Explosive WikiLeaks Release Exposes Massive, Aggressive CIA Cyber Spying, Hacking Capability

CIA org chart from the WikiLeaks cache (click to enlarge). "The organizational chart corresponds to the material published by WikiLeaks so far. Since the organizational structure of the CIA below the level of Directorates is not public, the placement of the EDG [Engineering Development Group]and its branches ... is reconstructed from information contained in the documents released so far. It is intended to be used as a rough outline of the internal organization; please be aware that the reconstructed org chart is incomplete and that internal reorganizations occur frequently."

by Gaius Publius

"O brave new world, that has such people in it."

Bottom line first. As you read what's below, consider:

• That the CIA is capable of doing all of the things described, and has been for years, is not in doubt.

• That unnameable many others have stolen ("exfiltrated") these tools and capabilities is, according to the Wikileaks leaker, also certain. Consider this an especially dangerous form of proliferation, placing cyber warfare tools in the hands of anyyone with money and intent. As WikiLeaks notes, "Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike."

• That the CIA is itself using these tools, and if so, to what degree, are the only unknowns. But can anyone doubt, in this aggressively militarized environment, that only the degree of use is in question?

Now the story.

WikiLeaks just dropped a huge cache of documents (the first of several promised releases), leaked from a person or people associated with the CIA in one or more capacities (examples, employee, contractor), which shows an agency out-of-control in its spying and hacking overreach. Read through to the end. If you're like me, you'll be stunned, not just about what they can do, but that they would want to do it, in some cases in direct violation of President Obama's orders. This story is bigger than anything you can imagine.

Consider this piece just an introduction, to make sure the story stays on your radar as it unfolds — and to help you identify those media figures who will try to minimize or bury it. (Unless I missed it, on MSNBC last night, for example, the first mention of this story was not Chris Hayes, not Maddow, but the Lawrence O'Donnell show, and then only to support his guest's "Russia gave us Trump" narrative. If anything, this leak suggests a much muddier picture, which I'll explore in a later piece.)

So I'll start with just a taste, a few of its many revelations, to give you, without too much time spent, the scope of the problem. Then I'll add some longer bullet-point detail, to indicate just how much of American life this revelation touches.

While the cache of documents has been vetted and redacted, it hasn't been fully explored for implications. I'll follow this story as bits and piece are added from the crowd sourced research done on the cache of information. If you wish to play along at home, the WikiLeaks torrent file is here. The torrent's passphrase is here. WikiLeaks press release is here (also reproduced below). Their FAQ is here.

Note that this release covers the years 2013–2016. As WikiLeaks says in its FAQ, "The series is the largest intelligence publication in history."

Preface: Trump and Our "Brave New World"

But first, this preface, consisting of one idea only. Donald Trump is deep in the world of spooks now, the world of spies, agents and operatives. He and his inner circle have a nest of friends, but an even larger, more varied nest of enemies. As John Sevigny writes below, his enemies include not only the intel and counter-intel people, but also "Republican lawmakers, journalists, the Clintons, the Bush family, Barack Obama, the ACLU, every living Democrat and even Rand Paul." Plus Vladimir Putin, whose relationship with Trump is just "business," an alliance of convenience, if you will.

I have zero sympathy for Donald Trump. But his world is now our world, and with both of his feet firmly planted in spook world, ours are too. He's in it to his neck, in fact, and what happens in that world will affect every one of us. He's so impossibly erratic, so impossibly unfit for his office, that everyone on the list above wants to remove him. Many of them are allied, but if they are, it's also only for convenience.

How do spooks remove the inconvenient and unfit? I leave that to your imagination; they have their ways. Whatever method they choose, however, it must be one without fingerprints — or more accurately, without their fingerprints — on it.

Which suggests two more questions. One, who will help them do it, take him down? Clearly, anyone and everyone on the list. Second, how do you bring down the president, using extra-electoral, extra-constitutional means, without bringing down the Republic? I have no answer for that.

Here's a brief look at "spook world" (my phrase, not the author's) from "The Fox Hunt" by John Sevigny:

Several times in my life - as a journalist and rambling, independent photographer — I've ended up rubbing shoulders with spooks. Long before that was a racist term, it was a catch-all to describe intelligence community people, counter intel types, and everyone working for or against them. I don't have any special insight into the current situation with Donald Trump and his battle with the IC as the intelligence community calls itself, but I can offer a few first hand observations about the labyrinth of shadows, light, reflections, paranoia, perceptions and misperceptions through which he finds himself wandering, blindly. More baffling and scary is the thought he may have no idea his ankles are already bound together in a cluster of quadruple gordian knots, the likes of which very few people ever escape.

Criminal underworlds, of which the Trump administration is just one, are terrifying and confusing places. They become far more complicated once they've been penetrated by authorities and faux-authorities who often represent competing interests, but are nearly always in it for themselves.

One big complication — and I've written about this before — is that you never know who's working for whom. Another problem is that the heirarchy of handlers, informants, assets and sources is never defined. People who believe, for example, they are CIA assets are really just being used by people who are perhaps not in the CIA at all but depend on controlling the dupe in question. It is very simple — and I have seen this happen — for the subject of an international investigation to claim that he is part of that operation. [emphasis added]

Which leads Sevigny to this observation about Trump, which I partially quoted above: "Donald Trump may be crazy, stupid, evil or all three but he knows the knives are being sharpened and there are now too many blades for him to count. The intel people are against him, as are the counter intel people. ... His phone conversations were almost certainly recorded by one organization or another, legal or quasi legal. His enemies include Republican lawmakers, journalists, the Clintons, the Bush family, Barack Obama, the ACLU, every living Democrat and even Rand Paul. Putin is not on his side — that's a business matter and not an alliance."

Again, this is not to defend Trump, or even to generate sympathy for him — I personally have none. It's to characterize where he is, and we are, at in this pivotal moment. Pivotal not for what they're doing, the broad intelligence community. But pivotal for what we're finding out, the extent and blatancy of the violations.

All of this creates an incredibly complex story, with only a tenth or less being covered by anything like the mainstream press. For example, the Trump-Putin tale is much more likely to be part of a much broader "international mobster" story, whose participants include not only Trump and Putin, but Wall Street (think HSBC) and major international banks, sovereign wealth funds, major hedge funds, venture capital (vulture capital) firms, international drug and other trafficking cartels, corrupt dictators and presidents around the world ... and much of the highest reaches of the "Davos crowd."

Much of the highest reaches of the .01 percent, in other words, all served, supported and "curated" by the various, often competing elements of the first-world military and intelligence communities. What a stew of competing and aligned interests, of marriages and divorces of convenience, all for the common currencies of money and power, all of them dealing in death.

What this new WikiLeaks revelation shows us is what just one arm of that community, the CIA, has been up to. Again, the breadth of the spying and hacking capability is beyond imagination. This is where we've come to as a nation.

What the CIA Is Up To — A Brief Sample

Now about those CIA spooks and their surprising capabilities. A number of other outlets have written up the story, but this from Zero Hedge has managed to capture the essence as well as the breadth in not too many words (emphasis mine throughout):

WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of ‘Vault 7’, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA's Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released: [org chart reproduced above]

A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, "would rock the technology world", the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

With respect to hacked devices like you smart phone, smart TV and computer, consider the concept of putting these devices in "fake-off" mode:

Among the various techniques profiled by WikiLeaks is “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

As Kim Dotcom chimed in on Twitter, "CIA turns Smart TVs, iPhones, gaming consoles and many other consumer gadgets into open microphones" and added "CIA turned every Microsoft Windows PC in the world into spyware. Can activate backdoors on demand, including via Windows update"[.]

Do you still trust Windows Update?

About "Russia did it"...

Adding to the "Russia did it" story, note this:

Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in "false flag" cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks' source notes that it "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.["]

As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, "CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state...."

This doesn't prove that Russia didn't do it ("it" meaning actually hacking the presidency for Trump, as opposed to providing much influence in that direction), but again, we're in spook world, with all the phrase implies. The CIA can clearly put anyone's fingerprints on any weapon they wish, and I can't imagine they're alone in that capability.

Hacking Presidential Devices?

If I were a president, I'd be concerned about this, from the WikiLeaks "Analysis" portion of the Press Release (emphasis added):

"Year Zero" documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration's commitments [that the intelligence community would reveal to device manufacturers whatever vulnerabilities it discovered]. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA's cyber arsenal are pervasive [across devices and device types] and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.

As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in "Year Zero" [that it] is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities ("zero days") possessed by the CIA[,] but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.

Does or did the CIA do this (hack presidential devices), or is it just capable of it? The second paragraph implies the latter. That's a discussion for another day, but I can say now that both Lawrence Wilkerson, aide to Colin Powell and a non-partisan (though an admitted Republican) expert in these matters, and William Binney, one of the triumvirate of major pre-Snowden leakers, think emphatically yes. (See Wilkerson's comments here. See Binney's comments here.)

Whether or not you believe Wilkerson and Binney, do you doubt that if our intelligence people can do something, they would balk at the deed itself, in this world of "collect it all"? If nothing else, imagine the power this kind of bugging would confer on those who do it.

The Breadth of the CIA Cyber-Hacking Scheme

But there is so much more in this Wikileaks release than suggested by the brief summary above. Here's a bullet-point overview of what we've learned so far, again via Zero Hedge:

Key Highlights from the Vault 7 release so far:

• "Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

• Wikileaks claims that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

• By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.

• The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

• Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

Also this scary possibility:

• As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks.

• The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.

Journalist Michael Hastings, who in 2010 destroyed the career of General Stanley McChrystal and was hated by the military for it, was killed in 2013 in an inexplicably out-of-control car. This isn't to suggest the CIA, specifically, caused his death. It's to ask that, if these capabilities existed in 2013, what would prevent their use by elements of the military, which is, after all a death-delivery organization?

And lest you consider this last speculation just crazy talk, Richard Clarke (that Richard Clarke) agrees: "Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, told the Huffington Post that Hastings’s crash looked consistent with a car cyber attack.'" Full and fascinating article here.

WiliLeaks Press Release

Here's what WikiLeaks itself says about this first document cache (again, emphasis mine):

Press Release

Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."

Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.

Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

Be sure to click through for the Analysis, Examples and FAQ sections as well.

"O brave new world," someone once wrote. Indeed. Brave new world, that only the brave can live in.

GP
 

Obama Should Have Pardoned Ed Snowden For Many Reasons-- Taking Him Out Of Putin's Hands Was One Big One

Friday evening we suggested-- tongue firmly in cheek-- not being mean to the brutal Russian dictator. Dictator and murderer. Many putatively-leftish intellectuals have felt some kind of naive kinship with Putin because he offered refuge to Ed Snowden. I have been grateful myself, though never for a moment childish enough to not understand that Putin's motives were anything but self-serving... generally the motivation for anything a head of state does.

Putin's "generosity" towards Snowden was a way of sticking his thumb in Obama's eye while making himself look vaguely progressivish and humanitarianish-- a joke to anyone who knows anything at all about Vladimir Putin, one of history's most egregious and ruthless kleptocrats. He and Trump are a match made in Heaven.

While Obama was still president, DWT was one of several blog begging him to pardon Snowden if, for no other reason, to take away a weapon Putin would have in terms of Trump. In late November we wrote that we were worried that Putin "will turn Ed Snowden over to Trumpanzee the first time el Presidente Pepe The Frog needs a rabbit to pull out of a hat." Has that time arrived already?

After all, Trump's approval rating seems to be in freefall and the percentage of people who want to see him impeached is likely to pass a solid majority by spring. He's losing and losing and losing. Everything he puts his deformed little hands to, turns to shit. How about a nice show trial for "the traitor?" Yesterday NBC News reported it could be in the works.

U.S. intelligence has collected information that Russia is considering turning over Edward Snowden as a "gift" to President Donald Trump-- who has called the NSA leaker a "spy" and a "traitor" who deserves to be executed.

That's according to a senior U.S. official who has analyzed a series of highly sensitive intelligence reports detailing Russian deliberations and who says a Snowden handover is one of various ploys to "curry favor" with Trump. A second source in the intelligence community confirms the intelligence about the Russian conversations and notes it has been gathered since the inauguration.

...If he were returned to American soil, Snowden-- a divisive figure in America who is seen by some as a hero and others as treasonous-- would face an administration that has condemned him in the strongest terms.

"I think he's a total traitor and I would deal with him harshly," Trump said in July. "And if I were president, Putin would give him over." In October 2013, Trump tweeted: "Snowden is a spy who should be executed."

CIA Director Mike Pompeo has also called for Snowden to face American justice. "I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence," Pompeo said last February.

...In an interview streamed on Twitter in December, Snowden said being forced to return to the U.S. would be a human-rights violation but would also put to rest to accusations that he is a Russian spy.

"A lot of people have asked me: Is there going to be some kind of deal where Trump says, 'Hey look, give this guy to me as some kind of present'? Will I be sent back to the U.S., where I'll be facing a show trial?" Snowden said.

"Is this going to happen? I don't know. Could it happen? Sure. Am I worried about it? Not really, because here's the thing: I am very comfortable with the decisions that I've made. I know I did the right thing."

More than 1 million people signed a White House petition calling for then-President Obama to pardon Snowden. Snowden himself did not file an application and tweeted that Army leaker Chelsea Manning should get clemency ahead of him. Obama commuted Manning's sentence but took no action on Snowden.

Would The Government Spy On You And Your Family?

Tuesday, we were looking at some of the reasons Hillary is doing less well-- even in states trending her way like Florida is now-- than she could be doing. While I was writing the post, I got a note from Ted Lieu about the Yahoo revelations. And, the malaise of some millennials who are smart enough to know they're not voting for the narcissistic racist and psychopath but are reticent to commit to Hillary are just uncomfortable with her old school, conservative attitudes about issues around national security state surveillance-- or, as Lieu referred to the Yahoo revelations, "big brother on steroids." He said "it must be stopped." She should too, unless she wants to spend the rest of the campaign pining for those millennial voters. As Lieu said, a government "directive to Yahoo to write a software program and search all of its customers’ incoming emails for certain content is a gross abuse of federal power... Law enforcement and the NSA did not have warrants for the hundreds of millions of customers that had their privacy violated." Justin Amash (R-MI) was as disturbed by this as Lieu was. But you know who felt even stronger about the revelations? Yeah... Ed Snowden. He was tweeting up a storm as soon as the news broke:

His first reaction was to urge everyone with a Yahoo email account to close it. Sounds like an excellent idea to me. He also brought up that "With Verizon buying Yahoo, who was revealed today to be spying on all of their customers, this seems relevant." Very relevant. Did anyone think it was worth mentioning at the VP debate a few hours later?

In the Afterward to Michael Gurnow's 2014 book, The Edwards Snowden Affair, Gurnow wrote, "Somewhat predictably given Clapper’s adamant defense, the NSA hasn’t changed its policies; it has merely tightened its security. Instead of conducting surveillance in a manner that won’t plague an employee’s conscience and spur another Snowden to action, the agency instituted an information lockdown. Shortly after the disclosures stared appearing, a two-person data extraction rule was instituted.

Perhaps the greatest cultural signifier of Snowden’s impact is seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly after the world saw Snowden’s face for the first time, sales of the 64-year-old classic skyrocketed. It witnessed a 5,800% overnight increase in sales. The novel went from 7,397 to 125 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

...[T]he public has only heard of the questionable means Washington goes to acquire data directly from communication sources. What is not being talked about is the intelligence it obtains from civilian data mining enterprises. These businesses come in two flavors: Private data collection companies and corporate retailers. The latter consists of commercial retail and fast food establishments. Considering Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, Google, Sprint and Verizon’s relationship with the federal government, it is not unreasonable to assume the data these two types of businesses collect is also sequestered by Washington.

Target’s ability to determine a young woman was pregnant before she knew is the tip of the spying iceberg. For example, many cell phone owners forget wifi usage is a revolving door. Most give little thought to accessing and using a store’s wifi, not realizing the company’s systems may be programmed to exploit the Internet connection. Once a connection is made, customer data-- including gender, address, telephone number and a consumer’s personal interests (via Internet searches and an individual’s social network pages, which are frequently left open for convenience)-- are recorded. In retail outlets, a corporation’s programming may also be set to track a person’s movements throughout the building and catalog the individual’s browsing habits. For the customer, the result is customized advertisements and coupons; for the company, consumer analysis is completed at a fraction of the traditional cost. Sadly, advances in technology permit businesses to supersede any attempts at protecting one’s privacy. Much like the U.S. intelligence’s ability to stalk a phone that is turned off, corporations are now able to access phones even if they aren’t deliberately connected to a store’s wifi.

The other and much darker side of corporate surveillance is data mining companies. These include firms such as Acxiom, Datalogix, Euclid, Federated Media, Epsilon, Digital Advertising Alliance, BlueKai and Network Advertising Initiative. Acxiom, the leader in the industry, has over 190 million profiles on American adults.

These entities make it their business to collect every conceivable type of knowledge about U.S. citizens. They first scour the Internet for any information a person is willing to make known before proceeding to public records. Yet these techniques are time and labor-intensive. Both data mining companies and corporations have a surveillance tool which is much more thorough, revealing and, most importantly, automated. They hire software engineers to design and implement third-party cookies. Unlike a first-party cookie, which initiates a discussion between a user’s computer and a specific website, a third-party cookie is equivalent to someone eavesdropping on a person’s power lunch conversation and selling the transcript to a competitor. One method software designers use to hide third-party cookies is by embedding them in advertisements. When an individual enters a website with an ad, a third-person cookie is set. If the user moseys over to another website with an ad by the same company, a notice of the individual’s continued interest-- including the time, date and computer’s IP address-- is sent to the business. By this time, the third-party cookie is controlling a person’s computer. When someone looks at shoes on a retailer’s website and then checks the local news, only toeerily find an ad of the footwear in a sidebar, a third-party cookie is at work. Third-party cookies essentially track and stalk Internet users. Aside from the invasive privacy violations, there are drastic, long-term psychological effects which result from the repetition of third-party cookies’ advertising. Many were confused by Snowden’s objection to surveillance on grounds that it stifled creativity and free thought. When an ad is designed to reappear time and again, it is reinforcing an idea or brand image in a potential consumer’s mind. The Familiarity Principle states a person becomes more comfortable and accepting of an image the more frequently it is encountered. This is basic biology. Familiarity instills trust, often at a subconscious level. Though customers believe they are expressing freedom of choice by picking Brand X over Brand Y, they may be unaware they saw Brand X in a sidebar while browsing online recipes the week before. They purchase Brand X without realizing the subconscious motivations for doing so. They have literally been brainwashed.

Data brokers take their information, organize it into concise little profiles, and offer it to anyone with an open checkbook. This includes the obvious customers, U.S. government and corporations, but they have other steadfast clients. Many “people locator” websites purchase data mining profiles and resell them to the general public. For a nominal fee, anyone can access a person’s birthday, place of birth, current and past residences, family relations, social security and phone number, educational background, email address, place of current and former employment, and medical, property and court records. Medical insurance firms are curious whether a potential client prints Internet coupons for over-the-counter headache medicine and pays in cash to avoid a rate-hiking paper trail.

Employment agencies want to know an applicant’s hobbies and proclivities without having to ask. Loan companies are interested in a candidate’s choice of recreational locales, be it a casino, truck rally or library. Once this data is combined with receipts from many of the major corporations, buying habits are then merged with wants and desires. The result is a very concise, detailed picture of an individual’s possessions, activities and goals. This is then compared to established buying patterns. The end result is daunting. The owner of an analyzed profile knows who a person was, is, and is going to be. Corporations refer to this as market research. Privacy advocates consider the process an infringement upon the Fourth Amendment and argue third-party cookie usage violates the last sanctuary of privacy, one’s thoughts. Orwell’s prophecy is modestly conservative by 21st-century standards. The main character in Nineteen Eighty-Four believes, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

The surveillance debate has intensified since June 5 and lent new perspectives upon the concept of the safety technology can provide. The underlying political issue is who has the right to particular varieties of information. The public believes there are two types of conversations, public and private. The intelligence community doesn’t agree.

In the Internet Age, a person can “Like” the activity of fishing enough to let the world know by making it public knowledge on one’s Facebook profile. The individual can also choose to obtain a vanity Facebook URL by confidentially submitting one’s telephone number to the social networking site. The phone number is used for authorization purposes to verify the request is coming from the Facebook account holder. Though it is not placed online, the number is nonetheless (questionably) stored on the company’s servers. David Omand, former head of GCHQ, has no problem with collecting the publicly-known fact Bob likes fishing along with his cell number via Facebook’s FISC order permitting the U.S. government access to the information.

For the watchers, there is no line dividing what an individual puts on the Internet and what people have privately entrusted to another party, be it a website, bank, doctor or telephone company. Government spies also scoff at the notion of intellectual property rights. Bought-and-sold politicians agree. If something is publicly or privately posted online, it automatically becomes the property of the website’s owner. (This is also why most businesses permit and encourage employees to use their company-issued phones and email accounts for personal communications-- the firms have legal license to review an employee’s private network and communications, because they own the devices and programs and therefore the data on them.) It is an absurd proposition analogous to stating an individual surrenders rightful ownership of a vehicle to a bank when it is parked on property whose tenant has yet to pay the mortgage in full. This policy refuses to acknowledge the resources and labor provided by the Facebook account holder, i.e., the computer used to access the social networking site, time it took to create a profile and mental ingenuity in deciding how and what to say about oneself. It is understood that the website has issued the venue which, in turn, makes the information available worldwide but the skewed exchange undermines the statement that profiles are “free.” No profit sharing is offered the user. Without account holders, social networking sites would be empty voids on lonely servers and not multinational corporate affairs.

In the surveillance communities’ opinion, everything is public domain and no one has the right to ask “Do you mind?” to someone eavesdropping on a conversation. Their argument is that if a person doesn’t want what is being said to be known (by whomever), the individual best not speak at all. In the cloak-and-dagger world of data mining, the person having a discussion cannot reasonably expect privacy, because the individual is voicing one’s thoughts, period. It does not matter whether they are spoken in confidence and directed to a particular person, much like an email is addressed “To: Bob” and not “To: Bob; Bcc: The NSA.” If the speaker is naïve enough to say something at a volume where a microphone can detect it, it is de facto public knowledge. Whereas government surveillance only exchanges the recorded conversation with its own kind, corporate surveillance broadcasts the discussion to anyone who is willing to pay to hear it. In the surveillance world, the only guarantee of privacy is dead silence.

The U.S. government knows the difference but deliberately ignores it. It does not want a distinction to be made, because it would restrict its power and the power of those who fund political campaigns: defense contractors, telecoms, Internet companies, corporate retailers, fast food enterprises and multimillion-dollar data mining firms. The last thing the U.S. government or private business wants is account holders to have control over their own information. Snowden’s skepticism of political solutions is understandable. The people who were hired to watch the watchmen did a poor job. American citizens were told their rights were being protected as a secret oversight court rubberstamped itself into extraneousness while never bothering to see what the NSA might be hiding. Regardless whether a new law is created or a task force is assigned, it can be expected that parties in possession of private information will continue to swear a consumer’s data is sacrosanct and they would never dream of violating a client’s privacy; all the while information is being steadily placed on the open market, swapped and surveilled. Every data mining opt-out form absolves itself by including the clause that the representative business cannot guarantee a person’s information will not conveniently fall into the company’s lap at a later date. If a causal web search produces an individual’s home address alongside the resident’s place of employment, a robber can look up the employer’s hours of operation and know when the house will likely be vacant. When situations like these are presented to those in power, the ball of accountability is bounced back and forth as witnessed when the U.S. government and telecoms pointed the finger of blame at one another after Greenwald exposed Verizon. No one is held accountable, violations continue and people are put at risk. Snowden was correct once again. Current surveillance practices make us less safe.

Regardless of how futile a circumstance may appear, it is instinct to try to defend oneself from perceived harm. Both businesses and private citizens reacted to the disclosures, some rather violently.

Hillary, Ed Snowden And The Millennial Vote

Yesterday, Hillary had an OpEd in Policy.Mic, Here's What Millennials Have Taught Me. Her point is that she's been listening to millennials and that she finds then "the most open, diverse and entrepreneurial generation in our country's history." Millennials were the mainstay of the Bernie Sanders movement as-- without the "help" of crooked like Wasserman Schultz, Harry Reid and corrupt party machines from one end of the country to the other, would have won the nomination for him. But now she needs their votes against the Trumpist boogeyman.

She notes that millennials have led "the way to a brighter future for all of us. You've fought for some of the most important accomplishments in our nation's history, like the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality. You've come together to challenge our country to protect human rights and strengthen families by fixing a broken immigration system, reforming our criminal justice system and ending the era of mass incarceration. And you've demanded that people of color be able to live their lives without fear of being killed at a routine traffic stop." And she talks about her own time in college, skipping over the fact that she was on the wrong side of history, an outspoken conservative, president of Wellesley's Young Republicans. Is she still missing the boat?

ObamaCare? Millennials want single payer, not a dysfunctional baby step in that direction, with built in profits for hated pharmaceutical monoplies. And, yes, millennials helped drag her away from her own instinctual, less than stellar record on marriage equality and, apparently, get her to shift her position on a conservative approach to criminal justice. Her attack on Trump is gratuitous and neither here nor there. Millennials are repulsed by him. But what is she offering to draw them in, to make it worth the bother of voting? Is it just a lesser-of-two-evils thing? Is that going to be enough? Maybe. She goes on to list some of her plans.

First, everyone who wants to go to college should be able to without drowning in debt. That's why I worked with Sen. Bernie Sanders to design a plan that will let everyone attend college debt-free. If you already have loans, we'll let you refinance them, defer them to start a business or forgive them if you spend 10 years in public service. You can even see how much you and your family could save under our plan by looking at the "college calculator" on our website. And we'll make sure a four-year degree isn't the only path to a good-paying job by supporting apprenticeships and other high-quality training programs.

Second, everyone should be able to get a job that pays the bills and can support a family. And not only that, you should be able to do work you love and find meaningful. So we'll create more good-paying jobs, raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay. This will help a lot of Americans, especially young people struggling to find footing in a difficult economy.

Third, no new parent should have to face the impossible choice between caring for a child or family member and losing a paycheck or even a job. It's outrageous that in 2016, the United States is the only developed country in the world without paid family leave of any kind. So we'll make high-quality child care and preschool available to every family in every community.  I've spent my career fighting to make a difference for children and families, and I can't wait to do even more as president.

Of course, to do any of these things, we can't have secret unaccountable money poisoning our politics. So I'll appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Citizens United and even propose a constitutional amendment to do the same. And by doing that, we'll make sure that no special interests can get in the way of protecting and expanding civil rights, LGBT rights and all human rights.

Many of you have shared with me that it feels like you're out there on your own-- like no one has your back. It shouldn't be that way. If I'm fortunate enough to be elected, you will always have a champion in the White House. But I can't do it on my own. I need you to work with me, keep fighting for what you believe, hold me accountable. I can't promise we'll win every fight on our first try. But I can promise you this: I'll never stop fighting for you.

So let's stand together to show the world what our country, and your generation, really stands for. Let's overwhelm division and intolerance with compassion, understanding and unity. Let's make clear that Love Trumps Hate-- not just this November, but always.

Yeah, nice... and Kevin Drum made an even better case for her at Mother Jones Monday morning. He insists there's a top notch postive case to be made for Hillary, over and above how horrible Trump is. He starts with a caveat that she, like all other politicians, is far from perfect. "If you think she's too instinctively hawkish-- as I do-- that might be reason enough for a liberal to vote for someone else. On some issues-- supporting the Iraq War, supporting TPP, voting for the PATRIOT Act, etc.-- she's taken positions that might be flat deal killers. On other issues, you might think she's not strong enough, or that it took her too long to get to the right place. Finally, on a personal level, she's often over-secretive, overly lawyerly, and sometimes skates a little close to some ethical lines. She distrusts the press and withholds information too often. And she is, plainly, an establishment politician, with all the flaws that implies." He then lists 84 points that ought to make progressives (and most millennials are that) consider voting for her. Read it for yourself (here) but, minus the Trumpist threat-- and with all due respects to Kevin-- I'm not convinced. Blue America is now raising money for her campaign and I'm urging my friends and readers in swing states to vote for her.

Below is far from a scientific poll, but I asked twitter users who they would rather see as a U.S. senator, Ed Snowden or Patrick Murphy. Murphy is an unaccomplished Florida backbencher in Congress currently playing a bit role in the rise of Marco Rubio. Saudi Arabia's member of the House Intelligence Committee-- an actual traitor, not a whistleblower-- Murphy signed a letter urging President Obama to deny Snowden a pardon. These were the results:

What would get me enthusiastic about Hillary as something more than a way of stopping Trump? In the Oliver Stone film, Snowden, Hillary and Trump are represented, not by actors, but with archival footage. Predictably, Trump calls for Snowden's execution. Hillary isn't quite as bad but her attitude on Snowden is as bad today as her attitude about same sex marriage was not all that many years ago. She should reexamine that attitude. That may say a lot more to millennials, who overwhelmingly see him as a whistleblower and not as a the traitor the decrepit House Intelligence Committee is trying to paint him as.

This is very tough for any politician. I asked every member of Congress I know and every congressional candidate I know for a statement on Snowden. Other than from a handful of courageous Berniecrats, the silence was deafening. The kind of leadership it would take to stand up-- like Bernie has-- and make a case for Snowden would be monumental... and would say something undenialbly powerful to millennials about Hillary. Monday morning the editors of The Guardian called attention to the unbearable hypocrisy of the editors of the Washington Post on the matter. The Post, they wrote "stunned many people in the United States, including a large section of the country’s journalistic community, by coming out against a pardon for whistleblower Edward Snowden. Despite the newspaper having been responsible for publishing leaks by the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, its latest editorial urges President Barack Obama not to pardon him... Two other newspapers that published Snowden’s revelations-- the Guardian and the New York Times-- have run opinion pieces calling on the US administration to allow him to return to the US without facing any charges."



One of the Berniecrats who did get back to me on this was Kerith StranoTaylor, a congressional candidate running in PA-05, a very conservative district in north-central Pennsylvania. Imagine if Hillary issued a statement like this:

Ed Snowden is the collateral damage of a misguided effort to privatize our national security.  First, in an effort to "shrink government' thousands of private contractors were entrusted with unfettered access to the most secret details of our national security. Our government was spying on its own citizens. He pulled back the curtain. Snowden should be pardoned. He revealed to America that the erosion done to our civil liberties under the Patriot Act was too great. Without his actions, would the Patriot Act have ever been curtailed? Prosecuting Snowden at this point is as egregious as the threatened 16-year sentence for Deric Lostutter, the hacker that exposed the 2012 high school football players' rape case in Stuebenville, Ohio. Three boys who witnessed the rape (and did nothing to stop it) were granted immunity from prosecution, but the man who notified the world of the rape, is facing 16 years in prison. This is not the way the world was supposed to work. I do not condone vigilantism. We are a country of laws. However, our Justice system allows for leniency when warranted, and this is a case where a pardon is more than appropriate.

Wendy Reed is the progressive Democrat taking on Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the Bakersfield area. Her instincts are just right even if she hasn't immersed herself in this case. "I am happy to stand with whistleblowers and patriots who do for American democracy what journalists used to do" she told us a few moments ago. "With what little I know about the Snowden situation, I do support clemency."

Ray Metcalfe is the most recently endorsed Blue America candidate. He's running for the Alaska Senate seat currently occupied by Lisa Murkowski and he has very strong feelings about the Ed Snowden controversy. "Personally I consider Edward Snowden to be a hero," he told us yesterday, "and, according to polling information published in the Christian Science Monitor, 60 percent of Americans age 18 to 29, agree. I believe the law should protect, not prosecute, those who expose criminal activity in our government; unfortunately it does not. Prosecuting someone thought to be a hero by so many would be extremely divisive among Americans. Oliver North got off on technicalities after lying to Congress about the Reagan Administration's cocaine smuggling to fund the Contra rebels, and years later, six of his coconspirators were pardoned. Now President Obama wants to prosecute Snowden for telling the truth. What's wrong with this picture? The practice of classifying information is thought to be done to keep information from the enemy. Unfortunately it has all too often become a tool for keeping Americans from knowing what their government is doing. If elected, I will advocate for whistle blower protections and restrictions for what purposes information can and cannot be classified."

Another was San Antonio's Tom Wakely, a candidate in TX-21. An army veteran, his thoughts on Snowden explains why he has so much enthusiasm for his campaign in Austin and San Antonio. "Tones of politicians and journalists," he wrote, "like to wax poetic on their personal interpretations or strict adherence to our Constitution. However, in the wake of what Edward Snowden revealed to the world, we aren't having a proper discussion about the 4th Amendment. Warrantless data espionage should be a huge issue not just for politicians and journalists, but for every person on the planet. All too often you hear the argument from the public that they likely have nothing to hide, and subsequently don't care. Would that argument apply to physical frisks whenever authorities felt like it? Would the same argument apply to authorities keeping a physical eye on you at all times? I'm willing to bet for most folks that they'd feel extremely uncomfortable. Now the Washington Post is calling for their own source to not be pardoned. What a dangerous precedent this sets. 'Thanks for the scoop on unconstitutional searches, good luck in jail.' Is this really what journalists want? I can't imagine all the reporters of the Washington Post agreeing with this sentiment. There are a lot of questions regarding Snowden's decisions in the aftermath of these leaks, but I'd be willing to bet he'd cooperate and be able to answer all of them if our government granted him the ability to return home. I liken Snowden to Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my views on the Vietnam War and allowed me to become part of the Veterans for Peace movement. Our government is supposed to be for the people. Edward Snowden proved that in the online realm, the government is skeptical of the people. Snowden acted for the people. We should bring him home with a pardon."

If you're already a DWT reader, you already know Tom Wakely and Wendy Reed. Ray Metcalfe is a former Alaska state legislator renowned for anti-corruption crusades in his state and Kerith is a biker and an attorney and you can help them all win their races by contributing at the Blue America thermometer below:

UPDATE: Grayson

Grayson was overseas when the Intelligence Committee sent their letter to Obama urging him to not pardon Ed Snowden. When he got back, he told me that "President Obama issued Presidential Policy Directive 19 for the specific (and much needed) purpose of protecting whistleblowers in the so-called 'intelligence community.' To say that anyone could be prosecuted for such whistleblowing-- in a secret trial, no less-- makes a mockery of that directive. Why even pretend that we protect whistleblowers, when in fact the military-intelligence complex gnaws at their bones mercilessly?"

Barton Gellman Makes Jackasses Out Of The 22 Tools On The House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence

Thursday evening we took a quick look at the venomous assault on whistle-blower Ed Snowden by the establishment stooges who make up the House Intelligence Committee. I reached out to over a dozen members of Congress for a countervailing opinion. No one was interested in going on the record. Barton Gellman, who was-- along with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill-- one of the 4 journalists who Snowden trusted with the NSA classified archives. He went through the same Intelligence Committee executive summary I looked over and found it to be "an aggressively dishonest piece of work." Basically, a hatchet job on Snowden, released to coincide with the premiere of Oliver Stone’s Snowden, their pathetic version of a counter-narrative. To start, Gellman objected to the committee's 22 members-- every member signed onto this thing-- description of Snowden as "a serial exaggerator and fabricator," with "a pattern of intentional lying." Here is the evidence adduced for that finding, in its entirety.

“He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints.”

This is verifiably false for anyone who, as the committee asserts it did, performs a “close review of Snowden’s official employment records.” Snowden’s Army paperwork, some of which I have examined, says he met the demanding standards of an 18X Special Forces recruit and mustered into the Army on June 3, 2004. The diagnosis that led to his discharge, on crutches, was bilateral tibial stress fractures.

“He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did.”

I do not know how the committee could get this one wrong in good faith. According to the official Maryland State Department of Education test report, which I have reviewed, Snowden sat for the high school equivalency test on May 4, 2004. He needed a score of 2250 to pass. He scored 3550. His Diploma No. 269403 was dated June 2, 2004, the same month he would have graduated had he returned to Arundel High School after losing his sophomore year to mononucleosis. In the interim, he took courses at Anne Arundel Community College.

“He claimed to have worked for the CIA as a ‘senior advisor,’ which was a gross exaggeration of his entry-level duties as a computer technician.”

Judge for yourself. Here are the three main roles Snowden played at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1) His entry level position, as a contractor, was system administrator (one among several) of the agency’s Washington metropolitan area network. (2) After that he was selected for and spent six months in training as a telecommunications information security officer, responsible for all classified technology in U.S. embassies overseas. The CIA deployed him to Geneva under diplomatic cover, complete with an alias identity and a badge describing him as a State Department attache. (3) In his third CIA job, the title on his Dell business card was “solutions consultant / cyber referent” for the intelligence community writ large—the company’s principal point of contact for cyber contracts and proposals. In that role, Snowden met regularly with the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the CIA’s technical branches to talk through their cutting edge computer needs.

“He also doctored his performance evaluations…”

Truly deceptive, this. I will tell the story in my book. Suffice to say that Snowden discovered and reported a security hole in the CIA’s human resources intranet page. With his supervisor’s permission, he made a benign demonstration of how a hostile actor could take control. He did not change the content of his performance evaluation. He changed the way it displayed on screen.

“… and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test.”

The first clause is too vague to check. The second seems to be based on an unsubstantiated public statement from Booz Allen vice chairman Mike McConnell. I cannot purport to know for sure, but I do know this. The exam in question is routinely given to freshly enlisted Navy and Air Force recruits to determine their aptitude for entry level “computer network operations.” Snowden was a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with years of experience under his belt by then. I can’t explain why anyone thinks he would have to steal the answers.

“In May 2013, Snowden informed his supervisor that he would be out of the office to receive treatment for worsening epilepsy. In reality, he was on his way to Hong Kong with stolen secrets.”

True! When Snowden decided to leave the NSA with a cache of documents for public release, he gave a false cover story for his absence.

That’s it. That’s the committee’s whole case for Snowden as big fat liar. I won’t belabor the irony, but let’s note in passing that four of the six claims are egregiously false, and a fifth is hard to credit. We can only hope the classified report, which boasts 230 footnotes, has better evidence. If you know whether or not that’s the case, feel free to let me know.

The report’s executive summary also has plenty of misleading claims on other subjects-- a remarkable number, really, for just three pages. Most have been the stuff of tub-thumping denunciations for years. Snowden “fled to Russia.” Well, no. He tried to fly to Ecuador, and the U.S. government trapped him in the Moscow transit lounge by revoking his passport. Or … Snowden could have relied on whistleblower protections. The Washington Post examined that proposition and found it largely incorrect. Or … Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents. In fact, the nation’s most senior intelligence officers, no admirers of Snowden, have repeatedly said they can only surmise the number. Then-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Michael T. Flynn, who is now advising Donald Trump, said “we assume that he took” every document he could reach. Then-NSA Director Keith Alexander said the agency could only count “what he touched, what he may have downloaded.”

Consider, next, the question of damage. I believe Snowden’s disclosures did a lot more good than harm, but I do not share the view of some of his fans that he did no damage at all. Even so, what are we to make of Subcommittee Chairman Lynn Westmoreland? In language largely echoed by the official report, Westmoreland said Snowden “did more damage to U.S. national security than any other individual in our nation’s history.” How about FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who helped the former Soviet Union roll up a whole U.S. espionage network and kill our agents? Or the Rosenbergs, maybe, who only handed over plans for the thermonuclear bomb? Or, as some would have it, George W. Bush, for the catastrophic choices he made in Iraq?

Another way to think on this is to ask, what counts as damage? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others decided to encrypt the links between their data centers after my colleague Ashkan Soltani and I disclosed that the NSA was breaking into their private clouds. Now the NSA probably can’t do that any more, or not as easily. It has to use legal process and approach the companies through the front door. Is that damage? Is that disconnected, as the committee implies, from any legitimate question of “privacy or civil liberties”? Or are the new restrictions on surveillance a policy response to intelligence overreach?

Let me close with a dog that doesn’t bark at all. The committee states, in its press release, that this report is aimed at examining “post-Snowden reforms.” There is no discussion at all of reform when it comes to the powers, policies, and practices of surveillance. Only one reform is deemed worth mentioning, and here the committee judges the NSA harshly. There is “more work” to do, the committee says, to make sure its secrets are locked down tighter from now on.

You can always assume that Republicans are going to be against the best interests of the country, so why even bother to list their names; 13 members of the committee are Republicans, as bad as 97% of all the Republicans in Congress. For some reason we sometimes-- foolishly-- expect more from Democrats. Not in this case, though. These are the 9 who went along with this charade:

• Adam Schiff, Ranking Member (New Dem-CA)
• Jim Himes (New Dem-CT)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• André Carson (New Dem-IN)
• Jackie Speier (D-CA)
• Mike Quigley (New Dem-IL)
• Eric Swalwell (D-CA)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• Joaquin Castro (New Dem-TX)

Worth remembering... for November? Take Patrick Murphy, for example, the worst of these clowns. This morning, Kirsten Clark, reporting for the Miami Herald wrote how Murphy (a so-called "former" Republican who is ostensibly now a Democrat) holds the same opinion of Snowden-- who's done more for this country than Patrick Murphy is likely to ever accomplish-- as Marco Rubio does.

"Given the findings by the House Intelligence Committee on which he serves, Congressman Murphy joined the entire bipartisan committee in strongly opposing a pardon for Snowden," Murphy's congressional spokeswoman Erin Moffet said in a statement to the Herald/Times.

"The congressman believes Edward Snowden should be held accountable for his actions," Moffet said. "The theft and disclosure of classified American military, defense, and intelligence documents, which may now be available to Russia, China, and other adversaries, must not be taken lightly.  Snowden not only violated privacy interests, but also harmed our national security."

Asked by the Herald/Times for Rubio's opinion on a Snowden pardon, Rubio's campaign spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said the senator also doesn't support it.

"Marco has been saying for years that Edward Snowden is a traitor, and he should face the full consequences for his dangerous betrayal of the U.S.," Perez-Cubas said.

No wonder Rubio is kicking Murphy's ass from the Panhandle to the Keys. It's been shown over and over and over that when voters want a Republican, they prefer the real Republican to a fake Republican-lite Republican. Murphy's position on Snowden is not just wrong, it fails to win him any Republican support and it just turns off millennials from voting for him-- and, possibly from voting for Hillary as well.

Ed Snowden-- Traitor Or Hero?

Perhaps you're aware that a campaign has begun to get President Obama to pardon whistleblower Ed Snowden. The ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all signed on with PardonSnowden.org, to win Snowden a pardon or, in Bernie Sanders' words, "clemency." The idea is to bring Snowden back to the U.S. without locking him up in prison. Among the backers are Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Daniel Ellsberg, Steve Wozniak, Danny Glover, Laurie Anderson, Lawrence Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Susan Sarandon, Michael Stipe, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald, Peter Gabriel, and Martin Sheen.

Needless to say, all 13 Republican members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence oppose any kind of pardon. They want Snowden's head. So they drafted a letter to President Obama urging him to not pardon Snowden. "We urge you not to pardon Edward Snowden" it begins, "who perpetrated the largest and most damaging public disclosure of classified information in our nation's history. If Mr. Snowden returns from Russia, where he fled in 2013, the U.S. government must hold him accountable for his actions."

But it wasn't just the 13 right-wing Republicans-- who include assholes like Peter King, Jeff Miller, Mike Conway, Mike Pompeo, Brad Wenstrup, Lynn Westmoreland and chairman Devin Nunes-- who signed on. All 9 Democrats-- basically a bunch of New Dems-- signed on too:

• Adam Schiff, Ranking Member (New Dem-CA)

• Jim Himes (New Dem-CT)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• André Carson (New Dem-IN)
• Jackie Speier (D-CA)
• Mike Quigley (New Dem-IL)
• Eric Swalwell (D-CA)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• Joaquin Castro (New Dem-TX)

Adam Schiff happens to represent the district I live in. I reached out to his office and they sent me a statement for attribution: "Snowden has long portrayed himself as a truth-seeking whistleblower whose actions were designed solely to defend privacy, and whose disclosures did no harm to the country’s security. The Committee’s Review-- a product of two years of extensive research-- shows his claims to be self-serving and false, and the damage done to our national security to be profound. The Review also shows that the Intelligence Community still has much to do to institutionalize post-Snowden reforms to protect the nation's sources and methods."

The committee chair, Nunes, is an old-fashioned '50s-era right-wing extremist and McCarthyite and he was eager to start calling names, of course: "Edward Snowden is no hero-- he’s a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country. He put our servicemembers and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors. In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word. I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes."

The letter to President Obama paints a very different picture:

Dear President Obama,

I am writing to ask you to use your presidential authority to pardon Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower who acted on the conviction that the public had a right and need to know about a global mass surveillance system that exceeded the limits of the Constitution.

Snowden’s actions, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that followed, set in motion the most important debate about government surveillance in decades, and brought about reforms that continue to benefit our security and democracy.

Last year, Congress reined in the government’s surveillance authority for the first time in nearly four decades, after a federal appeals court struck down as illegal the NSA’s mass call-tracking program. A blue-ribbon commission you convened recommended 46 sweeping changes to our surveillance and security practices. And technology companies around the world have been newly invigorated to protect their customers and strengthen our communications infrastructure.

None of these reforms would have occurred without Snowden’s actions. Former Attorney General Eric Holder believes that Snowden “performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made.” You have also expressed confidence that the debate about surveillance and democracy he helped launch “will make us stronger.”

Snowden should not be threatened with serious felony convictions and prolonged confinement under World War One-era laws that treat him like a spy who sold secrets for profit.

Winston Churchill once wrote, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” Not so with Edward Snowden.

It is clear that America’s democracy has benefited from Snowden’s actions, and I am confident he will be remembered as a whistleblower and patriot. I urge you to use the powers granted to you under Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution to pardon Edward Snowden.

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson said he would "probably pardon Snowden"  if he were elected president and Green Party candidate Jill Stein tweeted she would "invite him into my administration as a member of my cabinet." I haven't seen any recent polling on Snowden other than the very unscientific internet poll below, but from what I remember of older polls, they generally show the elderly wanting his head and millennials wanting to give him a medal.