John Cusack wants you to stop paying attention to Edward Snowden.
The actor lashed out at reporters Tuesday for fixating on Snowden’s saga, which has taken on the flavor of an international thriller in recent weeks.
Criticizing media personalities by name who have questioned either Snowden’s or Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald’s character—such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times’s David Brooks, and NBC News’s David Gregory—Cusack in a conference call said focusing on Snowden at the expense of the information he uncovered was “the oldest bait-and-switch in the book.”
“We’re not morons,” he said. “The questions this NSA scandal raises aren’t going away. How long do we expect rational people to excuse the abuse of power?”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-03 03:35:362013-07-03 03:35:36John Cusack: We’re Not Morons, Stop the Bait and Switch with Snowden
By Fox News. As an international round of asylum rejections piled up Tuesday for Edward Snowden, a plane carrying Bolivia’s president home from Russia was diverted to Vienna because of suspicions the NSA leaker might be onboard.
Officials in both Austria and Bolivia said that Snowden was not on the plane, which had to land in Vienna after Bolivian officials said France and Portugal refused to let it cross their airspace.
“We don’t know who invented this lie,” a furious Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said. “We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales.”
He said the decision by France and Portugal “put at risk the life of the president.”
Morales had said in an interview with Russia Today television that Bolivia would be willing to consider granting asylum to Snowden. He was reported meeting there Tuesday night with the plane’s crew to reprogram his return to Bolivia. Read more from this story HERE.
Snowden Affair Diverts Bolivian President’s Plane in Europe
By Thomson/Reuters. The diversion of Morale’s plane on Tuesday was another strange turn in the 30-year-old American’s cat-and-mouse game with the United States. Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca blamed it on “unfounded suspicions that Mr. Snowden was on the plane.”
“We don’t know who invented this lie,” Choquehuanca said. “We want to express our displeasure because this has put the president’s life at risk.”
Bolivia is among more than a dozen countries where Snowden has sought asylum and Morales, who was attending an energy conference in Russia this week, has said he would consider granting the American refuge if requested.
Bolivian Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra said the State Department may have been behind the decisions to not allow Morales’ plane to land in Portugal or fly over French air space…
Snowden’s options seem only to have narrowed since he arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong on June 23 with no valid travel documents, after the United States revoked his passport. Read more from this story HERE.
Venezuela’s President Maduro defends Edward Snowden: ‘He did not kill anyone’
By Valerie Richardson. Mr. Snowden’s increasingly desperate bids for asylum to escape prosecution on espionage charges could lead him back to America — specifically, South America.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro defended the accused leaker to Russian reporters Tuesday during a visit to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“He did not kill anyone and did not plant a bomb,” said Mr. Maduro, according to the Interfax news agency. “What he did was tell a great truth in an effort to prevent wars. He deserves protection under international and humanitarian law.”
Mr. Maduro avoided saying whether he would admit the accused leaker, but Bolivian President Evo Morales said in an interview with Russian Today television that his country would be willing to consider granting asylum to Mr. Snowden.
“If there were a request, of course we would be willing to debate and consider the idea,” Mr. Morales said on RT Actualidad, a Spanish-language broadcast, adding that in the past, “Bolivia was there to shield the denounced.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-03 03:27:422013-07-03 03:27:42Bolivian President’s Plane Diverted Due to Suspicion of Snowden on Board, Reportedly Endangers Passengers (+video)
By Fox News. NSA leaker Edward Snowden broke his weeklong silence on Monday, defending his “right to seek asylum” while separately claiming he remains “free and able” to publish sensitive information on U.S. surveillance.
The statements came as Wikileaks revealed that Snowden had made requests for asylum or asylum assistance to 19 additional countries around the world, following earlier requests made to the countries of Ecuador and Iceland.
In a statement issued on the WikiLeaks website, Snowden attacked the Obama administration, saying, “On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic ‘wheeling and dealing’ over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.
One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.
On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic “wheeling and dealing” over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.
This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.
For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.
In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.
I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.
By Jed Babbin. Even vacationing in Africa, President Obama isn’t far enough away to avoid the international disdain being heaped on him on the subject of infamous NSA leaker Edward Snowden. These days, you’re just not cool unless you’ve dissed Obama. It’s almost as if he welcomes the treatment he’s receiving.
On Thursday, President Obama said he’s not going to start “wheeling and dealing” with Russia and China to get Snowden extradited to the US. He disclaimed any intention to become involved in the matter by calling Putin or Chinese President Xi to try to get Snowden back. Obama evidently views the matter as below his pay grade.
“I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” he also told reporters during a news conference in Senegal. Nevertheless, he had Joey Biden call Ecuadoran Prez Rafael Correa on Friday to ask that Snowden be denied asylum there. Correa announced the call in a radio address, and didn’t miss the opportunity to slam Obama…
Though he’s not wheeling and dealing, you have to conclude that Obama is wheedling and diddling. Hong Kong authorities reported that they let Snowden go to Russia because our Justice Department didn’t respond to their requests for more information on why Snowden should be arrested. The Russians are denying that Snowden is really in Russia (being kept in a transit zone at an airport) so they can’t do anything about him either. And Correa is also saying that Ecuador will decide what to do with Snowden if he gets there (or to one of their embassies).
Being serially dissed by China, Russia, and now Ecuador, Obama looks — and is — more and more powerless. Yesterday, even the European Union (!) joined in. Some guy named Martin Schulz, who is apparently president of the European Parliament said he was “deeply worried and shocked” by reports that the NSA surveillance had been pointed at the EU. (My sources expressed equal shock at the idea that anyone had any interest in anything the EU had to say.) Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-02 03:23:222013-07-02 03:23:22Snowden Breaks Silence as New Asylum Requests Revealed, Says He Is ‘Free and Able’ to Continue Leaking (+video)
The US spying scandal deepened today as Secretary of State John Kerry said it is ‘not unusual’ for governments to bug the offices of their allies sparking fierce retorts from France and Germany.
The extraordinary statement has angered leaders across the world after leaked documents revealed America spied on 38 foreign missions and embassies including the European Union’s Washington nerve centre.
As outrage grew across the EU over the damaging revelations, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was first to lash out, declaring that ‘bugging friends is unacceptable’ before French premier Francois Hollande demanded its ‘immediate halt’.
Speaking to a press conference today, Kerry said: ‘I will say that every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs and national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that. All I know is that is not unusual for lots of nations.’
But the remarks did not wash with Francois Hallande who demanded an immediate explanation, adding: ‘We cannot accept this kind of behavior.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-02 03:15:512013-07-02 03:15:51European Nations Lash Out at Kerry Who Maintains that “Spying on Allies is Not Unusual”
Vice President Biden personally intervened in the case of Edward Snowden, calling Ecuador’s president to urge him to reject the NSA leaker’s asylum request.
The move comes after President Obama on Thursday said he had not phoned world leaders on the matter because he “shouldn’t have to” — and because he doesn’t want to start “wheeling and dealing” with other nations to extradite a “hacker.”
But as the stalemate dragged on, Biden on Friday phoned Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. It marked the highest-level conversation between the U.S. and Ecuador that has been publicly disclosed since Snowden began seeking asylum from that country.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-29 22:14:042013-06-29 22:14:04After Obama Says He Won’t Talk to World’s Leaders about Snowden, He Has Biden Contact Ecuador’s President (+video)
Kurt Vonnegut once opined: “Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power.” That power corrupts is hardly debatable. For that reason, the evolution of espionage has run in parallel with the development of organised tribes of human beings that we now refer to as countries.
Human nature makes it predictable that organisations such as the NSA would be cataloguing phone calls and other electronic interactions between humans. But Edward Snowden’s revelations also tell us how far electronic snooping has yet to go. While the din of outrage still resonates, we should be thankful that Snowden – a human being – actually exists. In the future, the world may never be alerted to such breaches of privacy because there will be no humans involved in spying at all. Just as algorithms have conquered our stock markets and our musical tastes, so too will they conquer surveillance. Even the most human of tasks, snooping, will become the province of the bots.
While it’s true that the surveillance Snowden spotlighted is of a new and digital variety, it still required human levers to give it any meaning. The NSA, for example, using its call log data, would take an interest in people who repeatedly dialled the phone numbers of known troublemakers. Human agents would query the call-logging database and find out who a prime target in Yemen might be speaking with inside the US. The data is collected passively and electronically, but much of the intelligence and the methods to derive it come straight from human minds. But what will happen when a machine makes the rules?
In the late 1940s, Vonnegut observed how General Electric was replacing human machinists with computer-operated milling machines to cut rotors for jet engines. This passing of duties from humans to bots led Vonnegut to imagine a world where human chores of all manners would cease being the labour of men and become strictly the work of machines. Power and income, then, would be concentrated among the few who controlled the machines. Snowden and the teams of analysts at the NSA, CIA and GCHQ who sit in front of our stores of electronic intelligence will hardly be necessary in 15 years. Algorithms will have replaced them, leaving only a few humans, like General Keith Alexander of the NSA, left to watch the house.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-29 22:12:502013-06-29 22:12:50Edward Snowden May Be the Last of the Human Spies
By Steven Nelson. The Department of Defense is blocking online access to news reports about classified National Security Agency documents made public by Edward Snowden. The blackout affects all of the department’s computers and is part of a department-wide directive.
“Any website that runs information that the Department of Defense still considers classified” is affected, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart told U.S. News in a phone interview.
According to Pickart, news websites that re-report information first published by The Guardian or other primary sources are also affected.
“If that particular website runs an article that our filters determine has classified information… the particular content on that website will remain inaccessible,” he said.
Pickart said the blackout affects “millions” of computers on “all Department of Defense networks and systems.” Read more from this story HERE.
Snowden’s father attempts to broker deal for son with Justice Dept.
By Ralph Z. Hallow. The father of suspected National Security Agency leaker Edward J. Snowden is seeking a deal with the Justice Department that would allow his son to remain free prior to a trial in exchange for his surrender to face espionage charges.
It also requests that the younger Mr. Snowden would not be subject to a gag order and that he be allowed to pick the venue of his trial, and says that if any of the agreements were violated the case would be dropped.
Mr. Snowden’s father, Lon, made the proposal in a letter sent to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The Justice Department said it has received the letter, written by well-known Washington attorney Bruce Fein, and is still considering its response.
“Mr. Snowden is reasonably confident that his son would voluntarily return to the United States if there were ironclad assurances that his constitutional rights would be honored, and he were provided a fair opportunity to explain his motivations and actions to an impartial judge and jury in the above-referenced prosecution,” according to the letter, obtained by The Washington Times. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-29 04:21:592013-06-29 04:21:59Blackout: Defense Department Blocks All Articles About NSA Leaks From ‘Millions’ of Computers (+video)
President Obama said Thursday he has not gotten personally involved in the case of Ed Snowden, because he expects other countries to “abide by international law” and not provide harbor to a fugitive. At the same time, he indicated he does not plan to go to extraordinary lengths to capture the NSA leaker, saying: “No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.”
As Republican lawmakers urge Obama to get tough with Russia as it denies extradition requests, Obama said he has not directly spoken with Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping. He flashed some annoyance as he declared he has not called either leader because “I shouldn’t have to.”
He noted that the U.S. does “a whole lot of business” with both countries, and said he doesn’t want to be in a position where he’s “wheeling and dealing and trading” just to “get a guy extradited.”
The president suggested this should have been a routine bit of business for either leader, so he decided not to get personally involved. Read more from this story HERE.
Tensions flare with Ecuador, Hong Kong over Snowden
Tensions flared Thursday between the Obama administration and countries that appear to be helping NSA leaker Edward Snowden, with the State Department pointedly warning a defiant Ecuador there will be “grave consequences” if the foreign government grants Snowden asylum.
State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell also ripped Hong Kong officials for trying to claim a day earlier that a misspelled middle name on Snowden’s paperwork contributed to him being allowed to catch a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow over the weekend.
“They knew he was a wanted fugitive, and they intentionally let him go,” Ventrell said, calling their excuse frivolous. “They’ve tried to sort of say, oops, he just left. And we’re saying, no, that this was an intentional decision.”
The dueling statements escalated the already-tense stand-off involving several countries now.
The Obama administration has warned that Hong Kong’s decision to let Snowden go could hurt U.S.-China relations. U.S. officials, to little avail, are still trying to convince the Russian government to expel Snowden to the United States — Snowden is believed to be hunkered down in the Moscow airport, but Russian officials claim he is not their problem. Read more from this story HERE.
Obama administration reportedly allowed NSA to gather Americans’ Internet data until 2011
The Obama administration allowed the National Security Agency to gather Americans’ Internet information, including emails, until 2011 under a secret program launched by President George W. Bush, according to newly leaked documents.
The data collection was first reported by the Guardian newspaper. An official confirmed its existence to the Associated Press.
The NSA ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it did not do what was needed to stop terrorist attacks, according to the NSA’s director. Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, said all data was purged at that time.
The Guardian Thursday released documents detailing the collection, although the program was also described earlier this month by The Washington Post.
The Guardian said that according to secret documents it had obtained, a federal judge sitting on the FISA court, a secret surveillance panel, would approve a collection order for Internet metadata every 90 days. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-28 05:40:312013-06-28 05:40:31Obama Downplays Snowden Case, Says US Not ‘Scrambling Jets to Get a 29-Year-Old Hacker’ (+video)
By Aaron Klein. While NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden continues to baffle world governments and the news media with his exact whereabouts and travel plans, one question apparently not being asked is whether he was ever in Hong Kong in the first place.
Or, if Snowden was in Hong Kong, did he leave the region the weekend, when he was reported to have departed for Moscow?
Snowden is currently a high-profile figure in the news. Yet not a single picture or video that places him in Hong Kong has emerged, including during his purported arrival at the airport with a small entourage of lawyers and a WikiLeaks representative.
The South China Morning Post claimed Snowden took off from the Hong Kong airport at 10:55 a.m. local time on Sunday on flight SU213 and was due to arrive at Moscow’s Shermetyevo International Airport at 5:15 p.m.
Upon the flight’s arrival, Russian and international camera crews caught no glimpses of Snowden. Read more from this story HERE.
U.S. loses secrets, prestige as China, Russia defy Obama over Snowden
By Dave Boyer. It doesn’t look good when the most powerful man in the world can’t get his hands on one of the most wanted men in the world.
Edward Snowden, the confessed National Security Agency leaker, has eluded U.S. authorities since early June, even as President Obama’s administration pleaded with officials in China and Russia to send the fugitive back to America.
The traditional rivals of the U.S. have even seemed to enjoy the Obama administration’s distress. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Mr. Snowden “a free man” Tuesday, confirming that Mr. Snowden had been at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport since Sunday. He explicitly refused to comply with the U.S. request to turn over Mr. Snowden, noting that the two countries don’t have an extradition treaty.
The episode is making the U.S. look weak in the eyes of Russia and China, said Leon Aron, a foreign policy analyst at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
“From the point of view of the Russians and the Chinese, definitely,” Mr. Aron said. “In their systems, legitimacy comes from being treated with fear and respect. And clearly, they’re choosing not to treat the United States that way.” Read more from this story HERE.
The Age of American Impotence:As the Edward Snowden saga illustrates, the Obama administration is running out of foreign influence.
By Bret Stephens. At this writing, Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive National Security Agency contractor indicted on espionage charges, is in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman insists his government is powerless to detain him. “We have nothing to do with this story,” says Dmitri Peskov. “I don’t approve or disapprove plane tickets.”
Funny how Mr. Putin always seems to discover his inner civil libertarian when it’s an opportunity to humiliate the United States. When the Russian government wants someone off Russian soil, it either removes him from it or puts him under it. Just ask investor Bill Browder, who was declared persona non grata when he tried to land in Moscow in November 2005. Or think of Mr. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, murdered by Russian prison officials four years later.
Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong, where local officials refused a U.S. arrest request, supposedly on grounds it “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” That’s funny, too, since Mr. Snowden had been staying in a Chinese government safe house before Beijing gave the order to ignore the U.S. request and let him go.
“The Hong Kong government didn’t have much of a role,” Albert Ho, a Hong Kong legislator, told Reuters. “Its role was to receive instructions to not stop him at the airport.”
Now Mr. Snowden may be on his way to Havana, or Caracas, or Quito. It’s been said often enough that this so-called transparency crusader remains free thanks to the cheek and indulgence of dictatorships and strongmen. It’s also been said that his case illustrates how little has been achieved by President Obama’s “reset” with Moscow, or with his California schmoozing of China’s Xi Jinping earlier this month. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-26 03:38:452013-06-26 03:38:45Was NSA Whistleblower Snowden Really in Hong Kong? (+video)
As the U.S. government presses Moscow to extradite former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, America’s most wanted leaker has a plan B. The former NSA systems administrator has already given encoded files containing an archive of the secrets he lifted from his old employer to several people. If anything happens to Snowden, the files will be unlocked.
Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who Snowden first contacted in February, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”
The fact that Snowden has made digital copies of the documents he accessed while working at the NSA poses a new challenge to the U.S. intelligence community that has scrambled in recent days to recover them and assess the full damage of the breach. Even if U.S. authorities catch up with Snowden and the four classified laptops the Guardian reported he brought with him to Hong Kong the secrets Snowden hopes to expose will still likely be published.
A former U.S. counterintelligence officer following the Snowden saga closely said his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community “think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the Internet.” This source added, “At this point there is very little anyone can do about this.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-26 03:30:242013-06-26 03:30:24Glenn Greenwald: Snowden’s Files Are Out There if ‘Anything Happens’ to Him
