Author Archives: Paul Woodward

The slaughter of migrating songbirds

If there was a league table of suffering, designed to remind us of the issues that deserve the greatest share of human concern, the plight of songbirds might not come high on the list.

Yet rather than attempting to adjudicate how concern should be sliced and apportioned, maybe we should instead reflect on the insidious effects of indifference.

Looking at the world often feels like staring at a raw wound — our instincts tell us to turn away. But this turning away, quickly becomes a habit and the desire to insulate ourselves from pain ends up as a way of shutting out life.

Jonathan Franzen writes: In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was inspecting cages crowded with wild turtledoves and quail when one of the birdsellers saw the disapproval in my face and called out sarcastically, in Arabic: “You Americans feel bad about the birds, but you don’t feel bad about dropping bombs on someone’s homeland.”

I could have answered that it’s possible to feel bad about both birds and bombs, that two wrongs don’t make a right. But it seemed to me that the birdseller was saying something true about the problem of nature conservation in a world of human conflict, something not so easily refuted. He kissed his fingers to suggest how good the birds tasted, and I kept frowning at the cages.

To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes.

Italian hunters and poachers are the most notorious; for much of the year, the woods and wetlands of rural Italy crackle with gunfire and songbird traps. The food-loving French continue to eat ortolan buntings illegally, and France’s singularly long list of huntable birds includes many struggling species of shorebirds. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain; Maltese hunters, frustrated by a lack of native quarry, blast migrating raptors out of the sky; Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them by the plateful, in defiance of the law. [Continue reading…]

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The slow NSA slide show

The Washington Post calls it “The NSA slide you haven’t seen” when it should have simply said “Another NSA slide you haven’t seen.”

At the current rate, the thirty-some remaining slides that Edward Snowden leaked to the Post and The Guardian will all have been published sometime towards the end of this decade.

The new report says, “A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post and published here for the first time,” insinuating that this might not have come from Snowden, but if it wasn’t part of the 41-slide collection he leaked, then I would surmise this was an authorized leak. The only difference from a similar slide previously published by The Guardian is in the background image. It earlier showed the world, but now shows North America.

Perhaps the NSA feels that the revised slide will better evoke a sense that its surveillance operations target foreign communications entering the U.S. rather than functioning as a global drag net. Perhaps the NSA’s concern is that circles on each slide which could be taken to identify data collection points, should not point to locations in South America, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, but instead to the Eastern and Western United States.

Either way, I suspect the Post published this slide at the behest of the NSA.

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Washington Post still acting out. Time to seek counselling?

Ever since the Edward Snowden story slipped out of Barton Gellman’s grasp and The Guardian started running with it for every dollar its worth, the Washington Post has struggled to contain its rage.

Last week under the churlish headline, “The Guardian: Small British paper makes big impact with NSA stories,” Paul Farhi set the tone by referring to the Post’s competitor as “a newspaper that’s small and underweight even by British standards”.

Now, veteran reporter Walter Pincus joins the fray in a column that presents a string of supposedly challenging questions directed at The Guardian and more specifically at Glenn Greenwald.

The only question Pincus fails to ask is: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”

What both Pincus’ and Farhi’s pieces seem to reveal is ferment inside the newsroom — as though in each case reporters and editors fooled each other into believing that their unrestrained contempt for The Guardian would shine light on the dubious nature of their British counterpart. Instead, all they reveal is the American newspaper’s desperate and unseemly effort to reclaim lost status.

For a paper that views itself as a pillar of the Washington political establishment, its reporters need to compose themselves a bit better and perhaps do a few breathing exercises before they write.

Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand, can be relied on to continue with his breathing exercises as he writes:

On Monday night – roughly 36 hours ago from this moment – the Washington Post published an article by its long-time reporter Walter Pincus. The article concocted a frenzied and inane conspiracy theory: that it was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, working in secret with myself and Laura Poitras, who masterminded the Snowden leaks ahead of time and directed Snowden’s behavior, and then Assange, rather than have WikiLeaks publish the documents itself, generously directed them to the Guardian.

To peddle this tale, Pincus, in lieu of any evidence, spouted all sorts of accusatory innuendo masquerading as questions (“Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hawaii facility?” – “Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?” – “Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?”) and invoked classic guilt-by association techniques (“Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections, including as founding members in December of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation” – “Poitras and Greenwald have had close connections with Assange and WikiLeaks”).

Apparently, the Washington Post has decided to weigh in on the ongoing debate over “what is journalism?” with this answer: you fill up articles on topics you don’t know the first thing about with nothing but idle speculation, rank innuendo, and evidence-free accusations, all under the guise of “just asking questions”. You then strongly imply that other journalists who have actually broken a big story are involved in a rampant criminal conspiracy without bothering even to ask them about it first, all while hiding from your readers the fact that they have repeatedly and in great detail addressed the very “questions” you’re posing.

But shoddy journalism from the Washington Post is far too common to be worth noting. What was far worse was that Pincus’ wild conspiracy theorizing was accomplished only by asserting blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods. [Continue reading…]

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David Brooks: Islamists ‘lack the mental equipment to govern’

David Brooks is the kind of mild-mannered conservative who was able to move from the Weekly Standard to the New York Times as easily as a hand sliding into a glove.

To describe the largest political class in the Middle East as lacking the equipment to govern, would, from anyone else’s mouth, sound like the crudest form of bigotry. Brooks makes it sound like incontrovertible truth.

Islamists might be determined enough to run effective opposition movements and committed enough to provide street-level social services. But they lack the mental equipment to govern. Once in office, they are always going to centralize power and undermine the democracy that elevated them.

Nathan Brown made that point about the Muslim Brotherhood recently in The New Republic: “The tight-knit organization built for resilience under authoritarianism made for an inward-looking, even paranoid movement when it tried to refashion itself as a governing party.”

Once elected, the Brotherhood subverted judicial review, cracked down on civil society, arrested opposition activists, perverted the constitution-writing process, concentrated power and made democratic deliberations impossible.

It’s no use lamenting Morsi’s bungling because incompetence is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam. We’ve seen that in Algeria, Iran, Palestine and Egypt: real-world, practical ineptitude that leads to the implosion of the governing apparatus.

I’m surprised Brooks included a link to Brown’s piece in TNR because anyone who goes there will see that the George Washington University professor doesn’t share Brooks’ contempt for Islamists. Brown writes:

In studying Islamist movements over the last decade, I generally found that the most rewarding time to speak to leaders was about a year or so after an election. During the heat of the political battle, they made decisions like most politicians do (on the fly, often overreacting to yesterday’s headlines) and spoke like most politicians do (providing glib spin than reflective analysis). But at calmer moments, they spoke less like politicians and more openly. And there was a reason why: The movements prided themselves (justifiably) on an ability to learn.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its sister organizations represent the most successful non-governmental organizations in Arab history. No other movements have been able to sustain, reinvent, and replicate themselves over so much time and space. And there are two secrets to that success: a tight-knit organizational structure that rewards loyalty and the ability to adjust and adapt.

How high does the Republican Party score on its ability to adjust and adapt? On the basis of its current trajectory as America’s old white party, I’d say: not very well.

Let’s suppose that Egypt’s military swiftly organize new presidential elections and Mohamed ElBaradei becomes the face of secularist rule in Egypt. Will Brooks then give the secularist just one year to see if they possess the mental equipment to govern?

It looks like it won’t be long before the New York Times columnist reverts to the neoconservatives’ default position: Muslims aren’t ready for democracy.

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Ignore the NSA — France, too, is sweeping up data

The New York Times reports: Days after President François Hollande sternly told the United States to stop spying on its allies, the newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France.

Le Monde reported that the General Directorate for External Security does the same kind of data collection as the American National Security Agency and the British GCHQ, but does so without clear legal authority.

The system is run with “complete discretion, at the margins of legality and outside all serious control,” the newspaper said, describing it as “a-legal.”

Nonetheless, the French data is available to the various police and security agencies of France, the newspaper reported, and the data is stored for an indeterminate period. The main interest of the agency, the paper said, is to trace who is talking to whom, when and from where and for how long, rather than in listening in to random conversations. But the French also record data from large American networks like Google and Facebook, the newspaper said.

Le Monde’s report, which French officials would not comment on publicly, appeared to make some of the French outrage about the revelations of Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, about the American data-collection program appear somewhat hollow. [Continue reading…]

That France’s political leaders — like those of every other Western democracy — are hypocrites will probably not come as news to the French or anyone else. But in reporting this, the New York Times appears to be assuming its default position: always defend governmental power — the power that this newspaper and its reporters mainline like heroin.

Mass surveillance? Everyone’s doing it. Let’s move on to the next story (and get a pat on the head from the White House).

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Snowden threatens American vanity more than national security

Following the diversion of the Bolivian president’s jet, which was forced to land in Austria on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports:

The highly unusual detour of a head of state’s flight came just days after Obama seemed to signal that the United States would avoid extraordinary measures beyond seeking Snowden’s extradition. “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” Obama said during a visit to Senegal last week.

It also pointed to a possible intelligence blunder. Still, former U.S. officials said that if the United States were involved, it may reflect a calculation by the Obama administration that the risk of embarrassment from an unsuccessful search was more than offset by a desire to avoid seeing Snowden arrive to a hero’s welcome in La Paz.

Before departing Moscow, Morales had suggested his country would be willing to consider granting Snowden asylum, a remark that triggered speculation that the Bolivian president might head home with the former NSA contractor in tow.

For that reason, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair said, U.S. intelligence officials would probably have been asked not whether they could be certain Snowden was on the aircraft, but whether they could assure the White House that he was not.

The efforts being made by the U.S. to prevent Snowden finding political asylum have little to do with national security. After all, he has made it clear that he has already taken measures to ensure that even if he is arrested, he has already protected access to the classified material in his possession — meaning, it will remain available for future publication even if he is behind bars.

So, the hunt in which the U.S. government is now engaged has nothing to do with preventing new leaks. It’s intended purpose is to show that anyone who has the audacity to challenge American power will lose.

The prospect of Edward Snowden receiving a hero’s welcome in Bolivia or anywhere else, evokes an iconic image of American defeat. In spite of its ability to conduct mass surveillance, twist the arms of smaller governments, wage wars anywhere on the globe, assassinate its enemies at the press of a button, and in so many other ways reinforce its claim to be the most powerful nation on earth, it now risks being outsmarted by an individual.

The American Goliath cannot tolerate the idea of losing.

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Small U.S. paper, jealous of the attention The Guardian is receiving

A headline in the Washington Post says it all: “The Guardian: Small British paper makes big impact with NSA stories“.

Minus the put down — “small British paper” — the report is somewhat complimentary of The Guardian‘s numerous recent successes. But it’s not until paragraph six that the Post acknowledges its competitor as “one of the world’s most heavily trafficked news sites with a high of 41 million unique monthly visitors.”

A news outlet that is still clinging to paper might do well to show a bit of deference to what it perceives as an upstart — even if it happens to be “frankly liberal” and foreign.

How awful! A liberal newspaper making waves in Washington. That really is deeply offensive to America’s media establishment.

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Clapper lies to Congress about lying to Congress

On March 12 when Sen Ron Wyden questioned Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was testifying in the Senate under oath, the senator, like any good lawyer, knew exactly what he was asking and chose his words carefully.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Wyden asked. He didn’t ask whether the NSA is reading our emails or listening to our phone calls. He used the all-inclusive “any type of data at all” and he was questioning the chief intelligence officer of the United States — and man who is perfectly aware of the breadth and nuance that attaches to the term “data.” Clapper doesn’t need a staff member to tutor him on the meaning of metadata — that is, to explain that this too is a form of data.

In a letter to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Clapper now claims that when he denied the NSA is collecting data on million of Americans, “my answer focused on the collection of the content of communications.”

He could have said: “I gave an answer to a question I hadn’t been asked.”

He now says: “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”

To call it erroneous is to imply that he made a mistake rather than that he was intentionally deceptive. That admission would be a confession to breaking the law. At this point, Clapper seems to think he can brush aside accusations that he committed perjury.

Several senators are clearly unimpressed by Clapper’s explanation.

“It now appears clear that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress and the American people,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted.

“Perjury is a serious crime … [and] Clapper should resign immediately,” he said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that Clapper had broken the law, comparing him to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has been charged with espionage.

“Mr. Clapper lied in Congress in defiance of the law in the name of security,” Paul said on CNN last month. “Mr. Snowden told the truth in the name of privacy. So, I think there will be a judgment, because both of them broke the law, and history will have to determine.”

Wyden, who knew about the NSA programs when he pressed Clapper on them, said that Clapper was preventing Congress from conducting oversight.

“This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a statement last month.

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U.S. spying on allies undermines foundation of diplomacy

Imagine buying a car and negotiating the price with a car salesman who — unbeknownst to you — is simultaneously checking your bank balance. It wouldn’t be a real negotiation.

This, we now learn, is how the United States approaches diplomacy with its allies.

In the eyes of myopic intelligence chiefs, this might look like a clever way of protecting American interests, yet — to borrow a phrase the NSA chief recently used — this will cause irreparable damage to alliances upon which the United States relies.

The NSA’s pathetic attempt at damage control is to plead, everyone does it. But even if it was true everyone would like to do it, the intelligence gathering capabilities of the United States far exceed those of any of its allies.

If President Obama wants to do something to restore U.S. credibility with its allies, he could start by firing NSA Director Keith Alexander and DNI James Clapper.

The Guardian reports: US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as “targets”. It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.

Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of targets includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states.

One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which, according to a 2007 document, is “implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC” – an apparent reference to a bug placed in a commercially available encrypted fax machine used at the mission. The NSA documents note the machine is used to send cables back to foreign affairs ministries in European capitals.

The documents suggest the aim of the bugging exercise against the EU embassy in central Washington is to gather inside knowledge of policy disagreements on global issues and other rifts between member states. [Continue reading…]

Der Spiegel reports: Leading trans-Atlantic analysts have reacted with shock and horror to the weekend revelations by SPIEGEL regarding the extent to which the American National Security Agency (NSA) spied on Germany and on European Union facilities.

“This is a very serious problem for the trans-Atlantic relationship,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It will make Washington’s work with Europe more difficult on a full range of issues, such as (the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement). Add this to a pre-election environment (in Germany) and the challenge becomes greater.”

The revelations are “very awkward,” agrees Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University. In the administration of President Bill Clinton, Kupchan was in charge of European issues on the National Security Council. Jack Janes, from the influential American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, says: “US Secretary of State John Kerry and possibly the president will have to address this publicly soon. They can’t stall any longer.”

A statement from German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday further indicated the volatility of the situation. “The monitoring of friends — this is unacceptable, it can’t be tolerated. We’re no longer in the Cold War,” the chancellor said through a spokesman. Merkel confirmed that she had already voiced her displeasure to the White House over the weekend and has demanded a full explanation.

An NSA spokesman on Sunday said that European concerns will be addressed using diplomatic channels. He added that the NSA does not comment on specifics of intelligence gathering operations but said “as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”

Der Spiegel also reports: Germany’s Federal Prosecutors’ Office confirmed to SPIEGEL on Sunday that it is looking into whether systematic data spying against the country conducted by America’s National Security Agency violated laws aimed at protecting German citizens.

A spokeswoman at the Federal Prosecutors’ Office, which is responsible for domestic security issues, told SPIEGEL that all available and relevant information about the Prism, Tempora and Boundless Informant spying programs is currently being reviewed by the agency. The spokeswoman said the office was seeking to form a reliable understanding of the facts. However, the agency has not indicated when or if it will launch a formal investigation.

Nevertheless, the spokeswoman said that “criminal complaints” relating to the scandal appear “likely”. One criminal complaint has already been filed in Germany. SPIEGEL has learned that a provision was used at the local public prosecutor’s office in the city of Giessen to lodge a criminal complaint against an unknown perpetrator over the spying.

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Washington Post ignores threat to national security and publishes new NSA slides

Back in early June when the Washington Post published four slides from the NSA’s PowerPoint presentation on PRISM, reporter Barton Gellman wrote: “If you saw all the slides you wouldn’t publish them” — even though Edward Snowden had pressed the Post to publish all 41 slides.

Now, in spite of Gellman’s insinuation that publication of any of the remaining slides could undermine national security, the Post has gone ahead and published four new slides.

Does this reflect newly found boldness on the part of the paper’s editors? Unlikely. Much more likely is that the Washington Post is now publishing classified information at the request of the NSA.

So, when the information in question is information the public needs to know, the Post is reluctant to publish it. But when the government decides that the release of the same information will now serve its own interests, then the Post is only too happy to oblige.

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In secret report, CIA claims torture was ‘effective’

The Washington Post reports: The CIA has completed a report that challenges the findings of a Senate investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, according to U.S. officials who said the response cites errors in the congressional probe and disputes its central conclusion that harsh methods used against al-Qaeda detainees failed to produce significant results.

The classified CIA document is expected to be delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday by Director John Brennan during a closed-door meeting with the committee’s chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and ranking Republican Saxby Chambliss (Ga.).

The agency’s rebuttal is the most detailed defense that the CIA has assembled to date of one of the more controversial programs in its history, one that employed simulated drowning and other brutal measures to get information from al-Qaeda captives before the agency was ordered to close its secret prisons in 2009.

But the agency’s response and the 6,000-page congressional report it addresses both remain classified, making it unclear whether portions of either document will be made public. A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the agency’s response, but current and former U.S. intelligence officials said it is sharply critical of the course of the committee’s investigation as well as its conclusions.

Despite lawmakers’ conclusions that harsh interrogations were ineffective, “anyone who was around and involved in the program knows that’s not right,” said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official. “I don’t know how they could fail to say that actually it was effective, and you can separate that from whether you approve of it or not.” [Continue reading…]

And why is a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official being quoted? Why? Because he/she is a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official. The statement itself is worthless. It refers to what anyone who was around knows, without actually saying whether that includes the source. And then it asserts that torture was effective, implying that it resulted in intelligence being gathered that could not have been gathered in any other way. That’s an unprovable assertion because if you use torture, you close off the possibility of finding out what you could have learned without the use of torture.

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Translating the Washington Post

Sometimes news reporting gets so twisted, it demands to be re-written. The beginning of a Washington Post report follows with the original sentences in italics and my re-writes in between.

It may be years before the full cost of Edward Snowden’s intelligence leaks can be measured.

It may be years before the full effect — both the costs and benefits — of Edward Snowden’s intelligence leaks can be measured.

But his disclosures about top-secret surveillance programs have already come at a price for the U.S. government: America’s foes have been handed an immensely powerful tool for portraying Washington as a hypocritical proponent of democratic values that it doesn’t abide by at home.

But his disclosures about top-secret surveillance programs have already placed the U.S. government in an awkward position: America’s critics now find it much easier to portray Washington as a hypocritical proponent of democratic values that it doesn’t abide by at home.

As Snowden continues his extraordinary flight from U.S. authorities, hopscotching the globe with the acquiescence of other governments, Washington’s critics have savored the irony of the world’s human rights champion being tripped up by revelations about its monitoring of phone and Internet communications.

As Snowden continues his extraordinary flight from U.S. authorities, hopscotching the globe without the intervention of other governments, Washington’s detractors have savored the irony of a country that sees itself as the world’s human rights champion being tripped up by revelations about its disregard for the constitutional rights of its own citizens through the monitoring of their phone and Internet communications.

Meanwhile, China, Russia, Cuba, and Ecuador — countries with dismal human rights records — have cast themselves as the champions of political freedom.

When the hypocrisy of the United States captures the world’s attention, it becomes increasingly difficult for the U.S. to lead the charge in the defense of human rights.

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How to curry favor with U.S. intelligence sources

What’s the easiest way of getting government officials to open up and provide you with a story? Just repeat whatever they say and call it “news.” Here’s an example from Associated Press and the word “said” in the headline is the subtle disclaimer — it signals to those who are paying attention that there may be no factual basis for the claims being made in the report.

“Al-Qaida said to be changing its ways after leaks”

U.S. intelligence agencies are scrambling to salvage their surveillance of al-Qaida and other terrorists who are working frantically to change how they communicate after a National Security Agency contractor leaked details of two NSA spying programs. It’s an electronic game of cat-and-mouse that could have deadly consequences if a plot is missed or a terrorist operative manages to drop out of sight.

Two U.S. intelligence officials say members of virtually every terrorist group, including core al-Qaida, are attempting to change how they communicate, based on what they are reading in the media, to hide from U.S. surveillance — the first time intelligence officials have described which groups are reacting to the leaks. The officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak about the intelligence matters publicly.

The officials wouldn’t go into details on how they know this, whether it’s terrorists switching email accounts or cellphone providers or adopting new encryption techniques, but a lawmaker briefed on the matter said al-Qaida’s Yemeni offshoot, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, has been among the first to alter how it reaches out to its operatives.

While this report is completely unsubstantiated, the report itself can be seen as transparent evidence that the intelligence community and members of Congress are using the press to characterize Edward Snowden as a traitor who is aiding and abetting terrorism.

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How Obama is becoming an insider threat to democracy

It seems like we’re getting snowed in by Snowden — if you’ll forgive the pun.

On Thursday, McClatchy published an investigative report, “Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S..”

By now, the term, “Insider Threat Program,” should be getting just as much attention in the mainstream media and the blogosphere as anything to do with Edward Snowden, and yet the story has largely been ignored.

While the NSA story is in large part a story about the potential dangers that can stem from mass surveillance, the Insider Threat Program describes the ways in which the day-to-day operations of government are changing now through a neo-McCarthyist attack on whistle-blowing.

The fact that this program is being instituted across all government agencies and not just those handling national security issues, reflects the degree to which we now live in a security state — one in which democratic processes have been made subservient to security and security has become the lens through which virtually everything gets viewed.

Changes that are most insidious and most difficult to reverse are those which shape culture. They don’t have to be encoded in laws and regulations.

While Obama came into office promising to change the culture of secrecy in Washington, his actions have had the opposite effect and the Insider Threat Program is another phase in a process through which government becomes more paranoiac, less innovative, more subject to group-think, and less representative of the interests of the people.

The most dangerous forms of change are often the least dramatic. They are incremental. What might become an intolerable trend, develops from small steps each of which might seem benign or reasonable at the time it occurs.

Obama in November approved “minimum standards” giving departments and agencies considerable leeway in developing their insider threat programs, leading to a potential hodgepodge of interpretations. He instructed them to not only root out leakers but people who might be prone to “violent acts against the government or the nation” and “potential espionage.”

The Pentagon established its own sweeping definition of an insider threat as an employee with a clearance who “wittingly or unwittingly” harms “national security interests” through “unauthorized disclosure, data modification, espionage, terrorism, or kinetic actions resulting in loss or degradation of resources or capabilities.”

“An argument can be made that the rape of military personnel represents an insider threat. Nobody has a model of what this insider threat stuff is supposed to look like,” said the senior Pentagon official, explaining that inside the Defense Department “there are a lot of chiefs with their own agendas but no leadership.”

The Department of Education, meanwhile, informs employees that co-workers going through “certain life experiences . . . might turn a trusted user into an insider threat.” Those experiences, the department says in a computer training manual, include “stress, divorce, financial problems” or “frustrations with co-workers or the organization.”

An online tutorial titled “Treason 101” teaches Department of Agriculture and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees to recognize the psychological profile of spies.

A Defense Security Service online pamphlet lists a wide range of “reportable” suspicious behaviors, including working outside of normal duty hours. While conceding that not every behavior “represents a spy in our midst,” the pamphlet adds that “every situation needs to be examined to determine whether our nation’s secrets are at risk.”

The Defense Department, traditionally a leading source of media leaks, is still setting up its program, but it has taken numerous steps. They include creating a unit that reviews news reports every day for leaks of classified defense information and implementing new training courses to teach employees how to recognize security risks, including “high-risk” and “disruptive” behaviors among co-workers, according to Defense Department documents reviewed by McClatchy.

“It’s about people’s profiles, their approach to work, how they interact with management. Are they cheery? Are they looking at Salon.com or The Onion during their lunch break? This is about ‘The Stepford Wives,’” said a second senior Pentagon official, referring to online publications and a 1975 movie about robotically docile housewives. The official said he wanted to remain anonymous to avoid being punished for criticizing the program.

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Is America in a death spiral?

Global warming may have caused irreversible damage to the environment; cigarette smoking can cause irreversible damage to the lungs; lead poisoning can cause irreversible damage to a child’s brain; and Edward Snowden’s intelligence leaks have caused irreversible damage to America — at least that’s what NSA director General Keith Alexander claimed today.

Irreversible damage? The end is nigh? Talk about hyperbole!

Edward Snowden has apparently now leaped to the top of the league among threats to America. Did Bush or Cheney or anyone else declare after 9/11 that al Qaeda had caused irreversible damage to America? Not that I recall. And yet a disaffected NSA system administrator has now supposedly caused more harm to America than even Osama bin Laden accomplished.

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America on drugs

Language can only ever reflect reality imperfectly, but there often times when the discordance between words and some semblance of truth is so extreme that the words we use become the primary obstacle to accurately perceiving the way things are.

Take the word health. The first meaning in the dictionary is: “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially: freedom from physical disease or pain.”

So-called healthcare providers might say that they are dealing with health in the neutral sense, which is to say “the general condition of the body.” Yet health in this sense is possessed by anyone who is alive, so to provide health care must surely have the objective of restoring or maintaining good health.

The healthcare business does no such thing. How can I say this so emphatically? The numbers are unambiguous: nearly 70 percent of Americans take one prescription drug and more than 50 percent take two. Overwhelmingly, these are not drugs that restore health; their most common purpose is to control disease and suppress symptoms. As a consequence, America has become a chronically sick nation hooked on pharmaceuticals.

America’s appetite for prescription drugs is not far removed from its hunger for street drugs as each with equally inadequate effect strives to stem the same affliction: unhappiness. For instance, among women between the ages of 50 to 64, one in four take antidepressants.

A few years ago, Richard Rodriquez wrote:

Who in America is asking, “Why?” Why are Americans so sad?

We need drugs to escape loneliness. We need drugs to tolerate company. We need drugs to feel and drugs to keep from feeling. We need drugs to fall asleep and drugs to get out of bed. Why?

Corporate drug-pushers have little interest in posing the question and even less in finding the answer.

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Privacy and democracy

To listen to Barack Obama or Dick Cheney, one would think that privacy is a reward that democracy only delivers reliably in fair weather, and that it is something most vigorously claimed as a right by those who don’t face the challenge of defending “freedom.”

These rugged statesmen, whose perspective — unlike that of the average citizen — is shaped by a much more expansive and intimate view of the ever-present threats to America, recognize that — as Obama put it recently — we can’t have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy. With respect to our private communications, it’s better to be read than dead.

The first responsibility of the United States government is to keep Americans safe, we are told again and again — as though democracy was a system of national defense and not, as this country’s founders defined it, government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Nevertheless, democracy’s defining attribute is not in fact its ability to protect people but instead that it treats all individuals equally as citizens and not subjects in an exercise of self governance. The operation of democracy hinges on respect for the individual’s autonomy; not protection of the individual’s life.

The way in which privacy functions as a foundation of democracy is through self definition. Through her or his own idiosyncratic definition of personal boundaries, the individual determines the scope of their own sovereign space — a space which others generally only enter by consent.

When the state violates this space, it is violating the individual’s right to self-determination, and when this is done in the name of national security, the freedom of the individual has been reduced to being a reward granted and measured by the state, rather than being the basis through which the state derives its authority.

There is an inherent tension between self-defined privacy and state-defined privacy. Whereas the state can only construct its definitions within the strictures of law, which are never specific to time and place, the individual constructs perpetually moving boundaries of privacy and the issue is never where exactly such boundaries are placed but simply whether passage across them is consensual.

If, for instance, the threshold is the front door, it’s not the boundary itself that determines how we define privacy. We might have no problem with a neighbor dropping in, yet refuse to allow the FBI to do likewise. And the neighbor welcomed at 7pm would become an intruder at 3am.

So, when the president or the head of the NSA assures us that the government is not listening to our phone conversations or reading our email, that’s besides the point. The point is that they have been gathering personal information about the social networks and daily lives of every single American without our permission. Whether the government, acting in secret, first seeks permission from a secret court, is also besides the point, since the power being exercised by that court was not knowingly granted by the people.

The problem is, in America and other democracies, affiliations with “the people” easily get trumped by those with “our people.” Whether Americans feel their privacy has been violated by government surveillance programs often depends on whether they voted for the ruling administration. To a degree, Democrats are more likely to feel their personal privacy has been violated by Bush rather than Obama and vice-versa for Republicans.

Even after the revelations about what is without doubt the most extensive surveillance program in human history, 39 percent of Americans are apparently oblivious about the fact that the government is compiling data on everyone.

This, perhaps more than any other number, speaks about the condition of democracy in America: that the actions of the government not only take place outside the awareness of most citizens, but that a very large minority evince little interest in what their government is doing.

This is government of the people, for the people, so that the people can turn their attention elsewhere.

Where government was intended to reflect the will of the people, it now operates less through popular consent than acquiescence.

Mass surveillance might be of highly questionable value and equally questionable legal legitimacy and yet it will continue with little effective restraint if it only meets weak resistance.

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FBI chief Mueller wants you to be afraid

The Guardian reports: The FBI has shrugged off growing congressional anxiety over its surveillance of US citizens, claiming such programs could have foiled the 9-11 terrorist attacks and would prevent “another Boston”.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, also revealed that US authorities would be taking action against whistleblower Edward Snowden for revealing the extent of its activities, confirming that the FBI and department of justice were taking “all necessary steps to hold the person responsible”.

But Mueller’s testimony before the House judicial oversight committee brought angry responses from many congressmen, who questioned whether such surveillance was lawful and demanded to know why it had failed to prevent the Boston bombing if it were so effective.

Preventing airline passengers from carrying knives on board; not basing thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia — there are all sorts of things that could have prevented 9/11.

What Mueller and other government officials are now doing is attempting to terrorize Americans. They are in effect saying that unless the citizens of this country are willing to live under mass surveillance, they or their loved ones are more likely to meet a premature and violent death. It’s called security-state blackmail.

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