Cybersecurity Law Is No Threat To Privacy: NSA Chief Gen. Alexander

It doesn't surprise. On June 8, Haaretz headlined "What was the Israeli involvement in collecting US communications intel for NSA?" More on that below. On April 3, 2012, James Bamford headlined "Shady Companies with Ties to Israel Wiretap for US for the NSA.

He said NSA chief General Keith Alexander's "having a busy year." He's "cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency's greatly expanded eavesdropping network."

"In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia."

prism (przm) n.

1. A solid figure whose bases or ends have the same size and shape and are parallel to one another, and each of whose sides is a parallelogram.
2. A transparent body of this form, often of glass and usually with triangular ends, used for separating white light passed through it into a spectrum or for reflecting beams of light.
3. A cut-glass object, such as a pendant of a chandelier.
4. A crystal form consisting of three or more similar faces parallel to a single axis.
5. A medium that misrepresents whatever is seen through it.

[Alternatively...]

prism noun ˈpri-zəm

[...]

4. a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it

The ongoing 'NSA surveillance scandal' has many parallels, and some direct links, with the disclosures made by WikiLeaks, the organisation its leader Julian Assange described as the "the intelligence agency of the people".

While we took satisfaction in seeing government and corporate crimes come back to haunt their perpetrators, SOTT.net remained cautious about lauding Assange or the WikiLeaks organisation as heroic. What did any of the 'Iraq War Logs' or U.S. State Department 'diplomatic cables' reveal that was not already publicly available information? Obviously some details were new, but they didn't change the fact that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was illegal under international law and that everyone involved had either committed or were ancillary to war crimes. Nor did anything so damaging come out to bring the perpetrators to justice or to catalyse real political change that would actually improve ordinary people's welfare.

Things, as you may have noticed in recent years, have only gotten worse for the masses.

So is Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower currently 'on the run' after disclosing 'top secret documents' to major media outlets, a hero or traitor? Is he neither? We discussed this and more in last Sunday's SOTT Talk Radio show on the NSA leaks. Have a listen:

They looked like two dejected schoolboys in front of the headmaster by the end of the two-hour Putin-Obama summit at the sidelines of the Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland. But as astonishing as the sound of silence was the fact that, on Syria, the former KGB guy was trying to save the "leading from behind" dude from himself.

President Barack Obama coined the monster euphemism that they had "different perspectives" on Syria. He said, deceptively, "We want to try to resolve the issue through political means if possible, so we will instruct our teams to continue to work on the potential of a Geneva follow-up."

If Obama was really trying to solve Syria "through political means" he would not have pre-emptively bombed the Geneva II talks with his "weapons-for-peace" program, as in weaponizing only the "good" Syrian "rebels" and only with a few "non-lethal" toys (that's the bottom line of Washington's spin). "If possible" in this case does translate into "impossible". As for the Geneva II talks, they don't rate anything better than "potential" because Obama knows the myriad, squabbling factions of the Syrian opposition will boycott it.

Sometimes it sounded like Putin wanted to put Obama out of his misery (as in "Assad must go" but I have no clue how to make him obey me). He was visibly trying to impress to Obama that expanding the proxy war in Syria would make the current - horrible - status quo look like a walk in the park.

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.

1. The Urge to be Global

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a "national security state." But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide," has been named "boundless informant." If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn't ask for a better hint than that word "boundless." It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyberwarfare.

That's the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of Booz Allen's enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firm's profitability and that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.

Booz Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.

But just when the good times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the past, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.

Well, they've solved the riddle. Ed Snowden was able to steal thousands of highly protected NSA documents because...he had a thumb drive.

This is the weapon that breached the inner sanctum of the most sophisticated information agency in the world.

This is the weapon to which the NSA, with all its resources, remains utterly vulnerable. Can't defeat it.

NSA bans thumb drives, but certain special employees are allowed to use them.

Would Snowden have been in that elite circle? He was an outside contractor who'd been assigned to the NSA, and he was only there for four weeks, on his latest tour, when he did the infamous deed and then departed, never to return.

Not only did Snowden stroll into NSA with a thumb drive, he knew how to navigate all the security layers put in place to stop people from stealing classified documents.

Current press reports focus on PRISM, the NSA's relationships with the biggest tech companies in the world, and the spilled leaks of Ed Snowden.

I've already laid out serious questions about Snowden's work history and whether he's told the truth about it.

Is it likely he could have accessed and snatched thousands of highly classified NSA documents?

"Let's see. Who's coming to work for us here at NSA today? Oh, new whiz kid. Ed Snowden. Outside contractor. He's not really a full-time employee of the NSA. Twenty-nine years old. No high school diploma. Has a GED. He worked for the CIA and quit. Hmm. Why did he quit? Oh, never mind, who cares? No problem.

"Tell you what. Let's give this kid access to our most sensitive data. Sure. Why not? Everything. That stuff we keep behind 986 walls? Where you have to pledge the life of your first-born against the possibility you'll go rogue? Let Snowden see it all. Sure. What the hell. I'm feeling charitable. He seems like a nice kid."

Al used to be a funny guy. Now, he's not.

Make no mistake about it, if Bush were president at the moment, Little Al would be attacking him mercilessly.

But with Obama in the White House, Al sings a different tune.

The NSA spying is A-OK. No problem.

"I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people."

Thanks, Al.

"There are certain things that are appropriate for me to know that are not appropriate for the bad guys to know."

Al, you see, has been briefed. He's bought into those "high-level" briefings. He now resides in a rarefied elite atmosphere. If Senator Al says NSA is good, it must be.

If you believe him, I've got condos for sale on Jupiter.

Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo.

That still doesn't preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.

Snowden's exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn't mean we have the whole story.

How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned to NSA, and he can get access to, and copy, documents that expose the spying collaboration between NSA and the biggest tech companies in the world - and he can get away with it.

If so, then NSA is a sieve leaking out of all holes. Because that means a whole lot of other, higher NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Poof.

First, I'm not doubting the documents Ed Snowden has brought forward. I'm not doubting the illegal reach of the NSA in spying on Americans and the world.

But as to how this recent revelation happened, and whether Ed Snowden's history holds up...I have questions.

Could Snowden have been given extraordinary access to classified info as part of a larger scheme? Could he be a) an honest man and yet b) a guy who was set up to do what he's doing now?

If b) is true, then Snowden fits the bill perfectly. He wants to do what he's doing. He isn't lying about that. He means what he says.

Okay. Let's look at his history as reported by The Guardian.