Glenn Greenwald & Laura Poitras (award-winning journalists), Jeremy Scahill (producer of Dirty Wars, an Oscar-nominated documentary), and other top-notch journalists recently launched First Look Media. Their initial digital News Magazine, The Intercept, today ran a story of bombshell proportions. It will be interesting to see if any of the Corporate Media---ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, & Fox News---cover this revelation...and if so, how.
Here's the link: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-covert-surveillance-and-pressure-tactics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/ ...or, just go to https://firstlook.org/theintercept/ and click on the lead story. [FAIR WARNING: I'm guessing there's about a 99% probability that if you go to the First Look website, you automatically will be surveilled (without a warrant) by at least the NSA and possibly by the UK's GCHQ as well. You'll see why I say that in a few moments. GCHQ is the Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's top spy agency.]
The authors of the article are Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher. [Greenwald is living in self-imposed exile in Brazil because he's being investigated by the UK as a terrorist suspect...simply for being a journalist. He provided Snowden-documents which were published by The Guardian in the UK. He's a U.S. citizen, but is wary of returning here because of our Fed Govt's close ties to the UK's GCHQ.] Without trying to steal any of Greenwald's or Gallagher's thunder, I'll list just a few of the article's key points below.
1. The NSA and GCHQ have targeted both Assange and the WikiLeaks website (as well as other activist groups) with high priority surveillance (without a proper warrant) for quite some time. Not only that, but WikiLeaks supporters have been targeted with "tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution".
2. The GCHQ monitored VISITORS to Wikileaks.org in 2011; it's unclear if that surveillance program, codenamed "ANTICRISIS GIRL", is still in operation. The visitors' IP addresses were recorded & stored. That means there's a very high probability that if you visited the site in 2011 (& possibly beyond that date), you're on a list of "suspects". [Of course, you should take some pride in being a suspect in the files of any Outlaw Government. Constitutions are violated on an almost daily basis by those governments, hence my designation of "outlaw".]
3. From 2008 to 2012 (at least), the U.S. intelligence community maintained a file called the "Manhunting Timeline" which detailed efforts of our Gov't & its allies to locate and prosecute or kill individuals who were suspected of being terrorists, drug traffickers, etc. In 2010, Julian Assange was added to the Timeline and our allies in the Afghan War were encouraged to file charges against him for publishing documents related to that war. [Gov't wrongdoings were exposed, and despite earlier claims, the Gov't later admitted that they could cite no death that resulted from the release of those documents.]
There's much more; read the entire article at firstlook.org/theintercept. This whole business is very similar to our Govt's COINTELPRO program launched against the Black Power Movement back when. COINTELPRO, it was later revealed, was rife with wrongdoing and unconstitutional activity by the FBI.
Perhaps some in my country don't realize that sites such as WikiLeaks and The Intercept are non-corporate, digital news magazines. People like Greenwald and Assange are journalists. One should ask: why are they denigrated, persecuted, & possibly prosecuted in the future for publishing exactly the same type of material that sometimes is published by The Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post? The answer is clear to me: those corporate entities are part of the oligarchical Establishment...they get a pass, a "get out of jail free" card. The Oligarchy considers them Institutions, not Insurrectionists (see recent previous posts on this Blog). They can be used and manipulated.
Perhaps some people everywhere don't see the danger in governments gathering & storing the phone numbers you call, or the websites you visit, or the things you buy with a credit card, or the destinations of your emails, or who knows what else. Perhaps it isn't clear how one becomes a "terrorist suspect", or a "part of a human network of a rogue organization" (another NSA term), or a "malicious foreign actor" (another NSA term), or what the result of all that may be. I believe it's abundantly clear...and we all should be very concerned. I know one person who is: Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a legal adviser to Julian Assange.
It's obvious from the documents revealed by Assange, Greenwald, Poitras, Gallagher, Scahill, Snowden, Manning, and others that segments of our Gov't (and the UK's Gov't) are running amok. They are violating our Natural Rights. The excuse of the National Security State, that it's for "our own good", does not suffice. Of course measures must be taken by governments to protect their citizens...but monitoring everyone without probable cause and then lying about it should never be tolerated in a free society.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he didn't immediately start hauling Jews off to concentration camps and killing them. They lost their freedoms little by little, over years. Jefferson once said that dissent was the highest form of patriotism. I fear that in this country (and others) dissidents, especially independent journalists, are the new Jews. They won't be hauled off to concentration camps, but they will be (and are being) smeared, denigrated, criminalized, and (in some, or perhaps many cases) imprisoned. It already has started...all in the name of "security". Meanwhile, USA hegemony continues throughout the world...not making us safer, but rather making us more and more enemies...while transnational corporations, who abhor competition, get richer and richer at the expense of the rest of us.
Partly just my opinion.
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