Another Spying Program Revealed

What began with the revelations about the secret court order to Verizon has by now broadened out, with spying on all sorts of internet communications apparently also going on under the ‘PRISM’ program. In short, another open secret has now made it into the mainstream media (more on that further below).

One aspect that has people troubled is that the program allows various Western governments to skirt legal restrictions regarding spying on their own citizens by simply letting Washington do it and obtaining the data from there. Of course they are all denying it. At least Australians can look forward to their own government’s new snooping law to probably die a sudden death, or least be significantly delayed.

Reuters reports:

“U.S. officials have confirmed the existence of the secret program, codenamed PRISM, which according to documents leaked to the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper has given them access to emails, web chats and other communications from companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

U.S. law puts limits on the government’s authority to snoop at home but virtually no restrictions on American spies eavesdropping on the communications of foreigners, including in allied countries with which Washington shares intelligence. That means Washington could provide friendly governments with virtually unlimited information about their own citizens’ private communication on the Internet.

Britain’s foreign secretary took to television on Sunday to reassure Britons that London’s own spies had not circumvented laws restricting their own activity by obtaining information collected by Washington.

In Germany, sensitive to decades of snooping by East German Stasi secret police, the opposition said Chancellor Angela Merkel should do more to protect Germans from U.S. spying and demand answers when President Barack Obama visits this month.

In Australia, a government source said the U.S. revelations could make it more difficult to pass a law allowing the government to access Internet data at home.

And in New Zealand, the revelations could cause further embarrassment for a government already forced to admit that it had illegally spied on an Internet file-sharing tycoon who is fighting extradition to the United States for computer piracy.

In Britain, which has forged the closest intelligence ties with Washington as the main U.S. battlefield ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians asked whether access to data collected by Washington allowed London’s own eavesdropping service GCHQ to evade limits on its own snooping powers.

Foreign Secretary William Hague would not say what information Britain received from the United States about British citizens but said it was “nonsense” that GCHQ would use cooperation with Washington to dodge British laws. He said he would answer questions on the subject on Monday in parliament.

“The idea that in GCHQ people are sitting around working out how to circumvent a UK law with another agency in another country is fanciful,” Hague told BBC TV on Sunday.

[…]

In Germany, which has strong rules on privacy, the opposition said the government was responsible for preventing wholesale U.S. spying on Germans. “No one has a problem with the USA keeping terrorists under surveillance – that has prevented terrorist attacks in Germany,” said Thomas Oppermann, a senior lawmaker from the opposition Social Democrats. “(But) total surveillance of all citizens by the USA is completely inappropriate. The German government must protect the privacy of Germans from the USA too.”

[…]

Australia’s spy and law-enforcement agencies want telecoms firms and Internet service providers to continuously collect and store personal data to boost anti-terrorism and crime-fighting. The legislation has been the subject of almost three years of heated closed-door negotiations. One government source said the initiative would be even more difficult to push through now.

[…]

In New Zealand, Internet file sharing tycoon Kim Dotcom, fighting extradition to the United States on charges of online piracy, said U.S. surveillance agencies played a role in illegal snooping by New Zealand’s security services in his own case.

[…]

The New Zealand government has acknowledged that its Government Communications and Security Bureau illegally bugged Dotcom’s communications before his house was raided in 2012 in the U.S. extradition case.”

(emphasis added)

Mr. Hague may call such suspicions ‘fanciful’, but they are very likely anything but. Just consider the Kim Dotcom case, where a Western government already had to admit to engaging in illegal surveillance. And that was merely over a copyright infringement case that stands legally on very wobbly feet to boot.

(Photo credit: fmh)

Whistleblower Snowden

It has now also come out that the public has to thank Edward Snowden, a 29 year old NSA whistleblower for the recent revelations. As the Guardian notes, people like Snowden are a ‘vital antidote to the surveillance state‘, but we think it’s a bit naïve to think that anything will change. There will be a few weeks of embarrassment and then things will very likely continue exactly as before. Not for Snowden though, who is now officially a ‘traitor’. The times when someone like Daniel Ellsberg could still hope to be ultimately vindicated in court for having acted in the interests of the public are long gone. The risks to whistleblowers have markedly increased. Just ask Bradley Manning, whose military trial has just begun (after he was kept in isolation in a brig since 2010), which Chris Hedges calls a ‘judicial lynching‘. Manning, readers may recall, publicized what appeared to be strong evidence of war crimes – but instead of prosecuting the perpetrators, the government is prosecuting him.

Anyway, back to Snowden:

“In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.”

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “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.”

[…]

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. “I am not afraid,” he said calmly, “because this is the choice I’ve made.”

He predicts the government will launch an investigation and “say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become”.

(emphasis added)

It is certainly admirable that a 29 year old would voluntarily drop his $200K/year job and become a fugitive in order to drag the debate into the mainstream. The ‘presstitute’ media can no longer ignore what everybody already knew, but if you take the time to compare what is written in the US mainstream press to what is written elsewhere, you can already see that they are furiously trying to spin it (the method employed is borrowed from Hegel. ‘Both sides’ are given equal time in print. The headline cites a soundbite from the government. We learn of the opposing viewpoints A and B. Later we will hear about the synthesis ‘C’, which will be what the elites wanted all along).

The demonization of Snowden and the legal maneuvering against him have of course already begun, led by this man:

NSA director James Clapper

(Photo credit: ap/applewhite)

“THE top US intelligence chief is seeking a criminal probe into bombshell leaks of government monitoring of Internet users and phone records, amid a furor over the secret programs’ threat to privacy.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed Saturday that US spy agencies use the PRISM program to gather data trails left by targeted foreign citizens using the Internet outside the United States. But in an interview with NBC News, portions of which aired Sunday, he called the disclosures “literally gut-wrenching” and said they had caused “huge, grave damage” to US intelligence capabilities.

“The NSA has filed a crimes report on this already,” Clapper told NBC, referring to the leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

He said he was “profoundly offended” that a disgruntled intelligence officer was a source for the leak to the Post. “This is someone who for whatever reason has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country,” he said. “And, so, I hope we’re able to track down whoever’s doing this, because it is extremely damaging to, and it affects the safety and security of this country.”

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who brought to light the PRISM program and a separate program that trawls through US phone records, said the public had a right to know and openly debate what the government was doing.

“Every time there’s a whistleblower, someone who exposes government wrongdoing, the tactic is to demonise them as a traitor,” he said on US network ABC’s This Week.

“What they were seeing being done in secret, inside the United States government, is so alarming they simply want one thing. And that is, they want the American people to learn about this massive spying apparatus and what the capabilities are, so we can have an open, honest debate.”

(emphasis added)

Of course the chief spy would think it’s ‘gut-wrenching’ and causing ‘grave damage’ to the agency’s spying capabilities when suddenly a public debate over its methods breaks out after it has become used to get anything it wants since 2001.  We should keep in mind though how overblown the alleged threat really is. No-one can touch the US or any other Western country militarily. That leaves only terrorists as a genuine threat, but terrorism is a phenomenon that isn’t ‘eternal’. It often turns out to be a fad – consider e.g. the RAF terrorists who once plagued Germany. After a few years, the entire movement faded into obscurity. It really consisted of just a handful of people.  Also, we should keep in mind that statistically speaking, the terrorism threat to life and limb ranks well below the probability of drowning in one’s own bathtub and even below the probability of dying from a ‘fall from a chair’. In other words,  Clapper is a past master of exaggeration. It is simply inconceivable that not spying on everybody will ‘deal a huge blow to security’. That is simply balderdash. The exact opposite is in fact true –  by enabling such a spying apparatus, the risk that it will one day be turned against society at large is by far the greater danger.

(Image credit: gamm)

More Regulation on its Way?

There is one paragraph in the Reuters report quoted further above that is noteworthy:

“Indeed, PRISM appears to be an effective tool for the NSA precisely because U.S. companies dominate the Internet, and global communications even among people overseas often pass through the United States. That is galling to those in Europe who have argued that local technology companies need to be nurtured to combat U.S. economic and political domination.”

As the Daily Bell argues in this context, one must always be suspicious when such topics suddenly make it into the mainstream media, which are otherwise so well-versed in simply remaining silent regarding topics that could embarrass those in power. It can hardly be denied that today’s mainstream press is more and more Pravda-like, employing self-censorship and going along with nearly every major government promotion no questions asked. Just think about the Iraq war promotion (which was so silly and transparent it was nauseating to realize that they regarded the public as that dumb) or the ‘AGW’ promotion, whereby the latter will probably still be going on even if we end up covered in three meters of ice in the middle of July. After all, the recent NSA spying revelations are not really news. Anyone following the alternative media knew all of this long ago; we may not have known that the program was dubbed ‘PRISM’, but everything else about it was known. Snowden is not exactly the first NSA whistleblower, there were others before him. And yet, those others were ignored, while Snowden wasn’t. Why?

The Daily Bell writes:

Dominant Social Theme: We need more government regulation to counteract the spying of government intel agencies.

[…]

“The mainstream media is filled with reports of vast surveillance mechanisms that have now been emplaced thanks to the evolving structure of the Internet.

Now, any time the mainstream media gets involved in broadcasting a particular meme, you must know in this modern era that it is taking place with the acquiescence and support of the powers-that-be.

In this case, from what we can tell, those in charge of these gigantic spying programs want people to know that they are being watched from afar. This may or may not be the case, but people tend to believe what they read and the idea appears to be, obviously, to frighten and intimidate people.

Second, as evidenced by this Reuters article, the acknowledgement of these programs – which the alternative media has already exposed – now gives various parties the justification to call for further regulations of the private sector that is being accused of cooperating with government spy-entities.

This Reuters article is especially interesting because it does not question government intelligence instrumentalities nor the need for them or their expansion. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on “web giants” that have been, one presumes, intimidated into cooperating with the spymasters in the first place.

(emphasis added)

In case you were wondering, this is the Reuters article referenced by the Daily Bell above. If you look at the article, the main concern appears indeed to be with the large US internet companies, which European governments think must be countered by ‘nurturing’ their own. However, there is also this interesting tidbit, which inadvertently puts all the faux outrage into perspective:

“Some of Europe’s difficulties in combating perceived data abuses arise from the fact that many European governments look with envy at the U.S. security services’ powers.

Britain is trying to strengthen its already powerful monitoring capabilities by bringing in what critics say would be the West’s most far-reaching surveillance laws. The Guardian reported on Friday that Britain’s eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, had been secretly gathering intelligence from PRISM and had access to the system since at least June 2010.”

(emphasis added)

Ever since they were saddled with the ECB and its BuBa-like restrictions on monetary financing of budget deficits, a number of European governments are also envious of Anglo-Saxon central banking socialism. It’s not surprise they are envious of the US government’s spying capabilities as well. What government doesn’t want to have such absolute power over its citizens, the ability to listen to and watch everything they say and do? If anyone thinks that ‘democracy’ is a shield against government abuse of power, then you have been asleep for a few decades or are getting your views about what government can do from 1970s crime movies.

As an aside, those are quite revealing in a way. Consider the difference between a typical 70s crime flick and a modern police procedural show on TV like ‘CSI’. In the 70s a major theme was that the detectives were hobbled by the constitution. They could not simply search anyone without a warrant, they had to read them their rights, could only keep them locked up for a limited time before they had to be presented to a judge, and so forth.

These obstacles to policing were almost always in some form present. Today, although these obstacles still exist on the surface, police officers depicted on CSI or similar shows by contrast regularly threaten recalcitrant suspects by invoking the PATRIOT act. The message that is hammered home so the couch potatoes all get it is: ‘we can do whatever we like’. Officially approved entertainment isn’t as harmless as it appears – it is part of social conditioning.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what comes of this debate. Our bet is: absolutely nothing, except perhaps even more government regulation of internet firms, as suspected by the Daily Bell. Clapper has no need to worry. After he released a flood of tweets and some information regarding PRISM in order to ‘clear up some misconceptions’, one commentator remarked:

“Shorter James Clapper: “PRISM isn’t a massive surveillance program! It’s the software we use to run our massive surveillance program!”

 

 

 

Yes, and they’re not going to turn it off. In fact, we are sympathetic to another point the Daily Bell brings up. It could well be that they don’t really care, that they want us to know. As in a none-too-subtle form of intimidation.