Peter Van Buren on State Department's Latest Edward Snowden Policy

http://wemeantwell.com 

While the entire rest of the world chews over Edward Snowden’s disclosures, sleep safe America, because your State Department (as well as somehow the Department of Agriculture) has its collective head in the sand.

A previously-unpublished cable sent recently to all employees worldwide “allows” them to look at Snowden’s disclosures on the internet (congrats; that’s a step up from when Hillary Clinton banned everyone from looking at Wikileaks at work) but they better darn well not “save, copy, or print” anything. See, if you just look at a document on that thar computin’ machine, it’s A-OK. But if yens’ print it out, then it becomes magically super-classified again and you gotta poke out yer own eyes. And you kids better not be doin’ any more speculating or you’ll feel my belt on yer backside! Makes sense, right?

Read it yourself (it’s all unclassified) and pretend you’re a real diplomat. Just be sure not to print this out or there’ll be a knock on your door late tonight!

FM SECSTATE WASHDC
TO ALL DIPLOMATIC AND CONSULAR POSTS COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATE
AMEMBASSY TRIPOLI IMMEDIATE
INFO DEPT OF AGRICULTURE USD FAS WASHINGTON DC
UNCLAS STATE 088244
E.O. 13526: N/A
TAGS: ASEC
SUBJECT: PROPER HANDLING OF PURPORTED CLASSIFIED MATERIALS IN THE MEDIA

1. The Department reminds all personnel that the unauthorized
disclosure of purported classified documents in the media (whether
in print or on blogs and websites) does not mean the documents have
been declassified. All employees must continue to abide by the
classification markings on such documents and handle them with the
appropriate protections, even if they have been posted on internet
websites or otherwise been made public by the media.

2. While Department employees may access news articles or outlets
using the Department’s unclassified computer network (OpenNet), you
are reminded not to save, copy, or print any purported classified
documents that may be posted on or available for download from media
websites. If you must print such purported classified material, it
must be handled in accordance with 12 FAM 530, which requires
locking classified materials in proper containers, as well as all
other applicable FAM and FAH regulations governing protection of
classified material.

3. Personnel should neither speculate about the authenticity of any
such document nor discuss whether any publicly released document is
classified or unclassified. Any media inquiries should be referred
to your post’s Public Affairs office.

4. Further questions regarding how to handle purported classified
material found in the media should be directed to your Regional
Security Office.

5. Minimize considered.

Kerry


BONUS: The Army is scared too.

- See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/#sthash.pPma2BFy.dpuf

Bruce Fein's Letter to Edward Snowden

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/text-of-the-letter-to-edward-snowden/article4878278.ece

Edward Joseph Snowden

Moscow

Dear Edward:

I, Bruce Fein, am writing this letter in collaboration with your father in response to the Statement you issued yesterday in Moscow.

Thomas Paine, the voice of the American Revolution, trumpeted that a patriot saves his country from his government.

What you have done and are doing has awakened congressional oversight of the intelligence community from deep slumber; and, has already provoked the introduction of remedial legislation in Congress to curtail spying abuses under section 215 of the Patriot Act and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. You have forced onto the national agenda the question of whether the American people prefer the right to be left alone from government snooping absent probable cause to believe crime is afoot to vassalage in hopes of a risk-free existence. You are a modern day Paul Revere summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny and one branch government.

In contrast to your actions, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper responded last March as follows to an unambiguous question raised by Senator Ron Wyden:

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper testified, “No sir, it does not.” Wyden asked for clarification, and Clapper hedged: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

Director Clapper later defended his stupendous mendacity to the Senator as the least untruthful answer possible. President Obama has not publicly rebuked the Director for frustrating the right of the people to know what their government is doing and to force changes if necessary through peaceful democratic processes. That is the meaning of government by the consent of the governed. “We the people” are sovereign under the U.S. Constitution, and government officials are entrusted with stewardship (not destruction) of our liberties.

We leave it to the American people to decide whether you or Director Clapper is the superior patriot.

The history of civilization is a history of brave men and women refusing to bow to government wrongdoing or injustice, and exalting knowledge, virtue, wisdom, and selflessness over creature comforts as the North Star of life. We believe your actions fall within that honorable tradition, a conviction we believe is shared by many.

As regards your reduction to de facto statelessness occasioned by the Executive Branch to penalize your alleged violations of the Espionage Act, the United States Supreme Court lectured in Trop v. Dulles (1958): “The civilized nations of the world are in virtual unanimity that statelessness is not to be imposed as punishment for crime.”

We think you would agree that the final end of the state is to make men and women free to develop their faculties, not to seek planetary domination through force, violence or spying. All Americans should have a fair opportunity to pursue their ambitions. Politics should not be a football game with winners and losers featuring juvenile taunts over fumbles or missteps.

Irrespective of life’s vicissitudes, we will be unflagging in efforts to educate the American people about the impending ruination of the Constitution and the rule of law unless they abandon their complacency or indifference. Your actions are making our challenge easier.

We encourage you to engage us in regular exchanges of ideas or thoughts about approaches to curing or mitigating the hugely suboptimal political culture of the United States. Nothing less is required to pay homage to Valley Forge, Cemetery Ridge, Omaha Beach, and other places of great sacrifice.

Very truly yours,

Bruce Fein

Counsel for Lon Snowden

Lon Snowden

Keywords: Snowden, Bruce Fein, whistle blower

Amnesty International Defends Snowden

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-must-not-persecute-whistleblower-edward-snowden-2013-07-02 

USA must not persecute whistleblower Edward Snowden

“

The US attempts to pressure governments to block Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum are deplorable. It is his unassailable right, enshrined in international law, to claim asylum and this should not be impeded.

”

Michael Bochenek, Director of Law and Policy at Amnesty International.

The US authorities’ relentless campaign to hunt down and block whistleblower Edward Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum is deplorable and amounts to a gross violation of his human rights Amnesty International said today.

“The US attempts to pressure governments to block Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum are deplorable,” said Michael Bochenek, Director of Law and Policy at Amnesty International. “It is his unassailable right, enshrined in international law, to claim asylum and this should not be impeded.”

The organization also believes that the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the USA.

“No country can return a person to another country where there is a serious risk of ill-treatment,” said Bochenek.

“We know that others who have been prosecuted for similar acts have been held in conditions that not only Amnesty International but UN officials considered cruel inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of international law.”

Senior US officials have already condemned Snowden without a trial, labelling him both guilty and a traitor, raising serious questions as to whether he’d receive a fair trial. Likewise the US authorities move to charge Snowden under the Espionage Act could leave him with no provision to launch a public interest whistle-blowing defence under US law.

"It appears he is being charged by the US government primarily for revealing its - and other governments’ - unlawful actions that violate human rights,” said Bochenek.

“No one should be charged under any law for disclosing information of human rights violations. Such disclosures are protected under the rights to information and freedom of expression.”

Besides filing charges against Snowden, the US authorities have revoked his passport – which interferes with his rights to freedom of movement and to seek asylum elsewhere.

“Snowden is a whistleblower. He has disclosed issues of enormous public interest in the US and around the world. And yet instead of addressing or even owning up to these actions, the US government is more intent on going after Edward Snowden.”

“Any forced transfer to the USA would put him at risk of human rights violations and must be challenged,” said Michael Bochenek.http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-must-not-persecute-whistleblower-edward-snowden-2013-07-02

The Guardian (UK) Defends Snowden

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/02/edward-snowden-whistleblower-not-spy

He has published US government information. And it is for this – not espionage – that he will have to answer to the law

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  • The Guardian, Tuesday 2 July 2013 18.54 EDT

It is now 10 days since the former US National Security Agency contractorEdward Snowden, source of the Guardian's NSA bugging revelations, flew out of Hong Kong, apparently en route to Ecuador. For 10 days he has been stalled at Moscow airport, while his passport has been annulled and repeated attempts to continue his journey to sympathetic jurisdictions have failed or been foiled. Over the weekend, Ecuador aborted the idea that he might find sanctuary in Quito. Mr Snowden submitted a request for political asylum in Russia, later withdrawn. Several other asylum bids also faltered at the start of this week. On Tuesday, Mr Snowden remained in Moscow, still dependent on the Russians while waiting on the apparently diminishing chance of being welcomed elsewhere around the world.

All this poses the complex and unavoidable question: what should now happen to Mr Snowden? The answer matters to Mr Snowden above all, as well as to the United States, whose data was published by the Guardian and the Washington Post. But it also matters to the world, because the internet is in every respect a global phenomenon, not an American one, and the data that the NSA is now routinely capturing does not belong to the agency or to the US. That is why the European Union and several member states, including France and Germany, have been so concerned about the allegations. It is also why so many people of all nations who regard themselves as admirers and allies of America are rightly concerned that the US should act appropriately towards the man who has triggered a debate which Barack Obama himself has acknowledged needs to take place.

Mr Snowden is clear that he leaked his information in order to alert the world to the unprecedented and industrial scale of NSA and GCHQ secret data trawling. He did not, he insists, leak in order to damage the US, its interests or its citizens, including those citizens in harm's way. Nothing of this sort has been published. Nor should it be. As long as he remains in Vladimir Putin's Russia, however, the real issue remains clouded. This damages Mr Snowden's cause, which this newspaper supports. He should therefore leave Russia as soon as he practically can.

The United States is deliberately not making this as easy as it could. Mr Snowden has always accepted that he will have to face the music for what he has done. This is likely to happen sooner or later. But it needs to happen in a way which respects Mr Snowden's rights, and civilian status, and which, above all, also recognises the high public seriousness of what he has decided to do. His welfare matters. It is wrong to acknowledge that there should be a proper debate about data trawling and secret internetsurveillance – a debate that could not have started without Mr Snowden – and simultaneously to treat him as a spy in the old cold war sense. Too many US politicians and government officials are doing so.

This is emphatically not a cold war style national security case; it is a 21st century case about the appropriate balance between the power of the secret state and the rights of free citizens in the internet era. To charge Mr Snowden under America's first world war Espionage Act is inappropriate. We live in a different world from that. America is not at war in the traditional sense. Mr Snowden is not a spy. Nor is he a foreign agent. He is a whistleblower. He has published government information. And it is as a whistleblower that he will eventually have to answer to the law.

Any charges against him should be ones to which it is possible to mount a public interest defence, of the sort that was mounted by Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case in the US, or in Britain by the former civil servant Clive Ponting after the Falklands war. It must be for a civilian jury to decide whether Mr Snowden's actions are more troubling and significant than the documents and practices which he has exposed. Mr Snowden must be able to come in from the cold. And America must do more to help make that happen.

Snowden's Father's Lawyer, Bruce Fein, Appears on Fox

http://www.dailypaul.com/291160/bruce-fein-lawyer-representing-edward-snowdens-father-lonnie-snowden-lays-out-conditions-for-nsa-leak-video

Putin Compares Snowden to Sakharov

Putin even compared Snowden to the iconic Russian dissident and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. “(Snowden) feels like a fighter for human rights, a new dissident to a certain degree, something like Sakharov, well, probably, of a different scale,” Putin said.

SOURCE: http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/01/snowden-claims-political-persecution-amid-confusion-over-asylum-requests/ 

Edward Snowden's Wikileaks Statement

Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow

Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

SOURCE: http://wikileaks.org/Statement-from-Edward-Snowden-in.html

Edward Snowden submits asylum applications

Tuesday July 2, 01:30 UTC

Translations
[pt_br] Edward Snowden faz pedidos de asilo a 21 países, inclusive ao Brasil 

On 30th June 2013 WikiLeaks’ legal advisor in the Edward Snowden matter, Sarah Harrison, submitted by hand a number of requests for asylum and asylum assistance on behalf of Edward J. Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

The requests were delivered to an official at the Russian consulate at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow late in the evening. The documents outline the risks of persecution Mr Snowden faces in the United States and have started to be delivered by the Russian consulate to the relevant embassies in Moscow.

The requests were made to a number of countries including the Republic of Austria, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Finland, the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of India, the Italian Republic, the Republic of Ireland, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Kingdom of Norway, the Republic of Poland, the Russian Federation, the Kingdom of Spain, the Swiss Confederation and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

The requests join or update others previously made including to the Republic of Ecuador and the Republic of Iceland.

The DiploMad 2.0: Pyramid Scheme in Egypt

The DiploMad 2.0: Pyramid Scheme: Not long ago I wrote a piece on Obama's Syria policy titled "Ishtar, the Remake."   I noted that Obama sought to repeat...

It would seem that this description written almost a year ago remains quite valid. As I stated then, the Egyptian military knows what Morsi and the MB are all about. I am surprised that they have waited this long to begin to make their move against the regime. I am sure that right now, this very minute, people at NEA in State are busy drafting talking points and strategy papers for the Secretary and the White House to pressure the Egyptian military into not moving against Morsi. The one time that a regime change in Egypt would favor our interests and those of Israel, we will be opposed. I guarantee it. It is quite possible, however, that the Egyptian military has decided that the Obama administration is so weak, so inept, so confused, or just so malevolent that it is best to ignore anything that comes out of Washington.

So in a ghastly simulacrum of the cycle set off by the disastrous French revolution, in Egypt we might  see the removal of the military emperor/pharaoh, followed by violence, then a mad murderous fundamentalist regime, and--with luck--end with a return to the rule of a military emperor/pharaoh.

Roger Kimball on UK's Pamela Geller Travel Ban

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/06/27/free-speech-in-the-uk-sayonara/

A spokesman for the Home Office welcomed the ban on Geller and Spencer, explaining: “The UK should never become a stage for inflammatory speakers who promote hate.” Hmm — “Who promote hate.” Query: do Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer “promote hate”?  Or is that just a rhetorical epithet employed by ideologues bent on advancing a certain politically correct agenda in order to stifle criticism? (Another question: what is a “hate crime”? Is a crime more of a crime because it was committed by someone who dislikes the victim? Or is it like the term “social justice,” a piece of rhetorical legerdemain intended to lend gravity to a noun by the act of prefacing an emotionally charged but irrelevant adjective?)

The point is that the metabolism of liberal democracy depends upon the free exchange of ideas, which means, in part, a vigorous circulation of competing ideas. No less a figure than John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, pointed out: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” There is plenty to criticize in Mill, heaven knows (and I’ve done my bitto criticize him), but he was surely right that liberal democracy depends in part upon fostering the “collision” of competing ideas.

The irony of the situation is rich. Geller and Spencer speak out against the intolerance of Islam. Got that? They speak. They lecture. They write books. Spencer’s written a shelf of them. Geller was behind a campaign to place “defeat jihad” posters in New York subways. One of the reasons they were traveling to the UK was to participate in a commemorative ceremony for Drummer Lee Rigby. Remember him? He was the chap who, last month, was walking down a street in Woolwich when two Muslims ran him down in a car and then stabbed and hacked him to death with knives and a cleaver. Like the Earl of Stratford, their motto was “thorough.” When these partisans of the religion of peace got through with him, he had to be identified by dental records.

Geller and Spencer are denied entry to the UK. Quoth a government spokesman: individuals whose presence “is not conducive to the public good” may be denied entry by the Home Secretary. He explained: “We condemn all those whose behaviours and views run counter to our shared values and will not stand for extremism in any form.”

That pretty much covers the waterfront, doesn’t it? Disagree with me and I’ll have you named an enemy of the state.

Mark Steyn on UK's Pamela Geller Travel Ban

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352156/one-step-forward-two-steps-back-mark-steyn

1) A few weeks ago, I wrote about a Canadian police department’s diversity enforcer attempt to shut down a Pamela Geller speech by getting her bounced from a Toronto synagogue. In Britain, the shut-up-he-explained crowd cut to the chase: They went to the (supposedly Conservative) Home Secretary, the ghastly Theresa May, and got Miss Geller and Robert Spencer banned from the entire country on the grounds that their presence in the United Kingdom would not be “conducive to the public good“.

By contrast, the presence of, say, Anjem Choudary, philosophical mentor of the Woolwich head hackers and a man who calls for the murder of the Prime Minister, is so “conducive to the public good” that British taxpayers subsidize him generously and provide a half-million-dollar home for him to live on. Mrs May’s Home Office has just admitted to the UK Muhhamed al-Arefe who advocates wife-beating. Perhaps Mr May will try out Imam al-Arefe’s expert advice on the beneficial effects of “light beating” on Theresa this weekend – or is spousal abuse only “conducive to the public good” of Muslim women?

The reflexive illiberalism of Britain’s so-called liberals – the urge to ban the debate rather than win it – is now so deeply ingrained they will soon be hungry for new victories. Nearly four centuries after Milton’s Areopagitica, freedom of speech is dead in England. In denying her charges access to dissenting ideas, Mrs May is inviting them to find alternative means of expression. No good will come from this.

Michael Savage on Edward Snowden

http://youtu.be/rTGclCHwZA4

Sen. Mike Gravel on Edward Snowden

From the Huffington Post:

Gravel served in counter-intelligence in Europe while in the military, and said that the "cult of secrecy" has gotten out of the control of the public. "I can understand [Wikileaks leaker Bradley] Manning and Snowden and admire them both," he said. "They have started a dialogue and they're going to pay a price for it."

...Gravel said that if successful, the prosecution of Manning and possibly Snowden would give the Justice Department the Espionage Act victory that eluded it in the government's case against Ellsberg in the '70s...

"I don't know why mainstream media hasn't woken up," said Gravel. "If it's a crime for Wikileaks to do it, if it's a crime for Manning to do it, if it's a crime for Snowden to do it, what about The Washington Post [which] revealed some of the stuff from Snowden?" 

Daniel Ellsberg on Edward Snowden

From the Huffington Post: 

Speaking from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ellsberg, 82, told HuffPost Live hosts Ahmed Shihab-Eldin and Josh Zepps that he, Snowden and accused WikiLeaks leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning "chose to give priority to our oath to defend and support the Constitution, rather than our promise to keep secrets for our boss or for our agency, when those secrets were concealing evidence that the Constitution was being violated."

...Ellsberg, who faced 12 felony counts for leaking the Pentagon Papers -- charges which were ultimately dropped -- said that Snowden "made the right choice." Ellsberg called PRISM, the program that allegedly collects user data from large technology companies like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook, as well as the NSA's broad collection of American's telephone records, "clearly unconstitutional."

Pamela Geller on Edward Snowden

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/06/us-surveillance-is-not-aimed-at-terrorists.html

Of course, you didn't have to tell us this. If you don't toe the party line, you're most probably under surveillance. If you are a jihadist, carry on. Obama is spying on twenty million Americans whose crime was to oppose his coming totalitarianism.

Why else would the NSA and FBI refuse to surveil the Boston jihadists after we were warned of their devout extremism by not one but two foreign countries? Or the Fort Hood jihadi, Nidal Hasan, who came out as a jihadist on grand rounds and was emailing Anwar Awlaki concerning his plans to commit mass murder?

We are under siege, America.

U.S. Surveillance Is Not Aimed at Terrorists By Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg, Jun 23, 2013 (thanks to Lou)

The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens.

People concerned with online privacy tend to calm down when told that the government can record their calls or read their e-mail only under special circumstances and with proper court orders. The assumption is that they have nothing to worry about unless they are terrorists or correspond with the wrong people.

The infrastructure set up by the National Security Agency, however, may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists. The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America’s largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use.

Doug Wead on Edward Snowden

From WorldNet Daily

So two questions remain: Isn’t the government taking a risk that by running Snowden into the ground they will only make him a hero?

It is clear that Snowden did not expect to be on the run. Did he really think he could escape from a government who has everyone’s emails and phone conversations stored away? Did he think that any corporation or ambassador or head of state or government in the world would stand before such a power? This treasure trove of data is the new atomic bomb, and America has it. No one else. We rule the world. Or perhaps, I should say that Barack Obama and his successor rule the world.

Poor Edward Snowden. Running to Hong Kong and then Moscow will only help the government paint him as a bad guy, a traitor to America. He imagined that people in American really believed in the Constitution or in a government of laws. He thought we would care about the fact that our government leaders lie to Congress and the media. He imagined that we still have a free press, who can write and say what they believe, without direction from corporate owners who, like druggies in the inner city, now depend totally on government subsidies and easy Fed loans to sustain their empires.

There is a simple answer to that one. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what any of us say. They have the new WMD. They don’t need to control everybody. There are plenty who will fall all over themselves to get in their good graces and say and do whatever they think the government wants, just to avoid the inconvenience of an IRS audit or a criminal investigation based on their emails and phone calls. So the government will risk Edward Snowden’s martyrdom.

Why? Because the government has even more secrets to hide. It fears another Snowden among its 4.2 million top-secret-cleared employees. They have to make his life so miserable that no one else will dare speak up.

And finally, one last thing remains to be known. If Edward Snowden is a spy, not a whistleblower, then for whom has he been spying? Russia? China? North Korea? Islamic fundamentalists?

No. He has been spying for us, the American people. He is our spy. He is the first American spy to be prosecuted by an American government. They will get him. And he will be locked away, and after the furor dies down, he may even be tortured by our government. He is like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam in the 1960s setting himself ablaze, signaling to the world that something is wrong here. He is a Paul Revere with an alarming message: “The government is coming, the government is coming.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/edward-snowdens-martyrdom/#GkKQhAJEF0zJ33jT.99 

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak on Edward Snowden

In The Guardian (UK):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/21/wozniak-guilty-nsa-surveillance-snowden

The Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has backed NSA whistleblowerEdward Snowden and admitted he feels "a little bit guilty" that new technologies had introduced new ways for governments to monitor people.

"I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot," he said.

Speaking to Piers Morgan on CNN he said he was not the kind of person to "just take sides in the world – 'I'm always against anything government, any three letter agency,' or 'I'm for them'."

But he added: "Read the facts: it's government of, by and for the people. We own the government; we are the ones who pay for it and then we discover something that our money is being used for – that just can't be, that level of crime."

When Morgan suggested the government would not be able to keep such a close eye on citizens without the work of innovators like him, Wozniak acknowledged: "I actually feel a little guilty about that – but not totally. We created the computers to free the people up, give them instant communication anywhere in the world; any thought you had, you could share freely. That it was going to overcome a lot of the government restrictions.

"We didn't realise that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren't. In the old days of mailing letters, you licked it, and when you got an envelope that was still sealed, nobody had seen it; you had private communication. Now they say, because it's email, it cannot be private; anyone can listen."

Asked about US surveillance programmes in an earlier interview with a Spanish technology news site, FayerWayer, Wozniak said: "All these things about the constitution, that made us so good as people – they are kind of nothing.

"They are all dissolved with the Patriot Act. There are all these laws that just say 'we can secretly call anything terrorism and do anything we want, without the rights of courts to get in and say you are doing wrong things'. There's not even a free open court any more. Read the constitution. I don't know how this stuff happened. It's so clear what the constitution says."

He said he had been brought up to believe that "communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them – these kinds of things were part of Russia. We are getting more and more like that."