Richard and All,
As I began reading this Opinion Column by Edward Jay Epstein, I
thought he was about to reveal "evidence" that Edward Snowden had
provided information that helped the Russians to tamper with our Free
Presidential Election. In fact, this may well be the next step of
Mister Epstein.
Of course he is writing from his lofty position as an "investigative
reporter", and his investigation is exactly what one would expect the
unbiased Wall Street Journal to publish.
But a Fairy Tale is still a Fairy Tale, no matter who writes it or
where it is printed.
Because those who dabble in the government's deep dark secrets are
never permitted to divulge their "secret" sources, there is no way of
challenging their "Professional" opinion. So setting Mister Epstein's
column aside, the question is, why do Mister Epstein and other
columnists find it so important to trash and re-trash Edward Snowden?
And more important, who determines which secret documents are too
delicate to ever share with the American Public? Since most of those
guarding the gates are appointed to their task, who determines their
qualifications? Since we know how our elected officials stretch the
truth and even tell fabricated tales, we don't want them appointing
those responsible for determining which secrets are the ones that
we'll never know about.
Look at this past presidential election. After all the mud slinging
settled, would anyone want to trust either Clinton or Trump with our
most secret documents? And yet, that is exactly what we are doing.
The day will come, and this is a fact that I gleaned from my most
reliable and trusty secret sources, the day will come when Edward
Snowden will be hailed as one of our nation's most Patriotic of
Americans. But not before the Empire has totally trashed him and
completely ruined his personal life. God Bless America!
Carl Jarvis
On 1/2/17, Richard Driscoll <llocsirdsr@att.net> wrote:
> http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrTcca_lGpYHvkAKCIPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByb2lvbXVuBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg--/RV=2/RE=1483408703/RO=10/RU=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wsj.com%2farticles%2fthe-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143%3fmod%3dtrending_now_1/RK=0/RS=S9S6B.H3CtY2anEFaatLSX1NjB4-
>
> All:
>
> I found this article in the WSJ. I think it is very interesting. We
> haven't had any commentary about Mr. Snowden for a good while.
>
> Richard
>
>
> * Commentary <http://www.wsj.com/news/types/commentary-u-s>
>
>
> The Fable of Edward Snowden
>
>
> As he seeks a pardon, the NSA thief has told multiple lies about
> what he stole and his dealings with Russian intelligence.
>
> 0:00 / 0:00
> Opinion Journal Video: Investigative Journalist Edward Jay Epstein on
> why the American spy doesn't deserve a presidential pardon. Photo: Reuters
> By
> Edward Jay Epstein
> Updated Dec. 30, 2016 10:21 p.m. ET
> 812 COMMENTS
> <http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143?mod=trending_now_1#livefyre-comment>
>
>
>
> Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of
> secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via
> Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never
> intended to engage in espionage, and was only a "whistleblower" seeking
> to expose the overreach of NSA's information gathering. With the clock
> ticking on Mr. Snowden's chance of a pardon, now is a good time to
> review what we have learned about his real mission.
>
> Mr. Snowden's theft of America's most closely guarded communication
> secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed
> against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr.
> Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training
> for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of
> the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some
> six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work,
> emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for
> epilepsy.
>
> This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in
> Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had
> stolen from the NSA.
>
> This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my
> investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the
> narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in
> Oliver Stone's 2016 movie, "Snowden," is demonstrably false.
>
> This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where
> he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary
> filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian.
> Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr.
> Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.
>
> To provide them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden
> culled several thousand documents out of his huge cache of stolen
> material, including two explosive documents he asked them to use in
> their initial stories. One was the now-famous secret order from
> America's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court requiring Verizon
> to turn over to the NSA its billing records for its phone users in the
> U.S. The other was an NSA slide presentation detailing its ability to
> intercept communications of non-American users of the internet via a
> joint program with the FBI code-named Prism.
>
> These documents were published in 2013 on June 5 and 6, followed by a
> video in which he identified himself as the leaker and a whistleblower.
>
> At the heart of Mr. Snowden's narrative was his claim that while he may
> have incidentally "touched" other data in his search of NSA files, he
> took only documents that exposed the malfeasance of the NSA and gave all
> of them to journalists.
>
> Yet even as Mr. Snowden's narrative was taking hold in the public realm,
> a secret damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very
> different story. According to a unanimous report
> <http://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_review_declassified.pdf>
>
> declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee on
> Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had "removed"
> (not merely touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based
> on, among other evidence, electronic logs that recorded the selection,
> copying and moving of documents.
>
> The number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were
> willing to say in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the
> House committee had the benefit of the Pentagon's more-extensive
> investigation. But even just taking into account the material that Mr.
> Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report concluded
> that he compromised "secrets that protect American troops overseas and
> secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and
> nation-states." These were, the report said, "merely the tip of the
> iceberg."
>
> The Pentagon's investigation during 2013 and 2014 employed hundreds of
> military-intelligence officers, working around the clock, to review all
> 1.5 million documents. Most had nothing to do with domestic surveillance
> or whistle blowing. They were mainly military secrets, as Gen. Martin
> Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the
> House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014.
>
> It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden's theft but the quality that was
> most telling. Mr. Snowden's theft put documents at risk that could
> reveal the NSA's Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing
> the NSA's most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was
> created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to
> penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.
>
> Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to
> steal. In an interview in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post on June
> 15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA,
> even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of
> computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.
>
> He evidently succeeded. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Richard
> Ledgett, the NSA executive who headed the damage-assessment team,
> described one lengthy document taken by Mr. Snowden that, if it fell
> into the wrong hands, would provide a "road map" to what targets abroad
> the NSA was, and was not, covering. It contained the requests made by
> the 17 U.S. services in the so-called Intelligence Community for NSA
> interceptions abroad.
>
> On June 23, less than two weeks after Mr. Snowden released the video
> that helped present his narrative, he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow,
> where he received protection by the Russian government. In much of the
> media coverage that followed, the ultimate destination of these stolen
> secrets was fogged over—if not totally obscured from the public—by the
> unverified claims that Mr. Snowden was spoon feeding to handpicked
> journalists.
>
> In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he was a conscientious
> "whistleblower" who turned over all the stolen NSA material to
> journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted he had no intention of
> defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America when he was
> trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to demonize him.
>
> For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, "I'm in
> exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me
> exiled" and "chose to keep me in Russia." According to Mr. Snowden, the
> U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport
> while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus
> forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin's regime.
>
> None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden's
> passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow
> on June 23. The "Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong
> authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden's passport was revoked June
> 22," according to the State Department's senior watch officer, as
> reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.
>
> Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government's pursuit of
> him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14,
> had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him
> while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline
> because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot
> <http://quotes.wsj.com/AFLT.MZ>, an airline which the Russian government
> effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow
> Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had neither a
> valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly
> Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.
>
> By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane
> departed Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to
> conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further
> revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia's Izvestia
> newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a
> security team in a "special operation."
>
> Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir Putin personally authorized
> this assistance after Mr. Snowden met with Russian officials in Hong
> Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a televised press conference on Sept. 2,
> 2013.
>
> To provide a smokescreen for Mr. Snowden's escape from Hong Kong,
> WikiLeaks (an organization that the Obama administration asserted to be
> a tool of Russian intelligence after the hacking of Democratic Party
> leaders' email in 2016) booked a dozen or more diversionary flight
> reservations to other destinations for Mr. Snowden.
>
> WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison, his
> deputy at WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowden's expenses
> and escort him to Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowden's arrival in Moscow was
> neither accidental nor the work of the U.S. government.
>
> Mr. Snowden's own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only
> empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote
> in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving
> in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few
> weeks earlier in Hawaii.
>
> As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin
> insiders who were in a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually
> brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich, was the
> first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the Duma
> (Russia's parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden's defection. "Let's be
> frank," Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016,
> "Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do."
>
> The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer
> and Mr. Putin's friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between
> Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities. On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena
> gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia
> Today television.
>
> When Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all
> the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr.
> Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given "some" of the NSA's documents
> in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. "So he [Mr. Snowden] does
> have some materials that haven't been made public yet?" Ms. Shevardnadze
> asked. "Certainly," Mr. Kucherena answered.
>
> This disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained
> why NSA documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the
> journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the
> NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued
> to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents
> released via WikiLeaks.
>
> As this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden's narrative, I went to
> Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation,
> Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was
> accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to
> Moscow.
>
> Mr. Snowden's narrative also includes the assertion that he was neither
> debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government official after he
> arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs counter to findings
> of U.S. intelligence. According to the House Permanent Select Committee
> on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he arrived in Moscow, "has
> had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services."
> This finding is consistent with Russian debriefing practices, as
> described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I spoke in Moscow
>
> Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in Moscow in December 2013 to have
> secrets in his head, including "access to every target, every active
> operation. Full lists of them." Could Mr. Snowden's Russian hosts ignore
> such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had authorized his exfiltration to
> Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit options, was in the palm of their
> hands. Under such circumstances, as Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his
> June NPR interview: "If there's a possibility to get information, they
> [the Russian intelligence services] will get it."
>
> The transfer of state secrets from Mr. Snowden to Russia did not occur
> in a vacuum. The intelligence war did not end with the termination of
> the Cold War; it shifted to cyberspace. Even if Russia could not match
> the NSA's state-of-the-art sensors, computers and productive
> partnerships with the cipher services of Britain, Israel, Germany and
> other allies, it could nullify the U.S. agency's edge by obtaining its
> sources and methods from even a single contractor with access to Level 3
> documents.
>
> Russian intelligence uses a single umbrella term to cover anyone who
> delivers it secret intelligence. Whether a person acted out of
> idealistic motives, sold information for money or remained clueless of
> the role he or she played in the transfer of secrets—the provider of
> secret data is considered an "espionage source." By any measure, it is a
> job description that fits Mr. Snowden.
>
> /Mr. Epstein's book, "How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the
> Man and the Theft," will be published by Knopf in January./
>
>
No comments:
Post a Comment