NSA scandal: the deepest secret of the Ed Snowden operation | Jon Rappoport's Blog
by Jon Rappoport
June 18, 2013
www.nomorefakenews.com
Everyone wants to see a hero.
When that hero emerges from the shadows and says all the right things, and when he exposes a monolithic monster, he’s irresistible.
However, that doesn’t automatically make him who he says he is.
That doesn’t automatically exempt him from doubts.
Because he’s doing the right thing, people quickly make him into a spokesman for their own hopes. If he’s finally blasting a hole in the dark enemy’s fortress, he has to be accepted at face value. He has to be elevated.
When dealing with the intelligence community and their spooks and methods, this can be a mistake. Deception is the currency of that community. Layers of motives and covert ops are business as usual.
In previous articles, I’ve raised a number of specific doubts about Ed Snowden.
Here I want to replay four statements Snowden made and examine them.
“When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this [NSA]…over time that awareness of wrongdoing sorts of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem…”
This statement describes Snowden, an analyst working at NSA, chatting regularly to colleagues about his growing doubts over the morality of NSA spying. This is quite hard to believe.
As Steve Kinney, writing at the Centre for Research on Globalisation points out, Snowden would have raised all sorts of red flags about himself.
If he hadn’t been fired outright, he certainly would have come under serious scrutiny, which, at the very least, would have reduced his ability to hack documents out of NSA’s most secret recesses.
And yet, Snowden, an analyst, claims he had access to “full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.”
Really?
That stretches doubt far beyond the point of credulity.
Both The Guardian and the Washington Post supposedly vetted Snowden carefully. I’d really like to see the results of that vetting.
“Rosters of everyone working at the NSA [and] the entire intelligence community…”
That’s untold thousands of people. That’s referring to many separate agencies.
Snowden doesn’t stop there. He maintains the security of NSA is not just a sieve, it’s also thousands of separate hunting parties, undertaken at the whim of any analyst:
“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”
Sure. NSA just opens the door to their own analysts, who can, on their own hook, launch spying episodes on anyone in the US. Boom. No operational plans, no coordination. A free-for-all.
“Hey, dig this. Nancy Pelosi was just talking to her hairdresser. I’m going to follow up on her. Think I’ll spy on Nancy and her husband, see what they’re up to. I’ll file reports as I go along…”
“A guy at Los Alamos just wrote to his boss about a new weapons system. Want to see what they’re planning?”
Finally, Snowden claimed he could “shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that’s not my intention.”
Not just spy on everybody in the US. Snowden asserts he could do that. But he could also make the entire spying apparatus of NSA (and even all other intelligence agencies?) go dark with a few hours of work—and he’d evade notice of his NSA bosses as he performed this herculean task.
No. Ridiculous. The very first thing an agency like NSA does is set up a labyrinth to prevent itself from being taken down.
Consider these four Snowden statements together, back up and think. These are propositions that cast the man into a deep pit of doubt.
Who is he?
What is his mission?
Is that mission his own, or is he working for someone who wants to punch a hole in the NSA?
NSA scandal: the deepest secret of the Ed Snowden operation
NSA scandal: the deepest secret of the Ed Snowden operationby Jon Rappoport
June 18, 2013
www.nomorefakenews.com
Everyone wants to see a hero.
When that hero emerges from the shadows and says all the right things, and when he exposes a monolithic monster, he’s irresistible.
However, that doesn’t automatically make him who he says he is.
That doesn’t automatically exempt him from doubts.
Because he’s doing the right thing, people quickly make him into a spokesman for their own hopes. If he’s finally blasting a hole in the dark enemy’s fortress, he has to be accepted at face value. He has to be elevated.
When dealing with the intelligence community and their spooks and methods, this can be a mistake. Deception is the currency of that community. Layers of motives and covert ops are business as usual.
In previous articles, I’ve raised a number of specific doubts about Ed Snowden.
Here I want to replay four statements Snowden made and examine them.
“When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this [NSA]…over time that awareness of wrongdoing sorts of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem…”
This statement describes Snowden, an analyst working at NSA, chatting regularly to colleagues about his growing doubts over the morality of NSA spying. This is quite hard to believe.
As Steve Kinney, writing at the Centre for Research on Globalisation points out, Snowden would have raised all sorts of red flags about himself.
If he hadn’t been fired outright, he certainly would have come under serious scrutiny, which, at the very least, would have reduced his ability to hack documents out of NSA’s most secret recesses.
And yet, Snowden, an analyst, claims he had access to “full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.”
Really?
That stretches doubt far beyond the point of credulity.
Both The Guardian and the Washington Post supposedly vetted Snowden carefully. I’d really like to see the results of that vetting.
“Rosters of everyone working at the NSA [and] the entire intelligence community…”
That’s untold thousands of people. That’s referring to many separate agencies.
Snowden doesn’t stop there. He maintains the security of NSA is not just a sieve, it’s also thousands of separate hunting parties, undertaken at the whim of any analyst:
“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”
Sure. NSA just opens the door to their own analysts, who can, on their own hook, launch spying episodes on anyone in the US. Boom. No operational plans, no coordination. A free-for-all.
“Hey, dig this. Nancy Pelosi was just talking to her hairdresser. I’m going to follow up on her. Think I’ll spy on Nancy and her husband, see what they’re up to. I’ll file reports as I go along…”
“A guy at Los Alamos just wrote to his boss about a new weapons system. Want to see what they’re planning?”
Finally, Snowden claimed he could “shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that’s not my intention.”
Not just spy on everybody in the US. Snowden asserts he could do that. But he could also make the entire spying apparatus of NSA (and even all other intelligence agencies?) go dark with a few hours of work—and he’d evade notice of his NSA bosses as he performed this herculean task.
No. Ridiculous. The very first thing an agency like NSA does is set up a labyrinth to prevent itself from being taken down.
Consider these four Snowden statements together, back up and think. These are propositions that cast the man into a deep pit of doubt.
Who is he?
What is his mission?
Is that mission his own, or is he working for someone who wants to punch a hole in the NSA?
