In an interview with GQ magazine, Glenn Greenwald explains the strategy that was developed to deal with the documents that Edward Snowden gave them. It was determined by his antipathy towards mainstream US media and the way they were so deferential to power.
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Recall the story of how the NSA was intercepting the shipment of US-made routers and secretly installing backdoors in them that would enable the NSA to gain access to their entire traffic and users before re-sealing the packages and forwarding them to the unwitting recipients.
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Last night I watched online the above two-hour Frontline program that was broadcast earlier this week on public television and it is well worth seeing. It tells the history of the NSA’s secret surveillance programs, focusing on the period from just before the events of 9/11 and leading up to soon after Barack Obama took office as president in 2008. The story of Edward Snowden and his leaks are used to bracket this story but is not the main focus. Part 2 deals with the role of the major internet companies and will be broadcast next week on public television stations and will also be on the internet.
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In an extended interview on The Colbert Report, Glenn Greenwald reveals more about the upcoming big NSA news. When asked directly what it will be about, he says that “One of the missing pieces is about who are the people on whom the NSA is spying on in America, who are they targeting, for what purposes, who are these people that they are declaring to be sufficient threats that it warrants reading their emails and what is the pattern of people that they have targeted. Are they political dissidents, are they critics of US foreign policy, or are they actual terrorists?”
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By now it should be no surprise that whenever the US accuses another country of doing something wrong, it is also very likely the case that they are doing the same thing. This hypocrisy has become so routine that one wonders whether one should even both to comment on it, but it is still necessary. The latest is the revelation about what the US has been doing with routers.
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Yesterday there was a debate in Toronto on the proposition “Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms”. It was live streamed last night and I apologize for not giving advance notice. For some reason I did not know earlier but heard about it only on my way home and managed to catch only the second half of it live.
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Given all the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ spy agencies intercepting the communications of individuals all over the globe, the obvious question that arises is to what extent they were involved in the Heartbleed bug, the weakness in the OpenSSL protocol that enables third parties to extract 64K chunks of information at a time from targeted computers without the hosts being aware, a security problem so serious that it even caused the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing.
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Andrew Rice of New York magazine had an entertaining description of the Polk Awards last night where Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman received the award for National Security Reporting for their work on the Snowden documents. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian who supported the printing of the first major articles, also was present to pick up a well-deserved award for his paper.
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