Guest Post by Glenn Greenwald
“Information Clearing House” – “The Intercept” –
Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America’s enemies (top Nixon aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the deaths of Americans with his leak); it’s just the tactical playbook that’s automatically used. 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™.
Still, 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. At first, the tawdry exploiters were the likes of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey, who once said Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” and now has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran–obsessed Robert Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson and current Fox personality Dana Perino); right-wing polemicists fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism; and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino’s co-host). So it was worth ignoring save for the occasional Twitter retort.
But now we’ve entered the inevitable “U.S. Officials Say” stage of the “reporting” on the Paris attack — i.e., journalists mindlessly and uncritically repeat whatever U.S. officials whisper in their ear about what happened. So 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. But much of the U.S. media loves to repeat rather than scrutinize what government officials tell them to say. So now this accusation has become widespread and is thus worth examining with just some of the actual evidence.
One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks — all of which were carried out prior to Snowden’s June 2013 revelations — hide their communications from detection?
This is a glaring case where propagandists can’t keep their stories straight. 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.
By itself, the glorious mythology of How the U.S. Tracked Osama bin Laden should make anyone embarrassed to make these claims. After all, the central premise of that storyline is that bin Laden only used trusted couriers to communicate because al Qaeda knew for decades to avoid electronic means of communication because the U.S. and others could spy on those communications. Remember all that? Zero Dark Thirty and the “harsh but effective” interrogation of bin Laden’s “official messenger”?
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. As one Twitter commentator put it yesterday when mocking this new It’s-Snowden’s-Fault game: “Dude, the drug dealers from the Wire knew not to use cell phones.”
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.
The evidence proving this — that The Terrorists have been successfully using sophisticated encryption and other surveillance-avoidance methods for many years prior to Snowden — is so overwhelming that nobody should be willing to claim otherwise with a straight face. 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.”
After 9/11, we were constantly told about how wily and advanced The Terrorists were when it came to hiding their communications from us. One scary graphic from the November 2001 issue of Network World laid it out this way:
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. This is what then-FBI Director Louis Freeh told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 1997 — almost 20 years ago:
The looming spectre of the widespread use of robust, virtually uncrackable encryption is one of the most difficult problems confronting law enforcement as the next century approaches. At stake are some of our most valuable and reliable investigative techniques, and the public safety of our citizens. We believe that unless a balanced approach to encryption is adopted that includes a viable key management infrastructure, the ability of law enforcement to investigate and sometimes prevent the most serious crimes and terrorism will be severely impaired. Our national security will also be jeopardized.
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).
As but one example, the GCHQ files contain what the agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook” of security measures, dated 2003, that instructs terror operatives in the use of sophisticated surveillance-avoidance techniques that — as we noted when we first reported it — are very similar to what GCHQ still tells its own operatives to use:
In light of all this, how can “officials” and their media stenographers persist in trying to convince people of such a blatant, easily disproven falsehood: namely, that Terrorists learned to hide their communications from Snowden’s revelations? They do it because of how many benefits there are from swindling people to believe this.
To begin with, 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.
As I documented last November, the key tactic of American and British officials is to wage a P.R. war against Silicon Valley companies who offer encryption by accusing them of Helping The Terrorists. Last September, FBI Director James Comey actually said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law,” while the New York Times gave anonymity in that article to a security official to link the new iPhone 6 to terrorism. The head of GCHQ called Apple and Google “the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals” as part of what the New York Times called “a campaign by intelligence services in Britain and the United States against pressure to rein in their digital surveillance after disclosures by the American former contractor Edward J. Snowden.”
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.
Above all, there’s the desperation to prevent people from asking how and why ISIS was able to spring up seemingly out of nowhere and be so powerful, able to blow up a Russian passenger plane, a market in Beirut, and the streets of Paris in a single week. That’s the one question Western officials are most desperate not to be asked, so directing people’s ire to Edward Snowden and Apple is beneficial in the extreme.
The origins of ISIS are not even in dispute. The Washington Post put it simply: “almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes.” Even Tony Blair — Tony Blair — admits that there’d be no ISIS without the invasion of Iraq: “‘I think there are elements of truth in that,’ he said when asked whether the Iraq invasion had been the ‘principal cause’ of the rise of ISIS.” As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy put it in August:
By destroying the Iraqi state and setting off reverberations across the region that, ultimately, led to a civil war in Syria, the 2003 invasion created the conditions in which a movement like ISIS could thrive. And, by turning public opinion in the United States and other Western countries against anything that even suggests a prolonged military involvement in the Middle East, the war effectively precluded the possibility of a large-scale multinational effort to smash the self-styled caliphate.
Then there’s the related question of how ISIS has become so well-armed and powerful. There are many causes, but a leading one is the role played by the U.S. and its “allies in the region” (i.e., Gulf tyrannies) in arming them, unwittingly or (in the case of its “allies in the region”) otherwise, by dumping weapons and money into the region with little regard to where they go (even U.S. officials openly acknowledge that their own allies have funded ISIS). But the U.S.’s own once-secret documents strongly suggest U.S. complicity as well, albeit inadvertent, in the rise of ISIS, as powerfully demonstrated by this extraordinary four-minute clip of Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan with Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency:
Given all this, is there any mystery why “U.S. officials” and the military-intelligence regime, let alone Iraq War-advocating hacks like Jim Woolsey and Dana Perino, are desperate to shift blame away from themselves for ISIS and terror attacks and onto Edward Snowden, journalism about surveillance, or encryption-providing tech companies? Wouldn’t you if you were them? Imagine simultaneously devoting all your efforts to depicting ISIS as the Greatest and Most Evil Threat Ever, while knowing the vital role you played in its genesis and growth.
The clear, overwhelming evidence — compiled above — demonstrates how much deceit their blame-shifting accusations require. But the more important point of inquiry is to ask why they are so eager to ensure that everyone but themselves receives scrutiny for what is happening. The answer to that question is equally clear, and disturbing in the extreme.
Research: Margot Williams.
Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to his collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, Glenn’s column was featured at The Guardian and Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation watchdog journalism award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Dempsey: I know of Arab allies who fund ISIS
See also
40 states financing Daesh terror group, says Russian president: Russian President Vladimir Putin says financing for the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group comes from dozens of countries, including some G20 member states.
Turkey Warned France Twice About Terrorist Attacker; Was Ignored
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/17/2015 09:13 -0500
Yesterday when we reported on the latest developments in the French (and global) response to the September 13 terrorist attack we noted something quite unexpected: France, in the words of its prime minister, had been warned in advance that an attack was coming.
To wit:
Perhaps preempting the question how the NSA and Europe’s sterling intelligence – which collects all the private information except that which is actually needed to avert tragic loss of life – failed so massively in preventing this terrorist attack, Valls said French intelligence services had prevented several attacks since the summer and police knew other attacks were being prepared in France as well as in the rest of Europe.
“We know that operations were being prepared and are still being prepared, not only against France but other European countries too.”
Our confusion yesterday summarized: “If you knew, why did you not stop them them” adding that “perhaps some questions are better left unasked.”
And yet, 24 hours later we have to ask again, because as the NYT reports, France had received an explicit warning about one of the terrorists from Turkey not once but twice. To wit:
The Turkish authorities warned their French counterparts twice in the past year about one of the attackers, Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, a 29-year-old French citizen who was known by the authorities as someone who had radical Islamist beliefs, an official said on Monday.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, in line with government protocol, said the government never heard back from France and only received an “information request” about Mr. Mostefaï after the Paris attacks.
“On Oct. 10, 2014, Turkey received an information request regarding four terror suspects from the French authorities,” the official said. “During the official investigation, the Turkish authorities identified a fifth individual, Omar Ismail Mostefai, and notified their French counterparts twice — in December 2014 and June 2015.”
European intelligence officials believe that Mr. Mostefaï traveled to Turkey in 2012, and probably then slipped into Syria.
The Turkish official disputed that account, saying Mr. Mostefaï entered Turkey in 2013 and that there was no record of him leaving the country.
Pointing to the lack of communication, the Turkish official said the case of Mr. Mostefaï reflected the importance of sharing intelligence in fighting terrorism.
It appears it did not. Unless, of course, France had no interest in preventing a terrorist attack perpetrated by at least one individual whom it had been warned about. In which case the question becomes: why did France blatantly ignore and do nothing when warned. We doubt we will get an answer, however we hope at least the friends and family of the deceased casualties get a response from the French government.
“France Is At War”: Hollande Unleashes 2nd Day Of ISIS Strikes, Mobilizes 115,000, Moves To Change Constitution
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/17/2015 07:44 -0500
France, still reeling from the carnage that unfolded in the streets of Paris last Friday, conducted dozens upon dozens of police raids on Tuesday, after more than 160 similar operations carried out on Monday led to the discovery of numerous weapons including a rocket launcher, Kalashnikov, and a bulletproof vest.
French authorities are still largely in the dark regarding how many people were ultimately involved in the attack and with suspected “mastermind” Abdelhamid Abaaoud out of reach in Syria, police are focused on locating Salah Abdeslam who allegedly helped with logistics and rented a black Volkswagen Polo used by the gunmen who stormed the Bataclan concert hall.
Of course really, the raids are a frantic attempt to track down and neutralize anything and everything before something else bad happens. As Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on France Inter radio, “we don’t know if there are accomplices in Belgium and in France… we still don’t know the number of people involved in the attacks.”
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says more than 100 people have been placed under house arrest and dozens have been arrested in the sweeping crackdown. “Under a state of emergency – which has been in place since the attacks on Friday – security services, police have extra powers and freedom to make arrests, search houses and confiscate weapons without judicial oversight,” The Sydney Morning Herald notes.
President Hollande told a joint session of the French parliament on Monday that “France is at war” and that he wants the state of emergency extended by three months. Hollande also proposed constitutional changes. As The Herald put it on Tuesday, Hollande wants “to create a new version of ‘exceptional measures’, giving the government some emergency powers available under martial law.” Here’s Le Monde (translated), noting that Hollande’s proposals mirror George Bush’s Patriot Act:
But that wants Francois Hollande, is “to provide an appropriate tool for founding taking exceptional measures, for a certain period without going through the state of siege nor deny civil liberties”. Clearly, this would be a somewhat state of emergency “light” in terms of the powers granted to the State, but may last longer. A proposal which is not without recalling the “Patriot Act” that the Bush administration had vote after September 11, 2001.
Here’s the bullet point summary from BBC:
Extension of state of emergency by three months
Changes to the constitution to allow the government to revoke citizenship of any convicted terrorists of dual nationality. Currently only those born outside France and naturalised can lose their citizenship
Measures to speed up expulsion of foreign nationals considered a threat to public order
Budget increases and extra recruitment to security forces and judiciary
If some of that sounds like it could be a slippery slope to you, you’re probably correct. “Those returning from Syria could be placed under house arrest,” AFP reported, citing a government source.
Cazeneuve also said 115,000 security personnel have been mobilized in order to “ensure Frances security.” The police officers, gendarmes and soldiers are being deployed across France. Hollande also evoked a never before used clause in the Treaty on EU which compels member nations to provide France with “aid and assistance by all means in their power”
Meanwhile, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle will be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean while French fighter jets pounded Raqqa for the second day in a row. Residents of the city (or “captives” as they might more appropriately be called given the fact that between ISIS and airstrikes they live in a perpetual state of paralysis), describe the last two nights as “insane.” One activist who spoke to al-Jazeera described two “insane” nights and interestingly, also said that the French aren’t really bombing anything and the only real damage is being done by the Russians:
However, a media activist in Raqqa, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that French air strikes had targeted abandoned ISIL bases in the suburbs of the city where there are no civilians or ISIL fighters.
“It has been two insane nights. Abandoned ISIL posts were targeted at the entrance of the city, along with ISIL checkpoints and several other points. Electricity and water have been cut off as supply lines were hit too.
“We can confirm that there were no civilians killed or injured in the latest French air strikes.
The Syrian activist in Raqqa said that in the past few days Russian air strikes had caused the most destruction.
“Last week, Russian air strikes destroyed one of the main bridges in the city in addition to the national hospital. Most hospitals in the city have been destroyed in Raqqa,” he said.
“Russian air strikes have resulted in so much destruction. If these countries wanted to bomb the heartland of ISIL, they could have done so. But they still have not targeted the group’s most important bases.
“This is what we do not understand. The targets bombed by French warplanes were mostly abandoned by ISIL fighters.
“Raqqa is devastated. Raqqa has endured the unbearable and we live in fear under ISIL’s dictatorship.
“A lot of people fled the the city. In fact, most refugees heading to Europe are from Raqqa.
A couple of things stand out here. First, note that according to the source cited above, the French (using US “intelligence”) are hitting targets where there are no fighters. The Russians, on the other hand, are hitting anything and everything which could hint at what many have alluded to all along – namely that the US is either i) intentionally avoiding ISIS, ii) scared of collateral damage, or iii) some combination of both and that’s now finding its way into French strikes via the provision of intelligence from Washington to Paris. Second, the Russians are the ones doing the real damage to ISIS although there is of course the allegation that they are targeting hospitals because these days, everyone has to accuse everyone else of bombing hospitals.
Finally, note that now, the French are doing exactly what they and other Western powers accused Russia of doing last month at Aleppo: exacerbating the migrant crisis by wreaking havoc on populated areas.
But we suppose they had no choice…
I’ll be first. Mr Greenwald’s review reveals the duplicity of the media.
Blaming Snowden for ISIS’ “success” is ludicrous.
Further, he details some history of how the ME was carved up to serve
the interests of the British and the French. How many people know
this?
The interview of Gen. Michael Flynn by Mehdi Hasan was interesting.
The Iranian “bad behavior” Gen. Flynn keeps referring to is silly.
It is a question of what “is” is. Jerk.
I was too slow. I was third.
http://www.americasfreedomfighters.com/2015/11/16/breaking-fbi-on-high-alert-after-whats-stolen-from-mass-army-depot/
Worcester, MA
Reserve Armory robbed over weekend
There is a “warning”
Why don’t they put bigger padlocks on the door?
Look out below!
Greenwald is a genuine journalist…if only even a handful of them still remained in the MSM we might get somewhere…but alas there are literally ZERO. It is obviously not the least bit difficult to discredit governments and “intelligence” agencies around the world…the only problem is NO ONE on the inside ever tries.
” … note that according to the source cited above, the French (using US “intelligence”) are hitting targets where there are no fighters.” ————- article posted by Admin
I nominate this to the Top10 all time funniest comments …. evah …. anywhere.
Hitting targets where there are no fighters. Fuckin hilarious.
GO FRANCE !!!!!!!!!!
USA!USA!USA!, and Russia, Turkey, and now France BOMBING THE FUCK outta ISIS for a year now …. and yet I hear the Big Nigger saying this will continue to be a long slog.
WTF??
ISIS must be the meanest toughest motherfuckin’ fighting force ever assembled on earf.
Or …. someone is really bullshitting us to death.
” …….. noting that Hollande’s proposals mirror George Bush’s Patriot Act:”
————- article posted by Admin
ummm …. I called that shit the VERY DAY of the attacks.
Not that I’m some kind of genius …. it’s just so damn predictable what these fuckers will do.
Are not the profits of war the same, targets or NO targets? Arms dealers are pretty much the same as Wall Street, they make money either way. Fake…..Real…..Who Cares? More champagne and caviar?
AAPL will close at 114.08, NFLX closes at 116.74, MSFT at 53.14.
Am I a stock market prophet. No. But that simple text string could easily contain up to 32 characters in secretly encoded text.
3 symbols out of a pool of 5000. If you are using a 5000 word dictionary then this represents 3 whole words OR up to 9 numerical digits. Additionally, the modifiers (will close, closes at, etc), can contain additional information. However it can get much more complicated than this. The symbol “AAPL” could point to an index value in a table of index values, this particular index value could point to chapter 10 sentence 13 of a fictional spy novel. In that case, you’ve now encoded an entire sentence in one symbol. And the spooks would have no way of knowing.
I keep harping on this because people just do not seem to understand how easy it is to hide messages in plain sight. There is no way to crack such encryption, unless they actually capture the key, in which case they switch to a new key.
Snowden provided the proof to what we all knew but couldn’t prove. I predict some day he will be revered with statues and busts across America, as well he should be because he is a patriot.