[Peace-discuss] The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating To NSA Defenders

Wed Jul 9 21:42:44 EDT 2014

  The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating To NSA Defenders

Screen Shot 2014-07-08 at 12.41.48 PM
Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Edward 
Snowden <http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/edward-snowden/>, NSA 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/nsa/>, Privacy 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/privacy/>, Surveillance 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/surveillance/>
By Conor Friedersdorf, www.theatlantic.com 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/a-devastating-leak-for-edward-snowdens-critics/373991/>
July 8th, 2014
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/Edward Snowden's new refugee document granted by Russia is seen during 
a news conference on August 1, 2013. (Reuters)/

Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective 
of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have 
us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a 
traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its 
mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy 
of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a 
wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.

But their narrative now contradicts itself. /The Washington Post's/ 
latest article 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html> 
drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described 
as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories 
of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, 
political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and 
disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders 
who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

The article goes on to describe how exactly the privacy of these 
innocents was violated. The NSA collected "medical records sent from one 
family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic 
transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious 
dress beams at a camera outside a mosque. Scores of pictures show 
infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and 
kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. 
In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam ..."

Have you ever emailed a photograph of your child in the bathtub, or 
yourself flexing for the camera or modeling lingerie? If so, it could be 
your photo in the /Washington Post/ newsroom right now, where it may or 
may not be secure going forward. In one case, a woman whose private 
communications were collected by the NSA found herself contacted by a 
reporter who'd read her correspondence.

Snowden defenders see these leaked files as necessary to proving that 
the NSA does, in fact, massively violate the private lives of American 
citizens by collecting and storing content---not "just" metadata---when 
they communicate digitally. They'll point out that Snowden turned these 
files over to journalists who promised to protect the privacy of 
affected individuals and followed through on that oath.

What about Snowden critics who defend the NSA? Ben Wittes questions 
<http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/07/a-quick-read-of-the-posts-latest-nsa-story/> 
the morality of the disclosure:

    Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government
    activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of personal
    communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly
    subject to strict controls. They are subject to strict controls
    precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the kid beaming before a
    mosque, the men showing off their physiques, and the woman whose
    love letters have to be collected because her boyfriend is off
    looking to join the Taliban don't have to pay an unnecessarily high
    privacy price. Yes, the /Post/ has kept personal identifying details
    from the public, and that is laudable. But Snowden did not keep
    personal identifying details from the /Post/. He basically outed
    thousands of people---innocent and not---and left them to the tender
    mercies of journalists. This is itself a huge civil liberties violation.

The critique is plausible---but think of what it means.

I never thought I'd see this day: The founder of /Lawfare/ has finally 
declared that a national-security-state employee perpetrated a huge 
civil-liberties violation! Remember this if he ever again claims that 
NSA critics can't point to a single serious abuse at the agency. Wittes 
himself now says there's been a serious abuse.

The same logic applies to Keith Alexander, James Clapper, Michael 
Hayden, Stewart Baker, Edward Lucas, John Schindler, and every other 
anti-Snowden NSA defender. So long as they insist that Snowden is a 
narcissistic criminal and possible traitor, they have no choice but to 
admit that the NSA collected and stored intimate photos, emails, and 
chats belonging to totally innocent Americans and safeguarded them so 
poorly that a ne'er-do-well could copy them onto thumb drives.

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who 
could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could 
take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to 
insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should 
keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive 
data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect 
that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it 
is farcical.

Here's the reality.

The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive 
photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to 
Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution---but even if you 
disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA 
has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the 
chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. /It has already 
been taken and given to reporters/. The necessary reform is clear. 
Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn't be allowed to 
collect and store it.

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