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Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
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They're saying Snowden left the airport in a regular taxi and will talk to the press, but not just yet.
Snowden granted 1-year asylum in Russia, leaves airport
Kucherena showed a photocopy of the document to the press. According to it, Snowden is free to stay in Russia until at least July 31, 2014. His asylum status may be extended annually upon request.
With his newly-awarded legal status in Russia, Snowden cannot be handed over to the US authorities, even if Washington files an official request. He can now be transported to the United States only if he agrees to go voluntarily.
Snowden departed at around 15.30 Moscow time (11.30 GMT), airport sources said. His departure came some 30 minutes before his new refugee status was officially announced.
His present location has not been made public nor will it be disclosed, Kucherena said.
Ed Pilkington at the Guardian.
Bradley Manning leak did not result in deaths by enemy forces, court hears
Counter-intelligence officer who investigated WikiLeaks impact undermines argument that Manning leak put lives at risk
The US counter-intelligence official who led the Pentagon's review into the fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures of state secrets told the Bradley Manning sentencing hearing on Wednesday that no instances were ever found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases.
Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet. "I don't have a specific example," he said.
It has been one of the main criticisms of the WikiLeaks publications that they put lives at risk, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. The admission by the Pentagon's chief investigator into the fallout from WikiLeaks that no such casualties were identified marks a significant undermining of such arguments.
Look at the manpower they threw at that investigation.
According to one of the govt officials on the panel at the Senate hearing yesterday, the executive branch had a meeting on Tuesday and decided to take the very unusual move of releasing documents during or just before a Senate hearing. I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with the fact that Greenwald was releasing new NSA revelations at the Guardian the same morning. Nor did the president deep six Grayson's hearing that same morning with his visit to the Capitol for a little birthday party with the House Dems. If Grayson's hearing had been held. Greenwald's testimony and he hearing would have been front and center, probably on the cable networks, and nobody would have noticed the very bogus Senate hearing with the same witnesses they had before, and what looked like a scripted kabuki telling us how the govt only collects the metadata to keep you safe.
And, surprise, the beacons of transparency heavily redacted the documents they released.
US government declassifies court order on NSA surveillance as pressure builds
Document suggests bulk collection of Americans' phone records is 'relevant' for terrorism investigations – but critics disagree
A surveillance document declassified on Wednesday details the ability of National Security Agency algorithms and "technical personnel" to search through the NSA's vast databases of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans.
Disclosed before the contentious Senate judiciary committee hearing on Wednesday, the April 25 document from the secret surveillance court known as the Fisa court bolstered assertions made by top intelligence officials about the restrictions on their ability to sift through the so-called "metadata" they collect in bulk.
But civil libertarians criticized the court's finding that mass collection of Americans' phone records is "relevant" to a terrorism investigation – the central contention for the legality of the bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The heavily redacted document, from April, sets out the rules that govern a related order covering the Verizon telephone provider, published by the Guardian in June and provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The Senate hearings and Keith Alexander's speech at the Blackhat convention were so bogus because they frame everything so carefully and so carefully parse words. Here's the ACLU with the new NSA-ese definitions of various words.
How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say
A lexicon for understanding the words U.S. intelligence officials use to mislead the public.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say.
And a few hours after the Guardian published the latest revelations about XKeyscore, Keith Alexander did a keynote speech at the first of two hacker conferences this week in Las Vegas. This is the Blackhat conference, which is much more friendly to him (lots of govt contractors and hackers who take $ for zero day exploits) than the DefCon conference, which formally asked the feds to stay home this year, even though Alexander did an infamous keynote there last year. Here is the full speech in full, along with the solemn intro. It was much anticipated, standing room only, a big event on Twitter, and at first he demanded that nobody film it, but gave in on that. I'll have more to say on this speech later, but here it is.
NSA Chief Keith Alexander Keynote @ Black Hat USA 2013
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