Edward Snowden has information that could prove to be the US’ “worst nightmare,” according to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who has been covering the NSA leaker’s public revelations of the US government’s surveillance activities.
From Reuters:
“Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had,” Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinean daily La Nacion.
“The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.”
From the transit zone of Russia’s Sheremetyevo airport yesterday, Snowden told human rights groups that he will seek temporary asylum in Russia while he pursues permanent asylum in a Latin American country.
Given some of the additional statements Greenwald made to La Nacion, Snowden’s intended final destination could be far more troubling for the US than initially thought.
Greenwald, who resides in Brazil, claims the NSA leaker is in possession of information that details some of the specific inner-workings of US surveillance activities on Latin American countries, according to Reuters.
Greenwald said in his interview with La Nacion that documents Snowden has tucked away in different parts of the world detail which U.S. spy programs capture transmissions in Latin America and how they work.
“One way of intercepting communications is through a telephone company in the United States that has contracts with telecommunications companies in most Latin American countries,” Greenwald said, without specifying which company.
While the former NSA contractor’s revelations about foreign surveillance operations have at times been activities that were already long suspected by officials in those countries, the information has fueled outrage from their general public and generated media attention – an outcome Snowden has used to his benefit.
Snowden told his audience at Sheremetyevo airport yesterday, while being interrupted by loud airport announcements, “a little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.”
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Comments
This guy is a hero? Really?
I don’t know, they did give Walter Duranty a Pulitzer, eh?
It’s pretty hard to fault the guy for exposing criminal activity by the U.S. government. Of course we don’t know for sure whether or not the government IS breaking the law, but it sure sounds like it to me. Snowden claims that “they” can listen in on any phone/Skype conversation or read any email/text message without a warrant. That’s a clear violation of the 4th Amendment right, is it not?
Osama bin Laden’s stated goal was to end freedom in America. It sure seems like he’s pretty much accomplished that. Think about that next time you’re getting a body search at the airport…
The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden … Greenwald’s version of objective journalism.
Well Greenwald does have a certain bias to people being on their knees. I do not want to be called a H8er!
Privacy, and the telephone. As soon as it was invented, the telephone became something everyone wanted. I even have a story from my mom, circa 1915 or so. When she and her family were living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. And, there was a telephone in the hallway, at the bottom of the stairs. The phone rang. And, as children will do, she raced to answer it. And, then she fainted. Because? The voice on the other side was her brother’s. And, she couldn’t figure out how his voice fit into “that little box.”
But phones were mostly “public.” Because there were many, many women hired by the telephone company. These women worked in front of large banks of switchboards, and they connected calls. Sure. They could also listen in. But the advertisements at the time show women supervised, so if they got caught listening in they’d be fired.
They’d be fired if they flirted with callers.
And, lots of Americans bought “party lines” … as the idea of having a phone spread far and wide. The TV personality who used to report market news, Jim Rodgers, said he came from such a small town, his home number was 3. (And, again, there were always phone operators connecting the calls.)
Now, of course, we have computers. So everything you do at your computer (unless you’re only off-line), is not viewable to others. It’s like you’ve pulled your drapes closed across your big living room window.
What’s most shocking? Not data mining. All companies do this, so they can sell you more stuff.
That “certain words” can be picked up? Sure. Data mining is amazing stuff. And, used by politicians who have a new way to hone their messages. Still, one side loses.
In this whole Snowden “thing,” I am amazed that Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, names one of the important characters Edward Snowden. (He’s the one who dies at the end. Where Yossarian, at first doesn’t see the flak wound to the gut.
And, what amazes me most of all? The whole upper echelon of be-ribboned generals and such, didn’t do any work. But turned over what they thought was scut work to a kid contractor. I’m actually glad that this dishonest system got kicked in the butt.
The name Edward Snowden sounded very familiar, but I forgot all about he Catch-22 character until you mentioned it.
Yossarian – ‘Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?’
Carol … you need to check out OMB Circular A-76 and a prior pdf version.
IT activities and support, as well as ITE provisioning has been determined to be a non-governmental “commercial activities.” In short, those generals couldn’t do the work if they wanted to, they must hire it out to contractors…of course they aren’t capable of doing the work either, but they are capable of getting hired by the contractors upon their retirement. Etc. Blah Blah….completes the circle, so to speak.
Nonsense. He placed information in the hands of some kind of trustees who will release it “only” if and when “something happens” to him? Yeah, sure. Who would these special trustworthy people be. Sounds like the media just wants to keep churning this story. Falsehoods of different kinds keep coming from various outlets daily. He’s getting amnesty here… he’s on a plane to there… Etc. Cloak-and-dagger drivel.
Dear Greenwald,
The POTUS is already our worst nightmare, bring it on.
You got it!
But to spin the clock backward and look at when this crap first began you have to go back to the Nixon years and the Pentagon Papers.
Our failure to effectively prosecute back then is the direct cause of our troubles today much like Harry Truman can be thanked for introducing the policy of undeclared wars.
Had we a robust CIA, Snowden would no longer be an issue but we don’t so we’re at we’re at…
For some reason, I’m not very comfortable with the idea that Barack Obama has access to what restaurant I’m going to eat at tonight, no matter who I called for the past 5 years.
Because I have a wild hunch that Obama thinks that, if he had a brother, that brother would look a lot more like Mohamed Morsi than myself, or about 285 million other American citizens.
Use cash
I’m beginning to think this was all set up by Obama. Prezbo has been wanting to take us down a notch in the worlds eyes and has been doing whatever he can to accomplish it.
What better way than to let the generals hand over the keys to the kingdom to Snowden and let him loose on the world to embarrass the US. The American people have lost trust the government and now the the rest of the world doesn’t trust us either.
more flexible in the second term towards russia.
See my earlier comment to Carol Herman on the hand over of IT work to contractors. I had to tolerate it, and the inefficiency it caused, until I got sick of it all and retired.
The Catch-22 for DOD is that they get to count every solider cut as a cost saving, without having to add back the cost of contractors…which is always even more cost. Do just one federal Executive Budget work up and the accounting alone will fry your brain. I promise.
The news can’t be any worse than that Obama will be in office 3.5 more years.
I honestly don’t know what to think of this guy.
Whatever Snowden has, China and Russia must have. So getting it out might be better, since it will be used against us otherwise.
I thought Snowden was going to reveal how NSA is spying ON US. We WANT them to spy FOR US.
Maybe it’s just one big misinformation campaign, or one big distraction from Obama’s scandals and/or crimes. Or just a “don’t kill me or this stuff goes viral” bluff.
With Obama’s thugs being elected/injected, hard to tell if we can trust anything in our government. Certainly not the IRS or Holder. I’m holding out some hope for some levels of the military or a few agencies, but Obama seems to dismantle and fundamentally transform, putting leftists everywhere. As if external enemies weren’t bad enough.
Stupid way this is being handled! America’s BOOBS on parade, as they try to terrify allies in cooperating with Snowden’s safe passage.
ALL the news goes against this Administration!
Who ever heard of recruiting a guy (without a college degree), and putting him in charge of the most sensitive information? Okay. The kid’s a hacker.
But this attempt to “prove” America has strength than no plane, from nowhere is safe to fly? We took down the plane of a Bolivian president? What’s it gonna take to kick our idiots in the butt?
We know Patreaus self-kicked.
But who “contracts out” our top (super duper) secret information?
When I was a kid I sent away for a free Captain Video Decoder Ring. I was just a kid. Not a criminal.
And, here? Our top American officials go ahead and cast themselves as worse than crooks and schemers.
Oh, by the way, America is losing this fight. Snowden comes before cameras (and gets into the top spotlight) just to show he’s still alive. Between obam-ster and putin, putin’s on top.
And, by the way, the NY Post, today, has an article of a drunk who staggered into a black couple’s table; and said something really nasty. (Containing the “n” word.) The Black man rose and punched him once. Drunken guy (who works at Goldman Sachs), crash lands backwards onto the concrete. Unconscious. With a picture on top of the article, because everywhere you look, somebody has a cell phone. And, their picture becomes a hot news item.
To my mind, partisan political corruption at the IRS is the big scandal. Until that’s properly investigated everything else, including Snowden and NSA overreaching, is just noise.
[…] Nagy at Legal Insurrection has up a great post today on “Greenwald Tells Argentinean Media Snowden Has Info That Could Be US’ ‘Worst […]
Presuming it’s not a bluff to keep Snowden’s value current, along with, then, Greenwald’s, what could it be?
People who are concerned about US criminality already know we are the worst criminals in the world. New details won’t make any difference. Besides,what are they going to do about it?
Nope. To really damage America, it has to be something else. If we take Greenwald at his judgment that this is the worst thing imaginable, what could it be?
Just for grits and shins, what could be worse than proving Obama was born in Kenya?
Imagine the fuss. Among other things, all those folks who sneered at the birthers are going to have to start insisting there’s no real importance to birth eligibility in this transnational world, anyway. And the founding fathers owned slaves, so shutup.
Now, I have no idea what Greenwald is talking about, but I don’t think there’s anything that poses a greater threat to US national and social and political stability than if Obama were suddenly to be discovered to be….not eligible.
I think Snowden has Obama’s college transcripts.
Wouldn’t that be terrific? Meanwhile, for college transcripts wouldn’t you have to look under the college records of Soetoro?
I have very mixed feelings about this one.
1. Obama. There is no Obama angle at all. NSA surveillance long predates Obama, or W, etc. Anyone who plays an Obama angle is an ideologue.
2. Outrage. Hard for me to be outraged at the surveillance, at least based on what we’ve been told thus far. Sounds like they scoop up everything, but if they want to look at an individual’s data they need a warrant.
3. News. This is old stuff in lots of ways. Versions of this have been going on in the U.S. for quite a long time. Back in the 1990s, I was in a city where Bill Clinton was visiting. Someone made a joke on a business conference call about an assassination, and by the time the joke teller got back to his hotel (he’d been in a car on a cellphone when he made the joke), the Secret Service was waiting for him.
How did that happen? Either the NSA directly, or monitoring by a friendly third country (read: the United Kingdom), which then passed it to the requisite authorities. The
“shock” over the NSA stuff has a Claude Raines feel to it.
4. Snowden spy. It’s also hard for me to support any prosecution of him beyond a wrist slap of some kind. He didn’t tell anyone anything that everyone with a third digit in his I.Q. didn’t know about. I don’t see him as any hero, but rather as more of a naive truth-teller. He shouldn’t do hard time for that, at least not based on anything I’ve heard or read.
5. Talking heads. The various media guests who make big bigs to stand up and salute the military-industrial complex have no credibility with me when they talk about this being damaging.
6. Glenn Greenwald. He’s a reporter with a hell of a story. Nothing more, nothing less. He’s done a bit of grandstanding, I suppose, but I can’t blame him.
7. Bottom line. The institutional U.S. government (as opposed to Barack Obama) has been embarrassed here. That appears to be the only reason they want to stick Snowden in a concrete box for 23 hours a day for the next 50 years. Call me a naive truth teller, but I don’t regard that as enough of a reason to ruin someone forever.
Random Crank.
Embarrassing the institutional US government might annoy said institutional US government. Whether that amounts to the “worst” thing that can happen, according to Greenwald, is not connected. Any embarrassment is almost certainly an addition to what is known, suspected, or believed in the complete absence of evidence. IOW, no big deal
I can’t figure Greenwald, if he’s not bluffing, thinks that an additional level of embarrassment–which does not hurt much, see the State Dept.–would be in the “worst” category. So I figure it’s something else entirely.
[…] ARGENTINA Greenwald Tells Argentinean Media Snowden Has Info That Could Be US’ ‘Worst Nightmare’ […]
[…] reporter Glenn Greenwald told an Argentinean daily last week that “Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than […]
“I think Snowden has Obama’s college transcripts.”
You could be right. It could also be the relevant Benghazi documents. Or the birth certificate. Or the truth about Sarah Hall Ingram. Or all of the above. All plausible.
The salient point to me, over and over through assiduous observation and ratiocination, is that the observed covers itself in secrecy and threat. We, the electorate, don’t know what’s going on. (Nor does some of the bureaucracy.) Therefore we can’t make intelligent, self-fostering decisions. And we feel we are meant to feel that powerlessness. Therefore we are overborne by a government and its bureaucracy which does not promote our interest and does not have our consent. Such a government is no government at all, and its laws are no laws at all, but rather a class with orders, families, etc. of violence.
I cannot see a near-term elimination or even circumscription of that violence. And a long-term elimination of it has to start with women espousing human values, to include homeschooling and much more. That will be dangerous for the women, very dangerous, but men aren’t going to eliminate the violence until they are moved to protect women trying to.