Snowden: NSA Revealed Only One Email, Shows NSA Lied Before... Also: None Of This Matters
from the battle-continues dept
After NBC confirmed Ed Snowden's earlier claims that he had tried to make use of internal channels to question NSA surveillance programs, James Clapper released a single email from Snowden to the legal department at the NSA, which they claim shows he never actually raised these issues. Snowden quickly responded, noting that this is not the only email, that he raised the issue more directly with his supervisors... and, most importantly, that none of this really matters.Oh yeah, also that the NSA lied before when it claimed no such thing existed.
The NSA’s new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers - after more than a year of denying any such contact existed - raises serious concerns. It reveals as false the NSA’s claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year, that “after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”More importantly, though, Snowden points out that none of this really matters:
Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities - such as breaking into the back-haul communications of major US internet companies - are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.
Ultimately, whether my disclosures were justified does not depend on whether I raised these concerns previously. That’s because the system is designed to ensure that even the most valid concerns are suppressed and ignored, not acted upon. The fact that two powerful Democratic Senators - Ron Wyden and Mark Udall - knew of mass surveillance that they believed was abusive and felt constrained to do anything about it underscores how futile such internal action is -- and will remain -- until these processes are reformed.Separately, after ODNI published the email, Tim Lee wrote a great piece over at Vox.com highlighting why it really doesn't matter at all if he did, or did not, raise the matter internally:
Still, the fact is that I did raise such concerns both verbally and in writing, and on multiple, continuing occasions - as I have always said, and as NSA has always denied. Just as when the NSA claimed it followed German laws in Germany just weeks before it was revealed that they did not, or when NSA said they did not engage in economic espionage a few short months before it was revealed they actually did so on a regular and recurring basis, or even when they claimed they had “no domestic spying program” before we learned they collected the phone records of every American they could, so too are today’s claims that “this is only evidence we have of him reporting concerns” false.
But the NSA's response to Snowden also has a deeper problem: it wouldn't have made a difference if Snowden had raised his concerns more forcefully through internal channels.And, of course, other whistleblowers had their lives completely destroyed. Still, this story is one worth paying attention to, because it demonstrates a serious problem with how the intelligence community handles anyone concerned about its programs. The idea that there are internal controls to handle such a thing is pretty clearly misleading, whether or not Snowden made full use of those channels.
Remember, the NSA's position is that it hasn't done anything wrong. The agency claims that its domestic surveillance programs comply with the law, and that it gets plenty of oversight from both the courts and Congress. The NSA has stuck to this position despite a year of pressure from Congress and the public. Why would it have been any more receptive to the concerns of a lowly contractor?
Maybe Snowden should have brought his concerns to sympathetic members of Congress? That wouldn't have done any good either, because key members of Congress already knew about the program. And some of them were outraged about it!
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Filed Under: ed snowden, nsa, proper channels, whistleblowing
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NSA is using tools that used to work when information didn't flow as easily as today. Smearing won't work as well anymore.
On a side note it reminds me from a portion on Dance with Dragons where some fellows are talking about Daenerys and how an evil witch she is when one of them says something like: "That's what the great slave merchants say about a queen who is trying to end slavery." So, that's what the NSA is saying about a guy who revealed they are total crooks.
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Or the simpler: MRDA (Google it if you're not familiar...)
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... and that's pretty much all that Google returns.
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Missouri Rental Dealers Association
Moldovan Research and Development Association
Meeting Recorder Dialog Act
Mandy Rice-Davies Applies
Mundri Relief and Development Association
acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/MRDA
granted, that list did not help me either.
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Pattern recognition skills of a brick
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I keep thinking that if they simply "OK, OK, we did wrong and are committed to correcting things!" That 99% of the sheple would believe it and a few months later the NSA could continue on unchanged.
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It is stupifyingly amazing that one individual has more trust than the entire government, much less one branch of it.
Once again, we see the mentality behind what is wrong with the NSA on display. No accountability at all. No oversight at all. No desire to see any meaningful changes speaks more to me of what is wrong with the NSA and by reflection what is wrong with much of the USG.
A president so intent on getting what he wants that he attempts to rule by executive order rather than solving the issues at hand in both parts of congress. An idea that E.O.s can take total precedence over the Constitution is dumbfoundly and a willfull violation all that this country stands for and the supposed laws that govern it.
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A human being has under 100 years to commit actions that destroy (and build) trust.
The government can be immortal and has many individuals taking actions. With some of these people being sociopaths.
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he doth protest too much
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He is trying to defend his position, as any normal person would do in such a situation. Everything he has said so far has been proven true, the same cannot be said for the other side where everything so far has been proven false.
Currently Snowden is far more trustworthy than the US government.
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Re: Re: he doth protest too much
Stop feeding the troll. I recently realized that if you feed a troll you bear responsibility for the troll's actions. If there was a monster rampaging through the countryside and you knowingly fed it, would you not bear responsibility for the monster's actions, would you not be an active enabler of its crimes?
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Sounds eerily like that, doesn't it?
Actually, political parties enjoy calling others "communists", "liberals", "fundamentalist" and a number of other things that are not even remotely useful as insults once you look their definition up. What's next as insults? "Freedom fighter", "constitutionalist", "citizen"?
These days, it would seem that "senator" is a worse insult than "citizen".
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We need to stop being afraid of the boogeyman and search the damn closet and under the bed instead of shivering beneath the bedclothes at the mention of his name.
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They're trying to distract from the real problem, the actual crimes against U.S. citizens (and freedoms worldwide), by continuing to focus on Snowden.
The sensitivity you see is journalists and other media flocking to Snowden every time the government gives them a tidbit to work with, asking for his opinions and statements on the matter. It's despicable - they should be focusing on the real crime here, not some he said/she said bullshit like it's Hollywood.
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NSA Cannot Search Email
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CIA = Central idiot agency
NSA = National syndicate agency
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CIA and FBI
Or the FBI?
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I'm surprised they haven't though of just making shit up and offering it to the news outlets currently functioning as government lick spittles.(They know who they are)
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They already have done this, via a British news outlet (forget which now) that was not privy to any of these leaks, shortly after the responsible journalism about them started.
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Making shit up might just force the Guardian to disclose stuff they would not have disclosed, due to its sensitive nature, just to prove the NSA shit was all standard lies.
You can absolutely bet your last dollar that they considered it though.
Posting a single email as the ONLY email, is in fact, as close as they're willing to get to total bullshit.
You see, should the Guardian have and publish other emails from Snowden to various links in the chain of command, the NSA can always just say;
"Oh. Those emails must have been erased, after they were dealt with. So we could not have found them. Sorry about that. Again."
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NSA's new name
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Look at the real picture...
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And to Mr Kerry...
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Why does a secret spy agency keep intentionally putting itself in newspaper headlines?
Why are they still floundering around like this months and months after the leaks started?
Why hasn't every last NSA agent still working for that laughable agency been fired for gross incompetence?
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Re: why hasn't every last agent quit in disgust?
And then how would they keep up their loan payments? They've already spent somewhere between 95 and 115% of their future income - before having earned it.
Which more-or-less makes them wage slaves to their corrupt employer. (In their own tiny minds, anyway. If they had any balls, they'd quit and deal with it.)
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All of it turned out to be lies!
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step 1. Consider every american citizen a terrorist
step 2. feel smug
step 3. ?????
step 4. profit
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tricked again
But, as always, they were held until the Government slipped up & released one. Now, when Snowden's internal E-mails are published, they can point to this one & say it definitely fits the NSA's format, & point out the journalists have had them for over a year, so Snowden can't have made it up to match the one that was released!
I thought the NSA was supposed to be some of the best & the brightest? It looks more like those in charge were just taken from the short bus, after those w/ functional autism had gotten off.
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Redemption
Thank you for clarifying your views in this post regarding these emails and please consider yourself redeemed in regards to your misguided statements from your recent post on topic...
"That said, it does sound as though Snowden may have slightly exaggerated his claims concerning his conversation with the NSA's lawyers."
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140529/12034327393/james-clapper-yes-snowden-emailed-ns a-lawyer-not-about-his-concerns.shtml
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I remember that 100% lie.
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