RFKJ's Big Brother vision for America

 

And shortly thereafter, perhaps during Trump's third term, they will be implants.

Both of which will make some corporation outrageously wealthy.  Apple?  TrumpKennedy Implants?

Big Brother is here

LG is getting a little too personal.

Big Brother Is Here - Part 2

RT has an article that breaks down the CIA leaks as to device and the capability for hacking into it.  Included are Apple, Microsoft and Android (specifically Samsung, HTC and Sony) devices.

Read it here.

Excerpts:

These [capabilities] include, but are not limited to: air gap jumping viruses such as ‘Hammer Drill’ that are capable of infecting computers or phones that have never been connected to the internet; hacking tools that focus on removable devices such as USB drives; systems for hiding data, be it in covert disk areas or in images.

[...]

Before any tech experts gloat, WikiLeaks also alleges that the CIA has developed advanced, multi-platform malware attack and control systems that cover Windows and Mac OS X but also mixed source platforms like Solaris and open source platforms like Linux.

  RT

Pretty much everything.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother Is Here

Maybe it really did start in 1984.

At a time when consumers everywhere are being urged to avail themselves of the “internet of things”, it turns out that the CIA got there first (by a long way). And it is not just we who have the ability to control our appliances – from our computers to our phones to our televisions, even our front-door locks, heating systems and, potentially, our cars – but the thousands beavering away on the government payrolls at Langley, Virginia, and Cheltenham, England.

[...]

[T]he publication of a huge cache of secret data, courtesy of WikiLeaks, will not only confirm your worst fears but suggest that the US and UK intelligence services have already gone much further in their planning than most of us had contemplated in our wildest imaginings.

[...]

[H]owever relaxed you may be about personal privacy, you probably don’t want the security services – friendly or otherwise – logging on to your computer during the night, monitoring your activities via your television or second-guessing your in-car computer.

[...]

And who gave the authority for the sort and scale of electronic intrusion that is now possible?

[...]

I am going to treat the Samsung smart TV in the corner of our sitting room with a new respect. I might try saying “good morning” and “good evening” to it, politely, even try out a few languages. If and when it replies in Mandarin, then it is probably far too late to be worried.

  The Guardian

Anbody who was worried about domestic surveillance and bought a smart TV after the Edward Snowden revelations is not smart enough to stay ahead of the game.

The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

The leak, named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age.

[...]

The new documents appear to be from the CIA’s 200-strong Center for Cyber Intelligence and show in detail how the agency’s digital specialists engage in hacking. Monday’s leak of about 9,000 secret files, which WikiLeaks said was only the first tranche of documents it had obtained, were all relatively recent, running from 2013 to 2016.

[...]

A programme called Weeping Angel describes how to attack a Samsung F8000 TV set so that it appears to be off but can still be used for monitoring.

[...]

In ‘Fake Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert CIA server.”

  Guardian

Weeping Angel indeed.

[I]t is understood the documents are genuine and a hunt is under way for the leakers or hackers responsible for the leak.

I bet. I wonder if this is the "second leaker" mentioned in the Snowden documentary, or if this is a new person. The ship of state is getting awfully leaky. So I also wonder if the state's habit of busting brilliant teenage hackers and offering them a job with the government as an alternative to prison has been a short-sighted approach.

Asked about the claims regarding vulnerabilities in consumer products, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said: “I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously that’s something that’s not been fully evaluated.”

Are they worried about T-Rump's obsessive TV-viewing?  Hopefully he doesn't have a smart TV.

Asked about Trump’s praise for WikiLeaks during last year’s election, when it published emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, Spicer told the Guardian: “The president said there’s a difference between Gmail accounts and classified information. The president made that distinction a couple of weeks ago.”

Except Hillary's email account contained classified information. So...where's the difference?

WikiLeaks has been criticised in the past for dumping documents on the internet unredacted and this time the names of officials and other information have been blacked out.

WikiLeaks shared the information in advance with Der Spiegel in Germany and La Repubblica in Italy.

My 85-year-old mother says she's happy to have the government know everything so they can catch the "bad guys". It was no use pointing out to her that the "bad guys" obviously know how to avoid getting caught because the government hasn't been too successful at catching them before they strike unless the government was the one putting them up to it in the first place. She's not alone. I've heard that sentiment in lines at airports every time I've flown anywhere.

Now, I ask you, how could the CIA catch "bad guys" through exploiting the ability to hack your TV? How will they get all the bad guys to buy a Samsung smart TV? And if they don't, what's the point of "Fake Off" mode? Who are they watching?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Vermont "Hacking" Incident - Even Worse

Recall that the Washington Post recently published an article saying the state of Vermont's electric grid had been hacked by the Russians. They quickly had to retract, saying the offensive software was found on a laptop that wasn't even connected to the grid. Turns out, it wasn't even that big of a deal. This is not only highly unprofessional of the Post, it's extremely dangerous.

The Post has now (unironically and unapologetically) had to publish this article:

An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn’t being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity.

[...]

The Post initially reported incorrectly that the country’s electric grid had been penetrated through a Vermont utility. After Burlington Electric released its statement saying that the potentially compromised laptop had not been connected to the grid, The Post immediately corrected its article and later added an editor’s note explaining the change.

U.S. officials are continuing to investigate the laptop. In the course of their investigation, though, they have found on the device a package of software tools commonly used by online criminals to deliver malware. The package, known as Neutrino, does not appear to be connected with Grizzly Steppe, which U.S. officials have identified as the Russian hacking operation. The FBI, which declined to comment, is continuing to investigate how the malware got onto the laptop.

  WaPo

Christ. How does any malware get on anyone's laptop? Absolutely commonplace on insufficiently protected computers, and sometimes on highly protected ones. I'd like to see figures on what percent of computers in this country get infected by malware.

But, that doesn't even appear to be the case here. The computer in question simply connected to an IP address. For what duration, we aren't told, but from this latest information, it didn't necessarily download any malware during the connection.

Initially, company officials publicly said they had detected code that had been linked by the Department of Homeland Security to Grizzly Steppe.

Over the weekend, the company issued a statement, saying only that it had “detected suspicious Internet traffic” on the computer in question.

That can happen to anyone on any computer anywhere every single day. If your anti-virus software is good enough, it won't let your computer be infected. And by good enough, I mean able to keep up with the constant barrage of new code created by hackers round the clock. No mean feat.

Experts also said that because Yahoo’s mail servers are visited by millions of people each day, the fact that a Burlington Electric employee checking email touched off an alert is not an indication that the Russian government was targeting the utility.

[...]

Authorities also were leaking information about the utility without having all the facts and before law enforcement officials were able to investigate further.

[...]

“Federal officials have indicated that the specific type of Internet traffic, related to recent malicious cyber activity that was reported by us [on Friday], also has been observed elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric,” company spokesman Mike Kanarick said in a statement.

[...]

“It’s not descriptive of anything in particular,” said Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos, a cybersecurity firm.

Bingo. The USG, rushing to react to the growing rabble of voices declaring Russia a bad actor in our election, and to appear to be doing something about it, sent out a report to companies like the Vermont utility provider listing a number of IP addresses to look for in their computer logs without any detail about what it meant or what they should do if they found any of them other than report it to the DHS. How could anything go wrong with that?

At least 30 percent of the IP addresses listed were commonly used sites such as public proxy servers used to mask a user’s location, and servers run by Amazon.com and Yahoo.

[...]

The IP address information alone is not useful, experts noted. Moreover, a server that is used by Russian spies one year might be used by “granny’s bake shop” the next, Lee said.

Or, the same year. At the same exact time.

And, you know what's especially ironic?

Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.

He needs to have a talk with them.

“No one should be making any attribution conclusions purely from the indicators in the [government] report,” tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, which investigated the DNC hack and attributed it to the Russian government. “It was all a jumbled mess.’’

Nice talk from someone who provided the questionable information that started the jumbled mess.

A senior DHS official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive security matter, defended the report.

“We know the Russians are a highly capable adversary who conduct technical operations in a manner intended to blend into legitimate traffic,” the official said. The indicators of compromise contained in the report, he said, “are indicative of that. That’s why it’s so important for net defenders to leverage the recommended mitigations contained in the [report], implement best practices, and analyze their logs for traffic emanating from those IPs, because the Russians are going to try and hide evidence of their intrusion and presence in the network.”

And here's the key: the Russians are quite capable of doing just that. Hiding it. Not having it out there where you can simply run down a list of IP addresses and find it. But hey, thanks for reflexively doing the government's bidding by reporting to it information that you have no freaking idea what it really means, without any kind of court order or legal assurance. You'll be very useful to Big Brother.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother Is Everywhere

Earlier this month, a special British court that rules on secret spying activities issued an emphatic denunciation of the nation’s domestic mass surveillance programs. [...British security] agencies, the court found, “operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years.”

[...]

On Thursday, an even more scathing condemnation of mass surveillance was issued by the Federal Court of Canada. The ruling “faulted Canada’s domestic spy agency for unlawfully retaining data and for not being truthful with judges who authorize its intelligence programs.” Most remarkable was that these domestic, mass surveillance activities were not only illegal, but completely unknown to virtually the entire population in Canadian democracy.

[...]

The third scandal also comes from Canada – a critical partner in the Five Eyes spying alliance along with the U.S. and UK – where law enforcement officials in Montreal are now defending “a highly controversial decision to spy on a La Presse columnist [Patrick Lagacé, who had enraged police officials by investigating their abusive conduct] by tracking his cellphone calls and texts and monitoring his whereabouts as part of a necessary internal police investigation.” [...T]he ensuing scrutiny revealed that police had actually “tracked the calls and movements of six journalists that year after news reports based on leaks revealed Michel Arsenault, then president of Quebec’s largest labour federation, had his phone tapped.”

[...]

Western officials are indeed addicted to unaccountable, secretive, abusive systems of mass surveillance used against their own citizens and foreigners alike, and the more those systems take root, the more core liberties are eroded.

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Brave New World

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $4 billion into efforts to transform public education in the U.S., is pushing to develop an "engagement pedometer." Biometric devices wrapped around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments excite and interest them -- and which fall flat.

The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall.

The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers' emotional response to advertising.

[...]

Any device that helps a teacher identify and meet student needs "is a good thing," said Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that receives funding from the Gates Foundation. "We have to be really open to what technology can bring."

[...]

In fact the sensors do not distinguish between fear and interest, between boredom and relaxation, so researchers plan to videotape each class that uses the biosensors. That way they can see what was happening in the classroom at moments of peak engagement.

[...]

Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.

  Reuters

This should make you uncomfortable.  Thought police.  Think about it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And We Are Right Behind 'Em

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother's Helping Hands

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

  Reuters

Yahoo and who else?

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target.

[...]

Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.

[...]

In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014.

[...]

According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.

Like Facebook doesn't help the spooks? He was more likely just pissed that Yahoo didn't inform him they were having this program built. Which, when you think about it, was bad, him being the security officer.

Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.

I bet.

The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.

But of course.

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

UPDATE:

Tightening the Screws

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

You Cannot Escape the Big Eye

From the UK:

Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.

[...]

On its website, Apple promotes the fact that it has, for example, “no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data when it’s in transit between devices”.

It adds: “So unlike other companies’ messaging services, Apple doesn’t scan your communications, and we wouldn’t be able to comply with a wiretap order even if we wanted to.”

[...]

Ministers have no plans to ban encryption services because they have an important role in the protection of legitimate online activity such as banking and personal data.

  UK Telegraph

I call bullshit on that. If they are mandating encryption that can be broken, they are effectively banning encryption.

I don't know how this affects the rest of the world if implemented, but we're at the same point here where Ladar Levison shut down his US company (Lavabit: encrypted email services) rather than comply with a similar demand from the FBI. I'm sure Apple won't be folding.

British police already have the power to compel someone to disclose cryptographic keys under RIPA (i.e., to order decryption on provision of a warrant).

[...]

Where a corporat[ion] such as Apple, Google, or WhatsApp knows about or engineers a weakness in encryption, this will allow an attacker to utilise and take advantage of that same weakness, no matter who that attacker is. Whether it be the service of a warrant by the home secretary, a foreign state, a terrorist, or that most insidious of threats, a bored teen-ager, all are equal before the eyes of mathematics.

  Weia Industries

Indeed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Esquire Magazine re Edward Snowden

Click here to read it: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/edward-snowden-leader?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_49512763

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Undaunted and Unbowed by Snowden Revelations

Big Brother continues big data mining projects.

The US Department of Homeland Security is hoping to find a private company that is technologically capable of providing a system that will track license plates across the nation, according to a new report.

A government proposal noticed by various media outlets including The Washington Post on Tuesday shows that DHS is trying to gain the ability to sift through large amounts of data collected from roadside surveillance cameras and law enforcement license plate readers.

The justification given on the document in question is that the database will be able to identify and track immigrants who entered the United States illegally and are on the run from authorities.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Homeland Security at Heathrow

Big Brother is alive and well. 

Ed Snowden co-counsel Jesselyn Radack was harrassed at Heathrow this weekend.

As she was going through customs, she was led to a separate room by a Heathrow Border Force agent who showed no interest in her documents, but seemed intent on asking her a series of questions that appeared aimed at emotional intimidation.

  RT

She was on her way to the Ecuadorian embassy where a meeting of the Sam Adams whistleblowers group was to take place.

”Who will you be seeing?” asked the agent. She replied with the name of the group, giving him a list of members – all prominent figures in rights advocacy and whistleblowing: “Ray McGovern, Annie Machon, Thomas Drake, Craig Murray,” she replied, adding that she is also a member.

Once the agent had realized the meeting was to be held at the Ecuadorian Embassy, he went on to ask her if it was with Julian Assange. “Yes,” she replied.

“Why have you gone to Russia twice in three months?” the customs agent then asked in a seemingly unrelated follow-up question, to which Radack she replied that it was her client, Edward Snowden.

More bizarre still: “Who is Edward Snowden?” Radack answered truthfully that he was a whistleblower, which was followed by a no less bizarre “Who is Bradley Manning?” with Radack answering once more – “a whistleblower.”

“Where is he?” the agent asked of the jailed leaker, now known as Chelsea Manning. Radack replied – “in jail”. “So he’s a criminal?”, he retorted. “He’s a political prisoner,” came the reply from Radack.

[...]

As it turned out, she was on the so-called “inhibited persons list” – a category created by the Department of Homeland Security implying that a TSA agent has the authority not to grant that person passenger a border pass and/or allow them into the next area.

Slightly different from the "no-fly" list. 

Another lawyer – Jennifer Robinson, who has also represented Snowden – appeared on the “inhibited passenger” list in April 2012. The categorization was then very fresh, having been invented only in March 2012, and pertains, among other things, to an agreement with the United Kingdom to agree to “new rules that required airlines to provide the Department of Homeland Security with details of passengers even if they weren’t traveling to the United States..."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Three Points Regarding the Latest NSA Stories

There are three points worth making about these latest developments.

• First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of many western leaders.

• Second, all of these governments keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how devoted they are to reform.

[...]

If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his basic political rights protected [...] ? Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?

• Third,

[...]

Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.

[...]

[I]s there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™?

  Glenn Greenwald

Revolutionary

Oath Keepers has placed three back-lit signs on the subway platform in the Washington Metro Pentagon Station, group founder Stewart Rhodes announced today.

"The first sign at the Pentagon Station is done in the style of the theater scene from George Orwell's 1984 and features Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, as 'Big Brother,'" Rhodes wrote, stating the "sign makes it clear that by exposing the NSA spying on Americans, Snowden honored his oath."

"This artwork will also be going on a billboard along a major freeway in Maryland, near the NSA headquarters at Ft. Mead within the week," Rhodes added.

[...]

"The third sign is intended to reach our military personnel within the Pentagon, and any other government employees who have ever served in the military, using the Iwo Jima flag-raising as a backdrop to the message."

  reason.com

Inciting military personnel to go against command?  Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for appealing to police and military in San Salvador to stop following orders to kill campaneros and obey instead God’s command “Thou shalt not kill.” But this isn’t El Salvador, and this isn’t 1980, and nobody's being killed, so no worries.

Gotcha

Drip, Drip, Drip

The [NSA] has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

[...]

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

[...]

In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

[...]

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong.

[...]

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said.

[...]

N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means.

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

[...]

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” [Edward Snowden] said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted. 

[...]

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization.

[...]

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

  NYT

Also: Report on these documents from Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian.

FISC Ruling Declassification Mad Libs

How nice of the government to declassify the document.

On Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a 2011 FISA Court ruling striking down a top-secret National Security Agency online-surveillance program. The court, whose opinions are normally classified, found that the agency had accessed as many as 56,000 electronic communications (such as emails) from American citizens and foreign nationals over a three-year period by tapping into fiber-optic cables.

The ruling is 86 pages long, but don't expect to read all of it.

[...]

[T] ake your best guess at what the redacted opinions should say with our NSA Choose-Your-Own-[Redacted] Mad Libs:

Click to play at Mother Jones:

The Guardian Incident

[S]ince this is 2013, not 1958, destroying one set of a newspaper's documents doesn't destroy them all, and since the Guardian has multiple people around the world with copies, they achieved nothing but making themselves look incompetently oppressive.

But conveying a thuggish message of intimidation is exactly what the UK and their superiors in the US national security state are attempting to accomplish with virtually everything they are now doing in this matter.

[...]

[T]he US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement. They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses." And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade.

  Glenn Greenwald

Including an attack on a hotel in Iraq where journalists were staying, resulting in the deaths of several journalists, and a direct attack on an al Jazeera office resulting in the death of a cameraman.

If the goal of the UK in detaining my partner was - as it now claims - to protect the public from terrorism by taking documents they suspected he had (and why would they have suspected that?), that would have taken 9 minutes, not 9 hours. Identically, the UK knew full well that forcing the Guardian UK to destroy its hard drives would accomplish nothing in terms of stopping the reporting: as the Guardian told them, there are multiple other copies around the world. The sole purpose of all of that, manifestly, is to intimidate.

And just so you know, don’t discuss your secrets in a room with windows or plastic cups.

The same two senior officials who had visited the Guardian the previous month returned with the message that patience with the newspaper's reporting was wearing out.

They expressed fears that foreign governments, in particular Russia or China, could hack into the Guardian's IT network. But the Guardian explained the security surrounding the documents, which were held in isolation and not stored on any Guardian system.

However, in a subsequent meeting, an intelligence agency expert argued that the material was still vulnerable. He said by way of example that if there was a plastic cup in the room where the work was being carried out foreign agents could train a laser on it to pick up the vibrations of what was being said. Vibrations on windows could similarly be monitored remotely by laser.

[...]

The Guardian's lawyers believed the government might either seek an injunction under the law of confidence, a catch-all statute that covers any unauthorised possession of confidential material, or start criminal proceedings under the Official Secrets Act.

Either brought with it the risk that the Guardian's reporting would be frozen everywhere and that the newspaper would be forced to hand over material.

"I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they wouldn't be achieving anything," Rusbridger said. "But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting."

Any such surrender would have represented a betrayal of the source, Edward Snowden, Rusbridger believed. The files could ultimately have been used in the American whistleblower's prosecution.

[...]

Furthermore the computer records could be analysed forensically to yield information on which journalists had seen and worked with which files.

Rusbridger took the decision that if the government was determined to stop UK-based reporting on the Snowden files, the best option was destroy the London copy and to continue to edit and report from America and Brazil. Journalists in America are protected by the first amendment, guaranteeing free speech.

  Guardian

We still have the First Amendment? It’s on its deathbed if we do. We knew it was in bad shape when the country adopted “Free Speech Zones” during the reign of George the W.