Plame and Wilson on Snowden and the MIC

By erica20 on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 12:01am |

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson have had reason to think long and deeply about privacy, surveillance and power issues in the wake of 2001. Here's their take on the Snowden story.

URL:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/23/nsa-intelligence-industrial-complex-abuse

3018 reads

Comments

You beat me to it. Add this one:

The Strange Case of Barrett Brown

by Donal on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 7:34am

Corporations are a s big a danger to freedom as government.

by rmrd0000 on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 8:24am

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

by Donal on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 9:07am

Maybe we should fear both dangers?

Hours before dying in a fiery car crash, award-winning journalist Michael Hastings sent an email to his colleagues, warning that federal authorities were interviewing his friends and that he needed to go "off the rada[r]" for a bit.

The email was sent around 1 p.m. on Monday, June 17. At 4:20 a.m. the following morning, Hastings died when his Mercedes, traveling at high speeds, smashed into a tree and caught on fire. He was 33.

"I was just coming northbound on Highland and I seen a car, like, going really fast and all of a sudden I seen it jackknife," witness to the scene, Luis Cortez, told KTLA.

Authorities reported that a single passenger inside this vehicle had died but that their identity couldn't be immediately determined.

Another neighbor described hearing a huge explosion drawing him and several others outside their homes.

One man was seen using a watering hose in his best efforts to stifle the engulfing flames.

In a terrifying display around 4:15 am witnesses say his vehicle collided with a tree in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles before bursting into flames.

The vehicle's engine ejected 50 to 60 yards from the scene before landing near a telephone pole, according to neighbor and film maker Gary Grossman who said he couldn't have written a scene like this for a movie.

[Certainly to an award winning reporter "dropping off the radar" means running traffic lights at high speed late at night to blow up running into a tree with your engine skidding off the road. Happens all the time - was probably just a bit too wound up so to speak]

by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 9:24am

BTW, one of HB Gary's spook partners (working with American Chamber of Commerce to hack Glenn Greenwald & Wikileaks) was selling access to zero-day bugs like the one below for about $2.5 million a year. A lot of room for unnoticed surveillance around here. Video bug out in the wild how long without detection? Presumably only used to track girls with porn cameras, nothing immoral or illegal.

A security flaw thought to have been fixed by Adobe in October 2011 has reappeared thanks to a new vulnerability involving Flash Player browser plug-ins.
The as yet unpatched vulnerability creates a means to seize control of webcams without permission before siphoning off video and audio from victims' PCs.

by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 9:48am

The FBI denies that there was an investigation of Hastings. Ibrahim Todashev is a glaring case of the FBI directly ending someone's life under very suspicious circumstances.

by rmrd0000 on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 10:04am

Sure, the FBI denies. With Todashev, the FBI said he had a knife, then he threw a table, then a metal pole or maybe a broomstick. And that there were 5 or 6 varied personnel doing the interview, only later it was only 3, and 2 had just happened to leave the room when the remaining one fired ~~one~~ seven bullets at Todashev. I'm sure we can expect an autopsy and finalized report sometime after September when the body's properly disintegrated. But don't worry, it'll be "transparent" - this year's nominee for most abused word.

by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 11:30am

The point being that grass roots pressure on Congress to at least question went on is easier in the Todashev case than with Hastings.

If the FBI was not asking, questions, who was? Did Hastings frequently go off the grid? There are a host of questions that have to be asked in the Hastings case. Todashev is easier.

by rmrd0000 on Mon, 06/24/2013 - 12:08pm

Plame and Wilson on Snowden and the MIC

Comments

Authorities reported that a single passenger inside this vehicle had died but that their identity couldn't be immediately determined.

In a terrifying display around 4:15 am witnesses say his vehicle collided with a tree in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles before bursting into flames.

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