I suspect he was talking about Cable commentators and some mainstream
columns that you didn't happen to run across.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of R. E. Driscoll Sr
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2015 4:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame
Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits
All:
This is the first time in the past day or so that I have seen the name
Snowden mentioned in any of my reading about the mess in France. I wonder
who is 'some of them'?
On 11/15/2015 3:07 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Greenwald writes: "I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and
blatantly -
how shamelessly - some of them jumped to exploit the emotions
prompted by
the carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the
bodies
still lay on the streets of Paris."
A memorial for the victims of the terrorist attack in Paris. (photo:
Frank
Augstein/AP)
Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from
Actual
Culprits Who Empowered ISIS
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
15 November 15
Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America's enemies (top
Nixon
aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the
deaths
of Americans with his leak); it's just the tactical playbook that's
automatically used. So it's of course unsurprising that ever since
Edward
Snowden's whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to
report on
secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been
accused by
"officials" and their various media allies of Helping The
TerroristsT.
Still, I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly - how
shamelessly - some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted
by the
carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies
still
lay on the streets of Paris. At first, the tawdry exploiters were
the likes
of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey,
who
once said Snowden "should be hanged by his neck until he is dead"
and now
has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran-obsessed
Robert
Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson
and
current Fox personality Dana Perino); right-wing polemicists fired
from
BuzzFeed for plagiarism; and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino's
co-host).
So it was worth ignoring save for the occasional Twitter retort.
But now we've entered the inevitable "U.S. Officials Say" stage of
the
"reporting" on the Paris attack - i.e. journalists mindlessly and
uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear
about what
happened. So now credible news sites are regurgitating the claim
that the
Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks - based on no
evidence or
specific proof of any kind, needless to say, but just the
unverified,
obviously self-serving assertions of government officials. But much
of the
U.S. media loves to repeat rather than scrutinize what government
officials
tell them to say. So now this accusation has become widespread and
is thus
worth examining with just some of the actual evidence.
One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden
reporting, The
Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted
emails to
plot, so western governments were able to track their plotting and
disrupt
at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise
to the
victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in
London, 2008
in Mumbai, and April, 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the
multiple
perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks - all of which were
carried
out prior to Snowden's June, 2013 revelations - hide their
communications
from detection?
This is a glaring case where propagandists can't keep their stories
straight. The implicit premise of this accusation is that The
Terrorists
didn't know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption
until
Snowden came along and told them. Yet we've been warned for years
and years
before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and
sophisticated that
they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic
surveillance.
By itself, the glorious mythology of How the U.S. Tracked Osama bin
Laden
should make anyone embarrassed to make these claims. After all, the
central
premise of that storyline is that bin Laden only used trusted
couriers to
communicate because Al Qaeda knew for decades to avoid electronic
means of
communication because the U.S. and others could spy on those
communications.
Remember all that? Zero Dark Thirty and the "harsh but effective"
interrogation of bin Laden's "official messenger"?
Any terrorist capable of tying his own shoe - let alone carrying out
a
significant attack - has known for decades that speaking on open
telephone
and internet lines was to be avoided due to U.S. surveillance. As
one
Twitter commentator put it yesterday when mocking this new
It's-Snowden's-Fault game: "Dude, the drug dealers from the Wire
knew not to
use cell phones."
The Snowden revelations weren't significant because they told The
Terrorists
their communications were being monitored; everyone - especially The
Terrorists - has known that forever. The revelations were
significant
because they told the world that the NSA and its allies were
collecting
everyone else's internet communications and activities.
The evidence proving this - that The Terrorists have been
successfully using
sophisticated encryption and other surveillance-avoidance methods
for many
years prior to Snowden - is so overwhelming that nobody should be
willing to
claim otherwise with a straight face. As but one of countless
examples,
here's a USA Today article from February, 2001 - more than 12 years
before
anyone knew the name "Edward Snowden" - warning that Al Qaeda was
able to
"outfox law enforcement" by hiding its communications behind
sophisticated
internet encryption:
The Christian Science Monitor similarly reported on February 1,
2001, that
"the head of the US National Security Agency has publicly complained
that Al
Qaeda's sophisticated use of the Internet and encryption techniques
have
defied Western eavesdropping attempts."
After 9/11, we were constantly told about how wily and advanced The
Terrorists were when it came to hiding their communications from us.
One
scary graphic from the November, 2001 issue of Network World laid it
out
this way:
All the way back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration
exploited the
fears prompted by Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City attack to demand
backdoor
access to all internet communications. This is what then-FBI
Director Louis
Freeh told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, 1997 - almost 20
years
ago:
The looming spectre of the widespread use of robust, virtually
uncrackable
encryption is one of the most difficult problems confronting law
enforcement
as the next century approaches. At stake are some of our most
valuable and
reliable investigative techniques, and the public safety of our
citizens. We
believe that unless a balanced approach to encryption is adopted
that
includes a viable key management infrastructure, the ability of law
enforcement to investigate and sometimes prevent the most serious
crimes and
terrorism will be severely impaired. Our national security will also
be
jeopardized.
How dumb do they think people are to count on them forgetting all of
this,
and to believe now that The Terrorists only learned to avoid
telephones and
use encryption once Snowden came along? Ironically, the Snowden
archive
itself is full of documents from NSA and its British counterpart,
GCHQ,
expressing deep concern that they cannot penetrate the
communications of
Terrorists because of how sophisticated their surveillance-avoidance
methods
are (obviously, those documents pre-date Snowden's public
disclosures).
As but one example, the GCHQ files contain what the agency calls a
"Jihadist
Handbook" of security measures, dated 2003, that instructs terror
operatives
in the use of sophisticated surveillance-avoidance techniques that -
as we
noted when we first reported it - are very similar to what GCHQ
still tells
its own operatives to use:
In light of all this, how can "officials" and their media
stenographers
persist in trying to convince people of such a blatant, easily
disproven
falsehood: namely, that Terrorists learned to hide their
communications from
Snowden's revelations? They do it because of how many benefits there
are
from swindling people to believe this.
To begin with, U.S officials are eager here to demonize far more
than just
Snowden. They want to demonize encryption generally as well as any
companies
that offer it. Indeed, as these media accounts show, they've been
trying for
two decades to equate the use of encryption - anything that keeps
them out
of people's private online communications - with aiding and abetting
The
Terrorists. It's not just Snowden but also their own long-time
Surveillance
State partners - particular Apple and Google - who are now being
depicted as
Terrorist-Lovers for enabling people to have privacy on the internet
through
encryption products.
As I documented last November, the key tactic of American and
British
officials is to wage a P.R. war against Silicon Valley companies who
offer
encryption by accusing them of Helping The Terrorists. Last
September, FBI
Director James Comey actually said: "What concerns me about this is
companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold
themselves
beyond the law," while The New York Times gave anonymity in that
article to
a security official to link the new iPhone 6 to terrorism. The head
of GCHQ
called Apple and Google "the command-and-control networks of choice
for
terrorists and criminals" as part of what The New York Times called
"a
campaign by intelligence services in Britain and the United States
against
pressure to rein in their digital surveillance after disclosures by
the
American former contractor Edward J. Snowden."
Then there's the blame-shifting benefit. For most major terror
attacks, the
perpetrators were either known to western security agencies or they
had
ample reason to watch them. All three perpetrators of the Charlie
Hebdo
massacre "were known to French authorities," as was the thwarted
train
attacker in July and at least one of the Paris attackers. These
agencies
receive billions and billions of dollars every year and radical
powers, all
in the name of surveilling Bad People and stopping attacks.
So when they fail in their ostensible duty, and people die because
of that
failure, it's a natural instinct to blame others: don't look to us;
it's
Snowden's fault, or the fault of Apple, or the fault of journalists,
or the
fault of encryption designers, or anyone's fault other than ours. If
you're
a security agency after a successful Terror attack, you want
everyone
looking elsewhere, finding all sorts of culprits other than those
responsible for stopping such attacks.
Above all, there's the desperation to prevent people from asking how
and why
ISIS was able to spring up seemingly out of nowhere and be so
powerful, able
to blow up a Russian passenger plane, a market in Beirut, and the
streets of
Paris in a single week. That's the one question western officials
are most
desperate not to be asked, so directing people's ire to Edward
Snowden and
Apple is beneficial in the extreme.
The origins of ISIS are not even in dispute. The Washington Post put
it
simply: "almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former
Iraqi
officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security
committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes." Even Tony
Blair -
Tony Blair - admits that there'd be no ISIS without the invasion of
Iraq:
"'I think there are elements of truth in that,' he said when asked
whether
the Iraq invasion had been the 'principal cause' of the rise of
ISIS." As
The New Yorker's John Cassidy put it in August:
By destroying the Iraqi state and setting off reverberations across
the
region that, ultimately, led to a civil war in Syria, the 2003
invasion
created the conditions in which a movement like ISIS could thrive.
And, by
turning public opinion in the United States and other Western
countries
against anything that even suggests a prolonged military involvement
in the
Middle East, the war effectively precluded the possibility of a
large-scale
multinational effort to smash the self-styled caliphate.
Then there's the related question of how ISIS has become so
well-armed and
powerful. There are many causes, but a leading one is the role
played by the
U.S. and its "allies in the region" (i.e., Gulf tyrannies) in arming
them,
unwittingly or (in the case of its "allies in the region")
otherwise, by
dumping weapons and money into the region with little regard to
where they
go (even U.S. officials openly acknowledge that their own allies
have funded
ISIS). But the U.S.'s own once-secret documents strongly suggest
U.S.
complicity as well, albeit inadvertent, in the rise of ISIS, as
powerfully
demonstrated by this extraordinary 4-minute clip of Al Jazeera's
Mehdi Hasan
with Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency:
Given all this, is there any mystery why "U.S. officials" and the
military-intelligence regime, let alone Iraq War-advocating hacks
like Jim
Woolsey and Dana Perino, are desperate to shift blame away from
themselves
for ISIS and terror attacks and onto Edward Snowden, journalism
about
surveillance, or encryption-providing tech companies? Wouldn't you
if you
were them? Imagine simultaneously devoting all your efforts to
depicting
ISIS as the Greatest and Most Evil Threat Ever, while knowing the
vital role
you played in its genesis and growth.
The clear, overwhelming evidence - compiled above - demonstrates how
much
deceit their blame-shifting accusations require. But the more
important
point of inquiry is to ask why they are so eager to ensure that
everyone but
themselves receives scrutiny for what is happening. The answer to
that
question is equally clear, and disturbing in the extreme.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference
not valid.
A memorial for the victims of the terrorist attack in Paris. (photo:
Frank
Augstein/AP)
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame
-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/https://theinterce
pt.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-
from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/
Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from
Actual
Culprits Who Empowered ISIS
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
15 November 15
histleblowers are always accused of helping America's enemies (top
Nixon
aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the
deaths
of Americans with his leak); it's just the tactical playbook that's
automatically used. So it's of course unsurprising that ever since
Edward
Snowden's whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to
report on
secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been
accused by
"officials" and their various media allies of Helping The
TerroristsT.
Still, I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly - how
shamelessly - some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted
by the
carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies
still
lay on the streets of Paris. At first, the tawdry exploiters were
the likes
of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey,
who
once said Snowden "should be hanged by his neck until he is dead"
and now
has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran-obsessed
Robert
Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson
and
current Fox personality Dana Perino); right-wing polemicists fired
from
BuzzFeed for plagiarism; and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino's
co-host).
So it was worth ignoring save for the occasional Twitter retort.
But now we've entered the inevitable "U.S. Officials Say" stage of
the
"reporting" on the Paris attack - i.e. journalists mindlessly and
uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear
about what
happened. So now credible news sites are regurgitating the claim
that the
Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks - based on no
evidence or
specific proof of any kind, needless to say, but just the
unverified,
obviously self-serving assertions of government officials. But much
of the
U.S. media loves to repeat rather than scrutinize what government
officials
tell them to say. So now this accusation has become widespread and
is thus
worth examining with just some of the actual evidence.
One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden
reporting, The
Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted
emails to
plot, so western governments were able to track their plotting and
disrupt
at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise
to the
victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in
London, 2008
in Mumbai, and April, 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the
multiple
perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks - all of which were
carried
out prior to Snowden's June, 2013 revelations - hide their
communications
from detection?
This is a glaring case where propagandists can't keep their stories
straight. The implicit premise of this accusation is that The
Terrorists
didn't know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption
until
Snowden came along and told them. Yet we've been warned for years
and years
before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and
sophisticated that
they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic
surveillance.
By itself, the glorious mythology of How the U.S. Tracked Osama bin
Laden
should make anyone embarrassed to make these claims. After all, the
central
premise of that storyline is that bin Laden only used trusted
couriers to
communicate because Al Qaeda knew for decades to avoid electronic
means of
communication because the U.S. and others could spy on those
communications.
Remember all that? Zero Dark Thirty and the "harsh but effective"
interrogation of bin Laden's "official messenger"?
Any terrorist capable of tying his own shoe - let alone carrying out
a
significant attack - has known for decades that speaking on open
telephone
and internet lines was to be avoided due to U.S. surveillance. As
one
Twitter commentator put it yesterday when mocking this new
It's-Snowden's-Fault game: "Dude, the drug dealers from the Wire
knew not to
use cell phones."
The Snowden revelations weren't significant because they told The
Terrorists
their communications were being monitored; everyone - especially The
Terrorists - has known that forever. The revelations were
significant
because they told the world that the NSA and its allies were
collecting
everyone else's internet communications and activities.
The evidence proving this - that The Terrorists have been
successfully using
sophisticated encryption and other surveillance-avoidance methods
for many
years prior to Snowden - is so overwhelming that nobody should be
willing to
claim otherwise with a straight face. As but one of countless
examples,
here's a USA Today article from February, 2001 - more than 12 years
before
anyone knew the name "Edward Snowden" - warning that Al Qaeda was
able to
"outfox law enforcement" by hiding its communications behind
sophisticated
internet encryption:
The Christian Science Monitor similarly reported on February 1,
2001, that
"the head of the US National Security Agency has publicly complained
that Al
Qaeda's sophisticated use of the Internet and encryption techniques
have
defied Western eavesdropping attempts."
After 9/11, we were constantly told about how wily and advanced The
Terrorists were when it came to hiding their communications from us.
One
scary graphic from the November, 2001 issue of Network World laid it
out
this way:
All the way back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration
exploited the
fears prompted by Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City attack to demand
backdoor
access to all internet communications. This is what then-FBI
Director Louis
Freeh told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, 1997 - almost 20
years
ago:
The looming spectre of the widespread use of robust, virtually
uncrackable
encryption is one of the most difficult problems confronting law
enforcement
as the next century approaches. At stake are some of our most
valuable and
reliable investigative techniques, and the public safety of our
citizens. We
believe that unless a balanced approach to encryption is adopted
that
includes a viable key management infrastructure, the ability of law
enforcement to investigate and sometimes prevent the most serious
crimes and
terrorism will be severely impaired. Our national security will also
be
jeopardized.
How dumb do they think people are to count on them forgetting all of
this,
and to believe now that The Terrorists only learned to avoid
telephones and
use encryption once Snowden came along? Ironically, the Snowden
archive
itself is full of documents from NSA and its British counterpart,
GCHQ,
expressing deep concern that they cannot penetrate the
communications of
Terrorists because of how sophisticated their surveillance-avoidance
methods
are (obviously, those documents pre-date Snowden's public
disclosures).
As but one example, the GCHQ files contain what the agency calls a
"Jihadist
Handbook" of security measures, dated 2003, that instructs terror
operatives
in the use of sophisticated surveillance-avoidance techniques that -
as we
noted when we first reported it - are very similar to what GCHQ
still tells
its own operatives to use:
In light of all this, how can "officials" and their media
stenographers
persist in trying to convince people of such a blatant, easily
disproven
falsehood: namely, that Terrorists learned to hide their
communications from
Snowden's revelations? They do it because of how many benefits there
are
from swindling people to believe this.
To begin with, U.S officials are eager here to demonize far more
than just
Snowden. They want to demonize encryption generally as well as any
companies
that offer it. Indeed, as these media accounts show, they've been
trying for
two decades to equate the use of encryption - anything that keeps
them out
of people's private online communications - with aiding and abetting
The
Terrorists. It's not just Snowden but also their own long-time
Surveillance
State partners - particular Apple and Google - who are now being
depicted as
Terrorist-Lovers for enabling people to have privacy on the internet
through
encryption products.
As I documented last November, the key tactic of American and
British
officials is to wage a P.R. war against Silicon Valley companies who
offer
encryption by accusing them of Helping The Terrorists. Last
September, FBI
Director James Comey actually said: "What concerns me about this is
companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold
themselves
beyond the law," while The New York Times gave anonymity in that
article to
a security official to link the new iPhone 6 to terrorism. The head
of GCHQ
called Apple and Google "the command-and-control networks of choice
for
terrorists and criminals" as part of what The New York Times called
"a
campaign by intelligence services in Britain and the United States
against
pressure to rein in their digital surveillance after disclosures by
the
American former contractor Edward J. Snowden."
Then there's the blame-shifting benefit. For most major terror
attacks, the
perpetrators were either known to western security agencies or they
had
ample reason to watch them. All three perpetrators of the Charlie
Hebdo
massacre "were known to French authorities," as was the thwarted
train
attacker in July and at least one of the Paris attackers. These
agencies
receive billions and billions of dollars every year and radical
powers, all
in the name of surveilling Bad People and stopping attacks.
So when they fail in their ostensible duty, and people die because
of that
failure, it's a natural instinct to blame others: don't look to us;
it's
Snowden's fault, or the fault of Apple, or the fault of journalists,
or the
fault of encryption designers, or anyone's fault other than ours. If
you're
a security agency after a successful Terror attack, you want
everyone
looking elsewhere, finding all sorts of culprits other than those
responsible for stopping such attacks.
Above all, there's the desperation to prevent people from asking how
and why
ISIS was able to spring up seemingly out of nowhere and be so
powerful, able
to blow up a Russian passenger plane, a market in Beirut, and the
streets of
Paris in a single week. That's the one question western officials
are most
desperate not to be asked, so directing people's ire to Edward
Snowden and
Apple is beneficial in the extreme.
The origins of ISIS are not even in dispute. The Washington Post put
it
simply: "almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former
Iraqi
officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security
committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes." Even Tony
Blair -
Tony Blair - admits that there'd be no ISIS without the invasion of
Iraq:
"'I think there are elements of truth in that,' he said when asked
whether
the Iraq invasion had been the 'principal cause' of the rise of
ISIS." As
The New Yorker's John Cassidy put it in August:
By destroying the Iraqi state and setting off reverberations across
the
region that, ultimately, led to a civil war in Syria, the 2003
invasion
created the conditions in which a movement like ISIS could thrive.
And, by
turning public opinion in the United States and other Western
countries
against anything that even suggests a prolonged military involvement
in the
Middle East, the war effectively precluded the possibility of a
large-scale
multinational effort to smash the self-styled caliphate.
Then there's the related question of how ISIS has become so
well-armed and
powerful. There are many causes, but a leading one is the role
played by the
U.S. and its "allies in the region" (i.e., Gulf tyrannies) in arming
them,
unwittingly or (in the case of its "allies in the region")
otherwise, by
dumping weapons and money into the region with little regard to
where they
go (even U.S. officials openly acknowledge that their own allies
have funded
ISIS). But the U.S.'s own once-secret documents strongly suggest
U.S.
complicity as well, albeit inadvertent, in the rise of ISIS, as
powerfully
demonstrated by this extraordinary 4-minute clip of Al Jazeera's
Mehdi Hasan
with Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency:
Given all this, is there any mystery why "U.S. officials" and the
military-intelligence regime, let alone Iraq War-advocating hacks
like Jim
Woolsey and Dana Perino, are desperate to shift blame away from
themselves
for ISIS and terror attacks and onto Edward Snowden, journalism
about
surveillance, or encryption-providing tech companies? Wouldn't you
if you
were them? Imagine simultaneously devoting all your efforts to
depicting
ISIS as the Greatest and Most Evil Threat Ever, while knowing the
vital role
you played in its genesis and growth.
The clear, overwhelming evidence - compiled above - demonstrates how
much
deceit their blame-shifting accusations require. But the more
important
point of inquiry is to ask why they are so eager to ensure that
everyone but
themselves receives scrutiny for what is happening. The answer to
that
question is equally clear, and disturbing in the extreme.
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