its support for precisely the same bill in August.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NSA Leaker Thomas Drake Praises Report Showing U.S.’ Failure Toward Whistleblowers

November 24, 2015

NSA Leaker Thomas Drake Praises Report Showing U.S.’ Failure Toward Whistleblowers

Former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake was originally charged with leaking classified information. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)

Whistleblower Thomas Drake, who in 2010 became the first American charged with espionage in almost 40 years and who was a predecessor of Edward Snowden, applauds a new report by the PEN American Center accusing the government of failing to protect whistleblowers.

The report comes after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said at last month’s Democratic debate that NSA whistleblower Snowden “could have gotten all the protections of being a whistleblower” instead of leaking materials to the press. PEN’s report shows that Clinton is wrong and that the U.S. government gives employees and contractors little assurance that they won’t be prosecuted, even if they go through sanctioned channels.

Of his experience as a whistleblower, Drake said during “Secret Sources: Whistleblowers, National Security and Free Expression,” a panel at the Newseum in Washington examining the impact of the Obama administration’s response to national security leaks, “I had become a dissident, as far as the NSA was concerned […] If you become a dissident, the white blood cells kick in, culturally, to get rid of you.”

Charges that Drake passed classified documents to a newspaper reporter were dropped in 2011. He said of the PEN report to Al-Jazeera’s “America Tonight”:

Probably the biggest takeaway for me is it’s one of the first reports that actually pulled this information all together in a cogent fashion. It gives a history. It shows the dynamics. It shows how things have evolved. It shows how far the administrations, particularly President Obama, have gone in pursuing those who would dare hold up a mirror to power. It talks about the lack of protections for sources. It highlights the risks to journalism, as sources, like myself, are considering engaging in criminal activity. It raises serious questions, extraordinarily disturbing questions, about the government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Venezuelan President Calls NSA Spying on State Oil Company ‘Vulgar,” Orders Official Inquiry

November 21, 2015

Venezuelan President Calls NSA Spying on State Oil Company ‘Vulgar,” Orders Official Inquiry

Venezuela will conduct a “comprehensive review of relations with the United States” and submitted a formal protest over new evidence that the National Security Agency spied on state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, the country’s president announced.

President Nicolas Maduro spoke about the latest spying revelations at an event late Wednesday night. Earlier in the day, The Intercept and teleSUR jointly published reports, based on a top-secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, detailing how the intelligence agency gained large-scale access to PDVSA’s internal computer network and successfully targeted top executives for electronic surveillance.

One named NSA target was Rafael Ramírez, PDVSA’s president from 2004 to 2014, now serving as Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations. Last month the Wall Street Journal reportedthat Ramírez has been the subject of a U.S. Justice Department investigation for alleged corruption during his time at the oil company.

Maduro called the U.S. espionage, conducted in part from its embassy in Caracas, “vulgar” and an “illegal action in light of international law.”

On Thursday, U.S. charge d’affaires in Caracas, Lee McClenny, was summoned to receive an official letter of protest from Alejandro Fleming, Venezuela’s deputy foreign minister.

In a press briefing, U.S. State Department spokesperson John Kirby declined to address the allegations directly, saying the State Department would instead “respond through diplomatic channels to the Venezuelan Government.”

Kirby added, “There’s no intent to use electronic surveillance to benefit commercial gain. That’s not changed,” echoing previous statements from President Barack Obama and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

After Brazilian network TV Globo revealed NSA spying on Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobrás in 2013, Clapper issued a statement affirming that the U.S. “collects information about economic and financial matters,” but does not use its “foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The War on Encryption and Bitcoin – Nothing to Do with Terrorism, Everything to Do with State Control

November 21, 2015

The War on Encryption and Bitcoin – Nothing to Do with Terrorism, Everything to Do with State Control

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

– James Madison, Founding Father and 4th President of these United States

Politicians and intelligence agencies throughout the Western world are currently engaged in an all out, shameless propaganda campaign to exploit the recent terror attacks in Paris to convince the citizenry that it should relinquish privacy for absolutely no reason.

The primary targets of the post-attack push have been encryption generally, and Bitcoin specifically. Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that these are two sides of the same coin. Both strong encryption for communication, and Bitcoin for transferring value, provide a level of freedom and dynamism outside of the oligarch-controlled, centrally planned, feudal global economic system. As such, these two tools must be demonized and eradicated to the extent possible.

Yesterday, in the post, Government is Lying – New Study Shows No Increase in Use of Encryption by Jihadists Since Snowden Revelations, I explained in detail how the whole push against encryption is based on total lies and fear-mongering. The key points were as follows:

Terrorists have not increased their use of encryption since the Snowden revelations.
The cat is already out of the bag when it comes to encryption software, and there’s nothing government can do to stop terrorists from using it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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