Posted on 06/09/2013 11:41:17 AM PDT by sunmars
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 have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.
Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.
In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
They private sector companies were given a court order to turn over records of ALL customers.
ALL customers does not constitute reasonable search and seizure, since you can’t suspect EVERYONE who has a phone.
The companies should have refused the order on Constitutional grounds.
But the companies’ Boards of Directors and corporate officers are all globalists, as is the Judge issueing the Order and the government attorneys who requested the Order.
If I’m a gun retailer, and you and all your friends buy rifles from me, do you see how it might be a problem for me to say “THE BILLS I SEND MY CUSTOMERS ARE PUBLIC INFORMATION”. And then I put all your invoices on my website for the government to see. What gun you bought, what bullets, where you live, etc.
If over the years I buy all sorts of equipment and supplies because I tinker with cars, boats, guns, baseball equipment, stoves and ovens (I like to cook), regrigeration, fertilizers (I like to garden), and I keep all my records, I would have boxes of old records. They would contain invoices for all the strange combinations of things I’d bought over the years. No doubt, if you wanted to, and you could get your hands on my boxes of old invoices that I paid, you could prove I had the material to build all sorts of bombs and booby traps and was running a gun repair business for terrorists.
George Washington & Co. realized that unreasonable search and seizure was often used by despotic governments, where they simply burst in one day, grabbed boxes of records and took them back to their office where they combed through them and some other evidence they gathered elsewhere, and combined it with some witness testimony where they fabricated cases against innocent people.
Having every person’s phone bill is exactly this kind of unreasonable a) seizure and b) search (they comb through the bills they’ve unconstitutionally seized without individual, valid search warrants, looking for evidence).
Saying everyone in the town is suspect, we’re seizing all their records from their homes, does not make the seizure Constitutionally valid.
They must a) for each single person b) have suspicion based on evidence c) enough to convince a judge to issue a search warrant then they can d) search and/or seize e) according to the search warrant for f) that single person.
There is no such thing as a Constitutionally valid blanket court order for search/seizure of a whole class of persons, everyone, etc. But there can be an order against a group that is a legal entity. Any group that is incorporated, a partnership, etc. Like a mosque. Or a business front that is run by the mafia. Or a business front that is run by the CIA. Such organizations, and their leaders, can have warrants issued for their books and records if there is evidence which satisfies a Judge that the entity could be suspected of doing what the petitioning persons accuse it of.
Not sure he violated the oath he took after passing his background check to get his clearance. I do believe that the constitution is mentioned as the only thing that has to be followed 100 percent during that oath. So....
Got this e-mail from the self-styled "progressive" RootsAction Team
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Note that they say they'll send signatures and comments "directly to him." (It's bullzit, and not being a total moron, of course, I'm not signing). But it's amazing they'd claim to know where he is. They making a little money on the side by collecting names for the NSA?
They're either stupid, or they think their followers are.
>>You should recognize that this guy is almost certainly a big lib and a big Obama supporter. Time will tell on that but there are clues in the interview and the Guardian Q&A.
<<
You sure are spending a lot of time trashing the guy. Blaming the messenger.
Yet you also spend a lot of time on this and other threads defending the NSA surveillance.
Odd.
>>the NSA broke no laws<<
It just obliterates the Fourth Amendment, no biggie.
>>It is a rare thing to see the members of the Free Republic supporting the liberal point of view.<<
If you support big government spying on us and stealing every bit of information they can get their hands on, our credit card transactions, emails, texts, Facebook posts, Skype messages, etc., etc., the whole shebang (and this will also include contents of any prayers we share in digital form)...
If you think supporting these things is conservative, u=you are an idiot.
And if you think opposing them is “liberal” you are a delusional fool.
Interesting you chose a screenname with “Intercept” in it. lol
“If he was briefed then he signed the official secrets act. “
Ah, he should have kept secret the fact that the Fourth Amendment was being done away with and We the People were now officially prisoners of the state.
He missed his chance at being a true patriot of the Fatherland.
Oh, yes, the assistant coroner who died of arsenic poisoning and yet the LA Times came out and said, “He was not involved in Breitbart’s autopsy.” Oh really? But he was still murdered, what of that? Is anyone at all curious who did it and why? Is it even being investigated? And then they roll their eyes, call us crazy, and...change the subject.
“I’ve never been big on revealing secret information. So I can’t praise this man for what he’s done.”
It’s ironic that you say you are not “big on revealing secret information.” Because the federal government IS big on revealing YOUR secret information and mine, to themselves.
In violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Are you “big” on that?
Didn’t say you were.
Yes, prior knowledge was out there. With some trades, it is impossible to find out who actually made them. I think that was in the book too.
I'll stand by this comment. There are good arguments on both sides. I'm not taking a position on either side until we see what is behind some of the more unbelievable statements that have been made by Snowden. Here is an example that I've been using:
"I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email."
If this is true than NSA has went way beyond current law as I understand it. It requires constant connection to Google's E-mail servers and many others or access to Google's archive servers and many others.
If it isn't true, and that will be admittedly hard to determine, then one has to question everything he says. So, for me, the key question is what is the data that NSA is actually archiving. I believe that the collection of foreign to domestic phone calls on a metadata basis was understood to be happening. To and from E-mails isn't a big stretch beyond that. To go to archiving e-mail content is the equivalent of a universal wiretap. If the law allows that I will be shocked. If it is being done I will be shocked. Let's see how it plays out.
And, most importantly, the Intercept in InterceptPoint has nothing to do with any of this. It's a term used in the design of Power Amplifiers (of all things). Don't ask. ;)
That’s no monkey. That’s a reptile.
You missed the point in the interview where he indicated he was a system manager.
I was a system manager on large multi-user computer systems since, oh, 1982. I had system administration privs on all manner of systems, from super-minicomputers to workstations, to clusters of super-mini’s.
Once you’re a system admin, you have the entire system at your disposal. You can read, write, delete, create files under anyone’s user-id, you can install and remove software, the whole gamut.
Unlike the B-52 mechanic who needs a pilot to fly the plane and a navigator and bombardier to bomb the target, a computer system manager needs no one and nothing else. For all intents and purposes, he’s a one-man show.
Going public was his only form of protection against Obama. Sure, Obama can kill him. But if it happens through anything but a medical assassination, the world will know and it will vindicate his very reasons to blow the whistle on the criminal shenanigans of this lawless regime.
And what did he “leak”? That Big Brother can see and hear everything? Anybody with a brain already knew that, and those of us who didn’t care if we were Alinsky’ed came right out and said it. If there were terrorists stupid enough that they didn’t know that already, they are too stupid to be effective anyway.
If our government could have all the clues, all the warnings from other countries, all the records of movements, etc of Tamarlan Tsarnaev, and still did nothing to keep him from killing in a terrorist attack, then what makes us think that ANY surveillance is going to be used to keep us safe?
Osama Bin Laden’s son Hamza was at the finish line of the Boston marathon. He was classified as a known terrorist, but as soon as Obama met privately with the Saudi ambassador that classification was removed, he was visited by the supposed First Lady, and was safely jetted away from US law enforcement.
We had advance warnings about Tsarnaev and it didn’t keep us safe. We had Bin Laden’s son in our hands and Obama made sure he got away safely. Don’t anybody try telling me that either of those guys carried out this plan without contacting each other. What good did all the surveillance do in keeping us safe from these 2 known terrorists who were almost certainly communicating with each other in this country?
Exactly. There have been (so far) no technical revelations about our capabilities. The only thing that's new is the fact that Obama has taken it upon himself to spy on all of us proactively and likely without proper authorization. That's what has Obama and his co-conspirators angry.
We’ve been doing drone attacks all over the place. The only time sending in an armed drone is considered an act of war is when it is to rescue our own personnel from a terrorist attack. In the eyes of this regime, that is...
And what did he “leak”? That Big Brother can see and hear everything? Anybody with a brain already knew that . . .
If he wanted to "leak" only what everybody "already knew," what was his point?
And, if he wanted to "leak" only what everybody "already knew," why did he feel a need to flee from what was his country?
I think we're going to find out that there is something "not quite right" about this guy and that he's got some psychological problems.
And what did he “leak”? That Big Brother can see and hear everything? Anybody with a brain already knew that . . .
If he wanted to "leak" only what everybody "already knew," what was his point?
And, if he wanted to "leak" only what everybody "already knew," why did he feel a need to flee from what was his country?
I think we're going to find out that there is something "not quite right" about this guy and that he's got some psychological problems.
What he leaked was details that prove what a bunch of us already knew. It’s easy for the ministers of disinformation to Alinsky the rest of us as “paranoid”. It’s not so easy to do that with somebody who has the proof in hand.
Yet there will still be those ministers of disinformation who will try to smear him as if he’s just a crazy person making stuff up, won’t there, Tau Food?
Lots of “contractors” work for the NSA. Lots and lots. Some of them are spin-outs, where NSA people are put into a front company, and others are companies that have specialized skills and assets with single-customer contracts, and some are just companies that make products that are useful which they might ‘adapt’ for NSA purposes. It runs the gamut.
We’ve outsourced quite a bit of our intel and military in the last 10+ years. The NSA is no different.
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