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Not even a week ago, President Obama was at the Berlin Wall vowing to scale back the U.S. arsenal in good faith that Moscow would follow suit in “negotiated cuts.” Before that, Obama was meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Palm Springs for a bilateral sit-down that he confidently branded as a positive step forward in U.S.-China relations. Buoyed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. intelligence activities and after reportedly milking the hard drives of four laptops he carried into his Hong Kong hotel, the Chinese government defied a Washington extradition request and let Snowden leave the former...

The Whistleblower Is Just A Tiny Part Of The Full Story Initial impressions This newsletter finds it easier to believe whistleblower Edward Snowden than to believe Obama. The fellow who has exposed some of NSA’s secrets seems genuinely concerned about the implications of the gargantuan data-mining efforts. His statements have an inherent plausibility and do not seem the views of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. He raises genuine ethical concerns that are relevant to any massive surveillance operation. Unlike Assange (the creepy freak) and Manning (who seems slightly stupid and gullible), this fellow makes a good impression.

The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. The "enemy" they're seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It's the American people....

Russ Tice worked as an offensive National Security Agency (NSA) agent from 2002 to 2005, before becoming a source for this Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times article exposing NSA domestic spying. This week he appeared on the Boiling Frogs Show and detailed how he had his hands "in the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts" during his 20 years as a U.S. intelligence analyst.Tice claimed that he held NSA wiretap orders targeting numerous members of the U.S. government, including one for a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama."In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a...

Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst and Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claimed Wednesday that the intelligence community has ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

There is microfilm as evidence.

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct. Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified...

Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst and Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claimed Wednesday that the intelligence community has ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats. He also made another stunning allegation. He says the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama back in 2004. “They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and...

It would make things so much easier for everyone if Edward Snowden were working for China. And that's certainly a possibility. His decision to flee to Hong Kong -- a Chinese vassal -- was an odd one, given that China is hardly a bulwark of transparency and civil rights. It's a bit like complaining that Boston is too Catholic and then moving to Vatican City in protest. Then there's the nature of the crime itself. Informed sources I've spoken with are generally aghast by what they say is the scope of information Snowden stole, material some believe he couldn't have...

The revelation that the National Security Agency is tracking every phone call each American makes, and broadly mining internet data puts President Obama at the center of yet another controversy. He and supporters in the Republican leadership, not Edward Snowden, are making themselves villains. Two sets of issues are central. Do NSA practices strike a reasonable balance between the threats posed by global terrorism and right to privacy? Are these the least intrusive necessary? Are safeguards against abuse adequate? Will Edward Snowden be thrown in jail for revealing classified information under the Espionage Act or other statutes? The president argues...

NSA leaker Ed Snowden claimed to have broken both of his legs while training for Special Forces. "In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression"." That is simply not true as the statement from the Special Warfare Center & School below clearly points out. "Snowden was never a student at...

Long Knives Out for That Punk Kid Snowden June 11, 2013 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's go to the audio sound bites. We have the Washington and media elites upset about Edward Snowden. Folks, let me ask.Didn't we just go through an election where we were toldthat the youths of America had all the answers? We had to get the youth of America interested in American politics. We had to get them interested to the point that they cared. The youth of America, it's their future. The youth vote, that mattered as much as anything,whoever got the youth vote was...

A former senior investigator with the State Department´s criminal investigative unit has turned whistleblower and alleged to both the media and Congress that senior staff within State Department covered up investigations into appalling behavior committed by members of Hillary Clinton´s security staff and our ambassador to Belgium. One of those alleged to have interfered was Cheryl Mills, Hillary´s chief of staff. The case in which Clinton enforcer Mills allegedly intervened centered upon Brett McGurk, Obama’s nominee to be US ambassador to Iraq. McGurk’s expected nomination fell apart after a computer hack exposed

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

Was ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden right to leak documents exposing the government's secret surveillance program? Yes, he made the right move No, he's a traitor The government surveillance doesn't bother me

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden's Claims Are Believable Because We've Heard Them Before Paul Szoldra, provided by Published 7:25 pm, Sunday, June 9, 2013 With a video interview released Sunday by The Guardian, we now know 29-year-old contractor Edward Snowden as the whistleblower behind leaks of secret NSA spying programs. There's a big reason why many are quick to believe his claims of vast government surveillance — with the NSA intercepting millions of phone calls and emails, and having supposed access to tech companies — because we've actually heard it all before. Many will debate over the coming days and weeks...

Edward Snowden was interviewed over several days in Hong Kong by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. Q: Why did you decide to become a whistleblower? A: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not...

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I...

Editor’s note: The following is a lightly-edited transcription of an interview with William Binney, a former employee with the NSA who after over 30 years with the agency quit and became a whistleblower, bringing to light many of their illegal activities and mass surveillance of American citizens. Libertas Institute: Please describe your work experience with the NSA. William Binney: For approximately 28 years, I was primarily involved in breaking codes and dealing with ciphers and data systems and solving those, and working with data, trying to do threat assessment with all of that data that we had. After a while,...

In April of 2012, whistleblower William Binney went on the program Democracy Now to reveal that the NSA was lying to the American people about their actions. Binney is a former intelligence agent. He stated that the NSA had "20 trillion transactions" on record. Specifically, transactions are phone calls, emails, internet searches, and credit card purchases made by average citizens. When asked if he believed that the United States government had every single email American citizens had sent, Binney stated that, "I believe they have most of them." When asked about the difference between the Obama and Bush administrations, Binney...