Edward Snowden’s Smut
In an interview with the Guardian published yesterday, Edward Snowden claimed that compromising pictures get shared around NSA.
Made a startling claim that a culture exists within the NSA in which, during surveillance, nude photographs picked up of people in “sexually compromising” situations are routinely passed around.
Boing Boing transcribed his comments on it.
The usual whiners are suggesting Snowden is making this up and demanding proof.
They seem to have forgotten the proof we’ve already seen of NSA officially retaining sexually compromising material. Here’s what Bart Gellman described in a follow-up to WaPo’s recent report on the data collected under Section 702.
Among the large majority of people who are not NSA targets, many of the conversations in our sample are exceedingly private. Often they are very far from publishable, without editing.
Him: “How about you [verb, possessive adjective, noun]
Her: “I [verb] if you [another verb].”
Him: “That can be arranged.”
Her: “I really need punishment.”
Another young woman, also not a target, responds to a suitor who proposes to pay a visit.
Her: “don’t think that would b fair on the guy im seeing”
Him: “you can be a bit naughty at times lol”
Her: “Yeah lol”
The conversation proceeds from there.
This is stuff officially retained by NSA. This is stuff they claim has foreign intelligence value. This is sexually compromising. And Gellman says many of the retained communications are like that.
Sure, I get that NSA wants to contact chain on who’s fucking whom, just as they want to chain on who’s calling whom. But to do that, they’re retaining smut.
NSA needs to be shut down. They clearly aren’t even close to staying inside the laws, and they clearly don’t give one shit (never mind two) about it.
I’m sure they wouldn’t use this later to blackmail someone;) The sounds of East Germany not so secret police.
Sexually compromising photos have been used to threaten & control people, esp those in power, since the camera was first invented. Mostly it’s been used against the powerful caught in shenanigans or against cheating spouses. Now it’s used against anyone, although the power is somewhat diminished in the younger generations, who aren’t averse to posting their own sexytime photos all over the place for all the world to see (which, given how things are these days, might be one way to defuse any threats against them for whatever reason).
There’s been reports about the NSA getting their rocks off on sexy photos & videos since all the info was revealed about the NSA. I suppose I’d rather pay for Nerds to wank to sexy photos than pay for Palestinian genocide. But that’s a different topic for debate.
The continuing Palestinian genocide however leads and has led to the hatred for the party which subsidizes it which results in revenge attacks which results in the “need” for the NSA/Police State. etc etc.
I’m surprised this is deemed “startling”. Ask any company’s IT services manager about what percentage of total system e-mails and web usage contains “smut”. It’s significant. It used to be well into double digits. The idea that virtual sex would not creep into the world of unaccountable, desk-bound, socially isolating secure computing is what’s startling.
As noted by jo6pac, apart from the humor and abuse enabled by unsupervised access to targets’ sexual explicitly materials, there’s the tried and true governmental use of it to embarrass and/or blackmail public figures. J. Edgar’s files were vast enough; imagine if he’d had access to e-mails and web site visits of a JFK, or a Karl Rove-style privatized network version of such activity by some other president, prime minister, cabinet official, UN weapons inspector or EU official.
And as Digby points out, do we really want our anti-terrorist and cyber “security” first responders spending so much time watching porn instead of, say, catching terrorists or stopping cyber attacks?
yes
Lord Acton told us that power corrupts; so are we really that surprised by Snowden’s revelation? I let go of any illusions I harbored about the NSA when I started reading the stories Glenn Greenwald began publishing in The Guardian. This is a crypto-fascist entity designed to assist the federal government in controlling the American public under the guise of being an anti-terrorist organization. To compound our tribulations, Americans were sold a bill of goods in 2008 by a young attorney from Chicago who promised to turn the page and bring a new era of transparency to Washington. The only way to bring the NSA and CIA under control is to abolish them and replace them with new organizations having bare-bones missions. Of course, we now know that President Kennedy had planned to make major changes to the CIA once he was reelected in 1964, but his assassination ended that effort. I feel confident when I say that taking on the CIA and NSA would be a monumental task for any president and probably wouldn’t be successful. (They know where all the dead bodies are buried.) We should also remember that one of the reasons President Nixon was destroyed in the Watergate scandal was because of who he appointed to be the new FBI Director when J. Edgar Hoover died. One of the men he passed over became “Deep Throat”.