If you’re following recent developments relating to the over-arching, year-long, NSA/Snowden-surveillance state story, there are two “must-reads” out this weekend: yesterday’s outstanding piece by Georgetown Law School Professor David Cole over at the New York Review of Books’ (“NYR”) Blog, ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata,’ and the first excerpt from Glenn Greenwald’s much-anticipated “No Place to Hide,” published over at the Guardian, in just the past couple of hours (note: per the article, at least one more excerpt will be published there prior to the book’s release on Tuesday)…
Glenn Greenwald: the explosive day we revealed Edward Snowden's identity to the world
Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com
Sunday 11 May 2014 08.56 EDT
In the hours after his name became known, the entire world was searching for the NSA whistleblower, and it became vital that his whereabouts in Hong Kong remained secret. In an extract from a new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald recalls the dramatic events surrounding the moment Snowden revealed himself in June 2013
On Thursday 6 June 2013, our fifth day in Hong Kong, I went to Edward Snowden's hotel room and he immediately said he had news that was "a bit alarming". An internet-connected security device at the home he shared with his longtime girlfriend in Hawaii had detected that two people from the NSA – a human-resources person and an NSA "police officer" – had come to their house searching for him.
Snowden was almost certain this meant that the NSA had identified him as the likely source of the leaks, but I was sceptical. "If they thought you did this, they'd send hordes of FBI agents with a search warrant and probably Swat teams, not a single NSA officer and a human-resources person." I figured this was just an automatic and routine inquiry, triggered when an NSA employee goes absent for a few weeks without explanation. But Snowden suggested that perhaps they were being purposely low-key to avoid drawing media attention or setting off an effort to suppress evidence.
Whatever the news meant, it underscored the need for Laura Poitras – the film-maker who was collaborating with me on the story – and I to quickly prepare our article and video unveiling Snowden as the source of the disclosures. We were determined that the world would first hear about Snowden, his actions and his motives, from Snowden himself, not through a demonisation campaign spread by the US government while he was in hiding or in custody and unable to speak for himself.
Our plan was to publish two more articles on the NSA files in the Guardian and then release a long piece on Snowden himself, accompanied by a videotaped interview, and a printed Q&A with him…
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The “Good First Step” Meme And Other Fables:
‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’
The “good first step” meme—regrettably, we’ve seen a lot of this type of propaganda in the MSM and the blogosphere over the past few years--about another kabuki-laden piece of Capitol Hill legislation that barely even begins to scratch the surface of a major problem facing our society; any significant solution to which would disrupt the status quo’s relentless efforts to exploit and undermine it.
So, instead of actually solving "the problem," we're left with a good first step. (As Marcy Wheeler notes below, that may be stretching the truth, too.)
And, that's all it is, as Georgetown University Law School Professor David Cole notes in his outstanding piece, published yesterday at the New York Review of Books' blog (NYR Blog): ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata.’
This time around it’s the USA Freedom Act, our captured government’s so-called marginal, half-assed “response” to the international and domestic uproar created by the almost year-long series of NSA document leaks initiated by Edward Snowden.
It’s a “good first step,” so we’re told by Georgetown University Law School Professor David Cole over at the NYRB blog, yesterday, until you read the greater truths in his fine print, farther down.
First, here's Marcy Wheeler, from Friday...
About HR 3361, the NSA Surveillance Efficiency Act, AKA USA Freedom Act
Published May 10, 2014 | By emptywheel
… it may expand (or, given Lofgren’s stated concerns about what records Section 215 might cover, sustain) the use of Section 215 to collect content, not just metadata. Imagine the possibility this gets yoked to expanded analysis at telecoms under the new CDR program?
We don’t know. This bill has gotten past two committees of Congress (we didn’t get to see any of the debate at HPSCI) without these details becoming clear. But the questions raised by this bill when you consider it as the fix to one or more problems the NSA has been struggling with, it does raise real questions.
Again, I don’t want to make light of the one thing we know this bill will do — take a database showing all phone-based relationships in the country out of NSA’s hands. That eliminates an intolerably risky program. That is an important fix.
But that shouldn’t lead us to ignore the potential expansion of spying that may come with this bill.
(Bold type is diarist's emphasis.)
Rinse. Repeat.
America, we’ve seen this show before. (TARP, Dodd-Frank and many other pieces of recent, “major legislation” come to mind. Just enough to extinguish some of the voters’ torches and send them home with their pitchforks pointed downward and in time to catch the latest episode of Survivor, but—once everything’s said and done--nothing significant enough is accomplished to actually solve the underlying societal “problem,” since the entire matter’s little more than a solution to their public relations issues, not our well-being.) More importantly, these now-institutionalized, pathological deceptions undermine our society’s future, since the primary purpose of said legislation is to mollify the disquieted voting public’s outrage while providing ongoing cover for more devious iterations of the same, downright destructive behavior of a rampantly corrupt government whose over-arching raison d’etre is to serve the interests of its largest benefactors.
Greenwald's book, available in less than two days, as we've already learned in the little that has been published about it to date, vividly describes the extremely close, heretofore untold backstories of those relationships between our nation's largest corporations and our government surveillance state; and, in greater detail than anything that's been released to the public since we first heard the name, Edward Snowden, 11 months ago.
In the meantime, we have this truly excellent piece from David Cole to remind us that it's going to take a lot more than just a little kabuki from Capitol Hill to turn the oligarchs' boats around.
Damn the unwashed masses, the one percents' yachts moves full speed ahead (you really should read Professor Cole's entire piece)...
‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’
David Cole
New York Review of Books' Blog (NYR Blog)
May 10, 2014
Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.
Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”
It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.
For some, no doubt, the very fact that this bill has attracted such broad bipartisan approval will be grounds for suspicion...
...
...The fact that the USA Freedom Act has achieved such wide-ranging support may be less an indication of its compromises than of a fundamental shift in American views. In July 2013, following the Snowden revelations, the Pew Research Center reported that for the first time since it started asking the question in 2004, more Americans expressed concern that counter-terrorism measures were infringing their civil liberties than worried that the government was not doing enough to keep them safe.
Congress is responsive to such shifts in popular opinion. The question now is whether that new attitude can be translated into more systemic reform, or whether enactment of this bill will placate enough people that the demand for further reform fizzles. If the Senate can pass or even strengthen the USA Freedom Act, as Senator Leahy has said he intends to do, it will be a significant achievement for civil liberties. But the biggest mistake any of us could make would be to conclude that this bill solves the problem.
(Bold type is diarist's emphasis.)
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From the comments, one of the many inconvenient realities concerning deliberate government misdirection on the entire phone surveillance issue is that the lion's share of our country's domestic phone dragnet occurs outside of the NSA's auspices, per my post here on April 28th: "Guardian, Wheeler Revisit 'Hemisphere': Massive, Secret U.S. Phone Dragnet Co-Funded by WH."
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