Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Obama lied to Merkel when claiming to know nothing about NSA bugging her phone, says new report

BBC News reports: Mrs Merkel phoned the US president when she first heard of the spying allegations on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama apologised to the German chancellor and promised Mrs Merkel he knew nothing of the alleged phone monitoring and would have stopped it if he had, Der Spiegel reports.

But on Sunday Bild newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying NSA head Keith Alexander personally briefed the president about the covert operation targeting Mrs Merkel in 2010.

“Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” the newspaper quoted a senior NSA official as saying.

Her number was still on a surveillance list in 2013.

Bild is a tabloid that does not have a reputation for journalistic excellence. Even so, if a conflict between the NSA and the White House is escalating, then an NSA source might turn to this type of publication as a way of making a veiled threat. The report has the effect of sowing doubt about Obama’s statements even if NSA officials now make dismissive responses, pointing out the unreliability of the press.

Obama has a dilemma. On the one hand it is becoming increasingly evident that he will need to steer some kind of reform in the NSA’s operations. But at the same time he doesn’t want to foster the appearance of the agency having become a rogue operation since that would also make him look like a negligent, ineffectual president. Neither does he want to get into an open fight since by their nature, intelligence agencies are dirty fighters. He can be reasonably confident that none of his communications are being monitored by any foreign intelligence agencies, yet why should he assume the NSA would never spy on an American president?

In a speech NSA chief Keith Alexander gave this summer, as he referred to when Obama “first came on board,” either unconsciously or intentionally, the four-star general seemed to be alluding to the transience of elected officials. The president, his cabinet, and members of Congress, sustain the facade of democracy, but the captains of the state like Alexander generally move around in the background, loyal to the president and the Constitution as they like to declare, yet harboring the conceit that they are America’s most stalwart defenders.

NSA disclosures put U.S. on defense

Politico reports: The NSA spying controversy is quickly transforming from a domestic headache for the Obama administration into a global public relations fiasco for the United States government.

After months of public and congressional debate over the National Security Agency’s collection of details on U.S. telephone calls, a series of reports about alleged spying on foreign countries and their leaders has unleashed an angry global reaction that appears likely to swamp the debate about gathering of metadata within American borders.

While prospects for a legislative or judicial curtailment of the U.S. call-tracking program are doubtful, damage from public revelations about NSA’s global surveillance is already evident and seems to be growing.

Citing the snooping disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Brazil’s president canceled a state visit to the U.S. set for this week. Leaders in France and Italy and Germany have lodged heated protests with Washington, with the Germans announcing plans to dispatch a delegation to Washington to discuss the issue. Boeing airplane sales are in jeopardy. And the European Union is threatening to slap restrictions on U.S. technology firms that profit from tens of millions of users on the Continent.

“Europe is talking about this. Some people in Europe are upset and may take steps to block us,” former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said in a telephone interview from Rome on Friday. “The reaction of retail politicians is to mirror the upset of the people who elected them.”

“Confidence between countries and confidence between governments are important and sometime decisive and there’s almost no confidence between the United States of America and Europe” now, former German intelligence chief Hansjörg Geiger said. “I’m quite convinced there will be an impact…. It will be a real impact and not only the [intelligence] services will have some turbulence.”

Some analysts see immediate trouble for U.S.-European arrangements to share information about airline passengers, financial transactions and more.

“The bigger problems are not in Berlin or Paris, but in the future out of Brussels,” said Michael Leiter, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. “At the EU, I expect them to be very, very resistant to any increase — and to have problems even with maintenance — of some of the information sharing we have now…..All of this complicates those discussions exponentially.”

For the average person, American or from elsewhere, the knowledge that their own communications are subject to NSA surveillance is likely to be a matter of relatively little concern. Even if they vehimently object to such collection as a matter of principle, they also are likely to feel reasonably confident that for all intents and purposes, this data gets lost almost as rapidly as it gets collected. It instantly becomes buried in vast databases where it will almost certainly never receive further scrutiny. Not only is the collection process unjustifiably intrusive, but it also seems grossly wasteful.

In response to this week’s revelations, Glenn Greenwald wrote:

[N]ote how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of many western leaders.

No doubt our political leaders are guilty of all kinds of hypocrisy, but in this case, surveillance of heads of state can hardly be put on a par with surveillance of ordinary citizens.

When the NSA was monitoring Merkel’s communications, it’s reasonable to assume that the monitoring went far beyond recording. They were not getting tossed into a database where they might reside until the day there was some justification to examine them. Much more likely, they were subject to daily analysis.

The NSA might be listening to everyone, but it focuses its attention on far fewer, including as we now know, some of America’s closest allies.

The American pathology

Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and expert on the NSA, says: “I think most of us who have studied U.S. intelligence over the years naturally assume that there is no country on the face of the planet who does not receive some level of attention from the U.S. intelligence community. We have to because we are one of the few global superpowers left on the planet.”

Aid says this in conjunction with a hint of incredulity about the current expressions of shock and indignation being expressed by America’s allies who object to being spied upon.

While the expressions of shock coming from Europe and elsewhere may indeed be contrived, the indignation is not, and this distinction is one that many Americans fail to grasp.

Once again, American exceptionalism rears its ugly head and once again Americans fail to recognize its ugliness.

America has to spy on its allies. Why? Because the prevailing attitude in this country — the American outlook — is that on a fundamental level, American interests differ from the interests of everyone else on the planet.

This is a form of insanity, but insanity is difficult to recognize when it gets expressed collectively. When virtually everyone suffers from similar delusions, then crazy becomes normal.

In order to plausibly justify bugging the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel or that of any of the U.S.’s other close allies, one would have to show how the benefits of doing so, outweigh the potential costs. In reality, the benefits are negligible to non-existent while the costs may prove enormous.

The argument that “everyone does it” simply doesn’t wash. Who has bugged President Obama’s Blackberry?

Let’s suppose that France succeeded in doing so. What’s America’s response going to be? Fair game. Everyone does it. I don’t think so.

But returning to the idea that the diplomatic crisis in which the U.S. is now embroiled is symptomatic of an American disease, the primary symptom which finds countless expressions is the idea that “because we are Americans” is a coherent and rational explanation for anything.

The idea that Americans are in some way intrinsically different from everyone else is baseless yet functions as a presupposition guiding so many of America’s actions.

In an op-ed at USA Today, Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, notes that the administration is currently reviewing U.S. surveillance capabilities, including with respect to foreign partners. “We want to ensure we are collecting information because we need it and not just because we can.”

The New York Times reports that the tapping of Merkel’s phone began a decade ago but that during his five years as president, Obama had no knowledge of this.

The same report also says: “In Washington, the reaction [from Europe] has set off a debate over whether it is time to put the brakes on the NSA, whose capabilities, Mr. Obama has hinted, have expanded faster than its judgment.”

A much more pointed response is reported coming from Germany:

So fierce was the anger in Berlin over suspicions that American intelligence had tapped into Ms. Merkel’s cellphone that Elmar Brok of Germany, the chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a pillar of trans-Atlantic exchanges since 1984, spoke Friday of America’s security establishment as a creepy “state within a state.”

To cast the issue as one of capabilities expanding faster than judgment is one of Washington’s habitual deflections. It presents an image of breathless officials struggling to keep pace with the advance of technology. Everyone’s innocent. Technology relentlessly improves and frail humans struggle to keep up.

But the real issue is not technological; it is political.

For the NSA to be spying on the German chancellor while the U.S. president knows nothing about it, shows that the NSA has become a rogue operation.

This has nothing to do with plausible deniability; it’s about inexcusable ignorance and lack of oversight.

The ultimate irony is this: America’s “need” to spy on the world is a byproduct of a lack of curiosity about the rest of the world. Americans fear what they don’t understand.

A world that Americans knew better, engaged with more fully, and which thereby ceased being imbued with a pervasive otherness, would be a less scary world. It would no longer be a world from which America feels the need to set itself apart.

NSA scrambles to defend itself

Having intelligence community leaders like Director of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as front-line defenders for the NSA turned out to be an ineffective strategy when both were exposed as liars. So, the NSA must now communicate indirectly, relying on journalists who are willing to function as mouthpieces for the agency.

Following the latest revelations about eavesdropping on the private communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other foreign leaders, the Associated Press’s intelligence writer, Kimberly Dozier, offers explanations on how and why the NSA spies on U.S. allies. It’s unlikely that the answers she offers are a summation of her own deep knowledge of the way the NSA works. Much more likely, this is simply the summation of an NSA background briefing. Read this as a paraphrase of the NSA speaking for itself.

First off comes this claim: that “intercepting foreign diplomats’ or leaders’ communications, like the alleged eavesdropping on Merkel, as well as on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon” is spying that the NSA “is authorized to do”. The intended takeaway from that statement is: we didn’t break U.S. law. The question which this statement fudges, however, is whether the NSA was directed to carry out such surveillance.

Then we come to the basic question:

Q: Why bug the phone of an ally?

A: Even a close ally like Merkel doesn’t share everything with the Americans, but decisions she makes can have a major impact on U.S. foreign, defense and economic policy overseas. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic party just won an election, and she is in the process of wooing other German political parties to form a coalition government. The party she chooses could pull her political policies in a different direction, in terms of counterterrorism cooperation with the U.S., for instance, or perhaps the new coalition might chill Merkel’s support of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

Say what?! The NSA needs to bug Merkel’s phone so that the U.S. can receive advance notice of the political makeup of the coalition she is forming? It can’t simply rely on conventional diplomatic and political channels of communication? That’s ridiculous — unless it’s meant to imply that the U.S. wants to covertly exercise some influence on the outcome of that political process.

I don’t actually believe that’s the implication because I don’t think anyone in Washington or at the NSA is crazy enough to imagine that the U.S. could successfully interfere in the domestic politics of its allies in this way.

There is a much simpler answer to this question and it’s offered by a career American official with long experience in Europe who spoke to the New York Times. Why bug the phone of an ally? Because you can.

The report notes: “Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations.”

By all appearances, the NSA is now in cry-baby mode and instead of acknowledging that it is suffering the effects of self-inflicted wounds, it wants to cast itself as victim. The Washington Post provides emotional support:

U.S. officials are alerting some foreign intelligence services that documents detailing their secret cooperation with the United States have been obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to government officials.

Snowden, U.S. officials said, took tens of thousands of documents, some of which contain sensitive material about collection programs against adversaries such as Iran, Russia and China. Some refer to operations that in some cases involve countries not publicly allied with the United States.

The process of informing officials in capital after capital about the risk of disclosure is delicate. In some cases, one part of the cooperating government may know about the collaboration while others — such as the foreign ministry — may not, the officials said. The documents, if disclosed, could compromise operations, officials said.

The notifications come as the Obama administration is scrambling to placate allies after allegations that the NSA has spied on foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The reports have forced the administration to downplay operations targeting friends while also attempting to preserve other programs that depend on provisional partners. In either case, trust in the United States may be compromised.

“It is certainly a concern, just as much as the U.S. collection [against European allies] being put in the news, if not more, because not only does it mean we have the potential of losing collection, but also of harming relationships,” a congressional aide said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is handling the job of informing the other intelligence services, the officials said. ODNI declined to comment.

In one case, for instance, the files contain information about a program run from a NATO country against Russia that provides valuable intelligence for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, said one U.S. official, who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. Snowden faces theft and espionage charges.

The narrative thrust here is that while the NSA is dealing with damage control, the cause of the damage was not the agency’s operations; it was Snowden’s revelations.

Instead of facing reality, the intelligence community would apparently now rather engage in a farcical exercise: present itself as victim of what it regards as the mischievous actions as a single man. The problem with this narrative (apart from the fact that it clearly misrepresents Edward Snowden’s actions) is that it actually underlines the inherent weakness of the bloated post 9/11 intelligence edifice: that is, that its weakness derives in large part from its sheer size.

As much as the actions of the NSA should be viewed in geopolitical terms, they should also be seen as the result of the beguiling power of technology. That is to say, when something is presented as being technically feasible — such as recording all the metadata associated with global communications — then that possibility becomes so alluring, that more fundamental questions get shunted to one side.

An obsession with accumulating more and more information turns into a maniacal desire. The expansion of the intelligence gathering process becomes a self-justifying, blindly funded enterprise which loses sight of basic questions about the value of the data, the means through which it can be productively analyzed, and the social and political implications of sanctioning perpetually expanding mass surveillance along with highly ill-advised targeted surveillance.

Washington Post reporters collude with source of ‘secret memos’ on drone strikes in Pakistan

The Washington Post reports:

Despite repeatedly denouncing the CIA’s drone campaign, top officials in Pakistan’s government have for years secretly endorsed the program and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts, according to top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos obtained by The Washington Post.

The files describe dozens of drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal region and include maps as well as before-and-after aerial photos of targeted compounds over a four-year stretch from late 2007 to late 2011 in which the campaign intensified dramatically.

Markings on the documents indicate that many of them were prepared by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center specifically to be shared with Pakistan’s government. They tout the success of strikes that killed dozens of alleged al-Qaeda operatives and assert repeatedly that no civilians were harmed.

It’s easy to conjure an image of reporters Bob Woodward and Greg Miller studying these documents and their markings, amazed at the trove of information they stumbled upon. But who are they kidding?

The key word in the opening sentence of their report is “obtained.”

I have a hunch these documents weren’t obtained while rummaging through dumpsters behind the some State Department offices. Neither do I imagine were they were handed to Woodward in a dimly lit parking garage by an anonymous source. Neither do I believe a new whistle-blower is involved.

If the reporting was more honest it would not evoke an aura of mystery by using this shadowy expression, obtained. It would instead refer to memos provided to the Washington Post.

As gifts rather than a discovery, the key questions are who provided the memos and what was the source’s objective?

With Bob Woodward’s name in the byline, it’s reasonable to assume that this is a case of an official leak in exchange for services rendered.

The principle service comes in the form of the headline: “Secret memos reveal explicit nature of U.S., Pakistan agreement on drones”

It sounds like the CIA is pushing back against Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s demand that the U.S. needs to respect Pakistan’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” and end drone strikes.

The purpose of the CIA in leaking these memos is to show that drone strikes have been conducted with the Pakistani government’s cooperation. But given the relative power of the U.S. and Pakistan, that cooperation is more like the kind the mafia earns through a protection racket.

The report later says:

In a measure of the antagonism between the two sides, a 2010 memo sent by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to its embassy in Washington outlined a plan to undermine the CIA.

“Kindly find enclosed a list of 36 U.S. citizens who are [believed] to be CIA special agents and would be visiting Pakistan for some special task,” said the memo, signed by an official listed as the country’s director general for Americas. “Kindly do not repeat not issue visas to the same.”

Referring to this as a plan to undermine the CIA, is a curious choice of phrase.

The report makes no mention of an event in early 2011 that seriously ruptured U.S.-Pakistani relations, revealing the threat the CIA poses far beyond Waziristan.

Raymond Davis, a 36-year-old former special forces soldier employed by the CIA, was arrested after he shot two suspected armed robbers in Lahore.

Shortly after the killings, The Guardian reported:

Pakistani prosecutors accuse the spy of excessive force, saying he fired 10 shots and got out of his car to shoot one man twice in the back as he fled. The man’s body was found 30 feet from his motorbike.

“It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat,” a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.

The Pakistani government is aware of Davis’s CIA status yet has kept quiet in the face of immense American pressure to free him under the Vienna convention. Last week President Barack Obama described Davis as “our diplomat” and dispatched his chief diplomatic troubleshooter, Senator John Kerry, to Islamabad. Kerry returned home empty-handed.

Many Pakistanis are outraged at the idea of an armed American rampaging through their second-largest city.

A passage in the Post’s report that seems revealing in a way that doesn’t serve the CIA’s interests is this:

[T]he documents also reveal a major shift in the CIA’s strategy in Pakistan as it broadened the campaign beyond “high-value” al-Qaeda targets and began firing missiles at gatherings of low-level fighters.

The files trace the CIA’s embrace of a controversial practice that came to be known as “signature strikes,” approving targets based on patterns of suspicious behavior detected from drone surveillance cameras and ordering strikes even when the identities of those to be killed weren’t known.

At times, the evidence seemed circumstantial.

On Jan. 14, 2010, a gathering of 17 people at a suspected Taliban training camp was struck after the men were observed conducting “assassination training, sparring, push-ups and running.” The compound was linked “by vehicle” to an al-Qaeda facility hit three years earlier.

On March 23, 2010, the CIA launched missiles at a “person of interest” in a suspected al-Qaeda compound. The man caught the agency’s attention after he had “held two in-car meetings, and swapped vehicles three times along the way.”

Other accounts describe militants targeted because of the extent of “deference” they were shown when arriving at a suspect site. A May 11, 2010, entry noted the likely deaths of 12 men who were “probably” involved in cross-border attacks against the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

Although often uncertain about the identities of its targets, the CIA expresses remarkable confidence in its accuracy, repeatedly ruling out the possibility that any civilians were killed.

One table estimates that as many as 152 “combatants” were killed and 26 were injured during the first six months of 2011. Lengthy columns with spaces to record civilian deaths or injuries contain nothing but zeroes.

Those assertions are at odds with research done by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, which released a report this week based on investigations of nine drone strikes in Pakistan between May 2012 and July 2013. After interviewing survivors and assembling other evidence, the group concluded that at least 30 civilians had been killed in the attacks.

White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged Tuesday that drone strikes “have resulted in civilian casualties” but defended the program as highly precise and said there is a “wide gap” between U.S. estimates and those of independent groups.

That someone targeted by a missile strike could be described as a “person of interest” is beyond Orwellian.

In law enforcement parlance, a person of interest is someone that authorities are investigating — someone who may end up being arrested.

To catch the “interest” of the Obama administration, however, apparently means marked for killing. Maybe the expression is an abbreviation: such-and-such is a person the U.S. would be interested in eliminating. A type of person who might be described in an addendum to Obama’s kill list — on his wish list. An opportunistic target; a person of interest.

What the report makes clear is that a person of interest turns out to be someone who catches the CIA’s attention on the basis of mere suspicion. The agency forms the impression this person’s up to no good and so kills him — just to be safe.

As damning as this account might sound, we then come to what can be called the bureaucrat’s defense: the records show…

Amnesty International can issue a damning report on the civilian casualties from drone strikes, but from Obama on downwards, everyone can plead innocence. How? By citing official records which show columns of zeros when it comes to civilians killed or injured.

Mistakes, there may have been a few, but every strike was launched on good faith by an honest American, serving this nation and blessed by God.

American myopia: spying on allies

An editorial in the Washington Post says: In response to the serial revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) spying against allied countries, the Obama administration offers two standard explanations. One is pragmatic: sweeping up phone records and other data in places such as France and Germany is an important counterterrorism operation that protects citizens of those nations as well as Americans. The other is tinged with cynicism: Many governments spy on one another, including on their friends, so no one should be shocked to learn that the United States does it as well.

These are reasonable answers, to a point. Germany and other European countries have been home to dangerous Islamist militants, including several perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. At least some of the spying on such targets is done in cooperation with European intelligence services. And France — which summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to express “shock” at the latest revelation of NSA data mining — is known to conduct similar operations, as well as industrial espionage sometimes aimed at U.S. targets.

There are, however, a couple of problems with the administration’s response. Some of the spying, revealed in leaks originating with NSA defector Edward Snowden, has targeted top political leaders and diplomats, including the last two presidents of Mexico, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and embassies and offices of the European Union. The NSA apparently scooped up e-mails and text messages of Ms. Rousseff and her top aides, as well as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto — something that cannot be explained away as counterterrorism.

The breezy U.S. response also overlooks the damage that revelations of spying are doing to important relationships. A furious Ms. Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington last month and her government is now busy concocting ways to lessen U.S. leverage on the Internet, including a new encrypted e-mail service. French protests may be hypocritical, but they could also lead to demands that anti-surveillance measures be included in a proposed transatlantic trade treaty. Already the European Parliament is considering legislation that would require technology firms such as Google to consult E.U. governments before complying with U.S. warrants seeking data.

There may be justification for some of this spying. Brazil, for example, has been a problematic partner in recent years, working at cross-purposes to U.S. policy on Iran and several Latin American countries. But the potential benefits of collecting intelligence on nominally friendly leaders has to be weighed against the potential blowback if the operations are exposed — which in the Internet era has become increasingly likely. It seems unlikely that anything gleaned from Ms. Rousseff’s e-mail is worth the trouble it has caused.

Without quite conceding this point, President Obama has been suggesting that U.S. surveillance practices may need adjustment. He promised Mr. Peña Nieto an investigation into the spying and told French President François Hollande in a phone call Monday that there were “legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed.” The review that’s underway surely will not lead to an end to foreign surveillance activity, nor should it. But better political controls are needed, along with an injection of common sense.

The core issue here is not about surveillance practices per se but rather the mentality that has facilitated those practices. America continues to strut around the globe with a sense of impunity — with the attitude that its unchallenged power insulates it from any lasting harm that might be caused by offending others. In other words, the American mindset has long been and continues to be: we can get away with anything.

The U.S. can launch ~~preemptive~~ preventive wars, conduct extrajudicial killings, engage in kidnapping, operate secret prisons, use torture, disregard basic human rights, and spy on the rest of the world, all without constraint. Were any other country to conduct itself in the same way, it would be branded by the U.S. government as a rogue state and face all kinds of threats and sanctions. But America defines itself as exceptional.

To the extent that this grandiosity once had an objective basis, this is now rapidly evaporating. The assumption that our allies need us more than we need them will eventually no longer hold. Indeed, in many ways it does not hold now.

New regulations that could soon be approved by the European Union will force companies such as Google to seek the authorization of European data protection authorities before complying with NSA data requests on European citizens. Any company failing to comply with these regulations could face fines of 5% of global revenue. That means, based on its current revenues, Google could get fined $2-3 billion for an infraction.

The U.S. government and U.S. companies will no doubt continue to fight against the imposition of these regulations, but as much as Americans may be in the habit of scoffing at European power, the fact is America is only two-thirds the size of the EU. The megalomania of NSA chief Keith Alexander notwithstanding, the interests of 500 million people can no longer be trampled on so easily in the name of America’s national security interests.

Learning from nature

Human beings have great skill and ingenuity in building machines, yet to the extent that we see ourselves as machine-builders and tool-users, we easily lose touch with the reality that we are organisms that can only exist because we coexist in an incredibly complex set of relations with constellations of other organisms.

Through a fixation on our capacities as agents of change, we see ourselves as distinct, individual, and set apart, yet in fact each of our bodies is really a society in which the cells we claim as our own are vastly outnumbered by bacteria that are not only essential for the assimilation of nutrients but also regulate our immune systems and even affect neurotransmitters in the brain. Our sense of autonomy is pure fiction.

When scientists re-engineer bacteria (see “Redesigning nature”), they are not simply making alterations to the DNA. They are also imposing the machine-builder’s mentality on the natural world. They are assuming that if nature can be shaped in accordance with human designs, it can be improved.

Patrick Blanc is a French botanist and creator of vertical gardens.

I just stumbled across Blanc’s work, so I actually have no idea what he thinks, yet his vertical gardens seem to be an expression of the opposite of the bioengineers’ orientation.

Turning the stark face of a building into a vibrant garden seems like a good way of showing that nature offers vastly more to the human world than we can produce by “enhancing” nature.

Instead of figuring out how we can redesign nature — as though we are its masters — we need to be informed by nature, that we might become better students.

L'Oasis d'Aboukir, Paris

Redesigning nature

One does not need to believe in a deity animating the natural world, in order to disturbed by the idea of manufactured organisms.

For the first time, scientists have created an organism with a new genetic code. We are told that recoded bacterium will be converted into:

… a living foundry, capable of biomanufacturing new classes of “exotic” proteins and polymers. These new molecules could lay the foundation for a new generation of materials, nanostructures, therapeutics, and drug delivery vehicles…

Treating DNA as a construction material involves a kind of hubris that glosses over what would seem to be inevitable: that there will be unintended consequences. By definition, we do not know what these will be.

SciTechDaily reports: Scientists from Yale and Harvard have recoded the entire genome of an organism and improved a bacterium’s ability to resist viruses, a dramatic demonstration of the potential of rewriting an organism’s genetic code.

“This is the first time the genetic code has been fundamentally changed,” said Farren Isaacs, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale and co-senior author of the research published October 18 in the journal Science. “Creating an organism with a new genetic code has allowed us to expand the scope of biological function in a number of powerful ways.”

The creation of a genomically recoded organism raises the possibility that researchers might be able to retool nature and create potent new forms of proteins to accomplish a myriad purposes — from combating disease to generating new classes of materials.

The research — headed by Isaacs and co-author George Church of Harvard Medical School — is a product of years of studies in the emerging field of synthetic biology, which seeks to re-design natural biological systems for useful purposes.

In this case, the researchers changed fundamental rules of biology. [Continue reading…]

In mountains of scrap, America leaves its mark on Afghanistan

After thirteen years of war, a mission long described as an effort to win hearts and minds, for many Afghans for generations to come, the enduring memory of America will be of this nation’s grotesque wastefulness. America will have become synonymous with trash as the legacy of a pointless war will be precisely that: a pile of trash.

But as if to highlight America’s exceptional relationship with trash, in this instance in an orgy of destruction, items of value are first getting crushed before they get left behind.

The Washington Post reports: The armored trucks, televisions, ice cream scoops and nearly everything else shipped here for America’s war against the Taliban are now part of the world’s biggest garage sale. Every week, as the U.S. troop drawdown accelerates, the United States is selling 12 million to 14 million pounds of its equipment on the Afghan market.

Returning that gear to the United States from a landlocked country halfway around the world would be prohibitively expensive, according to U.S. officials. Instead, they’re leaving behind $7 billion worth of supplies, a would-be boon to the fragile Afghan economy.

But there’s one catch: The equipment is being destroyed before it’s offered to the Afghan people — to ensure that treadmills, air-conditioning units and other rudimentary appliances aren’t used to make roadside bombs.

“Many non-military items have timing equipment or other components in them that can pose a threat. For example, timers can be attached to explosives. Treadmills, stationary bikes, many household appliances and devices, et cetera, have timers,” said Michelle McCaskill, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency.

That policy has produced more scrap metal than Afghanistan has ever seen. It has also led to frustration among Afghans, who feel as if they are being robbed of items such as flat-panel televisions and armored vehicles that they could use or sell — no small thing in a country where the average annual income hovers at just over $500.

In Afghanistan, nicknamed the “graveyard of empires,” foreign forces are remembered for what they leave behind. In the 1840s, the British left forts that still stand today. In the 1980s, the Russians left tanks, trucks and aircraft strewn about the country. The United States is leaving heaps of mattresses, barbed wire and shipping containers in scrap yards near its shrinking bases.

“This is America’s dustbin,” said Sufi Khan, a trader standing in the middle of an immense scrap yard outside Bagram air base, the U.S. military’s sprawling headquarters for eastern Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

Blogging for old media

News this week that eBay founder Pierre Morad Omidyar is ready to invest $250 million in a new media venture, should have come as unsettling news to staff at the Washington Post.

Jay Rosen says Omidyar “was one of the people approached by the Washington Post Company about buying the Post,” and since Amazon’s Jeffrey Bezos paid $250 million for the Post, it doesn’t sound like he outbid Omidyar. On the contrary, it sounds more like Omidyar felt like if he was going to spend that amount of money, it would be better spent creating a new organization than taking over an old institution.

Technology journalist David Kirkpatrick, describes the Post’s buyer like this: “Bezos is like a trickster. He’s like a very calculating, secretive genius.” Chances are, he views his purchase as a technologist and entrepreneur would: the acquisition of a platform and a strong brand. The bits inside that structure — traditionally known as journalists — must all be aware that they are each expendable.

So what’s a lowly blogger inside the newspaper going to do when afraid that he might seen get trimmed off like a piece of fat? Take new risks and try and stand out? Or curry favor inside the organization by flattering his superiors?

There is a social and journalistic taboo around speculating about motives. After all, since motives are inherently private, such speculation can easily be refuted — even if it happens to be accurate. Still, assessing motives is something that human beings do all the time, even if discretion usually dictates that those assessments, like the motives themselves, also remain concealed. Once in a while, though, it’s worth breaking the taboo.

On Wednesday, the Post’s associate editor and columnist, David Ignatius, revealed this:

The Turkish-Israeli relationship became so poisonous early last year that the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to have disclosed to Iranian intelligence the identities of up to 10 Iranians who had been meeting inside Turkey with their Mossad case officers.

Opinion writers like Ignatius revel in their occasional ability to break news, since it underlines their privileged access to high-level sources. At the same time, they have a habit of making themselves a mouthpiece for such sources. Ignatius, for instance, has been branded as “the CIA’s spokesman at The Washington Post.”

On Thursday, Max Fisher, the Post’s foreign affairs blogger, took the opportunity to give Ignatius’s column an extra boost and suggested that it might have helped resolve an enduring mystery: why it had taken the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, almost three years to apologize to Turkey for the deadly attack on the Mavi Marmara in 2010.

That refusal to apologize is now “much more understandable” — at least in Fisher’s mind — now that (thanks to Ignatius) we know about Turkey’s “effort to slap the Israelis” by outing their Iranian intelligence assets.

Under the headline, “Now we know why Netanyahu wouldn’t apologize for the Gaza flotilla raid,” Fisher is nevertheless forced to concede that this “explanation” explains virtually nothing: “This does not explain, of course, why Netanyahu wouldn’t have apologized between the initial 2010 raid and this reported 2012 spy outing.”

Indeed. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s unwillingness to apologize may in fact answer what Fisher regards as a remaining mystery: “Why did the Turkish government out these Israeli spies?” Urrmmm… how about because the Israelis wouldn’t apologize for killing nine Turkish citizens. (Note, Turkey now denies the outing ever occurred and says Ignatius’s story is a smear campaign.)

Now if Fisher really wanted to dig into the bad blood between Turkey and Israel, he might want to make a less complimentary reference to Ignatius and look back at the 2009 row at Davos which the columnist seriously mishandled.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan took exception to a thundering address delivered by Israeli president Shimon Peres who claimed that the IDF’s conduct, while slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, was above reproach. Ignatius tried to hush Erdogan by insisting that everyone would rather get to dinner, after which the Turkish prime minister famously stormed off the stage.

Fisher wants to point out that “many developments in international relations happen in secret,” as indeed they do, and that only later are some of these mysteries unraveled by sage-like columnists.

But in this case, the columnist was no sage and the most important developments were highly visible.

Documents reveal role of NSA’s targetted surveillance in drone warfare

NSA surveillance allowed the CIA to kill Hassan Ghul, a key al Qaeda operative, in a drone strike in Pakistan a year ago.

What further evidence could anyone need to accept that mass surveillance is necessary for America’s national security?

Sadly, that’s probably a strong argument in the sense that it’s an argument likely have its intended effect. Which is to say, if people believe that sifting through everyone’s email is what it takes to eliminate al Qaeda, then most Americans will probably acquiesce to this loss of privacy — a small price to pay in the fight against terrorism, so the thinking is meant to go.

The Washington Post reports:

It was an innocuous e-mail, one of millions sent every day by spouses with updates on the situation at home. But this one was of particular interest to the National Security Agency and contained clues that put the sender’s husband in the crosshairs of a CIA drone.

Days later, Hassan Ghul — an associate of Osama bin Laden who provided a critical piece of intelligence that helped the CIA find the al-Qaeda leader — was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged killing Ghul. But documents provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm his demise in October 2012 and reveal the agency’s extensive involvement in the targeted killing program that has served as a centerpiece of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy.

An al-Qaeda operative who had a knack for surfacing at dramatic moments in the post-Sept. 11 story line, Ghul was an emissary to Iraq for the terrorist group at the height of that war. He was captured in 2004 and helped expose bin Laden’s courier network before spending two years at a secret CIA prison. Then, in 2006, the United States delivered him to his native Pakistan, where he was released and returned to the al-Qaeda fold.

But beyond filling in gaps about Ghul, the documents provide the most detailed account of the intricate collaboration between the CIA and the NSA in the drone campaign.

The Post is withholding many details about those missions, at the request of U.S. intelligence officials who cited potential damage to ongoing operations and national security.

The NSA is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets,” an NSA spokeswoman said in a statement provided to The Post on Wednesday, adding that the agency’s operations “protect the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

So, for readers who don’t parse the reporting carefully, the narrative thread here is that contrary to the claims of its critics, the NSA isn’t in the business of spying on Americans; it has a vital role in hunting down terrorists.

But keep going — all the way down to paragraphs fourteen and fifteen:

The [leaked] documents do not explain how the Ghul e-mail was obtained or whether it was intercepted using legal authorities that have emerged as a source of controversy in recent months and enable the NSA to compel technology giants including Microsoft and Google to turn over information about their users. Nor is there a reference to another NSA program facing scrutiny after Snowden’s leaks, its metadata collection of numbers dialed by nearly every person in the United States.

To the contrary, the records indicate that the agency depends heavily on highly targeted network penetrations to gather information that wouldn’t otherwise be trapped in surveillance nets that it has set at key Internet gateways. [Emphasis mine.]

Or, to put it more bluntly, we have yet to be shown any evidence that mass surveillance plays any significant role in the war against al Qaeda. In tracking down Ghul, the crucial element appears to have been “a surveillance blanket over dozens of square miles of northwest Pakistan” — not a surveillance blanket covering the world.

And having said that, even while mass surveillance by the NSA seems to have prompted greater concern among Americans both inside and outside Washington than many other forms of America’s outlaw conduct over the last decade, the larger issue about which far fewer people show any interest is the policy of sanctioned assassination.

That an American president can now operate like a mafia boss is apparently OK — so long as every man on his hit list has an Arabic name.

Syria: ‘Chemical weapons sites’ and ‘rebel-held territory’

I get the sense that for some people, a belief that the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21 was carried out by rebels, has some of the elements of religious conviction. Faith can be sustained by the smallest of infrequent ‘signs’ — such a sign appeared in a New York Times report on Tuesday.

A Western diplomat in the Arab world said that though the Syrian government was legally responsible for dismantling its chemical weapons under an international agreement, its opponents should also cooperate in the process, because several chemical weapons sites were close to confrontation lines or within rebel-held territory.

Emptywheel reads this as “the clearest indication yet that it isn’t just access routes to chemical weapons sites that the rebels control, but that the rebels control some of the sites themselves.”

Not so fast. Firstly, given the short shelf-life of armed chemical weapons, we shouldn’t assume that a chemical weapons site necessarily contains any chemical weapons. It may only contain the materials necessary for assembling such weapons. Moreover, there’s a big difference between having access to such a site and having the knowledge to make use of what it contains.

Secondly — and just as important — chemical weapons sites “within rebel-held territory” does not necessarily imply chemical weapons sites under rebel control. Since the Assad regime retains control of all of Syrian air space, even where rebels might have closed off land routes to a particular site, it may still remain under government control and still be receiving supplies by air.

Snowden leaks: David Cameron urges committee to investigate Guardian

The Guardian reports: David Cameron has encouraged a Commons select committee to investigate whether the Guardian has broken the law or damaged national security by publishing secrets leaked by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

He made his proposal in response to a question from former defence secretary Liam Fox, saying the Guardian had been guilty of double standards for exposing the scandal of phone hacking by newspapers and yet had gone on to publish secrets from the NSA taken by Snowden.

Speaking at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Cameron said: “The plain fact is that what has happened has damaged national security and in many ways the Guardian themselves admitted that when they agreed, when asked politely by my national security adviser and cabinet secretary to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files.

“So they know that what they’re dealing with is dangerous for national security. I think it’s up to select committees in this house if they want to examine this issue and make further recommendations.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian knew that they were dealing with goons acting on the orders of Cameron’s intelligence chiefs who wouldn’t take no for an answer. They also knew that destroying the hard drives in question had no security significance whatsoever, given that copies of the files on those drives were all safe outside the UK.

On July 18th, [editor, Alan] Rusbridger received a call from Oliver Robbins, the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, alerting him that agents would be coming to the Guardian’s offices to seize the hard drives containing the Snowden files. Rusbridger again explained that the files were also on encrypted computers outside England, but his reasoning did not sway Robbins. Rusbridger asked if, instead, his staff members could destroy the files themselves, and Robbins consented. That Saturday, Rusbridger told associates to take the five laptops from the bunker to the basement and to smash the hard drives and circuit boards in front of two agents from the GCHQ.

If Cameron wants to draw any lesson from the incident, it should be that the editor of The Guardian is smarter than his own deputy national security adviser. By agreeing to let the drives get destroyed, the British government threw away its best opportunity to discover which files Snowden had taken — something that neither the NSA nor GCHQ has ever been able to establish.

Who wants to help improve the image of an oppressive government?

pr-execs

The deceit at the core of public relations is contained in the name.

Public Relations, or PR — it has a Stalinist blandness, as though it might perform the most benign, necessary, and mundane of functions. One might imagine that someone in public relations dealt with issues like making sure the trains run on time.

But if its name was more befitting of the function, then PR should be called mind twisting. It’s all about obscuring reality and shaping perceptions so that those perceptions meet the interests of the PR client, irrespective of the interests of the public.

The autocratic and brutal rulers of Bahrain have called out for the services of the best mind twisters in the business and bids have been made by companies that clearly have few concerns about tarnishing their own images. Why would they? After all, most PR outfits have less public visibility than intelligence agencies.

Bahrain Watch is calling attention to six major American and British PR firms that are hoping to win a new contract with the Bahrain government, those being, Bell Pottinger, Hill & Knowlton, Weber Shandwick, Portland Communications, Citigate Dewe Rogerson, and Consulum.

These aren’t household names and neither are the people who run them — but they should be, because these are people who not only advise Middle Eastern autocrats but just as often they counsel the leaders of Western governments.

Lord Bell, chairman of Bell Pottinger, was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher during three general election campaigns. Jack Martin, chairman and CEO of Hill Knowlton, was a senior advisor to the Democratic National Committee and the U.S. Senate Democratic Committee. Jack Leslie, chairman of Weber Shandwick, was a senior aide to U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Tim Allan, founder of Portland Communications, was a key media adviser to Tony Blair and served as deputy press secretary in Number 10, Downing Street.

With advisers like these, it’s small wonder we have such little confidence in our own democratic leaders. If those who have perfected the art of lubricating the wheels of government in Washington and London, can just as easily offer their services to a government that “has received widespread condemnation from international human rights bodies for human rights abuses, including arbitrary detentions, torture, mass political sackings and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression and association,” what does this say about the condition of contemporary Western governance?

Everyone knows our political system is rotten, but far too little attention is given to the individuals who, outside the media spotlight, have played such an instrumental role in turning democracy itself into the practice of public relations.

How does journalism turn into stenography?

Margaret Sullivan, public editor for the New York Times, writes: Eric Schmitt remembers being surprised when, as a member of a Times newsroom committee on reporting practices, he was given information about what bothered readers of The Times most. It wasn’t political bias, or factual errors, or delivery problems.

“The No. 1 complaint, far and away, was anonymous sources,” Mr. Schmitt, a longtime and well-respected national security reporter in the Washington bureau, told me last week. “It goes to the heart of our credibility.”

The committee’s 2004 report followed two damaging episodes at The Times: the flawed reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war and the dishonesty of the rogue reporter Jayson Blair. That report reminded journalists to use anonymous sources sparingly. The current stylebook puts it this way: “Anonymity is a last resort.”

Mr. Schmitt and I talked last week because I had criticized an article that he co-wrote earlier this month, which not only relied heavily on anonymous government sources but also described them in the most general terms, including “a U.S. official.”

From that conversation, and others with Times journalists, and from the contact I have continually with readers, I see a disconnect — a major gap in understanding — between how journalists perceive the use of anonymous sources and how many readers perceive them.

For many journalists, they can be a necessity. And that necessity is increasing — especially for stories involving national security — now that the Obama administration’s crackdown on press leaks has made news sources warier of speaking on the record. (Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, has written revealingly about this for the Committee to Project Journalists.)

“It’s almost impossible to get people who know anything to talk,” Bill Hamilton, who edits national security coverage for The Times, told me. Getting them to talk on the record is even harder. “So we’re caught in this dilemma.”

But for many readers, anonymous sources are a scourge, a detriment to the straightforward, believable journalism they demand. With a greater-than-ever desire for transparency in journalism, readers see this practice as “stenography” — the kind of unquestioning reporting that takes at face value what government officials say.

Whether journalism appears like stenography does not hinge on over-reliance on anonymous sources. It can just as easily come in the form of an on-the-record interview such as one with director of the NSA, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, published yesterday.

Reporters David E Sanger and Thom Shanker wrote: “He has given a number of speeches in recent weeks to counter a highly negative portrayal of the N.S.A.’s work, but the 90-minute interview was his most extensive personal statement on the issue to date.”

Given the paltry amount of information their report contains, one has to ask: what were they talking about for 90 minutes?

If journalists want to demonstrate that they are not operating like stenographers, then they need to start reporting on the process of reporting.

“The director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, said in an interview that to prevent terrorist attacks he saw no effective alternative to the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of telephone and other electronic metadata from Americans.”

Did Sanger or Shanker challenge that assertion? Did they point out that by the NSA’s own admission there has only been one conviction that was based on the use of this data?

If during the course of a 90 minute interview, Alexander made few substantive statements, was it because he wasn’t being asked any tough questions or because he deflected or refused to answer such questions?

Transparency is not simply about sources revealing their identities; it’s also about journalists revealing how they work.

We get told: “General Alexander was by turns folksy and firm in the interview.” And how were the reporters? Chummy? Meek? Deferential?

In a July report on the NSA tightening its security procedures, Sanger’s primary source was Ashton B. Carter, the deputy secretary of defense. Sanger neglected to mention that Carter is “an old friend of many, many years”. Is Alexander another of Sanger’s old friends?

Hitler’s underestimated charisma

Volker Ullrich, author of a new biography of Hitler, says that although the Holocaust — “this last, radical extreme of the political utopian vision of a racially homogeneous society” — was supported by “very many Germans,” it would have been “unimaginable without Hitler.”

Would another Holocaust be imaginable without another Hitler?

In terms of the scale of his destructive impact, Hitler was not unique. Stalin is widely viewed as having been responsible for 10 million or more deaths, yet rarely does one hear the phrase “another Stalin.”

Among genocidal dictators Hitler is singled out as exceptional. But those who warn of the danger of another Jewish Holocaust seem to imply that Hitler was the expression of an undercurrent of evil which could at any time give rise to another and equally dangerous manifestation — another Hitler.

The problem with this treatment of Hitler as a timeless embodiment of antisemitism is that it separates a principle of evil from an individual and the historical context in which he gained power.

While it’s certainly possible that there will be another genocidal dictator who turns out to be just as destructive as Hitler, there won’t be another Hitler. There might be another Holocaust, yet there seems just as much if not more risk that its victims turn out to be Muslims rather than Jews.

Volker Ullrich: [Hitler’s] great talent was for the games of politics. It’s easy to underestimate the exceptional qualities and abilities he brought to bear in order to succeed in this field. In the space of just three years, he rose from an unknown veteran to the king of Munich, filling the city’s largest halls week after week.

SPIEGEL: Hitler was a lone wolf. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and eventually became a vegetarian. How does such an eccentric become a magnet for the masses?

Ullrich: Munich around 1920 was an ideal environment for a right-wing agitator, especially one who could give speeches as fiery as Hitler’s. But he was also a skilled tactician, outmaneuvering his competition step by step. He surrounded himself with followers who looked up to him devoutly. And he secured the support of influential patrons, especially the Bruckmanns, a well-respected couple in the publishing world; the Bechstein family, who made pianos; and of course the Wagners in Bayreuth, who soon came to treat him like one of the family.

SPIEGEL: Even the earliest reports of Hitler as a speaker note the exchange of energy between him and his listeners. “I had a peculiar sensation,” one eyewitness wrote in June 1919, “as if their excitement was his doing and at the same time also gave him voice in return.”

Ullrich: To understand Hitler’s power as a speaker, we must consider that he was not just the bellowing tavern demagogue we always picture, but in fact constructed his speeches very deliberately. He began very calmly, tentatively, almost as if he were feeling his way forward and trying to sense to what degree he had a hold of the audience so far. Not until he was certain of their approval did he escalate his word choice and gestures, becoming more aggressive. He continued this for two or three hours until he reached the climax, an intoxicating peak that left many listeners with tears running down their faces. When we watch clips of his speeches now, we’re generally seeing only the conclusion.

SPIEGEL: The writer Klaus Mann, who observed Hitler devouring a strawberry tart at Munich’s Carlton Tea Room in 1932, afterward wrote, “You want to be dictator, with that nose? Don’t make me laugh.” Did it require a certain sort of disposition to be fascinated by Hitler?

Ullrich: Klaus Mann had an instinctive, aesthetically motivated repulsion from the outset. But there are also reports of people who held a very negative view of Hitler at first, yet still got swept up and carried away when they experienced him. Among the effects of Rudolf Hess, who served as Hitler’s private secretary starting in 1925, I found letters in which he described to his fiancée their agitation tours around Germany. In one letter, he describes a gathering of business leaders in the city of Essen in April 1927. When Hitler entered the room, he was met with frosty silence, complete rejection. After two hours, it was thunderous applause. “An atmosphere such as at (Munich’s) Circus Krone,” Hess wrote.

Snowden may have been target of witch-hunt when he left CIA

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that “The CIA suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.”

The CIA disputes this account:

“The C.I.A did not file any report on Snowden indicating that it suspected he was trying to break into classified computer files to which he did not have authorized access while he was employed at the C.I.A., nor was he returned home from an overseas assignment because of such concerns,” Todd Ebitz, an agency spokesman, said in the statement.

In dispute is what Mr. Snowden did on his computer, and the agency’s response to it. The two officials cited by The Times said the C.I.A. suspected Mr. Snowden was trying to gain access to classified computer files he was not authorized to view. But other officials on Friday characterized the activity as much less serious, not involving potential security violations.

It was unclear why there was a divergence of opinion.

These officials on Friday also said that Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. of his own volition. But had he remained with the agency in Geneva, they said, Mr. Snowden faced a potentially time-consuming and critical internal inquiry prompted by his supervisor’s report, an investigation that was halted once he quit the C.I.A. in 2009 to join the N.S.A. as a contract employee at a military facility in Japan.

The first report said:

While it is unclear what exactly the supervisor’s negative report said, it coincides with a period of Mr. Snowden’s life in 2009 when he was a prolific online commenter on government and security issues, complained about civil surveillance and, according to a friend, was suffering “a crisis of conscience.”

So, it’s not too hard to connect the dots: it looks like the target of the CIA’s concern was not Snowden’s actions, but rather, his beliefs.

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