It's Prism, not black and white

Not the point of it all.

After my last post, there are those out there who if they read it would say I've gone off of the conservative reservation.  Jed Babbin had a column at the American Spectator that I think would have him included in the list of people who think I'm suddenly a liberal anti-American scumbag. To someone like him, the Snowden revelations are clear cut, black and white.

Babbin recently opined:

Without making too fine a point of it, Snowden is a punk, a thief, and comparable only to Bradley Manning, the Army private now being court-martialed for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified emails. Snowden, like Manning, stole the information he leaked. Like Manning, he inflicted — with malice aforethought — damage on his country. Manning apparently did it in protest of the burden inflicted on him — he’s a gay activist — by the army. Snowden, a 29-year-old employed by a contractor working for NSA, doesn’t even have that excuse.

There’s still no problem telling right from wrong here. Neither of these pusillanimous punks had the right to decide for himself what should be leaked or not. But that’s not enough to dissuade some on the left, including one Laura Donohue, a Georgetown Law professor who, to the university’s undying shame, directs the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law.

In a Saturday op-ed, Mizz Donohue opines that the NSA’s surveillance programs not only violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure, but they also gather “…millions of Americans’ emails, photographs and documents.”

According to Donohue, it’s also improper for Verizon to be ordered to give the government the metadata on its customers’ phone calls. She contends that the law is being abused, wholesale, in violation of the Constitution.

Apparently, Donohue has confused the NSA with the IRS. They are not hunting for Americans to oppress because of their politics or even their religion. If you read, for example, the NSA procedure on targeting individuals for interception of data, you’ll see that the NSA spends an enormous amount of time scurrying around and debating with its lawyers to avoid gathering data on the wrong person.

Snowden's What Happens Next

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is on the move.  Stories have him leaving Hong Kong and now on the move to Equador, or Cuba or Russia. The extradition request from the United States it seems, was a day late and a dollar short.  But the most interesting question is this:  The president promised to put an online petition on the White House website.  Having done so, there is now a petition out there closing in on the 100,000 signature threshold to be reviewed.  The petition relates to Edward Snowden and seeks to have him pardoned for leaking the information he has leaked.

The Daily Dot has the details:

President Obama will now be forced to weigh in on the public's desire to pardon PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden, despite a carefully crafted effort to neither praise nor condemn him.

A We the People petition titled "Pardon Edward Snowden" reached the requisite 100,000 signatures Saturday morning. By the Obama administration's own rules, any petition that reaches that threshold will receive a formal response from the White House, though there’s no formal timetable for the official comment.

What the president decides to do with the petition is an interesting point. He could agree, he could go the route of a representative republic and say it is not in the public's best interest to pardon Snowden, or he could obfuscate and stall (or defer in more delicate terminology) - after all, bringing Snowden to America, prosecuting him and then considering a pardon may take long enough to outlive the presidency of Obama. I wonder what Hillary Clinton would have to say on the decision.

Speaking of which, has anyone asked Clinton what she thinks of the NSA Prism scandal?  Shouldn't they?

For Snowden, he will likely be able to find someplace happy to take him in and not extradite him back to America.  But the hunt for Snowden has taken on political significance too. It is no longer just a matter of national security.  The administration is using national security as a shield to protect itself from the scandal and the charges of hypocrisy directed at the president.

No matter what the president does, he risks further damaging his brand.  Though each option also presents some opportunity as well.  Given the dizzying array of scandals facing the president, damage it seems, is far more likely a result.

Agreeing to exonerate Snowden is probably the most noble approach for the president.  It's in line with his pre-election claims of transparency.  But there's that little problem of non-transparency, duplicity, and hypocrisy after his first election.

Disavowing the petition of course is blatantly anti-democracy in the eyes of many of his supporters, and hemming and hawing about these things will take time to sort themselves out is equally disingenuous (a la the Keystone pipeline non-decision.

No matter what happens, Snowden should have no misconception that his fate, petition-wise, will be dependent on the political calculus of what works for president Obama, and not on the merits of the petition.

Maybe Google has a spine?

Via WaPo,

Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it’s forced to give the government.

The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.

Google, one of nine companies named in NSA documents as providing information to the top-secret PRISM program, has demanded that U.S. officials give it more leeway to describe the company’s relationship with the government. Google and the other companies involved have sought to reassure users that their privacy is being protected from unwarranted intrusions.

Maybe a little bit late but at least they are distancing themselves from the administration.  It's amazing what self-preservation will cause people and companies to do.

Leaker Snowden crossed a line

Prior to today, Edward Snowden who leaked a lot of details about the government's secret collection of vast amounts of electronic data of citizens without a warrant or probable cause, has crossed a line.  Previously it could be argued that he was putting liberty ahead of national security. After all, what does national security matter if the principles the nation was founded on and which were enshrined in the Constitution, aren't being protected? Is the nation worth defending at that point?

The debate over those questions has gone away, the debate over whether Snowden himself was a patriot or a traitor, just went south.  There's no doubt he's a traitor now, after this:

Via the decidedly liberal partisan Washington Post, it turns out, that Snowden has started to reveal details about U.S. spying on China.  That's aiding and abetting a rival (if not adversary).

HONG KONG — Edward Snowden, the self-confessed leaker of secret surveillance documents, claimed Wednesday that the United States has mounted massive hacking operations against hundreds of Chinese targets since 2009.

The former contractor, whose work at the National Security Agency gave him access to highly classified U.S. intelligence, made the assertions in an interview with the South China Morning Post. The newspaper said he showed it “unverified documents” describing an extensive U.S. campaign to obtain information from computers in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Despite the Washington Post's political bent, it's hard to argue that Snowden is clearly sharing information with the Chinese after that South China Morning Post interview.  Snowden is no hero, he's a traitor.  China does not need to know that we are spying on them (or how).  I mean, we know it, they know it but he has damaged both the details and the deniability for America.  But that does not one thing to undercut the information he has shared about government spying on its own citizens.  That is a scandal with serious implications and needs to be investigated, and explained and discussed with all of the seriousness it deserves.  Liberty versus security deserves a lot more than a two minute drill and not to be derailed by the actions of Snowden.  After all, the spying on citizens (the AP scandal, the Prism scandal and the Verizon scandal) and the enemies list (the IRS scandal), are reminiscent of a past president who faced impeachment and ultimately resigned.  

Trading liberty for security

The debate that president Obama supposedly welcomes - how much security versus how much liberty - is one that is just now getting started. I plan on writing a lengthy position on it in the near future.  I need to analyze my own thinking on the subject first.  It's something I have recommended others to do as well.  Everyone should think about this - it is a very serious issue.  

The 'debate'  Obama wants is necessary. But I don't think it really should amount to a debate. A debate implies two resolute, absolute and mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive positions.  But I don't believe that is the case here.  The false choice president Obama has implied are on the one hand unfettered operational environment for terrorists but absolute personal privacy and Big Brother on the other hand.  There are clearly possibilities between those two extremes.

The face of the NSA Prism leak: Edward Snowden

The Guardian has been brilliant in its slow roll of the NSA leak scandal.  Today, with the express permission of the leaker, they released a few pieces on his identity.  The big reveal is the video.  The shock is that he has gone public with his identity at all.

Setec Astronomy. Sneakers come to life.

Click the link above to watch the video.  It's important to watch, whether you believe him or partially believe him or not at all.

UPDATE: Video embedded below.

It's a fascinating watch.  Whether it changes the direction of the debate over remains to be seen. It certainly will change the course of events. Does the NSA go after Snowden?  What about the interviewer Glen Greenwald? Is Snowden an Occupy Wall Street type? Or did he vote for the Libertarian party in 2008?  Is he a plant by the NSA to distract from the real search for the leak? Will he be extradited from China?  Is he a communist sympathizer for that matter? What about Booz Allen - who are they and what do they do for the NSA?

And if this guy claims there are no secrets that can be kept from the government, why does he have no Facebook Page?  The government knows all about him already anyway and he planned all along on going public, so the need to be secretive is lost on me.

Popular Mechanics: Why the NSA Prism Program Could Kill U.S. Tech Companies

This prism is destructive.

Unintended Consequences reasserts its ugly head validity.  Popular Mechanics was quick off the mark to point out that the government spying via the Prism program could really hurt some of America's most successful companies.  One has to wonder - is this an ingenious plot of a socialist president to destroy yet another sector of the American private economy? If so, his ineptitude is actually evil, socialist brilliance.

Popular Mechanics asserts the argument:

How much should we worry about a program that is aimed at monitoring the digital communications of foreigners? We should worry quite a bit, because this issue goes far beyond just respecting the civil liberties of non-Americans.

Think for a second about just how the U.S. economy has changed in the last 40 years. While a large percentage of our economy is still based in manufacturing, some of the most ascendant U.S. companies since the 1970s have been in the information technology sector. Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google are major exporters of information services (if you can think of such a thing as "exportable") through products such as Gmail, iCloud, Exchange, and Azure. Hundreds of millions of people use these services worldwide, and it has just been revealed to everybody outside the U.S. that our government reserves the right to look into their communications whenever it wants.

If you lived in Japan, India, Australia, Mexico, or Brazil, and you used Gmail, or synced your photos through iCloud, or chatted via Skype, how would you feel about that? Let's say you ran a business in those countries that relied upon information services from a U.S. company. Don't these revelations make using such a service a business liability? In fact, doesn't this news make it a national security risk for pretty much any other country to use information services from companies based in the U.S.? How should we expect the rest of the world to react?

Here's a pretty good guess: Other countries will start routing around the U.S. information economy by developing, or even mandating, their own competing services. In 2000, the European Union worked out a series of "Safe Harbor" regulations mandating privacy protection standards for companies storing E.U. citizens' data on servers outside of the E.U. For U.S. companies, that means applying stronger privacy protection for European data than for our own citizens' data. And now there is considerable reason to believe that Prism violated our Safe Harbor agreements with the E.U.

Has it come to this?

Indeed it has.  

America's lost credibility on human rights

While the growing scandals of government invasion of privacy do not rise to the level of China and massacres like Tienanmen Square the president has surely done a lot of damage to America's credibility on human rights. The timing as far as China is concerned, couldn't be better.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s meeting with the Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping this weekend is likely to be impacted in more ways than one by yesterday’s revelation that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting private information on individuals from major Internet companies.

Just as Obama prepares to meet with Xi to discuss issues such as cyber-security and civil liberties, it has emerged that the US government ordered the widespread collection of private information and may also have sanctioned hacking of internet companies’ private data.

President Obama is meeting with Chinese officials shortly, those meetings are now likely to be less productive for obvious reasons, on two fronts.  Firstly, the hacking issue will be pushed back because the U.S. federal government is going places with private data in a similar way to what they claim China is doing.   China when confronted with allegations of internet spying have a hammer for a reply as a result of this scandal.

And trying to get China to treat its people properly needs to be shelved for a while now; America is no position to lecture about human rights at this point. China can plead U.S. hypocrisy on both issues.

So the president's visit to China is likely to prove pointless except as an escape for the president from a (finally) hounding press.

Way to go.

UPDATED: The Prism of a police state

It's not a prism like this.

Wow. This is not the America I thought I knew.  I bet you feel the same way if you've heard of the Prism project.  If you haven't, then you need to know about it.  Scandal number four for the Obama administration in the spring of 2013 may end up dwarfing the other three scandals.  It was recently revealed that the government had accessed Verizon's customer records. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Prism has that eerie Nazi Germany police state feel to it.

Prism is detailed via Great Britain's The Guardian (providing the news that the American liberal media has refused to do with this president),

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

The liberal media didn't ever do it's job with this president.  But now that the cat is out of the bag and they have egg on their faces, they have to say something.  When you get the New York Times saying this about president Obama you know you've got a real issue that isn't going to go away.

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.

This comes on the heels of the the Justice Department thinking of journalists as the enemy and going after a Fox News reporter and the Associated Press.  It's ugly. And yet some in the media will still forgive this president.  That's another angle worth following as this thing unfolds.

It's possible that the press feels free to bash Obama now that he has won a second term and cannot be re-elected.  It doesn't hurt Hillary Clinton, whom many or most probably regard as the next president

Blaming Bush

It does not matter one bit whether this was started under president Bush and continued or even expanded under president Obama, it is wrong.  This president can no more blame Bush for PRISM this far into his tenure than David Letterman can blame Johnny Carson for low ratings in 2013.

It is the Obama administration, the one that was supposed to be the most transparent ever, that has carried out this Big Brother nightmare for the last four plus years.  If the president was honest about the transparency he promised none of these scandals he's facing would have surfaced.  Make no mistake, he owns this.

Focused here instead of the Arab Spring?

The ironic thing here is with all this focus on domestic terror, they completely missed Benghazi before, during and after the incident.  To say the focus was in the wrong direction is an understatement. Remember this?

She never backed down from this 2009 statement, and yet they never prevented the Boston Marathon bombers and only caught some of the other attempted domestic terrorism efforts because of the public's awareness.

Their focus seems like it has always been on these supposed right wing extremists.  There is a jihad going on and it is against conservatives.  What ties all of these scandals together?

1. They didn't have a clue of how to handle Benghazi.
2. They hedged endlessly on Libya.
3. They got it wrong on Iran and Syria.

YET,

1. They believe that domestic terrorism is fundamentally a right wing issue
2. They are using the IRS to harass and intimidate conservative groups
3. They are spying on journalists and the media and viewing them as the enemy.
4. They are spying on Americans. 

It sure seems to add up to an enemies list that is focused on the wrong targets - Americans and not radical Islamic jihadists.

More importantly, is this the liberty that you were promised in America?  The debate over whether the government should prioritize anti-terrorism over liberty never really happened.  We know this because all of these things were happening covertly.  Whatever debate happened in public never really mattered.  When you look at the situation through that prism, liberty seems more illusory than real.

UPDATE: Newt Gingrich was on Hannity last night making the same point about the government collecting all this data and not finding the Boston Marathon bombers. He seemed to argue that they are ineffective.  I would argue that they are ineffective because they are focusing in the wrong direction - domestic instead of overseas, and domestic conservative groups instead of domestic Islamic jihadists.