Dissident Veteran For Peace

Dear Google Content Reviewer: This post has been unpublished and approved for publication multiple times since February 2021. Each time I request review and have it approved it is unpublished again within hours. Apparently, something in the post is triggering an algorithm. Can you please tell me why this post keeps getting unpublished?

Below is the trailer from 2015's A Good American featuring William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis, Thomas Drake (a.k.a. the "NSA Four"), and Diane Roark. Below that are several videos featuring Binney.

A Good American—naturally an Austrian, which is to say non-American, film—tells the astounding, largely untold story of pervasive corruption, incompetence, and/or deliberate misconduct by high government officials in utilizing available threat intelligence. One of the most interesting segments was the discussion of how senior commanders ignored intel that predicted the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam and were never held accountable.

The heart of the film, of course, is the story of the deliberate sabotage of ThinThread, an in-house US National Security Agency program that in all likelihood would have provided actionable intel to stop the 9/11 attacks had it not been shutdown just weeks earlier. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NSA opted for a mass surveillance program carried out via lucrative private contracts. The principal developers of ThinThread—which had strong built-in privacy protections—were thwarted in trying to get other government agencies to take up the technology and, eventually, raided by the FBI after they filed a DoD IG whistleblower complaint.

See also:

• Whistle-blower: Trump likely surveilled for some time (video)
• Ex-NSA official: Spies don't believe Russia collusion story (video)

Labels: 9/11, civil liberties, Edward Snowden, film & television, government, military, National Security Agency, surveillance, Trump, United States

As it turns the 2014 German television interview of Edward Snowden featured below is not widely available. I could only find it on archive.org. Here's an outtake:

If I'm a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who were reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they're working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.

Labels: civil liberties, Edward Snowden, National Security Agency, privacy, surveillance, video

All the quotations below are from the 2019 hardcover edition of Permanent Record, the autobiography of Edward Snowden.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they're gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.

Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America's response.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US Government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. [pp. 77-78]

Comments on the occasion of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011:

The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red-Severe, Orange-High, Yellow-Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation. [p. 204]

To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to a state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a "private" business.

There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry's freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone's. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don't need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You're assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.

Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don't care about freedom of the press because you don't like to read. Or that you don't care about freedom of religion because you don't believe in God. Or that you don't care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you're a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn't mean that it doesn't or won't have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling. [p. 208]

Labels: 9/11, civil liberties, Edward Snowden, National Security Agency, privacy, quotations, surveillance, War

Labels: civil liberties, National Security Agency, privacy, Remy, surveillance, video

[Setting: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson discuss information in the Edward Snowden "revelations" from "The adventure of the extraordinary rendition" by Cory Doctorow]

Holmes to Watson: "Naturally, as those agencies have commanded more ministerial attention, more freedom of action, and more strings-free allocations with which to practice their dark arts, Mycroft's star has only risen. As keen a reasoner as my brother is, he is not impervious to certain common human failings, such as the fallacy that if one does good, then whatever one does in the service of that good cannot be bad."


Watson to Holmes: "I know that malware is the latest in a series of names for computer viruses, and I suppose that 'malware implantation' is the practice of infecting your adversaries with malicious computer code."

H to W: "Quite so. You may have heard, furthermore, of Edgehill, the top secret Strap 1 program whose existence was revealed in one of the Snowden documents?"

W to H: "It rings a bell, but to be honest, I got a sort of fatigue from the Snowden news—it was all so technical, and so dismal."

H to W: "Tedium and dismalness are powerful weapons—far more powerful than secrecy in many cases. Any bit of business that can be made sufficiently tedious and overcomplexified naturally repels public attention and all but the most diligent of investigators. Think of the allegedly public hearings that demand their attendees sit through seven or eight hours of monotonic formalities before the main business is tabled—or of the lengthy, tedious documents our friends in Brussels and Westminster are so fond of. If you want to do something genuinely evil, it is best for you that it also be fantastically dull."


[An excerpt from Jacob Appelbaum's "Letter to a young selector".]

In war, surveillance is obvious. Watching an enemy seems as natural as the coming of winter. But even in "peacetime," surveillance is never a matter of peace. Proponents of surveillance often paint a picture of terrorism versus surveillance, when in reality surveillance is used in service of nonconsensual control of all kinds, including extreme acts of terror. It is used to more effectively extract economic value, to squelch dissent, to undermine, and to harm with the information gathered. Those who wield power over surveillance systems will use them to more effectively target, censor, murder, and wage war. Surveillance is violence and it makes other kinds of violence more likely.


Source: Laura Poitras, ed., Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living under Total Surveillance (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016) pp. 42, 44, 156.

Labels: Edward Snowden, National Security Agency, surveillance, technology

"The Three Percenters - Original" (TTPO) bills itself as "a national organization made up of patriotic citizens who love their country, their freedoms, and their liberty [and] are committed to standing against and exposing corruption and injustice." They further claim "We are NOT a militia" and "We are NOT anti-government."

Nevertheless they have been branded by the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which works closely with US law enforcement, as part of the "sector of the radical right known as the 'Patriot' or antigovernment extremist movement". According to the "anti-hate activists" at the SPLC, the " 'Patriot' movement ... includes the militia movement, which comprises groups such as the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, who actively engage in paramilitary activities."

TTPO has been similarly and negatively profiled by Political Research Associates and media outlets (see e.g. here and here and here). They have also been targeted by the Anti-Defamation League, another outfit with a history of legally-actionable defamation and of spying on constitutionally-protected activities.

As a result, TTPO has indicated that the SPLC is an example of an external threat "defined as 'those threats and forces that originate from an individual or organization that does not identify nor ever has identified themselves as belonging to the patriot movement and have aligned themselves in staunch opposition of The Three Percenters Original or our affiliates and allies and have through direct action and behavior sought to harm, damage and defame our members or this organization and allies or affiliates damaging than threats posed to us from an external source." Thus, the SPLC is subject to placement on TTPO's official "Blacklist".

TTPO has also adopted, in their national bylaws, communications standards that designate "the forum located at ​www.thethreepercenters.org" as "the primary method of communications between all levels". The national and all of their state chapters have Facebook pages. The bylaws also state: "The use of Facebook pages should only be used for non-sensitive postings or to alert members to a posting on the forum."

So, I suppose someone thinks TTPO has implemented some level of communications security. Here's what I don't get: If you know you are an active target why would you have any Facebook pages at all for your group at any all level unless you want to give Facebook ("the perfect mass surveillance tool"), the National Security Agency, and law enforcement a great means to collect data on your members and supporters?

The national TTPO Facebook page has 166,922 likes and 166,896 followers—an intel treasure trove giveaway by TTPO, a group that claims: "Our goal is to utilize the failsafes put in place by our founders to rein in an overreaching government and push back against tyranny." I'm neither a supporter nor an opponent of TTPO—I'm not making a judgment about their purposes or activities. I'm highlighting the striking disconnect between what they claim to stand for and what they've done with Facebook.

Update: The Clowns (or is it Agents?) of TTPO

Labels: civil liberties, National Security Agency, politics, privacy, repression, surveillance, Three Percenters