Edward Snowden has warned that the ‘Deep State’ has infiltrated and shaped the Trump administration, just like they did with Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him.
In an exclusive interview (below) with La Repubblica, the NSA whistleblower explains how every single U.S. president is inevitably hijacked by Deep State operatives, working on behalf of the New World Order:
Five years have passed since you revealed the NSA’s mass surveillance activities, and we have just seen dozens of US Democrats voting with the Trump Administration to renew the NSA’s surveillance powers, we’ve seen Italy approve a law which extends mandatory data retention to six years, but we’ve also seen a UK Court ruling that the UK’s mass surveillance regime is unlawful. The debate is still ongoing and the picture is mixed. In the long run, will mass surveillance be downsized in our democracies, or will it continue to flourish? “That’s a big question…(he smiles). For one it’s certainly a real shame, I think, for the Democratic party, and unfortunately this has become quite routine, that the party that is presenting itself as a progressive force is so often joining in to limit the rights that the public enjoys. I don’t think this is unique to the Democratic Party, we see this happening even in countries that don’t share the same dynamics. What we are seeing is a new kind of creeping authoritarianism spreading across the globe. Having said that, we have made some limited progress: in the United States, of course, we had the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which is the first surveillance law in 40 years that limited the powers of intelligence agencies rather than expanding them, but it is not guaranteed that this progress will continue, and in fact we see laws like the section 702 of the FISA [the NSA’s surveillance powers reauthorized by the U.S. Congress]. This is why we see technologists increasingly working to develop new means of enforcing human rights, through systems that apply without regard to what jurisdiction you are currently in. Let’s say you’re Italian, or you’re Belgian or you are French and you want to protect people’s rights. Naturally, you look at your community, so you design a system that enforces the rights that you are used to in Italy, which no matter what people say about the political troubles of Italy, it’s certainly not the worst country in the world, but when we start looking at more troubled societies and we look at the Russias and the Chinas of the world, they have much lower regard for digital rights. If that Italian system or Belgian system works globally, it can spread immediately, more quickly than governments can react. Instantaneously, an Italian can be protecting the rights of a Chinese person, of an African person, an American person”.
Many documents of the so-called “Snowden archive” remain unpublished, would you like to see them published? “I think this is a way to get to some of the criticism there has been about the rate of publication (he smiles). There is still work to be done, for sure, and I hope that the archive will continue to be useful to journalists. On the other hand, there are parts of the archive that were never intended for publication, they have, for example, the names of the terrorist targets. The idea is: journalists need to have the context to understand when the government is lying to them. Not every detail in the archive would be in the public interest to know, but many of them are. This is why I pursued the model I did, where journalists review the documents, they go to the government, they challenge the government on whether these things should be in the public domain, the government can say: we disagree with you, which is what they always do, but that doesn’t stop the reporting, journalists should have the final say here, not some bureaucrat. Is this the right model? I don’t know, but I was very careful in putting this model together to intentionally be overly cautious, to be more careful than was necessary, for a specific reason: as we have seen in the Chelsea Manning case, in many of the WikiLeaks disclosures, the government instantaneously responds in the event of any leak of classified information that is embarrassing, but not damaging, by claiming that it is dangerous, by virtue of the very fact that this was classified information, it claims that it is dangerous information”. We have seen how the US government has spent years accusing WikiLeaks of putting lives at risk, but in the end, during the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government was forced to admit that no one died, no one was hurt… “They do this every time, that is why journalists are working so hard to be, again, more careful than necessary. This project [publishing the Snowden files] is about something larger than surveillance, it is about democracy, and the idea here is: if we can’t understand what the government is doing, our votes lose their meaning. Therefore we need a strong example: even the most secret documents in the United States government can be published openly without causing harm, because now more than five years later, the government has never ever showed anyone who died, anyone who was harmed, and if that was the case, they would have immediately been leaking it to the press to discredit myself and the journalists”. Thanks to your files we exposed how the NSA targets Italy. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we published the NSA’s intercepts of our former PM, Berlusconi. The Italian judiciary opened an investigation, but we never heard again from the prosecutors. Italy is the only country in the world whose judiciary nailed 23 CIA operatives who renditioned the Milan cleric, Abu Omar. We succeeded in obtaining accountability for the CIA, but not for the NSA. Why? “You said we got accountability for the case of torture, which is an important thing: if we can’t hold torturers or kidnappers accountable to law, what does the law mean? It is true that Italy tried these people and it did convict them, but it is not as if they are sitting in prison today. This is better than the alternative, which is that they never face any justice at all, but at the same time, it is not true accountability. It is ultimately this fear of consequences that it is necessary, if we want to be able to control the activities of intelligence services not just within our own country, but internationally. Now the CIA case is unique, because like most human intelligence services, it is actually putting people into that country. But people screw up. If you read the history of the Abu Omar case, these were not Jason Bourne or James Bond, because those people in real life do not exist. They were normal bureaucrats with a little bit of training, who get lazy, miss home and they call their wives, their husbands from the hotel phone, when they were supposed to be pretending to be an entirely different person. The NSA is not typically entering these other countries in person. If they are, they do it for very short periods and there are no real witnesses, because the things they operate on are machines, instead of human beings. So the NSA has less exposure, generally, than the CIA. But I think actually the largest distinction is in terms of political will: if the Italian prosecutors had wanted to demand that the next time U.S. diplomatic representatives, or the CIA chief in Italy, or the intelligence partners in the US, had engaged in Italy, that they would be required to testify, under oath, before a court, they certainly could have done that. They chose not to. And it is important to understand that that is always a conscious political choice”.
How do you look at the increasing relationships between corporate power like Amazon and the intelligence agencies in our democracies? “These are the companies that enable the mass surveillance abuses that were revealed in 2013. One of the very first programs, the PRISM program, I was talking about how companies were opening their private data silos. Everything Facebook knows, everything Google knows, everything Amazon knows, and the government would say ‘what do you have on this person?’ And these companies would provide it, in many cases beyond what the law required”. They denied that, when your files were published… “Initially they said: ‘we don’t know about this kind of stuff, this program, we’ve never heard of it”, then they said ‘Oh we do this, but it’s through a process and the government asks us a question’, but that was the whole point. These companies have data about you that they own, it’s exclusively on their servers, and they’re taking copies from their servers and providing them directly to government. The point here is the intelligence agencies are powerful, but even they have limits. What they can see, what they can hear, what they can spy on, who they can recruit, who they can pay. Amazon, or Facebook or Microsoft, or Google, they too have limits. They have an extraordinary amount of information, but they only have what they have. But if the government can force these companies to work for them, or simply get these companies to work for them, now the government can do what Facebook and Google cannot. Google can only look in its own silo. The government can look in Facebook’s silo, Google’s silo, and everyone else’s”. How do you reply to those critics who attack you for “only” exposing the US mass surveillance and saying that the Chinese and the Russian surveillance complexes are no less threatening? “This is an easy one: I am not Chinese, I am not Russian, I didn’t work for the Chinese secret services or Russian secret services, I worked for the US ones, so of course my information would be about the US”. Critics say we should also expose the Russians and the Chinese… “Yes, if I could, I would. We need more Chinese whistleblowers, we need more Russian whistleblowers, and unfortunately that becomes more difficult to make that happen when the United States is itself setting a precedent that whistleblowers get persecuted and attacked, rather than protected”. How do you see this serious diplomatic crisis between the UK and Russia? “I haven’t followed it that closely, but the idea that political violence is being used in any form is reprehensible, it needs to be condemned. If the UK allegations are correct, poisoning people, particularly people who are long out of their service, and in a different country, is contemptible”. However, one wonders how these alleged Russian operatives can move around in a country where there is the powerful GCHQ. ” You know, that’s not my area of expertise, I didn’t work with assassinations”. Source http://yournewswire.com/edward-snowden-deep-state-white-house/
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