person:snowden

  • Si des gens programmés pour repérer les profils de malfaiteurs se penchent sur les données qui vous concernent, ce n’est pas vous qu’ils vont trouver - ils vont trouver un malfaiteur.

    Edward Snowden
    Edward Snowden | Amnesty International
    https://www.amnesty.org/fr/latest/campaigns/2016/03/edward-snowden-privacy-is-for-the-powerless/?l=fr&s=300x250&v=snowden
    https://www.amnesty.org/remote.axd/amnestysgprdasset.blob.core.windows.net/media/12098/207863_citizen_four_-_film_stills_dir_laura_poitras_.jpg?center=0.5,0.5&pre
    #snowden #surveillance-de-masse

  • • L’art de la révolte de Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
    http://www.fayard.fr/lart-de-la-revolte-9782213685786

    Edward Snowden, Julian Assange et Chelsea Manning sont les figures essentielles des luttes qui se jouent autour des secrets d’État et de la surveillance de masse, des libertés à l’ère d’Internet, de la guerre et du terrorisme. Ils sont souvent considérés comme des lanceurs d’alerte révélant des informations. Pour Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, ils sont bien plus que cela : ce sont des personnages exemplaires qui réinventent un art de la révolte. Avec eux, nous assistons à l’émergence d’une nouvelle manière de penser la politique et de se constituer comme sujet politique.
    La pratique de l’anonymat telle que WikiLeaks la fait fonctionner, les gestes de fuite et les demandes d’asile de Snowden ou d’Assange rompent avec les formes traditionnelles de la contestation. Dès lors, ces modes d’action nous conduisent à nous interroger sur le fonctionnement de l’espace démocratique, sur les notions de citoyenneté, d’État, d’appartenance, de prise de parole, d’espace public, de collectif, et nous invitent à reformuler le langage de la philosophie critique.
    La théorie contemporaine concentre son attention sur les rassemblements populaires comme Occupy, les Indignés ou les printemps arabes. Et si c’étaient les démarches solitaires de Snowden, d’Assange, de Manning qui constituaient les foyers où s’élabore une conception inédite de l’émancipation ?
    Geoffroy de Lagasnerie est philosophe et sociologue. Il est professeur à l’École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. Il est l’auteur notamment de La Dernière Leçon de Michel Foucault (Fayard, 2012) et de Logique de la création (Fayard, 2011).

    http://www.fayard.fr/sites/default/files/styles/couv_livre/public/images/livres/9782213685786-X.jpg?itok=OsAaK4PF

    • Geoffroy de Lagasnerie pour son livre L’art de la révolte sur Les Nouveaux chemins de la connaissance (France Culture)
    http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-les-nouveaux-chemins-de-la-connaissance-actualite-philosophiq

    • Son blog :
    http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/geoffroy-de-lagasnerie

    #internet #militant #Snowden #Assange #Manning #liberté

  • Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/opinion/israels-nsa-scandal.html

    L’unité 8200 d’#Israël http://seenthis.net/messages/293043 peut faire chanter des Palestiniens innocents grâce à la #NSA des #Etats-Unis,

    Among his most shocking discoveries, [#Snowden] told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

    Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.

    Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to #Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”

    It appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses. In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media, they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society.

    The veterans of Unit 8200 declared that they had a “moral duty” to no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians.” An Israeli military spokesman disputed the letter’s overall drift but said the charges would be examined.

    It should trouble the American public that some or much of the information in question — intended not for national security purposes but simply to pursue political agendas — may have come directly from the N.S.A.’s domestic dragnet. According to documents leaked by Mr. Snowden and reported by the British newspaper The Guardian, the N.S.A. has been sending intelligence to Israel since at least March 2009.

  • De la surveillance de masse à la paranoïa généralisée
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27nMNqASbi0

    Il y aura un avant et un après Snowden. Avant, les défenseurs des libertés qui dénonçaient la société de surveillance passaient pour des « paranos ». Ce à quoi je répondais que la paranoïa était plutôt à chercher du côté de la NSA.

    Aujourd’hui, tout le monde a compris que l’on vivait bel et bien dans une société de surveillance. Le problème, c’est que nombre de ceux qui nous qualifiaient de « paranos » sont bel et bien devenus paranoïaques, voire conspirationnistes, persuadés que la NSA, le GCHQ ou la DGSE, Google, Facebook & Microsoft nous espionnent tous. #Wait...

    Non, la NSA, le GCHQ ou la DGSE, Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Cie ne sont pas Big Brother, et ils n’espionnent pas tout le monde tout le temps. Et notre boulot, aujourd’hui, est aussi de comprendre et d’expliquer ce qu’ils font exactement, plutôt que d’entretenir le #FUD ambiant.

    Une très utile conférence de Jean-Marc Manach à Pas Sage en Seine 2014.

    #Big_Brother #Direction_générale_de_la_Sécurité_extérieure #Edward_Snowden #Glenn_Greenwald #Minority_Report #National_Security_Agency #Paranoïa #Renseignement_d'origine_électromagnétique #Surveillance_de_masse #Surveillance_électronique

  • Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii | Threat Level | WIRED Kevin Poulsen

    (Disclosure: I’m on the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board with Sandvik, and both Snowden and Greenwald sit on the foundation’s board of directors.)

    http://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-cryptoparty

    In Melbourne, Wolf received an e-mail asking for advice on putting together the Oahu event. She offered some tips: Teach one tool at a time, keep it simple. “If I’d known it was someone from the NSA, I’d have gone and shot myself,” she says.

    Snowden used the Cincinnatus name to organize the event, which he announced on the Crypto Party wiki, and through the Hi Capacity hacker collective, which hosted the gathering. Hi Capacity is a small hacker club that holds workshops on everything from the basics of soldering to using a 3D printer.

    “I’ll start with a casual agenda, but slot in additional speakers as desired,” write Cincinnatus in the announcement. “If you’ve got something important to add to someone’s talk, please share it (politely). When we’re out of speakers, we’ll do ad-hoc tutorials on anything we can.”

    When the day came, Sandvik found her own way to the venue: an art space on Oahu in the back of a furniture store called Fishcake. It was filled to its tiny capacity with a mostly male audience of about 20 attendees. Snowden spotted her when she walked in and introduced himself and his then-girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who was filming the event. “He was just very nice, and he came to the door and introduced himself and talked about how the event was going to run,” Sandvik says.

    They chatted for a bit. Sandvik asked Snowden where he worked, and after hemming and hawing, he finally said he worked for Dell.

    Last week Glenn Greenwald published his book on Snowden, No Place To Hide, which revealed the Cincinnatus nickname for the first time, leading me and others to the Oahu crypto party post. It turns out Snowden sent his first anonymous e-mail to Greenwald just 11 days before the party. At the time of the event, he was still waiting for Greenwald to reply.

    “I kind of hope, secretly, that the #crypto_party offered Snowden an outlet to think about what he was already beginning to plan to do,” Wolf says.

    “I’m kind of proud that he taught a group of people as well,” she says. “That’s huge. We relied on volunteers who often put themselves at risk to teach at places and situations that were uneasy for them. That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto party while he was working for the #NSA. I’m glad he did. What a fucking legend.”

  • #Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best #N.S.A.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/us/snowden-used-low-cost-tool-to-best-nsa.html

    Using “web crawler” software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden “scraped data out of our systems” while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. “We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,” the official said. The process, he added, was “quite automated.”

    (...)

    .... from his first days working as a contractor inside the N.S.A.’s aging underground Oahu facility for Dell, the computer maker, and then at a modern office building on the island for Booz Allen Hamilton, the technology consulting firm that sells and operates computer security services used by the government, Mr. Snowden learned something critical about the N.S.A.’s culture: While the organization built enormously high electronic barriers to keep out foreign invaders, it had rudimentary protections against insiders.

    (...)

    Investigators have yet to answer the question of whether Mr. Snowden happened into an ill-defended outpost of the N.S.A. or sought a job there because he knew it had yet to install the security upgrades that might have stopped him.

    • Agency officials insist that if Mr. Snowden had been working from N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., which was equipped with monitors designed to detect when a huge volume of data was being accessed and downloaded, he almost certainly would have been caught. But because he worked at an agency outpost [Oahu, Hawaii] that had not yet been upgraded with modern security measures, his copying of what the agency’s newly appointed No. 2 officer, Rick Ledgett, recently called “the keys to the kingdom” raised few alarms.

  • Le recrutement de #Snowden raconté par son ancien employeur
    Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden’s Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen - WSJ.com
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626804579363651571199832?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F

    Mr. Snowden was a security guard with the NSA, moved into its information-technology department and was sent overseas, Mr. McConnell [vice chairman of Booz Allen and former NSA director] said. He then left the agency, joined another company and moved to Japan. But Mr. Snowden wanted back in with the NSA. He then broke into the agency’s system and stole the admittance test with the answers, Mr. McConnell said. Mr. Snowden took the test and aced it, Mr. McConnell said. “He walked in and said you should hire me because I scored high on the test.

    The NSA then offered Mr. Snowden a position but he said didn’t think the level—called GS-13—was high enough and asked for a higher-ranking job. The NSA refused. In early 2013, Booz Allen hired Mr. Snowden.

    He targeted my company because we enjoy more access than other companies,” Mr. McConnell said. “Because of the nature of the work we do…he targeted us for that purpose.

    Évidemment, il est entré par effraction…

    En plus, en vérité, il ne sait rien…

    Inside the NSA are four levels of information. Level 1 is of basic administrative. The next level consists of reports, written in a way that give information without revealing sources. Levels 3 and 4 “gets into how we do what we do,” Mr. McConnell said. He said that Mr. Snowden had very limited access to the third tier and almost no access to the fourth.

  • Obama Readies Revamp of NSA - WSJ.com
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303754404579311051971481812

    The #NSA -review panel recommended that 1/the U.S. should extend to non-U.S. citizens the protections of the Privacy Act of 1974 . The president is leaning toward accepting that proposal, the senior administration official said. Details of how the privacy protections would be applied were unclear.
    #surveillance

    Applying privacy protections to non-U.S. citizens would be a significant shift in U.S. posture that wasn’t proposed seriously until the uproar overseas in response to disclosures by Mr. Snowden, which suggested that the NSA had built a global surveillance operation that regularly scooped up communications of citizens of countries around the world, including friendly ones.

    Another recommendation would create 2/ the post of advocate for privacy issues, who would argue before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court now approves surveillance requests based only on arguments from the government’s perspective .

    Mr. Obama proposed such a change himself in August. Details of the post are still being fleshed out.

    3/ A key reform proposal is the restructuring of the phone-data program. Currently, the NSA collects all the data and houses it in its database. The review panel had said the data should be held by the phone companies or a third party, not by the NSA.

    “It is absolutely being seriously considered,” the senior administration official said of the proposal. “We are studying it really carefully and hope that we’ll have a decision that the president can announce on how we want to move forward on that.”

    The scope of the eventual NSA overhaul, however, will depend on what the president decides on other key proposals.

    4/T he review panel recommended that U.S. phone data only be searched with the approval of a court. Currently, NSA searches are based on a standard it calls “reasonable, articulable suspicion,” which is determined internally.

  • Tech executives to Obama: NSA spying revelations are threatening business - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2013/12/17/6569b226-6734-11e3-a0b9-249bbb34602c_story.html

    Their message was to say: “ What the hell are you doing? Are you really hacking into the infrastructure of American companies overseas? The same American companies that cooperate with your lawful orders and spend a lot of money to comply with them to facilitate your intelligence collection? ” said one industry official familiar with the companies’ views.

    The NSA has stressed that its overseas collection is carried out lawfully, under executive authority. Any data on Americans are handled according to rules that protect their privacy, including the requirement to obtain a warrant to target an American’s communications, officials say.

    In the meeting, the executives reiterated a list of demands that had been sent to the White House in a letter last week calling on the administration to cease bulk data collection of e-mails, online address books and other personal information; to impose limits on how easily the NSA can obtain court orders for Internet data; and to allow the companies to be more transparent about government intelligence requests .

    Several participants acknowledged that the White House had to balance the companies’ business concerns against national security considerations .

    Senior administration officials described the meeting with the 15 executives as “constructive, not at all contentious.”

    This was an opportunity for the President to hear from CEOs directly as we near completion of our review of signals intelligence programs, building on the feedback we’ve received from the private sector in recent weeks and months, ” the White House said in a statement.

    One participant suggested the president pardon #Snowden. Obama said he could not do so, said one industry official . White House officials have said that Snowden is accused of leaking classified information and faces felony charges in the United States, and that he should be returned as soon as possible to the United States, “where he will be accorded full due process and protections.”

    Senior executives from AT&T, Yahoo, Apple, Netflix, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Facebook were among those in attendance.

    “We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the President our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urged him to move aggressively on reform,” the technology firms said in a joint statement after the meeting.
    #surveillance
    #nsa

    Many of these firms have played a key role in boosting Obama’s political fortunes. Tech companies pumped nearly $7.8 million into his campaign in the last cycle , according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

    Some of the top officials meeting with the president Tuesday served as bundlers for his 2012 bid. Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, raised between $100,000 and $200,000, according to the center, and Shervin Pish­evar, co-founder of the Sherpa technology investment fund, raised more than $500,000. Mark Pincus, Zynga’s chief product officer and chairman, gave $1 million to Priorities Action USA, the super PAC that supported Obama.

  • “The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism”

    http://evgenymorozov.tumblr.com/post/71228557738/my-ft-oped

    Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.

    But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.

    • What eludes Mr #Snowden – along with most of his detractors and supporters – is that we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities – with democracy the main victim.

      This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the #NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and have some political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates about capitalism – or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto of the privacy debate.

      Other overlooked dimensions are as crucial. Should we not be more critical of the rationale, advanced by the NSA and other agencies, that they need this data to engage in pre-emptive problem-solving? We should not allow the falling costs of pre-emption to crowd out more systemic attempts to pinpoint the origins of the problems that we are trying to solve. Just because US intelligence agencies hope to one day rank all Yemeni kids based on their propensity to blow up aircraft does not obviate the need to address the sources of their discontent – one of which might be the excessive use of drones to target their fathers.

      Unfortunately, these issues are not on today’s agenda, in part because many of us have bought into the simplistic #narrative – convenient to both Washington and #Silicon_Valley – that we just need more laws, more tools, more transparency. What Mr Snowden has revealed is the new tension at the very foundations of modern-day capitalism and democratic life. A bit more imagination is needed to resolve it.

  • White House says Snowden should still face charges in U.S. | Reuters
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/16/us-usa-snowden-idUSBRE9BF1AE20131216
    Carney, le bouledogue d’Obama

    Our position has not changed on that matter at all ," Carney told reporters at a briefing in response to a question. " Mr. Snowden has been accused of leaking classified information and he faces felony charges here in the United States. He should be returned to the United States as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process in our system .

    #snowden

  • An open letter from Carl Bernstein to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger | Media | theguardian.com
    http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/03/open-letter-carl-bernstein-alan-rusbridger

    But your appearance before the Commons today strikes me as something quite different in purpose and dangerously pernicious: an attempt by the highest UK authorities to shift the issue from government policies and excessive government secrecy in the United States and Great Britain to the conduct of the press – which has been quite admirable and responsible in the case of the Guardian, particularly, and the way it has handled information initially provided by Mr Snowden.

    Indeed, generally speaking, the record of journalists, in Britain and the United States in handling genuine national security information since World War II, without causing harm to our democracies or giving up genuine secrets to real enemies, is far more responsible than the over-classification, disingenuousness, and (sometimes) outright lying by a series of governments, prime ministers and presidents when it comes to information that rightly ought to be known and debated in a free society. Especially in recent years.

    You are being called to testify at a moment when governments in Washington and London seem intent on erecting the most serious (and self-serving) barriers against legitimate news reporting – especially of excessive government secrecy – we have seen in decades.

    #surveillance
    #nsa
    #snowden

  • N.S.A. May Have Penetrated Internet Cable Links - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/technology/a-peephole-for-the-nsa.html?ref=technology

    Although the Internet is designed to be a highly decentralized system, in practice a small group of backbone providers carry almost all of the network’s data.

    Security experts say that regardless of whether Level 3’s participation is voluntary or not, recent N.S.A. disclosures make clear that even when Internet giants like Google and Yahoo do not hand over data, the N.S.A. and its intelligence partners can simply gather their data downstream.

    That much was true last summer when United States authorities first began tracking Mr. Snowden’s movements after he left Hawaii for Hong Kong with thousands of classified documents. In May, authorities contacted Ladar Levison, who ran Lavabit, Mr. Snowden’s email provider, to install a tap on Mr. Snowden’s email account. When Mr. Levison did not move quickly enough to facilitate the tap on Lavabit’s network, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did so without him.

    Mr. Levison said it was unclear how that tap was installed, whether through Level 3, which sold bandwidth to Lavabit, or at the Dallas facility where his servers and networking equipment are stored. When Mr. Levison asked the facility’s manager about the tap, he was told the manager could not speak with him. A spokesman for TierPoint, which owns the Dallas facility, did not return a call seeking a comment.

    Verizon has said that it and other carriers are forced to comply with government requests in every country in which they operate, and are limited in what they can say about their arrangements.

    “At the end of the day, if the Justice Department shows up at your door, you have to comply,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, said in an interview in September. “We have gag orders on what we can say and can’t defend ourselves, but we were told they do this with every carrier.”

    #nsa #masssurveillance #prism #bullrun #snowden #level3 #google #yahoo #lavabit #datacenter #backbone

  • #NSA Report Outlined Goals for More Power - NYTimes.com
    By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS, November 22, 2013
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/nsa-report-outlined-goals-for-more-power.html?pagewanted=all

    (U) SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016 (23 février 2012)
    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/23/us/politics/23nsa-sigint-strategy-document.html

    In response to the controversy about its activities after Mr. #Snowden’s disclosures, agency officials claimed that the N.S.A.’s sweeping domestic surveillance programs had helped in 54 “terrorist-related activities.” But under growing scrutiny, congressional staff members and other critics say that the use of such figures by defenders of the agency has drastically overstated the value of the domestic surveillance programs in counterterrorism.

    #terrorisme

    Relying on Internet routing data, commercial and Sigint information, Treasure Map (...) collects Wi-Fi network and geolocation data, and between 30 million and 50 million unique Internet provider addresses (...) It boasts that the program can map “any device, anywhere, all the time.”

    (...) The program is not used for surveillance, they said, but to understand computer networks.

    The program takes advantage of the capabilities of other secret N.S.A. programs. To support Treasure Map, for example, the document states that another program, called Packaged Goods, tracks the “traceroutes” through which data flows around the Internet. Through Packaged Goods, the N.S.A. has gained access to “13 covered servers in unwitting data centers around the globe,” according to the PowerPoint. The document identifies a list of countries where the data centers are located, including Germany, Poland, Denmark, South Africa and Taiwan as well as Russia, China and Singapore.

    Despite the document’s reference to “unwitting #data_centers,” government officials said that the agency does not hack into those centers. Instead, the officials said, the intelligence community secretly uses front companies to lease space on the servers.

    #infrastructure

    Au passage je découvre la page SIGINT sur Wikipedia, où il est question d’interception sur #câbles_sous-marins :
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renseignement_d'origine_%C3%A9lectromagn%C3%A9tique#Interception_des_c

  • #Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-files-to-russia.html?pagewanted=all

    He argued that he had helped American national security by prompting a badly needed public debate about the scope of the intelligence effort. “The #secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure,” Mr. Snowden said. He added that he had been more concerned that Americans had not been told about the N.S.A.’s reach than he was about any specific #surveillance operation.

    “So long as there’s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there’s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision,” he said. “However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that’s a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of ‘governing in the dark,’ where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input.”

    Mr. Snowden said that in 2008 and 2009, he was working in Geneva as a telecommunications information systems officer, handling everything from information technology and computer networks to maintenance of the heating and air-conditioning systems. He began pushing for a promotion, but got into what he termed a “petty e-mail spat” in which he questioned a senior manager’s judgment.

    • N.S.A. has not offered a single example of damage from the leaks. They haven’t said boo about it except ‘we think,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘have to assume’ from anonymous and former officials. Not ‘China is going dark.’ Not ‘the Chinese military has shut us out.’ ”

      hmmm #NSA #Snowden #surveillance #chine

  • N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
    By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html

    The concerns in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse. But the new documents provide a rare window into what the N.S.A. actually does with the information it gathers.

    A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.

  • Obama ou la guerre froide pour les nuls *

    http://www.marianne.net/Obama-ou-la-guerre-froide-pour-les-nuls_a231043.html

    Barack Obama est en train de s’atteler à un exercice toujours délicat : la réécriture de l’histoire. A preuve sa décision de boycotter le sommet bilatéral américano-soviétique, prévu de longue date, et de ne pas rencontrer Vladimir Poutine, qu’il retrouvera cependant lors du sommet du G 20.

    Et pourquoi donc, Votre Honneur ? A cause de l’asile politique temporaire accordé par la Russie à Snowden, l’ex agent américain ayant révélé quelques unes des frasques de ses supérieurs, emportés par leur folie inquisitoriale. Le président américain y voit le signe extérieur du vent de « guerre froide » qui soufflerait de nouveau sur les plaines de Sibérie.

    C’est le monde à l’envers. Le scandale Snowden, que l’on sache, ne vient pas de son atterrissage à Moscou, mais de ce qu’il a révélé des pratiques de l’Empire américain. Le scandale Snowden, ce n’est pas sa fuite (obligatoire), mais l’ampleur des dérives d’un pays souvent présenté comme un modèle de démocratie.

    Il faut donc remettre les choses à l’endroit. C’est un peu comme si, du temps de l’URSS, Moscou avait demandé des comptes à Washington sous prétexte que Soljenitsyne, auteur de « L’Archipel du goulag », s’était réfugié aux Etats-Unis. A l’époque, fort justement, on sommait les dirigeants de feu l’Union Soviétique de réviser leurs pratiques plutôt que de faire la leçon au monde entier. Aujourd’hui, toutes choses égales par ailleurs, c’est à la Maison Blanche de s’expliquer et non l’inverse.

  • What’s the Point of a Summit? - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/opinion/whats-the-point-of-a-summit.html

    Le NYT veut que #Snowden soit extradé.

    Most of the debate about whether Mr. Obama should attend has centered on Mr. Snowden, who fled to Russia after his disclosures. The administration wanted him returned to the United States to face charges of leaking national security secrets.

    Russia’s decision was provocative. Asylum is for people who are afraid to return to their own country because they fear persecution, unlawful imprisonment or even death because of their race, their ethnicity, their religion, their membership in particular social or political groups, or their political beliefs.

    Mr. Snowden undoubtedly fears returning home because he would be arrested and prosecuted. But those fears do not qualify him for asylum. And does he really feel safer in a country where Mr. Putin, an increasingly authoritarian leader, has jailed and persecuted his critics?

  • Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin | Consortiumnews
    http://consortiumnews.com/2013/07/28/puttin-the-pressure-on-putin

    Holder assured the Russian Justice Minister that the U.S. “would not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States.” Holder also saw fit to reassure his Russian counterpart that, “Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States.” Wow, that’s a relief!

    The United States is so refined in its views on human rights that it won’t torture or execute a whistleblower. Of course, that only reminded everyone that the United States is one of the few advanced societies that still puts lots of people to death and was caught just last decade torturing detainees at CIA “black sites,” not to mention the brutal treatment of other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

    And, there was the humiliating treatment afforded another American whistleblower, Private Bradley Manning, whose forced nudity and long periods in solitary confinement during eight months of confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. prompted international accusations of torture.

    Holder’s strange promise may have been designed to undercut Snowden’s bid for asylum, but it also reminded the world of America’s abysmal behavior on human rights. And, even if the United States promises not to torture someone, government lawyers have shown how they can play games with the definition of the term or just outright lie. Holder’s reputation for veracity is just a thin notch above that of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who admits he has chosen to testify under oath to the “least untruthful” things.

  • US secretary of state threatens Venezuela over Snowden asylum

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/20/kerr-j20.html

    ABC cites at least one source who was familiar with the content of a phone call made a week ago by Kerry to Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elías Jaua only hours after Venezuela announced that it had granted asylum to Snowden.

    During the phone call, Kerry reportedly made the following threats:

    To ground any and all Venezuelan airplanes flying in American or NATO airspace upon any suspicion that Snowden may be on board, including the flights of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “Immunity is for the president, not for the plane,” Kerry said.

    To revoke US entry visas to Venezuelan citizens.

    To bring criminal charges for drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes against Venezuelan officials. The ABC source said that Kerry mentioned specific names of government officials against whom the US would press charges.

    To immediately halt sales of US gas products to Venezuela. Venezuela purchases a half-million barrels of gasoline and 350,000 barrels of Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether, a gasoline additive, from the US each month.

    On Friday, US State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf acknowledged that Kerry and Jaua spoke last Friday, but denied as “completely false” the claim that Kerry made any threats.

    “The Secretary made no reference in his conversation with Foreign Minister Jaua as to what our response would be if Venezuela were to assist Mr. Snowden or receive him,” she said.

    “Instead, Secretary Kerry conveyed to the Foreign Minister that Mr. Snowden is accused of serious criminal offenses and should be returned to the United States to face those charges if he were to come into Venezuelan jurisdiction.”

    Harf then called into question her denial by issuing a threat of her own:

    “Should Venezuela assist Mr. Snowden or receive him, we will consider what the appropriate response should be at that time.”

    Vous vous rappelez encore:
    http://seenthis.net/messages/152951#

    via https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2873866

  • Wolfgang Blau - I guess the challenge for so many newsrooms right...
    https://www.facebook.com/wolfgang.blau/posts/10151723360295960

    I guess the challenge for so many newsrooms right now is that covering #Tempora and #Prism demands far more skilled and knowledgeable journalists than it does when only focusing on where Mr. #Snowden is. (And when this lack of resources meets ignorance, nothing comes as cheap for an editor or correspondent as simply denouncing Mr. Snowden in a grandious gesture. )

    #journalisme #surveillance

  • USA seemingly unaware of the irony in accusing Snowden of spying
    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/06/us-seemingly-unaware-of-irony-in-accusing-snowden-of-spying.html

    “These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said : “In the United States, you can’t spy on people”

    Seemingly not kidding, the spokesman went on to discuss another charge against Mr. Snowden—the theft of government documents: “The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”

    “Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy”

    #humour

  • Snowden Censored by Craven Media
    http://cryptome.org/2013/06/snowden-censored.htm

    Mr. Snowden, please send your 41 #PRISM slides and other information to less easily cowed and overly coddled commercial outlets than Washington Post and Guardian. Their arm-waving, self-aggrandizing verbosity, after conspiring to obey official demand to censor your information is a pattern well-documented by unfettered disclosure sites. Their piecemealing release is hoary dramatization, diverting cover-up, of failure to deliver untampered material. Your valor is yet to be fully disclosed, do not settle for being seduced by false promises portending being kicked under the bus.

    #NSA #censure #whistleblowing

  • Former C.I.A. Worker Says He Leaked Surveillance Data - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/us/former-cia-worker-says-he-leaked-surveillance-data.html?hp&_r=0

    Mr. Snowden said that he admired both Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers, and Bradley Manning, the Army private who has acknowledged providing huge troves of government documents in the WikiLeaks scandal.

    But he drew a contrast, saying that “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest.” He said that “harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”