[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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