Big Brother is Watching You

[Vrede too]

“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made. Now, I would say that doing what he did – and the way he did it – was inappropriate and illegal.”

-- Eric Holder

So, if something is a public service and it leads to positive changes, is it the problem or is the problem with our laws and our definition of inappropriate?

I guess you could look at it either way. If you look at it only from the standpoint of bad law and definition of inappropriate, the next time somebody shoots a child molester we'd have to make vigilantism legal.

I would argue with the premise that it was both a public service and that it lead to positive societal changes. At best, it's a local service - if even that compared to prison - and vigilantism leads to negative societal changes.

[O Really]

I would argue with the premise that it was both a public service and that it lead to positive societal changes. At best, it's a local service - if even that compared to prison - and vigilantism leads to negative societal changes.

Was that in reference to the molester-killer or Snowden?

[Vrede too]

Who am I to argue with Eric Holder's contra-intuitive opinion on public service and positive societal changes?

[rstrong]

I guess you could look at it either way. If you look at it only from the standpoint of bad law and definition of inappropriate, the next time somebody shoots a child molester we'd have to make vigilantism legal.

Nonsense.

When you discover a child molester, you can report it to police and be certain that they'll take it seriously. Not so with whistleblowing against government corruption. Not any more.

Holder said, "Now I would say that doing what he did - and the way he did it - was inappropriate and illegal." But that was the only way left to do it. Yes, in theory there were ways to report the problem internally. Snowden tried them, and was ignored.

This has been a common theme with other high ranking officials whistleblowing on torture and mass surveillance. There simply were no "proper channels" that had any more effect than talking to a brick wall. Public disclosure was the only way.

And what if Snowden had leaked the information to American newspapers only and not fled the country?

Daniel Ellsberg was charged in 1971 under the Espionage Act as well as for theft and conspiracy for copying the Pentagon Papers. The trial was dismissed in 1973 after evidence of government misconduct against him, including illegal wiretapping, was introduced in court.

For the two years he was under indictment, he was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures.

Today, the government actions that got the case thrown out of court are legal. Today, Snowden would not be allowed out on bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado, in total isolation conditions described by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

[O Really]

I don't think you can argue that the laws Snowden broke (e.g. unlawful disclosure of classified information, data theft) are inappropriate or unreasonable. The laws you may have issue with are the ones that allowed NSA to collect/use the data in the first place. But I don't think you'd want to get into a situation where you'd say, "Oh, sure, this guy stole some stuff but he used it for what he and Holder think is the common good so we're going to ignore the violation." IMNVHO, if there is a place to consider intent and impact, it would be in the sentencing, not in the prosecution.

[O Really]

I guess you could look at it either way. If you look at it only from the standpoint of bad law and definition of inappropriate, the next time somebody shoots a child molester we'd have to make vigilantism legal.

Nonsense.

When you discover a child molester, you can report it to police and be certain that they'll take it seriously. Not so with whistleblowing against government corruption. Not any more.

Whistleblowers who report corruption do have protections. "Whistleblowers" who steal data to report something they disagree with, not so much.

[Vrede too]

.... "Whistleblowers" who steal data to report something they (and Holder, retroactively) disagree with, not so much.

I don't think you can argue that the laws Snowden broke (e.g. unlawful disclosure of classified information, data theft) are inappropriate or unreasonable....

In a vacuum, no, in the context of what the NSA is doing, the 4th Amendment, public service and positive societal changes, and the lack of recourse that rstrong describes, we can and have argued just that - at a minimum the need for stronger counterbalancing whistleblower protection law. Sadly, Obama/Holder have been harsher towards whistleblowers than most.

[rstrong]

Whistleblowers who report corruption do have protections. "Whistleblowers" who steal data to report something they disagree with, not so much.

Bullshit.

a) Whistleblowers who report torture and mass surveillance of the American people aren't reporting "something they disagree with." They're reporting crimes. (Small wonder that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was lying to Congress about it. Before Snowden's "stolen data" showed that he was lying.)

b) Whistleblowers in these cases have protection ONLY if they report through "proper channels" that ignore them. In other words, only if they don't do any whistleblowing. That's the common theme here with the other whistleblowers: There's no form of whistleblowing that gives you those protections.

[Vrede too]

... IMNVHO, if there is a place to consider intent and impact, it would be in the sentencing, not in the prosecution.

By that reasoning Jim Crow law violators should have been prosecuted but should have gotten lighter sentences.

[O Really]

... IMNVHO, if there is a place to consider intent and impact, it would be in the sentencing, not in the prosecution.

By that reasoning Jim Crow law violators should have been prosecuted but should have gotten lighter sentences.

Maybe. Depends on what they did in violation of the Jim Crow laws. If they burned down a building that had a "whites only" sign on it, it's still arson. If they broke into the Woolworths and had a food fight at the lunch counter, it's still breaking and entering, etc. But they didn't generally do that sort of thing and even then, a lot of "trespassing" charges got dropped. Snowden wasn't staging a sit-in at the NSA or refusing to take a back seat on the bus.

[Vrede too]

He didn't burn down a building or stage a food fight. Burning the "whites only" sign is a more apt analogy. Snowden violated secrecy law after alternatives were shot down in order to make revelations that most Americans wanted to know about, and even the then sitting AG calls doing so "a public service" that lead to positive changes. If law does not improve society, the law is the problem, not the people who nonviolently break it.

[O Really]

If "revelations that most Americans wanted to know about" is the criteria for protection of intelligence confidentiality, we're in deep shit. Part of my problem with Snowden's adventure is that what he did essentially was to say, "these guys followed the law - it's a bad law and you won't like it, but they followed it." Then, after creating a ruckus where most who heard about it had no clue as to why they were mad, and maybe doing real or potential damage to the intelligence organizations, the underlying law (PATRIOT Act) remains unchanged. I understand that for a variety of reasons I value intelligence organizations more than most of my fellow posters here, and am less aghast at the parade of potential horribles. But bottom line, I opposed PATRIOT when it passed, and still do. Yet it remains.

[rstrong]

If "revelations that most Americans wanted to know about" is the criteria for protection of intelligence confidentiality, we're in deep shit.

It ain't about Americans wanting to know what the Kardashians are up to. It was the government conduction mass surveillance against the American people. (And elsewhere, turning United States into a mass torture state.) Anyone who swore an oath to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" would be obligated to do what Snowden did.

BTW, in addition to the examples I gave above, here's a former senior Defense Department official - part of the "proper channels" for whistleblowers - publicly admitting that the "proper channels" were a joke for someone like Snowden, highlighting how the government regularly sic'd the Holder-run DOJ on anyone who blew the whistle, and that Holder and his team were all too willing to go after whistleblowers. The proper channels are pretty much guaranteed to end your career.

There is no public interest or whistleblowing defense allowed under Espionage Act claims.

[Vrede too]

SOA/WHINSEC Grads in the News

Most Notorious SOA Graduates

for immediate release
July 12, 2016
Contact: Hendrik Voss, SOA Watch, 202-234-3440

Close the SOA/WHINSEC Included in the Platform of the Democratic Party

At the two-day Platform Committee meeting, that took place in Orlando, Florida last weekend, it was agreed to include the closing of the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, as one of its planks into the Democratic Party's policy platform.

The amendment to call for the closure of the notorious US military training school, which reads “Our support of democracies and civilian governments in the Western Hemisphere includes our belief that their military and police forces should never be involved in the political process, and therefore we will reinstate the 2000 Congressional mandate to close the School of the Americas now known as WHINSEC” was introduced by Marcos Rubenstein, a member of the platform committee, who was elected by the Sanders delegates.

The "Close the School of Americas" plank was accepted by both the Sanders and the Clinton campaigns and is now in manager's mark. That means that only grammatical changes are now allowed. This is the first time that the draft of the Democratic Party's policy platform includes the call for the closure of the School of the Americas/ WHINSEC.

The draft policy platform, which still needs to be ratified at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later this month, is supposed to be the policy on which the presidential candidate runs, and around which Democrats rally. While the platform is nonbinding, grassroots activists, who have been concerned about the hawkish stands of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton towards Latin America, will push the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign to adhere to the platform’s call for the closing of the School of the Americas/ Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Hillary Clinton has been dogged on the campaign trail with questions about her role as Secretary of State in the 2009 military coup in Honduras, which was carried out by graduates of the School of the Americas. The State Department under Hillary Clinton legitimized the 2009 coup, which has led to increased militarization, and unleashed violence and human rights abuses. Thousands of Hondurans are fleeing their country, as political violence by the government and death squads is ongoing. Hundreds have been murdered, including indigenous environmentalist and social justice activist Berta Cáceres, who was shot in her house in the Honduran community of La Esperanza on March 3, 2016.

School of the Americas Watch, the activist organization that is working against US militarization throughout the Americas, is mobilizing for a Convergence at the US/Mexico border from October 7-10, 2016 in the lead-up to the elections: http://SOAW.org/border The convergence will demand a fundamental shift in US foreign policy, shine a light on how US militarization in Latin America is a principal root causes of migration, and call attention to the devastating impact of US security and immigration policy on refugees.

“In order to create real change, we can't rely on politicians to make it happen for us. We have to organize to build broad-based grassroots power, and hold those who are making decisions that affect our lives accountable.” said Hendrik Voss of School of the Americas Watch.

Hillary Clinton’s dodgy answers on Honduras coup

[rstrong]

Now that people are waking up to privacy issues, that's changing in recent years. Microsoft for example refuses to hand over email without a court order. And refuses to hand over email on a server in Ireland to authorities in the US.

Follow-up. ZDNet: In privacy victory, Microsoft wins appeal over foreign data warrant

The case centered on a uniquely-different warrant that was issued by US prosectors in that it was for data stored in an email account stored by Microsoft overseas. Prosecutors said that because the data was hosted by a US-based company, Microsoft must comply.
[...]
The software giant has been battling US prosecutors for two years over data held in its Dublin, Ireland datacenter, which it said cannot be accessed or retrieved by a US search warrant.

Both Microsoft and Irish authorities have long asked the US government to go through the international mutual legal assistance treaties set up between the two countries.

This isn't just about foreign data; it's a victory for American privacy too. And not only because it'll make it harder for other countries where Microsoft operates (which is most of them) to order them to hand over data on Americans hosted on American servers.

American policy is that Americans' right to privacy ends at the border. (In some cases within 100 miles of a border or coast line, which includes something like two thirds of the American population.) Data on American cloud server farms often gets backed up to server farms half-way around the planet. So if the authorities wanted your data without a warrant, they could demand it from the overseas servers. This'll make it a lot harder to do that, while still allowing them to get the data through international mutual legal assistance treaties with courts involved.

[Vrede too]

In first, U.S. judge throws out cell phone 'stingray' evidence

[Seth Milner]

Has anyone else seen this? I read this twice to make sure I was reading it correctly! These assholes have found a way to obtaining your cell phone number; probably as way to enhance the gummit's snooping capabilities. Piss on 'em, it ain't nobody's effin' business what my cell number is!

Starting in August 2016, Social Security is adding a new step to protect your privacy as a mySocialSecurity user.
This new requirement is the result of an executive order (from who?) for federal agencies to provide more secure authentication for their online services. Any agency that provides online access to a customer’s personal information must use multi-factor authentication.

When you sign in at ssa.gov/myaccount with your username and password, we will ask you to add your text-enabled cell phone number.
The purpose of providing your cell phone number is that, each time you log in to your account with your username and password,
we will send you a one-time security code you must also enter to log in successfully to your account.

Each time you sign into your account, you will complete two steps:

Step 1: Enter your username and password.
Step 2: Enter the security code we text to your cell phone (cell phone provider's text message and data rates may apply).
The process of using a one-time security code in addition to a username and password is one form of “multi-factor authentication,”
which means we are using more than one method to make sure you are the actual owner of your account.


Here's the real pisser:
If you do not have a text-enabled cell phone or you do not wish to provide your cell phone number, you will not be able to access your "mySocialSecurity account".

If you are unable to or choose not to use mySocialSecurity, there are other ways you can contact us.

Bastards.

[O Really]

And yet, some would howl if their SSA account got hacked and claim security was too weak. Don't worry, Seth, you don't have to give them your number. Feel free to go down and sit on line at your local office.

[Seth Milner]

Strange reply coming from one who contributed heavily to "Big Brother is Watching You".

[O Really]

Yes, but my contributions about Big Brother (other than the TV show) have been mostly "meh" Unlike some we know. But anyway, it's your effin phone, Seth! What do you think, SSA is going to send you robo marketing calls? Sell your number to time share solicitors? Do you think if the evil NSA or whoever wants your number they can't find it?