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Monday, July 1, 2013

NSA Leaks : Part VIII


"We must also stress that the task they have is rather difficult, because they must find a solution within the framework of international law. We can't directly say today that such norms exist, or that there's a ready recipe," he said.
Since Putin first acknowledged Snowden's arrival in Moscow, officials have repeatedly noted the absence of a bilateral extradition treaty. Russia has often expressed concern over its citizens held in the US, namely Viktor Bout, a convicted arms trafficker with suspected ties to Kremlin officials. from The Guardian 

Edward Snowden has applied for extradition in Russia.  In one sense, this is an excellent choice. The FSB might be the organization most likely to prevent him from being assassinated dying in a very suspect car explosion fire like journalist Michael Hastings. On the other hand, Russia might just swap him for Viktor Bout.  The latest Snowden leak implicates the U.S. in bugging our allies. And then there are the new Prsim slides from the Washington Post. Are you one of the "117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database?" The "Special Source Operations" providers include Gmail, Facebook, MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo,Google, Apple, Skype, paltalk, AOL, Youtube... More from The Washington Post ...

Michael Hastings books and articles are not to be missed. Hastings was a millennial war reporter who lost his fiance in Baghdad to a car bomb.  There was something old school about his writing; something that reminded me of London or Steinbeck. His narrative has few wasted words, a juiced 'reality speak', his biases and doubts pushed right up through his syntax so you knew who he was and what he was thinking as he told his story. I especially liked his Rolling Stone article on how the U.S. Army deployed psyops on visiting U.S. elected representatives.  His work "The Operators" is a seminal tale of the 21st century American military-industrial complex gone nuts.   In effect, his narrative was the aggrieved, no bullshit voice of millennials and no one who has lived through the last 12 traumatic years in America should be surprised to find that Hasting's generation has zero tolerance for spin or sympathy for power.  Hastings, whose engine was found 100 feet from his car and whose body was so badly burned it was difficult to identify, deserves a white house petition asking for a full investigation into his death. As far as I am concerned, we now have evidence that the 21st century American surveillance state just doesn't just force the best and the brightest moralists to Russia;  it also burns them to death.