I read somebody's comment today that said
that a corrupt government is worse than the
mafia, just because of the sheer scale of the
thing.
and who's gonna fix this, more politicians?
I don't think so.
Read a quote from Nietsche today (did I
spell it right?): There are only 2 kinds of
people, to politicians, tools and enemies.
Ed Snowden, and the guys below, are
not tools.
checkit: TECHDIRT
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NSA Leakers, Thomas Drake And Mark Klein, Speak Out In Defense Of Ed Snowden
from
the confirms-what-they-said dept
As
US politicians and pundits push each other aside to tar and feather Ed Snowden
for revealing some basic facts about NSA surveillance that the politicians and
pundits themselves refused to call out for its clear abuse of basic 4th
Amendment principles, two of the most important previous leakers of details of
NSA surveillance have spoken out in support of Snowden. Thomas Drake, the
former NSA employee who blew the whistle on NSA surveillance abuse (and faced
decades in jail on trumped up charges that fell apart in court), has pointed
out that Snowden's revelations confirm his own claims from before:
The NSA programs that Snowden has revealed
are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct
exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind, in 2001. In the first week
of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA's lead attorney. When
I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said:
"The White House has approved the
program; it's all legal. NSA is the executive agent."
It was made clear to me that the original
intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional
safeguards. "You don't understand," I was told. "We just need
the data.
Drake
also highlights how he did use the "official" whistleblower channels
that many are saying Snowden should have used, and look what happened to him:
I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden
only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community
Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of
command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the
Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action,
because he's been following this for years: he's seen what's happened to other
whistleblowers like me.
By following protocol, you get flagged –
just for raising issues. You're
identified as someone they don't like, someone not to be trusted. I was
exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional
investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about
Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had
but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known
threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have
prevented 9/11.
But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed
went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give
information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.
The
end result was that his whistleblowing didn't do much, but he got arrested
because he accidentally kept an almost entirely meaningless document about
meeting participants in his home. And, when he was arrested, for just having
the list of meeting attendees, he was smeared for causing "exceptionally
grave damage to US national security."
Separately,
former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, who revealed that he helped install NSA
equipment directly within AT&T's network is speaking out about how Snowden,
rather than the telcos, deserve retroactive immunity. The telcos broke the law
and had to have Congress go back and
retroactively make what they did -- which clearly broke the law at the time --
legal. Klein points out how his revelations were brushed off and ignored,
while Snowden's revelations confirm a lot of what he said:
"It was clear that the NSA was looking
at everything," Klein said. "It wasn't limited to foreign
communications."
On Tuesday, Klein said that for a number of
reasons, Snowden's disclosures sparked more public outrage than his own
revelations did more than seven years ago.
For one thing, Klein said, Snowden had
direct access to a secret court order and details of the program, while Klein pieced together the government's
surveillance through internal AT&T documents and in discussions with
colleagues who worked on the project.
"The government painted me as a
nobody, a technician who was merely speculating," said Klein, who made his
disclosures after he accepted a buyout and retired from AT&T in 2004.
"Now we have an actual copy of a FISA court order. There it is in black
and white. It's undisputable. They can't deny that."
