What?? they are blaming the Paris attacks on Snowden….. that is ludicrous, because France and all the rest of them are still spying on everyone.   They are passing the blame for their own mistakes…. Why did they miss it….?  I think it’s the needle in the haystack that Snowden spoke of….   Terrorists knew long before Snowden how to hide their communications…… long before.   If they didn’t they would be hit by a drone strike…..

 

Why the CIA is smearing Edward Snowden

Security agencies hope to use our fear of terrorism to win backdoor access to our internet communications

 

Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity.

Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several pre-existing adversaries: internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden.

Are we ready to endorse the precept that no human communication can ever take place without the US government being able to monitor it? 

The CIA's former acting director, Michael Morell, blamed the Paris attack on internet companies "building encryption without keys", which, he said, was caused by the debate over surveillance prompted by Snowden's disclosures.

Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein blamed Silicon Valley's privacy safeguards, claiming: "I have asked for help. And I haven't gotten any help."

Former CIA chief James Woolsey​ said Snowden "has blood on his hands" because, he asserted, the Paris attackers learnt from his disclosures how to hide their communications behind encryption. Woolsey also said the National Security Agency whistleblower should be "hanged by the neck until he's dead, rather than merely electrocuted".

In one sense, this blame-shifting tactic is understandable. After all, the CIA, the NSA and similar agencies receive billions of dollars a year from Congress and have been vested by their Senate overseers with virtually unlimited spying power. They have one paramount mission: find and stop people who are plotting terrorist attacks. When they fail, of course, they are desperate to blame others.

The CIA's blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving, was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence the perpetrators in Paris used the internet to plot their attacks, let alone used encryption technology.

Read more @ http://www.theage.com.au/comment/why-the-cia-is-smearing-snowden-20151130-glc080.html

Glenn Greenwald: Why the CIA is smearing Edward Snowden after the Paris attacks

Read more @ http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1126-greenwald-snowden-paris-encryption-20151126-story.html

CIA blames National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden for Paris attacks

AMERICA’S most senior intelligence officers have blamed the Paris attacks on National Security Agency renegade Edward Snowden.

Both the current CIA director John Brennan and his predecessor James Woolsey claimed in separate interviews that leaks by the former contractor taught Islamist terrorists how to use encryption and avoid standard means of electronic communication to evade detection.

This is despite the fact that terrorists are known to have used anti-surveillance techniques since before 9/11 and an independent report last year, which found “no correlation” between updates to jihadist encryption software and Snowden’s leaks.

But according to Mr Brennan: “In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorised disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that have been taken that make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging.

“There has been an increase in the operational security of a number of operatives of these terrorist networks as they have gone to school on what it is that they need to do in order to keep their activities concealed from the authorities.”

Read more @ http://www.news.com.au/technology/cia-blames-national-security-agency-whistleblower-edward-snowden-for-paris-attacks/news-story/9c0be6ad1de03e67214b486126c0a6d7

 

Does Edward Snowden really have blood on his hands over Paris?

 “What Snowden disclosed was the astonishing extent to which the government’s surveillance power had been turned on ordinary citizens. The CIA director knows this"

In a pair of public appearances this week, CIA Director John  Brennan made clear that he blames leaks by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden for enabling terrorists to evade detection.

“Because of a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists,” Brennan said, the CIA and others agencies have lost use of critical tools needed “to find these terrorists.”

Brennan’s assertion has become a refrain in the two years since Snowden exposed details about a range of U.S. surveillance programs. And former CIA director R. James Woolsey went further, saying on Sunday, “I think Snowden has blood on his hands from these killings in France.”

Read more @ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/does-edward-snowden-really-have-blood-on-his-hands-over-paris-a6740626.html

 

Blaming Snowden For The Paris Attacks – OpEd

When intelligence services fail their calling; when institutions armed to the teeth with surveillance capacities and anti-terrorism laws falter in preventing what was their purpose to prevent, the cult of blame is bound to surface. Given his role in blowing the lid off the surveillance complex of infinite growth and finite gain, Edward Snowden was always fair game after the Paris attacks.

The wounded within the intelligence fraternity strike out with inevitable fury. They were caught with their pants down, an observation more acute given the French surveillance padding introduced after the Charlie Hebdo killings of January this year. This supplemented a 2013 law permitting warrantless surveillance of Internet usage. The French surveillance state was found wanting.

Ha’aretz, through Associated Press, revealed the rather uncomfortable fact that Iraqi intelligence had warned of an ISIS attack a day prior to the slaughter in Paris, conveying a dispatch by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that coalition countries were in for blows. The attacks “in the coming days” would be deployed against countries fighting in Iraq and Syria, and would also include Iran and Russia, employing “bombings or assassinations or hostage taking in the coming days.” [1]

The response? This is the sort of communication French intelligence receives, according to a French security official quizzed on this, received “all the time” and “every day”.

This was subsequently disputed by four Iraqi intelligence officials who conveyed warnings that France was specified in the listing, with details about where the attackers may have trained for their Parisian terror sojourn. Given that the venue was Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State’s declared de facto capital, eyes should have opened wide in anticipation.

The intelligence also featured warnings about how a sleeper cell would be triggered to assist the attackers, an enterprise involving 24 people, with 19 attackers and five others steering the endeavour and responsible for logistics. This, it would seem, is a bloated security complex so overdeveloped it has lost sight of its feet.

Read more @ http://www.eurasiareview.com/19112015-blaming-snowden-for-the-paris-attacks-oped/

 

Glenn Greenwald: It's 'Irrational' To Blame Paris Terrorism On Snowden

"Many large scale terrorist attacks have been successfully perpetrated well before anyone ever heard the name Edward Snowden."

Glenn Greenwald called claims that Edward Snowden was to blame for last week's attacks in Paris "unbelievably irrational" in a conversation with HuffPost Live on Monday.

The Snowden confidant said that he's not surprised by attempts to link Snowden to the terror in Paris because doing so redirects blame that should be placed on intelligence agencies. Greenwald explained:

If you think about who's actually trying to convince people to blame [Snowden], it's current and former officials at the CIA, the NSA and other government agencies. And if you think about their predicament, these are people who receive billions and billions of dollars every year in American taxpayer money and have been vested with enormous radical authorities ... and they have only one mission, and their mission is to find terror plots. And so when they fail miserably in their job and dozens of people die, as just happened in Paris, of course they're petrified that people are going to look to them and say, 'Why did you fail in your job?' So what they want to do is point the finger at other people and say, 'Oh, don't think about us, don't look at us, don't ask why we failed even though we have all this money. Look over there are Edward Snowden, it's his fault.'

 Greenwald added that the world's history of terror attacks is proof that it doesn't make sense to accuse Snowden of teaching the attackers in Paris how to evade surveillance.

Read more @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/glenn-greenwald-irrational-to-blame-snowden-leaks-for-paris-terrorists_564b4005e4b08cda348a7d00?section=australia&adsSiteOverride=au

 

OPED: Why the CIA is smearing Snowden

Read more @ http://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/opinion/2015/11/30/oped-why-cia-smearing-snowden/76563780/

 

Don’t blame Edward Snowden for terror in Paris

As soon as some picture of the Paris attacks began to come into focus, the debate over Edward Snowden started again. Senior officials are now saying the former contractor’s leaks made it harder to catch the perpetrators of the atrocity in France. The known facts so far tell a different story.

Last Monday, CIA director John Brennan said terrorists had practiced more “operational security” after leaks about some intelligence programmes. The next day, Politico published an interview with Brennan’s predecessor, Michael Morell, who said Snowden’s leaks helped contribute to the rise of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and that had they not occurred, the West would have had a “fighting chance” to prevent the terror in Paris. Former CIA director James Woolsey over the weekend was more explicit, saying Snowden has “blood on his hands”.

The case against Snowden emerged after some European officials said the attack’s plotters in Belgium, France and Syria likely used encrypted messaging applications. FBI Director James Comey has said easy-to-use encrypted communications technology creates “dark spaces”, making it harder (though not impossible) for the bureau to intercept these conversations.

The question now is whether Snowden’s disclosures caused terrorists to be more cautious, and use this technology to foil the efforts of governments to find them. Senior US officials have made variations of this claim since 2013. Morell, for example, wrote in his memoir published this year that terror networks monitored by US intelligence “went dark” after some of the Snowden stories were published.

Read more @ http://gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/don-t-blame-edward-snowden-for-terror-in-paris-1.1624295

 

Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack: ‘He was small and lithe, like a house cat’

The Indian novelist recalls an extraordinary encounter in a Moscow hotel with the NSA whistleblower

The Moscow Un-Summit wasn’t a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that John Cusack, Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war) and I didn’t get the cautious, diplomatic, regulation Edward Snowden. The downshot (that isn’t a word, I know) is that the jokes, the humour and repartee that took place in Room 1001 cannot be reproduced. The Un-Summit cannot be written about in the detail that it deserves. Yet it definitely cannot not be written about. Because it did happen. And because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations. And this, certainly, was a real one.

What mattered, perhaps even more than what was said, was the spirit in the room. There was Edward Snowden who, after 9/11, was in his own words “straight up singing highly of Bush” and signing up for the Iraq war. And there were those of us who, after 9/11, had been straight up doing exactly the opposite. It was a little late for this conversation, of course. Iraq has been all but destroyed. And now the map of what is so condescendingly called the “Middle East” is being brutally redrawn (yet again). But still, there we were, all of us, talking to each other in a bizarre hotel in Russia. Bizarre it certainly was.

The opulent lobby of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton was teeming with drunk millionaires, high on new money, and gorgeous, high-stepping young women, half peasant, half supermodel, draped on the arms of toady men – gazelles on their way to fame and fortune, paying their dues to the satyrs who would get them there. In the corridors, you passed serious fistfights, loud singing and quiet, liveried waiters wheeling trolleys with towers of food and silverware in and out of rooms. In Room 1001 we were so close to the Kremlin that if you put your hand out of the window, you could almost touch it. It was snowing outside. We were deep into the Russian winter – never credited enough for its part in the second world war. Edward Snowden was much smaller than I thought he’d be. Small, lithe, neat, like a house cat. He greeted Dan ecstatically and us warmly. “I know why you’re here,” he said to me, smiling. “Why?” “To radicalise me.” I laughed.

We settled down on various perches, stools, chairs and John’s bed. Dan and Ed were so pleased to meet each other, and had so much to say to each other, that it felt a little impolite to intrude on them. At times they broke into some kind of arcane code language: “I jumped from nobody on the street, straight to TSSCI.” “No, because, again, this isn’t DS at all, this is NSA. At CIA, it’s called COMO.” “It’s kind of a similar role, but is it under support?” “PRISEC or PRIVAC?” “They start out with the TALENT KEYHOLE thing. Everyone then gets read into TS, SI, TK, and GAMMA-G clearance... Nobody knows what it is…”

We spoke about whether the economic sanctions and subsequent invasion of Iraq could be accurately called genocide

It took a while before I felt it was all right to interrupt them. Snowden’s disarming answer to my question about being photographed cradling the American flag was to roll his eyes and say: “Oh, man. I don’t know. Somebody handed me a flag, they took a picture.” And when I asked him why he signed up for the Iraq war, when millions of people all over the world were marching against it, he replied, equally disarmingly: “I fell for the propaganda.”

Dan talked at some length about how it would be unusual for US citizens who joined the Pentagon and the National Security Agency to have read much literature on US exceptionalism and its history of warfare. (And once they joined, it was unlikely to be a subject that interested them.) He and Ed had watched it play out live, in real time, and were horrified enough to stake their lives and their freedom when they decided to be whistleblowers. What the two of them clearly had in common was a strong, almost corporeal sense of moral righteousness – of right and wrong.

A sense of righteousness that was obviously at work not just when they decided to blow the whistle on what they thought to be morally unacceptable, but also when they signed up for their jobs – Dan to save his country from communism, Ed to save it from Islamist terrorism. What they did when they grew disillusioned was so electrifying, so dramatic, that they have come to be identified by that single act of moral courage.

I asked Ed Snowden what he thought about Washington’s ability to destroy countries and its inability to win a war (despite mass surveillance). I think the question was phrased quite rudely – something like, “When was the last time the United States won a war?” We spoke about whether the economic sanctions and subsequent invasion of Iraq could be accurately called genocide. We talked about how the CIA knew – and was preparing for the fact – that the world was heading to a place of not just inter-country war but of intra-country war, in which mass surveillance would be necessary to control populations. And about how armies were being turned into police forces to administer countries they have invaded and occupied, while the police – even in places such as India and Pakistan and Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States – were being trained to behave like armies to quell internal insurrections.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/28/conversation-edward-snowden-arundhati-roy-john-cusack-interview

 

Victims of SMS cat facts spam made to tweet at Edward Snowden for release

Read more @ http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-culture/victims-of-cat-facts-twitter-spam-made-to-tweet-at-edward-snowden-for-release-20151119-gl3gu0.html

 

Here's why everyone is tweeting 'Meow, I <3 catfacts' to Edward Snowden

Read more @ http://www.businessinsider.com.au/heres-why-everyone-is-tweeting-meow-i-2015-11

 

Silicon Valley by sea: Titans of tech pay $10,000 to party on networking cruise that offers everything from sunrise yoga and world-class cuisine to a live talk with Edward Snowden - but no Wi-Fi

The biggest names in tech traveled across the country from Silicon Valley earlier this month for a four-day, invite-only cruise that set sail on November 13 from Miami.

The second-annual Summit at Sea was both a networking event and party for the 3,000 carefully curated influencers onboard.

And while the lineup of impressive speakers may have been the main draw for most of those on the trip, there was also a wide variety of classes that were offered including sunrise yoga, calligraphy workshops, 3D figure painting classes, and live demonstrations and tutorials on shark tagging. 

Best of all, guests had plenty of time to enjoy this wide variety of classes as well as the panels over the course of the four days - which included a live interview with Edward Snowden - because there was no Wi-Fi access on the ship save the 10 computers in the main lobby.

Read more @ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3328277/Silicon-Valley-sea-Titans-tech-pay-10-000-party-networking-cruise-offers-sunrise-yoga-world-class-cuisine-live-talk-Edward-Snowden-no-Wi-Fi.html

 

Edward Snowden Continues To Bring Out Differences Between Civil Libertarians And Advocates Of The Surveillance State

The recent vote by the European Parliament calling on member states to protect whistle blower Edward Snowden from extradition and  prosecution, while largely symbolic, demonstrates how the United States government is conservative by international standards. This was seen again in the past week when, with absolutely no evidence to back them, some in the intelligence community used the recent terrorist attack in Paris to make Snowden the scapegoat. Glenn Greenwald has debunked these arguments:

The CIA’s former acting director, Michael Morell, blamed the Paris attack on Internet companies “building encryption without keys,” which, he said, was caused by the debate over surveillance prompted by Snowden’s disclosures. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) blamed Silicon Valley’s privacy safeguards, claiming: “I have asked for help. And I haven’t gotten any help.”

Former CIA chief James Woolsey said Snowden “has blood on his hands” because, he asserted, the Paris attackers learned from his disclosures how to hide their communications behind encryption. Woolsey thus decreed on CNN that the NSA whistleblower should be “hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.”

 In one sense, this blame-shifting tactic is understandable. After all, the CIA, the NSA and similar agencies receive billions of dollars annually from Congress and have been vested by their Senate overseers with virtually unlimited spying power. They have one paramount mission: find and stop people who are plotting terrorist attacks. When they fail, of course they are desperate to blame others. The CIA’s blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving, was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence that the perpetrators in Paris used the Internet to plot their attacks, let alone used encryption technology.

CIA officials simply made that up. It is at least equally likely that the attackers formulated their plans in face-to-face meetings. The central premise of the CIA’s campaign — encryption enabled the attackers to evade our detection — is baseless.

Even if they had used encryption, what would that prove? Are we ready to endorse the precept that no human communication can ever take place without the U.S. government being able to monitor it? To prevent the CIA and FBI from “going dark” on terrorism plots that are planned in person, should we put Orwellian surveillance monitors in every room of every home that can be activated whenever someone is suspected of plotting?

The claim that the Paris attackers learned to use encryption from Snowden is even more misleading. For many years before anyone heard of Snowden, the U.S. government repeatedly warned that terrorists were using highly advanced means of evading American surveillance…

Greenwald elaborated more on this, and concluded with a general warning about how the government uses terrorism as an excuse to infringe upon civil liberties:

Read more @ http://themoderatevoice.com/211048/edward-snowden-continues-to-bring-out-differences-between-civil-libertarians-and-advocates-of-the-surveillance-state/

 

US ends phone data collection exposed by Edward Snowden

Washington: The US government has halted its controversial program to collect vast troves of information from Americans' phone calls, a move prompted by the revelations of former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

Privacy advocates and some tech firms are welcoming the end of the bulk gathering of so-called "metadata," but some security hawks fear law enforcement will be hampered in their efforts to thwart terror attacks.

Read more @ http://www.ibnlive.com/news/world/us-ends-phone-data-collection-exposed-by-edward-snowden-1170784.html

 

NSA phone data program exposed by Edward Snowden expires Saturday

The National Security Agency is scheduled to end its dragnet collection of data on phone calls that use domestic carriers Saturday night — the most significant change in U.S. intelligence-gathering since Edward Snowden revealed details of the agency's programs two years ago.

Under the Patriot Act approved by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA had been permitted to gather records about phone calls and hunt through them to discover connections to al-Qaida and other groups.

The legal authority for that system expires Saturday. Under a new law, the NSA must ask phone companies for records on a case-by-case basis. That gives the agency access to a greater volume of phone records than before.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Friday that the new program limits the data collected to "the greatest extent reasonably practicable."

Read more @ http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-nsa-phone-program-20151127-story.html

 

Why Edward Snowden thinks you should use an ad blocker

It's no secret that ad blocking software is on the rise. One study released by Adobe and Pagefair, a company that tries to help publishers get around ad blocking tech, earlier this year found that there are 45 million active ad-block users in the United States -- a figure that increased 48 percent between June 2014 and June 2015.

And Edward Snowden, the source for a slew of reports in The Washington Post and elsewhere that revealed the extent of the government's digital surveillance capabilities, thinks that's a good thing.

Here's what he said in a recent interview with Micah Lee at the Intercept:

"Everybody should be running adblock software, if only from a safety perspective ...

"We've seen Internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, or whoever it is, insert their own ads into your plaintext http connections ... As long as service providers are serving ads with active content that require the use of JavaScript to display, that have some kind of active content like Flash embedded in it, anything that can be a vector for attack in your web browser -- you should be actively trying to block these. Because if the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response."

Essentially, Snowden is making the security case for using ad blockers.

Read more @ http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20151121/business/151129974/

 

Edward Snowden: Install ad blockers to boost online privacy

Edward Snowden has strongly criticised online ads, and advised Internet users to employ an ad blocker to protect their privacy online.

"Everybody should be running adblock software, if only from a safety perspective.

"We’ve seen internet providers inserting their own ads into your plaintext http connections.

"As long as service providers are serving ads with active content that requires the use of Javascript to display or that have some kind of active content like Flash embedded in it, you should be actively trying to block these.

"Because if the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response," he told online publication The Intercept.

A "malvertising" attack occurs when an ad network unknowingly hosts harmful files which are disguised as ads.

These types of attack have increased over the last few months, with one making the headlines when it infected Yahoo's website.

Most news sites employ dozens of trackers and cookies that gather information about personal web browsing habits which can be used for advertising purposes.

Read more @ http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/technology/edward-snowden-install-ad-blockers-to-boost-online-privacy-34213927.html

 

Edward Snowden Divulges the 5 Easiest Ways to Protect Yourself Online

In a recent interview with The Intercept, Edward Snowden offered some advice for what average citizens can do to reclaim their privacy. Because the sharing of information should be a conversation, not an enigma buried in a site's 'Terms of Service.'

1. This includes Signal, an easy-to-use app that encrypts your mobile phone messages, as long as the person you're calling or texting also has the app installed. Developed by Open Whisper Systems, the app is available for both iOS and Android.

2. The next easy step is to enable two-factor authentication on your accounts. This way an attacker needs not only your password, but also a physical device, like your smartphone, to get the secondary code that opens your account.

3. A password manager, like KeePassX, will ensure your passwords are diversified across all accounts. So, if one account becomes compromised, they won't all become compromised.

Read more @ http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/snowden-explains-why-its-super-easy-to-protect-our-privacy-online 


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~