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

Fri Jul 11 23:47:55 EDT 2014

An interesting perspective.

What is incredible is there is a significant segment of the
American people who believe that Snowden and Assange are criminals.

Given that acts of violence are not only immoral,
but futile and negative to a good cause--
what is needed are more pens and fewer swords.

On 07/10/2014 09:42 AM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss wrote:
>
>
>   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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> <http://www.popularresistance.org/the-latest-snowden-leak-is-devastating-to-nsa-defenders/#>
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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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