Previous NSA Leakers, Thomas Drake And Mark Klein, Speak Out In Defense Of Ed Snowden
from the confirms-what-they-said dept
As US politicians and pundits push each other aside to tar and feather Ed Snowden for revealing some basic facts about NSA surveillance that the politicians and pundits themselves refused to call out for its clear abuse of basic 4th Amendment principles, two of the most important previous leakers of details of NSA surveillance have spoken out in support of Snowden. Thomas Drake, the former NSA employee who blew the whistle on NSA surveillance abuse (and faced decades in jail on trumped up charges that fell apart in court), has pointed out that Snowden's revelations confirm his own claims from before:The NSA programs that Snowden has revealed are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind, in 2001. In the first week of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA's lead attorney. When I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said:Drake also highlights how he did use the "official" whistleblower channels that many are saying Snowden should have used, and look what happened to him:"The White House has approved the program; it's all legal. NSA is the executive agent."It was made clear to me that the original intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional safeguards. "You don't understand," I was told. "We just need the data.
I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he's been following this for years: he's seen what's happened to other whistleblowers like me.The end result was that his whistleblowing didn't do much, but he got arrested because he accidentally kept an almost entirely meaningless document about meeting participants in his home. And, when he was arrested, for just having the list of meeting attendees, he was smeared for causing "exceptionally grave damage to US national security."
By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You're identified as someone they don't like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.
But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.
Separately, former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, who revealed that he helped install NSA equipment directly within AT&T's network is speaking out about how Snowden, rather than the telcos, deserve retroactive immunity. The telcos broke the law and had to have Congress go back and retroactively make what they did -- which clearly broke the law at the time -- legal. Klein points out how his revelations were brushed off and ignored, while Snowden's revelations confirm a lot of what he said:
"It was clear that the NSA was looking at everything," Klein said. "It wasn't limited to foreign communications."
On Tuesday, Klein said that for a number of reasons, Snowden's disclosures sparked more public outrage than his own revelations did more than seven years ago.
For one thing, Klein said, Snowden had direct access to a secret court order and details of the program, while Klein pieced together the government's surveillance through internal AT&T documents and in discussions with colleagues who worked on the project.
"The government painted me as a nobody, a technician who was merely speculating," said Klein, who made his disclosures after he accepted a buyout and retired from AT&T in 2004. "Now we have an actual copy of a FISA court order. There it is in black and white. It's undisputable. They can't deny that."
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Filed Under: ed snowden, edward snowden, mark klein, nsa, nsa surveillance, thomas drake, whistleblowers, whistleblowing
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Gallup Poll
More Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the federal government agency program that as part of its efforts to investigate terrorism obtained records from U.S. telephone and Internet companies to "compile telephone call logs and Internet communications."
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Re: Gallup Poll
Please copy this Gallup poll summary and the url into the previous Techdirt article on polling.
That way links to all four polls on this issue will be clustered together in one place.
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Milkity Milk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeZCMNB2YO0
Go Mike, Milk It Good!!! But never ever discuss any of it on the merits. Get those clicks! Get those clicks! The clicks are more important than the truth! Gotta earn those pennies. Click. Click. Moo. Moo. Cluck. Cluck.
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Doesn't this infuriate you? Look at how this "news" organization is milking it. Milk. Milk. Milk.
Isn't it disgusting? You should start commenting over there, as it's the right thing to do. I mean the one article has over 6000 comments. Godspeed.
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Doesn't this infuriate you? Look at how this "news" organization is milking it. Milk. Milk. Milk.
LOL! Are you really comparing the Guardian with Pirate Mike "I'm Not A Journalist But I Sometimes Do Journalism Only I Won't Ever Discuss How One Can Tell When I'm Doing Journalism And When I'm Not" Masnick's TechTurd Palace?
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What do you plan to do about it?
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Techdirt should have an insightful, funny, sad, and a report button.
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And make no mistake, that’s what you’ve done here: trolling.
You sit here and wait for the next story to come through so you can complain about Techdirt ‘milking’ this story (and those related to it) as if you have nothing else better to do. You make the same general posts each time even though you know they’ll get reported and end up ‘flagged by the community’. You do this for no reason other than you possessing a hateboner for Mike Masnick and Techdirt in general.
But why?
Well, I assume you hate them because they do something you can’t: write legible, tangible, cogent arguments on a specific issue. I haven’t seen a single post from you that makes any sort of ‘real’ argument on any given issue raised by the average Techdirt article.
Between you and Out Of The Blue, I dare to wonder if you two foolishly beat your drums because somewhere, only in your dreams, you believe that your act will somehow ‘topple’ Techdirt and cause Masnick to give in to your demands of shutting up. In your mind, anything is possible, right?
Deep down, however, you do this for an even baser reason: you have nothing interesting to say and people will only hear what little you have to say if you troll Techdirt. You could easily start a blog on Tumblr or Wordpress or Blogger (though you might want to avoid the last one because of the Google thing) and lay down coherent counterarguments to everything Mike says. But then you have a real problem: once you’ve finished bitching about Mike, what else do you have to write?
Therein lies the real reason your trolling fails to do anything but inspire snarky comments such as this one: you have nothing else to say.
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Sharing *is* caring.
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wow, I only wish I could just be pissed off at copyright buttmunchers but noooo bitchasses have to threaten to the very core the existence of a free country.
TSA! TSA! Ya'll are choking on keeping your republic, yes, myself included.
Damn it.
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If they had respected them and not alienated them then when something really harmful , like the names of cia spies was released they could control it, at this rate nobody trusts the government with anything.
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Look at that. Oh, how foolish. If there were such a program or programs, which I can neither confirm nor deny due to national security, it would be made clear that any such program did not do what he says. But since I am unable to acknowledge that any such programs may exist, I can't deny these speculative and uninformed statements.
Trust us! Would we lie to you...?
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A quote
----- Martin Luther King Jr
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