Snowden speaks in ‘Citizen Four’

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It is chilling to know for a fact that since 9/11/2001, the U.S National Security Agency, NSA, has been track­ ing phone calls from ATT and Verizon, and also bank activity, internet searches, and all social media sites used by every person in America. It also tracks our credit card purchases—on the internet or from brick and mortar stores.

This information was revealed by Edward Snowden to filmmaker, documentarian Laura Poitras and jour­ nalist Glenn Greenwald at a clandestine meeting in a Hong Kong hotel room over a period of eight days in May 2013. How Greenwald was going to write it up is a huge part of Laura Poitras’s important and shock­ ing documentary film, “Citizen Four.”

Snowden was a young contract employee for the consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton in their Hawaii offices. They lent his services to the NSA as a systems administrator/consultant. Snowden at first thought it was important to look for data disclosing terrorist plots from militant groups like al-Queda. But soon, while advising superiors at the NSA on methods of developing security systems against hackers, he dis­ covered files on its domestic spying activities against U.S. citizens.

Subsequently, Snowden downloaded into his com­ puter many thousands of implicating files. (He had unlimited access and the highest security clearance because of his expertise.) Then, knowing of Poitras’

revelatory documentary films, specifically one about whistleblower William Binney, he began e-mailing her using the code name Citizen Four, and hinting at what he had in his possession.

Snowden also came to know Poitras from an ar­ ticle written about her by the British Guardian’s in­ vestigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, in which she said to him that she was a “government target.”

Snowden had previously tried to interest Greenwald, (continued from page 12: “Corporate media sounds the alarm”) a sustained mass movement against climate change. The presence of 400,000 people marching on Sept. 21 in advance of a UN climate talk shop—over twice what march organizers expected—speaks to the growing im­ pulse to fight the status quo, particularly among young people and those living with the direct environmental consequences of fossil fuel extraction.

Those who marched carried signs representing a broad range of currents and struggles, notably includ­ ing anti-fracking, tar sands pipeline blockades, Native American sovereignty, immigrant rights, anti-racism and anti-police violence. Yet unified demands—those that could have been amplified enough by the sheer numbers marching for them to overcome the corporate media blackout—were absent from the march, which was produced by political liberals and endorsed by cor­ porate front groups.

Ironically, the same can be said for the “anti-capital­ ist” Flood Wall Street civil-disobedience action the fol­ lowing day, which saw 2500 people block a street in Manhattan for eight hours with no apparent aim other than catharsis for their hatred of the bourgeoisie. After a workday’s worth of non-interference, the NYPD ulti­ mately took the street-sitters up on their pageant, acci­ dentally pepper-spraying themselves before arresting a man in a polar bear suit.

10 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2014 but Greenwald never followed through since he felt Snowden’s method of encrypting e-mail too annoy­ ing. But he changed his mind after Snowden connect­ ed with Poitras.

Writer Barton Gellman, then a journalist at the Washington Post, became involved in May 2013, when the Post declined to “guarantee publication within 72 hours of all the Power Point slides that Snowden had leaked exposing the PRISM electronic data min­ ing program [which searched Google and Yahoo] and would eventually lead to a code allowing Snowden to later prove that he was the source.”

In the film Snowden tells Poitras that he knew the wiretapping was wrong and unconstitutional—an infringement on individual privacy. He wanted this to be known publicly, but realized that how to do it would be tricky. He has said that he abides by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth and Fifth Amendments: “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.” He also discovered that U.S. intelligence’s MUSCULAR system tapped into the undersea cable.

Poitras’s film opens with a black screen with Snowden’s keystrokes appearing as though he’s typ­ ing his queries to her in real time. Her answers ap­ pear below his messages in the same way. After con­ firming his identity and involving Greenwald, the three agree to meet at a secure location in a Hong Kong hotel, in May 2013.

The film was shot almost entirely in Snowden’s small, no-frills room, where everything is white: the bedding, walls, carpets, and window covering. So it was a color shock when Snowden covered his head and laptop with a red cowl (he works propped up on his bed) so the camera couldn’t capture his key­ strokes.

Scenes of the Hong Kong skyline and other outdoor sites give the audience a break from the room’s claus­ trophobic atmosphere. At one point, the fire alarm We face a critical juncture in the nascent climate movement, at which we must try our best to contribute our vision to its direction. In the most immediate and practical sense, this means applying our understand­ ing of transitional demands to the situation. This is also where much of our pre-convention discussion has focused, so I will try briefly to summarize some of the perspectives that have been offered.

Over the last few years we have been calling for a mas­ sive mobilization of government resources to retool the economy to become climate neutral. We have compared the scope of this project to the emergency ramping-up of war production that the U.S. undertook during World War II. A “Marshall Plan” for the climate, to rebuild hol­ lowed-out factories and farms for use in the transition, may seem like an even more apt analogy to blue-collar workers.

The moving parts of our Transitional Program for Class and Climate Justice include a halt to military spending; nationalization of the financial and energy sectors under democratic workers’ management; clean, efficient, free mass transit; a rapid transition from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy sources such as wind and solar; technology and wealth transfer to poorer na­ tions; paid retraining for workers transitioning to new sectors of the economy; and “climate jobs” providing full employment at union wages. We of course support worker factory seizures and conversion of any and all vehicle plants to mass transit production.

In Socialist Action’s pre-convention discussion, com­ rades raised the important point that this program in which he denied that NSA collects data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. When pressed, Clapper added: “Not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

Poitras shows a clip of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange trying to arrange asylum for Snowden in various countries after threats surfaced from the U.S. government to Snowden’s life and liberty should he return voluntarily. However, the U.S. revoked his passport.

Edward Snowden ended up in Moscow after spend­ ing close to three months in limbo in the Moscow airport. He was first granted a one-year stay, which was then renewed for three years. There, in January 2014, he was asked during an interview why he de­ cided to blow the whistle. Snowden replied: “Sort of the breaking point was seeing Clapper directly lie un­ der oath to Congress … that really meant for me there was no going back.”

By his own words, backed up by extensive research, Snowden has not released his appropriated files by transfer or USB flash drives to any foreign govern­ ments. He wanted only that the public be made aware of the matter through the media, reportage, and pub­ lication of the files.

One critic has asked that if Snowden is willing to accept the consequences of his actions, i.e., jail time, why is he hiding out in Moscow? When you have members of the U.S. Congress labeling him a traitor, and Senator Diane Feinstein all but calling for his head, does he or anyone believe he will get a fair trial? And notable government figures as disparate as Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, plus the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Guardian, wonder why the NSA is not on trial for the illegal wiretapping that Snowden has proven in spades.

When the film ended, we in the audience erupted with applause. Someone shouted, “We are all on the list.” Another said, “Okay, so now what do we do?” As the credits rolled and the lights came up, a voice was heard to say, “Revolution!” If we weren’t on the list before, we certainly are now. n should include affirmative policies to meet the special needs of women, including “free 24-hour childcare, free 24-hour elder care, and freely available socially pro­ duced healthy food for them and their children.”

Socialist Action’s transitional program is based on the premises that we cannot wait for a socialist revolution to start addressing the looming climate catastrophe, and that the ruling class may make some progress if pushed by an uncompromising mass movement. However, we recognize that a sustainable economy is ultimately not possible within a capitalist framework, and have writ­ ten extensively as to why this is the case. This was also the perspective put forward in many of the eco-socialist workshops within the Climate Convergence conference that took place prior to the Sept. 21 march.

Other forces on the left have a different angle. The re­ formist Green Party calls for a “Green New Deal,” which has some provisions similar to our program but also calls for government investment in “green businesses” and other social democratic policies. We distinguish ourselves by calling for initiatives that are sponsored by the government under workers’ management, not by private business. We also vehemently oppose neo-Mal­ thusian analyses that place blame for the crisis on pop­ ulation growth among the poor, who are responsible for a miniscule share of the world’s climate-changing carbon emissions.

In my report on the Sept. 21 Climate March in the October 2014 edition of Socialist Action newspaper, I raised pieces of our program to the level of specific (continued on page 11)

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(Above) Speaking at the Oct. 17 public rally during the national convention of Socialist Action (U.S.), in Minneapolis, is Chris Mato Nunpa, Ph.D, a retired associate professor of Indigenous Nations & Dakota Studies. At left is Barry Weisleder, national secretary of Socialist Action (Canada), who gave greetings.

(continued from page 1: “‘Redskins’ football team protested”)

Obama passed the Affordable Health Care Act, which gifted the health-care and pharmaceutical monopolies a cool trillion dollars more than they had sto­ len previously, while simultaneously robbing millions of union workers of health-care benefits won in struggle.

Yesterday’s “Cadillac plans” have also been on Obama’s chopping block.

Obama’s promised Comprehensive Immigration Reform disappeared. In its place he deported two million im­ migrants, exceeding the total of all the presidents before him. He even at­ tempted to circumvent the law that mandates that immigrants receive a fair hearing before being thrown out of the country. Here he took aim at the 50,000 children who massed at the U.S. border believing that they could enter the U.S.

to escape the U.S.-imposed poverty and exploitation of Latin America.

Obama’s NSA surveillance policies and his “interpretation” of the Patriot Act made George Bush look like a civil liber­ tarian. Bush never organized 1.3 secu­ rity-cleared NSA and other spy agency operatives to record all electronic com­ munications of all U.S. citizens and, in­ deed, those of the whole world. Obama prosecuted more people under the Pa­ triot Act and related legislation than all previous presidents combined.

Obama is the world’s number-one shale fracker, poisoning the nation’s waters and raising global temperatures with abandon.

Weeks before the election, when pollsters everywhere predicted major Democratic Party defeats and loss of its Senate majority, the party’s top strate­ gists embarked on a campaign to close the gap by a massive effort to turn out Black and Latino voters.

In the Southern states that Obama won in 2008, via unprecedented Black participation, huge sums were expend­ ed in mid-October 2014 to place radio and newspaper ads in local Black com­ munity media. The ads, highlighted in a late October issue of The New York Times, warned that Republican victo­ ries would mean “more Fergusons” and “more Travon Martins,” as if the nation’s racist criminal justice system were re­ stricted to police brutality, murder, and mass incarceration in the largely Re­ publican South. Indeed, “liberal” Blue State California leads the way in these matters, perhaps second only to Texas.

Southern Republicans, the modern-day heirs to the racist Dixiecrats (South­ ern racist Democrats, themselves heirs to the former slave owners, Klansmen, and White Citizens Council terrorists who ruled the South after the smashing of Reconstruction) cried foul and ac­ cused the South’s post Nixon-era rem­ nant Democrats of “race-baiting.”

The Democrats looked to a 2013 Cen­ sus Bureau report indicating that in 2012 a higher percentage of African Americans than whites voted in a presi­ dential election for the first time in his­ tory. This was the matchup between President Obama and Republican nomi­ (continued from page 10) demands, which prompted some response. One reader expressed concern over my formulation of the need for payments to poor nations by wealthy ones. Third-world negotiators at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit put forward the demand for “climate reparations,” using the analogy of reparations for slavery: the polluters that have substantially caused the crisis should pay compen­ sation to its victims, as well as the costs of adaptation and clean energy development. This demand is included in Socialist Action’s 2014 Political Resolution [soon to be issued as a pamphlet by Socialist Action Books.] The existing imperialist institutions such as USAID and the IMF/World Bank cannot act as vehicles for these nee Mitt Romney, in which 66 percent of eligible Blacks voted, as compared to 64.1 percent of whites. Similar statistics apply to Latino voters.

But polls before the current election predicted a significant decline in illusions in either of the two capitalist parties among oppressed nationalities. A national poll a week or so be­ fore the election recorded that the Latino voter participation would decline by at least 10 per­ cent, with one in three Latinos stating that they knew of at least one family member or friend who had been deported—under Obama’s rule. The percentage of Latinos who indicated “signifi­ cant confidence” in the Demo­ crats dropped to 14 percent.

Fully 43 percent of those who were not likely to cast ballots, according to a Pew poll a week before the election, were His­ panic, African American, or other racial and ethnic minori­ ties,—roughly double the per­ centage among likely voters (22 percent).

Hoopla aside regarding any significant transformation in U.S. politics that will accompany the Republican election vic­ tory, Obama’s Democratic Party strate­ gists once again signaled that the cor­ porate agenda would be advanced with full force. A front-page story in the Nov. 2 New York Times entitled, “Braced for a Shift in Congress, Obama Is Setting a New Agenda,” reported that the presi­ dent’s “top aides” are “mapping pos­ sible compromises with Republicans to expand trade, overhaul taxes and build roads and bridges.”

Translated to the language of the rul­ ing class, this means further lowering wages of U.S. manufacturing workers to increase U.S. corporate competitiveness abroad, while continuing to export U.S. jobs, granting deeper tax cuts for the rich at home, and lowering corporate taxes on the trillions of dollars made abroad to encourage major monopolies like Apple Corporation to repatriate its behemoth profits with minimum taxes.

For the workers, setting aside a rela­ tive pittance to repair bridges and roads will be part of fostering the false illusion that U.S. capitalists might be considering significant government spending to create jobs.

On the Republican side, the new Sen­ ate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, admitted a few days before the vote that his party’s pledge to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act would go nowhere—and not only because the Republicans had not achieved the re­ quired the 60 Senate votes to accom­ plish it, or that they can utilize the special “reconciliation” procedure that requires only 51 votes, or the fact that Obama can veto any such attempt.

In truth, the year-long “debate” over this health-care legislation, which pre­ served and qualitatively expanded this inefficient and inadequate nearly monopolized industry, which is run for private profit of the elite insurance companies and associated financial in­ stitutions, adds additional trillions to their coffers at the expense of working people. Obama’s bill, and the Republi­ cans’ too, are based not on “taxing the rich” but rather on the “Robin Hood in reverse” thesis that workers must pay.

Obama, as is expected, can techni­ cally veto any and all appeal efforts or legislation presented to him for ap­ proval. The Republicans, in turn, have their own “strategy” to supposedly ad­ vance their agenda. They intend to offer endless amendments to any “spending bills” that might secure bipartisan sup­ port. The latter are often a requirement to avoid “shutting down the govern­ ment” entirely—that is, not paying fed­ eral workers on the basis that funds to do so have been withheld. This strategy was effectively employed several times over the past years.

In such circumstances the ruling rich never fail to appoint special panels of equal numbers of Democrats and Re­ publicans to resolve supposed differ­ ences of opinion. These are the “blue ribbon” and direct representatives of the corporate elite who truly run the country. They are the bipartisan panels of capital that engage in trading billions and trillions in taxpayer dollars among themselves to advance their corporate­ and banking interests at the expense of the vast majority.

The same holds for the U.S. Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue Service and all other top in­ stitutions of the capitalist state, where daily decisions are made in the exclu­ sive interests of the ruling 0.1 percent.

That was the scene in 2009 when the nation’s financial system faced immi­ nent collapse. The top corporate and banking leaders met in private with the Treasury Secretary and the chair of the Federal Reserve to devise an unprece­ dented bailout, which was in a matter of a week or less, approved nearly unani­ mously by Congress.”

The working class and its represen­ tatives are excluded from all capitalist payments without furthering the ends of imperialism. We must contrast this with the call for direct, no-stringsattached payments from the governments of top climate polluters to the governments of impoverished nations. We can’t only call for socialist revolution and workers’ solidarity to combat the increased diseases, storms, and coastal inundation that working people in tropical countries face. The rich must pay for the crisis they’ve created.

This principle brings up the idea of a carbon tax. In our movement, the demand for a “heavy, progressive income tax” dates back to Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and is just as relevant today. We can and should work with groups that promote a heavy, progressive carbon tax as a demand, but promote the need for nationaliza­ tion of the energy sector under democratic workers’ management as well.

The Transitional Program for Class and Climate Justice, Julius Arscott / Socialist Action institutions. The U.S. is an advanced capitalist state wherein its fundamental corporate institutions dominate public, economic, and social life in accord with their interests only.

U.S. elections, today nearly year-round propaganda vehicles for the parties of the corporate elite, are little more than orchestrated “contests” aimed at con­ vincing the “people” that they live in a democratic society. A recent poll indi­ cates that 60 percent of the American people prefer a new party to emerge on the political scene, presumably one that represents their interests as opposed to those who currently govern.

They increasingly understand that there are no significant differences be­ tween Republicans, with their more overt reactionary babbling Tea Party wing, and the Democrats, with the “Blue Dog” wing of their own more overtly fa­ natical advocates of the same ideas and policies. In the end, this charade that passes for politics devolves into back­ door decision-making on every critical issue, whether it be to wage yet another trillion-dollar war or to grant trillions more to this or that section of the cor­ porate power structure.

The need has never been greater for working people to break from the parties of capital and build their own working-class political party based on a reinvigorated and fighting tradeunion movement, as well as on the hun­ dreds and millions more who will be organized in new unions, all in alliance with the oppressed nationalities, immi­ grants, and youth. These are the kinds of institutions that the vast majority can organize, finance, participate in, con­ trol, and use to advance their interests in the political arena.

These institutions can and must also become the political expression of a fighting working class that takes on capitalist exploitation and oppression in the workplace, in the communities, and everywhere where working people fight for their basic rights. n included in Socialist Action’s 2014 Political Resolution, is informed by both the science of global warming and our historical approach to transitional demands. We re­ ject solutions based on the ideas that technology alone will save us, that the planet can be inhabited sustainably at current levels of material production, or that capital­ ism can somehow be transformed into a sustainable economic system. Likewise, we reject the notion that population is the problem and must be forcibly reduced; this perspective is reactionary and dangerous.

We contend that a decrease in capitalist modes of pro­ duction will correspond with an increase in the satisfac­ tion of human wants and needs. While we look eagerly toward socialist revolution as the ultimate solution to the climate crisis created by capital, in the interim we recognize the urgent need for movement-building to force the ruling class to seriously address the looming catastrophe. n SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2014 11

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SOCIALIST ACTION Tony Savino / Socialist Action