Chomsky, Greenwald & Snowden: On Privacy

The balance between national security and government intrusion on the rights of private citizens was the topic of a panel discussion featuring renowned linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald. Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, acted as moderator.

Reddit: #DickPics4Freedom

You can thank Edward Snowden for the recent flood of erect penis pictures currently filling up the ‘DickPics4Freedom‘ thread on Reddit.

The x-rated act of protest was inspired by John Oliver’s sit-down interview with Snowden, who shed light on the U.S. government’s secret surveillance program which is definitely spying on your private pictures, including all the dick pics you’ve been sending to people.

If you want to check out the x-rated pictures, click here. ...

The Gaily Grind.

NSA: We Have Come For Your Dick Pics

Does anybody actually care about NSA surveillance?

That was the primary question at hand when Last Week Tonight's John Oliver flew to Russia to meet with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden has been living in the country (after a stint in the Moscow airport) since Russian President Vladimir Putin granted him asylum in August 2013.

At first, Oliver takes a confrontational tone, asking, "How many of those documents have you actually read?" He also demanded that Snowden "own" any mistakes or problems that arise from the leaking of harmful classified intelligence.

"So the New York Times took a slide, didn't redact it properly, and in the end, it was possible for people to see that something was being used in Mosul on al-Qaida," says Oliver.

While Snowden admits "that is a problem," he never comes close to walking back his actions.

Things get lighter when Oliver suggests that Americans don't care about domestic surveillance. A montage of innocent bystanders grapple with who Snowden is, and several confuse him with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The comedian then suggests that the answer to it all ... is dick pics.

While there is no official "Dick Pic Program," Snowden confirms that "[the government is] still collecting everybody's information, including your dick pics."

"When you send your junk through Gmail, that's stored on Google's servers," Snowden adds, saying that by that point, it's easily within reach of Uncle Sam.

Does that mean Americans should think twice before sending them? Absolutely not, says Snowden, who then offers perhaps the memorable defense of dick pics ever.

"You shouldn't change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing," he tells Oliver. "If you sacrifice our values because we're afraid, we don't care about those values very much."

So watch out — a #DickPicsForFreedom hashtag may be coming to a Twitter feed near you.

Joking aside, Oliver and Snowden continue to provoke important conversations about how much the government should know about us. As the U.S Patriot Act comes up for repeal, and more and more Americans are consistently shown to be against excessive government surveillance, it's something we should all be thinking about.

Mic.

Non US-based people can watch the interview here.

PS Online porn could be the next big privacy scandal.

Thought For The Day: Edward Snowden

“When we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day.

"History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews. But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?

"Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?"

Reddit.

Chomsky: Greenwald

'
'If you're somebody who enjoys bashing the American media - and I am somebody who enjoys that immensely - it comes as no surprise that in the abstract you recognise that the American media all the time disseminates wildly false claims... But when you're actually at the centre of one the stories and you know first-hand what actually happened your appreciation for their eagerness and capacity to deceive substantially increases.' Glenn Greenwald.

Update: A glowing review of Greenwald's new book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the surveillance state, by his evil pinko paymasters at The Guardian.

Also published Monday, Beyond: Edward Snowden the comic book.

Thought For The Day: Alan Bennett

"Spying is excusable because they thought that they were doing something to improve things, that they were morally on the right side

"None of the spies spied for money, They all did it out of conviction, it was not to do with material gain. The treason they're supposed to have committed doesn't nowadays seem to me to be a particularly important crime. The Edward Snowden stuff – I'm wholly on his side."

The Guardian quotes from an unpublished Radio Times interview.

She's 80 on Friday!

x

PS The Daily Mail and Mail Online readers, surprisingly, not that keen on this GAY COMMUNIST TREACHERY!

Chelsea Manning: Sam Adams Award 2014

This is Chelsea's preferred photo - there are no recent ones, obvs.

When the public lacks the ability to access what its government is doing, it ceases to be involved in the governing process. There is a distinct difference between citizens, in which people are entitled to rights and privileges protected by and from the state, and subjects, in which people are placed under the absolute authority and control of the state. In essence, this is the difference between tyranny and freedom. To echo a maxim from Milton and Foes Friedman: a society that puts secrecy – in the sense of state secrecy – ahead of transparency and accountability will end up neither secure nor free.

From Chelsea Manning's acceptance statement.

Edward Snowden addresses the Oxford Union by videolink yesterday as Chelsea receives the Sam Adams Award For Integrity And Intelligence.

Glenn Greenwald: Enemy Of The State

“I came of age in the late ’70s, early ’80s, when things were way worse than they are now. And, you know, you get this strong sense that somehow the prevailing order is antithetical to who you are—it rejects you, is hostile to you, it teaches you that you’re bad and wrong and dirty. You feel like you can’t reason or deal with it. You just feel it and its powerful force. So there’s a lot of different ways to cope and deal with that.”

“One way is people internalize those judgments. Like, ‘I’m horrible, I’m filthy, I’m broken, I’m wrong, I’m defective, I’m going to go destroy myself’ — which is why gay teens end up killing themselves, right? I just decided to turn the aggression on the people I felt were attacking me. I was like, ‘You’re not going to tell me that I’m wrong, I’m going to show you that your actions are wrong.’ So that was the approach I took toward authority. This very hostile, aggressive way of being that required me to analyze all figures of power and that eventually became waging war on prevailing orthodoxies. And when you do that, it’s an intellectually lonely exercise, but you become much stronger.”

The Advocate run a lengthy, very interesting profile of Glenn Greenwald.

And just to lighten the mood here they give you ten Hello! style fun facts about Glenn and his hot Brazilian boyf David Miranda.

Glenn Greenwald: Quo Vadis?

Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and blogger who brought The Guardian the biggest scoop of the decade, is departing the London-based news organization, for a brand-new, large-scale, broadly focused media outlet, he told BuzzFeed Tuesday.

Greenwald, 46, published revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of American and British domestic spying and about officials’ deception about its scope. He said he is departing for a new, “once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity” with major financial backing, the details of which will be public soon.

“My partnership with The Guardian has been extremely fruitful and fulfilling: I have high regard for the editors and journalists with whom I worked and am incredibly proud of what we achieved,” Greenwald said in an emailed statement. “The decision to leave was not an easy one, but I was presented with a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline.”

Greenwald said that because the news had leaked “before we were prepared to announce it, I’m not yet able to provide any details of this momentous new venture.” It will, he said, “be unveiled very shortly."

...Greenwald declined to comment on the precise scale of the new venture or on its budget, but he said it would be “a very well-funded … very substantial new media outlet.” He said the source of funding will be public when the venture is officially announced...

“My role, aside from reporting and writing for it, is to create the entire journalism unit from the ground up by recruiting the journalists and editors who share the same journalistic ethos and shaping the whole thing — but especially the political journalism part — in the image of the journalism I respect most,” he said.

Greenwald will continue to live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he said, and would bring some staff to Rio, but the new organization’s main hubs will be New York City; Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco, he said.

The venture, which he said had “hired a fair number of people already,” will be “a general media outlet and news site — it’s going to have sports and entertainment and features. I’m working on the whole thing but the political journalism unit is my focus.”

Greenwald said he looked forward to creating a new organization with “no preexisting institutional strictures on what you can do.”

And he said his move is driven solely by the opportunity presented.

“When people hear what it is, there is almost no journalist who would say no to it,” he said.

BuzzFeed.

How amusing that this news was leaked.

Fagburn can exclusively reveal that he doesn't know what this is all about, yet.

PS There's a rumour his wealthy benefactor is the billionaire eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. [No idea if this other story is reliable].

David Miranda: Can't Happen Here!

At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.

I immediately contacted the Guardian, which sent lawyers to the airport, as well various Brazilian officials I know. Within the hour, several senior Brazilian officials were engaged and expressing indignation over what was being done. The Guardian has the full story here.

Glenn Greenwald writing in Monday's Guardian.

Yesterday's Guardian ran an interview with David.
The Guardian's slightly gone to town on this - the talented Mr GG is one of their own, of course - but it's been the biggest news story of the week so far.
Chilling stuff - and a story involving a clear breach of the human rights of a gay man, whose only "crime" is being the boyfriend of an investigative journalist; Amnesty are on to it.

One wonders if the gay media's coverage would have been different if David Miranda had been detained illegally by the Russian authorities?

Pink News haven't covered it at all, for shame.

Anyway, I've organised a protest outside the British Embassy in Moscow for this Saturday - please join me.

 

Update: Textbook stuff from Richard Littlejohn in Friday's Daily Mail:

 

One might have hoped that the Guardian would extend the same support to Jim Davidson as they have to their own man.
But while Miranda has the right credentials — gay, fashionably Brazilian, Left-wing, anti-American, anti-British — Jimbo [Jim Davidson] ticks all the wrong boxes.
He’s a serial heterosexual, fiercely patriotric, works tirelessly for military charities, tells the ‘wrong’ kind of jokes and, horror or horrors, was a cheerleader for Mrs Thatcher and the Tories.
So, even if he isn’t guilty, as far as the Guardian is concerned it serves him right. His kind aren’t entitled to ‘human rights’.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Savile remains dead.

 

If anyone has the faintest idea what that last line means, can they please get in touch?

Russia: I Love You!

Fuck these Western power-serving Orientalist hysterical hegemonic morons.
Every time I hear another Tory MP, neo-colonialist gay campaigner or gay businessman saying they hate Russian homophobia I just want to buy a bottle of Stoli and defect - Snowden-style!
If it wasn't for the Russians, gay men in Europe would still be in Nazi concentration camps.

• The Fall Of Communism As Seen In Gay Pornography. This is what "civilisation" looks like!

Google Pride: It's The Least We Could Do

Pink News gets even more excited about Google doing a stupid rainbow Doodle to celebrate gay pride that only shows up if you type in some LGBT searchwords.

Which slightly defeats the whole point of Pride, one might think.
But look at that baby - isn't it AMAZING?
It's surely of half-hearted tokenistic corporate PR crapola like this that our gay brothers and sisters dreamed of while rioting outside the Stonewall Inn on those balmy hot summer nights back in June 69.
And - right here, right now - it feels so good to be constantly reminded - post-Snowden - that Google are keeping tabs on me and hopefully filing them for whenever the US national security state wants my personal details handed over.
HUZZAH!

PS I don't mean to keep singling out Pink News, it's just Gay Star News won't realise Google have done this for a few days.

Update: The PN PR-driven idiocy goes on. Celebrate how much megacorps know about you. Yay!

Glenn Greenwald: Political Exile

Blogger and columnist Glenn Greenwald may have broken the biggest American story of the year, but the American can’t even live in America.
Greenwald, a gay man, moved to Brazil so he could be with his spouse since the U.S. government does not recognize same-sex couples when applying for residency visas. Greenwald said that this experience has allowed him to cast a critical eye on the subjects he reports on.
“When you grow up with any kind of real challenge that forces you to evaluate your relationship to these conventions and the things that you’re taught…you start to question what that system is.” Greenwald said. “Is it really valid in the way that it’s rejecting me or is it the system itself that is corrupted? I think that lends itself to a much more critical eye that you end up casting upon things that you’re taught are indisputably true.”

CNN - you can watch the interview excerpt here.
Glenn Greenwald hates it when someone's biographical details are prioritised over what they think and say, so maybe you could read his blog on Guardian Online.

Update: On Friday 14th The Guardian started this stunningly misguided open thread, Glenn Greenwald: In his readers' words.
Please don't try and turn serious journalists into minor celebrities.

Edward Snowden: Another Bradley Manning?

Q: Do you see yourself as another Bradley Manning?
A: "Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good."
Q: Do you think what you have done is a crime?
A: "We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence."
Q: What do you think is going to happen to you?
A: "Nothing good."

Edward Snowden in The Guardian - almost a special edition of the paper. 
The above is the top half of the front page.