AMY GOODMAN: William Binney, can you respond to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper? And then I want to ask Glenn to do the same.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Sure. In my mind, that’s a red herring. I mean, it’s just a false issue. The point was, the terrorists have already known that we’ve been doing this for years, so there’s no surprise there. They’re not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that they’re—we’re not—the government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; it’s trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States. That’s where I see it.
Defenders of NSA Surveillance Web Omit Most of Mumbai Plotter's Story (Yahoo News, many links)
U.S. agencies did not find Headley or warn foreign counterparts about him in the first half of 2009 while he conducted surveillance in Denmark and India and met and communicated with ISI officers and known Lashkar and al-Qaida leaders.
Edward Snowden and Washington's revolving-door culture (Al Jazeera)
The recent NSA leak reveals the disturbing extent to which the US' government and corporate sectors have merged.
In an exclusive interview carried out from a secret location in the city, the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst also made explosive claims that the US government had been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland for years.
Is Obama going beyond Orwellian? (Al Jazerra)
The government would like to shift the conversation to accuse other people of wrongdoing, when it is their own wrongdoing that should be discussed and examined before the American people. David Colapinto, a lawyer who has represented a number of whistleblowers
James Clapper: Obama stands by intelligence chief as criticism mounts (The Guardian)
Admission that James Clapper gave ‘least truthful answer' on domestic surveillance could become a problem for the president
NSA controversy: Should James Clapper go or stay? (Los Angeles Times)
When the federal government went looking for phone numbers tied to terrorists, it grabbed the records of just about everyone in America. Why every phone number? “Well, you have to start someplace,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told NBC News on Monday. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press / June 12, 2013)
NSA hacker Edward Snowden: U.S. targets China with hackers (Washington Post)
According to Snowden, the NSA has engaged in more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, including hundreds aimed at Chinese targets. Among the targets were universities, businesses and public officials.
NSA hacks China, leaker Snowden claims (CNN)
Snowden's allegations appear to give weight to claims by some Chinese government officials that the country has been a victim of similar hacking efforts coming from the United States.
N.S.A. Scandal: God Save Us From the Lawyers (New Yorker)
With some honorable exceptions, their primary function is protecting the interests of the political and corporate establishments, often by finding some novel and tendentious way to legitimate their self-interested actions.
‘Scandal' and the politics of definition (Al Jazeera)
Within this framework, scandal is best understood as a disruption of the natural, sacred order, which is restored by ritual exposure, condemnation, punishment, and cleansing. Conceptually, the essence of scandal is that things are not as they seem, or as they should be – that supposedly “high” things are actually “low”, that righteous things are corrupt, honourable things dishonorable – and that all must be made right again.
The People's Republic of Surveillancestan (Sage International)
The techno-social revolution that we are living through spurred by the Internet, social media and cleverly designed, inconspicuous platforms are inviting us to throw away our personal privacy. This revolution is driven by a combination of commercial competition between the Information Age commerical giants and encouraged by governments desperate to deliver us to the ‘promised land' of safety and security. The question is – whose safety, whose security?
The Price of the Panopticon (New York Times)
A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center over the four days immediately after the news first broke found that just 41 percent of Americans deemed it unacceptable that the National Security Agency “has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.”
Unanswered Questions in NSA Disclosures (Medium.com)
There’s just one problem: A lot of his story doesn’t add up.
US: Urgent Need for Surveillance Reforms (Human Rights Watch)
“Existing laws do not seem to have kept up with the threat to privacy and other rights posed by the government’s relatively new capacity to collect and analyze quickly vast quantities of personal information,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director at Human Rights Watch.
[ Sameer Arshad ]
