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laura poitras
The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom
The ruling elites, who refuse to accept responsibility for profound social inequality or the crimes of empire, have no ideological veneer left to justify their greed, ineptitude and pillage
Jul 16, 2018
The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher--the maniacal goal of the U.S. government--would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason. It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites. If Assange is extradited to the United States and sentenced, The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other media organization, no matter how tepid their coverage of the corporate state, would be subject to the same draconian censorship. Under the precedent set, Donald Trump's Supreme Court would enthusiastically uphold the arrest and imprisonment of any publisher, editor or reporter in the name of national security.
Trump is not Vladimir Putin's puppet. He is part of the wave of right-wing populists, who have harnessed the rage and frustration born of an economic and political system dominated by global capitalism and under which the rights and aspirations of working men and women do not matter.
There are growing signs that the Ecuadorean government of Lenin Moreno is preparing to evict Assange and turn him over to British police. Moreno and his foreign minister, Jose Valencia, have confirmed they are in negotiations with the British government to "resolve" the fate of Assange. Moreno, who will visit Britain in a few weeks, calls Assange an "inherited problem" and "a stone in the shoe" and has referred to him as a "hacker." It appears that under a Moreno government Assange is no longer welcome in Ecuador. His only hope now is safe passage to his native Australia or another country willing to give him asylum.
"Ecuador has been looking for a solution to this problem," Valencia commented on television. "The refuge is not forever, you cannot expect it to last for years without us reviewing this situation, including because this violates the rights of the refugee."
Moreno's predecessor as president, Rafael Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the embassy and made him an Ecuadorean citizen last year, warned that Assange's "days were numbered." He charged that Moreno--who cut off Assange's communications the day after Moreno welcomed a delegation from the U.S. Southern Command--would "throw him out of the embassy at the first pressure from the United States."
Assange, who reportedly is in ill health, took asylum in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense charges. He feared that once in Swedish custody for these charges, which he said were false, he would be extradited to the United States. The Swedish prosecutors' office ended its "investigation" and extradition request to Britain in May 2017 and did not file sexual offense charges against Assange. But the British government said Assange would nevertheless be arrested and jailed for breaching his bail conditions.
The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations. The ruling elites, who refuse to accept responsibility for profound social inequality or the crimes of empire, have no ideological veneer left to justify their greed, ineptitude and pillage. Global capitalism and its ideological justification, neoliberalism, are discredited as forces for democracy and the equitable distribution of wealth. The corporate-controlled economic and political system is as hated by right-wing populists as it is by the rest of the population. This makes the critics of corporatism and imperialism--journalists, writers, dissidents and intellectuals already pushed to the margins of the media landscape--dangerous and it makes them prime targets. Assange is at the top of the list.
I took part with dozens of others, including Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Craig Murray, Peter Van Buren, Slavoj Zizek, George Galloway and Cian Westmoreland, a week ago in a 36-hour international online vigil demanding freedom for the WikiLeaks publisher. The vigil was organized by the New Zealand Internet Party leader Suzie Dawson. It was the third Unity4J vigil since all of Assange's communication with the outside world was severed by the Ecuadorean authorities and visits with him were suspended in March, part of the increased pressure the United States has brought on the Ecuadorean government. Assange has since March been allowed to meet only with his attorneys and consular officials from the Australian Embassy.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled Friday that those seeking political asylum have the right to take refuge in embassies and diplomatic compounds. The court stated that governments are obliged to provide safe passage out of the country to those granted asylum. The ruling did not name Assange, but it was a powerful rebuke to the British government, which has refused to allow the WikiLeaks co-founder safe passage to the airport.
The ruling elites no longer have a counterargument to their critics. They have resorted to cruder forms of control.
The ruling elites no longer have a counterargument to their critics. They have resorted to cruder forms of control. These include censorship, slander and character assassination (which in the case of Assange has sadly been successful), blacklisting, financial strangulation, intimidation, imprisonment under the Espionage Act and branding critics and dissidents as agents of a foreign power and purveyors of fake news. The corporate media amplifies these charges, which have no credibility but which become part of the common vernacular through constant repetition. The blacklisting, imprisonment and deportation of tens of thousands of people of conscience during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s are back with a vengeance. It is a New McCarthyism.
Did Russia attempt to influence the election? Undoubtedly. This is what governments do. The United States interfered in 81 elections from 1945 to 2000, according to professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. His statistics do not include the numerous coups we orchestrated in countries such as Greece, Iran, Guatemala and Chile or the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. We indirectly bankrolled the re-election campaign of Russia's buffoonish Boris Yeltsin to the tune of $2.5 billion.
But did Russia, as the Democratic Party establishment claims, swing the election to Trump? No. Trump is not Vladimir Putin's puppet. He is part of the wave of right-wing populists, from Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in Britain to Viktor Orban in Hungary, who have harnessed the rage and frustration born of an economic and political system dominated by global capitalism and under which the rights and aspirations of working men and women do not matter.
The party elite, including Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, is a creation of the corporate state. Campaign finance and electoral reform are the last things the party hierarchy intends to champion.
The Democratic Party establishment, like the liberal elites in most of the rest of the industrialized world, would be swept from power in an open political process devoid of corporate money. The party elite, including Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, is a creation of the corporate state. Campaign finance and electoral reform are the last things the party hierarchy intends to champion. It will not call for social and political programs that will alienate its corporate masters. This myopia and naked self-interest may ensure a second term for Donald Trump; it may further empower the lunatic fringe that is loyal to Trump; it may continue to erode the credibility of the political system. But the choice before the Democratic Party elites is clear: political oblivion or enduring the rule of a demagogue. They have chosen the latter. They are not interested in reform. They are determined to silence anyone, like Assange, who exposes the rot within the ruling class.
The Democratic Party establishment benefits from our system of legalized bribery. It benefits from deregulating Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry. It benefits from the endless wars. It benefits from the curtailment of civil liberties, including the right to privacy and due process. It benefits from militarized police. It benefits from austerity programs. It benefits from mass incarceration. It is an enabler of tyranny, not an impediment.
They divert the public's anger toward demonized groups such as Muslims, undocumented workers, people of color, liberals, intellectuals, artists, feminists, the LGBT community and the press.
Demagogues like Trump, Farage and Johnson, of course, have no intention of altering the system of corporate pillage. Rather, they accelerate the pillage, which is what happened with the passage of the massive U.S. tax cut for corporations. They divert the public's anger toward demonized groups such as Muslims, undocumented workers, people of color, liberals, intellectuals, artists, feminists, the LGBT community and the press. The demonized are blamed for the social and economic dysfunction, much as Jews were falsely blamed for Germany's defeat in World War I and the economic collapse that followed. Corporations such as Goldman Sachs, in the midst of the decay, continue to make a financial killing.
The corporate titans, who often come out of elite universities and are groomed in institutions like Harvard Business School, find these demagogues crude and vulgar. They are embarrassed by their imbecility, megalomania and incompetence. But they endure their presence rather than permit socialists or leftist politicians to impede their profits and divert government spending to social programs and away from weapons manufacturers, the military, private prisons, big banks and hedge funds, the fossil fuel industry, charter schools, private paramilitary forces, private intelligence companies and other pet programs designed to allow corporations to cannibalize the state.
The irony is that there was serious meddling in the presidential election, but it did not come from Russia. The Democratic Party, outdoing any of the dirty tricks employed by Richard Nixon, purged hundreds of thousands of primary voters from the rolls, denied those registered as independents the right to vote in primaries, used superdelegates to swing the vote to Hillary Clinton, hijacked the Democratic National Committee to serve the Clinton campaign, controlled the message of media outlets such as MSNBC and The New York Times, stole the Nevada caucus, spent hundreds of millions of dollars of "dark" corporate money on the Clinton campaign and fixed the primary debates. This meddling, which stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, who probably could have defeated Trump, is unmentioned. The party hierarchy will do nothing to reform its corrupt nominating process.
WikiLeaks exposed much of this corruption when it published tens of thousands of messages hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's email account. The messages brought to light the efforts by the Democratic Party leadership to thwart the nomination of Sanders, and they disclosed Clinton's close ties with Wall Street, including her lucrative Wall Street speeches. They also raised serious questions about conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation and whether Clinton received advance information on primary-debate questions.
The Democratic National Committee, for this reason, is leading the Russia hysteria and the persecution of Assange. It filed a lawsuit that names WikiLeaks and Assange as co-conspirators with Russia and the Trump campaign in an alleged effort to steal the presidential election.
But it is not only Assange and WikiLeaks that are being attacked as Russian pawns. For example, The Washington Post, which has sided with the Democratic Party in the war against Trump, without critical analysis published a report on a blacklist posted by the anonymous website PropOrNot. The blacklist was composed of 199 sites that PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, "reliably echo Russian propaganda." More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were major progressive outlets including AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. PropOrNot, short for Propaganda or Not, accused these sites of disseminating "fake news" on behalf of Russia. The Post's headline was unequivocal: "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during the election, experts say."
In addition to offering no evidence, PropOrNot never even disclosed who ran the website. Even so, its charge was used to justify the imposition of algorithms by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon to direct traffic away from the targeted sites. These algorithms, or filters, overseen by thousands of "evaluators," many hired from the military and security and surveillance apparatus, hunt for keywords such as "U.S. military," "inequality" and "socialism," along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras. These keywords are known as "impressions." Before the imposition of the algorithms, a reader could type in the name Julian Assange and be directed to an article on one of these targeted sites. After the algorithms were put in place, these impressions directed readers only to mainstream sites such as The Washington Post. Referral traffic from these impressions at most of the targeted sites has plummeted, often by more than half. Challenged by these algorithms and the abolition of net neutrality, these sites will be pushed further and further to the outer reaches of the media.
If the United States had a public broadcasting system free from corporate money or a commercial press that was not under corporate control, these dissident voices would be included in the mainstream discourse. But we don't.
Any news or media outlet that addresses the reality of our failed democracy and exposes the crimes of empire will be targeted. The January 2017 Director of National Intelligence Report spent seven pages on RT America, where I have a show, "On Contact." The report does not accuse RT America of disseminating Russian propaganda, but it does allege the network exploits divisions within American society by giving airtime to dissidents and critics including whistleblowers, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, Black Lives Matter activists, anti-fracking campaigners and the third-party candidates the establishment is seeking to mute.
If the United States had a public broadcasting system free from corporate money or a commercial press that was not under corporate control, these dissident voices would be included in the mainstream discourse. But we don't. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm X, Sheldon Wolin, Ralph Nader, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Edward Said once appeared regularly on public broadcasting. Now critics like these are banned, replaced with vapid courtiers such as columnist David Brooks. RT America was forced to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). This act requires Americans who work for a foreign party to register as foreign agents. The FARA registration is part of the broader assault on all independent media, including the effort to silence Assange.
WikiLeak's publication in 2017 of 8,761 CIA files, known as Vault 7, appeared to be the final indignity. Vault 7 included a description of the cyber tools used by the CIA to hack into computer systems and devices such as smartphones. Former CIA software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte was indicted on charges of violating the Espionage Act by allegedly leaking the documents.
The publication of Vault 7 saw the United States significantly increase its pressure on the Ecuadorean government to isolate and eject Assange from the embassy. Mike Pompeo, then the CIA director, said in response to the leaks that the U.S. government "can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us." Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Assange's arrest was a "priority."
It is up to us to mobilize to protect Assange. His life is in jeopardy. The Ecuadorean government, violating his fundamental rights, has transformed his asylum into a form of incarceration. By cutting off his access to the internet, it has deprived him of the ability to communicate and follow world events. The aim of this isolation is to pressure Assange out of the embassy so he can be seized by London police, thrown into a British jail and then delivered into the hands of Pompeo, John Bolton and the CIA's torturer in chief, Gina Haspel.
Assange is a courageous and fearless publisher who is being persecuted for exposing the crimes of the corporate state and imperialism. His defense is the cutting edge of the fight against government suppression of our most important and fundamental democratic rights. The government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, where Assange was born, must be pressured to provide him with the protection to which he is entitled as a citizen. It must intercede to stop the illegal persecution of the journalist by the British, American and Ecuadorean governments. It must secure his safe return to Australia. If we fail to protect Assange, we fail to protect ourselves.
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Trump's War Cabinet and Coming American Despotism: Will We the People Rise Up?
Through freely associating with one another, united in love, we can walk the revolutionary way of peace, carrying the steps of our ancestors.
Mar 30, 2018
The United States is in a major upheaval. Trump's cabinet shake up moves the country into an alarming direction. From the nomination of torturer Gina Haspel as a head of the Central Intelligence Agency to Mike Pompeo, the former CIA Director and a vocal opponent of nuclear deal with Iran as a new secretary of state, his selection exposes the White House's dangerous kill instincts.
An ultimatum came with the president's appointment of John Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations as his 3rd national security advisor. Bolton who served in the George W. Bush administration is notorious for his hawkishness, with a great zeal for military action against Iran and North Korea. This rearranging of the deck chairs on the sinking empire signals the great calamity of foreign policy ahead with potential threats of nuclear war.
In this seeming free-fall toward despotism, what can ordinary people do about it? Tackling corruption of our political system and averting a doomed future requires us to truly understand the problems we are facing. The crisis of representation is now amplified with increasing trends toward authoritarianism, violence and white supremacy. This trouble didn't just arise with Trump, the new commander in chief. A glimpse of it was shown during the 2008 financial meltdown, which was covered up swiftly by bank bailouts and politics of 'hope and change'. The truth is that the seed for dystopia has been inside this country all along. The roots of the issues that are now emerging in Trump's America go back to the very beginning of this nation.
In its modern formation, the United States inspired the world with its torch of liberty and equality. At the same time, this beacon of light had its own darkness within. From the onset, America contained internal contradictions manifested as the founder's hypocrisy and the violation of its own ideals with genocide of natives, slavery of blacks and suppression of women. The Founding Fathers of the United States brought a victory of rejecting the power of the King's monarchy and pioneered a path for one's own self-determination. The concept of a nation governed by laws, not by a man was groundbreaking at that time. Yet, without reconciling its own shadow, this nation of law failed to fully shield the republic from the tyranny of the Old World.
Supremacy of reason
The unredeemed darkness found in America's troubled past was a force inside Western civilization that tries to define history, subjugating other perspectives to its single vision. Author and essayist John Ralston Saul (1992) in Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West described how:
"reason began, abruptly, to separate itself from and to outdistance the other more or less recognized human characteristics-- spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience." (p. 15)
Europe, with its ethos of separation and objectivity set out to conquer the world, spreading its influence across many continents. This domineering power of reason found its new front of exploration in the New World. America, driven by the monotheistic goal of Manifest Destiny expanded its territory with brutality. It swallowed what is edible, assimilating immigrants one by one to its conception of what is civil, while spitting out those that it considered impalatable, relegating them into three-fifths of a person or exterminating them from the earth altogether as savages.
This maddened head centricity was manifested in the structure of a new government. Sheldon Wolin, author of Democracy Inc noted how the framers of the Constitution created a so-called managed democracy, a system that favored elite rule and that "the American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy" (2008, p. 228). The intellectual elites regarded the democratic majority rule as an irrational force and they feared the tyranny of popular majorities. While the faculty of reason positioned itself as a supreme force, enslaving all other human characteristics, a potential to account its autocratic power was found inside America.
Civil disobedience of We the People
Expressed in the preamble of the Constitution "We the People" was faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves. This was an intention to shift from the model of government that acts as authority of their lives to one that places power in the hands of ordinary people. In this government established under the rule of the people, the source of legitimacy was not derived from a God or King, but was meant to come from people themselves.
This arrangement of governance was not granted from above. It was first demanded by those who opposed the ratification of the 1787 Constitution that lacked the guarantee of individual liberties. A loose coalition of several states who saw inadequate separation of power in the proposed structure of checks and balances contended to restrict governmental power, in order to safeguard the rights of individuals. The proponents of the Bill of Rights articulated essential parts of the sovereign power of We the People as a freedom of expression; freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
By building upon First Amendment rights, further efforts emerged from below. From abolitionists' defiance to the women's suffrage movement, people's determination for individual autonomy persisted. On December 1, 1955, history saw another strong will for self-determination. During the usual evening rush hour in Montgomery, Alabama, 42 year old Rosa Parks took courageous action that changed the entire landscape of this nation.
Her lifelong rebelliousness came to momentum on that day when she refused to give up her seat. Young Rosa once said to her grandmother, "I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated than not be allowed to say 'I don't like it.'" This refusal to obey unjust laws of segregation was her act of free speech and with this, she was claiming the power to speak back. This instigated non-violent direct action. Instead of appealing to authority, those who have been denied their liberty boycotted buses and by walking one step at a time they paved a way toward freedom.
Solidarity of civil disobedience that united the destiny of black and white people appeared in the Bay Area in 1964. Mario Savio, a young student of the University of California at Berkeley, upon returning from his volunteer in Mississippi Freedom Summer saw the similar struggle on the campus in the administration's ban on students' political activities and their effort to regulate the content of speech. Inspired by the courage of black people fighting for first class citizenship, students who had been treated as raw materials that are to be made into products, began pushing the boundaries of free speech.
With sit-ins, picket lines and weeks of demonstrations, white middle class youth exercised speech that had consequences to rebel against bureaucracy and the university's crackdown on students who were participating in the civil rights movement. In his impassioned speech, Savio liberated human emotions that have been oppressed by the dictatorship of reason. The iconic image of this freedom's orator atop the police car ignited radical politics, giving birth to the free speech movement (FSM) that put the city of Berkeley at the center of world's attention.
Taming corporate power
In the U.S. political system of managed democracy, giant corporations began to assert their influence, gaining control over media to manipulate public perception and manufacture consent through illusions of choice. In the structure of corporations that legally authorize a single entity to act on behalf of a company or a group of people, an unchecked colonial mentality was incorporated. Under the legal fiction of corporate personhood, these artificial entities that are separate and distinct from owners gained equal rights as humans.
Manifest Destiny has now become Nike's slogan of "just do it". With limited liability and having no human beings in charge, the abstraction of the head inside transnational corporations took flight from the communal ground. Under the banner of a free market, Wall Street cowboys in suits with their unbridled greed plundered their way into the globe, without ever having to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
When commercial interests got out of hand and the ruthless mentality of profits at any cost penetrated into every aspect of our lives, political activist Ralph Nader began taking on corporate abuse, fraud and crime. This launched the beginning of civic arousal in a form of a modern consumer movement. Law students and graduates across the country came together to form what is known as Nader's Raiders, dedicating themselves to causes of environmental protection, workers rights and government oversight.
A few decades later, Nader who became an icon revived in the American people an appetite for democracy. In his presidential runs as an independent and third party candidate, the man who took on General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair for the issues of automobile safety began to challenge the defective engine of a concocted political system of the lesser of the two evils that itself was unsafe at any speed with either party. By providing a choice that is not available in this charade democracy, he called for direct action of voting with conscience. This people's lawyer empowered all to awaken a fire in the belly to defy the rules of corporate masters and reclaim their own significance.
The rise of cryptographic direct action
In the political winter of the post-911 war on terror, as fear and apathy spread around the globe, a new insurgency surfaced online. The waves of whistleblowers began shedding light on the collaborative secrecy of elites that deceive and manipulate the public behind the facade of democracy. WikiLeaks, with its motto of "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful", opened an avenue for the conscience of a young generation who grew up on the Internet.
Here the conscience that led black people's struggle for racial equality burst into the digital space. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the civil rights movement described conscience as a subtle intuitive voice within that tells one legalized racism is unjust and calls him or her to disobey such laws. With the idea that cryptography is the "ultimate form of non-violent direct action" (2012, p. 5), WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief Julian Assange built the system of scientific journalism that would give everyday people around the world tools to combat military might and confront the madness of fallen reason that censors and suppresses intuition that knows what is right.
The invention of the anonymous drop box was truly revolutionary. It enabled anyone to send information securely without the trace of his or her identity. Through the robust decentralized infrastructure built around this game changing technology, WikiLeaks was able to provide unprecedented source protection in the history of journalism. Here, the organization that derived its source of inspiration in American founding ideas, freed the First Amendment that had been captured through corporate monopoly and co-optation of the media, making it available all around the world.
It is through WikiLeaks' adamant commitment to the principle of free press that former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning was able to exercise uncompromising free speech and engage in an American tradition of civil disobedience. Manning, whom the late attorney and President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner described as the "conscience of our nation", let the American public see their own culture's barbarianism, atrocities of everyday collateral murder that had been carried out against natives and racial minorities at home, continuing on in a distant land.
In her request for a presidential pardon, Manning stated her commitment to the ideal of America:
"I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."
Through her non-violent cryptographic direct action, she helped America find its conscience. One individual's act of courage brought another. By following the step of his forerunner, political activist Jeremy Hammond exposed the inner workings of the pervasive surveillance state. At the sentence hearing, he explained how he perfectly understood the consequences of his action and that it was against the law, yet he felt a duty to confront injustice.
Then came Edward Snowden. Inspired by Manning, he too courageously released information that belongs to the public and informed people about the NSA's mass surveillance. In one of the addresses he made, Snowden also described his act as a public service and connected it with Dr. King's non-violent civil disobedience. Through his whistleblowing, the former NSA contractor defended individual privacy as fundamental civil rights for all people and tried to preserve the world where people can share creativity, love and friendship freely without every conversation and interaction being monitored and recorded.
Whistleblowers and their faith in ordinary people
From WikiLeaks disruptions to Snowden revelations, courageous act of truth-tellers renewed the faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves. Both Manning and Snowden believed in the public's right to know and held a view that when people are informed, they can make changes and determine their own destiny.
Faith is different than mere belief. It is not about one blindly trusting or passively accepting something. Faith is an active will that requires one to choose out of themselves to believe in something. When established media and trusted institutions failed, Manning chose to put her trust in the journalistic organization that was little known at that time. When the government's internal mechanisms of accountability were broken, combined with the betrayal of Obama's campaign promises and his war on whistleblowers, Snowden turned to American journalists whom he could trust by his own judgment of the integrity of their work. They placed faith not in political leaders or authority but in fellow men and women.
It is to this faith in the ability for the wise and knowledgeable public to govern themselves that fearless journalism responded. WikiLeaks, the publisher of last resort kept its promise to the source by publishing full archives with maximum political impact and bringing information back to the historical record. Through honoring Snowden's wishes, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman broke the story of NSA surveillance and led the Guardian's independent journalism, making the established media fulfill its duty. In the aftermath of Snowden's disclosures, when this young whistleblower was stranded in Hong Kong, WikiLeaks demonstrated its extraordinary source protection with journalist Sarah Harrison risking her own liberty to help Snowden attain asylum.
With this faith given by peers, citizens around the world who have been distrusted by their own governments and made powerless began to claim their own power. By recognizing that someone believed in them and sacrificed their lives so that they can be free, these ordinary people were able to believe in their own ability to protect those they love and preserve rights that they cherish. The will to respond to this faith in one another awakened love for one's neighbor. This made it possible for ordinary people to carry out extraordinary acts, to choose paths that do not lead to financial success, fame and security, but one of scourging, persecution and punishment.
Manning was sentenced to prison for 35 years, initially being held in a cage in Kuwait and then being put in a tiny cell in solitary confinement. Hammond was sentenced for 10 years and is still confined. Snowden remains in exile, being called for execution by the president and his new nominee for the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. WikiLeaks has been declared an enemy of the state by the most powerful government in the world, being subjected to legal and extra-legal pressure. Unconstitutional secret U.S. Grand Jury investigation against WikiLeaks and its staff continues, keeping its founder in long years of arbitrary detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in violation of the UN ruling. Now, threats of a free press increase with Trump's Department of Justice stating the arrest of the Assange is a "priority" and the former CIA chief calling the whistleblowing site a "hostile intelligence service".
Our native heart as the seat of reason
Contagious courage lit by people's faith created a fellowship that no amount of state violence can break. It began to shift the balance of power, replacing the source of legitimacy from trusted institutions to the network of trust in one another. This faith as a seat of reason is a function of the heart that philosopher Jacob Needleman (2002) pointed to as an intelligence of very high order that Native Americans lived with. This knowledge of the heart was crushed by Anglo's mission of territorial expansion, with the killing of natives and the destruction of their culture and land.
What was this knowing of the heart which early European settlers largely failed to understand? Needleman (2002) described how indigenous people of America regarded man as "the bridge between heaven and earth, between levels of being in the universe". They lived their lives in a manner that aligns with cosmic law, "according to conscience, which is the voice of the universe within each man or woman" (p. 196). For them, conscience was linked to peace. Needleman described how:
"to be at peace within the community or to live in peace with other nations is to submit to a rule of law that is the communal expression of conscience and that provides conditions within which an individual is free to listen for that voice within himself." (p. 196)
This peace as a way of living was at the foundation of this nation. It was the breath that inspired the document of the Declaration of Independence. The formation of the United States was influenced by the Iroquois and their great law of peace that set a model of governance based on decision-making processes on consensus rather than majority rule. The legendary peacemaker that brought order and peace in a time of chaos and formed the Iroquois Confederacy spoke of the constitution of Great Peace:
"We bind ourselves together by taking hold of each other's hands so firmly and forming a circle so strong that if a tree should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it, so that our people and grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace and happiness." (1994, p. 71)
At a root of enlightenment ideas, individual liberty and equality, there lies a native heart that remembers our kinship that extends into the Seven Generations to come. This First Nation's idea of peace as an essential principle of government secures every individual's ability to freely explore his or her own unique and diverse ways to develop their relationship to their own conscience.
This intelligence of the heart became silent as the reason that was cut off from its roots took charge to lead modern civilization. The heart buried deep inside the American soil yearns to breathe free, waiting for sparks that awaken its wisdom.
Revolutionary way of peace
Our forebears, no matter how imperfect they were, brought us ideas conceived in a revolutionary spirit. The genius of the Constitution is that it makes fundamental laws and principles of government amendable. The highest law of the land preserved space for people to not accept authority imposed on them and even to revolt against it when it is necessary, by giving ordinary people means to change rules. America indeed was founded on rebelliousness, demonstrated in the Declaration that reads "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive... it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and institute a new Government..."
The government that was brought by our founding fathers not only allowed dissent, but depended on our rebellion. The realization of the Constitution as the fulfillment of ideals in the Declaration required individuals with a strong and independent mind. It demanded people to develop moral courage to defend these ideals against special interests of single groups or nations and any adversarial forces that try to deny them.
Through revolutionary spirit kindled inside ordinary men and women, the heart becomes uplifted and its ideals come alive. From the civil rights movement to Nader's Raiders, through people's courageous civic action striving to keep the promise of equality, the quiet pulse of peace began to speak. Whistleblowers at the frontier of digital liberation through their act of civil disobedience upheld the great law of peace, to resuscitate the ideals of this country.
The national security state armed with intelligence agencies increases its power, trying to control the entire world. In this coming dystopia, will American people claim their own sovereign power and can We the People develop solidarity to form a more perfect Union?
Solutions to the crisis of representation are within us. Through freely associating with one another, united in love, we can walk the revolutionary way of peace, carrying the steps of our ancestors. The mind uprooted from the heart has long escaped accountability. Western civilization in its crusade to free the world from superstition and irrationality lost connection to the source of its own light. Now two worlds of the mind and heart that have long separated can come together. Logic of domination and separation yields to its higher mind of intuition and imagination, unleashing a creative power of the human spirit.
The light drawn out of our own darkness enlightens our civilization, illuminating the way for the intelligence that lost its course to come home. Ordinary people linked with their own wisdom can give birth to the rule of real democracy here on earth that embodies the divine law of the universe, allowing all to experience life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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"Ringing Endorsement" for The Intercept as Sebastian Gorka Calls News Outlet "Bad for Democracy" and "A Joke"
Add this to the strange things former White House advisor identifies as a threat to the republic
Nov 09, 2017
Former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka doesn't want to talk to reporters from The Intercept about domestic U.S. policy because he views the outlet as "bad for democracy" and he doesn't like their "attitude." Also, he said, they're "a joke."
That was the result when journalist Lee Fang attempted to ask Gorka--back in the news this week after Fox News stirred controversy for hiring the right-wing firebrand as a contributor--if he would answer a few questions in Washington D.C. on Wednesday.
Watch:
While The Intercept--founded in late 2014 by journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill--continues to provide breaking and in-depth coverage of both domestic and global issues with a team of award-winning investigative journalists and outspoken editorial writers, the charges were especially curious coming from a man like Gorka--known for "shady ties to racist groups" and making outlandish Islamaphobic and xenophobic proclamations.
As Addy Baird wrote for ThinkProgress on Wednesday, the new gig at Fox for Gorka--"reportedly a sworn member of a Nazi-allied party in Hungary"--is hardly surprising, but troubling nonetheless. Baird reports:
Gorka left the White House in August, not long after his closest ally, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Gorka has repeatedly said he resigned, but a White House official told a pool reporter that Gorka "did not resign" but "no longer works at the White House."
During his time working for Trump, Gorka defended the White House's silence on a bombing at a mosque because, according to Gorka, it might have been faked by liberals. Gorka also drew criticism for saying people should stop criticizing white supremacists so much.
When Gorka left the White House, he complained the administration wasn't Islamophobic enough.
As free press advocate Tim Karr declared in response to the video posted of Gorka, "I can't imagine a more ringing endorsement of [The Intercept's] good and essential work."
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Klein Takes New Role Exposing "Hidden Agenda" of Trump's Disaster Capitalism
Canadian author and activist has joined The Intercept to document 'shocks of the Trump era'
Feb 13, 2017
Activist and author Naomi Klein, whose 2007 book The Shock Doctrine gave rise to the idea that politicians will exploit crises to further grab power and push forward a "radical pro-corporate agenda," as she put it, is now charged with monitoring the "shocks of the Trump era" from her new post with First Look Media's investigative outlet The Intercept.
"As one of the world's foremost journalists and thinkers about power and injustice, Klein is uniquely suited to the task of dissecting the extraordinary political moment ushered in by Donald Trump's election," wrote editor-in-chief Betsy Reed in Monday's announcement.
"Predatory capitalism thrives on crisis, and Trump's rule threatens to plunge the world into a seemingly endless series of political, environmental, and humanitarian disasters," Reed continued. "No one is better than Naomi Klein at exposing the hidden agendas of disaster capitalists and their agents in government."
President Donald Trump has already made clear that his version of governance includes slashing oversight and regulations while placing industry and Wall Street titans at the helm.
And as Klein explained in a late January column--which provided a glimpse into her new beat--it's an equation "that can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks." What's worse, she argued, is that the "Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically."
On Twitter, Klein's new colleagues welcomed the new senior correspondent while she replied in kind, thanking Intercept co-founding editors Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, as well as Field of Vision filmmaker Laura Poitras, for creating the platform.
It feels like the perfect time to be officially joining @theintercept, which embodies fearless investigative reporting + analysis every day. https://t.co/0WHKAtSz5W
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) February 13, 2017
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Calling for Prosecution of Its Own Source, Washington Post Slammed for 'Towering Cowardice'
Prominent newspaper received Pulitzer for reporting on NSA programs leaked by Edward Snowden — Now they want him locked him away for it
Sep 18, 2016
Shocked by the "towering cowardice" of the Washington Post's Sunday editorial calling for Edward Snowden to be prosecuted, journalist Glenn Greenwald led the charge against the prominent newspaper for achieving what he described as an "ignoble feat" in American history: being "the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own paper's source - one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service."
Published just two days after Oliver Stone's biopic on the NSA whistleblower, 'Snowden,' premiered in U.S. theaters and following the launch of a national campaign by human rights groups and privacy advocates calling for him to be pardoned, the timing of the WaPo editorial--simply titled "No pardon for Edward Snowden"--emerged as an unexpected (and unwelcome) salvo from a paper whose news editors and journalists played a central and early role in reporting on the information provided.
Greenwald, who along with the Washington Post's Barton Gellman and filmmaker Laura Poitras, was among the first journalists to engage with Snowden and report on key NSA mass spying programs previously kept secret from the U.S. and global public, responded to the editorial in scathing fashion. According to Greenwald:
what makes today's Washington Post editorial so remarkable, such a tour de force, is that the editors are literally calling for the criminal prosecution of one of the most important sources in their own newspaper's history. Having basked in the glory of awards and accolades, and benefitted from untold millions of clicks, the editorial page editors of the Post now want to see the source who enabled all of that be put in an American cage and branded a felon. That is warped beyond anything that can be described.
On Twitter, Snowden chimed in on his own behalf:
Last week, various groups launched the #PardonSnowden campaign which include a petition for people who want to add their support for the call.
"Snowden's actions, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that followed," the petition reads, "set in motion the most important debate about government surveillance in decades, and brought about reforms that continue to benefit our security and democracy."
That argument, however, appears inadequate for the Washington Post editorial board, which argued that Snowden's "revelations about the agency's international operations disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly 'tremendous damage' to national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve?"
In addition to Greenwald's detailed take-down of the Post's argument, critics of the newspaper were unsparing on social media:
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The House Intelligence Committee's Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Snowden Report
Late on Thursday afternoon the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a three-page executive summary (four, if we count the splendid cover photo) of its two-year inquiry into Edward Snowden's National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures. On first reading, I described it as an "aggressively dishonest" piece of work.
Sep 18, 2016
Late on Thursday afternoon the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a three-page executive summary (four, if we count the splendid cover photo) of its two-year inquiry into Edward Snowden's National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures. On first reading, I described it as an "aggressively dishonest" piece of work.
With a day or so to reflect on it, I believe it's worse than that. The report is not only one-sided, not only incurious, not only contemptuous of fact.
It is trifling.
After twenty-five months of labor, the committee's "comprehensive review" of an immensely complex subject weighs in at thirty-six pages. (None of which we may read, because it "must remain classified.") I have graded college term papers that long. It is one more dispiriting commentary on the state of legislative oversight that the committee's twenty-two members, Republican and Democratic, were unanimous in signing their names.
A reminder at the outset. I am one of four journalists (with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewen MacAskill) who received classified archives of NSA documents from Snowden. I am writing a book on the subject for Penguin Press. Feel free to consider, as you read this, that my stories in The Washington Post played a role in the disclosures that the committee is at pains to denounce.
The real burden of this report, released on the eve of the premiere of Oliver Stone's Snowden film, is to offer a counter-narrative. An accompanying press release quotes committee members describing Snowden as "no hero," "not a patriot," and "a traitor."
Since I'm on record claiming the report is dishonest, let's skip straight to the fourth section. That's the one that describes Snowden as "a serial exaggerator and fabricator," with "a pattern of intentional lying." Here is the evidence adduced for that finding, in its entirety.
"He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints."
This is verifiably false for anyone who, as the committee asserts it did, performs a "close review of Snowden's official employment records." Snowden's Army paperwork, some of which I have examined, says he met the demanding standards of an 18X Special Forces recruit and mustered into the Army on June 3, 2004. The diagnosis that led to his discharge, on crutches, was bilateral tibial stress fractures.
"He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did."
I do not know how the committee could get this one wrong in good faith. According to the official Maryland State Department of Education test report, which I have reviewed, Snowden sat for the high school equivalency test on May 4, 2004. He needed a score of 2250 to pass. He scored 3550. His Diploma No. 269403 was dated June 2, 2004, the same month he would have graduated had he returned to Arundel High School after losing his sophomore year to mononucleosis. In the interim, he took courses at Anne Arundel Community College.
"He claimed to have worked for the CIA as a 'senior advisor,' which was a gross exaggeration of his entry-level duties as a computer technician."
Judge for yourself. Here are the three main roles Snowden played at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1) His entry level position, as a contractor, was system administrator (one among several) of the agency's Washington metropolitan area network. (2) After that he was selected for and spent six months in training as a telecommunications information security officer, responsible for all classified technology in U.S. embassies overseas. The CIA deployed him to Geneva under diplomatic cover, complete with an alias identity and a badge describing him as a State Department attache. (3) In his third CIA job, the title on his Dell business card was "solutions consultant / cyber referent" for the intelligence community writ large--the company's principal point of contact for cyber contracts and proposals. In that role, Snowden met regularly with the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the CIA's technical branches to talk through their cutting edge computer needs.
"He also doctored his performance evaluations..."
Truly deceptive, this. I will tell the story in my book. Suffice to say that Snowden discovered and reported a security hole in the CIA's human resources intranet page. With his supervisor's permission, he made a benign demonstration of how a hostile actor could take control. He did not change the content of his performance evaluation. He changed the way it displayed on screen.
"... and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test."
The first clause is too vague to check. The second seems to be based on an unsubstantiated public statement from Booz Allen vice chairman Mike McConnell. I cannot purport to know for sure, but I do know this. The exam in question is routinely given to freshly enlisted Navy and Air Force recruits to determine their aptitude for entry level "computer network operations." Snowden was a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with years of experience under his belt by then. I can't explain why anyone thinks he would have to steal the answers.
"In May 2013, Snowden informed his supervisor that he would be out of the office to receive treatment for worsening epilepsy. In reality, he was on his way to Hong Kong with stolen secrets."
True! When Snowden decided to leave the NSA with a cache of documents for public release, he gave a false cover story for his absence.
That's it. That's the committee's whole case for Snowden as big fat liar. I won't belabor the irony, but let's note in passing that four of the six claims are egregiously false, and a fifth is hard to credit. We can only hope the classified report, which boasts 230 footnotes, has better evidence. If you know whether or not that's the case, feel free to let me know.
The report's executive summary also has plenty of misleading claims on other subjects--a remarkable number, really, for just three pages. Most have been the stuff of tub-thumping denunciations for years. Snowden "fled to Russia." Well, no. He tried to fly to Ecuador, and the U.S. government trapped him in the Moscow transit lounge by revoking his passport. Or ... Snowden could have relied on whistleblower protections. The Washington Post examined that proposition and found it largely incorrect. Or ... Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents. In fact, the nation's most senior intelligence officers, no admirers of Snowden, have repeatedly said they can only surmise the number. Then-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Michael T. Flynn, who is now advising Donald Trump, said "we assume that he took" every document he could reach. Then-NSA Director Keith Alexander said the agency could only count "what he touched, what he may have downloaded."
Consider, next, the question of damage. I believe Snowden's disclosures did a lot more good than harm, but I do not share the view of some of his fans that he did no damage at all. Even so, what are we to make of Subcommittee Chairman Lynn Westmoreland? In language largely echoed by the official report, Westmoreland said Snowden "did more damage to U.S. national security than any other individual in our nation's history." How about FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who helped the former Soviet Union roll up a whole U.S. espionage network and kill our agents? Or the Rosenbergs, maybe, who only handed over plans for the thermonuclear bomb? Or, as some would have it, George W. Bush, for the catastrophic choices he made in Iraq?
Another way to think on this is to ask, what counts as damage? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others decided to encrypt the links between their data centers after my colleague Ashkan Soltani and I disclosed that the NSA was breaking into their private clouds. Now the NSA probably can't do that any more, or not as easily. It has to use legal process and approach the companies through the front door. Is that damage? Is that disconnected, as the committee implies, from any legitimate question of "privacy or civil liberties"? Or are the new restrictions on surveillance a policy response to intelligence overreach?
Let me close with a dog that doesn't bark at all. The committee states, in its press release, that this report is aimed at examining "post-Snowden reforms." There is no discussion at all of reform when it comes to the powers, policies, and practices of surveillance. Only one reform is deemed worth mentioning, and here the committee judges the NSA harshly. There is "more work" to do, the committee says, to make sure its secrets are locked down tighter from now on.
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Human Element Makes Oliver Stone's 'Snowden' Quite Captivating
Every whistleblower undergoes some kind of transformation that pushes them to the point where they make the pivotal decision to challenge power. Oliver Stone's film about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden portrays how he went from a person reluctant to question the government to a person who believed it was virtuous to challenge abuses of government power.
Sep 18, 2016
Every whistleblower undergoes some kind of transformation that pushes them to the point where they make the pivotal decision to challenge power. Oliver Stone's film about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden portrays how he went from a person reluctant to question the government to a person who believed it was virtuous to challenge abuses of government power.
"Snowden" unfolds in the Mira Hong Kong Hotel, where Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) met with journalists Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). The script intermittently flashes back to periods of Snowden's life, from his time in a military boot camp to his time working for the CIA in Geneva to when he worked at an NSA facility in Oahu, Hawaii.
Gordon-Levitt nails the intonation of Snowden's voice. Shailene Woodley is fabulous as his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and the choice to make much of the film revolve around Snowden's relationship with Mills positively elevates the film to a fairly compelling love story. In fact, the way the story is told suggests Snowden's views on questioning the government changed from post-9/11 flag-waving nationalism the more his romance with Mills blossomed, especially since she was against the Iraq War and other acts of President George W. Bush's administration.
Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower attorney who has represented Snowden, told Shadowproof, "I found the depiction of Ed to be very fair and balanced. There are so many caricatures of him, as well as a tendency to see him in binary terms: hero versus villain. This humanizes him as the multi-faceted, thoughtful individual he is."
"Oliver Stone met with Snowden in Russia at least half a dozen times over a period of years," according to Radack. She recognized that those meetings could be intense on a "multiplicity of different levels," and "Stone and Snowden are also both very cerebral, sensitive, thoughtful, and self-aware," and those meetings informed the film.
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was a technical consultant for the film, also found Stone captured Snowden well by showing the character and not some caricature.
"The human element is very much on the screen," Drake contended. "I believe that makes the movie. I don't think it would be the same without the relationship, and it wasn't a passing relationship. It was a deep relationship, and of course, they discover each other online."
Mills holds a mirror up to Snowden, Drake added. She forces him to reconcile with American exceptionalism, that license to do whatever is necessary to "prosecute the global war on terrorism" no matter the collateral damage. "That is the beauty of Lindsay, and Lindsay [keeps] checking him in that regard."
There are few family scenes in the film. According to Radack, "I understand there are strong privacy considerations for that, but I think, for example, that the fact that there's a strong military and government tradition in his family and background is very interesting. He doesn't come from a family of former hippies."
Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage) and Corbin O'Brien (Rhys Ifans), two composite characters in the film, are vehicles for injecting some key ideas about security into the film. Forrester is a former intelligence official, who Snowden crosses paths with during his CIA training. The character has a background in the analog era of surveillance. O'Brien is a superior to Snowden. He acts like a mentor and tries to indoctrinate Snowden and pull him deeper into the security state because Snowden is very skilled at developing surveillance programs.
Drake said the Forrester character was a combination of whistleblowers like Bill Binney and himself, as well as other former intelligence officials. Corbin was developed to represent American exceptionalism or the imperial mindset. As Drake noted, the character says secrecy protects security, and security is victory. "That's an empire line."
One scene that really sticks out in the film for Drake involves O'Brien addressing the New York Times story, which revealed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program in 2005. It reflects the lie that the U.S. is a nation of laws. In reality, there are two governments, "a shadow government and normative state," and the rules are militarized. The battlefield is global, and the purpose of any program or policy, which may undermine the rule of law, can be justified by a kind of "linear logical madness." So, Fourth Amendment or privacy concerns are not permitted to overshadow the pursuit of security.
Drake's act of whistleblowing and the zeal in which the U.S. government pursued him with Espionage Act charges features prominently in the film. Snowden grapples with how the government is trying to silence Drake, Binney, and other whistleblowers. It forms part of the inspiration for Snowden to flee the country instead of going through internal channels to expose wrongdoing.
"One thing I was worried about--I was worried it would get too in the weeds technically, and this was part of my role, ensuring that it didn't get buried by the technology," Drake shared. The real focus was on the change that occurred in Snowden, his personal transformation.
Stone was "hungry for detail." He tried to absorb everything he possibly could, according to Drake. Like, "What was the context? What was it like to work there? What was the culture like? What are the buildings like? What was the place like? The people you reported to?"
It all could have become too dense, but fortunately, the details never suffocate the profound relationship between Snowden and Mills brought to life by Gordon-Levitt and Woodley. What Drake calls a "seductive world" pulls on him, and the "Siren call of secrecy and security" is powerful. She wants him to leave, but he cannot just leave.
"I was willing to go to prison, even if I lost my family," Drake recalled. Likewise, the film shows Snowden willing to sacrifice all those years he spent with someone whom he cares about deeply.
The story of the journalists, who wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning stories on documents from Snowden, plays a small role in the film. Leo and Quinto give decent performances, but they aren't given much opportunity to showcase their abilities to become these characters. The audience never really is offered a chance to get into what they were going through. (Perhaps, that is because we already have Laura Poitras' Oscar-winning documentary, "Citizenfour," and Stone did not want to replicate too many scenes from that film.)
Asked about how the film may further contribute to the shift in public opinion toward Snowden, from vilification to broad support, Radack responded, "I always have said that Snowden's trajectory is a marathon, not a sprint. I hope it won't take decades to resolve, but if you look at the path of someone like Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, it took 40 years for him to go from a 'traitor' to a 'hero.'"
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Watch: The New Trailer for Oliver Stone's Biopic of Edward Snowden
'Run, hide, live to tell the truth'
Apr 28, 2016
The first trailer for Snowden, Oliver Stone's biopic of whistleblower Edward Snowden was released on Wednesday, offering a glimpse of the forthcoming film that depicts Snowden's entry into the National Security Agency (NSA), his 2013 release of mass surveillance documents, and his subsequent escape to Hong Kong.
Watch:
The film covers similar ground as Citizenfour, the 2014 documentary chronicling the fallout of Snowden's revelations, which was directed by Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who helped report on the documents, along with Glenn Greenwald. Citizenfour received the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015.
The film depicts all three. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden, Melissa Leo as Poitras, and Zachary Quinto as Greenwald. The film also stars Tom Wilkinson as Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian journalist who traveled to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden and report on the leaks.
In the trailer, Snowden is shown being discharged from the army due to an injury and subsequently joining the NSA to "help my country make a difference in the world."
He is also shown taking an SD card loaded with government secrets out of the NSA building by hiding it under the tile of a Rubik's cube, perhaps a reference to a message he sent to Poitras ahead of their real-life rendezvous in Hong Kong: "We will meet in the hallway outside of the restaurant in the Mira Hotel. I will be working on a Rubik's cube so that you can identify me."
(He simply put the files on a USB thumb drive and walked out of the building.)
Snowden watched the trailer, too.
"Run, hide, live to tell the truth," the trailer states.
Snowden is set for release on September 16.
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Journalists Should Stand Up for Whistleblowers
Feb 24, 2016
The Obama administration's ongoing crusade against government whistleblowers -- which culminated last year in the imprisonment of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling -- has reignited a debate over the role journalists should play in defending their profession and the sources and networks on which it depends
Sterling is serving a three-and-a-half-year prison term for a conviction based primarily on circumstantial evidence. This is a heavy sentence, though less than the draconian 24 years the government originally sought.
Sterling's alleged crime was divulging a botched CIA operation to New York Times journalist James Risen.
While the Times and other news organizations fought for their own—hiring a team of lawyers to defend Risen against a government subpoena—they did much less to advocate for the rights of whistleblowers or denounce Sterling's severe punishment.
The case highlights the tension among journalists about their larger role in society. Do they merely provide an objective window into the world, or should they advocate for the free flow of information and those who provide sources for their reporting?
Reporters could learn a lesson from free speech and privacy advocates. We see our work as an essential collaboration among "what," "why," and "how" people.
The "what" people are those who first identify a problem in society. They are whistleblowers, like former intelligence officer Edward Snowden, who alerted us to the alarming extent of mass government surveillance.
The "why" people investigate the roots of a problem. Journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras have devoted their careers to analyzing the rise of the surveillance state. Naturally, a "what" person like Snowden would seek out Greenwald and Poitras to explain the threat of wholesale surveillance to a wider audience.
The "how" people are the advocates who work with the information and analysis to organize the public around a solution. Following Snowden's revelations, a coalition of privacy advocates -- including Access Now, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and my organization, Free Press -- mobilized public campaigns to try to stop unchecked government spying.
Together, "what," "why," and "how" people form an ecosystem for protecting the flow of information. When one element is missing, the system falls apart.
The world of journalism is made up of "what" and "why" people. While many journalists claim objectivity as a tenet of their trade, they dismiss advocates' "how" work as beyond the realm of "serious" reporting.
This has left a perilous gap when the ecosystem is under threat.
Reporters Without Borders' Press Freedom Index now ranks the United States 49th out of 180 countries. That's a 14-place drop since 2012," says Delphine Halgand, the group's U.S. director.
She adds that President Obama's war on whistleblowers is largely to blame. The Obama administration has prosecuted eight whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917, more than any previous administration combined."
Obama's Justice Department has used the 100-year-old law -- which was intended to go after World War I-era spies -- to convict Sterling and others. This sets a dangerous precedent, intimidates reporters and sources, and cloaks government operations from public scrutiny.
We all need to address this problem, but news organizations, in particular, should take it very seriously.
A more interconnected world has blurred the lines that once separated reporters from whistleblowers and citizen journalists. Each plays a role in a system whose survival relies on the health of its parts.
Journalists must not only defend their own rights but also ask how they can better advocate for the people who are indispensable to their work. Their jobs depend on freeing the flow of information, and so does our democracy.
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In Landmark Ruling, UK Court Affirms "Journalism Isn't Terrorism"
Court rules in favor of David Miranda, detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport in 2013 while transporting journalist documents on NSA revelations
Jan 19, 2016
In a landmark ruling, a British appeals court on Tuesday found that the UK's terrorism law violate the European Convention on Human Rights--a decision that came in the case of David Miranda, who was detained and searched at London's Heathrow airport in 2013 while carrying encrypted documents related to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The ruling means government ministers will have to reevaluate a controversial provision in the Terrorism Act, known as Section 7, which gives law enforcement officers the power to stop, question, detain, and search people in airports and certain other transit areas, whether or not they are suspected of terrorism.
Individuals who refuse to answer questions or hand over any requested documents or information may be fined, imprisoned up to four months, or both.
"If journalists and their sources can have no expectation of confidentiality, they may decide against providing information on sensitive matters of public interest," the ruling states. "The court of appeal ruling rejects the broad definition of terrorism advanced by government lawyers. The correct legal definition of terrorism, the court of appeal has now ruled, requires some intention to cause a serious threat to public safety such as endangering life."
The decision was handed down by Lord Dyson, the court's most senior judge. "The stop power, if used in respect of journalistic information or material is incompatible with article 10 [freedom of expression] of the [European convention on human rights] because it is not 'prescribed by law'," Dyson said.
Miranda, who is the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was interrogated for nine hours at Heathrow in August 2013 while transporting documents to Greenwald from journalist Laura Poitras, both of whom were reporting on the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance program. Miranda attempted last year to challenge his detention, but the High Court in London ruled that police had been justified in stopping and searching him.
The government argued at the time that Miranda met the definition of a terrorist because he was carrying documents that "would endanger people's lives" if released.
Tuesday's decision overturns at least part of that ruling.
On Twitter, Miranda
Thrilled%20with%20the%20court%20ruling!%20My%20purpose%20was%20to%20show%20UK's%20terrorism law%20violates%20press%20freedoms.%20And%20journalism%20isn't%20"terrorism."%20We%20won!
--%20David%20Miranda%20(@davidmirandario)%20January%2019,%202016%20Keep ReadingShow Less
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