ProPublica: The recent disclosure of sweeping surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has prompted a new wave of legal challenges to the U.S. government’s intelligence-gathering programs. [See the list…]
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Category Archives: Five Eyes
Did the NSA really help spy on U.S. lawyers?
Orin Kerr writes: The front page of the Sunday New York Times features a new Snowden-based story that looks, at first blush, like a really big deal. Authored by James Risen and Laura Poitras, the story opens with considerable drama by suggesting that the NSA is spying on U.S. lawyers:
The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers.
A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.
Sounds like the NSA helped spy on U.S. lawyers, right? Well, not so fast. If you unpack the story and ignore the opening spin, the story ends up delivering considerably less than it promises.
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As I understand it, the Times story is based on a short entry in an NSA internal bulletin celebrating the liaison office’s accomplishment. It reports that the liaison helped clear up a legal issue, and that it all ended well, as the Australians ended up giving useful intel to the U.S. But because it’s just an internal bulletin, it doesn’t tell us what we want to know: What advice was provided, and whether the intel was related to the legal issue. Without that information, it’s hard to know if there’s a significant story here. [Continue reading…]
How to ‘obtain’ a memo from the NSA
Obtain: to get something that you want, especially through your own effort, skill, or work
Michael Isikoff reports: A civilian NSA employee recently resigned after being stripped of his security clearance for allowing former agency contractor Edward Snowden to use his personal log-in credentials to access classified information, according to an agency memo obtained by NBC News.
In addition, an active duty member of the U.S. military and a contractor have been barred from accessing National Security Agency facilities after they were “implicated” in actions that may have aided Snowden, the memo states. Their status is now being reviewed by their employers, the memo says.
The Feb. 10 memo, sent to congressional intelligence and judiciary committees this week, provides the first official account of a sweeping NSA internal inquiry aimed at identifying intelligence officials and contractors who may been responsible for one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. history. The memo is unclassified but labeled “for official use only.”
While the memo’s account is sketchy, it suggests that, contrary to Snowden’s statements, he used an element of trickery to retrieve his trove of tens of thousands of classified documents: “At Snowden’s request,” the civilian NSA employee, who is not identified by name, entered his password onto Snowden’s computer terminal, the memo states.
When an investigative journalists writes that he has “obtained” a memo from the NSA, it might seem that the publication of the memo is the fruit of the labor of investigation. Obtain connotes, he got his hands on it, rather than, it fell into his lap.
In the case of Michael Isikoff and the NSA memo he obtained, how much effort did that require?
I don’t know, but I doubt it involved much more effort than is required to open an email from a Congressional staffer with a subject line like “Must-read document.”
Maybe it didn’t come by email. Maybe it was delivered by hand. Either way, my guess is that more effort was being made by the sender than the receiver. Indeed, in this case I wouldn’t put it past the sender to have volunteered a loaded term like “trickery” in an unspoken quid pro quo along the lines that a journalist lucky enough to be selected to receive such a gift should show his gratitude by framing his report in terms that would please the source.
As with so many news reports, assessing its significance requires more than reviewing its content. It requires that we understand how it came to be published.
Isikoff is in this respect no different from any other reporter: he reveals nothing about his own investigative process.
What he does is advance a narrative that the NSA have been pushing from day one: that Snowden should not be seen as a whistleblower; he should be treated as a thief.
Yet the NSA, like every other intelligence agency, is not run by professional truth-tellers. From their perspective, Snowden represents a multifaceted problem and one element of the solution they are pursuing is character assassination.
Snowden has not faced questioning under oath in Congress, but so far — unlike Keith Alexander and James Clapper — nothing he has said has been demonstrated to be a bald-faced lie.
The New York Times notes that another feature of the memo is that it appears designed to lay to rest any expectation of high-level accountability:
The letter, first reported by NBC News, was intended to answer congressional queries about who, beyond Mr. Snowden himself, would be held accountable for the security lapses that led to his disclosures. The answer appeared to suggest that no senior officials of the N.S.A. or its oversight organization, the office of the director of national intelligence, will be disciplined or fired for what officials have called the largest and most damaging disclosure of classified material in American history.
The director of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, is retiring next month after serving far longer than his predecessors. The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., who has also been a focus of criticism for failing to police the speed at which security upgrades have been conducted throughout the intelligence community, remains in office.
Both men, and their wives, were guests at the state dinner on Tuesday night for France’s president, François Hollande, which was widely interpreted as an indication they remained in good stead at the White House.
Like Isikoff, the Times reporter, David Sanger, appears to be carrying water for the NSA when he claims that the question — “did [Snowden] have the help of a foreign intelligence service?” — is “reverberating around the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department”.
While those reverberations are apparently audible to Sanger, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has heard nothing.
Finally, one question that neither of the reporters address is whether it would be unusual for NSA employees or contractors to provide a systems administrator with their passwords. Even though, for obvious reasons, that practice can be described as a security lapse, it might also have been commonplace.
If that’s the case, then the individual referred to in the NSA who resigned, may now justifiably feel like the fall guy.
Internet governance too U.S.-centric, says European commission
The Guardian reports: The mass surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency means that governance of the internet has to be made more international and less dominated by America, the European Union’s executive has declared.
Setting out proposals on how the world wide web should function and be regulated, the European commission called for a shift away from the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which is subject to US law, is contracted by the US administration and is empowered to supervise how digital traffic operates.
“Recent revelations of large-scale surveillance have called into question the stewardship of the US when it comes to internet governance,” said the commission.
“Given the US-centric model of internet governance currently in place, it is necessary to broker a smooth transition to a more global model while at the same time protecting the underlying values of open multi-stakeholder governance …
“Large-scale surveillance and intelligence activities have led to a loss of confidence in the internet and its present governance arrangements.” [Continue reading…]
Rand Paul sues Obama administration over NSA surveillance
The Kentucky senator said he and the conservative activist group FreedomWorks filed the suit for themselves and on behalf of “everyone in America that has a phone.”
The lawsuit argues that the bulk collection program that’s been in existence since 2006 violates the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. It calls for an end to the program, which was revealed by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. [Continue reading…]
Americans find swift stonewall on whether NSA vacuumed their data
The denials illustrate the bind in which the disclosures have trapped the Obama administration. While it has pledged to provide greater transparency about the NSA’s communications collections, the NSA says it cannot respond to individuals’ requests without tipping off terrorists and other targets.
As a result, Americans whose email and telephone data may have been improperly vacuumed up have no way of finding that out by filing open records requests with the agency. Six McClatchy reporters who filed requests seeking any information kept by the NSA on them all received the same response. [Continue reading…]
The Day We Fight Back: An internet protest to stop the NSA
It’s been over two years since the death of SOPA. But as attention has turned instead to NSA surveillance, the 2012 protests have provided assurance that online action can create real results. This is the idea behind The Day We Fight Back, an anti-surveillance web protest being held Tuesday, February 11th, in memory of hacktivist and anti-SOPA organizer Aaron Swartz. “In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history,” says the site. “Today we face another critical threat.” If anything, though, the reference doesn’t inspire confidence so much as it underscores just how much more complex — and difficult to confront — that new threat really is.
The goal of the 2012 blackout was simple: spur people to call their representatives and express opposition to a new bill. The Day We Fight Back, though, is an attempt to dismantle a system that’s been in place for years. Inside the US, participants are urged to put a banner on their website and call or email their legislators in support of Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) USA Freedom Act, which would reform the NSA’s metadata database. But they’re also urged to oppose Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) FISA Improvements Act, a bill that sounds just as pleasant but has been sharply criticized for enshrining the database program in law. And even these are just baby steps in the long run. [Continue reading…]
The NSA’s secret role in the U.S. assassination program
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald report: The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.
The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents previously provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is also supported by a former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.
In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device. [Continue reading…]
Snowden docs: British spies used sex and ‘dirty tricks’
Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and exclusively obtained by NBC News describe techniques developed by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) as part of a growing mission to go on offense and attack adversaries ranging from Iran to the hacktivists of Anonymous. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.
Both PowerPoint presentations describe “Effects” campaigns that are broadly divided into two categories: cyber attacks and propaganda operations. The propaganda campaigns use deception, mass messaging and “pushing stories” via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. JTRIG also uses “false flag” operations, in which British agents carry out online actions that are designed to look like they were performed by one of Britain’s adversaries. [Continue reading…]
Snowden used low-cost tool to best NSA
Using “web crawler” software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden “scraped data out of our systems” while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. “We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,” the official said. The process, he added, was “quite automated.”
The findings are striking because the N.S.A.’s mission includes protecting the nation’s most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Mr. Snowden’s “insider attack,” by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.
Moreover, Mr. Snowden succeeded nearly three years after the WikiLeaks disclosures, in which military and State Department files, of far less sensitivity, were taken using similar techniques. [Continue reading…]
CIA confirms agency obliged to follow federal surveillance law
But neither the agency nor its Senate overseers will say what, if any, current, recent or desired activities the law prohibits the CIA from performing – particularly since a section of the law explicitly carves out an exception for “lawfully authorized” intelligence activities.
The murky episode, arising from a public Senate hearing on intelligence last week, illustrates what observers call the frustrations inherent in getting even basic information about secret agencies into public view, a difficulty recently to the fore over whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its surveillance partners.
Last Wednesday, in a brief exchange at the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked CIA director John Brennan if the agency is subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a three-decade-old law intended to protect computer systems, like those of financial and government networks, from unauthorized access.
Brennan demurred, citing the need to check on the legal complexities posed by Wyden’s question, and pledged to give the senator an answer within a week.
The answer, agency spokesman Dean Boyd told the Guardian, is: “Yes, the statute applies to CIA.”
Wyden gave no indication of what prompted his query. His office would not elaborate, citing classification rules, and neither would the CIA. [Continue reading…]
NSA incapable of accomplishing its own mass surveillance goals
As I have long argued, Americans have less reason to be afraid of the NSA intercepting their communications than afraid that vast resources are being wasted on an effort that turns out to be fruitless.
Along with an over-extension of powers comes an over-extension of competence. Finding a needle in a haystack is very difficult. But finding a needle while examining less than a third of the haystack is just a waste of time.
The Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The disclosure contradicts popular perceptions that the government is sweeping up virtually all domestic phone data. It is also likely to raise questions about the efficacy of a program that is premised on its breadth and depth, on collecting as close to a complete universe of data as possible in order to make sure that clues aren’t missed in counterterrorism investigations.
In 2006, a senior U.S. official said, the NSA was collecting “closer to 100” percent of Americans’ phone records from a number of U.S. companies under a then-classified program, but as of last summer that share had plummeted to less than 30 percent.
The government is taking steps to restore the collection — which does not include the content of conversations — closer to previous levels. The NSA is preparing to seek court orders to compel wireless companies that currently do not hand over records to the government to do so, said the current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
That effort comes in the wake of President Obama’s decision last month to find a way to move the data out of the government’s hands to assuage concerns about intrusions on privacy. Obama has given the Justice Department and the intelligence community until March 28 to come up with a plan.
The actual percentage of records gathered is somewhere between 20 and 30 percent and reflects Americans’ increasing turn away from the use of land lines to cellphones. Officials also have faced technical challenges in preparing the NSA database to handle large amounts of new records without taking in data such as cell tower locations that are not authorized for collection. [Continue reading…]
James Clapper: Director of National Fear
Last week the man who serves as America’s Director of National Intelligence trudged up to Capitol Hill to tell the assembled members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (pdf) that the annual worldwide threat assessment, put together by the intelligence community, has filled him with dread. He told the room:
Looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.
That is some scary stuff.
However, if you think you’ve heard this before from Clapper … well you have.
Last year he appeared before Congress for a similar purpose and, lo and behold, he was very, very concerned then too (pdf):
I will say that my almost 50 years in intelligence, I do not recall a period in which we confront a more diverse array of threats, crises and challenges around the world. This year’s threat assessment illustrates how dramatically the world and our threat environment are changing.
And here he was in 2012 testifying (pdf) on that year’s threat assessment report, “Never has there been, in my almost 49-year career in intelligence, a more complex and interdependent array of challenges than that we face today.”
Of course, one must consider the possibility that over the past five decades the world has never been as dangerous, complex and challenging as it’s been over the past three years (putting aside for a moment that whole “threat of nuclear holocaust” that defined much of the 60s, 70s and 80s.) If, however, you’re skeptical about this, well you have good reason because Clapper’s alarmist tone is hardly matched by the threats he cites. [Continue reading…]
Pratap Chatterjee: The Wild West of surveillance
The question Senator Ron Wyden asked on March 12th of last year was straightforward enough and no surprise for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. He had been given it a day in advance of his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee and after he was done, Senator Wyden and his staff offered him a chance to “amend” his answer if he wished. Did the National Security Agency, Wyden wanted to know, gather “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”? Being on that committee and privy to a certain amount of secret intelligence information, Wyden already knew the correct answer to the question. Clapper, with a day to prepare, nonetheless answered, “No, sir. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
That was a bald-faced lie, though Clapper would later term it the “least untruthful” thing he felt he could say. As we now know, the NSA was, among many other things, gathering the phone “data” of every American and storing it for future use. In other words, after some forethought, the director perjured himself.
Mind you, Clapper isn’t exactly shy about charging other people with implicit crimes. In recent testimony before Congress, he demanded that whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden “and his accomplices” return all agency documents. It was a stunning use of a term whose only meaning is criminal and clearly referred to the journalists — Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and reporters from the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among other papers — who have been examining and writing about the Snowden documents.
It caught something of the chutzpah of the top officials who run Washington’s national security state — and little wonder that they feel emboldened and demanding. After all, not only is Clapper not going to be charged with perjury, but he has retained his post without a blink. He has kept the “support” of President Obama, who recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper (in what passes these days for a rebuke of our surveiller-in-chief), “Jim Clapper himself would acknowledge, and has acknowledged, that he should have been more careful about how he responded.” More careful indeed!
I’ve long argued that while we, the citizens of the U.S., remain in legal America, the U.S. national security state exists in “post-legal America” because no illegal act from warrantless surveillance to torture committed in its service will ever be prosecuted. So it’s no surprise that Clapper won’t even be forced to resign for lying to Congress. He’s free as a bird and remains powerful indeed. Tell that to some of our whistleblowers.
In his latest post, TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee offers an anatomy of a surveillance world that grows more, not less, powerful and full of itself with every passing moment and technological advance, a national security world whose global ambitions know no bounds. Tom Engelhardt
Selling your secrets
The invisible world of software backdoors and bounty hunters
By Pratap ChatterjeeImagine that you could wander unseen through a city, sneaking into houses and offices of your choosing at any time, day or night. Imagine that, once inside, you could observe everything happening, unnoticed by others — from the combinations used to secure bank safes to the clandestine rendezvous of lovers. Imagine also that you have the ability to silently record everybody’s actions, whether they are at work or play without leaving a trace. Such omniscience could, of course, make you rich, but perhaps more important, it could make you very powerful.
That scenario out of some futuristic sci-fi novel is, in fact, almost reality right now. After all, globalization and the Internet have connected all our lives in a single, seamless virtual city where everything is accessible at the tap of a finger. We store our money in online vaults; we conduct most of our conversations and often get from place to place with the help of our mobile devices. Almost everything that we do in the digital realm is recorded and lives on forever in a computer memory that, with the right software and the correct passwords, can be accessed by others, whether you want them to or not.
Now — one more moment of imagining — what if every one of your transactions in that world was infiltrated? What if the government had paid developers to put trapdoors and secret passages into the structures that are being built in this new digital world to connect all of us all the time? What if they had locksmiths on call to help create master keys for all the rooms? And what if they could pay bounty hunters to stalk us and build profiles of our lives and secrets to use against us?
Well, check your imagination at the door, because this is indeed the brave new dystopian world that the U.S. government is building, according to the latest revelations from the treasure trove of documents released by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
War on Anonymous: GCHQ launched DDoS attack on hackers, Snowden docs show
The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous.
According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.
The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder — and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.
The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly.
The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites.
Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond.
“While there must of course be limitations,” said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, “law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online.”
“No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment,” said Leiter.
But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency’s assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime.
“Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs,” said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. “Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression.” Coleman estimated that the number of “Anons” engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands. [Continue reading…]
Glenn Greenwald denies selling NSA documents
“I’m never selling documents,” Greenwald said in an interview. “I don’t get money and give them documents, like, ‘Hey, nice doing business with you.’”
Greenwald said he has worked with news outlets around the globe to publicize newsworthy aspects of the documents Edward Snowden copied while working for the NSA in Hawaii. However, Greenwald said he and others working with him supply the foreign outlets with proposed articles and are not “fencing stolen material,” as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) argued at a hearing Tuesday.
“We do the reporting first… I vet the stories,” Greenwald said. “We come with the story already formed. We work on drafts of the story. We always edit the story. We have approval rights.”
Greenwald, who is an attorney, acknowledged insisting on freelance contracts in order to supply the stories. However, he said that is itself a legal precaution aimed at ensuring that authorities treat him as a journalist and not as a source. Traditionally, sources have sometimes been subject to prosecution for disclosing secret documents, while the government has shied away from prosecuting those who act as journalists or publishers. [Continue reading…]
Video: The Snowden interview that someone doesn’t want you to watch?
Apparently, a concerted effort is being made to block public access to Edward Snowden’s recent interview with German television. Allegedly the interview is repeatedly being removed from YouTube and other sites where it has been posted have suffered denial of service attacks. So, if you didn’t watch when I posted it before, here it is again.
How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower
TheTrueHOOHA wanted to set up his own web server. It was a Saturday morning, a little after 11am. He posted: “It’s my first time. Be gentle. Here’s my dilemma: I want to be my own host. What do I need?”
Soon, regular users were piling in with helpful suggestions. TheTrueHOOHA replied: “Ah, the vast treasury of geek knowledge that is Ars.” He would become a prolific contributor; over the next eight years, he authored nearly 800 comments. He described himself variously as “unemployed”, a failed soldier, a “systems editor”, and someone who had US State Department security clearance.
His home was on the east coast of America in the state of Maryland, near Washington DC. But by his mid-20s he was already an international man of mystery. He popped up in Europe – in Geneva, London, Ireland, Italy and Bosnia. He travelled to India. Despite having no degree, he knew an astonishing amount about computers. His politics appeared staunchly Republican. He believed strongly in personal liberty, defending, for example, Australians who farmed cannabis plants.
At times he could be rather obnoxious. He called one fellow-Arsian, for example, a “cock”; others who disagreed with his sink-or-swim views on social security were “fucking retards”.
His chat logs cover a colourful array of themes: gaming, girls, sex, Japan, the stock market, his disastrous stint in the US army, his negative impressions of multiracial Britain (he was shocked by the number of “Muslims” in east London and wrote, “I thought I had gotten off of the plane in the wrong country… it was terrifying”), the joys of gun ownership (“I have a Walther P22. It’s my only gun but I love it to death,” he wrote in 2006). In their own way, the logs form a Bildungsroman.
Then, in 2009, the entries fizzle away. In February 2010, TheTrueHOOHA mentions a thing that troubles him: pervasive government surveillance. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?” [Continue reading…]
