The Personal Side of Taking on the NSA
By Glenn Greenwald 27 June 13 , Anow, Guardian UK via Reader Supported News
When I made the choice to report aggressively on top-secret NSA programs, I knew that I would inevitably be the target of all sorts of personal attacks and smears. You don’t challenge the most powerful state on earth and expect to do so without being attacked. As a superb Guardian editorial noted today: “Those who leak official information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the punishment.”
via The Personal Side of Taking on the NSA.
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The Wonderful American World of Informers and Agents Provocateurs. Close Encounters of the Lower-Tech Kind.
By Todd Gitlin June 27, 2013 tomdispatch.com
Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they areaware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.
Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time — look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t. What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.)
Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.
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Gupta: ‘Brown made a splash in February 2011 by helping to uncover ‘Team Themis.” (photo: unknown)
Barrett Brown’s Revelations Every Bit As Explosive As Edward Snowden’s
By Arun Gupta 28 June 13 Guardian UK via Reader Supported News
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From the Philippines to the NSA: 111 Years of the US Surveillance State
By Mike Morey Occupy.com | News Analysis Saturday, 29 June 2013 via truthout.org
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, in Washington, June 19, 2013. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, in Washington, June 19, 2013. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)The National Security Act of 1947 represented a major reorganization of America’s military establishment, unifying the Army, Navy and a newly created Air Force under a new agency, the Department of Defense. A National Security Council would serve in the White House as advisers to the president and a Central Intelligence Agency constituted our first peacetime intelligence gathering body.
The Act was given its great impetus by the perceived threat of Soviet communism. Not since the Red Scare period immediately following World War I had Americans been so unnerved by the thought of a communist conspiracy infiltrating and undermining American democracy.
“Wall Street Journal” Hit on Glenn Greenwald Provokes Angry Response
By Greg Mitchell (about the author) pednews.com Source: The Nation
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Edward Snowden’s Long FlightClick title to read full article. NationofChange.org July 2, 2013 | |
 Peter Van Buren, Op-Ed: “As a State Department whistleblower, I think a lot about Edward Snowden. I can’t help myself. My friendships with other whistleblowers like Tom Drake, Jesslyn Radack, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Kiriakou lead me to believe that, however different we may be as individuals, our acts have given us much in common. I suspect that includes Snowden, though I’ve never had the slightest contact with him. Still, as he took his long flight from Hong Kong into the unknown, I couldn’t help feeling that he was thinking some of my thoughts, or I his.” |
Edward Snowden Isn’t on the Run . . . We Are
The lessons of the US whistleblower in Anne Applebaum’s Russia
Subhankar Banerjee, Huffington Post <> Sent to WAMMToday by David Culver
June 27, 2013 | First came the “shock and awe”: the revelations of massive spying by the US and British governments—on the people of the world. Then came the enlightened debate: Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? Then arrived the Hollywood-style entertainment: Where is Edward Snowden going? (The Washing Post even published a map of his potential journey, as if he is some kind of an explorer trying the first ascent of Everest, or the first trek to the North Pole). Then came the finger: first from China, and then Russia. Then arrived the much-anticipated distraction—the “Obama Climate Plan.” And now, the “chill”—Russia the evil.
Eminent Russia scholar George Kennan passed away in 2005. Today, Anne Applebaum is as qualified as anyone in the US to write on Russia. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her magisterial book, Gulag: A History (2004). Yesterday, in The Washington Post she opened her op-ed on Edward Snowden in Russia with the following words.
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