February 6, 2014 — (TRN) — Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the National Security Agency took with him multiple “Doomsday” packages of information when he departed the country and began revealing how intensely the US Government is spying on its own citizens. He has the personal home info for all Elected Officials, Law Enforcement, Judges, Bankers, Corporate Boards of Directors and more!
At a classified briefing for members of Congress which took place on Wednesday, members found out that Snowden took with him:
a complete roster of absolutely every employee and official of the entire US Government.
The names, home addresses, unlisted personal home telephone and personal cellular phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every person involved in any way, with any department of the US Government.
The files include elected officials, Cabinet appointees, Judges, and **ALL** law enforcement agency employees including sworn…
“As ABC Newsman Michael Finney explains it, Weissinger checked one bag too many and incurred a $60 fee that she couldn’t pay on the spot. She hadn’t expected the fees because her itinerary failed to mention them. For security/terrorist-related reasons her airline, U.S. Airways, wouldn’t let her abandon one of her bags at the airport, and they also wouldn’t let her pay the fees once she got to Idaho. So she missed her flight, which resulted in another fee. Then U.S. Airways told her she had to buy a brand-new ticket, which cost $1,000. And this is how she became trapped in the airport.”
“It’s obvious to all that the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, could easily transfer Snowden into U.S. custody if it wanted to, but it simply doesn’t want to because there is greater reward in seeing the world’s only superpower thunder and grumble like a mark who’s just lost his fortune in an elaborate con.”
My guess is Snowden’s story will morph from a tale about spying and totalitarianism into one about mental illness with an emphasis on narcissism or another axis involving grandiose and messianic delusions.
Evidently, China has turned out not much interested in Snowden after all, and while stuck in Moscow, he’s become something of a political hockey puck between Obama and Putin.
“Snowden is a free person,” Putin proclaimed during a news conference in Turku, Finland, where he feigned annoyance at getting dragged into the closely watched incident.
“I’d prefer not to deal with this issue at all,” he said. “It’s like shearing a piglet — too much squealing, too little wool.
Those Who Know very well know what they have been doing in the field of Global Signal Intelligence.
From the “Iran Curtain” (Iranian internal control of constituent communications) to Chinese patent theft to American domestic collection and foreign hacking, there are no secrets that remain undetected forever. Instead, perhaps, there are only agreements, disagreements, and arrangements involving the uses of massively compiled data.
What they’re ignoring is that this is actually how democracy works. Even in a free society, the state has to have some secrets. The means and methods by which it tracks terrorists should, I’d suggest, be one of them. Should those means and methods be subject to scrutiny? Yes. Should that scrutiny come from our democratically elected representatives? Yes. Should the powers being scrutinised also be the subject of checks and balances from the courts? Yes. In other words, precisely what has been happening with Prism.
Jeffrey Toobin posting on The New Yorker’s web site: “Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave the Guardian and the Postthat even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Postdecided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden’s.”
Toobin’s colleague John Cassidy provides counterpoint: “He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed.”
In Politico, Tal Kopan has worked up a scathing indictment of Snowden’s character founded on the slant of the details, from Snowden’s dropping out of high school, albeit completing his GED coursework in the community college system, to the stickers on his laptop: “4.His laptop stickers reveal his beliefs. Stickers on Snowden’s laptop express support for Internet freedom, The Guardian said. One reads, “I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation,” and another is for the Tor Project, an online anonymity software.”
“The main stipulation for seeking asylum in Iceland would be that the person must be in Iceland to start the process,” said Johannes Tomasson, the chief spokesman for Iceland’s Ministry of Interior in Reykjavik. “That would be the ground rule No. 1.”
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk erected what the New York Timesdescribes as “locked mailboxes” in which to place data on suspicious persons requested by the government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times’ description, published Saturday, used unnamed sources.
Basically, it looks like the post-911 Bush Administration launched a broad and comprehensive effort to detect terrorists and their operations (apparently, ignoring plain old gumshoe Russian intelligence sharing prior to the Boston Marathon bombing shouldn’t be mixed in with this NSA story), and, legally, Congress-approved, by law, Obama has sustained the Bush Administration plan.
This is for my paranoids — it’s at least four years old, has been viewed more than 57,000 times, and it will take you where you want to go.
God has not exempted geeks from having their own character and personality issues, so here I may lump Assange, the Wikileaks guy (click for the latest on that), and Snowden together — birds of similar feather, says I, and asylum, indeed, is what they have needed.
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