ANTIWAR.COM targeted for investigation, website hacked today [View all]

[yurbud]

This really brings the Snowden revelations home. I haven't visited Antiwar.com as much the last few years because, however glacially slow it looked like our hot wars were winding down.

Now that our government is demonizing Russia on a daily basis, I thought they might have something useful to say.

This was the first article I read. When I had a few minutes to post it here, their site was infected with malware that originated in Ukraine.

"You know, one of the interesting things is, obviously, people are very aware of the COINTEL abuses. I know you’ve had people on your show who actually participated in the break-in of the FBI and took the documents that unveiled that program. People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, ‘threats.’ That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat. And a lot of times people will say, ‘We don’t yet have the reporting in this case that shows that kind of abuse.’ And a lot of that reporting is still reporting that we’re working on and that I promise you is coming."

My blood ran cold for a second reason, however, one more personal and immediate: that’s because in the summer of 2011 we discovered that the FBI had indeed targeted Antiwar.com – specifically myself and our webmaster, Eric Garris – for what they termed a "preliminary investigation" in 2004. We learned this through a Freedom of Information Act request made by someone else: in an April 2004 memosome FBI high mucka-muck speculated that we might very well be "agents of a foreign power" – and that it was high time to "sniff" around after us.

The significance of the "foreign agent" phraseology was underscored when the Snowden revelations came to light: for the "legal" rationale behind the NSA’s police state operation is that targets are alleged to have a "foreign" connection. Technically, the American version of the KGB isn’t supposed to be conducting surveillance on any US citizen without a requisite "foreign" connection – and here was the FBI inventing one, or at least trying to. Since there is no such connection – Antiwar.com is run by Americans, and has no overseas organization or funders – I assumed, at first, that this exempted us from the NSA’s spying.

As time went on, however, and it became clear that a "foreign connection" could be established by discovering a "two-hop" or even a "three-hop" link to an entity deemed foreign, I started getting a little nervous – and yet still my innate skepticism remained largely intact. After all, wouldn’t it be awfully stupid for the NSA – and the FBI – to be spying on a legitimate constitutionally-protected non-criminal enterprise such as Antiwar.com? The danger of being caught, I thought, was too great: it would all come out eventually.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/05/13/the-american-republic-is-dead/