Email Supports Snowden Claim He Questioned NSA Practices

[Ichingcarpenter]

U.S. officials once disputed NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s claim that he had raised questions about the agency’s domestic surveillance programs before he fled the U.S. with thousands of stolen documents, but now confirm that Snowden sent at least one email about the agency’s practices to officials.


“I actually did go through channels, and that is documented,” he asserted. “The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.”

“I would say one of my final official acts in government was continuing one of these communications with a legal office. And in fact, I’m so sure that these communications exist that I’ve called on Congress to write a letter to the NSA to verify that they do.“

Just six months ago, the NSA told the Washington Post’s Bart Gellman that no evidence of a paper trail existed. “After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden's contention that he brought these matters to anyone's attention," said the agency in a statement

But two U.S. officials who have read an email sent by Snowden to the NSA’s Office of General Counsel on April 5, 2013, a month before he stopped working as an NSA contractor, said the message questioned agency policies and practices.

Snowden sent the April 2013 email to the NSA’s lawyers while on temporary assignment at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md.




http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/naive-gravely-mistaken-analysts-rebut-snowden-claims-n117101

[MohRokTah]

1. #1, that's not a quote from the link you provided.

This is:

"NBC News did contact the NSA and the CIA, which have declined to comment. Government officials confirmed that Snowden emailed the general counsel's office at the NSA with his concerns. We have filed requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act, and will report on the government responses. "

#2, sending a single email is not following the proscribed legal methods of whistle blowing.

Ergo, by Snowden's own admission, he is not a whistle blower.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. They said they had no emails

They lied, they did.

[MohRokTah]

4. Edward Snowden said he was not a spy

Now he says he was a spy.

HE lied, no matter how you look at it.

BTW, lying is in the NSA job description. It's how they insure classified information is protected. They never reveal anything and will always lie about it when asked by reporters.

[msanthrope]

7. Note....if this email was sent April 2013, it's after stealing, after Greenwald....

It's the pathetic ass covering that we were discussing last night.

[MohRokTah]

18. Yep eom

[riderinthestorm]

3. NSA caught lying about Snowden? Quelle surprise!

Not.

This is an email they failed to find, I'm guessing, during a scrub job....

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. And a rather major one, semantics aside

on his is 'proper' whistle blowing channels or not. He called them out they denied he did or even attempted to.

So who has been telling the truth?
NSA or Snowden?

[riderinthestorm]

8. The enormous effort to discredit Snowden because he didn't "go thru regular channels"

Can hopefully be laid to rest.

I'm glad at least this email survived.

[msanthrope]

12. Not at all...in fact, it sinks him. He wrote that letter after meting Greenwald and

after stealing, apparently.

Not before..... so that letter shows that his intent was never to whistle blow... it was to asscover.

[Leme]

9. my guess

whistle blowing has many steps and loopholes, trap doors and gotchas. And they might get you before you finish typing the words.

[msanthrope]

11. Actually...it's Snowden caught lying...by gis own admission.

He claims he sent a letter in April 2013.

But previously he claimed that he had contacted many people...long before that.

April 2013 is after he stealing and after he met with Greenwald. It's a pathetic attempt at ass covering after the fact.

[Aerows]

38. I'm rather shocked

I thought they were the least untruthful agency around.

[msanthrope]

6. By April...he'd already met with Greenwald and stolen stuff..this is the pathetic ass

covering we discussed last night.

[ProSense]

14. Exactly, Snowden is about theatrics. n/t

[msanthrope]

17. GG and ES had already met when this letter was written...I do

not doubt out this was some sort of collusive effort to say that he had been a whistleblower... ex post facto after the crime was committed.

[MohRokTah]

25. Greenwald could be facing charges too, now.

I'm sure the fact that Snowden met with Greenwald before the documents were stolen did not get past the DOJ.

[Savannahmann]

29. Question

If the NSA has only just "found" this email, and because of the revelations of Snowden, has been shown to be lying consistently to Congress, and the American People, what makes you think you can believe them about the emails or other documentary evidence regarding Snowden's alleged attempts to raise questions concerning the legality of the leaks?

If history is any indication, in another decade they'll find something else from Snowden that had been "lost". Of course, the defenders of the power of the Government will ignore those lost documents that may be found sometime in the future as irrelevant.

[msanthrope]

30. Well...we don't know that the NSA found anything. Nor do we have a single NSA official on record

saying there was never any emails. The NSA has played this pretty close to the vest while the grand jury continues. All we have is what Snowden says they have said.

You are accepting Mr. Snowden at face value in his long con......1) he makes a ridiculous claim (they say they have nothing from me!) 2) So, once you've accepted that claim, the next part of the con is to claim that of course there are emails!!!! Here is one!

So...niw it looks like the NSA lied....when in truth, they've said nothing contradictory. (I'm a defense attorney...I use this tactic.)

Now....you have to accept the third part of the long con.....forget the date, and its significance.

[Savannahmann]

35. Here are the incontrivertable facts.

So no matter what your feelings about Snowden are, these are the facts that are not disputed.

1) The NSA was and is collecting information on every email, cell phone call, text message, and packet of information that goes across the internet in the United States.

2) These programs have not prevented a single terrorist attack.

3) All of these bulk collection programs certainly violate the 4th Amendment.

4) General Clapper lied before congress to cover up these programs.

Now, for a year people have been blasting Snowden as a liar. Yet the only people consistently proven to be liars are those who work for the NSA and the Government.

You say you are a Defense Attorney. Would you still suggest your client plead guilty if the witnesses for the Prosecution have been demonstrated to be lying about everything? Because if you did suggest such a thing to me, that would be the end of your services upon my behalf. Personally, IMO, you sound far more like a Prosecutor, because they don't care if the police lie, the lab lies, or what the video shows. All they want is the accused to go to jail. But perhaps they have a different definition of defense where you are.

The Long Con you say? Pfui. The long con has been the actions of the Government. The Government has consistently lied about everything. From claiming that Snowden has blood on his hands, and will be responsible for the next terrorist attack that wouldn't have been prevented by this unconstitutional program anyway, to claiming that these programs are never abused. The programs were abused often, and who knows how many people were convicted thanks to "parallel Construction". Now, that would appear to me, a layman, that the defendants were denied the opportunity to cross examine witnesses and for the court to insure that all evidence was gathered in accordance with established law. But I'm no defense attorney, that I readily admit. Of course, my opinion is influenced by the ACLU which thinks that is exactly the case, and they are lawyers.

Bah. I accept the truth, which is the Government is doing these things, and they violate the 4th Amendment. James Clapper lied under oath, and has not been prosecuted for perjury. Those are the incontrovertible facts. Snowden at least can go into the History Books as a whistle-blower, presuming he doesn't hire you as his defense attorney. If that was the case, then we could count on Snowden going into the history books as the greatest traitor since Benedict Arnold.

[msanthrope]

36. The NSA just released the email...Snowden raises no concerns about NSA programs.

So...he's kinda fucked.

None of the 4 "facts" you raise have any relevance in the criminal case against him.

You should ask Wyden why Clapper isn't being prosecuted. The answer might surprise you.

[Savannahmann]

39. Interesting, criminal defense argument.

A soldier has a duty to obey all legal orders of his commanders. He has a similar duty to disobey illegal orders. That is why Lynndie England was prosecuted successfully. Despite the fact that she was instructed to do those things by the CIA agent, she had a duty to disobey an illegal order.

There is a premise in the law that you are not bound by any secrecy agreement if you are instructed to commit an illegal act. A police officer who is instructed to lie by a superior can not use the defense that he was following orders in committing the illegal act. Prison guards who participated in the Holocaust were hunted, arrested, tried, and convicted for following illegal orders. The defense of obeying those who were in authority above them did not sit well with the Court as memory serves.

So it is not only an American tradition, but an international legal premise. You can not use the defense I was following orders to diminish your responsibility for illegal actions. Now, the question remains, did Snowden break the law? Many here on DU, and about half the people in this nation seem to think so. But let's turn this around. If the NSA had been discovered, and those involved were charged with criminal violations of the Civil Rights statutes, would the memos from lawyers have been a defense? The answer is absolutely not. Because every high school civics class has covered the Fourth Amendment. I was only following orders may be a public relations defense, but is hardly a suitable defense in the court.

So Snowden exposed programs that clearly violated the 4th Amendment. I would have objected as well had I been informed of this program. The first defense of these programs were not that they were legal under some beautiful stretch of the imagination concerning a thirty year old supreme court case, but was that they were necessary to defend against terrorism. Subsequently we have learned without a doubt that this argument is nonsense as it has been shown that the program prevented not one single terrorist attack.

If anything, it reminds me of the debates concerning torture of terror suspects. Alan West faced a court martial for firing his pistol to get information from someone he believed had information of a pending attack on the US. The fact that the information gained was false demonstrates clearly that torture gets what you want to hear, but not necessarily the truth. I have long considered it a travesty that Alan West was not convicted, but I'll leave that alone and avoid the temptation to digress. If anything, it demonstrated that torture is ineffective in getting accurate information. The use of water-boarding has produces mixed results. Sometimes it has gotten "good" information, and other times it has not. So it can't be argued that the torture is an effective means of interrogation. At best it could be considered minimally effective in some limited circumstances. But it is still illegal under both domestic law and international law.

All the ticking time bomb scenarios aside, torture doesn't work reliably. So all the scenarios that claim that we could prevent an attack if we allowed the barbarities to continue are specious, as the results of the procedures are not reliable. It doesn't work, and it's illegal. That should have been the end of the debate.

So we have the historic example of culpability for following an illegal order. We have the Constitution, which clearly shows such programs are illegal. We have the fact that it is ineffective at it's stated purpose. So in conclusion, we are left with this. Snowden revealed an illegal activity by the US Government. Snowden is accused of breaking a law prohibiting him from revealing an illegal activity, a law that violates the very foundation of law, and one which when used by Concentration Camp guards was tossed aside by Juries of all the allied powers as well as juries made up of Israeli citizens. Why is our law prohibiting the disclosure of illegal activity any more proper or moral than the regulations of the Germans during World War II that compelled guards to participate in the gassing of Civilians in the Concentration Camps? If I was only following orders was not a defense for the Germans, or Japanese accused of war crimes, why is it a defense for members of this nation?

As a defense attorney, I would presume that you would be aware of all of this. Those comments are my own, but the ideals have been stated by many others including John Kerry when he "revealed" the war crimes committed by Americans in Viet-Nam. What happened to our nation, that we went from being aghast at Governments that committed illegal actions to one that actually supports a Government in its persecution of those who reveal the illegal actions. Because if it wasn't for those people come forward and tell us the truth, we wouldn't know that Blacks in the South were used as test subjects to study the long term effects of Syphilis. We would be utterly ignorant of the CIA using LSD in mind control experiments. We would be ignorant of Iran Contra. We would be utterly unaware of the fact that Bush lied about the WMD's. How much would we not know now if it wasn't for Mark Felt.

Give me the truth any day. My respect for those who tell us the truth about things is always given. I have little respect for those who struggle mightily to cover the truth in a blanket of lies. That's the real Crime that Snowden did. He exposed the unvarnished truth, which prohibited people from doing what Bush did, which is lie about the program while defending it.

The truth shall set you free. Unless you are an American, then it gets you tossed in jail with the Defense Attorney being the one who throws away the key. We've seen that too, only it was the Soviet Union, not the United States. How far we've fallen.

[msanthrope]

41. Kindly tell us the specific illegal act Snowden was commanded to do. nt

[Savannahmann]

43. Participation in an illegal act is participation in a conspiracy isn't it Councillor?

Wasn't Salim Hamdan charged with providing support for Terrorism when he was merely a driver to Osama bin Laden? Did he commit any terror acts? Are we going to claim that he planned out the attacks on the Embassies? Perhaps the driver gave Osama the idea to attack the World Trade Centers on 9-11? No, none of that. His crime was being associated with a known criminal.

Did the administrative people at the Concentration Camps order people to slaughter others? No, they kept whatever records were required, pay for the Germans mostly, numbers in, undoubtedly.

Yet, they were all guilty of being part of the illegal act weren't they?

Let me ask you this Councilor. If I know my neighbor is a bank robber, lets say he has robbed five banks. I have taken no money. I have participated in no planning, nor have I participated in the crimes. I didn't drive the cars, nor did I oil the weapons. Yet, by refraining from informing the police that I am aware of illegal activity going on next door, am I not subject to being charged as an accessory after the fact?

So being aware of an illegal activity, and taking no action to bring it to an end, I am guilty of a crime. Interesting isn't it? Participation in the Conspiracy requires nothing more than saying nothing.

[msanthrope]

44. Right...so tell me the illegal act Snowden claims he was forced to do. nt

[Number23]

45. Great catch, msanthrope

[struggle4progress]

10. You linked to the wrong article. Your link goes to an article

'Naive and Gravely Mistaken': Analysts Rebut Snowden Claims

while your excerpt comes from a different article

Email Supports Snowden Claim He Questioned NSA Practices

Near the end of the article you excerpt, one finds:

... One U.S. official who had read the email said that in it Snowden asked a question about how the NSA was interpreting its legal justifications for domestic surveillance ... Three days later, the NSA’s lawyers responded that he was correct in his analysis of how the NSA justified its collection of domestic data, and said the collection was legal. The official said that Snowden had asked a question, but had not “raised concerns” about the NSA’s practices ...

so the headline "Email Supports Snowden Claim He Questioned NSA Practices" may not mean what you think it means

[ProSense]

13. So his claim

"Snowden sent the April 2013 email to the NSA’s lawyers while on temporary assignment at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md. "

...that he went to all those people over a period of time was bullshit?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024640825

[msanthrope]

15. His testimony to the European Parliment was bullshit. nt

[KittyWampus]

16. the timing of the email= asscoverage. But carry on with the attempts to glorify the idiot.

After all, you all keep saying it isn't about Snowden. LOL

[msanthrope]

19. He stole....THEN wrote the letter. That's not whistleblowing...that's realizing

he's going to get caught and covering his ass....

No wonder he Jackrabbited the fuck out of Hawaii....

[Ichingcarpenter]

21. It Refutes the NSA's Assessment that

the leaker never tried to deal with his concerns internally.

“After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention,” an NSA spokeswoman told The Washington Post last year that it had not

The email would also deal a blow to Snowden's critics, who allege that his willingness to go to the press before his bosses shows that he was eager to prove a point and not right a wrong.

An NSA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the new email.



Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/207563-snowden-went-to-nsa-bosses-before-press#ixzz337Tyq5Jb
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

[msanthrope]

31. Why doesn't Snowden show us the email, then? For all we know, he emailed a laundry list. nt

[Octafish]

20. Snowden On Going Through 'Proper Channels': Reporting Concerns Gets You Flagged As A 'Troublemaker'

TechDirt, CrooksandLiars.com

The NSA defenders who label Ed Snowden a "traitor" (senators, congressmen and any number of former intelligence officials) often assert the whistleblower had an opportunity to use "proper channels" rather than take the route he chose: leaking documents to journalists.

Snowden's written testimony to the European Parliament, which was covered here earlier by Glyn Moody, includes in-depth responses to those who still believe he could have handled this differently. When asked if there are "adequate procedures to signal wrongdoing" inside the agency, Snowden had this to say:

Unfortunately not. The culture within the US Intelligence Community is such that reporting serious concerns about the legality or propriety of programs is much more likely to result in your being flagged as a troublemaker than to result in substantive reform...

(As noted here earlier, Snowden's negative writeup while with the CIA was a result of him bringing a security flaw in the agency's software to a supervisor's attention. He fixed the flaw and was rewarded with a critical note in his file written by the person he originally brought the problem to.)

In my personal experience, repeatedly raising concerns about legal and policy matters with my co-workers and superiors resulted in two kinds of responses. The first were well-meaning but hushed warnings not to "rock the boat," for fear of the sort of retaliation that befell former NSA whistleblowers like Wiebe, Binney, and Drake…

The second were similarly well-meaning but more pointed suggestions, typically from senior officials, that we should let the issue be someone else's problem. Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns, no one at NSA could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.

The world's foremost intelligence agency is nothing more than the world's most secretive cubicle farm, staffed with supervisors more interested in coasting towards retirement at the helm of the placid USS CYA then actually addressing an employee's concerns.

CONTINUED with links...

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/snowden-going-through-proper-channels

Weird times: Snowden tries to defend democracy and gets labeled a traitor, meanwhile, traitors who destroy democracy are called officials.

[Ichingcarpenter]

23. Snowden leaked the name of a CIA spy

Sorry, I'm wrong that was the white house just this past week in a breach of security.

Snowden has released no names in his leaks and made sure that wouldn't happen in his agreement with the press. he has corresponded with.

Tech Dirt has more on the release and the interview.


''The other thing I found worth noting: at one point, Williams asked Snowden what he would say to President Obama if they were in a room together. Snowden responded that he would leave that to the President's advisors, as he did not feel qualified to advise the President. Williams, after a pause, followed up by pointing out that he hadn't really meant about advising the President on the larger matters of the NSA, but rather about Snowden's own situation. And, again, Snowden indicated that this was a decision that the President would have to make. For all the talk from Snowden's critics about how he's some sort of "narcissist" (that word gets thrown around a lot), this exchange seemed to reveal quite the opposite.

Many people with large egos and who have become known as "experts" on a specific topic, when asked what they would say to the President when meeting, would immediately jump to their specific talking points. But Snowden wouldn't even presume that was appropriate. Similarly, when then asked about his own personal situation, the look on Snowden's face suggested he'd never even thought about what he would say to someone directly with the power to allow him to come back home. Perhaps he's an astoundingly good actor -- but Snowden really does come off as someone who is both incredibly self-aware and astoundingly humble given what he's done.''

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140529/05402527387/nbc-confirms-that-snowden-did-try-to-raise-concerns-internally-before-going-to-journalists.shtml

[Octafish]

28. Friend of Putin, too, I've been told.

Repeatedly by the relatively same few repeating voices.

Here's what Snowden's documented -- a year ago:

What Edward Snowden has revealed

Joseph Kishore
11 June 2013, World Socialist Web Site

EXCERPT...

Snowden’s actions are courageous and principled, but historical experience has demonstrated that the defense of democracy is not possible simply through individual actions. It requires a social movement of the working class, based on an understanding that the crisis of democracy is rooted in the class structure of American and world capitalism.

On the one side stands the financial aristocracy, which, in its social instincts and political outlook, is authoritarian. It looks on the population as a whole as a hostile force, and every citizen as a potential enemy. And with good reason. The corporate and financial elite is well aware that the policies it is pursuing are deeply unpopular.

The aim is to intimidate and blackmail an entire society. As Snowden noted, after the state has gathered, on a permanent basis, data from everyone, “You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with.”

Such methods will be employed against any and all political opposition. With the information it has already assembled, the government can readily construct a detailed social and political profile of nearly every individual in the United States.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/11/pers-j11.html

What Chris Hedges and Hannah Arendt noted re government surveillance:

The Last Gasp of American Democracy

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014

EXCERPT...

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

[font color="green"]The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. [/font green]

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

Great thread, Ichingcarpenter. Really lights up those who believes in democracy and those who prefer law-and-order as defined by a 5-4 Supreme Court.

[neverforget]

42. And friend of "Papa" Paul Rand too

or so we've been told

[Logical]

33. So did the Whitehouse! LOL nt

[BlueCheese]

22. Is anything they say true?

Lies, lies, lies.

Soon we'll find out that Snowden never had any boxes in his garage, too.

[Ichingcarpenter]

24. I'm more concerned about the continued

and past lies the NSA keep doing.

[woo me with science]

26. K&R And more and more lies from our government are confirmed...

[grasswire]

27. NBC has filed FOIA for the other emails.

He always referred to them in the plural. NBC could only locate one, but has filed Freedom of Information Act request for the others, which may be dated earlier.

[msanthrope]

32. They won't get any emails through FOIA, but if Snowden has this proof, he should publish it. nt

[ProSense]

34. It was released, and

it was an e-mail asking about training.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025020127

Snowden email fell short of NSA criticism
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025020097

LOL!

[Rex]

37. Well it is a proven fact that the NSA got caught in quite a few lies.

I guess Congress is too busy dealing with the Clown Posse to deal with Clapper and his group of liars. Or maybe they are scared to.

[Ichingcarpenter]

40. What is so sad

is that some people will defend, something wrong, and they know it
without trying to find out the truth

'There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth;

not going all the way, and not starting.''

Buddha



A government , of the people, by the people should after viewing documented malfeasances such as the NSA,'s shit the banking/wall street structure shit and other crimes against the people

the people who
who have been continually lied to them, under oath, in front of the senate and the Congress , which is your representative for 'the people' is obligated under oath to witness, protect, and defend the constitution for


'We the People""




yet they still want to trust the spin doctors that use crisis management on the truth..


The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Winston Churchill