Hillary says no Star Chamber for Snowden. Germany arrests NSA spy. And the intercepts go on, with anyone who has an interest in anonymity on the web being made a person of interest.
A few stories about the NSA today. The most consequential is that Germany has apparently arrested a member of its intelligence agency who was spying for the NSA. Philip Oltermann, The Guardian:
A new surveillance scandal is threatening to unsettle US-German relations after it emerged that an employee of the Germany's intelligence agency has been arrested under suspicion of acting as a double agent for the USA.
According to several reports in the German media, a 31-year-old member of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) administration department in Pullach was on Wednesday arrested by the country's federal prosecutor, originally under suspicion of passing on information to Russian intelligence services.
However, under questioning by the federal prosecutor the suspect said he had received money in exchange for passing on secret information to a US contact. If his claims turn out to be true, German papers say it would constitute the biggest scandal involving a US-German double agent in the post-war era.
Der Spiegel's report is here. Translation here.
This is probably not going to go well given that Thomas Drake has testified to the German Parliament that the BND is just an appendix of the NSA. Translationhere. So, the Germans are faced with the nightmare prospect of having their most secret agency so thoroughly penetrated that it might have to be closed down and re-opened with completely different staff just in order to regain some sense of national sovereignty.
In another story, which I regard as a kind of dark comedy, Hillary Clinton has boldly asserted the right of Edward Snowden to legal defense should he be so foolish as to return to the United States without first gaining immunity. She has gone even further and claimed that the trial could be public!
Sort of like our Constitution demands, since the alternative is the Star Chamber.
Phoebe Greenwood, the Guardian:
The former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said Edward Snowden should have the right to launch a legal and public defence of his decision to leak top-secret documents if he returns to the United States.
"If he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable and also able to present a defence, that is his decision to make," Clinton said in a video interview with the Guardian on Friday.
...
When Clinton was asked if she believed the Espionage Act – passed in 1917 – should be reformed in order to allow Snowden a defence, she claimed not to know what the whistleblower had been charged with as they were "sealed indictments".
"In any case that I'm aware of as a former lawyer, he has a right to mount a defence," she said. "And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defence and a public defence, which can of course affect the legal defence.
...
Snowden's legal team have stated that lack of recourse to a public interest defence is a key obstacle to the whistleblower returning to the US.
Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "The laws would not provide him any opportunity to say that the information never should have been withheld from the public in the first place.
"And the fact that the disclosures have led to the highest journalism rewards, have led to historic reforms in the US and around the world – all of that would be irrelevant in a prosecution under the espionage laws in the United States."
Note the difference between what Wizner and Clinton said. She said that Snowden should be allowed a
public defense, while Wizner said he should be allowed a
public interest defense. The latter means that he would be allowed to present evidence that any laws he broke were to prevent greater crimes, sort of parallel to a fireman entering a house to prevent a fire from spreading. I'd like to ask Clinton whether she means that the trial should be public, which would be problematic considering that the material is classified or whether by "public defense," she means him hiring a PR firm to defend himself in the media.
And don't miss David Harris Gershon on how anyone who is interested in anonymity on the web is being targeted by NSA.
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Oh, almost forgot: Happy Independence Day!
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Update: BM Scott, in comments, links to this Spiegel article, saying the American Ambassador has been (politely) summoned to explain this matter. Translation here