OK, here—direct from Wikipedia—is the timeline of the Edward Snowden revelations:
• On June 5, The Guardian released a top secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that ordered a business division of Verizon Communications to provide "on an ongoing daily basis" metadata for all telephone calls "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls" and all calls made "between the United States and abroad."[23]
• On June 6, The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the existence of PRISM, a clandestine electronic surveillance program that allegedly allows the NSA to access e-mail, web searches, and other Internet traffic in realtime.[24][25]
• On June 9, The Guardian revealed Boundless Informant, a system that "details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information [the NSA] collects from computer and telephone networks."
• On June 12, the South China Morning Post disclosed that the NSA has been hacking into computers in China and Hong Kong since 2009.[26]
• On June 17, The Guardian reported that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency, had intercepted foreign politicians' communications at the 2009 G-20 London Summit.[27]
• On June 20, The Guardian revealed two secret documents, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, describing the rules by which the NSA determines whether targets of investigations are foreign or domestic.[28]
• On June 21, The Guardian made further disclosures about 'Tempora,' an 18-month-old British operation by GCHQ to intercept and store mass quantities of fiber-optic traffic.[29]
• On June 23, the South China Morning Post reported that Snowden had said the NSA had hacked Chinese mobile-phone companies to collect millions of text messages and had also hacked Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Asian fiber-optic network operator Pacnet. The newspaper said Snowden provided documents that listed details of specific episodes during a four-year period.[30][31] According to Glenn Greenwald, "What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China."[32]
• On June 25, Greenwald reported Snowden claims that he had sent files with NSA secrets to associates for his personal insurance, and that their contents would be revealed should something untoward happen to him.[32]
• On June 29, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA had planted bugs in EU offices in Washington, New York, and Brussels, and had infiltrated their computer networks, according to documents provided by Snowden.[33][34]
Damaging stuff, right?
Or is it? As Chris Hayes points out in the video below, Osama bin Laden knew perfectly well that the US was tracking him—that’s why he never used cell phones and communicated through couriers. True, some of his associates used them, and also true, that helped us catch bin Laden. But let’s face it, any serious terrorist would have to be pretty stupid not to assume that cell phones, emails and internet use are being monitored.
I ask all this for a simple reason: I’m trying to figure out what damage, if any, Edward Snowden has caused. What has he said that terrorists didn’t know? Has he really put lives in jeopardy? Did the Chinese really not know, or suspect or assume, that the US hacked their systems? Does any diplomat of any country think that a hotel room is un-bugged?
And Hayes makes an interesting point. Barbara Starr, the veteran CNN reporter on the Pentagon, came out with leaked information that indicated that the government is able to observe the terrorist organizations frantically trying to change providers. And Hayes wonders—isn’t that information just as dangerous as anything Snowden revealed? Oh, and he points out that nobody is slamming Starr, but Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who is revealing information from Snowden, got tarred a couple days ago by the news that he had been involved in the porn industry (as a lawyer, not a participant…).
Hayes’s point? A leak in favor of surveillance is OK; a leak against surveillance is not.
Snowden has stripped the United States of its ability to be a hypocrite. We can no longer pretend that we are not snooping on everyone: friends, foes, and our own people. But is there really, as Hayes says at the end of the clip, a secret government?
Well, in 1987, Bill Moyers said there was, pissing the conservatives off so much that they threatened to cut off PBS funding for years. Moyers makes the point: the National Security Act of 1947 created something that we had never had in this country before. Never before had we worried full time about our security. Never before had we had the concept of enemies at work against us.
Enemies for very good reasons—an Iranian points out in the documentary that there is no Iranian family without at least one member tortured or killed by the Shah’s secret police. The police the CIA trained after they had overthrown an elected leader and installed the Shah. And how many other nations has the CIA messed with? How much blood is on their hands?
Correction…
…our hands.
Of course the world is pissed at us, of course they’re laughing at us. Guess what?
They’re right, we’re wrong.
