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Still think Edward Snowden is a hero? (1 Viewer)

It's lolworthy to me when you guys pick fights with each other on the internet.

Can we go back to talking about the Feds monitoring my Netflix habtis zzzzzzOMG HE WATCHES THE KNICK

 
You're 55 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

So let's give the various law enforcement agencies more surveillance power and increase the number of criminal offenses on the books to counteract terrorism. That's good thinking.

Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack in the U.S. (over the period 2007 - 2011) = 1 in 20 million.

Meanwhile, here's an estimate of the wrongful imprisonment rate in the U.S.

Taking the low end estimate of 5000 wrongful imprisonments per year, that puts your probability of wrongful imprisonment at about 1 in 64,000, making it about 312 times more likely you'll be wrongly imprisoned than you will be killed by a terrorist. Yeah, we need to curtail that nasty constitution to keep us safer.

Some interesting cause of death probabilities.

Cherry picking one - your chance of dying in a car crash = 1 in 112.

Better get the government working on taking away everyone's car keys - right Otis?

 
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Oh wait. Other stuff can kill me?

Well crap. In that case, don't you dare watch what I buy at Whole Foods this week. Because #######it, if the Feds know I bought the 78% cacao dark chocolate almonds, I honestly don't know how I'll live.

 
Doctor Detroit said:
Otis said:
Doctor Detroit said:
Otis said:
It's lolworthy to me when you guys pick fights with each other on the internet.
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I understand you're well liked around here Diabotis but.....
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I don't get it.

I mean, I get the fat joke part. CLEVER.
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See Asperger Spocks diatribe for the rest of the story.
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I do remember him saying something like that. But I honestly don't pay careful attention to what the spock guys type. I mostly just see NERD NERD NERD NERD OTIS IS FAT NERD NERD and then I take a drink and go to the next thread.

 
The Kremlin Admits | Snowden is a Russian Agent


In the three years since Edward Snowden landed in Moscow, his relationship with his hosts has been a source of much speculation and controversy. The American IT contractor, who worked for the CIA and NSA until he fled Hawaii with more than a million purloined secret files, has not left Russia since he arrived at Sheremetyevo airport on 23 June 2013, on a flight from Hong Kong.

Snowden landed in Moscow with the permission of the Russian government, whose representatives he met during his sojourn in Hong Kong that lasted more than three weeks. He became so friendly with them that he actually celebrated his 30th birthday at the Russian consulate!

On the run from prosecution in the USA, Snowden received asylum from Vladimir Putin. Although Snowden recently indicated he would like a pardon from President Barack Obama before he leaves office in January, there’s no indication that will happen. The White House only a month ago explained that it considers Snowden to be a criminal, so any pardon seems like a fantasy.

Then there is the messy question of Snowden’s ties with the Kremlin. To anybody acquainted with the world of espionage, particularly when it involves Russians, Snowden is a defector and his collaboration with Moscow’s security agencies is a sure thing – as I explained in BILD recently.

Experts on the Kremlin’s powerful intelligence apparatus, what Russians call the “special services,” have no doubt that collaboration is a matter of simple quid pro quo. Any Western intelligence official who receives sanctuary in Russia will share what he knows with his hosts: there is no choice in the matter.

Snowden and his representatives have insisted that he is no collaborator. The official story is that Snowden arrived in Moscow with none of the classified documents he stole from NSA, and he refused to share secrets with Russian intelligence. According to Wikileaks, which told Snowden to flee to Moscow, the defector was approached by Russian spies after his arrival in their country, but refused to spill secrets.

Since Wikileaks itself is now more or less openly a front for the Kremlin, with its head Julian Assange mouthing pro-Putin propaganda with increasing frequency, there’s no reason to take its claims about Snowden seriously – particularly given Assange’s admitted role in getting the American to Moscow in the first place.

Nobody I know in Western intelligence circles believes any of these claims of Snowden’s innocence. If he has not collaborated with Russia’s special services, he would be the very first defector since 1917 not to do so. There are no indications that Vladimir Putin, who publicly called Snowden a “strange guy” and is not known for giving anything away for free, is that charitable.

Snowden’s relationship with Russian intelligence was in the public eye recently when the issue arose during the Bundestag’s NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss. Last month, Hans-Georg Maassen, the BfV President, created a stir when he explained that, in reality, Snowden is very likely a Russian agent.

BND President Gerhard Schindler went further, explaining to BILD that Snowden is “a traitor” and “Er ist zum Spielball des FSB geworden, und das ist alles andere als gut” – the FSB being the Federal Security Service, Russia’s powerful and unsavory domestic intelligence agency.

Although these statements should not be controversial, since Snowden has been in Russia for three years and shows no signs of leaving Putin’s protection, his defenders objected to such commonsense pronouncements by Germany’s security leadership. However, Snowden did himself no favors by suddenly being able to tweet in fluent German – a language he seems to have learned overnight – which bolstered the case that he is the plaything of the FSB.

Now, the Kremlin has settled the issue once and for all by stating that Edward Snowden is indeed their man. In a remarkable interview this week, Franz Klintsevich, a senior Russian security official, explained the case matter-of-factly: “Let's be frank. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do. If there's a possibility to get information, they will get it.”

With this, Klintsevich simply said what all intelligence professionals already knew – that Snowden is a collaborator with the FSB. That he really had no choice in the matter once he set foot in Russia does not change the facts.

Klintsevich is no idle speculator. He is a senator who has served in the State Duma for nearly a decade. More importantly, he is the deputy chair of the senate’s defense and security committee, which oversees the special services. The 59-year-old Klintsevich thus has access to many state secrets – for instance regarding the Snowden case.

He is also a retired Russian army colonel, having served 22 years in the elite Airborne Forces (VDV). Klintsevich saw action in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the VDV and, based on a careful reading of his biography, appears to have served with GRU, that is military intelligence (his work in “special propaganda” in Afghanistan and his 1991 graduation from the Lenin Military-Political Academy are indications of his GRU affiliation).

Klintsevich is not a well-known figure outside Russia – he appeared in the Western press briefly in 2012 with his short-lived idea to buy Hitler’s birth house in Braunau, in order to destroy it – but he is a well-connected member of the Kremlin’s ruling elite. Given his senate committee position and his GRU past, there is no doubt that Klintsevich is considered nasch (“ours”) by Russia’s special services.

His statement outing Snowden’s relationship with the Kremlin therefore cannot be an accident or a slip of the tongue. For whatever reason, Putin has decided to out Snowden as the collaborator that he actually is – and has been for three years already.

One reason for this may be Snowden’s recent tepid criticism via Twitter of Russia’s draconian new laws on domestic surveillance – which vastly exceed any of the activities of the Western democracies that Snowden has so strongly criticized from his FSB hideaway. Indeed, his hosts finally allowing their American collaborator to tweet negatively about Russia – many had noted Snowden’s silence on FSB repression and worse – may be a sign that the defector has outlived his usefulness.

In truth, Snowden was never all that well informed about American intelligence. Contrary to the myths that he and his mouthpieces have propagated, he was no more than an IT systems administrator. Snowden was never any sort of bona fide spy. There are no indications he really understands most of what he stole from NSA.

The FSB therefore milked Snowden of any valuable information rather quickly. He likely had little light to shed on the million-plus secret files he stole. Instead, his value to Moscow has been as a key player in Kremlin propaganda designed to discredit the Western intelligence alliance.

In that role, Snowden has done a great deal of damage to the West. But he was never a “mole” for Moscow inside NSA. In reality, the Snowden Operation is probably a cover to deflect attention from the one or more actual Russian moles who have been lurking inside NSA for years, undetected.

Based on the cases of previous Western intelligence defectors to Moscow, Edward Snowden faces an unhappy future. Whatever happens to him is up to his hosts, who control all aspects of any defector’s life. There no longer can be any honest debate about his relationship with the Kremlin, which has settled the matter once and for all. Putin and his special services consider Snowden to be nasch – there is no question about that now.
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http://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/edward-snowden/kremlin-admits-snowden-is-a-russian-agent-46619846.bild.html

 
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That's a lot of speculation over a single quote. Here's what Snowden's lawyer says in response:

KELLY: "Let's be frank," he says. "Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do," adds Klintsevich. "If there's a possibility to get information, they will get it." It's a possibility that Snowden's lawyer, Ben Wizner of the ACLU, denies.

BEN WIZNER: Of course, it's impossible to prove a negative. But as he has made clear, he didn't even bring sensitive information with him to Russia, precisely because he didn't want to be in a position where he could be coerced. He was approached. He made very clear that he had no intention of cooperating, and he has not.

In the end, we really have no way of knowing if Snowden cooperated with the Russians. We know it is in their interest for us to think he has, and his lawyer's interest for us to think he hasn't.
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Lester Burnham said:
Only morons ever thought he was a hero.
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First, you shouldn't blindly go tossing labels about. But regardless of whether he was a hero or not, the information he leaked has helped us as a country, both private and public sectors, become more secure. So he has performed a service that may not have happened if he didn't leak the information. I don't necessarily consider him a hero, but he isn't a villain either.

 
Maelstrom said:
First, you shouldn't blindly go tossing labels about. But regardless of whether he was a hero or not, the information he leaked has helped us as a country, both private and public sectors, become more secure. So he has performed a service that may not have happened if he didn't leak the information. I don't necessarily consider him a hero, but he isn't a villain either.
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The guy broke an oath & caused untold damage. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-listen-to-edward-snowdens-supporters-his-leaks-have-been-a-gift-to-terrorists-10307959.html

https://www.rt.com/usa/235595-snowden-leaks-damage-nsa-washington/

There are hundreds of thousands of honest hard working cleared Americans who didn't leak information they were sworn to protect. There are anonymous avenues for reporting suspected illegal activities within the intelligence community.  That's all I am going to say.

 
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Edward Snowden can shine a light on a bunch of awful and unconstitutional things that our government does that we should all worry about and also do stupid stuff that creates additional challenges for our security agencies. You guys don't really do nuance do you?

 
Lester Burnham said:
The guy broke an oath & caused untold damage. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-listen-to-edward-snowdens-supporters-his-leaks-have-been-a-gift-to-terrorists-10307959.html

https://www.rt.com/usa/235595-snowden-leaks-damage-nsa-washington/

There are hundreds of thousands of honest hard working cleared Americans who didn't leak information they were sworn to protect. There are anonymous avenues for reporting suspected illegal activities within the intelligence community.  That's all I am going to say.
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There is a lot of conjecture, and a lot of things where there is correlation, not causation. That said, these things are why I stop short of saying he is a hero. The intelligence agencies where doing some really scummy, and borderline illegal (if not outright illegal) things that needed to be brought to the public eye. There really weren't other avenues, despite what the president and NSA have claimed - he would have had to go to his boss or the Congress, both of whom had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130829/01280024346/no-snowden-didnt-have-any-other-avenues-to-blow-whistle.shtml)

Terrorists have known how to evade surveillance and they were using strong encryption since long before the Snowden leaks.  In fact, terrorists have been using encryption and other similar tactics since before 9/11. Their techniques, if compromised, would have changed regardless of the leak. I do not sympathize in the least with terrorists, but I also think that our security agencies should not have carte blanche to do whatever they want. And that is where things were headed (maybe already there).

 
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bentley said:
Edward Snowden can shine a light on a bunch of awful and unconstitutional things that our government does that we should all worry about and also do stupid stuff that creates additional challenges for our security agencies. You guys don't really do nuance do you?
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:confused:  That doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. :confused:

Wanna dumb it down a bit for us, Thurgood Marshall?

 
“I have to make a little bit of a complaint here, although I shouldn’t really go there. You know, Edward Snowden hasn’t published anything in three years,” said Assange. “He did one thing—it was a very important thing. And it was in fact so important that I, and this organization, saved his ### by rescuing him from Hong Kong, getting him asylum, making 23 asylum applications, and setting up his defense fund of the Courage Foundation, which I am a trustee of today. So, OK, I know Edward is trying to get a pardon at the end of the Obama presidency so he’s playing that game. I understand. He’s in a very serious situation.”
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/06/julian-assange-to-bill-maher-we-re-working-on-hacking-trump-s-tax-returns.html

- So per Assange he and WL arranged the asylum of Snowden with Russia. How did that happen?

 
DOJ: much of seized 50TB from ex-NSA contractor is “highly classified”



Prosecutors want Hal Martin behind bars until his trial.


In the final filing before a second custody hearing in a week, prosecutors said Thursday afternoon that a former National Security Agency contractor accused of removing massive amounts of secret data and documents should remain in custody.

Among that trove of data, investigators say they found “numerous names of intelligence officers of the United States” who are serving abroad.

When Martin was arrested in August, investigators seized 50TB worth of data and many other printed and classified documents from Martin’s home in suburban Maryland. If all of this data was indeed classified, it would be the largest such heist from the NSA, far larger than what former contractor Edward Snowden took.

“Although still undergoing review, it is estimated that a substantial portion of the 50 terabytes of digital information seized from the Defendant contains highly classified information,” Harvey Eisenberg, and other prosecutors wrote in an explanation of what Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) intelligence is, underscoring that it is considered to be “irreplaceable once compromised.”

...
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Anybody get the feeling that Snowden wasn't working alone and maybe he was the little fish and Martin is the big fish?

 
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‘Assange’ Doc Suggests Russia Knew In Advance Ed Snowden Would Spy on NSA


  • Exclusive: Leaked doc shows Russian spies from Cuba met Ecuadorean counterparts in Quito on April 4th, 2013
  • The letter of credentials was held in Ecuador’s London Embassy among intelligence files marked ‘Assange’
  • Julian Assange tried to arrange Snowden’s asylum in Ecuador
  • Snowden originally planned to fly there via Cuba – but never boarded
  • On April 5th, Snowden sends his only legal email to the NSA
  • During the month of April 2013, Snowden admittedly stole top-secret NSA documents
  • Snowden has always maintained he was a ‘whistleblower’ and had no contact with foreign intelligence agencies before leaving the NSA
  • But the FSB’s head in Cuba flying to Quito, and the location of the letter in Ecuador’s London Embassy with other files on Assange, suggests there was advance collusion and planning between Russia and Ecuador before Snowden stole a raft of top-secret files
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The note is a record of a meeting between Russian and Ecuadorean spies in Quito, Ecuador. Ostensibly, it appears to have no relevance to Julian Assange or to Wikileaks. However, it was held by SENAIN at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Julian Assange has asylum, among files relating to him.

The document strongly suggests that both Ecuador and Russia knew in advance that Edward Snowden would steal highly classified files from the NSA, using his position as a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, before Snowden took them.

The sequence of events is as follows:

March 2013 – Mr. Snowden takes a job at Booz Allen in order to obtain top secret documents from the NSA facility in Hawaii.

April 4th, 2013 – The head of the FSB in Cuba, Col. Kazalupov, meets in Quito, Ecuador, with Ecuadorean intelligence (SENAIN).

A copy of a letter confirming this meeting, written by the Russian Ambassador to Ecuador, is held at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Julian Assange has asylum, in SENAIN files relating to Assange and to Wikileaks.

April 5th, 2013 – Mr. Snowden writes his only of concern email to legal counsel at the NSA, with a vague query about Executive Orders.

April, 2013 – during this month, according to Mr. Snowden himself, he steals a tranche of top-secret documents, some of which he gave to the South China Morning Post.

May 20, 2013 – Mr. Snowden flies to Hong Kong.

June 21, 2013 – The United States charges Snowden with espionage.

June 22, 2013 – Using an Ecuadorean travel document arranged by Julian Assange and London’s Ecuadorean consul, Snowden flies to Moscow.

June 24, 2013 – Reporters are told to expect Snowden on an Aeroflot flight to Cuba, where Col. Kazalupov heads the FSB. He is expected to fly from Cuba to Ecuador where he will receive asylum.

However, as reported below, following pressure from the United States, neither Cuba nor Ecuador was willing to grant Snowden safe passage. President Correa of Ecuador canceled the travel document Assange and the London embassy had arranged for Snowden.

...
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http://heatst.com/politics/assange-doc-suggests-russia-knew-in-advance-ed-snowden-would-spy-on-nsa/

 
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How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft  - Edward Jay Epstein

I've seen a lot about Snowden and while I am only on Chapter 12 of this book, it is amazing how BS Oliver Stone's movie is about him.  The movie paints him to be some sort of cross between Alan Turing and Robin Hood.  The book portrays him something close to a combination of David Lightman (wargames) and Aldrich Ames.  He basically got in through nepotism, his grandfather was an admiral in the coast guard.  He got and kept jobs because of government incompetence in sharing of information with 3rd party companies (Dell / Booz Allen) and a lack of quality checking on his background (He stated he was getting a a masters degree from Liverpool, but didn't complete a course).

It also documents how calculated and obsessive he was with details regarding dealing with Greenwald and Poitras, but that he had no passports or tickets to get to a country with no extradition from Hong Kong.  The purported amount of data that was stolen was 900,000+ documents, but the amount that was given to the journalists about domestic spying was around 50,000.  The writer research leaves little doubt that domestic spying was just a cover up for either Snowden being a Russian spy.  He also suggests that either willingly, unknowingly, or through data share with the Russians that the Chinese also have the information that was stolen.

The movie though, couldn't be much further from this book if it had dragons and pixie dust.

 
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