Almost three weeks ago, all three of the major Sunday network news shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’ Face the Nation and ABC’s This Week — allowed very powerful elected officials, such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), to come on the air and claim, without evidence, that they’d seen “clues” suggesting former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden was, somehow, a Russian agent.
The officials were required to offer absolutely no evidence for their extraordinary claims on the three major broadcast networks. Snowden was subsequently forced to strongly rebut the scandalous charges, which are apparently straight out of the Nixon/Cold War era playbook.
While that sort of wholly substance-free red-baiting is now perfectly appropriate, seemingly, on network “news” shows, it’s similarly remarkable that it seems those very same networks, and most of the others, obsessed with unsubstantiated bullshit claims about Snowden, failed to even note a full-length, detailed, substantive videotaped interview with Snowden on Germany television’s ARD almost two weeks ago on January 26th.
Interestingly, on the ARD website, where the exclusive interview was originally posted, a note on the page explains cryptically: “Due to legal reasons the video is only available in Germany.” Huh. So it can’t be watched there from here in the U.S. Okay. So, here’s the full interview as posted at LiveLeak…
Please decide for yourself if he’s a “Russian agent”, as based on his comments here and the actual public evidence that exists (none) to support the defamatory claims of the very powerful elected members of Congress. The entire interview is interesting and as fascinating as he is.
I’m not sure if it offers a lot of new information, in regard to Snowden’s leaks (as he notes several times during the conversation, he’s leaving it to the journalists to decide what is newsworthy and what isn’t from amongst the documents which he reportedly no longer even has), but there’s one section I wanted to underscore, as it’s something we’ve discussed here for many years. Namely, the dangers of privatizing our national security/surveillance state, which he speaks to very directly in the interview…
SNOWDEN: That’s a very difficult question to answer. Um, in general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatizing government functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer, a government employee for the Central Intelligence Agency, but I’ve also served much more frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means is you have private for-profit companies doing inherently governmental work, like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And anyone who has the skills, who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to do so, will be empowered by the government to do that and there’s very little oversight. There’s very little review.
…
INTERVIEWER: You worked for the NSA through a private contractor with the name Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the big ones in the business. What is the advantage for the U.S. Government or the CIA to work through a private contractor to outsource essential government functions?
SNOWDEN: Contracting culture of the national security community in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees, at the same time as keeping lobbying groups in Congress — typically from very well-funded businesses, such as Booz Allen Hamilton — the problem there is, you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind.
The result of that is what we saw at Booz Allen Hamilton, where you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time, with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing. The government didn’t even know they were gone.
For those who have been on a jihad against Snowden since his initial disclosures last year — whether they are powerful elected officials from both major parties, like Feinstein and Rogers, neo-conservative Republicans who have long supported an all-powerful surveillance state in defiance of the Constitution, or Democratic loyalists of Barack Obama who are torturing themselves to find any reason to attack Snowden because they believe his allegations somehow hurt the President — I’d love to hear what their defense is for privatizing our national security/surveillance “needs” to private, 100% unaccountable corporate interests.
Specifically, I wonder, how it is that they justify the type of behavior that it has allowed, not just in the Snowden case, but, for example, in the planned 2011 multi-million dollar attack that was being prepared for launch against private U.S. citizens and journalists — in this case, including myself and my family — by intelligence contractors using taxpayer-funded tools developed for the so-called “War on Terror”.
Advancing a case that charges Snowden is the “bad guy” here, whether the argument is substance-based or created out of whole cloth (as most such arguments against him appear to be), succeeds only in supporting that kind of unaccountable, fascistic corporate/government structure which has proven to offer little, if any, benefits to the citizenry, but plenty of unrestrained power with which to counter pretty much everything otherwise known as “an American value” found at the heart of our U.S. Constitution.
Remember, that privatized national security/surveillance state is not a bug to those private corporations profiteering off of it, it’s a feature. Please recall the selling point written into the proposal [PDF] to pitch their so-called “Corporate Information Reconnaissance Cell” that three intelligence contracting firms had prepared for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, when the firms were hoping to win a $12 million contract to spy and commit espionage against people like me: “[W]ho better to develop a corporate information reconnaissance capability than companies that have been market leaders within the DoD and Intelligence Community.”
Who better, indeed.
He is not a Russian agent, he is a bona fide American Whistleblower. And a very good one.
It is fascinating to see how closely the official response to Snowden tracks what Col. Oliver North unsuccessfully tried to accomplish when he sought to silence U.S. private mercenary-turned-whistleblower, Jack Terrell after Terrell exposed the gunrunning, drug trafficking and assassination plots of the North-led Contra supply network in 1986.
As revealed by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, after receiving memos that concluded Terrell posed an “operational threat” to North’s illegal Contra supply network because he knew too much, North made up, from whole cloth, allegations that Terrell may be a paid agent of Nicaragua’s security service that North combined with a totally bogus claim that Terrell may be planning to assassinate President Reagan.
As the Ed Meese led DOJ, seeking to fend off an pending investigation by a Kerry Senate subcommittee, falsely claimed that they had already investigated Terrell’s allegations and had found them to be without substance (in truth, FBI memos revealed precisely the opposite), the FBI not only placed Terrell under surveillance as a suspected terrorist, but did so as well with respect to several journalists whom Terrell had spoken to.
In that instance, the effort fell short when the illegality of the entire Iran-Contra affair began to unravel both in Congress and the national press, forcing those in powerful government positions to begin distancing themselves from North.
Here, we see those, exposed by Snowden’s revelations of NSA illegality, have now conjured the same bogus “foreign agent” allegations as a means of damage control.
Perhaps the most significant thing Snowden mentioned was that the government no longer sees itself as working for the people, but rather has aligned itself entirely behind a corporate profit-driven agenda.
It is interesting to see that the little people who pay all the taxes are actually paying for their own enslavement. It used to be that slaveowners had to pay to support their slaves. Not any more it seems
BTW, Excellent work, Brad!
Who knows what snowden was up to and what the government is up to as well. I don’t know if his (snowden) life is on the line or not but I do know he put other lives on the line, for sure.
snowden is a little punk who set off lying and plotting to obtain government information and data, then he scurried off to two commie countries. Come on people! he is far from being any kind of hero.
Every time I see the term “whistle blower” to describe this nut, I lol and think you have got to be kidding me.
A “whistle blower” doesn’t cause more harm than he wants to stop. A “whistle blower” doesn’t lie, steal, cheat and bamboozled his way to obtain sensitive information and data. Also a “whistle blower” doesn’t blackmail our government with the government’s own information. Nor do they collect mount of information to prove a point.
No hero in my book.
USAF
GameOfLife @ 5:
Your remarkable cluelessness about Snowden, whistleblowing and “commie” countries not withstanding, I’ll only bother to ask you about these two parts of your silly, completely inaccurate comment:
Your evidence that Snowden has done so? Please cite specifics. Otherwise, people might think you’re pulling shit out of your ass.
Your evidence to show that Snowden did anything such thing? Cause, otherwise, without such evidence, it’s absolutely clear that you’re now completely pulling shit out of your ass.
Oh, and by the way, as a self-proclaimed “USAF”, I’ll take your word for it, but I’m sorry to see you’ve changed your mind about the oath you once took.
GameOfLife @ 5 writes:
Actually, thanks to Snowden’s willingness to risk all, we now know what the government was up to. Thanks to Snowden. we now know that the privatized, national security state was in the process of creating an unprecedented level of electronic surveillance across the entire globe that exceeds every other method of surveillance employed by any government in recorded history — a level of surveillance that was only imagined by George Orwell in his renowned, but ominous work of fiction, 1984. That blanket surveillance, that, as a minimum, captured the metadata of every domestic electronic communication, has not been shown to have prevented a terrorist plot in so much as a single case.
In this video, Snowden explains precisely why he did what he did — the “what he was up to” as phrased by you. To date, the government has not offered a single piece of evidence that refutes Snowden’s explanation, and, as Brad Friedman aptly observed @6, neither have you.
The game the NSA is playing by turning ordinary Americans into “the enemy” is a dangerous one that always ends badly. It ends badly for democracy. It ends badly for the People. And, whether the dunderheads in DC realize it or not, it ends badly for them too. The wars have truly come home and we have to stop this one too.
It’s past high time these agencies were ended. That will never happen willingly by the government or it’s elected representatives. It will have to happen when those within this totally corrupt system decide they have had enough and do the right thing and dump everything there is about these agencies out for the entire World to see and read, including the names, titles and locations of every person and facility associated with them. Yes, blow everyone’s cover. It will be the only way to render ALL of these agencies effectively useless. At this point they are so out of control, I don’t care who gets hurt or killed by disclosure. The American public, and the rest of the World will be immeasurably better off without these organizations. End the American Empire!
The military NSA is not mentioned in FISA as one that can ask the FISC to gather data.
Further, the military NSA is committing a crime under possee comitatus which has a two year prison sentence attached.
Snowden is reporting a military crime and Constitutional violations against Americans which make him a whistleblower patriot.
Brad is spot on in this post.
GameofLife @ of course fails to comment on the content of Snowden’s remarkable comments that Brad quoted in this article.
As I have asked before, with our private and personal information in the hands of non-accountable third parties, is there any feasible or practical way to protect ourselves?
Defunding the NSA state by state as has been suggested before might at best slow down our government’s access to all this privately held information. (Or it might not — my guess is there are probably hidden contingency funds to cover any such lapses). But even if our government was curtailed, what will curtail the private corporations? Would they have other buyers of our data? Would they find their own lucrative uses for it?
We have no protection.
GeneDebs @ 9:
Just want to go on record to note how much I disagree with you. I appreciate your frustration and, as you know, I find comments like GameOfLife’s @ 5 absolutely ridiculous, appalling, and in direct contradiction of the oath taken by anybody in the U.S. military (as he presumably did, as part of the USAF).
But while his comments are ridiculous and obnoxious, I gotta say that yours — calling for blowing covers of people who are likely to be killed in their own country should that happen — is right up there on the idiocy scale.
Moreover, I believe there is a place for these agencies (or, at least, for much of the work they do). But not at the expense of either the rule of law or the Constitution.
Shutting them down and, as you say, “dump[ing] everything there is about these agencies out for the entire World to see and read, including the names, titles and locations of every person and facility associated with them”, however, is absolutely not the way to proceed. Not even close.
One of the reasons rogue military operations take place inside the military NSA is the growing political power of the military in Washington (A Tale of Coup Cities – 9). They have brought or free press rating down to #46 in the list of the top 50 nations.