Whistleblower Snowden plagues Obama’s national security state

Scan page 4

4 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2013 When UK Guardian staffwriter Glen Greenwald reported last month that whistleblower Edward Snowden could do more harm (in the political sense) to the U.S. government than any other person on earth, most observers believed that his statement was perhaps an exaggeration. Today, it’s clear that there is more than a grain of truth to Greenwald’s assertion.

The almost comedic yet horrifying image seen around the world of Guardian staffers sledge hammer­ ing their newspaper’s hard drives on orders from the British government, no doubt at the request of top U.S. officials, was aimed at warning any and all Snowden supporters—as well as others who might download his massive trove of U.S.-classified documents—that the price to pay would be high. The 35-year sentence meted out to courageous whistleblower Sergeant Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning no doubt serves as a warning to all who would expose the truth about U.S. surveillance practices, military atrocities, and deadly dealings around the world.

On Aug. 21 Guardian staffwriter Greenwald captured the brutality and portended repression following this incident. Greenwald wrote: “Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger on Monday night disclosed the re­ markable news that UK authorities, several weeks ago, threatened the Guardian UK with prior restraint if they did not destroy all of their materials provided ment of the paper’s offices to oversee the physical de­ struction of hard drives.” (In Britain, “prior restraint” is the legal prohibition against publication of material that the government deems a threat to its “national security interests.”)

“As Rusbridger explains, this behavior was as inane as it was thuggish: since this is 2013, not 1958, de­ stroying one set of a newspaper’s documents doesn’t destroy them all, and since the Guardian has multiple people around the world with copies, they achieved nothing but making themselves look incompetently oppressive.”

Undoubtedly, Rusbridger was on the mark, but even here there are additional critical elements to the mat­ ter, including the fact that Snowden’s trove has been encrypted to make its accessibility limited to only those who possess the codes to unlock it. Mindful of this, U.S. cloak and dagger officials began their search for the codes with a vengeance, beginning with a se­ cret order issued to Lavabit, a Texas-based encrypted e-mail service used by Snowden to protect his records of illegal government spying and related abuse. Lav­ abit, according to Greenwald, announced on Aug. 9 that“It was shutting itself down in order to avoid com­ plying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users’ con­ tent.”

Greenwald continues, “‘After significant soul search­ ing, I have decided to suspend operations,’ the com­ pany’s founder, Ladar Levinson, wrote in a statement to users posted on the front page of its website. He said the US directive forced on his company ‘a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.’ He chose the latter.”

Greenwald’s article continued: “What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court pro­ ceeding it has engaged [emphasis in original]. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is be­ ing done to their company.”

In an exclusive Aug. 26 interview with the on-line publication Truthout, Greenwald stated that his re­ search of government documents on the state of de­ coding encrypted material led him to believe that at least for the moment U.S. experts were unable to break Snowden’s encrypted materials.

Snowden’s 20,000 to 30,000 documents—perhaps even more according to the most recent reports—ac­ cumulated over at least two years, reveal the secret and illegal commission of crimes against the Ameri­ can people and the people and nations of the world.

Rarely a day passes when the Obama administra­ tion does not deploy its fire-fighting fleet of cover-up agents to deny what is now universally known. But it is increasingly routine that a U.S.-issued denial is quickly countered by yet another rebuttal based on the trove of secret government documents that con­ stitute Snowden’s acquired archives. Every lie is coun­ tered by a truth based not on idle speculation but rather on texts from the government horse’s mouth.

Adding to Obama’s dilemma is a perhaps unusual conflict of interest with the nation’s corporate me­ dia. The New York Times, for example, has partnered with the UK-based Guardian in releasing Snowden’s frequent exposures. For The Times—whose reporters have also been illegally dogged by the government’s spies—and for the Washington Post, which also part­ ners with the Guardian, being forced to remain silent or report important news secondhand is a heavy price to pay. The price is not only a financial one but also with regard to their ability to maintain the neces­ sary image of a “free press” in corporate “democratic” America.

It is more accurate to say that the U.S. corporate me­ dia exercise “self restraint” when it comes to telling the full truth about corporate and government mis­ deeds. Even here, a few dissident voices are inevitably raised when the so-called free press finds its reporters facing jail terms for refusing to divulge their sources.

In the United Kingdom, officials simply ban material from publication; that is, they impose “prior restraint.” Violators are subject to severe punishment. In the U.S. the censorship process is subtler but largely results in the same outcome.

A recent revelation by Snowden cited a secret in­ sands of domestic e-mails.

The judge noted also that he had been consciously misinformed by government officials regarding the scope of the surveillance requested. He detailed his accusations against government sleuths in an 85-page document, which is still classified.

This incident itself, as well more recent revelations that the U.S. government “vacuums” and opens the communications of countless millions of Americans, drove yet another nail in the coffin of the govern­ ment’s credibility.

Snowden appears to leave no stone unturned re­ garding the government’s daily lies and obfuscation. Most recently, he released secret documents wherein the government paid various on-line providers mil­ lions for the legal expenses they incurred in defending their illegal government-ordered actions. Of course, the U.S. judicial system, primed in advance to do the government’s bidding, including virtually always up­ holding its “national security” laws, is a comfortable ally of the government and the corporate interests it protects.

As with all such matters, no sooner has the lie been exposed, than Obama or his subordinates note that whatever “errors” might have been committed are now legally rectified. This consists in the govern­ ment’s approval of never-ending “amendments” to its FISA and related legislation that formally legalize what has been exposed as illegal, a neat game if there ever was one!

Several major corporate media noted in mid-August, for example, that while the government does scruti­ nize virtually all e-mail and other communications of 75 percent of the population’s communications, it ex­ ercises “discretion” in doing so. Rather than reading every one of trillions of such communications, the gov­ ernment’s speed-of-light computers are programmed to intercept only those that include key words, e-mail addresses, or other information deemed relevant to its “war on terror.”

But even this “scrutiny” has now been admitted by government officials to be “flawed.” An unnamed State Department official admitted to The New York Times that additional and non-approved words or terms were added to the government’s approved list, thus checking the e-mails of additional millions of internet and cell phone users.

Government apologies for this “accidental” trans­ gression were duly noted by the accepting corporate media, none of which have challenged the wholesale violations of constitutionally protected rights other than with perhaps a modest slap on the wrist and cau­ tioning to be more careful and a bit less intrusive.

Prior to Snowden’s revelations Obama and his spokespersons insisted that there was no significant gathering of phone, e-mail, and other such commu­ nications. With Snowden’s documents made public, their story was changed to the effect that nothing col­ lected had been done illegally; nothing violated U.S. law. But with three billion so-called legally gathered (continued on page 5, in “Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years”)