houdini1984
8 hours ago
In a perfect world, Snowden would have been able to report the IC's violation of Americans' rights to Congress. He should have attempted to do so. But is he a traitor? Hardly.

Here's the thing. We're talking about a Congress that failed to punish the intelligence community for... wait for it... spying on Congress. Yes, that's right. The IC was literally spying on our representatives, and forced to admit to those activities. And what did Congress do? They continued to renew all the powers that the IC regularly abuses.

Anyone who's paying attention understands that our elected representatives are, almost to a man and woman, scared to death of this country's intelligence community. They are terrified that their own secrets may be used against them by a vengeful IC. They are willing to sacrifice your liberties to maintain some semblance of peaceful coexistence between themselves and the forces of the deep state.

So, yeah. Snowden's actions are easy to criticize. And they were illegal, in the purest sense of that word. But was he wrong to distrust Congress? Was he right to believe that the American people deserve to know that their government is violating their rights on a daily basis? Did he have an obligation to choose between going to prison or remaining silent?

Personally, I am glad that the truth came out. And I don't blame Tulsi one bit for refusing to be nagged into calling the man a traitor. That nagging is just designed to distract from the real issue, which is that our government has long been weaponized against us.

anon-w8wg houdini1984
5 hours ago edited
Snowden was kind of simultaneously hero and traitor. His actions absolutely threw a wrench in America's military and intelligence gears (I was in the military at the time). However, he brought to light things that the people needed to know, things that never should have been approved. Personally, I don't have a problem calling him traitor. I have no problem with Tulsi Gabbard not calling him a traitor, though, as long as she notes what was bad about his actions. She did this, which makes her more qualified than most intelligence directors, IMHO.

In fact, now that I think of it, Snowden might have helped put us on the MAGA track. So, maybe there's more good to him than I've given him credit for.

Random US Citizen
11 hours ago
What Snowden did was illegal and punishable by law. On the other hand, Gabbard is right—he also exposed a lot of domestic spying by the U.S. government against its own citizens. It’s interesting—in a sort of horrifying way—that so-called conservative Republicans are more upset that Gabbard opposes Patriot Act overreach than any other issue that came up at her confirmation hearing.

anon-bjec NightStalker
9 hours ago
I doubt we would have had one Trump presidency, much less two, without Snowden. Who would have believed the massive duplicity with which the deep state acts? A lot of us might have actually bought into the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA nonsense, not believed it was even possible for Obama to weaponize the IC against a political opponent. A lot fewer people would have been aware of just how bad the IC and deep state are when operating domestically.

People like Schifty Schiff see Russians under every rock without stepping back to see the big picture. Snowden exposed sources and methods alright. Sources: massive domestic spying apparatus weaponized against Americans. Methods: outrageous violations of every basic tenet of the Constitution and founding principles.

We needed to know.

An intriguing video from Feb. 2018 went viral over the weekend and had a lot of folks on the right talking because of something that actress Claire Danes said to talk show host Stephen Colbert and how he immediately interjected and changed the subject. When you hear it, you'll understand why.

Danes was sharing about how her "Homeland" show went to something of a weeklong "spy camp" because they knew someone in the CIA. There in Georgetown, they met actual "spooks," people in the State Department, and journalists. Colbert asked her, what was the most surprising thing that she learned from that experience? //

Danes said every year it was different, but that year it was "all about the distrust between the [Trump] administration and the intelligence world, and the intelligence community was suddenly kind of allying itself with journalists, which usually they're not..."

It was at that point that Colbert interjected and deflected to another point about when they had started shooting the season's episodes. //

Now, this may have slipped by in 2018. But after everything that has happened in the meantime, it certainly had people talking about how Colbert seemed to cut her off and what exactly she was talking about when she said they were "allying with journalists?" What were they doing? //

This was after New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer's comment in 2017, which even raised the hackles of the ACLU with what it intimated.

Western Lensman @WesternLensman
·
Replying to @WesternLensman
Shades of Chuck Schumer:

"You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. Even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this."

9:31 PM · Dec 23, 2024 //

There's another point I think that's interesting about the Danes video. Danes is talking about how the "spy camp" gave them thoughts. Maybe the CIA folks realized they had the opportunity to feed what they wanted to the show, perhaps to get out information that they might have wanted to get out there? Not saying they did, but this could have given them the opportunity.

As Trump comes into office on Jan. 20, is this intel community that was unhappy before going to calm down this time around, especially now that they know Trump will be bringing big changes to their agencies?

I wouldn't bet on it. One can only wonder what might happen next, between now and then.

Early in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire past decade, from “Russiagate” to the “lawfare” cases entangling himself and his advisers, as the fruits of an illegitimate regime that threw the rule of law out the window.

This interpretation of recent history, surely viewed as partisan by Trump’s opponents, will be tested by the facts, once they become better known and documented. But the president-elect’s suggestion that the workings of the U.S. government must be more transparent is long overdue. //

It is high time for a serious overhaul of classification procedures, with the appointment of a presidential “task force” of the kind suggested in the Classification Reform for Transparency Act (which still awaits passage). President Obama’s Executive Order 13526 of 2009 limited classification times for ordinary records to 10 years and established a cap of 25 years for more sensitive files. But the nine telltale “exemptions” were left in place, allowing security agencies to continue stonewalling — while adding massively to the vault of our nation’s secrets.

If we streamline exemptions to a few simple categories such as “sources at risk,” private data of living citizens, and military-technological and trade secrets and shorten classification to a single presidential term of four years (e.g., to prevent an opposition party from mining recent presidential files for use in election campaigns), we could exponentially reduce the expense of classification going forward and restore public trust in Washington, D.C. — not least by putting a healthy fear into our public servants that they cannot abuse their powers and get away with it.

Meanwhile, why not declassify all U.S. government files more than 25 years old? If a strict exemption threshold is met, government agencies could still redact personal data or trade or military secrets — but the files themselves should be opened. Rather than require citizens and historians to pry information out of Washington via FOIA applications, the burden of classification should be placed where it belongs — on the government.

Files should be open to the public unless otherwise specified, not secret by default. We the people have a right to know what our government does in our name, and to know our own history.

You’ve probably heard someone use the phrase, “We can neither confirm nor deny.” This non-specific saying, known as the “Glomar response,” has a fascinating history behind it, and it originated to answer questions about a dicey CIA operation.

In the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviets were engaged in a dangerous political game, and they were using their nuclear submarines to play. In 1968, the Soviets lost K-129, one of their nuclear submarines, northwest of Hawaii in the Pacific. It sank to the bottom of the ocean under unknown circumstances.

The US knew the Soviet sub had sunk with nuclear missiles on board and knew that it would hold a treasure-trove of intelligence information if they could get to it. The CIA eventually located the vessel three miles beneath the sea and began to come up with plans to get to the submarine.

Because of the depth where the submarine sat, it was decided that the best course of action would be to retrieve it by lifting it from the ocean floor. The CIA ran through several different scenarios before they ultimately settled on using a claw-like device to lift the submarine from the seafloor and raise it into a ship’s hull. The problem was the operation had to be done entirely in secret. //

Things came to a head when the Los Angeles Times was set to publish a story about the operation. The CIA tried to stop it but was unsuccessful, and a request for disclosure about the project was made by the LA Times. The CIA had to find a way to respond.

The task of coming up with an appropriate response fell to an attorney at the CIA named Walt Logan, the Associate General Counsel. Logan was bound by law to tell the truth, but he also had to adhere to the CIA’s policies and not reveal any secrets or intelligence sources that could be detrimental to national security.

He came up with a response to the request that was neither untruthful nor did it compromise national secrets. It became known as the “Glomar response.” In it, Logan said about the existence of the secret operation and the request for disclosure, “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed.”

The response by the CIA stood after being challenged, and the Freedom of Information request was declined. A precedent was then set for any government organization to use the “Glomar response” as they saw fit when there was a Freedom of Information request. The courts have so far supported the response by governmental agencies, but only if they provide enough information to justify using it.

Puzzling out the power supply to Urals atom plants.

THE DECRYPTION OF A PICTURE, by Henry S. Lowenhaupt

One day in August 1958 Charles V. Reeves showed me a picture of the Sverdlovsk Central Dispatching Office of the Urals Electric Power System which he had found in the July issue of Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Look magazine (Figure 1a). He remarked that at the Boston Edison Company he had controlled electric power generation and flow in the Boston metropolitan area from just such a dispatching station. //

[Source: Studies in Intelligence. Volume II. Issue: Summer. Year: 1967]

In a fit of rage, Henry II said, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Four Norman knights—Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton—heard Henry's complaint and decided to act. They cornered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and hacked him to death.

No one accuses Henry II of ordering the death of Thomas à Becket, but by the same token, no one doubts that the knights who did the killing were acting according to Henry's wishes.

So what would inspire the IC to burn more of its already shredded and feces-stained credibility to promote a story that is, at worst, an outright lie and, at best, a disingenuous parsing of the word "order?"

My guess would be that Jake Sullivan has hatched some sort of midwit plan that will only work if Putin's complicity in Navalny's murder can be whitewashed into a misunderstanding. The erasure of the murder would allow Biden and Putin to meet face-to-face. By determining that rogue actors killed Navalny without official sanction, it could, conceivably, permit the removal of some of the sanctions imposed after Navalny's death. The IC, as always, stands ready to do whatever it takes to please its Democrat masters, national security, and the Constitution be damned. //

Laocoön of Troy Dieter Schultz
2 hours ago edited
Back when Val Plame was doin' glamour shots for Vanity Fair as the CIA Analyst You'd Love to...Fly with..I took a look at the CIA's nuclear counter proliferation efforts and their track record. Val was a counterproliferation alumnus.

This office has missed every atomic or thermonuclear test except ours and the UK's. Every one. They got ours because they were notified when the test was gonna happen. They got the UK one right because they were invited to observe. Everybody else's slipped it by them. The level of epic fail in this office is nearly perfect.

Why are we still paying for the epic fail?

Edward Snowden @Snowden
·
This is a textbook case of Congressional capture. With a single briefing, the intelligence agencies routinely transform their most strident critics into the tamest of cheerleaders. //

Scott Adams:

If I correctly understand our system of government, when a president or leader in the Congress gets into office, someone in the CIA pulls them aside for “the talk” and completely changes their priorities.

The public is then told the leaders now have secret knowledge the public can never know.

But the leader has no way of knowing the “secret” information is true and in context.

That puts the secret-keepers in firm control of the government’s big decisions. If the secret-keepers agree with a government policy, they stay out of it. If they disagree with a policy, they say the UFOs will attack — or some other unverifiable thing — and by the way, we have recordings of every phone call you ever made, and scare the leaders into compliance.

Right in front of us. None of this is secret. //

Justin Truedope
2 days ago edited

I will splinter the CIA into ab thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds. -- JFK

JFK had sworn to get rid of the CIA and the Deep State but unfortunately, they got rid of him first. Remember that Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that President Donald Trump was “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community over its fake Russia narrative. He's probably repeated that same sentiment to Mike Johnson, who rightly interpreted it as a credible threat.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer had told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. What Chucky really meant was that he knows that the Deep State controls everything, including the Fake News narrative, but unlike President Trump, he's far too cowardly to ever try to do anything about it. #Trump2024 #VOTE

As it stands now, the law, which is set to expire April 19, allows U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on foreign nationals based overseas, but it also lets the FBI comb through the massive amounts of data the intelligence community collects and gather information about American citizens. These are known as “backdoor searches,” //

they want to require that the FBI obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data for information about Americans — a reasonable reform. The intelligence community, and the members of the House Intelligence Committee over whom they have influence, oppose this. //

Whatever the original justification of Section 702 was — in the wake of 9/11, the intelligence community argued that massive government surveillance capabilities were necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks — the purpose of it now is to enable the FBI to surveil Americans, especially Americans who express views and opinions the government deems to be a threat. //

But the intelligence community and the lawmakers on the Intelligence Committee dug in their heels, rejecting multiple compromise reform bills. These bills, wrote Goitein, “would have passed if IC/intel committees were willing to concede that Section 702 should not be used as a means of warrantlessly accessing Americans’ communications.” //

How bad is warrantless spying by our government? Pretty bad. In April 2022, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual report that showed the FBI made more than 3.4 million search queries of the NSA database in 2021 on U.S. citizens. About a third of these were “non-compliant searches,” which means they fell outside the normal rules and regulations. In other words, they were illegal.

But that’s not all. As the X account @TheLastRefuge noted, from November 2015 to May 2016, the FBI and contractors for the DOJ/FBI conducted more than 1,000 illegal searches targeting Republican primary candidates.

TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2
·
10) Although the number of the illegal search queries were redacted, we know the number is four digits from the size of the redacted text. More than 1,000 and less than 9,999.
6:20 PM · Apr 10, 2024. //

It’s time for ordinary Americans to wake up and realize what our government is doing to us. Under the pretext of keeping us safe from foreign terrorists, the intelligence community has erected a vast surveillance apparatus that targets American citizens — and it will not under any circumstances allow that apparatus to be reformed.

Which is why it should be dismantled completely.

The GOP-controlled House failed to add an amendment proposed by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., that would have altered Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to mandate that federal authorities obtain a warrant before surveilling American citizens. Johnson and 85 Republicans joined Democrats in killing Biggs’ proposal through a tied House vote. //

The House passed the bill 273-147 to re-authorize the government’s use of FISA for the next two years, with 126 Republicans and 147 Democrats voting in favor. The bill must clear the Senate before it hits President Joe Biden’s desk for signature. //

the White House’s Jake Sullivan and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland “call[ed] members on the Hill” this morning to pressure them into squashing Biggs’ amendment.

Jake Sherman @JakeSherman
·
VERY intense W.H. lobbying effort on the warrant issue.

• Jake Sullivan/Merrick Garland made calls
• NSC attorney Josh Geltzer and Deputy homeland security adviser Jen Daskal were right outside the floor with representatives from DOJ/CIA to talk to members

If you have a secret police force threatening people, spying on them, and working secretly the levers of political power, then you don’t have a democracy. You have no control over really anything as a voter. //

If you have the power to spy on someone and then to leak the information that you gather or manipulated and then leak it in order to control that person, that’s a major power. In fact, that’s a bigger power than any voter in this country has. And so he’s acting on their behalf when he lies to you. And so it shouldn’t surprise you that they want to keep that power.

By a vote of 212-212, the amendment failed. One hundred and twenty-eight Republicans voted for the amendment, and 86 voted against it. On the Democrat side, the vote was 84 yes and 126 no.

Thomas Massie
@RepThomasMassie
·
Follow
This is how the Constitution dies.

By a tie vote, the amendment to require a warrant to spy on Americans goes down in flames.

This is a sad day for America.

The Speaker doesn’t always vote in the House, but he was the tie breaker today. He voted against warrants.
12:37 PM · Apr 12, 2024 //

I'm sorry, if I know the FBI is lying about using FISA, why would I suddenly believe their sales pitch on its critical role in national security? It isn't like the FBI had a few bad actors making the occasional abuse. The data shows that abuse of FISA and lying to the FISA court are baked into the system.

Rep Andy Biggs
@RepAndyBiggsAZ
·
Follow
3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans' private communications.

278,000 improper searches on American citizens.

19,000 improper searches of donors to a congressional candidate.

There is no shortage of spying authority abuses by the weaponized FBI. Get a warrant. #FISA

1:19 PM · Apr 10, 2024. //

But the fix was in. Biden's attorney general and national security advisor called individual members of Congress, telling them Doomsday loomed if the federal government had to obey the US Constitution. //

It is abused relentlessly and there is no effort within the government to hold anyone to account for violating that law. For instance, no one involved in the abuse of FISA to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign and transition team has been punished. //

Weminuche45
6 minutes ago edited
The way this works is that if he doesn't support it, his career will be destroyed by the same "intelligence community" people and the system that has collected and stored everything he has said or done for the last 10+ yrs, and you too. That is who actually runs our country, and this is how. Welcome to Stasi American Democracy.

There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance... //

PaulBart • November 27, 2023 7:14 AM

Yawn. Wikileaks Assange still in jail. Snowden still fugitive in Russia. Hillary and the “missing” emails still not “found”.

Lets have state-sponsored health care. Nothing says government boot tastes delicious like having your medical records and health issues handled by the state. Mmm-mmm good. //

Aaron • November 27, 2023 10:19 AM

A government should know next to nothing about its people.
A people should know almost everything about their government.

The world is upside-down

For those who jumped all over @PaulBlart, you’re missing his point.
People who exposed illegal government actions are still prosecuted as criminals.
Government individuals who perform illegal actions are still in government.

The world is upside-down

The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits programs like this.
Yet it persists and gains funding

The world is upside-down. //

JonKnowsNothing • November 27, 2023 11:50 AM

@Aaron

re: You missed the memo – along with millions of others

The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits programs like this
No, No, No it doesn’t – anymore.

A good number of years back, before the NSA lost control of the narrative, they used to claim they did everything according to the “commonly understood meaning” of the 4th amendment: Get a Warrant.

Once they began to lose control, they were confronted by their real usage of this amendment. There are videos of the debate with Gen Michael Hayden on this topic along with a laugh track at what he said. He said it plain and clear.

Gen Hayden is one smart guy and you never want to enter a debate with him.

• The 4th states that “unreasonable” searches require a warrant

• It does not say ALL searches require a warrant, only “unreasonable” ones
  So, it was quite simple logic shift

• All searches are now “reasonable” and not “unreasonable”

• All searches include “everything” the new definition of “relevant”
  So the NSA, CIA, All USA Leas do not need a warrant unless they want to.

If they want to arrest someone and charge them with some crime, they will get a warrant via parallel construction for the courts. //

Aaron • November 27, 2023 6:29 PM

@JonKnowsNothing

I didn’t miss the memo

I served under Gen. “Porky the Pig” Hayden

The memo is an illegitimate power grab from a long line of 3 letter agencies that no longer serve the purpose in which they were commissioned for.