Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Snowden, the NSA, U.S. Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald (left) with "Dirty Wars" documentary producer Jeremy Scahill
 
Snowden (Getty Images/AFP)
Nearly a year after he first met Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to unveil new secrets about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the surveillance state. His new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, is being published today. It includes dozens of previously secret NSA documents, including new details on how the NSA routinely intercepts wi-fi routers, computer servers, and other electronic devices being exported from the United States. 

No Place to Hide (us.macmillan.com)
According to leaked documents published in the book, the NSA then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seals, and sends them on. This gives the NSA access to entire networks and all their users. (Users may think they're computers are safe without being aware that the network they aare on is being harvested for data). 

The book includes one previously secret NSA file that shows a photo of an agent opening a box marked CISCO. Below it reads a caption: "Intercepted packages are opened carefully." Another memo observes that some signals intelligence tradecraft is "very hands-on (literally!)" 
Greenwald joins us in the studio to talk about this and other new revelations about the NSA, including its global economic espionage, spying at the United Nations, and attempting to monitor in-flight Internet users and phone calls. For his reporting on the NSA, Greenwald recently won a George Polk Award and was part of the team from The Guardian that just won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.
 
Can't believe they made me an Obama poster
"Once people understood that this extraordinary system of suspicionless surveillance, which was truly unprecedented in scope, had been created completely in the dark, it became more than a surveillance story," Greenwald says. "It became a story about government secrecy and accountability and the role of journalism, and certainly privacy and surveillance in the digital age."

The Greenwald interview

 
Obama will beg NSA to protect privacy
This is the final part of Democracy Now's extended interview with Glenn Greenwald. He reflects on his Pulitzer Prize, adversarial investigative journalism, and the corporate media’s response to his reporting on whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NSA documents.
 
"We knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories...that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, 'This doesn't actually seem like journalism anymore,’ because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do," Greenwald explains. "It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government."

From The Guardian
How NSA spies on Americans and the world
In the hours after his identity became known, the entire world was searching for the NSA whistleblower, and it became vital that his whereabouts in Hong Kong remain secret. In an extract from a new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald recalls the dramatic events surrounding the moment Snowden revealed himself in June 2013.
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