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Snowden must get asylum now!
  • The US are very very nervous about the whole Snowden issue. Its bloody ridicolous. Forcing Evo Morales airplain to land in Austria because they think Snowden is on board. Comeon! Thats hilarious! US director of national intelligence Clapper lies unpunished to Congress about the whole Nation being spied. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/01/james-clapper-apology-congress-erroneous-response Obama is pissing himself in his pants. Obviously they are expecting big things to come up by his leaks. EU is already obeying any orders after shortly and shyly protesting. US are bullying the entire world - even Snowdens father, trying to play a shitty emotional card. Every single day that passes, Snowden is doing a great thing! Hale-fuckin-luya... He should get asylum now!

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  • Sorry guys out some days for work, I've been thinking about this subject and apart from the theme that this guy is a decoy :-) We really must not judge people like this, all this is for distraction, the important event that is happening in this precise moment is that ourselves are alive, and have strength to do something for our own lives and people we love. Be happy enjoy little precious things like fresh air and a smile. And just maybe when they are spying on us the happiness will get to them also... ;-)

    BIG SMILE TO ALL

  • I hope people in the EU especially Germany will react about, whats happening now, while in the US nobody seems to care really about their human rights being thrown into trash.

  • The big story is really probably that Snowdon is going to be made an example of.

    Information wants to be free

    Once the war-cry of idealists, it sould now be given the status of one our law s of social behaviour: Information will be free and will get out, no matter what we do.

    Jut like most of we IT consumers felt that initial rush of empowerment at being able to research and find friends and products online - only to discover later that our own searches were no secret, so have governments found out that their own snoooping activities tent to come to the surface. (Yes at very high levels, cigar-smoking government types get Rushes of empowerment like a kid with a new face-book account).

    Some Governments developed different styles of stealth. The Chinese went for what they really wanted. Others in the US like Oliver North, jumped in willy nilly and was naive enough to think he could cover his Iran arms- dealing tracks by deleting lots of email on his own computer workstation. He got burned and we all laughed. By then we'd learned that emails get read off servers.

    But there's another born every minute. Government politicians, understanding little about IT, can order surveillance clumsily. What turns out is that all our attempts to watch on somebody get found out in the end - either by new technology, a USB stick left somewhere, a disgruntled employee, a careless employee or simply a set of procedures which were flawed.

    Even cash leaks. Our banks have periodic incursions of cash trickling out. Staff get called in at 3 am to stick their fingers in dykes. Sometimes there are GULP-sums of cash whisked away - yet the Banks rarely declare those losses.

    If the Banks have outward trickles, the French would have bubbles coming from their blow-up Zodiacs "a la Rainbow Warrior," While the USA has a barbed-wire canoe, with its faithful subjects lashing out with their paddles at the occasional deserters like Snowdon.`

    I'm absolutely sure the USA has masses of data - and that they can hardly wait to tell us how good it is. But I'm saying a lot of it is possibly data for it's own sake, lots of it useless, that there differing arguments about how it should be mined, That there will have been a confusing number of means of collating, prioritising, storing and retrieving the data. If you remember Mogadishu, Afghanistan, Kuweit, Watergate, Abu Graheb and Guantanamo Bay, a picture should start to form of the way orders are carried out at variance with procedures.

    We'll find out. The 4th and 5th amendments allow every US agent to spill the beans eventually.

  • Too much easy cynism around here in this discussion, too many hyperviews done from a laptop - in the meantime there is some cash: Venezuela offered asylum. Great! Lets go on, this story just started.

  • Contacting really independent people :-)

    Yeah, Greenwald is so much part of the mainstream that the D.o.D. has officially blocked access to his blogs on the Guardian's website from all of its bases. That and the forced search of the Bolivian president's (one of Obama's drinking buddies) plane in Austria for a potential whistleblowing fugitive is all part of their plot to convince the world Snowden is not a decoy...

  • ZXX font

    How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them? I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) — misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence. I drew six different cuts (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise and Xed) to generate endless permutations, each font designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way. I offered the typeface as a free download in hopes that as many people as possible would use it.

    http://blogs.walkerart.org/design/2013/06/20/sang-mun-defiant-typeface-nsa-privacy/

  • Contacting really independent people

    Hence, Greenwald. His involvement was enough to convince me that Snowden was legit.

  • Then what mechanism do you propose for exposing government offenses, other than working with independent journalists like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, publishing material on the internet for everyone to read, giving interviews and using mass-media as best you can?

    Contacting really independent people :-)

  • @leonbeas

    So if Snowden wants to use this way to tell the world we are being spied ... It's a complete contradiction"

    Then what mechanism do you propose for exposing government offenses, other than working with independent journalists like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, publishing material on the internet for everyone to read, giving interviews and using mass-media as best you can?

    What would you suggest he do, other than telepathy or smoke signals?

  • Before Orwell's 1984 was WE......

    We is set in the future. D-503 lives in the One State,[2] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which allows the secret police/spies to inform on and supervise the public more easily.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/george-orwell-1984-zamyatin-we

  • IS this really a conversation imagining that the US,UK and especially France etc DONT spend most of our hard earned pennies on spying still?

  • Snowdon ~ as a decoy or just a brilliant opportunity? The US response is message to the world of the same kind we got from the Stasi, the KGB and other authoritarian powers:

    "We know all about you, and we have been monitoring you for a long time."

    "If you get smart with us we'll bring you down. Just look what we did to this guy. "

    "You can run but you cannot hide.."

    As Al Capone put it, to justify his unlawful operations,

    "My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way."

    Or, to quote the bully who stole your lunch at school, the US is responding to our accusations of their snooping,

    "Yes, I did steal your lunch. And just what are you going to do about it?"

    Or, as George Orwell wrote, "Big Brother is Watching You.".

    Why would the US need to advertise that point? Well, as it turns out, the USA's surveillance in the past (as revealed by the KGB) has usually turned out to be a hopeless shamozzle. I agree more and more with @Vitaly_Kiselev - this, intended or not, has turned out some priceless publicity for American hegemony. And, in case anyone missed it, a bare-faced, undisguised threat to the private lives of us all.

  • come on guys, mass media is a tool (one of the most powerful, after accidental death and nuclear warheads) how is it possible that TV or newspapers tell you the truth, only what is of interest is carefully told and manipulated, and this is no secret for anyone with half brain. So if Snowden wants to use this way to tell the world we are being spied, having himself the feedback on how "things" really work. It's a complete contradiction, so... or he is a decoy, or he's just trying to save is ass from a bullet with is name on it, by making himself some a kind of "martyr", and the only reason is not already dead is because is threatening with selling some sensitive info to someone really powerful with different interests, simple no?

    If I was a "real" Snowden and really have this goal of making the world aware of the outrageous lack of privacy we all have, TV and Mass media is the last place I would go, and if I value my head would try to use other more hidden ways to reach this goal.

    If my "arse" is on the line than yeah go to the TV invent a story that cant be ignored and is of interest for guys in power and start a soap opera. Even though I was at the end being a decoy to save myself.

    LOL

  • Well looks, like slowly is coming out what was obvious: more and more intelligence services are involved in spying everybody. Thats why the EU also is not really protesting against anything. They just stand by foot to the US - violating human rights. The most pervers thing is to pretend, this is protection about terrorists. Its all about global control. Resources. Power. Yesterday Obama killed another 17 people in Pakistan with his evil drones - violating human rights - who is the terrorist? Who wouldn't stand up and fight against this evil power to revenge a terrorist killing of his whole family? This is an undeclared war against the people on world scale.

  • [any government that is "shocked" by the so-called "revelation" that we're spying on them is either naive, grandstanding for PR, or both!]

    They are required to be shocked or else lose face and beg for anal sex. The sheer scale of what's done is shocking though and runs into the ground for all eternity any higher moral ground the US may have had in its (young) history. This has damaged the US image worse than two unjustified wars combined.

  • This story somewhat reminds me of the case of Christopher Boyce (see the movie "Falcon and the Snowman" if you're not familiar with him). The differences are he hasn't sold his information (as far as we know) and he managed to flee the country. Now the US can bully, threaten and bribe world nations. I wonder what deal Old Man Biden cut with Ecuador?? I say leave the guy alone. As Vitaliy suggests, any government that is "shocked" by the so-called "revelation" that we're spying on them is either naive, grandstanding for PR, or both!

  • Thing is that that in this case he behaved very strange. As he contacted newspapers and media corporations in such a way that everyone knew about him, all details for months.

    Based on the accounts of the principals involved, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, neither of whom is a known liar, Snowden first contacted Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, but failed to persuade Greenwald to set up a secure internet connection, until Poitras intervened a few months later. Poitras then got Bart Gellman of the Washington Post involved, and Greenwald took the story to the Guardian, where he works as a blogger.

    Snowden's behavior may or may not be strange, but it's not surprising, when no course was likely to succeed in maintaining his cover for very long -- he had disappeared from his job, and violated his security contract by travelling on his passport without advance permission. This itself may be strange -- he might have done better staying in his job -- but he appears to have heroic impulses, which is not surprising for a 29-year old. Unfortunately for him, he also appears to have had a naive view of his prospects for political asylum.

    Maybe the U.S. government plotted all this out, but for what possible purpose? And how did they program him? The simplest explanation looks to be the most likely one.

  • I can't see any conspiracy in this - he felt compelled to release this information in the public interest, for better or for worse.

    Thing is that that in this case he behaved very strange. As he contacted newspapers and media corporations in such a way that everyone knew about him, all details for months. And all such outlets have certain policies about natinal security, so this information become known to NSA in seconds.

    As I said, information were presented in the form that can be consumed by average person having few minutes before TV. And this information, at best, can be called light slap.

    The "global elite slapping the US and showing them their place" suggest the the "global elite" lost control and there is a government FOR the people in charge? Does not compute.

    Nope, it does not mean that anyone lost or gained control. Just different groups have different interests.

  • there is no useful end game for any of the decoy hypotheses presented here. Sometimes Occam's razor is just that. The "global elite slapping the US and showing them their place" suggest the the "global elite" lost control and there is a government FOR the people in charge? Does not compute.

  • I can't see any conspiracy in this - he felt compelled to release this information in the public interest, for better or for worse. My coworker said today that she thought he was getting paid for it, and was rather incensed with my position about his motive being honorable - basically as a privacy-rights defender.

    We both agreed that he's pretty much screwed though - his biggest crime was taking classified information from the defense apparatus of the state.. it could be completely harmless, but parading it in front of the public attacks the authority of the state.. remember there are millions of Americans that have access to classified information, which is a great way to keep whistleblowers quiet. When they see Snowden chased all over the world and finding no friends anywhere most will choose to keep their mouths shut.

    Anyway I don't expect it do do much policy-wise.. people just don't really care, and probably assume it's for homeland security and doesn't apply to them.. that is probably the case, but it's certainly at risk of being corrupted in the future

  • oh yeah, people love conspiracy theories....

  • that the facts couldn't be ignored by major media, hard as major media is trying to turn the whole thing into amateur psychology babble, the same way it did with Bradley Manning.

    Thing is major media have exactly same interestes most of the time.

    Another decoy theory is that Snowden is just global elite toy, used to slap US slightly and show them their place.

    You can make many absolutely probably theories, but only his owners know real one.

    The claim that the whole thing is an orchestrated diversion -- as opposed to an incidental one -- strikes this reader as, well, far more improbable than the claim that Snowden is exactly who he says he is.

    You can't even imagine how much orchestrated things can looks like random ones.

  • @Vitaliy_Kiselev

    He also did not disclosed anything valuable.

    He may not have disclosed anything which wasn't already known or assumed, but he disclosed it in such way, with documents, that the facts couldn't be ignored by major media, hard as major media is trying to turn the whole thing into amateur psychology babble, the same way it did with Bradley Manning.

    The claim that the whole thing is an orchestrated diversion -- as opposed to an incidental one -- strikes this reader as, well, far more improbable than the claim that Snowden is exactly who he says he is.

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    The Global War on You (GWOY): This term, not yet in the language, is designed to replace a post-9/11 Bush administration name, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), sometimes also called World War IV by neocons. GWOT was famously retired by President Obama and his top officials, turning the ongoing global war being fought on distant battlefields and in the shadows into a nameless war. That may, however, change. You are, after all, being called to the colors in a war on... you. Congratulations, son or daughter, Uncle Sam wants you (even if not in the way he used to in your grandparents’ day). You, after all, are the central figure in and the key to GWOY and the basis upon which the new global security state will continue to be built.

    http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175720/