Biden admin urged to drop Assange prosecution

Some U.S. Congressmen are gathering signatures for a bipartisan letter to president Joe Biden demanding that he terminate the ongoing prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Biden admin pressured to drop Julian Assange's case by bipartisan group of lawmakers | Post Millennial | Darian Douraghy:

October 23, 2023 - "Reps. Thomas Massie, (R-KY) and James McGovern (D-MA) are pushing for members of the House of Representatives to demand Joe Biden terminate the prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who[m] the US is currently attempting to extradite after he was accused of publishing sensitive national security information.

"Massie and McGovern's letter calls for their colleagues to take part in a bipartisan initiative to 'strongly encourage the Biden administration to withdraw the US extradition request currently pending against Australian publisher Julian Assange and halt all prosecutorial proceedings against him as soon as possible,' Fox News reports. 

"Assange was put into a London prison in 2019, and has since been ordered to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage. His prosecution has been highly controversial since its beginning, with those in favor arguing he has greatly harmed American national security. Others have asserted that Assange was simply exposing inconvenient truths about the activities of the US government, and that his arrest sets a terrifyingly dangerous precedent for the rights of whistleblowers and journalists alike. 

"Massie and McGovern's letter notes that '[d]eep concerns about this case have been repeatedly expressed by international media outlets, human rights and press freedom advocates.... Last April, several Members of Congress argued to Attorney General Merrick Garland that "[e]very day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home." One example: the Assange case has been cited by officials of the People's Republic of China to claim that the US is 'hypocritical' when it comes to support for media freedom.'

"As this is transpiring, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to meet with Biden in Washington this week and will likely discuss Assange's case, according to Fox News. Albanese has called for the US to bring the prosecution of Assange to an end more than once in recent months. An Australian government spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News that 'Mr. Assange's case has dragged on for too long and that it should be brought to a close'....

"The two congressmen have a separate letter addressed to Biden that is planned to be delivered after they receive signatures from other House lawmakers....

"This is not Massie's first rodeo; the Kentucky congressman has in the past backed bipartisan legislation to reform the Espionage Act as well as safeguard whistleblowers and journalists."

Read more: https://thepostmillennial.com/biden-admin-pressured-to-drop-julian-assanges-case-by-bipartisan-group-of-lawmakers

Why won't the U.S. drop charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange? | CBC News | July 2, 2023:

War on Terror comes home to America

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming | Glenn Greenwald: 

January 18, 2021 - " The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting 'terrorism' that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago.... We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named 'Green Zone,' vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of 'sedition,' 'treason,' and 'terrorism' against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence'..... 

"The Wall Street Journal reports that 'Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.' Meanwhile, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) ... has had a bill proposed since 2019 to simply amend the existing foreign anti-terrorism bill to allow the U.S. Government to invoke exactly the same powers at home against 'domestic terrorists'....

"Why would such new terrorism laws be needed in a country that already imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world...? What acts should be criminalized by new 'domestic terrorism” laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because — just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws — their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition....

"First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to 'incite violence.' The bastardizing of this phrase was the basis for President Trump’s rushed impeachment last week. It is also what is driving calls for dozens of members of Congress to be expelled and even prosecuted on 'sedition' charges for having objected to the Electoral College certification, and is also at the heart of the spate of censorship actions already undertaken and further repressive measures being urged....

"To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores 'incited' their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest.... But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause... that if speech is classified as 'incitement to violence' despite not explicitly advocating violence, it will sweep up any political speech which those wielding this term wish it to encompass. No political speech will be safe from this term when interpreted and applied so broadly and carelessly.

"And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of 'Democrat v. Republican' or even 'left v. right' is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside....

"If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about 'right v. left' and most definitely do not care about 'Republican v. Democrat' — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order. Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status.

"That a new War on Terror is coming is not a question of speculation and it is not in doubt. Those who now wield power are saying it explicitly. The only thing that is in doubt is how much opposition they will encounter from those who value basic civic rights more than the fears of one another being deliberately cultivated within us."

Read more: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is

Coronavirus healthy for surveillance industry

The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Set Off A Massive Expansion Of Government Surveillance. Civil Libertarians Aren't Sure What To Do | Buzzfeed News - Rosy Gray & Caroline Haskins:

March 30, 2020 - "The coronavirus pandemic, which has grown to over 740,000 cases and 35,000 deaths around the world, has been so singular an event that even some staunch advocates for civil liberties say they’re willing to accept previously unthinkable surveillance measures. 'I’m very concerned' about civil liberties,' writer Glenn Greenwald, cofounder of the Intercept ... told BuzzFeed News. 'But at the same time, I'm also much more receptive to proposals that in my entire life I never expected I would be, because of the gravity of the threat.' Greenwald won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for his reporting on the disclosures by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed a vast secret infrastructure of US government surveillance....

"And he is far from the only prominent civil libertarian and opponent of surveillance trying to calibrate their response as governments around the world are planning or have already implemented location-tracking programs to monitor coronavirus transmission, and have ordered wide-scale shutdowns closing businesses and keeping people indoors. Broad expansions of surveillance power that would have been unimaginable in February are being presented as fait accompli in March....

"While the US hasn’t announced a nationwide stay-at-home order like France and Italy have, large parts of the US are under some degree of lockdown, with nonessential businesses shuttered and nonessential activities outside the home either banned or discouraged. And while President Trump and his allies have focused on the economic devastation wrought by this shutdown, some libertarians have raised concerns about the damage those decrees have done to people's freedoms....

"Surveillance at previously politically unimaginable scales has reached countries around the world.... In South Korea, the government is mapping the movements of COVID-19 patients using data from mobile carriers, credit card companies, and the Institute of Public Health and Environment. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the country's internal security agency to tap into a previously undisclosed cache of cellphone data to trace the movements of infected persons in that country and in the West Bank. And in the Indian state of Karnataka, the government is requiring people in lockdown to send it selfies every hour to prove they are staying home.

"No such tools currently exist in the United States — but ... [t]hose doors are already being broken down. The COVID-19 Mobility Data Network — a collaboration between Facebook, Camber Systems, Cuebiq, and health researchers from 13 universities — will use corporate location data from mobile devices to give local officials 'consolidated daily situation reports' about 'social distancing interventions.' Representatives from the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network did not respond to requests for comment....

"Representatives from data analytics company Palantir have reportedly been working with the CDC on collecting and integrating data about COVID-19, while Clearview AI has reportedly been in talks with state agencies to track patients infected by the virus. Neither Palantir nor Clearview AI responded to requests for comment....

"Those efforts cause concerns for people like Evan Greer, the deputy director of digital rights activist group Fight for the Future, who told BuzzFeed News that such tools, once deployed, would inevitably be used for more purposes than to fight the pandemic. 'We have so much history that shows us that mass surveillance generally isn't very effective, and mission creep is inevitable,' she said. 'It's not necessarily a question of if data that was handed over to the government because of this crisis would be repurposed. It's a matter of when.'"

Read more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/they-were-opposed-to-government-surveillance-then-the

New documentary on web outlaw Kim Dotcom

The martyrdom of Kim Dotcom | Stuff.co.nz - Philip Mathews:

July 23, 2017 - " Controversial internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is interviewed in his Auckland waterfront apartment in 2016. There is tasteful decor, natural light, sea views and directly behind the man himself, an upside down US flag on a cushion.

"Given that the US was into its fifth long year of trying to extradite Dotcom to face trial on copyright and other charges, that shot seems like one of Dotcom's famous provocations – in your face, Uncle Sam.... Annie Goldson​, director of the documentary Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web, can't remember who art-directed the two-day interview, but thinks it was Dotcom himself....

"Detailed, neutral and at times sympathetic, Goldson's documentary started to take shape in 2014 when Dotcom, already a folk hero and political martyr in New Zealand after the raid on his Coatesville mansion in 2012, made the ill-judged decision to enter politics. Does anyone remember Internet Mana? The shaky alliance between the techno-radicals of Dotcom's Internet Party and Mana's old school socialists crashed into the 2014 election campaign like a runaway train.

"It climaxed at a political circus called the Moment of Truth. Dotcom flew investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald ​to Auckland and crossed live to free-speech heroes in hiding Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Five days before the election, the Auckland Town Hall was packed with activists and journalists who expected this stunt to topple the Government....

"On election night in 2014, when it was clear Internet Mana had failed, Dotcom blamed himself and his toxic brand, and largely disappeared from public life. Now he is reclusive in his luxury pad, separated from his wife Mona (their story is a charming romantic interlude in the film). After two years of negotiations, Dotcom agreed to an interview and offered access to his archives, including home movies of family life in Coatesville before everything soured....

"[T]he biography that Goldson constructs suggests someone who always yearned to be famous. He played up the Dr. Evil role but long before he was even called Dotcom, the 20-year-old Kim Schmitz​ was turning up to a Munich nightclub in a flash white suit, posing as though he had already made it.... It was the classic Jay Gatsby​ myth, the self-invented phony. Even arrests were good for business – the notorious hacker could rebrand as a security consultant. In the background there was a tough childhood with a violent alcoholic father....

"There are good interviews in the film, shedding light on complex areas of freedom and copyright. Greenwald is there. The musician Moby is there. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is there. US technology journalist Greg Sandoval calls Dotcom 'a PR genius". Movie producer turned scholar Jonathan Taplin argues that 'he's a criminal ... he should be in jail'. 

"No one can agree on Dotcom and the film won't change that. It is not just his personal style that provokes strong opinions. Instead, as Goldson notes, there is something about these internet guys, 'these individuals' we have created.... Think of Dotcom and Assange and, more recently, Peter Thiel​. What do they have in common? They are transnational, mostly apolitical, loosely libertarian. They represent a different, more confusing world to come."

Read more: https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/94791949/the-martyrdom-of-kim-dotcom
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Blaming Snowden for Paris massacre: "How dumb do they think people are?"

Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS - The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald:

"Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America’s enemies... So it’s of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by 'officials' and their various media allies of Helping The Terrorists™....

"I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly — how shamelessly — some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted by the carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies still lay on the streets of Paris.... But now ... credible news sites are regurgitating the claim that the Paris Terrorists were enabled by Snowden leaks — based on no evidence or specific proof of any kind, needless to say, but just the unverified, obviously self-serving assertions of government officials....

"The implicit premise of this accusation is that The Terrorists didn’t know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption until Snowden came along and told them. Yet we’ve been warned for years and years before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and sophisticated that they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic surveillance....

"Any terrorist capable of tying his own shoe — let alone carrying out a significant attack — has known for decades that speaking on open telephone and internet lines was to be avoided due to U.S. surveillance.... The Snowden revelations weren’t significant because they told The Terrorists their communications were being monitored; everyone — especially The Terrorists — has known that forever. The revelations were significant because they told the world that the NSA and its allies were collecting everyone else’s internet communications and activities.

""As but one of countless examples, here’s a USA Today article from February 2001 — more than 12 years before anyone knew the name 'Edward Snowden' — warning that al Qaeda was able to 'outfox law enforcement' by hiding its communications behind sophisticated internet encryption... The Christian Science Monitor similarly reported on February 1, 2001, that 'the head of the U.S. National Security Agency has publicly complained that al Qaeda’s sophisticated use of the internet and encryption techniques have defied Western eavesdropping attempts'.... All the way back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration exploited the fears prompted by Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City attack to demand backdoor access to all internet communications.

"How dumb do they think people are to count on them forgetting all of this, and to believe now that The Terrorists only learned to avoid telephones and use encryption once Snowden came along? Ironically, the Snowden archive itself is full of documents from NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, expressing deep concern that they cannot penetrate the communications of Terrorists because of how sophisticated their surveillance-avoidance methods are (obviously, those documents pre-date Snowden’s public disclosures)....

"U.S officials are eager here to demonize far more than just Snowden. They want to demonize encryption generally as well as any companies that offer it. Indeed, as these media accounts show, they’ve been trying for two decades to equate the use of encryption — anything that keeps them out of people’s private online communications — with aiding and abetting The Terrorists. It’s not just Snowden but also their own long-time Surveillance State partners — particular Apple and Google — who are now being depicted as Terrorist Lovers for enabling people to have privacy on the internet through encryption products.

"Then there’s the blame-shifting benefit. For most major terror attacks, the perpetrators were either known to Western security agencies or they had ample reason to watch them. All three perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre 'were known to French authorities,' as was the thwarted train attacker in July and at least one of the Paris attackers. These agencies receive billions and billions of dollars every year and radical powers, all in the name of surveilling Bad People and stopping attacks.

"So when they fail in their ostensible duty, and people die because of that failure, it’s a natural instinct to blame others: Don’t look to us; it’s Snowden’s fault, or the fault of Apple, or the fault of journalists, or the fault of encryption designers, or anyone’s fault other than ours. If you’re a security agency after a successful Terror attack, you want everyone looking elsewhere, finding all sorts of culprits other than those responsible for stopping such attacks."

Read more: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/
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USA FREEDOM Act: Meet the new law, same as the old law

USA FREEDOM Act: Small step for post-Snowden reform, giant leap for Congress - Dan Froomkin, The Intercept:

June 2, 2015 - "Exactly two years after journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras traveled to Hong Kong to meet an NSA [National Security Agency] whistleblower named Edward Snowden, Congress has finally brought itself to reform one surveillance program out of the multitude he revealed — a program so blatantly out of line that its end was a foregone conclusion as soon as it was exposed.

"The USA Freedom Act passed the House in an overwhelming, bipartisan vote three weeks ago. After hardliner Republicans lost a prolonged game of legislative chicken, the Senate gave its approval Tuesday afternoon as well, by a 67 to 32 margin. The bill officially ends 14 years of unprecedented bulk collection of domestic phone records by the NSA, replacing it with a program that requires the government to make specific requests to the phone companies....

"At the same time, the Freedom Act explicitly reauthorizes — or, rather, reinstates, since they technically expired at midnight May 31 — other programs involving the collection of business records that the Bush and Obama administrations claimed were authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. In fact, even the bulk collection of phone records, which was abruptly wound down last week in anticipation of a possible expiration, may wind up again, because the Freedom Act allows it to continue for a six-month transition period.

"And while the Freedom Act contains a few other modest reform provisions‚ such as more disclosure and a public advocate for the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, it does absolutely nothing to restrain the vast majority of the intrusive surveillance revealed by Snowden.

"It leaves untouched formerly secret programs the NSA says are authorized under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and that while ostensibly targeted at foreigners nonetheless collect vast amounts of American communications. It won’t in any way limit the agency’s mass surveillance of non-American communications."

Read more: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/02/one-small-step-toward-post-snowden-surveillance-reform-one-giant-step-congress/

NSA impersonated Facebook to hack, infect computers

Leaked Documents show NSA Impersonated Facebook to Infect Millions of Computers | Ben Swann Truth In Media:- Joshua Cook:

March 14, 2014 - "With the intention to infect millions of computers with malware, the National Security Agency impersonated popular social networking site Facebook.

"According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the clandestine initiative enabled the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

"Journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher reported in The Intercept: 'In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.'"

"The Facebook exploit was called QUANTUMHAND and was first used on a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps.

"After that, the NSA planned to spread it to millions of computers around the globe using an automated system known internally as TURBINE. TURBINE gave members of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit the ability to tap into, or destroy, computers on a massive scale, documents show."

Read more: http://benswann.com/leaked-documents-show-nsa-impersonated-facebook-to-infect-millions-of-computers/
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Snowden docs show U.S. NSA spied in Canada during G20 in Toronto

New Snowden docs show U.S. spied during G20 in Toronto - Greg Weston, Glenn Greenwald, & Ryan Gallagher, CBC News:

November 27, 2013 - "Top secret documents retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden show that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits....

"The briefing notes, stamped 'Top Secret,' show the U.S. turned its Ottawa embassy into a security command post during a six-day spying operation by the National Security Agency [NSA] while U.S. President Barack Obama and 25 other foreign heads of government were on Canadian soil in June of 2010....

"An NSA briefing note describes the American agency's operational plans at the Toronto summit meeting and notes they were 'closely co-ordinated with the Canadian partner.'

"The NSA and its Canadian partner, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, gather foreign intelligence for their respective governments by covertly intercepting phone calls and hacking into computer systems around the world.

"The secret documents do not reveal the precise targets of so much espionage by the NSA — and possibly its Canadian partner — during the Toronto summit."

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/new-snowden-docs-show-u-s-spied-during-g20-in-toronto-1.2442448

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA revelations

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations | World news | guardian.co.uk - Glenn Greenwald, Ewan MacAskill, and Laura Poitras:

June 9, 2013 -"The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency [NSA] for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell....

"From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. 'I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,' he said....

"In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: 'I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.'

"Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. 'I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.'

"He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. 'I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.'"

"Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA."

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance