Who's Your Daddy? Ctd.

Now that he has begun positioning the his army to complete the conquest of Ukraine, and now that the United States has taken a  very public stand against such action, Russian President Vladimir Putin needs something sharp and pointy and very public with which to poke President Obama in the eye.

 Cue Uncle Vlad allowing Ed Snowden to "interview" him on Russian state teevee!

And by "interview" I mean he was permitted one softball question with no follow up. Eerily similar to the way David Gregory "interviews" every Republican who has ever been on on Meet the Press...except, of course, Greggers* is not living under the surveillance and protection of the person he is questioning -- a person who has a long record of locking up or killing dissidents and journalists and is middle of the slow-motion military invasion of a neighboring country.

Mr. Snowden's sock-puppet question was introduced by one of the programs co-hosts as follows:

"We've got really sensational, really outrageous video message from a person who revolutionized the world by leaking information about American secret services."

Let's see how that worked out, shall we?

Putin replied by stating Russia did not carry out mass surveillance on its population, and that its intelligence operations were strictly regulated by court orders.

"Mr Snowden, you are a former agent, a spy, I used to work for the intelligence service, we are going to talk one professional language," Putin said, according to translation by state-run broadcaster Russia Today.

"Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law so...you have to get a court permission to stalk that particular person.

"We don't have as much money as they have in the States and we don't have these technical devices that they have in the States. Our special services, thank God, are strictly controlled by society and the law and regulated by the law."

...

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Greenwald took to Twitter to explain this development to his 347,000 followers in the same calm, reasonable and evenhanded tones for which he is legendary:

Snowden should storm the Kremlin, take their surveillance docs & demand to be sent to the US: just like his brave patriotic critics would do
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 17, 2014

Once again, if you are one of those people who believe strongly that neither Mr. Greenwald nor Mr. Snowden are the story I strongly urge you to send your comments to:

President Vladimir Putin

23, Ilyinka Street

Moscow, 103132, Russia.

Or use this handy link to forward them to Uncle Vlad using electronic mail.

If you have anything constructive to add -- pro or con -- as always, the comment section is yours.  However to save myself the time and trouble of individually approving each of the approaching torrent of comments about my jackbooted fascistic hatred of all things freedom-related, let us just stipulate that I am a terrible person who obsessively refuses to post anything but long, anti-free-press, pro-dronekill screeds (while drooling, also too) and you should steer clear of my horrid little sellout blog at all costs.

*Commenter gratuitous is quite right that I screwed up my analogy.  And once I repaired my dumb mistake, it's clear that comparisons with Gregory -- who also depends entirely on pleasing and serving the interests of many of the people he is "interviewing" -- is is actually closer than I thought.  

Who's Your Daddy?

Eddie, Pop-Pop has to go deal with some bad people in a place called "Ukraine", but after I get back I want you to tell me more funny stories about American spying and the evil deeds of your murderous tyrant President.

From the Daily Beast:

With Last Media Critics Blocked, Putin Silences the Russia Press

Forget investigative reporting, even critical commentary is now out of bounds as the Kremlin clamps down on Web news sites. 

Until this week, a handful of websites seemed to be the last bastions of the free press in Russia. But on Thursday those bastions fell. The Kremlin blocked three independent news sites, including one run by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, as well as a widely read investigative blog, Livejournal.com, by Alexei Navalny.

Only two years ago, during protests in Moscow against the return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency, the Russian online media played a key role mobilizing demonstrations. They were called the front line of democracy in an ever less democratic state. They were popular and they were the only media able to operate freely since television had come under government control and the newspaper industry fell into the hands of oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin.

How, then, did Putin manage what some are calling an “online coup d'état?”

Much the same way Putin, the veteran of Russia’s intelligence services, does so much else: with careful calculation and preparation followed by brutal action.

...

Still, I wouldn't expect the action figure market to be affected either way:

As The Project to Reform the FISA Courts

And instigate a great debate among the American public regarding domestic surveillance takes another step forward.

From The Intercept (emphasis added):

The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously.

By Peter Maass

7 Mar 2014, 9:06 AM EST

What if the National Security Agency had its own advice columnist? What would the eavesdroppers ask about?

You don’t need to guess. An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has actually served at the agency as a Dear Abby for spies. Her “Ask Zelda!” columns, distributed on the agency’s intranet and accessible only to those with the proper security clearance, are among the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The columns are often amusing – topics include co-workers falling asleep on the job, sodas being stolen from shared fridges, supervisors not responding to emails, and office-mates who smell bad. But one of the most intriguing involves a letter from an NSA staffer who complains that his (or her) boss is spying on employees.

In the letter, which Zelda published in a column on September 9, 2011, the employee calls himself “Silenced in SID” – referring to the Signals Intelligence Directorate, the heart of the NSA’s surveillance operations. Zelda’s column, headlined “Watching Every Word in Snitch City,” offers an ironic insight into a spy agency where the spies apparently resent being spied upon.

...

So now, thanks to Edward Snowden and the greatest heist of American surveillance secrets in history, we know the NSA had an advice column.

I bet they had cookbooks too. And a barbecue. And signs on the office freezer warning people not put soda in the freezer because is 'splodes.

But wait! There's more.  We also have "Zelda"'s resume:

Who is Zelda? And who is “Silenced in SID”? The document provides no information about the identity of the letter’s author; he or she could be almost anybody at the agency. In a previous column, Zelda explains that Ask Zelda! was initially intended as a forum for supervisors in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, but that non-supervisory workers began submitting questions, too.

A bit more is known about Zelda. Her introductory column, in 2010, identifies her as serving for approximately 20 years as “a first-line and mid-level Agency supervisor.” At the time her column began, she was also an adjunct faculty member of the agency’s National Cryptologic School. Her column was part of a regular NSA bulletin called “SIDtoday” that is distributed on the agency’s classified NSAnet. According to traffic statistics, in fact, Ask Zelda! quickly proved to be among the bulletin’s most popular features.

Which is all very amusing and light and fluffy...until you consider the provenance of the trove of stolen secrets from which it comes.  

Until you consider that Mr. Snowden spent years stealing American surveillance secrets -- going so far as to change jobs for the expressed purpose of stealing stuff he could not access any other way --  in order to carefully amass a documentary arsenal.  And the purpose of creating that digital doomsday device, we have been assured over and over again, was that is was the only means Mr. Snowden had at his disposal to rouse the American public to action regarding the secret and probably illegal liberties the NSA was taking with regards to spying on American citizens, and the dangerous weakness of the oversight body -- the FISA court -- which was supposed to keep such activities within the bounds of the Constitutional protections every American has a right to expect.

Because only an enterprise of such deadly seriousness of purpose could possibly justify the greatest theft of American state secrets in history and the compilation of a trove of documents containing (according to Glenn Greenwald) “...enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States”.

This is the trove of stolen secrets which Mr. Snowden had with him when he fled his country.  This is the trove to which Mr. Snowden apparently still has access to even as he continues to enjoy the hospitality of the liberty loving Vladimir Putin and his Russian government.

"These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world."

-- Edward Snowden

And that is the trove through which  Peter Maass pawed in order to bring the readers of Pierre Omidyar's new online magazine the trivial news that the NSA has some mild lunch-theft and B.O. problems.

As a writer, the only clever back-story I can come up with to explain why Mr. Greenwald and the rest of the crew at First Look who have work so hard to establish a reputation for Utterly Humorless, Remorseless Jugular Ripping would go out of their way to use the only capital they have -- access to Mr. Snowden's  cache of stolen documents -- in such a utterly frivolous manner is that they are sending the NSA this message:  Fear us, because Mr. Snowden has stripped you so bare that we have everything, right down to your Post-It notes and three year's worth of NSA Jokes of the Day.

Of course, Mr. Omidyar remains perfectly free to use his resources -- both digital and financial, both earned and purloined -- as he chooses with fearing that he will hear jackboots kicking in his door and rushing up the stairs of his luxurious Hawaiian residence.  

After all, this isn't Russia.  

About Last Night

(Video has a lead-off ad.)

It is unfortunate that during all the years he spent as the IT guy for Surveillance, Inc., Mr. Snowden never picked up on the fact that Russia is an actual police state ruled by an actual tyrant: a place where journalists are actually murdered in large numbers and non-heterosexual citizens are beaten in the streets with the imprimatur of the government.  Now, as Mr. Putin's guest, Mr. Snowden is no longer in a position where he can speak out about anything except the ugly excesses of Surveillance, Inc.

Of course, First Look Media is under no such constraints.

Given their vast resources, award-winning staff, and the global attention the launch of their enterprise has garnered, if they chose to, they could certainly afford to bring the full weight of that enterprise's power and prestige to bear on Mother Russia, and continue their non-stop coverage of Surveillance, Inc.

After all, even before he had Pierre Omidyar's $250M at this command, it took Glenn Greenwald less than one day to breeze past the bare-facts-as-they-were-then-know regarding the Boston Marathon bombing and put the entire tragedy in-harness to his larger agenda:

As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge 

The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid

So we know Mr. Greenwald moves fast.  And so far as I can tell he has never curbed his use of language-as-Molotov-cocktail  for anyone.  So given that media from all over the world are covering Vladimir Putin's overt state oppression, his rampant domestic spying, his grotesque civil rights abuses, his stomping of journalists and his bloody meddling in the affairs of other countries, it certainty seems...weird...that planet Earth's most famous brand-new media enterprise -- which has been expressly launched to cover state oppression, domestic spying, civil rights abuses, the abuse of journalists and bloody meddling in the affairs of other countries -- would be staying so conspicuously silent on the subject.

Perhaps now that they have a journalist with actual Russian-reporting chops on-staff -- 

Taibbi grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburbs. He attended Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1992 from Bard College located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, then spent a year abroad at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University in Russia. His father is Mike Taibbi, an NBC television reporter.

...

Taibbi joined Mark Ames in 1997 to co-edit the controversial English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile. Of Exile, Taibbi said, "We were out of the reach of American libel law, and we had a situation where we weren't really accountable to our advertisers. We had total freedom."[citation needed] In the U.S. media, Playboy magazine published pieces on Russia both by Taibbi and by Taibbi and Ames together during this time.

-- they can spare some of Mr. Taibbi's considerable talents and contacts to give Vladimir Putin's Russia the rigorous and unstinting journalistic hiding it so obviously deserves.

Spy in the House of Love

From La Monde (translated):

The future will tell, perhaps, one day, why Paris has remained so quiet, compared to Rio or Berlin after the revelations about the U.S. electronic spying programs worldwide. Because France was equally focused and now has tangible evidence that its interests are covered daily.

According to documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) obtained by Le Monde , telephone communications are French citizens, in fact, intercepted a massive way. These pieces, unveiled in June by former consultant agency, Edward Snowden, describe the techniques used to capture the secrets illegally or simple privacy of French. Some items were discussed by the German weekly Der Spiegel and the British newspaper The Guardian . Others are new.

Among the thousands of documents removed from the NSA by the former employee is a graph that describes the extent of telephone surveillance carried out in France. It was found that over a period of thirty days, from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70.3 million recordings of telephone French data were performed by the NSA.

...

In all the hubbub about the Republicans Party cutting off food to poor people, closing national monuments, shuttering NASA, monkey-wrenching critical medical research and threatening to blow up the world economy unless the US government stops trying to offer Americans affordable health insurance, we have somehow let the conversation about curtailing domestic surveillance and beefing up the FISA court oversight slip from the headlines.

And I what could better serve to reignite that conversation than using stolen US intelligence documents to tell the French that we spy on them?

Figleaf Dries Up, Blows Away

From the WaPo via Edward Snowden's Magic Bag of Secrets:

Documents reveal NSA’s extensive involvement in targeted killing program

By Greg Miller, Julie Tate and Barton Gellman

It was an innocuous e-mail, one of millions sent every day by spouses with updates on the situation at home. But this one was of particular interest to the National Security Agency and contained clues that put the sender’s husband in the crosshairs of a CIA drone.

Days later, Hassan Ghul — an associate of Osama bin Laden who provided a critical piece of intelligence that helped the CIA find the al-Qaeda leader — was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged killing Ghul. But documents provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm his demise in October 2012...

Portions of which were redacted at the request of the US government:

But beyond filling in gaps about Ghul, the documents provide the most detailed account of the intricate collaboration between the CIA and the NSA in the drone campaign.

The Post is withholding many details about those missions, at the request of U.S. intelligence officials who cited potential damage to ongoing operations and national security.

One can argue whether or not this information is in the public interest.

But now that Russia's most famous import and his press flak/future-media-mogul have dribbed and drabbed a dozen different titillating flavors of classified US government intel across half the planet, can we at least drop the pretense that the ongoing adventures of Mr. Snowden had anything but the briefest, anonymous-truckstop-handjob relationship to the original fairy tale we were fed regarding Mr. Snowden's reasons for fleeing the country with his Magic Bag of Secrets?

Reasons which, as I recall, had something to do with focusing with singular, laserlike intensity on kick-starting a debate among the good citizens of these United States about NSA domestic surveillance and our (either pathetically weak or somewhat effective but too shrouded in mystery, depending on your reading list) FISA courts?