[governance] (Tangential) Edward Snowden Makes Himself an Even Bigger Problem to the Officialdom

Riaz K Tayob riaz.tayob at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 07:29:10 EDT 2013


Some interesting analysis, including how the left and right in the US 
are responding to this... this is definitely not just a left wing or 
liberal concern in the US...


Edward Snowden Makes Himself an Even Bigger Problem to the Officialdom 
<http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/NakedCapitalism/%7E3/0j7jP4Yr45E/edward-snowden-makes-himself-an-even-bigger-problem-to-the-officialdom.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email> 


Posted: 10 Jun 2013 03:25 AM PDT

Former CIA employee, most recently Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden 
was already the intel community's biggest nightmare, and now this:

You could not have done better if you had gone to central casting and 
had a professional scriptwriter. He's on the nerdy side of attractive, 
sensible-sounding and relaxed, articulate, and able to deliver key 
points in a compact, mass market friendly manner. Sadly, who carriers 
the message matters a great deal to Americans, and Snowden has revealed 
himself to be credible and likeable. In other words, as Foreign Policy 
noted a couple of days ago, the PR battle is on, and Glenn Greenwald and 
the Guardian team have played this very well. The releasing of key 
pieces over a series of days has kept the story on a full boil, and 
having Snowden agree to the taping and releasing it towards the end was 
astute, witness:

Screen shot 2013-06-10 at 4.41.00 AM 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Screen-shot-2013-06-10-at-4.41.00-AM.png>

But putting the effectiveness of the strategy of the packaging of the 
story aside, the message in the video is even more disturbing than the 
program overviews released so far. If nothing else, listen to the 
section starting at 3:16 to 3:40, where he described the untrammeled 
access analysts have to information. Your information.

And we're already seeing serious fracturing on political lines. Some 
vocal members of the right are alarmed about the reach of the 
surveillance state. Glenn Beck <%28https://twitter.com/glennbeck> and 
Rod Dreher <%28http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher> of the 
American Conservative have come out supporting Snowden by name. Rand 
Paul 
<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/caa202e6-d12b-11e2-a3ea-00144feab7de.html#axzz2VhrwtelH>, 
Neil Cavuto 
<http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/08/im-not-going-to-play-this-game-with-you-neil-cavuto-rips-guest-for-obama-spy-scandal-defense/>,
Peggy Noonan 
<http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/06/08/the-era-of-metadata/>,
Jim Sensenbrenner 
<http://www.ibtimes.com/jim-sensenbrenner-republican-author-patriot-act-says-nsa-prism-surveillance-goes-too-far-1297697>,Heather 
Ginsberg <http://townhall.com/tipsheet/heatherginsberg/> and Ed 
Morrissey 
<http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/07/white-house-on-surveillance-hey-lets-have-a-debate/> 
have all criticized the programs discussed in the Snowden revelations.

Andrew Dittmer sent these comments from the very conservative site 
TheBlaze, picking the most recent ones expressing a clear point of view 
on Snowden:

    "Regardless this guy is an American hero. Thank God for his courage
    and integrity."

    "Just finished listening to the video and analyzing his body
    language;this guy is a good guy and nothing like that POS Bradley
    Manning. Manning should spend life in prison or be shot and this guy
    needs an Independent seat in the Senate and head an Intelligence
    Committee."

    "I'm glad that this information is exposed, but I don't believe this
    "whistleblower" had purely honorable intentions. He could have given
    this information to Constitution friendly politicians, NY Times, Fox
    News, but he chose to give it to a well known anti-American
    journalist that works for a foreign news organization."

    "I find it interesting that you think Glenn Greenwald is
    anti-American because he recently went to work for a british
    newspaper (bigger money offer, American capitalism and such) and
    that he is willing to speak out against the gubment. Is that not an
    American ideal -- to speak out against the gubment when you think it
    is wrong?"

    "The difference is simple, Manning was trying to hurt America, this
    guy is
    trying to save her."

    "As for me, this dude is a freedom fighter for humanity and against
    tyranny."

    "not very bright for an ex-spook. Guess he doesn't read the news,
    Obamy is out for leaker blood."

    "One day when we elect an American again as president I hope we can
    put this man on a Quarter as an anniversery coin."

    "The govt program is illegal, so I'd like to think he's a good guy.
    I'm concerned he could be seeking publicity, but I hope he's a true
    believer in freedom & liberty, though I see globalism in his word
    choices, which sets off my alert signals."

    "Watched the video. Can't say the young man is a patriot and hero,
    nor can I say that he is a wacked liberal. More needs to be seen and
    revealed. The man definitely has humility and is not arrogant, but
    very bright. Some would say that he is not very bright doing what
    heis doing."

As Chris Engel pointed out yesterday, a number of sites, particularly 
tech oriented sites, have tried attacking Greenwald's work for 
inaccuracy. Ed Harrison has been keeping tabs on the reporting (see here 
<https://delicious.com/edwardnh/freedom> and here 
<https://www.diigo.com/user/edwardnh/freedom>) and describes it as 
falling into two camps, the first being techies who take issue with the 
use of terminology. This is similar to the sort of finance pedantry 
which was routine during and after the crisis. While getting the fine 
points right matters, too often the critics are simply trying to confine 
the discussion to experts, who also happen overwhelmingly to be pro 
status quo. The second is more obvious: journalists who are affiliated 
with the technology industry (and may not be experts but translate for 
them regularly) and will defend their meal tickets (the tech industry 
gets huge amounts of funding from the defense and intel communities).

The other element that Ed highlighted by e-mail is that this shows the 
dangers of outsourcing government functions. Here are some sections of a 
blistering, must-read 2007 Salon article by Tim Shorrock on Booz 
<http://www.salon.com/2007/01/08/mcconnell_5/> (hat tip Richard Smith):

    With revenues of $3.7 billion in 2005, Booz Allen is one of the
    nation's biggest defense and intelligence contractors. Under
    [J.Michael] McConnell's watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved
    in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs the Bush
    administration has run, including the infamous Total Information
    Awareness data-mining scheme. As a key contractor and advisor to the
    NSA, Booz Allen is almost certainly participating in the agency's
    warrantless surveillance of the telephone calls and e-mails of
    American citizens...

    U.S. intelligence budgets are classified, as are nearly all
    intelligence contracts. But the overall budget is generally
    understood to be running about $45 billion a year. Based on
    interviews I've done for an upcoming book, I estimate that about 50
    percent of this spending goes directly to private companies. This is
    big business: The accumulated spending on intelligence since 2002 is
    much higher than the total of $33 billion the Bush administration
    paid to Bechtel, Halliburton and other large corporations for
    reconstruction projects in Iraq...

    Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Booz Allen was hired by
    the CIA to audit the agency's monitoring of trillions of dollars in
    international financial transactions moving through a European
    cooperative called SWIFT....

    The ACLU and Privacy International, an organization that monitors
    government intrusion, jointly issued a scathing report on the issue
    last September. "Though Booz Allen's role is to verify that the
    access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the US
    government calls its objectivity significantly into question," the
    two organizations said....

    Booz Allen served as the NSA's chief advisor on one of its most
    significant outsourcing projects. Called Groundbreaker, this huge
    project was launched shortly before the 9/11 attacks to overhaul the
    NSA's internal I.T. systems. Booz Allen's work on this project was
    outlined in a Booz Allen magazine piece on "Government Clients."
    Working with the NSA, the article states, Booz Allen "helped create
    a new model of managed competition that outsourced key pieces of the
    agency's IT infrastructure services." Its work on Groundbreaker
    "included source selection support and evaluating vendor proposals."

    Last year, however, the Baltimore Sun investigated the project and
    concluded it was a failure. Over the course of the project,
    Groundbreaker's $2 billion price tag had doubled, and the problems
    with the system, according to insiders who spoke to the Sun, were
    legion. "Some analysts and managers have said their productivity is
    half of what it used to be because the new system requires them to
    perform many more steps to accomplish what a few keystrokes used
    to," the paper reported. Another NSA program that Booz Allen was
    involved in, Trailblazer, which was designed to overhaul the NSA's
    signals intelligence system, is widely considered an even worse failure.

Oh, and guess who the majority owner of Booz is? Carlyle Group, the 
long-time DC heavyweight private equity firm with deep connections to 
the Bush family. We can see how clever it is proving to be to have 
outsourced big chunks of the defense, security, and intelligence 
apparatus to mercenaries, even worse, ones with really high return 
targets (the traditional public service model led to screening for true 
believers. By contrast, Snowden touches on his discomfort with his 
well-paid lifestyle and his power).

And even though a lot of the tech community benefits directly from 
military-industrial complex largesse, there's also a good deal of soul 
searching and consternation in some quarters of that world as well.

We finally may have seen the abuse where Obama's default strategy, that 
any problem can be solved by better PR, has met its match. The fact that 
Greenwald and the Guardian have played this story well and gotten it the 
airing it deserves is very important. But it's also that Snowden has 
been able to provide concrete examples that put the spotlight on the 
scope and lack of real checks on a massive police state apparatus. And 
it isn't just Americans that are alarmed. It's going to be very hard for 
the officialdom to minimize or explain away this information, and we 
should all be very grateful for that.

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