Free Republic

Ecuador's government has ordered everyone in the US Embassy's military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month's end. The group was ordered to halt operations in Ecuador in a letter dated April 7, embassy spokesman Jeffrey Weinshenker said Thursday. The Associated Press was alerted to the expulsions by a senior Ecuadorean official who refused to be identified by name due to the information's sensitive nature.

December 20, 2014 Diane Feinstein, the Iron Maiden By Deana Chadwell Language, that contract that we make with the members of our society, holds our society together; without it we can accomplish nothing. Nor can we function without the protection of good and selfless people who step forward to face the evil that always threatens successful nations. Diane Feinstein’s release of the enhanced interrogation technique documents is, on both national and linguistic fronts, an act of treason. To attack the language by which we carry on our national dialogue and the methods we use to protect our right to have...

A retired National Security Agency (NSA) senior agency executive warned the agency in 2009 that the program to collect, store and analyze American phone records wasn’t providing enough intelligence to be effective. Prior to the revelations made by Edward Snowden, dissenters within the Intelligence agency warned that the collection program wasn’t worth the backlash if the program became public. The role of the NSA was to eavesdrop on hostile foreign entities, not American citizens. Now the agency has tarnished its reputation of guarding America to become the free world’s secret police. The AP–ever faithful to its dear leader–noted that Obama...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

You saw the Disney movie as a kid. You may have read the book. But did you know some of it was based on real history? While the story of King Arthur, Merlin, and all the rest may not be true, there really is a centuries-old sword stuck in a stone. In the small Italian town of Chiusdino, there’s a small chapel near Saint Galgano Abbey known as Montesiepi chapel. And inside you’ll find a big slab of stone in the floor with the handle of a sword sticking out of it.

The crown jewels of any intelligence organization are its sources and methods – the means by which information is obtained. I have no doubts that, thanks to Edward Snowden, Russia and China now have an extraordinary volume of data on NSAs sources and methods for collecting information from communications. That means they now know the weaknesses in their and other of our adversaries’ communications procedures and our strengths in exploiting them. And not just voice communications, but also radar, telemetry, missile and rocket command and response, military GPS locationing and weapons systems countermeasures. On far too many subjects, Russia and...

Last year, UK cinemagoers were treated to two competing accounts of the story of Julian Assange: Bill Condon’s oddly inert drama The Fifth Estate, and Alex Gibney’s more pointedly dramatic documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. Although very different in form, content and, indeed, success (Gibney’s film was Bafta-nominated, Condon’s was hailed as one of the year’s biggest flops), both movies wrestled with the conundrum of separating the cult of Assange’s divisive personality from the significance of the information that he helped to publish – for better or worse.

Once again I salute Edward Snowden as an all-American hero. On second thought, make that an all-world hero. A movie on how and why Snowden revealed NSA wiretaps is about to be released. Showbiz reports Edward Snowden Doc Premieres: Shocking Inside Look at How He Did It. Citizen Four is the shocking doc about Edward Snowden made by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Just screened tonight was the two hour film which will be released by the Weinstein Company this month. It doesn’t paint the Obama administration in a very good light as Snowden explains how the government has violated...

The New Yorker Festival presents Edward Snowden in conversation with Jane Mayer.

Citizen Four is the shocking doc about Edward Snowden made by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Just screened tonight was the two hour film will be released by the Weinstein Company this month. It doesn’t paint the Obama administration in a very good light as Snowden explains how the government has violated privacy rights on a massive scale. Also the filmmakers clearly inducate that all roads lead to POTUS, a fairly serious accusation. There may be serious repercussions.

It is not an accident that the point man for the damaging disclosure of so much Top Secret information enjoys asylum in Russia and that the intelligence is ending up in the hands of Islamic extremists. “It is reasonable to assume that Vladimir Putin is giving information obtained via Snowden to ISIS or al Qaeda so they can damage U.S. infrastructure as his proxy,” former NSA executive Charlie Speight explained to us. “Without getting his hands dirty or spending a single ruble, Putin can bring us down and elevate Russia.” The Putin-Snowden collaboration makes sense in the context of the...

STOCKHOLM (AP) - Edward Snowden was among the winners Wednesday of a Swedish human rights award, sometimes referred to as the "alternative Nobel," for his disclosures of top secret surveillance programs. The decision to honor the former National Security Agency contractor with the Right Livelihood Award appeared to cause a diplomatic headache for Sweden's Foreign Ministry, which withdrew the prize jury's permission to use its media room for the announcement....

North Korea says imprisoned American tried to become 'second Snowden' By James Pearson SEOUL Fri Sep 19, 2014 8:10pm EDT (Reuters) - An American recently sentenced to six years hard labor by a North Korean court pretended to have secret U.S. information and was deliberately arrested in a bid to become famous and meet U.S. missionary Kenneth Bae in a North Korean prison, state media said on Saturday. Matthew Miller, 25, of Bakersfield, California, had prepared his story in advance and written in a notebook that he was seeking refuge after failing in an attempt to collect information about the...

Snowden has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and several have argued that he should get it this year. Currently, he has been granted asylum in Russia, but the United States wants him to be arrested and extradited. Dagbladet has asked Conservative Party (Høyre) politician Tetzschner whether the Norwegian police may arrest a person coming to the country to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The parliamentary representative believes Norwegian police can and should arrest Snowden. - In principle, we care principle of equality. In addition, Norway honor the agreements we have signed, which also ensures extradition to Norway, he...

This week, Switzerland's attorney general completed a legal opinion on the question of whether Snowden could be granted political asylum if he traveled to Switzerland to testify about the National Security Agency's surveillance activities in the Swiss homeland. The AG's office concluded that Snowden would be given asylum as long as prior obligations made by higher-level Swiss officials did not take priority.

A former top official at the National Security Agency says the Islamic State terrorist group has “clearly” capitalized on the voluminous leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and is exploiting the top-secret disclosures to evade U.S. intelligence. Bottom line: Islamic State killers are harder to find because they know how to avoid detection. Chris Inglis was the NSA’s deputy director during Mr. Snowden’s flood of documents to the news media last year. Mr. Snowden disclosed how the agency eavesdrops, including spying on Internet communications such as emails and on the Web’s ubiquitous social media. Asked by The Washington Times...

The NSA cyberwarfare program, called MonsterMind, uses software to look for traffic patterns indicating possible foreign cyberattacks, according to Snowden, quoted in a lengthy profile in Wired. MonsterMind could automatically block a cyberattack from entering the U.S., then retaliate against the attackers, according to the Wired story. Snowden, when he was working as an NSA contractor, was concerned that MonsterMind could lead to misdirected counterattacks. "These attacks can be spoofed," he told Wired. "You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting...

Putin is effing with Edward Snowden. Snowden’s one year of asylum ended on July 31, and he applied in mid-July for another year. As yet, he has heard nothing, except that he will be permitted to stay while his fate is decided. Putin is most likely sending Snowden a message. What is the message? That he is in Russia at Putin’s whim and sufferance. That he had better do as he is told, and not get any ideas. That he is owned. Note that the Russians doubtlessly are deeply suspicious of Snowden, and likely despise him. To give an idea...

Nihad Awad is a born in Jordan Palestinian living in the U.S. for more than two decades. He is co-founder and CEO of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the largest Muslim civil rights organizations in the United States. He was an advisor to Al Gore and met Presidents Bush and Clinton as well as several U.S. Secretary of State. His e-mails were monitored from 2006 to 2008. "As a citizen I am beside myself that the government spies on activists. Though we have done so much for society in this country, we are still suspected." Awad believed...

In an interview published by The Guardian on Sunday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden explained that sometimes racy images intercepted by the NSA were shared by analysts. During the interview, which was conducted in Russia, Snowden said that some of the American military personnel working on the NSA’s programs were between 18 and 22 and did not always respect the privacy of those whose communications were intercepted. “In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely...