Edward Snowden, a Shitty Little Traitor

Edward Snowden, a former technician at the CIA and a Booz Allen Hamilton contract worker for the National Security Agency, insists that the public must know what the National Security Agency (NSA) is doing to defend us from terrorists, as if we can tell the American people what the NSA is doing without also tipping-off the terrorists.

We have highly-qualified judges and elected legislators who make decisions about the legality these programs. This 20-something did not even finish high school, and nobody elected him to any national office.

Is Edward Snowden a judge on the national security court who approved these national security measures? Was Edward Snowden elected President by the people and given the responsibility to protect our rights and lives? Is he an elected Congressman or Senator who is charged with overseeing this program?

We can't all know the methods we use to detect terrorists, so we have to trust national security courts and elected officials. This creepy little traitor ignores our democratic system. He thinks he knows more than older, more educated people who have the responsibility to defend the country because they were chosen by the people.

Edward Snowden is not standing up in a US court defending his actions. He ran away to China. Perhaps he was really working for the Chinese. He's nothing but a shitty little traitor. 

Kent Clizbe Claims CIA Asked for His Computer

Climate Change denialist and self-described "ex-CIA operations officer" Kent Clizbe claims that a "nice lady" at the CIA asked him to turn over his computer: "The discussion with the nice lady made clear that they’d been monitoring and inspecting my personal email, my comments on political blogs, my recently published books...and pretty much everything about my personal life since 2001... the nice lady ended the hour and a half discussion with a request to turn over my personal computer to her" (5-16-13).

This is ironic, since "Our Man in the Nut House" Kent Clizbe has been monitoring and inspecting climate scientist Michael Mann's stolen emails. He even wrote to Mann's colleagues at the University of Virginia and at Penn State and promised them a huge federal whistle-blower reward if they would denounce Dr. Mann. None of them accepted his offer, and all the scientific reviews of Mann's research exonerated him.

Following his (apocryphal?) chat with the "nice lady," Clizbe claims that he immediately contacted "the best lawyer in town": The one who handles every high level issue having to do with the CIA and personnel."  Clizbe doesn't tell us who this eminent lawyer is, but perhaps he is alluding to Plato Cacheris, who defended traitors like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

Of course, these claims may just be Clizbe's latest fantasy. He used to brag about his CIA credentials, in spite of the fact that the CIA is concerned about the national security implications of climate change; but now Clizbe is claiming that he is a dissident who is being purged.

Perhaps Clizbe is trying out a new persona, or perhaps he is really in hot water. Time will tell.

Certainly he is not on the same page as the CIA or the National Intelligence Council (NIC) when it comes to climate change. Clizbe sounds more like Virginia's corrupt Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli or former Russian President Medvedev, who, until Russia's terrible 2010 forest fires, claimed that climate change was a "trick."

Time (8-2-10) observes:

Two months before Copenhagen, [Russia's] state-owned Channel One television aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which argued that the notion of man-made climate change was the result of an international media conspiracy. A month later, hackers sparked the so-called Climategate scandal by stealing e-mails from European climate researchers. The hacked e-mails, which were then used to support the arguments of global-warming skeptics, appeared to have been distributed through a server in the Siberian oil town of Tomsk, raising suspicion among some environmental activists of Russia's involvement in the leak....

"Broadly speaking, the Russian position has always been that climate change is an invention of the West to try to bring Russia to its knees," says Vladimir Chuprov, director of the Greenpeace energy department in Moscow [More here]. Case in point: when Medvedev visited Tomsk last winter [early 2010], he called the global-warming debate "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects." That was two months after the Copenhagen talks.

Like Kent Clizbe and Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Soviet and Russian propaganda campaigns have often depicted scientists as crafty and meretricious, although the Soviet and Russian leaders have frequently publicly re-evaluated their propaganda. Even in Russia, politicians eventually retract ridiculous lies about scientists because they need to deal with reality.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Explains Prism

"Over the last week we have seen reckless disclosures of intelligence community measures used to keep Americans safe. In a rush to publish, media outlets have not given the full context–including the extent to which these programs are overseen by all three branches of government–to these effective tools.

In particular, the surveillance activities published in The Guardian and The Washington Post are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress. Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber attacks against the United States and its allies.

Our ability to discuss these activities is limited by our need to protect intelligence sources and methods. Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a “playbook” of how to avoid detection. Nonetheless, Section 702 has proven vital to keeping the nation and our allies safe. It continues to be one of our most important tools for the protection of the nation’s security.

However, there are significant misimpressions that have resulted from the recent articles. Not all the inaccuracies can be corrected without further revealing classified information. I have, however, declassified for release the attached details about the recent unauthorized disclosures in hope that it will help dispel some of the myths and add necessary context to what has been published." ---Director of National Intelligence James Clapper

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has put out a fact sheet that explains Prism, "an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (50 U.S.C. § 1881a)."

According to NPR (6-8-13):

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Saturday said media reporting this week about government surveillance activities amounted to "reckless disclosures" that could hand terrorists a playbook to foil detection.

He said the surveillance measures are legal and said the reporting lacked full context:

"In particular, the surveillance activities published by The Guardian and The Washington Post are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress," Clapper wrote in a statement. "Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber attacks against the United States and its allies."

Clapper said the ability to discuss the activities is "limited by our need to protect intelligence sources and methods" and that disclosing such information "can obviously give our enemies a 'playbook' of how to avoid detection."

A separate "fact sheet," put out by Clapper's office said PRISM — described by The Guardian as a massive, highly classified program — is "not an undisclosed collection or data mining program.
"It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government's statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)" [See full text.]