Author: Jason Ditz

Sign the petition

With all the talk about Edward Snowden and the attempts to persecute/prosecute him as a leaker, it’s easy to forget that this battle is already going on with Pfc. Bradley Manning, the source of a large amount of information on US overseas war crimes by way of WikiLeaks.

Manning’s partially-secret military trial is just now getting under way, even though he was arrested in May of 2010 and the Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly guarantees the right to a speedy trial, which it specifies as 120 days.

During those years of detention Manning was repeatedly subjected to abuse by security forces, with the scandals around his mistreatment at Quantico getting so bad that they actually ended up closing the whole site permanently.

Manning’s crime is materially no different than Snowden’s: a desire to make the American public aware of things we desperately needed to know. 3+ years of pre-trial abuse is already more than enough for that, and it’s time to let Bradley go.

A new petition at the White House’s portal is calling for President Obama to immediately an unconditionally pardon Edward Snowden for leaking the truth about the NSA’s huge overarching surveillance of everyday Americans.

The US hasn’t charged Snowden yet, of course, but officials have made it clear they intend to, and have been throwing out works like “treason” for an action which, at its core, was simply about informing the American public of something they desperately needed to know.

Of course I’m not so naive as to think that Obama would actually pardon someone who revealed such gross violations of civil liberties under his watch – that’s not how these things work. At the very least, however, the petition would compel President Obama to make a comment on the matter, and would prevent him from passing the buck on the persecution/prosecution of Snowden and dodging responsibility for it.

The petition has already gotten 37,000 signatures in the first day, and a decisive victory for it will make it even harder for the administration to ignore.

The leaks about America’s ever growing (and already ridiculously large) surveillance state came with a handy list of nine companies that joined the program. Those companies are, per the NSA’s own leaked data, giving the NSA direct access to their servers and, according to officials, the PRISM Nine also went out of their way to redesign their systems to easier facilitate the NSA’s spying on Americans.

Microsoft was the first on the list, joining way back when PRISM was just getting started. We all know Microsoft, and with its creation of Bing and its acquisition of Skype (another of the PRISM Nine), it is a big player in this scandal.

Here’s where it gets even worse (as it always does). Microsoft is coming out with a new video game console later this year. It will cost $499. I like video games. I even own Microsoft’s current video game system. But then it dawned on me – this new system will:

1. Require a constant connection to the Internet to even function.
2. Require the new version of Kinect to be always connected, and it is always on.

Kinect, for those unfamiliar, is an array of high definition cameras that can track movement in three dimensions. It was conceived of as a “joystickless” way to control games. It also includes a microphone, and that is always on on the new Xbox One, nominally so you can say commands and the system executes them without needing a remote control.

Which means Microsoft wants to install a three-dimensional surveillance array into your home, and require you to keep it always on, always feeding data to the Internet. And this company is a known facilitator of NSA surveillance of individual Americans. See the problem?

Microsoft was never high up on my “trust” list in the first place, but I hope no one is stupid enough to pay them $499 for the privilege of installing always-on surveillance equipment in your home to watch you knowing, not suspecting, but knowing that they are passing that information on to the NSA.

In 48 hours of leaks we went from the NSA collecting meta-data on practically every phone call in the United States to the revelation of an overarching Internet surveillance scheme called PRISM, which collects data wholesale from nine major US Internet content providers.

And I can’t say enough about how horrible that is. I mean, literally everyone reading this is certain to have some sort of data exchange with the PRISM nine. For me, I do some of my work on an Apple computer, and Apples in on it. I use linux for stuff too, but it doesn’t matter that this is secure because I do all of my email at Gmail, communicate with coworkers on AOL Instant Messanger, use Google as a search engine for research. All that stuff is still getting swept up.

Some of that stuff is just unavoidable too – if you stop using Google Search what are you going to use? Yahoo is in on this, and so is Microsoft (Bing). That’s pretty much it for competent English-language search engines in 2013.

As of last night though there was a lot of speculation surrounding the creepily specific denials of companies that they aren’t providing “direct access,” with Business Insider talking about broad eavesdropping as allowing them to get away with only “passive” compliance from these companies being the most plausible explanation.

Except it gets worse.

Turns out the Business Insider indirect data collection is a whole ‘nother series of programs the NSA is running, that are distinct from PRISM.

Guardian has leaked another (partially redacted) slide on the matter, and it turns out all those claims by Google, Facebook et al. of not giving the NSA direct access are something distinct from legalese. Something we can call, for the sake of clarity, flat out lies. Here’s what the NSA’s top secret document says:

PRISM
Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple

The partially redacted part talks about Upstream collection of data through the basic communications infrastructure of the Internet, listing four programs that do this (two are blacked out), and admonishes NSA analysts viewing the presentation “You Should Use Both.”

So the well, well over 90% of data that was being culled in PRISM wasn’t even the end of the story, and four other programs exist that are likely sweeping up likely most of the rest of it.

Big Brother would be lucky to be half this efficient, and its probably time to retire the term “Orwellian,” since that level of information awareness is starting to look quaint compared to the grim reality we’re now facing.

FISA Court Chief Judge Reggie Walton objects to the characterization of his court as a “rubber stamp” that will approve literally anything. Even though they approved an order to spy on every goddamn phone call in the United States.

President Obama objects to the media calling PRISM a “secret” program, even though the Powerpoint presentation that finally revealed it’s existence, some 5 years after it started, is stamped “Top Secret.”

I object to the idea that either of these men was able to rise to a position above crossing guard on a not-too-busy street.

Last night news broke that a FISA court granted the NSA an insanely broad warrant for literally every single call made by Verizon customers over a several month period.Tens of millions of phone calls.

It gets worse.

Apparently even though FISA judges are essentially just empty robes with a giant rubber-stamp attached, going to see them every time they wanted to spy on somebody was getting inconvenient for the NSA – mostly because that “somebody” was literally everybody, everywhere, for all time.

Enter PRISM, the Orwellian scheme which apparently began in 2007 with an NSA deal with Microsoft. Under the deal Microsoft allowed the NSA to directly access the personal data of Microsoft’s customers. Like, all of them.

And like any really, really bad idea it grew precipitously. Yahoo jumped on board in 2008. Google and Facebook joined in 2009. Skype, Youtube, AOL, and finally Apple this year.

What you search, what you browse, what you download. Every AIM chat, every VOIP phone call, every time you logged into any service with any of these companies, or made any Social Networking connections, the NSA was in the know.

It all sounds like a bad novel or some goofy conspiracy theory, but this is just the plain, undeniable facts, as presented to new NSA employees in a PowerPoint presentation (which has since been leaked). The presentation was apparently meant to get new hires up to speed on what they could expect in the way of cooperation when spying on Americans.

The answer is absolute, unfettered access to virtually everything done within the purview of any of the major US internet companies, with no questions asked.

Congress cheerfully defended the horrific abuse of privacy that was the FISA-Verizon fiasco – presumably we won’t be able to expect any better out of them after this.