Snowden

The only people keeping him from coming back to the US is our own government.
USA government suspended his passport which left him stranded.
Exposing the illegal activities of the NSA was the right thing to do.

The only people keeping him from coming back to the US is our own government.
USA government suspended his passport which left him stranded.
Exposing the illegal activities of the NSA was the right thing to do. Originally Posted by The2Dogs

Absolutely!


FREE EDWARD SNOWDEN!


FREE CHELSEA MANNING!

Bump for Ivan the Chimp...

Oh, shit! Will ya look at that? The peep count for this thread is now approaching 2.7 million! The next most-viewed thread in the Political Forum has less than 118,000 views.

This calls for a serious response. We need to ban all Rooskis and chimps from entering the country until we can figure out JUST WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!

Also, someone needs to keep Ivan the Chimp under close surveillance. He picks up his coded chimp instructions from his Kremlin masters under a rock on Mt. Sunflower.

Way to go dick nose, now you will have something else to whine about.
You are so predictable.

Listen Ivan you traitor-chimp, the only reason you haven't been waterboarded and thrown in an 8 x 6 padded cell yet is because they want to learn more about your handlers. Enjoy that Kansas mountain air while you still can.

Listen Ivan you traitor-chimp, the only reason you haven't been waterboarded and thrown in an 8 x 6 padded cell yet is because they want to learn more about your handlers. Enjoy that Kansas mountain air while you still can. Originally Posted by lustylad

LMAO what a pathetic piss ant you are lusting for lads, thanks for the bump loser.

LMAO what a pathetic piss ant you are lusting for lads, thanks for the bump loser. Originally Posted by i'va biggen

You're welcome, next time a little farther left. THANKS!

You're welcome, next time a little farther left. THANKS!


Originally Posted by IIFFOFRDB

Is that similar to sniper attacks on the LE protecting your right to protest under the 1st Amendment?

Thanks for the bump losers.

Thanks for the bump losers. Originally Posted by i'va biggen

Don YOU thank all of YOUR customer's for their " bumps " at YOUR KansASS gloryholes EKIM ???? !

FREE EDWARD SNOWDEN!

FREE EDWARD SNOWDEN! Originally Posted by The2Dogs

Read this and learn!

We're now approaching 3 million views!


The Fable of Edward Snowden

As he seeks a pardon, the NSA thief has told multiple lies about what he stole and his dealings with Russian intelligence.

By EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN
Updated Dec. 30, 2016 10:21 p.m. ET

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.

This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.

This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.

This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.

To provide them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden culled several thousand documents out of his huge cache of stolen material, including two explosive documents he asked them to use in their initial stories. One was the now-famous secret order from America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court requiring Verizon to turn over to the NSA its billing records for its phone users in the U.S. The other was an NSA slide presentation detailing its ability to intercept communications of non-American users of the internet via a joint program with the FBI code-named Prism.

These documents were published in 2013 on June 5 and 6, followed by a video in which he identified himself as the leaker and a whistleblower.

At the heart of Mr. Snowden’s narrative was his claim that while he may have incidentally “touched” other data in his search of NSA files, he took only documents that exposed the malfeasance of the NSA and gave all of them to journalists.

Yet even as Mr. Snowden’s narrative was taking hold in the public realm, a secret damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very different story. According to a unanimous report declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had “removed” (not merely touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based on, among other evidence, electronic logs that recorded the selection, copying and moving of documents.

The number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were willing to say in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the House committee had the benefit of the Pentagon’s more-extensive investigation. But even just taking into account the material that Mr. Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report concluded that he compromised “secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states.” These were, the report said, “merely the tip of the iceberg.”

The Pentagon’s investigation during 2013 and 2014 employed hundreds of military-intelligence officers, working around the clock, to review all 1.5 million documents. Most had nothing to do with domestic surveillance or whistle blowing. They were mainly military secrets, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014.

It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.

Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.

He evidently succeeded. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Richard Ledgett, the NSA executive who headed the damage-assessment team, described one lengthy document taken by Mr. Snowden that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would provide a “road map” to what targets abroad the NSA was, and was not, covering. It contained the requests made by the 17 U.S. services in the so-called Intelligence Community for NSA interceptions abroad.

On June 23, less than two weeks after Mr. Snowden released the video that helped present his narrative, he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow, where he received protection by the Russian government. In much of the media coverage that followed, the ultimate destination of these stolen secrets was fogged over—if not totally obscured from the public—by the unverified claims that Mr. Snowden was spoon feeding to handpicked journalists.

In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he was a conscientious “whistleblower” who turned over all the stolen NSA material to journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted he had no intention of defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America when he was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to demonize him.

For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.” According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The “Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June 22,” according to the State Department’s senior watch officer, as reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.

Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government’s pursuit of him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14, had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot, an airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.

By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security team in a “special operation.”

Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir Putin personally authorized this assistance after Mr. Snowden met with Russian officials in Hong Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a televised press conference on Sept. 2, 2013.

To provide a smokescreen for Mr. Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong, WikiLeaks (an organization that the Obama administration asserted to be a tool of Russian intelligence after the hacking of Democratic Party leaders’ email in 2016) booked a dozen or more diversionary flight reservations to other destinations for Mr. Snowden.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison, his deputy at WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowden’s expenses and escort him to Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowden’s arrival in Moscow was neither accidental nor the work of the U.S. government.

Mr. Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few weeks earlier in Hawaii.

As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin insiders who were in a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich, was the first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection. “Let’s be frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016, “Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do.”

The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer and Mr. Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities. On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia Today television.

When Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr. Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. “So he [Mr. Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been made public yet?” Ms. Shevardnadze asked. “Certainly,” Mr. Kucherena answered.

This disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained why NSA documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents released via WikiLeaks.

As this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden’s narrative, I went to Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation, Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to Moscow.

Mr. Snowden’s narrative also includes the assertion that he was neither debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government official after he arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs counter to findings of U.S. intelligence. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he arrived in Moscow, “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.” This finding is consistent with Russian debriefing practices, as described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I spoke in Moscow

Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in Moscow in December 2013 to have secrets in his head, including “access to every target, every active operation. Full lists of them.” Could Mr. Snowden’s Russian hosts ignore such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had authorized his exfiltration to Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit options, was in the palm of their hands. Under such circumstances, as Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his June NPR interview: “If there’s a possibility to get information, they [the Russian intelligence services] will get it.”

The transfer of state secrets from Mr. Snowden to Russia did not occur in a vacuum. The intelligence war did not end with the termination of the Cold War; it shifted to cyberspace. Even if Russia could not match the NSA’s state-of-the-art sensors, computers and productive partnerships with the cipher services of Britain, Israel, Germany and other allies, it could nullify the U.S. agency’s edge by obtaining its sources and methods from even a single contractor with access to Level 3 documents.

Russian intelligence uses a single umbrella term to cover anyone who delivers it secret intelligence. Whether a person acted out of idealistic motives, sold information for money or remained clueless of the role he or she played in the transfer of secrets—the provider of secret data is considered an “espionage source.” By any measure, it is a job description that fits Mr. Snowden.

Mr. Epstein’s book, “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,” will be published by Knopf in January.

Your assumption is that what this person has written is the truth.

The real issue is that the NSA was in violation, the man made multiple attempts to whistle blow and was shot down, he did what any true patriot of the Constitution would do and exposed it.

Just because the government does it, does not make it right, lawful, or within the framework of our Constitution. It is not the right, responsibility, or even legal for our government to collect the information on the people of these United States of America. At some point somebody has to take a stand.

Isnt Epstien one of those people that believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination of JFK?

I think he also has an issue with journalism and fiction.

Your assumption is that what this person has written is the truth.

The real issue is that the NSA was in violation, the man made multiple attempts to whistle blow and was shot down, he did what any true patriot of the Constitution would do and exposed it.

Just because the government does it, does not make it right, lawful, or within the framework of our Constitution. It is not the right, responsibility, or even legal for our government to collect the information on the people of these United States of America. At some point somebody has to take a stand.

Isnt Epstien one of those people that believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination of JFK?

I think he also has an issue with journalism and fiction. Originally Posted by The2Dogs

The main "evidence" that he made multiple attempts to raise the concerns is dubious.

Even if it was true--and I doubt it was--there are ways to do it and ways not to. What he did was far more about the many, many OTHER things he took and gave to foreign governments. Snowden is a traitor and a spy. Nothing else.

The fact that the gov't was wrong does not make Snowden right.

The main "evidence" that he made multiple attempts to raise the concerns is dubious.


is it? did or did not Clapper lie about the depth of the surveillance? he did. that's perjury in the face of a congressional appearance. and you think they'd pay any attention to a low level analyst's complains when they were prepared to lie to congress and the public about it?

and i bet you think the russkies hacked the DNC too ROLF!!

Even if it was true--and I doubt it was--there are ways to do it and ways not to. What he did was far more about the many, many OTHER things he took and gave to foreign governments. Snowden is a traitor and a spy. Nothing else.

what other things? don't you know now how the controlled media spins whatever narrative their political masters demand? they "say" he gave other items yet the reporters he contacted say otherwise.

The fact that the gov't was wrong does not make Snowden right. Originally Posted by Old-T

actually .. it does make him right. the fact that the government was breaking the law and lying about it shows the very agencies in question were not open to discussion of their illegal activities, by anyone .. especially a low level it geek, and of course not Congress and the public either.

here is my ultimate rebuttal Old-thing ..


Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." That quote often comes up in the context of new technology and concerns about government surveillance.Mar 2, 2015

and if you dig around, you'll find this quote doesn't mean what most take it for today. has more to do with oppressive taxes. but it fits this narrative quite well whether Franklin intended it to or not.


so Old-thing, what ya gonna do when the Gov uses your hobby phone data to arrest you for banging hookers? and don't be an idiot and say "they'd never go that far ..." because they already have.