In an article assessing Facebook last month, Washington Post writer Molly Roberts attacked whistleblowers for demonstrating a “lack of loyalty” to their institutions and described their actions as “betrayal.”  Roberts argued that it took “gumption” for whistleblowers to decide that they are right and that the leaders above them are wrong.  She wrote that these actions “look like “individualism to some and narcissism to others.”  In fact, the nation needs more whistleblowers, particularly after the corruption of the Trump presidency.

Fortunately, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Inspector General, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, a former whistleblower herself who filed a sworn affidavit thirty years ago against the confirmation of Robert Gates as CIA director, wrote a letter to the Post defending whistleblowing.  Ekedahl, who is my wife, noted that institutions, even religious ones, become loyal to themselves rather than to the missions they proclaim.  Ekedahl asked,  “Are victims of abuse by priests ‘betraying’ the Catholic Church when they become whistleblowers? Are civil servants who disclose corruption in their departments guilty of ‘lack of loyalty’?”

Investigative reporters of the Washington Post often have their exposes because of whistleblowers.  Watergate and Deep Throat is the enduring example.  In his excellent new book, “Midnight in Washington,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) documents the necessity of whistleblowers to the Congress, particularly the congressional intelligence committees.  As Schiff states, without whistleblowers the congress “would be almost completely reliant on the intelligence agencies to self report any problems.”

Nevertheless, whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were maligned in the editorial columns of the Post. David Ignatius, an apologist for the CIA for decades, charged that Snowden looked “more like an intelligence defector…than a whistleblower.”  Then-host of Meet the Press, David Gregory, asked Glenn Greenwald, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden…why shouldn’t you be charged with a crime.”  Greenwald’s “crime” was to report Snowden’s revelations in the U.K. Guardian.

So-called liberal pundits in the Post piled on. Richard Cohen, who beat the drums for war against Iraq, called Manning a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.”  Ruth Marcus, another liberal writer for the Post, referred to Snowden’s “unattractive personality,” and gratuitously maligned all whistleblowers as “difficult ones, the sort who tend to feel freer to speak out precisely because they don’t fit in.”  Marcus argued that Snowden should have “stuck around to test the system the Constitution created,” and dealt with the consequences of his actions.  In other words, whistleblowers should ignore the caprice of U.S. jurisprudence and the reactionary politics of the U.S. Supreme Court.

We would have benefitted from whistleblowers who could have exposed the CIA’s ten-year campaign of sadistic torture and abuse. A letter last week from seven senior military officers officially condemned the torture carried out by CIA officers and contractors. The author of the letter, a Navy captain, called the torture of a terrorist a “stain in the moral fiber of America.”  He noted that his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military.

The military officers, who had heard the harrowing testimony at Guantanamo Bay of a detainee in the agency’s custody, wrote their letter to urge clemency.  They noted that CIA agents and operatives subjected the detainee to “physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques,” comparable to “torture by the most abusive regimes in modern history.”  The story appeared last week in the New York Times; there was no mention of the letter in the Washington Post.  A great deal of previous testimony from other victims didn’t get reported by the mainstream media.

Last month, the New York Times, but not the Washington Post, published important details of how the United States and the CIA deceived the Polish government on the details of the sadistic interrogation program taking place at the CIA’s black site in Poland.  Poland wanted assurances regarding the handling of prisoners at the site; the CIA refused to sign any documents.  It was particularly outrageous for the CIA to compromise the relatively new independent status of an East European country that had been behind the Soviet iron curtain for decades.

The European Court of Human Rights censured Poland for allowing torture at the black site.  Yet, the CIA treats the issue as a classified matter and refuses to allow former intelligence officers to discuss the issue.  Once again, the CIA is using its tool of censorship to prevent an embarrassment to its reputation and not to protect the national security interests of the United States.

The letter of the senior military officers documents in detail the cruel experiences of a former prisoner at one of CIA’s black sites.  The letter represents an authoritative rebuttal to former directors of the CIA George Tenet and Michael Hayden and deputy directors John McLaughlin and Michael Morell who argued in a book titled “Rebuttal” that the CIA got a “bum rap.”  Their book moved swiftly through the CIA’s Publications Review Board without change, although CIA’s leaders had misrepresented every aspect of the torture program to the Senate intelligence committee.  Meanwhile, critics of CIA’s torture program such as myself faced long delays and heavy-haded censorship in trying to publish criticism of the program.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s Inspector General report on torture and abuse as well as the Senate intelligence committee’s report remain classified and hidden in various governmental vaults.  As a result, the CIA has been given carte blanche in its efforts to deceive the American public on the torture program.  In June 2003, President George W. Bush recorded that the United States “was committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.”  In fact, the CIA’s Inspector General brought examples of abuses to the attention of the Department of Justice, but Attorney General John Ashcroft had no problem with CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  Not even the waterboarding of one detainee 119 times bothered Ashcroft.

President Barack Obama unfortunately contributed to the miscarriage of justice.  The Convention against Torture, which the United States ratified in 1994 bans torture without exception and requires that torturers be prosecuted.  Obama stopped torture but totally failed to carry out the second requirement.

As Ms. Ekedahl stated in her letter to the Post, “By shedding light on their actions, whistleblowers remain loyal to the supposed mission of those institutions—and loyal to our broader civil society.”  With a masthead that states “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Post should be defending whistleblowers and ending its campaign of vilification.

counterpunch.org

The gold standard for shamelessness has long been the guy who murders his parents and then pleads for the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

The US, as well as the lickspittle NATO nations of Europe have pretty much topped this hypothetical example with a real one. They accomplished this by going into high dudgeon over Belarus President/dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s ruse of warning of a bomb on a UK Ryanair passenger jet flying from  Greece to Lithuania and sending Belorus fighter jets to intercept and ‘escort’ and divert the plane to a landing in Minsk. There his police conducted a comic “search” for the nonexistent threat and then arrested a critical Belarus journalist who was on board.

European countries are calling Lukashenko’s outrage an official government act of piracy and are threatening to ban all flights from Belarus in response. In the US, an indignant Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement saying:

“The United States strongly condemns the forced diversion of a flight between two EU member states and the subsequent removal and arrest of journalist Raman Pratasevich in Minsk. We demand his immediate release. This shocking act perpetrated by the Lukashenko regime endangered the lives of more than 120 passengers, including U.S. citizens. Initial reports suggesting the involvement of the Belarusian security services and the use of Belarusian military aircraft to escort the plane are deeply concerning and require full investigation.”

Blinken added that the US would join America’s “partners” in the EU and Lithuania  and Greece [the two terminuses of the diverted plane’s flight] in calling for the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization to review these events.”

What seemed to exercise Sec. Blinken so was the threat to “independent media” posed by this unusual act of repressive government power in an effort to shut down a journalist. “The United State once again condemns the Lukashenk regime’s ongoing harassment and arbitrary detention of journalists,” Blinken said archly.

So why is the US in this case so uniquely shameless?

It was only eight years ago that it was the US that was forcing down a plane, only in that case it was not just any plane but rather one carrying a head of state, Bolivian President Evo Morales.  But as with this latest incident the goal was harassing an “independent media” and nabbing a critic.  In that 2013 incident the real target was Edward Snowden, source for one of the biggest stories of the century:  the disclosure  thousands of documents from a global spying program by the top secret US National Security Agency where he had been employed as a private contractor.

Snowden, you may recall, ended up trapped in the transfer area of the Moscow Airport for weeks because the Obama administration had revoked his passport while he was flying from a hideout in Hong Kong in hopes of reaching some haven willing to grant him asylum from prosecution in the US for espionage and other crimes.

While Snowden was camping in the airport, the US apparently received what it thought was a tip that Snowden was being granted asylum in either Cuba or Bolivia and that he would be spirited out of Russia on the Morales presidential plane, which was bring him home from a  summit meeting he’d attended with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Reportedly under US pressure, European governments in the UK, Spain, Portugal and Italy all denied the leader’s plane a landing for needed refueling, foring the presidential aircraft to turn back an land at the airport at Vienna, where the Bolivian president was forced by complicit Austrian government officials to endure the indignity of having his presidential craft searched for a hidden Snowden — who was, embarrassingly, nowhere to be found. (If Morales had been flying Snowden to Bolivia to obtain asylum there or elsewhere in Latin America, that would have been his absolute right, not a criminal act)

In the end of course, Snowden, still at the Moscow airport, was granted asylum by Russia, where he remains to this day. He will likely will become a  Russian citizen eventually, since the US under three consecutive presidents has made it clear that if he tries to fly elsewhere, he will have his flight grounded like what happened to Ryanair passengers, and be carted off like Pratasevich in chains to face espionage charges in the US.

And for what?  Exposing what virtually every American agrees is a massive violation of the Bill of Rights, and that most major US media outlets considered to be the story of the century.  So much for respecting “independent media” in the US, and for respecting international sovereignty and the rule of law.

The US action in 2013 was far more egregious than that of Belarus this month. A flagrant breach of international law, .it established a precedent that Belarus’s Lukavshenko is simply taking advantage of.

All Belarus dictator Lukoshenko did was force a civilian airliner to land and to inconvenience 120 international passengers for a few hours while arresting his domestic journalistic enemy.  What Obama did, almost certainly with Blinken’s assistance, I might add,  was wilfully violate the sovereignty of a nation by preventing and even risking the life of the popularly elected president (not dictator!) of an independent, sovereign Latin American nation, forcing the Morales presidential plane to land and submit to a search.

At least Lukashenko had the huevos to commit his outrage against international law overtly. Obama hid his treacherous violation of international law and the sovereignty of nations by claiming the forced landing of the Morales plane was the work of Western European nations (the so-called “free world”) — nations which in fact had no interest in Snowden or in President Morales.

And Blinken’s role?  During all of 2013, from the start of Obama’s second term, Blinken was deputy national security advisor to the president, meaning this shameless hypocrite and more recently shameless arms peddler,  was surely intimately involved in the scheme to capture Snowden by hijacking the Morales presidential jet. Blinken equally surely was also actively involved in the behind-the-scenes pressure brought on European governments to deny landing permission to the Bolivian presidential jet so that it would have turn around and land in Austria. (England, Spain, Portugal and Italy all didn’t come up with that hokey plot on their own. They can’t even agree on fishing rights or acceptable limits on national debt!)

The moral standing of the US has been in the toilet for decades, of course, but this latest hypocritical US official expression of indignation over the Lukashenko outrage moves the US out of the toilet and into the sewer.

counterpunch.org

Last Wednesday, Senior U.K. Cabinet ministers were hauled before a leak inquiry to determine who was responsible for the unprecedented reporting of highly secret discussions concerning national security.

Gavin Williamson was found to be guilty by an investigation of Theresa May’s instigation. Her letter to Williamson was not unambiguous – it categorically stated he was guilty. There was no margin for misunderstanding. As Williamson heads to the backbenches, May has made a new enemy – one who was a party whip – with all the secrets that role comes with.

“There is another potentially culpable: former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Through reforms that he institutionalized, Cameron has inadvertently brought the American political culture of leaking highly classified information into British politics. Britain’s NSC is the “holy of holies.” Attended by a small core of politicians and the heads of the intelligence, security and military services, it is the ultimate decision-making forum in Britain’s national security architecture.”

It’s also a little-remarked fact that, unlike many British arrangements, the NSC is a relatively recent innovation, for which Cameron is responsible. Cameron argued in 2010 that Britain needed to formalize its national security decision-making after the freewheeling “sofa government” of Labour’s Tony Blair.

By appointing a national security adviser and instituting the NSC, partially modelled on the U.S. equivalent, Cameron gave structure to what had previously been the province of informal groups largely composed of officials. By instituting a formal entity of which he was the chair (of course), Cameron not only increased the power of the prime minister’s office in the process but brought senior Cabinet ministers into the heart of national security policymaking, giving them access to sensitive intelligence, therefore significantly raising the prospect of leaks.

The National Security Council (NSC) discussed the role of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in Britain’s future 5G telecoms network and concluded some months ago that the Chinese company should be allowed to be involved. As for the mainstream media, the leak and end of Williamson’s role, that is the end of the story.

However, there is more information about this story that is worthy of note. These dots may or may not be connected, the point being, there’s more to understand about the motivation of Williamson’s demise.

Dot One. Since stepping down as PM after the Brexit result in 2016, David Cameron now has the role of putting together a $1bn investment fund between Britain and China. The idea was to formalise a closer working relationship between the two countries. The fund was formally approved of by both Westminster and Beijing.

Dot two. Back in 2011, former government Chief Information Officer John Suffolk joined China-based IT company Huawei as global head of cybersecurity. Read those words again – former Tory government Chief Information Officer now works for Huawei as head of global cybersecurity. Suffolk was the most senior civil servant to have access to sensitive matters of government, particularly as he was also head of security risk. It was Cameron who gave Suffolk his blessing to join Huawei.

This should not have happened. It is simply too sensitive a role for someone at the heart of government and the civil service to be loyal to a foreign state business with access to the most sensitive information regarding Britain’s cybersecurity. At the time, a Cabinet Office spokesman was keen to add that an “unprecedented number of conditions” were attached to Suffolk’s appointment – as if that means anything in today’s ruthless geo-political cybersecurity environment.

In the meantime, Suffolk has been defending Huawei to the hilt who said about the cybersecurity risk to Britain just two weeks ago that – “There’s no such thing as a zero-risk connected business.”

Dot three. Some months earlier in 2011, Sir Andrew Cahn stepped down after five years in charge of UK Trade & Investment, the government department that promotes exports and attracts foreign direct investment. He is currently a non-executive director of Nomura. Sir Cahn also just happens to be the Chairman of the UK Advisory Board of Huawei – a very ‘comfy’ connection between Huawei and the British government.

Dot four. Despite concerns about Huawei that included America forcing other ‘five-eyes’ nations to abandon plans to allow Huawei access to critical infrastructure projects, the UK decided to forge on ahead with Huawei. However, a recent government report concluded that Huawei’s “basic engineering competence and cybersecurity hygiene was poor, which could be exploited further down the line.” It went further – the HCSEC (Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre) continued to find serious vulnerabilities in the Huawei products examined. Several hundred vulnerabilities and issues were reported to inform their risk and remediation in 2018. Some vulnerabilities identified in previous versions of products continue to exist.”

Dot Five: In 2012, TechRadar magazine spoke to Derek Smith, a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, who explained that the UK government has no concerns about Huawei at all. Since then Smith has become part of the National Security Council [NSC] Head of Counter-Terrorism, Security &Intelligence Communications. He was David Cameron’s Senior Press Officer on foreign policy and defence and was promoted to his current role by Cameron. Smith also disclosed in that interview – “The long-standing relationship the UK government has with Huawei, and the continued work between the two parties, means the Cabinet Office is confident that there are no security concerns.”

Dot Six: In 2009, America’s spy agency the NSA hacked into the Huawei router network in a programme called ‘Shotgiant’ which was unearthed by the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. The project was designed to spy on the Chinese government and other companies there. In the end, the NSA was itself trying to find out how it “could exploit the equipment to spy on end users.” Britain’s GCHQ was involved. At the time, BT routers in the UK extensively used Huawei products and Britain’s GCHQ set up a special facility for testing Huawei equipment to make sure it wasn’t quietly offering access of some kind to Chinese spies and hackers. Unbelievably, GCHQ was found to have allowed “The Cell” to be staffed by Huawei employees!

Dot Seven: The UK’s recent implementation of the so-called ‘porn-block’ was a contract that was originally given to Huawei, which would have allowed it to control the “Homesafe” filter, which David Cameron praised back in 2013 during his push for tighter controls on adult content. The BBC discovered that UK-based Huawei employees were able to decide which sites were blocked on the service and that even users who opted out of Homesafe would have their internet usage data routed through Huawei’s system. Even if that system is now served by another company, the point is that the government wants access to the information of who is accessing porn.

Dot Eight – In the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, it was revealed that the British security services GCHQ in Cheltenham had Huawei constractors working on its networks (Image above). The file wording stated – “oddly enough, has Chinese Huawei contractors operating on their networks.”

Dot Nine: A senior Conservative politician has emerged as one of Huawei’s leading advocates in Brussels. Some dodgy dealings have recently emerged including hiding payments made by Beijing for many business class trips and luxury hotel stays along with ‘subsidence’ payments.

Conclusion

The point about these individual bits of information is this. The mix of ex-senior ministers, members of the national security council, counter-terrorism officers, GCHQ, America’s NSA, senior members of Britain’s ‘establishment’ with deep connections into the Huawei top brass, including David Cameron himself who is currently promoting a Beijing/UK trade collaboration and MEP’s being bought off all sounds very ‘muddy waters’ when considering the nature of Theresa May’s motivations for Williamson’s sacking. We must also consider that British spooks have been working very closely with Huawei and their employees.

Williamson has strenuously denied the leak. He has encouraged on multiple occasions a police investigation. He has even sworn on his children’s lives he is innocent – a genuinely suicidal thing to say from a career point of view if caught lying.

You don’t have to like Williamson to defend him. This whole matter which has elements of the government, unaccountable security services, the decidedly murky world of geopolitical cyberwarfare and the current political conflict that Britain finds itself in – smacks of something other than we have been told. Is Williamson simply a convenient ‘patsy’ to demonstrate Theresa May’s fortitude and power at a crucial time or is there something more insidious going on?

If Williamson is guilty of serious breaches of national security, the argument that the law has not been broken is nonsense. That is the sole reason he has been fired. Why has he not been thrown out from politics completely given the seriousness of the crime? Surely, if he was guilty of breaching national security as defence secretary he would be charged or silenced, not put back on the benches. Why has Theresa May repeatedly refused to release a copy of the findings of their investigation to Williamson himself?

There’s more to this than we’ve been told.

And why would anyone believe Theresa May?

truepublica.org.uk

One of the few positive things in the ill-named USA FREEDOM Act, enacted in 2015 after the Snowden revelations on NSA domestic spying, is that it required the Director of National Intelligence to regularly report on its domestic surveillance activities. On Friday, the latest report was released on just how much our own government is spying on us. The news is not good at all if you value freedom over tyranny.

According to the annual report, named the Statistical Transparency Report Regarding Use of National Security Authorities, the US government intercepted and stored information from more than a half-billion of our telephone calls and text messages in 2017. That is a 300 percent increase from 2016. All of these intercepts were “legal” under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is ironic because FISA was enacted to curtail the Nixon-era abuse of surveillance on American citizens.

Has the US government intercepted your phone calls and/or text messages? You don’t know, which is why the surveillance state is so evil. Instead of assuming your privacy is protected by the US Constitution, you must assume that the US government is listening in to your communications. The difference between these is the difference between freedom and tyranny. The ultimate triumph of totalitarian states was not to punish citizens for opposing its tyranny, but to successfully cause them to censor themselves before even expressing “subversive” thoughts.

We cannot celebrate our freedom or call ourselves an exceptional nation as long as we are under control of the kind of surveillance that would have turned the East German Stasi green with envy. We know the East German secret police relied on millions of informants, eager to ingratiate themselves with their totalitarian rulers by reporting on their friends, neighbors, even relatives. It was a messy system but it served the purpose of preventing any “unwelcome” political views from taking hold. No one was allowed to criticize the policies of the government without facing reprisals.

Sadly, that is where we are headed.

Our advanced technological age provides opportunities for surveillance that even the most enthusiastic East German intelligence operative could not have dreamed of. No longer does the government need to rely on nosy neighbors as informants. The NSA has cut out the middleman, intercepting our communications – our very thoughts – at the source. No one who calls himself an American patriot can be happy about this development.

Not even the President is safe from the surveillance state he presides over! According to a news report last week, federal investigators monitored the phone lines of President Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, even when he was speaking to his client – the president!

An all-powerful state that intercepts its citizens’ communications and stores them indefinitely to use against them in the future does not deserve to be called the leader of the free world. It is more the high-tech equivalent of a Third World despotism, where we all exist subject to the whim of those currently in political power.

Edward Snowden did us all an enormous favor by risking it all to let us know that our government had come to view us as the enemy to be spied on and monitored. If we are to regain the liberty that our Founders recognized was granted to us not by government, but by our Creator, we must redouble our efforts to fight against the surveillance state!

ronpaulinstitute.org

In case it has escaped your notice, the diplomatic tit-for-tat between Moscow and Washington has become deadly serious.

After vacating all staff, on Saturday US authorities took control of three Russian diplomatic facilities, in San Francisco, Washington and New York. The US State Department has said it will control all access to the buildings and take responsibility for security and maintenance at the sites.

The Russians are furious. A statement in Moscow on Sunday denounced the US maneuver as an “outrageous move” and “a blatantly hostile act”. It alleged that “US special services supported by armed police are in control of the seized buildings,” which “are the property of Russia and have diplomatic immunity.”

Moscow also demanded US authorities “come to their senses” and return the facilities forthwith. Otherwise, Washington will “bear the total blame” for what ensues.

Significantly, the statement warned that the degradation of Russia-US ties cannot but negatively impact “the current condition of global stability and international security.”

An act of Russian retaliation is on the cards. The Moscow grapevine is full of speculation. A possible countermove could be the retrocession of Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador in Moscow.

A final decision is awaited. President Vladimir Putin is currently in Xiamen, China, attending the BRICS summit meeting, which will conclude on Tuesday.

Spaso House has legendary significance and it would be an enormous blow to US prestige if the Russian authorities canceled the lease on it and reclaimed the property.

Ironically, due to his business acumen, Vtorov came to be known as the “Siberian American.” After the Bolshevik Revolution, he was killed in mysterious circumstances, in 1918, and his mansion became state property. It later became the residence of the American ambassador in 1935 when the two countries established diplomatic relations.

Of course, the most famous story about Spaso House relates to the Stalin era. In 1945, the Soviet authorities took advantage of the then ambassador William Harriman’s passion for wood carvings by presenting him with a beautiful wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. So enchanted was he with the gift that he decided to hang it on the wall of his office. What the unsuspecting diplomat did not know was that the KGB had planted a listening device called Chrysostom (also known in the trade as Golden Mouth) near the beak of the eagle. The device, which ended up in the CIA Museum at Langley, was not discovered until 1952.

Spaso House has witnessed many epochal events down the years, not least the official dinner, during the historic visit to Moscow of US President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy, in May 1988, which was attended by Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev and. The State Department airlifted in all the food and china for the occasion.

The State Department cannot be unaware that such blatant violations of the Vienna Convention do not go down well in the court of world opinion. In all probability, the crassness of the ploy was deliberately contrived, with the aim of striking at Russian pride.

The big question is whether President Barack Obama could have foreseen all this when he ordered sweeping sanctions against Russia last December, including the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats, in retaliation for alleged Russian efforts to interfere with the US presidential election.

It seems highly unlikely that Obama’s diktat’s were a Machiavellian act to pre-empt his successor’s stated Russia policies. A more charitable explanation would be that the last president unknowingly lit the fuse.

What is apparent is that the career diplomats in Washington have gone on Sabbatical. The US security establishment seems now to be in the driving seat and determined to settle scores for all the real and perceived slights and humiliations against it ever since the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed up at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on June 23, 2013.

atimes.com

The fight between Apple and the FBI has been framed as an epic battle between big tech and big government. Apple, says the Obama Administration, is siding with “its business model and public brand marketing strategy” ahead of public safety. That’s not it, says Apple CEO Tim Cook. He says his company is “a staunch advocate for our customers’ privacy and personal safety.”

Donald Trump has weighed in on the controversy, ad-libbing a call for a boycott of Apple products including the iPhone, the device at the center of the debate. Two weeks ago, a federal court ordered Apple to write code that would allow the FBI to unlock an iPhone used by one of the gunmen in the San Bernadino mass shooting. Apple refused, saying the code could be used to unlock other iPhones as well, not just the one covered by the order. A Wall Street Journal report that the feds are currently going after a dozen or so iPhones in other cases seems to back up Apple’s argument.

What this is really about — but barely touched upon in corporate media — is Edward Snowden.

A few years ago, no one — left, right, libertarian — would have supported Apple’s refusal to cooperate with a federal investigation of a terrorist attack associated with a radical Islamist group, much less its decision to fight a court order to do so. If investigators hadn’t combed through the data on the phone used by Syed Farook before he slaughtered 14 people, it would have been seen as dereliction of duty.Obviously the authorities need to learn everything they can about Farook, such as whether he ever had direct communications with ISIS or if there were any coconspirators. Looking at evidence like that is what law enforcement is for.

Rather than face Uncle Sam alone, Apple’s defiance is being backed by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo — companies who suffered disastrous blows to their reputations, and billions of dollars in lost business, after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that they spent years voluntarily turning over their customers’ data to the spy agency in its drive to “hoover up” every email, phone call, text message and video communication on the planet, including those of Americans.

Most Americans tell pollsters Apple should play ball with the FBI. But Apple and its Silicon Valley allies aren’t banking on the popular vote. Their biggest customers are disproportionately well-off and liberal — and they don’t want government spooks looking at their personal or business information.

Another underreported aspect of this story is the same sort of interagency squabbling that contributed to the failure of counterterrorism officials to see the whole picture before 9/11, and was supposed to have been fixed by such Bush-era bureaucratic revamps as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and bringing America’s 16 intelligence agencies under a single director.

When you stop to think about this, it’s insane.

The NSA, specifically chartered to intercept signals intelligence that originates overseas — that is specifically prohibited from gathering data that is sent from one American to another American — continues to do so, probably at an even greater degree of efficiency than the period between 2009 and 2013, the era documented by the Snowden revelations leaked to the news media. Ignoring the anger of the American people, Congress did nothing to rein in the NSA. So they continue to break the law, and violate our privacy, on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, the FBI — the agency that is legally authorized to eavesdrop on American citizens as part of investigations authorized by judicial warrants, can’t get into a terrorist’s smartphone…something everyone agrees it ought to be able to do.

The NSA almost certainly has the contents of Farook’s iPhone — and yours, and mine — on a server at its massive data farm in Bluffdale, Utah. Thanks to a court order and inside-the-Beltway turf battles, however, the NSA can’t/won’t turn them over to the FBI.

This is what happens when government treats citizens with contempt. Citizens return the favor.

President Barack Obama is on track to go down in history as one of the, or perhaps as the worst and most criminal presidents in US history.

He started out, campaigning in 2008, as someone would would restore the rule of law in US international affairs and here at home after eight years of criminality during the Bush and Cheney administration, as saying he would end America’s wars and bring back an era of international cooperation and negotiation, and as saying that he would confront the dire threat of global climate change.

On the basis of that promise, he won a dramatic election victory, raising hopes across the country and across many voting blocks. On that basis, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize — the first time the award was given before anything had been done by the laureate being honored. And on the basis of that promise, people expected action on climate change.

Instead, the president began backpedaling almost instantly. Instead of restoring the rule of law, he almost immediately announced that he would not permit his Justice Department to engage in any prosecutions of CIA, FBI, military of Bush/Cheney administration personnel for violations of international law or of US law. He introduced new secrecy rules, launched a record number of prosecutions of government whistleblowers, including an international manhunt to arrest or kill NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which included the forcing down of a presidential aircraft carrying the president of Bolivia, wrongly suspected of flying Snowden from Russia to that Latin American country, and a secret espionage indictment against Wikileaks founder Julien Assange, who has thus been trapped for years in the little UK embassy of Ecuador which has granted him asylum. And most egregiously, Barack Obama, sabotaged the first international meeting on climate change held in Denmark, and has ducked every opportunity to have the US lead on reaching an international agreement to seriously reduce global carbon emissions.

During the three Congressional electoral cycles and his re-election campaign in 2012, Obama studiously avoided pressing on any of these key issues, and especially on climate change. His position: “all of the above”, for energy development, has seen the US move, not towards carbon emission reductions, but towards expanded production of gas, oil and even coal extraction, making the US the largest oil producer in the world, and a major provider of dirty coal to both US electric companies and large coal using countries abroad, including China.

Now we have this flimflam artist up in Alaska, talking about the crisis he has helped worsen, calling it an existential issue. And yet even as he speaks, the Shell Oil Company is towing a giant oil drilling rig up to the Arctic Ocean, thanks to an Obama administration permit, to begin drilling for oil in the shallow waters north of Alaska — drilling for yet more oil, that is, even as the world is facing a glut of the stuff, in a delicate region that would be devastated by a well blow-out, because ice would make containment an impossibility.

Future generations of Americans will surely look back at President Obama as not just a con-man, but as someone who blew several trillion dollars on continued wars around the globe, as someone who terminally destroyed the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, instead of rescuing these documents as promised, and as the president who, when given the last real opportunity to reverse climate change, ducked the challenge and pandered to the corporations that selfishly wanted short-term gain over long-term survival for humanity and the biosphere.

There are plenty of other criminal acts by this president to consider. On his watch, this first African-American president allowed an increased national police to become a fully-armed occupying army across the country. No American today is safe from abusive police who make up crimes and ignore the law at will, but paying a uniquely terrible price are African-Americans and other people of color, who once gave this president 90% of their votes or more, but who now are being gunned down with a grim regularity by mostly white cops who fire at the slightest provocation, even at unarmed kids. On his watch too, young children, fleeing US-caused gang violence in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere in Latin America, have been sent back to their home countries illegally, or held in prisons in this country in violation of direct court orders. He also ordered his Justice Department not to prosecute the criminal bankers who willfully destroyed the US and the global economy to profit themselves and their institutions.

This president, let’s be clear, has not just been incompetent and gutless. He has been a slick political fraud and both a common and a Constitutional criminal. In a just nation of engaged citizens, Obama would already have been impeached for any number of serious crimes, beginning with the failure to prosecute known war criminals of the Bush/Cheney administration, including the president and vice-president themselves.

That’s not going to happen, because this is not a just nation of engaged citizens.

But there will be a reckoning. History will judge this president harshly, as it has judged criminal leaders of the past, from Rome’s Nero to Italy’s Mussolini or Uganda’s Idi Amin. It may strike some as hyperbole to put President Obama in league with such universally acknowledged monsters as these, but when human beings begin dying by the millions because of climate-change caused famines, floods, droughts and international armed conflicts we will surely look back at the actions and inactions of this particular president, who had the opportunity to make a huge difference and chose not just to do nothing, but to make things worse, and will say his crimes perhaps exceeded theirs.

In the 1998 Hollywood thriller «Enemy of the State», Jason Robards played fictional U.S. Representative Phillip Hammersley. The chairman of a key House of Representatives committee, Hammersley is opposed to a USA PATRIOT Act-like bill that sanctions massive telecommunications surveillance throughout the United States. Hammersley is subsequently confronted by U.S. government agents on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The agents give Hammersley a deadly injection and prescription pills are then scattered on the floor of his car. Hammersley and his car are pushed into the bay. The news reports then claim that Hammersley tragically committed suicide. The NSA’s deputy chief, Thomas Reynolds, who is played by Jon Voight, heads an agency that has gone rogue and routinely violates laws that ensure that NSA’s operations are within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.

As a result of the latest release of classified NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the last three NSA directors – Michael Hayden, Keith Alexander, and the present one, Mike Rogers – have adopted the fictional policies of Thomas Reynolds in «Enemy of the State» and have taken the agency and its so-called «information warriors» into rogue status. Rogers, who is director of the NSA, also wears the hat of the Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, which is located with NSA at the agency’s Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters. There was initial opposition from some members of Congress to combining the two positions under a single military officer because of the power that such a position could amass. Those initial reservations were justified considering the depth to which NSA has sunk in carrying out offensive information warfare operations around the world.

The most recent revelations about NSA’s «Fourth Party» operations carried out primarily from the NSA’s base at Menwith Hill, England in concert with the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, describes how the NSA uses hostile hackers to break into the systems of not only other hostile targets but also neutrals and friendlies. By implanting special surveillance devices in network routers, servers, firewalls, wireless bridges, and other equipment manufactured by U.S. and foreign companies, the NSA and its FIVE EYES surveillance partners in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have managed to turn the computer hackers employed by hostile intelligence agencies, as well as non-state players, such as hacker groups, into «Fourth Party» collectors of meta-data for the NSA. The system implantations permit NSA to «piggyback» on to hacking operations being conducted by unwitting foreign cyber-warfare data plunderers without being detected by the hackers. These Counter Computer Network Exploitation operations involve active and passive meta-data acquisition by NSA from Fourth Parties and «re-purposing» the meta-data collected by Fourth Parties.

In other words, there is no reason to believe that recent stories about Chinese government hackers breaking into the databases of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and downloading the sensitive personnel records of millions of present and past U.S. government employees, are entirely true. Considering the fact that NSA is able to piggyback on the efforts of foreign hackers, including those in China, Russia, and Iran, there is the likelihood that it was not the Chinese who gained access to the OPM files but NSA’s offensive information warfare teams working within the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) branch who ultimately obtained the millions of files as a way to alarm Congress and receive additional budgetary funding.

The U.S. Cyber Command includes elements that do nothing but maliciously attack foreign computers and networks and the mask the true point of origin of the hacking attacks by routing them through Russian, Chinese, and other servers. The NSA’s use of the phrase «leveraging victims» of computer network exploitation (CNE) activities suggests that NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency are involved in «dirty tricks» operations to amass as many witting or unwitting Fourth Party «victims» as necessary. There are no guarantees that Fourth Parties are all nation states, but that they may include friendly hacker groups — known as «White Hats» – and political organizations, in addition to covertly-implanted devices.

One NSA slide on Fourth Party operations illustrates an NSA «listening post» being embedded as part of the VOYEUR program within the servers of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) in Tehran and those used by Hezbollah in Lebanon. One NSA operation is to piggyback on Iranian hackers working for the MOIS and «steal, through a «redirector» program the data that the Iranians are able to download from hacking targets. The NSA refers to such targets as «victims». One NSA PowerPoint slide bullet point states that a priority for NSA is to «identify victims for 4th Party Collection Opportunities». «Victims» are nations or other entities that the NSA and its partners believe have been the targets of cyber-attacks from hostile nations or groups.

It is clear how NSA and its Israeli partner, Unit 8200, were able to infect Iranian computer networks involved in that nation’s nuclear power program with the destructive Stuxnet virus. NSA and its allies are able to penetrate foreign computer networks through implanted Fourth Party devices, some known as «beacons», placed clandestinely inside systems manufactured by Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Apple, Juniper Networks, Motorola, Seagate, Western Digital, and others.

A Fourth Party decision tree prepared by NSA asks the question, «Is 4P (4th Party) data enough?» If the answer is «no, we need direct access», the NSA decision tree directs the NSA operator to «steal» data from the «victim» of a hacking attack.

Fourth Party data acquisition sites are integrated with NSA’s XKEYSCORE metadata collection system, which operates from worldwide foreign satellite and undersea cable signals intercept stations, as well as from Special Source Offices (SSOs) located in U.S. and other FIVE EYES embassies and missions. SSO sites are operated by the Special Collection Service (SCS), a joint NSA and CIA operation that is known within NSA as «F6». SCS is known as the «black bag» component of NSA.

A PowerPoint slide on NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) activities and Fourth Party operations indicates that China, Egypt, Brazil, Venezuela, Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, and Oman are major Fourth Party players. One Fourth Party collection operation is codenamed DEADSEA but it is not clear where the operation is located. Another Fourth Party operation is codenamed BADASS. NSA’s Menwith Hill Station in England is described as a focal point for «MENA (Middle East/North Africa) 4th Party Collection opportunities».

The Middle East/North Africa (MENA) Fourth Parties that likely passed signals intercepts to NSA, but were generally considered hostile to U.S. interests, likely included Libya under Muammar Qaddafi and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, both of which cooperated with U.S. intelligence in holding as prisoners and interrogating and torturing a number of Al Qaeda suspects. If Libya under Qaddafi and the Assad government in Syria had cooperated as Fourth Parties with the NSA, did the agency later turn around and use Fourth Party access rights to help overthrow the two governments? If the answer is yes, as it seems to be, NSA has embarked on a path of unprecedented deception and guile in its supposed national security-related responsibilities.

In «Enemy of the State», the good guys eventually won out over the evil NSA. In the real world, NSA continues to engage in roguish practices, from wiretapping «Der Spiegel» in Germany to reading the private e-mails of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. In the wilds of Africa, «rogue» elephants are often killed by hunters tasked to carry out the job in order to protect public safety. NSA is a virtual rogue elephant but there are no congressional budgetary «hunters» willing to take the fatal shots to put down the wild intelligence agency beast.