Since retiring from a three-decade career at the NSA in 2001, a mathematician named William Binney has been telling anyone who will listen about a vast data-gathering operation being conducted by his former employers. “Here’s the grand design,” he told filmmaker Laura Poitras last year. “You build social networks for everybody. That then turns into the graph, and then you index all that data to that graph, which means you can pull out a community. That gives you an outline of everybody in that community. And if you carry that out from 2001 up, you have 10 years of their life that you can then lay out in a timeline that involves anybody in the country. Even Senators and Representatives—all of them.”
As a new wave of classified documents published by news organizations appeared online over the past week, the Department of Defense instructed employees and contractors that they must neither seek out nor download classified material that is in the public domain.
“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites, disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain remains classified and must be treated as such until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority,” wrote Timothy A. Davis, Director of Security in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence), in a June 7 memorandum.
“DoD employees and contractors shall not, while accessing the web on unclassified government systems, access or download documents that are known or suspected to contain classified information.”
“DoD employees or contractors who seek out classified information in the public domain, acknowledge its accuracy or existence, or proliferate the information in any way will be subject to sanctions,” the memorandum said.
Institute of Ethics & Emerging Technologies, June 10, 2013
It should be self-evident that recent NSA revelations bring up some grave concerns about civil liberties. But they also raise other profound and troubling questions – about the privatization of our military, our inflated expectations for digital technology, and the increasingly cozy relationship between Big Corporations (including Wall Street) and Big Defense.
Are these corporations perverting our political process? The campaign war chest for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who today said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden committed “treason,” is heavily subsidized by defense and intelligence contractors that include General Dynamics, General Atomic, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Bechtel. One might argue that a politician with that kind of backing is in no moral position to lecture others about “treason.”
But Feinstein’s funders are decidedly old-school Military/Industrial Complex types. What about the new crowd? This confluence of forces hasn’t been named yet, so for the time being we’ll use a cumbersome label: the “Security/Digital Complex.” With computers and communications encompassing an ever-larger portion of human activity, we may someday learn that this new force dwarfs even its predecessors in the Feinstein camp when it comes to its impact on our democracy, our economy and our values.
There’s much we don’t know yet, so it’s wise to be cautious in describing this new force. But Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the reactions to them, are offering us a glimpse into rarely-seen intersections of Wall Street wealth, information technology, and the national security state.
Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo.
That still doesn’t preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.
Snowden’s exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn’t mean we have the whole story.
How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned to NSA, and he can get access to, and copy, documents that expose the spying collaboration between NSA and the biggest tech companies in the world—and he can get away with it.
If so, then NSA is a sieve leaking out of all holes. Because that means a whole lot of other, higher NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Poof.
If the NSA is not a sieve, it’s quite correct to suspect Snowden, a relatively low-level man, was guided and helped.
Does that diminish what Snowden accomplished? No. But it casts it in a different light.
At last week's annual summit of the Organization of American States, Latin American leaders distanced themselves from the United States' drug policies and agreed to consider the widespread legalization of marijuana.
The OAS summit “was really a tipping point for this movement” to end the war on drugs, said Pedro Abramovay, a campaign director for Avaaz, a global nonprofit group that has petitioned the OAS to liberalize its drug policies.
The move comes as Uruguay debates a bill to legalize the production and sale of pot (it is already legal there for personal use) and as Chile considers decriminalizing it. Latin American leaders also have kept a close eye on how Colorado and Washington, having legalized marijuana, will go about regulating its consumption.
At the summit, which wrapped up on Friday in Antigua, Guatemala, delegates reviewed a recent OAS study that explores a range of options for a new regional drug policy that might include legalizing or decriminalizing cannabis, and even abandoning the fight against the coca production in some areas. “Never before has a multilateral organization engaged in such an inclusive and intellectually legitimate analysis of drug policy options,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement. The delegates agreed to create a high-level commission to debate the study and make policy suggestions.
This is how far we have changed from the Founder's vision of the United States.
The Founders', as the Constitution and Bill of Rights make clear, made a big deal about privacy. “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
– Benjamin Franklin (on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania – 1759)
How different that is from the Pew and The Washington Post survey which discovered: “A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism…”
Pakistan: In response to two US drone attacks since taking his oath of office last week, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif issued an official statement after his first cabinet meeting. “The policy of protesting against drone strikes for public consumption, while working behind the scenes to make them happen, is not on.”
He told the cabinet that drone attacks were a violation of national sovereignty and the government “had chalked out a policy” to counter them. He said it was a matter of concern that after he took charge of the government' drone attacks were launched which was not acceptable in any way
Comment: Over the weekend, the new government summoned the US Ambassador to deliver an official protest. The statements at the cabinet meeting signify that the new government will go beyond issuing pro forma protests. Sharif has a policy in mind and changes are likely.
Sharif also ordered a 30% cut in the staff of the Prime Minister to set an example for the rest of the cabinet whom he ordered to cut 30% of non-developmental expenditures. He told the cabinet to set priorities consistent with his guidance and report back to him in two weeks on how to revive the economy. He also advised that those who fail will be replaced.
Whether Snowden will give away — among other intelligence secrets he claimed to know — the locations of every CIA base overseas and identities of its undercover officers is unclear.
