Snowdon is a dummy

Snowden has revealed more cases of executives from key European or other companies being spied on by the NSA.

Wake up and smell the coffee already. Anti-terrorism has grown into a fig leaf for greed. It would not surprise me if the good guys within the NSA were involved in all sorts of dirty commercial and financial deals.

[...]
"This report confirms my greatest fears — Snowden’s real acts of betrayal place America’s military men and women at greater risk. Snowden’s actions are likely to have lethal consequences for our troops in the field," Rogers said in a statement at the time.

But details to back up Rogers' claims are not included in the declassified material released to the Guardian.

Neither he nor any other lawmaker has disclosed specific details from the DIA report but they have continued to push the “damage” narrative in interviews with journalists and during appearances on Sunday talk shows.

The declassified portion of the report obtained by the Guardian says only that DIA “assesses with high confidence that the information compromise by a former NSA contractor [redacted] and will have a GRAVE impact on US national defense”.

The declassified material does not state the number of documents Snowden is alleged to have taken, which Rogers and Ruppersberger have claimed, again citing the DIA’s assessment, was 1.7m. Nor does the declassified portion of the report identify Snowden by name.

“[Redacted] a former NSA contractor compromised [redacted] from NSA Net and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS),” the report says. “On 6 June 2013, media groups published the first stories based on this material, and on 9 June 2013 they identified the source as an NSA contractor who had worked in Hawaii.”

JWICS is identified as a “24 hour a day network designed to meet the requirements for secure [top-secret/sensitive compartmented information] multi-media intelligence communications worldwide. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has directed that all Special Security Offices (SSOs) will install the JWICS.”

The Washington Post, quoting anonymous sources, reported last October that Snowden “lifted the documents from a top-secret network run by the Defense Intelligence Agency and used by intelligence arms of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.” The Post further claimed that Snowden “took 30,000 documents that involve the intelligence work of one of the services” and that he gained access to the documents through JWICS.

The report says that on 11 July 2013, about a month after the Guardian’s first report on the NSA’s metadata program was published, DIA chief Lieutenant General Michael Flynn “directed establishment of the Information Review Task Force 2 (IRTF-2) to acquire, triage, analyze, and assess all DIA and DoD compromised information”.

“Since 11 July 2013, IRTF-2 has led a coordinated DoD effort to discover, triage, and assess the impact of non-NSA Defense material from NSA holdings of compromised data,” according to the DIA report. “As of 18 December 2013, the federated IRTF-2 assessment includes: [redacted]”

Flynn was recently forced out of his position at DIA as part of a “leadership shakeup,” according to a report published in the Washington Post.

A partially declassified annex of the report contains various “terms of reference” that provide some clues as to what the impact assessment contains. For example, the report defines “compromised” as “out of government control”, while “disclosed” is defined as “made available to the public via the media, or to a foreign adversary”.

No evidence has surfaced to support persistent claims from pundits and lawmakers that Snowden has provided any of the NSA documents he obtained to a “foreign adversary”. ... ... ...

If so, the spying was not related to the theft of corporate secrets. One possible reason for such spying might be because it gave information about a government that we were spying on.

The former president of the (German) Federal Constitutional Court and now one of the most important German legal chairs, gave an expertise at the parliamentary committee.

What the NSA did, he said, was a severe criminal act. The German government and parliament had the constitutional duty to protect the German citizens against such attacks.
He gave a lot of legal advise how that should be done. [Which hopefully will be online in English soon, since I'm not in the mood to translate all those legal terms.]

How do you say, "Let's declare war on them?" in German

Report/book review in the Guardian: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald – review

But like the automobile when it first came into existence, it is going to be treated as some kind of fatal intrusion by the masses.

We certainly do not need someone like Glenn Greenwald to tell us that...at least, not the ones of us who are awake and willing to face reality.

Frank Apisa wrote:

We certainly do not need someone like Glenn Greenwald to tell us that...at least, not the ones of us who are awake and willing to face reality.

Amazing, Frank, that you and all the others, who were and are awake, knew all that.

Seems, reality was only known to insiders.

Are you suggesting now that all the others, who didn't belong to that group of people, should be left in the dark?

I mean, neither you nor anyone of the others told us about it.

But I agree: automobile is a very good analogy - it started here in Germany, too. And before that, we had had Mr. Diesel and Mr. Otto ...

It was available to anyone who was awake...and willing to see the situation for what it is.

I have been saying that consistently, Walter.

THERE IS NO PLACE TO HIDE.

Frank Apisa wrote:

It was available to anyone who was awake...and willing to see the situation for what it is.

I have been saying that consistently, Walter.

I'd thought that our Constitutional Court (especially under his former president Papier, whom I quoted above) was quite awake as the other legal experts and MPs.

They must have been sleeping like I did and the vast majority of Germans.

Frank Apisa wrote:

THERE IS NO PLACE TO HIDE.

You should have told that the NSA earlier, Frank!