Blame It on Russia

But James Bamford, author of many spy/intelligence articles and books, doesn't believe it.

Today, [Watergate's campaign spying by] amateur burglars [has] been replaced by cyberspies, who penetrated the DNC armed with computers and sophisticated hacking tools.

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Now, in the latest twist, hacking tools themselves, likely stolen from the National Security Agency, are on the digital auction block. Once again, the usual suspects start with Russia – though there seems little evidence backing up the accusation.

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[I]f Russia had stolen the hacking tools, it would be senseless to publicize the theft, let alone put them up for sale. It would be like a safecracker stealing the combination to a bank vault and putting it on Facebook. Once revealed, companies and governments would patch their firewalls, just as the bank would change its combination.

[...]

f Russia had stolen the hacking tools, it would be senseless to publicize the theft, let alone put them up for sale. It would be like a safecracker stealing the combination to a bank vault and putting it on Facebook. Once revealed, companies and governments would patch their firewalls, just as the bank would change its combination.

[...]

According to the former NSA officials who viewed the Shadow Broker files, they contained a number of exploits [...] s that the NSA often pays thousands of dollars for to private hacking groups.

[...]

I was [...] given unrestricted access to [the Snowden] cache of documents. These included both the entire British, or GCHQ, files and the entire NSA files.

But going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find a single reference to the ANT catalog [a highly secret NSA document that was leaked in Decmeber 2013]. This confirmed for me that it had likely been released by a second leaker. And if that person could have downloaded and removed the catalog of hacking tools, it’s also likely he or she could have also downloaded and removed the digital tools now being leaked.

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Consisting of about 300 megabytes of code, the tools could easily and quickly be transferred to a flash drive. But unlike the catalog, the tools themselves – thousands of ones and zeros – would have been useless if leaked to a publication. This could be one reason why they have not emerged until now.   Reuters

"The second leaker." I've always wondered whatever happened to that person who was referenced at the very end of the Poitras documentary about Edward Snowden (Citizen Four). Since we have never been told, I assumed that it was likely the NSA found that person and neutralized him in one way or another. Maybe not.

We'll be looking forward to the promised further emails from Wikileaks.

But we now have entered a period many have warned about, when NSA’s cyber weapons could be stolen like loose nukes and used against us. It opens the door to criminal hackers, cyber anarchists and hostile foreign governments that can use the tools to gain access to thousands of computers in order to steal data, plant malware and cause chaos.

It’s one more reason why NSA may prove to be one of Washington’s greatest liabilities rather than assets.

The fun has only just started.

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

That Other Leaker - the Drone Papers

The ending of CitizenFour hinted at a second leaker, and then we heard nothing for over a year.  There was a suggestion in some reports that the FBI had located the person, and I wondered if they'd silenced him or her  (it's a "him").  I still don't know about that, but it appears the papers were already in the hands of people at The Intercept. They've just released them with this article (authored by several reporters):  The Drone Papers.

DRONES ARE A TOOL, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, “targeted killings.”

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THE DOCUMENTS COME FROM a Pentagon study, circulated in early 2013, evaluating the intelligence and surveillance technology behind the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) killing campaign in Yemen and Somalia in 2011 and 2012.

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This is a labyrinth with 12 entrances and no exit. It is built on a cache of documents provided to The Intercept by a source within the intelligence community.

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Note the “%” column. It is the number of jackpots (JPs) divided by the number of operations. A 70 percent success rate. But it ignores well over a hundred other people killed along the way.

This means that almost nine out of 10 people killed in these strikes were not the intended targets.

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Much of what is seen by a drone’s camera [...] appears without context on the ground. Some drone operators describe watching targets as “looking through a soda straw.”

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For many years, lawyers and human rights advocates have wondered about the chain of command. How are non-battlefield assassinations authorized? Does it fall within the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), or through some other authority?

The documents we have are not comprehensive, but they suggest a linear chain—all the way up to the president of the United States (POTUS).

  The Intercept

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

Mainstream Reporters

Even at this late date, with a record number of at least eight individuals charged by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act (compared to three such prosecutions for all of Obama’s predecessors combined), many prominent journalists can’t see, or won’t admit, or don’t believe, that an attack on whistleblowers is also an attack on the press and on the First Amendment.

They appear either not to care or to have scant awareness of the chilling effect on the symbiotic relationship between investigative reporters and their sources every time whistleblowers are charged or convicted for crimes that could land them in prison for decades, if not a lifetime.

They also appear to accept at face value the stories spun by the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon or other members of the vast U.S. national security state apparatus. It matters not to them the number of times those agencies have been shown to be liars, whether it be over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the extent of the vast surveillance operations directed at American citizens and people worldwide.

Why do these stars of the news media so readily brush off concerns about our dangerous warfare/surveillance state revealed by Snowden, Manning and the others? Why do they cheer on the government’s crackdown on unauthorized leaks and tell us surveillance and the diminishment of our civil liberties is really for our own good in a scary world – rather than side with the Bill of Rights and the handful of other journalists and whistleblowers who expose secrets that people in a free society should have the right to know? Why do they sound as if they are angling for a position on the National Security Council or membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, rather than aspiring to be another I.F. Stone (who lived by the tenet, “all governments lie”) or Edward R. Murrow or Seymour Hersh?

  AntiWar

Money? Prestige in D.C.? Access to government officials? Well, the latter would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Access to more lies isn’t much of a prize.

I'll have to guess it's money and career maintenance that turns reporters into government shills.  Corporate news organizations which are a part of the massive money machine controlling Washington are probably not going to keep independent reporters on the payroll.

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

And, by the way, whatever happened to the "second leaker" from the Snowden documentary?  The last I can find anything about that person is reports from October 2014 which said the FBI raided his/her home.  The person has gone unnamed and, as far as I can tell, unreported, since then.  Where's Jeremy Scahill, to whom the leaks were made, and his supposedly independent and corporate-free news organization, The Intercept, (also Glenn Greenwald's employer) on this?  Silent.  Why?

The Second Leaker

The FBI has identified an employee of a federal contracting firm suspected of being the so-called "second leaker" who turned over sensitive documents about the U.S. government's terrorist watch list to a journalist closely associated with ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

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The FBI recently executed a search of the suspect's home, and federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia have opened up a criminal investigation into the matter, the sources said.

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Contacted Monday, [the Intercept reporter who broke the watch list story, [Jeremy] Scahill declined any comment about his source, but said neither he nor The Intercept had been notified by federal officials about the investigation. He added, however, that he is not surprised to learn of the probe: "The Obama administration in my view is conducting a war against whistleblowers and ultimately against independent journalism."

  Yahoo

This article also references a remark Eric Holder made regarding the persecution of New York Times reporter James Risen:

"As long as I am attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job will go to jail," Holder said at a meeting with news media representatives when asked about the Risen case.

And that immediately rung a bell for me. I’d asked why Eric Holder had decided to resign. Perhaps he wasn’t willing to do the administration’s bidding and was “asked” to leave.

Citizen Four: Revelation of the Second Leaker

“Citizenfour” unexpectedly ends in startling, quasi-comic dumbshow fashion in Moscow, as Greenwald reveals to a goggle-eyed Snowden the as-yet undisclosed revelations of an even higher-up whistleblower by scribbling words on scraps of paper, promptly read, digested, and just sporadically caught by the camera. The papers are then torn into small squares, with only the word “Potus” clearly visible. Whether this coda records fact or theatricalizes unrealistic speculation remains unclear.

  Variety

This Variety review and a Hollywood Reporter review both talk about this revelation that the second leaker implicates the president in the same manner. Hollywood Reporter says you are “free to believe it or not.”

What are they afraid of? Of course there is going to be scrambling and denial coming from the White House, and perhaps attempts to seriously silence the second leaker. But for all we know about Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, what reason do we possibly have to disbelieve this one item?

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

Confirmation: There Is Indeed a Second Leaker

Towards the end of filmmaker Laura Poitras’s portrait of Snowden – titled Citizenfour, the label he used when he first contacted her – [Glenn] Greenwald is seen telling Snowden about a second source.

Snowden, at a meeting with Greenwald in Moscow, expresses surprise at the level of information apparently coming from this new source. Greenwald, fearing he will be overheard, writes the details on scraps of paper.

The specific information relates to the number of the people on the US government’s watchlist of people under surveillance as a potential threat or as a suspect. The figure is an astonishing 1.2 million.

  Guardian

That really is astonishing.

In his first comment about the documentary, which Poitras had shown to him in advance, Snowden told the Guardian: “I hope people won’t see this as a story about heroism. It’s actually a story about what ordinary people can do in extraordinary circumstances.”

The Guardian

So then, ordinary people can be heroes.