Tag Archives: Edward Snowden

Unprotected text

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iosEncryptionIf you have a cell phone with robust encryption, it may deny entry to unwanted intruders who wish to rifle through your most personal information.

Our government prefers to be opaque when it comes to telling us what it’s doing, and yet is astonished when we cherish personal privacy, and defend it with various tools including encryption.

According to former CIA analyst, Edward Snowden, a fugitive somewhere in Russia these days, our government didn’t ask permission or authority when it invaded our Google and Yahoo accounts, nor when the NSA helped conduct global surveillance programs in conjunction with pliable Telcom companies and foreign governments.

When we were a collection of colonies, English authorities sought to enforce the tax laws using “writs of assistance” to enter any house they chose, to look for “contraband,” and to demand that you help them to invade your privacy.

When we won our revolution, we wrote a bill of rights to guard against these unwarranted invasions.

But now our privacy can be compromised without physically entering a home, given modern technological “progress.”

Aldous Huxley wrote, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

In a fairly recent Supreme Court opinion, Riley v. California, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that ninety percent of Americans have cell phones and they contain “a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives — from the mundane to the intimate.” Continue reading →

Freedom of religion – not really! – ask any Muslim!

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A famous Muslim temple – photo by John P. Flannery

A famous Muslim temple – photo by John P. Flannery

Bigots conceal their religious prejudice under the guise that they want to keep us safe and secure.

In fact, they compromise individual freedom, violate our constitution’s promise, foster more prosecutorial misconduct, and, prove what they’re really about is religious discrimination.

We’re talking about the reckless political trash talk demanding that our government surveil every Muslim Mosque in America.

America says it’s tolerant of all religions, and bound by our constitution to make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but our historic record reveals a different story.

Starting in colonial times, America was brutal to Roman Catholics. Catholics were ridiculed for their beliefs, their churches burned, believers killed. A groundless fear that the papacy might direct our government almost kept that “upstart from Massachusetts,” Senator John F. Kennedy, from becoming President, even though our Constitution says – “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office…”

We decry anti-Semitism abroad but Jews in America have been denied access to jobs, clubs, colleges, and neighborhoods.

We are now focusing on the most recent assault by wrong-headed candidates and elected officials demanding a nationwide surveillance net cast over every mosque as a suspect harbor for Islamist terrorists.

No matter that President John Adams, in the Treaty with the Barbary States in 1797, assured Tripoli that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” and, further, that the United States had no “enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims].”

But does that mean we may not investigate a place of worship?

Not so but the devil is in the details as to how and when.

As a New York federal prosecutor, I tried a case with a pay-off to the French connection for a heroin shipment, the parking ticket for a heroin laden car for the “buy money,” passed in the first pew at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

We didn’t know about it beforehand and no decent investigator was going to keep St. Patrick’s under surveillance ever after on the highly unlikely possibility it would ever happen again.

Compare how NSA identified Muslim “suspects” from 2002 to 2008.

The Snowden materials released to the Guardian in 2014 disclosed that NSA’s surveillance “training” materials referred to any individual “suspect” as “Mohammed Raghead,” quite revealing, and a “suspect” was anyone, (a), of Muslim faith, and, (b), politically active, despite the First Amendment prohibitions against the government “chilling” either speech or religion.

The real rub is that this “surveillance” required no suspicion of actual terrorism.

Worse, when our federal law enforcement finds no crime, they may create it, with promised grandiose rewards for doing things the FBI dictates be done. Continue reading →

For law enforcement – privacy is inconvenient

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ciaDirectorWhatever anyone thinks of former CIA network administrator, Edward Snowden, whether as a whistleblowing champ hero or a hacking chump coward, he raised the consciousness of citizens to the fact that they had very little privacy, that we all remain under constant warrantless NSA surveillance for no good reason while their secret big data haul makes the fictional Orwellian Big Brother a harsh reality.

Many are willing to surrender freedom and privacy for seeming security.

Many say they don’t care if the government is hoovering up every bit of information about them – what do they have to hide?

For all the self-asserting bluster about their individual dignity and independence, many have chosen to escape from the hard-earned freedom defined by our bill of rights to embrace humiliating subjection.

A recent declassified report, authored in 2009, but released just this past Saturday, said the IGs from five Intelligence and Law Enforcement agencies couldn’t identify any specific ways that the massive surveillance, under the code name, “Stellar Wind,” exposed by Mr. Snowden, thwarted a single possible terrorist attack.

In a law school note, many years ago, I wrote for a law school journal, that the notion of privacy “implies solitude or quiet or ‘social distance,’ no doubt as a reaction to our densely populated, commercial society” and the “concept of control is fundamental to an American definition of privacy.”

Professor Allan Westin described privacy as the “claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.”

In the hallowed chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, during oral argument, the government made crystal clear its disrespect for everyone’s “right to be let alone” from the government’s intrusion. Continue reading →

Lock that digital back door

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banksafeIt’s time to lock that digital back door to your private information to defend against the government’s unrestricted intrusion on what was once presumed to be the safe and easy bit and byte beltway that we call the Internet.

You may not think to lock the doors to your country home until there’s a burglary or home invasion in your neighborhood.

We enjoyed that open country door freedom on the Internet until the sobering disclosures more than a year ago by former CIA computer specialist, Edward Snowden.

Snowden has since made it crystal clear that, if you’re not encrypting what your communicating, your information is likely flowing by the petabyte into NSA’s multi-million dollar data-devouring Super Cray Computer, once called “the Black Widow.”

Since the disclosures, the President, the NSA, and the Congress have lacked the resolve to discourage the government’s uninhibited surveillance of us, its citizens. Continue reading →

What Inalienable Rights?

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Chloris the pig eats flowers

If you listened to the talking heads on last Sunday’s shows, you may have come away with an uneasy feeling about how the U.S. does its business, particularly in the embarrassing matter of the most famous whistle blower since Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers – we’re talking about Edward J. Snowden and his disclosures about how our government has been vacuuming up our private information at home and abroad.

We should first review the especially lawless and bellicose remarks of Republican U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham from South Carolina.

Senator Graham would rather have Hong Kong disregard the serious legal issue raised by the Virginia federal indictment charging Snowden with “espionage,” namely, that the treaty we signed states that Hong Kong need not extradite an American if the underlying indictment is deemed “political” (and espionage charges are almost always considered “political”).

Of course, given the right charges, Hong Kong might have decided to extradite Snowden.  But these charges, namely, “espionage,” appear to have been drafted by politicians who wanted a headline instead of by smart criminal lawyers who might have found criminal charges that didn’t run afoul of the extradition treaty.

Fox News Sunday Anchor Chris Wallace weakly insisted the extradition failed because Hong Kong was “legalistic” — for actually insisting the United States satisfy the terms of the extradition treaty we signed.

Graham blusters and fulminates about using our nation’s considerable raw economic force against any nation state that would “harbor” Snowden.

It’s fascinating how these guys in our government leak what they wish, but anyone who releases information revealing their lies and misconduct, triggers a manhunt to the ends of the earth to bring him down and shut him up – and we have the proof of this in the case of Snowden.

In fact, Senator Graham said, “I hope we’ll chase him (Snowden) to the ends of the earth, bring him to justice and let the Russians know there will be consequences if they harbor this guy.” Continue reading →