MUST READ: 'So The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear?' - GuardianUK

[WillyT]

So the innocent have nothing to fear?
After David Miranda we now know where this leadsThe destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation
Simon Jenkins - The Guardian
Tuesday 20 August 2013 15.30 EDT

<snip>

You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.

Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.

Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America's foreign intelligence surveillance court, a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA, had itself been defied by the agency "thousands of times". It was victim to "a culture of misinformation" as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world's largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.

Yet like all empires, this one has bred its own antibodies. The American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry has grown so big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism that it is as impossible to manage internally as it is to control externally. It cannot sustain its own security. Some two million people were reported to have had access to the WikiLeaks material disseminated by Bradley Manning from his Baghdad cell. Snowden himself was a mere employee of a subcontractor to the NSA, yet had full access to its data. The thousands, millions, billions of messages now being devoured daily by US data storage centres may be beyond the dreams of Space Odyssey's HAL 9000. But even HAL proved vulnerable to human morality. Manning and Snowden cannot have been the only US officials to have pondered blowing a whistle on data abuse. There must be hundreds more waiting in the wings – and always will be.

There is clearly a case for prior censorship of some matters of national security. A state secret once revealed cannot be later rectified by a mere denial. Yet the parliamentary and legal institutions for deciding these secrets are plainly no longer fit for purpose. They are treated by the services they supposedly supervise with falsehoods and contempt. In America, the constitution protects the press from pre-publication censorship, leaving those who reveal state secrets to the mercy of the courts and the judgment of public debate – hence the Putinesque treatment of Manning and Snowden. But at least Congress has put the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, under severe pressure. Even President Barack Obama has welcomed the debate and accepted that the Patriot Act may need revision.

In Britain, there has been no such response...

<snip>

More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/innocent-fear-david-miranda

[Little Star]

1. It was a must read. Another truth telling article. Thanks! k&r

[Fantastic Anarchist]

2. Bookmarking to read when I get home.

Thanks for posting, WillyT!

[WillyT]

23. You Are Quite Welcome !!!

[Octafish]

3. Police State UKUSA

Turnkey Tyranny where money trumps peace.

[JEB]

4. International corporate repressive government

where money trumps peace, civil liberties, freedom of the press, legal due process etc. etc.

[DevonRex]

17. UKUSA is Five Eyes. Nothing to do with GB's internal laws.

The Guardian has always known about UKUSA and that if they hurt the US they're hurting the UK - Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. And The Guardian has always known that in Britain the govt has much more leeway in matters of national security and the press than we do in the U.S.

And, while I'm at it, the entire world has always known that UKUSA divides the globe up and spies on the world and that the U.S. has Mexico, Central and South America. So, Brazil's outrage to the contrary, Brazil has been playing everybody for the fool with their act.

Shit, it's detailed in Wikipedia under UKUSA. Guess which piece the UK has and why they might have stopped Miranda coming from Germany, among other valid reasons?

[uponit7771]

5. The Guardian has to fear slacking sales so they make crap up about little Green Men looking through

...the computer and use the most amount of sophistry to do it.

At some point this gets silly


Their WHOLE line on the "spying" crap is to take advantage of peoples lack of knowledge of what computers can and cant do to stoke fear.

It's like a theme out of the X-Men or something


All the while not a tenth of the attention is spent on what the GOP is doing with the 15th amendment...

That deserves a lot more attention than this area 51 shit

[AnotherMcIntosh]

7. Good to see that somebody gets it. Finally. Somebody gets it.

/sarcasm off

[99th_Monkey]

8. Oh good, a new slur: "Area 51 shit"

Since your constitutional "rights" mean so little to you,
you may as well go to work for The Man, so you can
at least get paid for not giving a rats ass.

[think4yourself]

9. I thought it was the 14th Amendment.

[delrem]

12. +1! Nice job smearing The Guardian, uponit7771

I'm sure you were heavy into smearing The Guardian back when it was reporting Manning's leaks, right? Of course I'm right - else you'd be a hypocrite. Likewise you honed your skills at character assassination of reporters and leakers during the reign of "dubya", right? It wouldn't make sense otherwise. Good on ya for such consistency over the reigns of two different administrations, under two different parties. DU rec, for sure!

[Nuclear Unicorn]

16. Is this the same Area 51 shit we were told to disregard because

anybody who didn't assume it was already happening was too naïve to comment.

Or is this the same Area 51 shit we were told was blessed by the FISC?

Or is it the same Area 51 shit Snowden was indicted for revealing?

[railsback]

6. Fearing for my hard drives!

Even though I have everything backed up elsewhere, I now fear that there's a possibility that people in white clothes might show up at my door and make me destroy them.. and then I'll have to go buy new ones.

[Civilization2]

10. The growing corporate-military, the rising police-state, revel the ending of democracy.

1% power is corporate control, states now bow to banksters, who are too big to fail, and above the law,. billions of dollars in wealth stolen and zero real prosecutions. The problems are systemic, the rot is rampant, citizens united (even the new-speak name is telling!),. NAFTA, Trans-Pacific Partnership, NDAA, and on and on,. anti-democratic laws written by and for the corporate-military, for the 1% who profit by them,. not the people, never do these new laws represent the will of the people.., and now it comes to light that all communications is being recorded and monitored by AI systems to watch for "terrorists"? Who exactly are they watching for? How exactly are they manipulating democracy, and our daily lives using this vast "system"??

[JDPriestly]

11. K&R.

[Douglas Carpenter]

13. a must read - must be kicked to the front page

[Cryptoad]

14. The Legal Dept

of the Guardian knows this whole thing is going south in the courts. they are starting to distance between themselves and the crime!

[ancianita]

15. Those who attack the Guardian fail to appreciate the new theater that journalism is in, I think.

Most people can see that they're playing the theater of "The Secret Guarding," just like the government goons are ... who were, oh noes, one click away from ramming down the Guardian's doors. Most people know that all that info is likely in lots of other locations, that this is a kind of 'time out' stall for time to get public opinion on their side, sell papers, take the pressure off and figure out which country they need to safely do this kind of work in.

It will be interesting to see how allies of US MIC complex work toward corporate elites' dismantling of world democracy, and which "official sources" consistently amplify their memes. These state attacks on journalists isn't about old school politics or nations anymore; it's about a new era of stealth players in pursuit of different ends.

[Douglas Carpenter]

18. knr

[blackspade]

19. K&R

[xchrom]

20. Du rec. Nt

[struggle4progress]

21. "Hi, guys! Just wanted to check in and let you know we've got tens of thousands of your national

security documents, which we've been talking about to folks in China and other places. We're telling everybody we think some of these documents could do unprecedented nightmarish harm if we released them! Don't over-react! Bye!"

[WillyT]

22. Morning Kick !!!