MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-01-21 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] The Snoden Affair
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http://www.newsweek.com/why-obama-wont-pardon-edward-snowden-nsa-538632
U.S.
Why President Obama Can't Pardon Edward Snowden
By Edward Jay Epstein On 1/5/17 at 7:00 AM
01_20_Snowden_01
01/20/17
COVER STORY
A three-year investigation found that key parts of Edward Snowden's
story do not check out. Andrew Kelly/Reuters
U.S.
Edward Snowden
Barack Obama
National Security Agency
Close
On September 14, 2016, days before the premiere of Oliver Stone’s
hagiographic movie Snowden, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil
Liberties Union and Amnesty International launched a well-funded
campaign, with full-page ads in The New York Times, imploring President
Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, a former contract worker at the
National Security Agency, for stealing a vast number of secret
documents. “I think Oliver will do more for Snowden in two hours than
his lawyers have been able to do in three years,” said Snowden’s ACLU
lawyer, Ben Wizner.
Related: The Snowden report misses its mark
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week
A president can pardon anyone from any crime for any reason, or no
reason at all, but, as the hours tick away on his presidency, it is
unimaginable that Obama, a former law lecturer, will ignore all he knows
about what Snowden did and absolve him of his crimes.
This may surprise many people, in part because most of what they know
about this case came from the mouth (and tweets) of a single source,
Edward Snowden. Here is the sanitized version of his story: On May 20,
2013, just over month after he began working at the NSA Cryptologic
Center in Hawaii, he failed to show up for work. He called in sick—but
he wasn’t sick, he was running. He had flown to Hong Kong with a massive
cache of stolen secrets. While in Hong Kong, he gave a very small
portion of these documents to three handpicked journalists: Laura
Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, Glenn Greenwald, a
Brazil-based blogger, and Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning
reporter for The Washington Post. The exposes these journalists
produced, based on those documents, dominated the headlines for weeks.
As the world reeled, Snowden vanished again, this time for 13 days, from
June 11 to June 23, before turning up in Russia, which gave him
sanctuary, protection and a global platform for his campaign to expose
further NSA secrets, and which offered to protect him from prosecution
for his crimes.
From Moscow, he repeatedly claimed he was an idealistic whistleblower
who had been deliberately stranded in Russia by the Obama
administration, which, he suggested, was hoping to demonize him because
he had made the U.S. government look bad. He claimed the State
Department had trapped him in Russia by revoking his passport while his
plane was airborne on June 23. As for the documents he had taken, he
insisted he had given all of them to the three journalists while in Hong
Kong. He asserted that he had kept no copies and had no access to any of
the purloined materials after he left Hong Kong.
I spent three years investigating Snowden’s story for my book, How
America Lost Its Secrets: Snowden, the Man and the Theft. I went to the
places in Hawaii and Japan where Snowden worked for the NSA, the places
he staged his anti-surveillance “crypto-parties” in Honolulu, and to
Moscow, where I interviewed former Russian intelligence officers,
Kremlin insiders and the lawyer who serves as Snowden’s intermediary
there. Aside from Oliver Stone—who paid this lawyer $1 million,
supposedly for the rights to his novel—I am the only American journalist
to interview him face-to-face. What I learned, bit by bit, from my many
months of investigation, was that the key parts of Snowden’s story,
although endlessly repeated in the media as fact, do not check out.
Unpardonable Sins
01_20_Snowden_05 Snowden speaks via video link during a news conference
in New York on September 14. Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Unlike me, President Obama did not have to go to Russia to learn the
truth about Snowden’s theft. He could just read the damage assessment
report done by the NSA in 2013, and the more extensive one done by the
Pentagon in 2014. Obama also appointed his own group to look into the
Snowden affair, and he received the full classified report of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which was signed by Adam
Schiff, the ranking Democrat, as well as the eight other Democrats on
the committee, and was entirely based on work of the intelligence
services. So, unlike those ACLU lawyers who merely echo Snowden’s
version of events, Obama must know that his story is as fictional as
Stone’s movie.
For example, Obama knows his administration did not strand Snowden in
Russia. (And why trap an American intelligence worker with a headful of
secrets in an adversary nation?) On June 14, 2013, the Justice
Department filed a criminal complaint against Snowden for theft and
violation of the espionage laws; on June 22, the State Department
invalidated his passport except for return to the U.S., and its senior
watch officer confirmed that the American Consul General in Hong Kong
had notified Hong Kong authorities that Snowden's passport was invalid.
(Even accounting for a 13-hour time difference, the passport was invalid
while Snowden was in Hong Kong.) So, instead of scheming to trap him in
Moscow, the U.S. government did all it could to prevent him from
boarding a plane to Moscow and defecting to Russia.
But it failed. On June 23, Snowden boarded an Aeroflot jet bound for
Moscow, even though he didn’t have a valid passport. The fact that an
airline basically controlled by the Russian government allowed him to
board could only mean someone intervened to get Snowden on that plane
and then mounted a “special operation,” as the Russian newspaper
Izvestia put it, to take him off the plane before the other passengers
once it landed.
On September 2, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin resolved the
mystery regarding who intervened on Snowden’s behalf in a televised
press conference: He personally authorized Snowden’s trip to Russia
after the American had met with Russian “diplomats” in Hong Kong.
Putin either made this extraordinary effort on behalf of Snowden out of
altruism, or because he expected to get something of value from
Snowden’s defection.
It also was revealed that WikiLeaks, an organization the Obama
administration said was a tool of Russian intelligence after it released
emails stolen from Democratic Party leaders, helped in Snowden’s escape.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, admitted that he laid down a
smokescreen by booking a dozen decoy flights out of Hong Kong for
Snowden, and sent his deputy, Sarah Harrison, to Hong Kong to pay
Snowden’s expenses and escort him to Moscow.
Obama also knows Snowden stole much more than files regarding illegal
activities or domestic surveillance by the NSA. The report of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (partly declassified on
December 22, 2016) stated that Snowden had “removed” (not merely
touched) 1.5 million documents, and he gave journalists only a tiny
fraction of his haul. And even the portion Snowden “handed over” to
journalists, the report found, compromised “secrets that protect
American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against
terrorists and nation-states.”
0120snowdenobama As Obama's presidency winds down, it is unlikely he
will ignore everything he knows about Snowden and absolve him of his
crimes. SHAWN THEW/EPA
The president also knows from the NSA’s damage assessment that Snowden
compromised materials critical in the intelligence war against Russia,
including documents NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett called the “keys
to the kingdom.” One such document, which Ledgett described in a Vanity
Fair interview, included all requests to the NSA by U.S. intelligence
agencies to fill the gaps in their coverage of Russia and other
adversary nations, and thus it provided a roadmap to the entire U.S.
intelligence system.
Obama and Ledgett know Snowden targeted the NSA’s super secrets, the
so-called Level 3 documents. To protect itself from penetrations, the
NSA stratifies data in tiers, depending on sensitivity. Level 1 is
mainly administrative material. Level 2 contains data from which the
secret sources and methods have been removed, so that data can be shared
and analyzed. Level 3 documents cannot be shared outside a small group
of authorized individuals because they disclose the secret sources and
methods through which the NSA surreptitiously obtained that information,
including lists of sources in China, Russia, Iran and other adversary
countries. This information could invalidate America’s entire
intelligence enterprise if it were placed in the hands of an adversary.
That’s why most Level 3 data is not handled by independent contractors.
One NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, was the oldest and most trusted
of these firms, did have a contract to work on this Level 3 data in
Hawaii, and that’s why in March 2013, Snowden sought a job there, at a
cut in salary. Steven Bay, the manager at Booz Allen who hired and
supervised Snowden, said after the theft that Snowden took this job to,
“get access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA had hacked.”
Snowden admitted this in an interview with The South China Morning Post
while he was in Hong Kong.
As a result, the keys, sources and methods that, among other things,
allowed the U.S. to see and counter aggressive moves, including
cyberattacks, by adversaries were compromised. This was a devastating
blow to U.S. security.
Obama also knows that NSA documents Snowden copied and removed but did
not give to those journalists in Hong Kong were used to embarrass
America’s allies in NATO well after he arrived in Moscow. For example,
the explosive revelation that the NSA targeted the cellphone of German
Chancellor Angela Merkel was released in September. In June 2015, NSA
documents stolen by Snowden on WikiLeaks caused further trouble by
revealing that the phones of three presidents of France—Jacques Chirac,
Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande—had also been targeted. These
embarrassing revelations—made long after Snowden claimed he had no more
documents—put Obama in a very bad spot with America’s European allies.
On top of all that, Obama could hardly accept Snowden’s claim that he
was never debriefed by the Russians or had even met with any Russian
officials. The House report concludes that while in Moscow, Snowden
“had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.”
No matter how loud the clamor from Snowden supporters, Obama will not
grant Snowden a pardon.
A Hacker Without a Country
Governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged
animals. — Edward Snowden, Moscow, 2016
01_20_Snowden_02 A northeast Portland resident displays upside down U.S.
flags in protest against the NSA spy programs. Rex/AP
The many and varied consequences of Edward Snowden’s theft can be
divided into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly. The good
is the vigorous national conversation about surveillance spurred by his
disclosures. The relentless growth of data-collection technology is a
threat to personal privacy—smartphones in our pockets, GPS recorders in
our cars, fitness bands on our wrists, closed-circuit TV cameras in
stores, and network-connected devices in our homes leave a digital trail
of every move we make. The government can subpoena, as part of an
investigation, our personal data, including our internet searches,
social media postings, electronic communications and credit card
records. (One prosecutor just tried to extract data from a suspect’s
Amazon Echo.) Snowden did us all a huge favor by disclosing that the
government was vacuuming in phone billing records and internet activities.
There is, however, an important distinction to be made. In popular
culture, surveillance is often associated with the sinister measures
taken by a totalitarian government to suppress dissidence. But what
Snowden exposed was not a rogue operation; it was programs authorized by
the president and Congress, and approved by 15 federal judges. If one
accepts that the nation’s security remains a legitimate function of
government, the issue is not if there should be surveillance; it must
rather be what the proper use of surveillance is.
The NSA surveillance of telephone records exposed by Snowden was
different from surveillance done, for example, during the Cold War. The
recent targets came from a list of 300 to 400 foreign jihadists living
abroad. Many of these individuals were identified by the FBI and the CIA
as active bomb makers, assassins and weapons specialists in Syria, Iraq
and Pakistan. This was not domestic surveillance, per se, but when any
of these suspects dialed a phone number in the United States, the NSA
checked the billing records of the domestic phone number called to
determine all the calls that had emanated from it. While this
surveillance targeted foreign terrorists, not domestic dissenters, the
bulk collection of phone records had the potential for more nefarious
use, a danger Snowden brought to the public’s attention. As a result,
Congress modified the Patriot Act so that the NSA could still search the
billing records (after obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act court), but it could not archive the data. That means
there is little risk to individual privacy. Snowden deserves credit for
this.
01_20_Snowden_04 A 'no trespassing' sign marks the boundary of an NSA
eavesdropping facility in the Appalachian mountains, which Snowden outed
as a major data collection site. JIM LO SCALZO/EPA
The bad part of this tally of consequences is that Snowden profoundly
damaged an intelligence system American presidents have relied upon for
over six decades. The heart of that system was the sources and methods
used to intercept the communications of other nations. For example, the
NSA had developed the remarkable ability to tap into an adversary
nation’s computers, even though they had been isolated from any network.
However, Snowden deliberately exposed this technology (published in The
New York Times and other newspapers in 2013) for reasons we do not know.
The full extent of the damage he did to U.S. security may never be
known, even though the Department of Defense spent the better part of a
year—and tens of thousands of investigative man-hours—trying to sort out
all the sources and methods pertaining to military and cyberdefense
operations he compromised. Michael McConnell, the then–vice chairman of
Booz Allen Hamilton, stated publicly, “Snowden has compromised more
capability than any spy in U.S. history.” McConnell had no obvious
reason to exaggerate the loss because his company was partly responsible
for the devastation wrought by Snowden. It hired him, even after its
vetters flagged an untruthful statement about his expecting to receive a
graduate degree in his application. McConnell said, “This will have
impact on our ability to do our mission for the next 20 to 30 years.”
The practical value of peacetime intelligence about the activities of
adversary states is not always evident. What is far clearer to the
public is the value of intelligence that can thwart terrorist attacks
against subways, nightclubs and other civilian targets. Snowden deprived
the NSA of much of the effectiveness of its PRISM program by revealing
it, through the articles published at his specific behest in The
Guardian and The Washington Post that explained how it worked. This
single revelation compromised a system, duly authorized by Congress and
the president, that had been the government’s single most effective tool
for learning in advance about attacks in America and Europe by jihadist
terrorists.
01_20_Snowden_11 An attendee holds a "Pardon Snowden" sign as U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during an event in West Allis,
Wisconsin, on December 13, 2016. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty
The ugly part of the Snowden equation is the rampant growth of public
disdain for politicians, government agencies and even politics—according
to recent polls, four out of five Americans distrust their government.
In this culture of cynical suspicion, any claim that the secrets Snowden
disclosed caused needless harm is dismissed as government propaganda.
Snowden’s word is taken over that of government officials because, as
The Nation declared, Snowden speaks “truth to power.” Such is his aura
of self-abnegating glory that even when his revelations exposed U.S.
government actions in foreign lands, including the alleged tapping of
friendly government officials’ conversations, they were conflated with
the purported sins of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program. In this
culture of distrust, any fact that contradicts the one-source narrative
of the innocent whistleblower can be pre-emptively dismissed because
Snowden, ensconced in Moscow at an unknown location, remains the
ultimate truth-teller. After three years of investigating this case, I
must refute this depiction of Snowden, and any version of these events
that paints him the hero.
Smashing opening a Pandora’s box of government secrets was a perilous
undertaking. Whether Snowden’s theft was an idealistic attempt to right
a wrong, a narcissistic drive to obtain personal recognition, an attempt
to weaken the foundations of the surveillance infrastructure in which he
worked, or all of the above, by the time he stepped off that Aeroflot
jet in Moscow, it had evolved, intentionally or not, into something much
simpler and far less admirable. He was disclosing vital national secrets
to a foreign power. Conjectures about Snowden’s motives matter less than
the undeniable fact that he was greatly assisted in his endeavors by
powerful enemies of the United States.
That is why he can never be pardoned.
Edward Jay Epstein’s book, How America Lost Its Secrets: Snowden, the
Man and the Theft, will be published January 17 by Knopf.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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