Snowden

Snowden summoned Americans 'to confront the growing danger of tyranny,' father says

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By: RT.com, 07/02/2013

Reuters / Bobby Yip

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s father has published an open letter praising his son’s contributions in exposing the United States’ vast surveillance operations. According to the Associated Press, Lonnie Snowden celebrated his son’s work "summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny." The letter was reportedly penned by the leaker’s dad and Bruce Fein, a Washington, DC-based attorney who has represented CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.

 

Publishing of the open letter comes less than 24 hours after Edward Snowden issued a statement through the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks from Moscow, where he has spent eight days so far awaiting potential asylum from one of more than a dozen countries he’s pleaded with for assistance. President Barack Obama has asked for Snowden to be extradited to the US, and the Department of Justice has indicted him on counts of espionage for disclosing state secrets involving the NSA’s clandestine surveillance programs.

 

For more on this story visit www.rt.com

Edward Snowden withdraws Russian asylum request

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Guardian.co.uk, By: Miriam Elder, 07/02/2013

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Edward Snowden has withdrawn his request for political asylum from Russia, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, further adding to the uncertainty over the US whistleblower's future. A spokesman for Russian president Vladimir Putin said Snowden withdrew the request after Putin's statement making clear that he would be welcome only if he stopped "his work aimed at bringing harm" to the United States.

 

"Snowden really asked to remain in Russia," Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman, said. "Learning yesterday of Russia's position … he abandoned his intentions and his request to get the possibility to stay in Russia." Russia has refused to hand over Snowden, charged under espionage laws in the US after leaking top-secret documents on US surveillance programmes. He has been kept hidden away since 23 June, when he landed in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport from Hong Kong.

 

For more information visit www.guardian.co.uk

The Geeks Who Leak

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Time.com, By: Michael Scherer, 06/24/2013

The President calls them a threat to national security. The Internet calls them heroes. A new wave of hacktivists is changing the way we handle secrets. The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.

 

"The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong," said Edward Joseph Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who admitted on June 6 to one of the most significant thefts of highly classified secrets in U.S. history.

 

For more on this story visit www.time.com

'World order unjust and immoral!' Ecuador’s Correa rips into Snowden coverage

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By: Rt.com , 06/27/2013

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.(Reuters / Ricardo Rojas)

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa came up with scalding online remarks over criticism his country faced from the US press for potentially granting asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. “They’ve managed to focus attention on Snowden and on the ‘wicked’ countries that ‘support’ him, making us forget the terrible things against the US people and the whole world that he denounced,” Correa said Wednesday in response to a Tuesday Washington Post editorial. “The world order isn’t only unjust, it’s immoral,” Correa added.

 

The US newspaper accused Correa of adhering to double standards in the NSA leaker case, as Ecuador is considering harboring Snowden from prosecution over US espionage charges. It descried the Ecuadoran president as “the autocratic leader of a tiny, impoverished” country with an ambition to replace the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez as “the hemisphere’s preeminent anti-US demagogue”.

 

For more on this story visit www.rt.com

Glenn Greenwald Teases More NSA Info: ‘Majority’ Of ‘Significant’ Revelations ‘Have Yet To Be Made’

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Mediaite.com, By: Meenal Vamburker, 06/25/2013

Glenn Greenwald has been the subject of both praise and criticism since the NSA surveillance story took center stage in the news cycle. And he’s not done yet. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Greenwald teased future revelations, saying the most significant ones are still to come. “The majority of revelations that are significant have yet to be made,” Greenwald told the paper.

 

Asked to elaborate, Greenwald told POLITICO he could not provide any details before the reporting was ready. As for leaker Edward Snowden, who has been the one behind the information, Greenwald said he last spoke to him when Snowden was in Hong Kong — but he is working on stories based on documents leaked by Snowden.

 

For more on this story visit www.mediaite.com

Spy games: Inventor of World Wide Web accuses West of hypocrisy

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RT.com - 27 June 2013

AFP Photo / Paul J. Richards

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has lashed out at Western governments, calling them hypocritical for spying on the internet while reproaching other oppressive nations for doing the same; adding that the revelations may change the way people use computers.

The British computer scientist, who invented the Web in 1989, accused the West of "insidious" online spying after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked details of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) dragnet telephone and internet surveillance programs, implicating US and UK in a wave of international criticism.

"In the Middle East, people have been given access to the internet, but they have been snooped on and then they have been jailed," Berners-Lee told The Times newspaper in an interview.

"It can be easy for people in the West to say 'Oh, those nasty governments should not be allowed access to spy.' But it's clear that developed nations are seriously spying on the internet," he added.

Berners-Lee believes that the new revelations about Western government spying could change the way people, especially teenagers, use the internet and their computers.

Read more here

U.S. Surveillance Is Not Aimed at Terrorists

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Bloomberg.com, By: Leonid Bershidsky, 06/23/2013

The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens.

 

People concerned with online privacy tend to calm down when told that the government can record their calls or read their e-mail only under special circumstances and with proper court orders. The assumption is that they have nothing to worry about unless they are terrorists or correspond with the wrong people.

 

For more on this story visit www.bloomberg.com

Vladimir Putin: Edward Snowden Still In Moscow Airport Transit Zone, Won't Be Extradited

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Thehuffingtonpost.com, By: The Associated Press, 06/25/2013

Amnesty International has issued a statement criticizing the Obama Administration’s prosecution of Edward Snowden. While the media has largely yielded to demands from the White House not to call Snowden a “whistleblower,” Amnesty International views him in this light and specifically objects to the use of the Espionage Act by the Obama Administration in this case. I discuss the charges against Snowden in a column today in USA Today.

 

Widney Brown, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International stated that “No one should be charged under any law for disclosing information of human rights violations by the US government. Such disclosures are protected under the rights to information and freedom of expression.” The organization further stated that “[h]is forced transfer to the USA would put him at great risk of human rights violations and must be challenged.”

 

For more on this story visit www.thehuffingtonpost.com

Jonathan Turley ~ Amnesty International Denounces Obama Administration’s Prosecution Of Snowden

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jonathanturley.org, By: Gillian, 06/25/2013

Amnesty International has issued a statement criticizing the Obama Administration’s prosecution of Edward Snowden. While the media has largely yielded to demands from the White House not to call Snowden a “whistleblower,” Amnesty International views him in this light and specifically objects to the use of the Espionage Act by the Obama Administration in this case.

 

Widney Brown, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International stated that “No one should be charged under any law for disclosing information of human rights violations by the US government. Such disclosures are protected under the rights to information and freedom of expression.” The organization further stated that “[h]is forced transfer to the USA would put him at great risk of human rights violations and must be challenged.”

 

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