MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Edward Snowden : From Russia With Love
By rmrd0000 on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 3:07pm |Given Russia's actions in Crimea, shower spying at the Olympics and sending Cossacks after Pussy a Riot, one might have expected more detailed questioning of Snowden during his televised appearance at SXSW. Should Snowden be as vocal about Russia as he is about the United States?
URL:
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2014/3/10/questions-the-aclu-should-have-asked-snowden-but-did-not
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On the home front, Sen Feinstein accuse the CIA of spying on the Senate.
Meanwhile, Putin sends a biker gang and jack-booted, armed thugs into the Ukraine.
by rmrd0000 on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 3:16pm
The crowd at SXSW showed itself to be very supportive of Snowden. Presumably, the moderators of the Snowden appearance were aware of that fact even before it was demonstrated during the event. So, again presumably, the crowd had paid attention to Snowden's case since it exploded into the news. Snowden wasn't at SXSW to explain himself.
So why then should anyone expect that Spandan Chakrabartis three questions be asked when the crowd had already, and for months now, heard them asked and then heard them answered about a billion times, give or take?
It cracked me up to follow your final link expecting to see Putin riding a motorcycle and instead seeing him on a tricycle. Seems like they could do 'macho man' a bit more convincingly than that for a staged photo-op.
by A Guy Called LULU on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 4:16pm
I noted Snowden did say, as I have, that the NSA is wasting far too many resources gathering oceans of data. They are literally drowing in a sea of useless metadata.
Snowden said if the snooping was properly targeted at people who are known risks, the NSA would have had a better chance of detecting and stopping, for instance, the Boston bombers. He agreed that data gathering done lawfully is appropriate and necessary.
by Anonymous ncd (not verified) on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 4:33pm
The People's crock....lifting a Rupert Murdoch front page--In the words of the immortal Takei, Oh Myyy,
edit to add: DoubleA, HELP! I tried what you said, and you see how it turned out!
RMRD, you are showing your ass, (as we say in the ghetto).
Why in the name of the Sweet Baby Jesus would you expect Snowden to criticize the only power with a prayer of standing up to the evil empire (guess who!) and keeping him safe?
The article was bullshit, and so is this post.
Edit to add: Oh, and BTW, the "people's" view gives no hint of the names behind the blog...could it be....(wait for it...) rmrd?
by jollyroger on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 6:30pm
The site is not my blog. The. Blogger does share my point of view.
Snowden has taken refuge in Russia. Putin is no hero. Snowden remains silent on Russian abuses.
You seem upset by the facts.
by rmrd0000 on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 8:06pm
The key word: "refuge" ..as in "refugee", as in "refugees can't be choosers"
by jollyroger on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 8:35pm
So when Snowden rails against government surveillance. he just means the United States? Identical behavior by Russia gets a pass. Can we really trust that Russia has not decrypted data that Snowden stole?
by rmrd0000 on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 10:20pm
con respetto, we (purportedly) hold ourselves to a higher standard than Russia, do we not?
by jollyroger on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 11:06pm
Are you saying that by choosing Russia Snowden choose the worse option? Did Snowden simply make a lateral move, there being no difference between the US and Russia? The more homophobia, Crimean aggression, Cossack attacks on Pussy Riot we see, there is less validity in Snowden's argument of making a moral choice. If he remains silent, he has confirmed that he merely wants to save his own hide and cares very little for physical suffering handed out by his host country.
by rmrd0000 on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 11:25pm
Whaddya mean "chose" he didn't get to choose...reference the grounding of the Ecuadorian jet just because it MIGHT have had him on it..he's a fugitive from the Death Star, and he ain't got Han Solo helping him...:
wants to save his own hide
edit to add: Jesus! He's already given up Maui and (by report) some top shelf pussy, what do you want from the guy?
The reports appear to have been accurate..
by jollyroger on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 11:33pm
He chose to leave rather than stand up for principle. Gandhi , Mandela and King faced prison. Pussy Riot went to prison. Snowden would have had an army of attorneys at his feet. He is diminished by his connection to Vlad. Both the US and Russia have global influence and global offenses. By not speaking out on Russian abuses, Snowden has sided with one offender over the other.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 8:59am
I will stipulate that he is not Gandhi, King or Mandela.
Who the fuck is?
Why not complain that Obama isn't Lincoln?
You set an absurd standard, and make very unrealistic projections (army of lawyers. yada yada) Armies of lawyers don't do shit for you in Gitmo, and didn't help Chelsea Manning (who only exposed brutal murder war crimes...lotsa luck, kid)
I think Snowden is a hero and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (maybe they'll revoke Barry's and give it to Snowden...)
by jollyroger on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 10:06am
Pussy Riot demonstrated more courage than Snowden.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 10:17am
So?
Edit to add:
I support the Nobel for them too. Your point is?
by jollyroger on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 10:32am
There were thousands who faced police dogs and water hoses in Alabama and South African police firing into unarmed crowds. People demonstrated courage. Snowden ran and is willing to sit in comfort while Vlad carries out abuses.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 10:40am
No, they get no credit for fighting for civil rights for minorities because they didn't also fight for civil rights for gays. Just as Snowden gets no credit for fighting the surveillance state because he didn't address Putin's antigay laws.
Martin Luther King is irrelevant in the fight for civil rights because he didn't address gay rights, in fact its likely he was homophobic. Just as Snowden is irrelevant in the fight over NSA surveillance because he didn't address Putin's antigay laws.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:53pm
Snowden's big mistake was getting hooked up with Wikileaks & Assange. His document dump was too much too fast, with little or no concern for his own fate.
He needed a good civil liberties lawyer for advice, a measured, anonymous release of documents, to a respected establishment outlet, perhaps 6-12 months after quietly leaving his job at NSA.
Chelsea Manning was upset about a video of a US chopper mowing down civilians and reporters in a Baghdad street, and Wikileaks pumped him for that, and 1/2 million other documents. His fate was sealed at that point. Talk about 'pump and dump'...
by NCD on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 11:12am
Vlad rigged the Crimea ballot so that there is no way to vote against returning control to Russia. Snowden's host is a true gentleman.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 1:07pm
His actions have left him with no control of his own fate, he has no influence on what Putin does in the Crimea or anywhere else.
by NCD on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 2:57pm
As long as he doesn't speak out, he is viewed as Putin's toady. There is no reason to believe that Snowden hasn't provided information to Russia.. Remember US ambassador Victoria Nuland being caught talking about the EU and the Ukraine and launching an F-bomb? The initial tweet came from Russia. Was this leaked recording the product of innate Russian spy techniques, or did information from Snowden help in the surveillance.? Snowden's silence on a Russian aggression permits speculation on how the Russians were able to monitor the conversation.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 3:19pm
You're a nasty piece of work - speculation, empty accusation, and then he's not Jesus incarnate. Similar to you & Wattree's hatchet jobs on Cornel West every week. They didn't promise you shit - they work on the issues they believe in, and if you don't like it, tough shit - go curl up in fetal position and bawl your eyes out. You want to do something grand, get out there and do it - until then quit kvetching about their choices. Snowden has more cojones than all of this site multiplied by how much (sorry ladies) - including of course me. That doesn't mean we need a psychoanalysis session to see where he lines up with MLK or the Pope or whatever. Rah for Snowden. There were just a million people in Sochi giving Putin his global PR job - fuck all of them before Snowden - he's just trying to find a place of refuge - we could have boycotted Sochi just on the prinicple of how Putin screwed Checnya, turned it into rubble, but we didn't. So why does Snowden have to be penitent for our weakness when we're just flipping channels trying to find the US hockey game? He's not a dock worker, a burger flipper, a DC lobbyist, a hair dresser, an auto worker, an astronaut - he is what he is, and he's plowed the field he plowed - that's it - take it for what it's worth.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 4:15pm
See response below
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 5:25pm
There is no reason to believe that Snowden hasn't provided information to Russia.
True, very true, and there is no reason to believe that Obama didn't coordinate with Lerner to target conservative groups with IRS harassment. Nor is there no reason to believe that Obama wasn't in charge of the CIA spying on congress.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 4:27pm
There is data that Conservative groups were not targeted. Conservative groups along with Progressive groups were investigated by the IRS and the Progressive groups got the worse of it. You need a better example.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 5:16pm
The vast majority of groups targeted were conservative. There's no reason not to think those few liberal groups just got caught in Obama's plan to target conservative groups. There's no reason to believe Obama wasn't involved in using the IRS to harass conservatives. Obama is the Chief executive. There's no reason to believe he wasn't involved in the CIA spying on congress.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:27pm
Snowden didn't make a big mistake - he released a ton of stuff we needed to be aware of - still digging through - and there was no really graceful way to do it, but how he did it still looks pretty good. We're still finding more and more ways our intelligence services have been lying and misleading - with no repercussions, no firings. Think of it as "how to gracefully tell your neighbor her boyfriend's been entertaining a steady stream of coke whores while she's not home - oh, and your best friend is his pimp" - while keeping up the facade that it's for national security because he's somehow a professional. Awful, you broke it to her too quickly - should have taken 3 years of Sundays to slowly come around to the issue - all your fault.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 4:32pm
Snowden's position does not frankly look 'pretty good' or the result of careful decision making on his part. He is bearing the fruits of his hubris and Assange's voracious appetite for secret stuff. But maybe Snowden likes where he is, 'Putin's toady'.
by NCD on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:04pm
The information he released is being investigated.
Maybe you're caught up in the National Enquirer human drama part of the story, but some of us only care about curtailing government spying on its citizens & the rest of the world.
Maybe you'd like the Justin Bieber fan site?
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 4:02am
On meta/picture: You can't change it now. After comments have responses, the edit function goes away.
In the future, delete the comment or everything in it and repaste and do it again til you get it looking like it should on Preview.
You can play around with a picture a 100 times if you'd preview before you hit save.
Looks to me what you did with this one is drag it down from the center, altering the ratio of height to width. You've got to drag from one of the corners in order to maintain the same aspect ratio of the original picture.
It's really easy once you take a few minutes to get the hang of it, takes only a sec after that, and as I said, it works in a lot of apps like MSWord, so it's a useful thing to know how to do.
by artappraiser on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 9:03pm
Oh, i know how in office and stuff, once I get a live dialog box. I think my mistake is pasting the pic AFTER i've already typed in text. I'll try the reverse next time.
by jollyroger on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 9:25pm
If you have a hard time entering text afterward, just do "switch to plain text editor" for a sec, put in a couple characters, in order to start before or after the codes, then switch back and finish ur text.
by artappraiser on Tue, 03/11/2014 - 9:33pm
Response to PP above.
Your disjointed rant proves that because Snowden took refuge in Russia his impact has been diminished. Putin's acts of aggression have made Snowden unimportant. Sen. Diane Feinstein, a supporter of government surveillance, will be a heroine because she is now directly challenging the CIA. Feinstein was not worried about citizen metadata being collected but is now upset that the CIA may be spying on Congress. Feinstein will "lead" the fight while Snowden will be "that guy in Putin's Russia". He is a non- entity in the United States.
The rapid rebuttal to my statement about Snowden was that ambassador Nuland was using an insecure line despite the fact that she should have been aware that "everybody" is spying. Snowden's flight made it easy to divert the conversation. There are big holes in US security not being addressed and having nothing to do with surveillance of US citizens.
Snowden is now a distraction. Feinstein will be viewed as one of those who valiantly fought the surveillance machinery. Snowden will be the guy who ran. He is neutralized.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 5:52pm
You're ignoring months of Congressional efforts in finally trying to conduct oversight and dig into this on several levels, as well as more judicial allowance of challenges to the government's overarching claim of secrecy for all things. Snowden gave a great deal of energy to this conversation - completely unrelated to Feinstein's sudden awakening due to personal inconvenience. Whether Feinstein gets the credit, I don't much care - I care about the review of our ridiculous snooping government under the guise of "protecting" us.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:06pm
Do you really believe that Congress was "trying"? Really?
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:21pm
Congress is 535 people. Some are trying.
Read emptywheel.net for more details.
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 3:59am
http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/11/our-chat-with-edward-snowdens-legal-cou...
So let’s look at the courts. Now, it’s true that a court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved, in secret, some of these programs. It’s a court that hears only from the government, does not have the benefit of adversarial briefing, didn’t get to hear what our objections would have been. It’s also a court that was set up to give warrants, not to write opinions on whether surveillance programs in general were lawful. And when we tried to bring challenges to these programs in open federal courts, we got as far as the Supreme Court, but every court turned us away without even considering the legality of the programs. The government said, “These plaintiffs have no right to be in court. They can’t show that they were subjected to these surveillance programs, and therefore they don’t have standing. And they’re not allowed to use the discovery process to learn that, because that would be a state secret.” The result being that no one has the right to go into federal court to challenge the legality of these programs.
What’s happened since his disclosures? We have now taken some of these documents, gone back into federal courts, where our standing is really much harder to question. Two federal judges have now considered, for example, the constitutionality of the government’s collection of all telephone metadata. They’ve come so far to different conclusions on the legal question, but both said that the plaintiffs have standing to be in court. So one thing that he’s done is he’s reinvigorated judicial oversight.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 6:33pm
The information is important.
Congress is broken and will have zero impact on controlling surveillance initially.
We do have to rely on the courts, a longtime position I have held.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 03/12/2014 - 8:31pm
One of the problems, it seems to me, is that there is no protected way for someone like Snowden--or the other whistleblowers who are out in the cold--to come forward and be listened to by Congress or...so the information can be evaluated.
People keep saying Snowden should have used "a different route," but all those different routes, as far as I've seen, have led to banishment. All these folks have been fired from jobs to which they were dedicated and devoted many years, and one, I read, is working in an Apple store.
You don't want "one guy" taking national security into his own hands, but you do want people to come forward with information about wrong doing or abuse.
by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 03/13/2014 - 8:36am
There's a lot more grist for your mill in this new article, rmrd:
Putin: During and After Sochi, by Christian Caryl, New York Review of Books; the concluding sentence:
If anyone still harbors any illusions about the nature of the police state that currently holds sway in Russia, the dispiriting reality behind the pomp and circumstance of the Winter Games should dispel them for good.
by artappraiser on Sat, 03/15/2014 - 4:11pm
Thanks
Putin is a homophobe, a dog murderer and the person who sent Cossacks to literally whip up on Pussy Riot and those are his good qualities.
by rmrd0000 on Sat, 03/15/2014 - 5:18pm
Just found that Stephen Cohen over at The Nation is basically accusing NYRB of taking a perspective along those hyperbolic lines:
....Not long ago, committed readers could count on The New York Review of Books for factually trustworthy alternative perspectives on important historical and contemporary subjects. But when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, the NYRB has succumbed to the general media mania. In a January 21 blog post, Amy Knight, a regular contributor and inveterate Putin-basher, warned the US government against cooperating with the Kremlin on Sochi security, even suggesting that Putin’s secret services “might have had an interest in allowing or even facilitating such attacks” as killed or wounded dozens of Russians in Volgograd in December.
Knight’s innuendo prefigured a purported report on Ukraine by Yale professor Timothy Snyder in the February 20 issue. Omissions of facts, by journalists or scholars, are no less an untruth than misstatements of fact. Snyder’s article was full of both, which are widespread in the popular media, but these are in the esteemed NYRB and by an acclaimed academic. Consider a few of Snyder’s assertions....
It looks like lefties might be as divided as conservatives are on Putin, eh? Funny (not) : similar divide on Snowden!
Whodda thunk it? All I got to say is: I bet it's all Israel's fault!
More seriously, I've really learned to trust C.J. Chivers on the region: I've come to believe that whatever he reports from there, you can be pretty damn sure it's a picture of reality.
by artappraiser on Sat, 03/15/2014 - 5:36pm