Internet traffic to the United States from Asia, Africa and even Latin America has been in decline, a trend that is almost certainly going to accelerate as those regions ramp up their own network exchange points and local services to minimize dependence on networks and media services under US control.The global imperative is to contain and isolate the criminal NSA data-mining exploits solely to the United States. That is, to quarantine this Orwellian infection to North America.That’s what the world is talking about today.

Actually, it’s hundreds of millions of computers, and billions of phone calls, that are routed through the NSA’s data collection traps — from every corner of the world — every minute of the day. Even though most of them are not communicating to anyone in the US, the Internet’s current architecture allows the NSA to capture them all. Potentially, that means every single soul on earth who uses electronic communication is being tracked.

Other nations understood this immediately. They are well aware that their citizens have been caught in the illegal NSA dragnet. This is a completely unacceptable act by the US — just as it would be if the world’s Internet backbone was located in Russia and Moscow was mining the rich personal data of every American citizen.

The United States has inadvertently declared itself to be a rogue, predatory Police State. When the story broke, officials in European capitals demanded immediate answers from their US counterparts and denounced the practice of secretly gathering digital information on Europeans as unacceptable, illegal and a serious violation of basic human rights.

There were heated and outraged discussions at the G-8 summit in Ireland. Eric Holder was flown to Brussels for questioning by the European Union. When Holder left, they were even more outraged. The Germans openly liken the United States actions to the actions of the Cold War-era Stasi.

US & NSA Accused of Criminal Privacy Violations in Dozens of Nations –

Snowden Blowback

Submitted by Pluto
June 25, 2013 – 3:12am

Do you remember this story from last September?

It wasn’t a big story in the US, but the rest of the world took a keen and somewhat alarmed interest in it. It’s the beginning point — the first clue — that something was very much amiss in America:

WASHINGTON, Sept 4, (AFP): A hacker group has claimed to have obtained personal data from 12 million Apple iPhone and iPad users by breaching an FBI computer, raising concerns about government tracking.

The group called AntiSec, linked to the hacking collective known as Anonymous, posted one million Apple user identifiers on Monday purported to be part of a larger group of 12 million obtained from an FBI laptop.

Contacted by AFP, FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said: “We’re not commenting.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Peter Kruse, an e-crime specialist with CSIS Security Group in Denmark, said on Twitter that the leak “is real” and that he confirmed three of his own devices in the leaked data.

“Also notice that they claim to have fullname, addresses, phone numbers etc… Big ouch!” he tweeted.

———————

Eric Hemmendinger, a security expert with Tata Communications headquartered in India, said the report raises concerns about the protectors of cybersecurity.

“The question is not whether it’s accurate, it is why did the feds have the information and why did they not take due care to secure it,” he told AFP.

———————

Aldo Cortesi, a security consultant living in New Zealand, called the incident “a privacy catastrophe.”

“The vulnerabilities ranged from de-anonymization, to takeover of the user’s gaming social network account, to the ability to completely take over the user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts,” he said on a blog posting.

———————

Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos, remarked, “Quite why the FBI was collecting the UDIDs and personal information of millions of iPhone and iPad users is not yet clear — but it’s obvious that the data (and the computer it was apparently stored on) was not adequately secured.”

———————

Johannes Ullrich of the SANS Internet Storm Center said it was difficult to verify the report.

“There is nothing else in the file that would implicate the FBI. So this data may very well come from another source. But it is not clear who would have a file like this,” he told AFP.

“It’s unclear why the FBI, if the report were true, would have the data,” he added. “The size of the file would imply a widespread, not a targeted, tracking operation….”

::

In the posting of this data, AntiSec said the original file “contained around 12,000,000 devices” and that “we decided a million would be enough to release.”

AntiSec said it posted the information to draw attention to Apple’s practices which allow users to be tracked [in real time].

“We never liked the concept of UDIDs since the beginning indeed. Really bad decision from Apple,” it said. “The FBI is using your device info for a tracking-people project or some shit.”

It seems AntiSec had stumbled upon a tiny piece of the vast NSA “global” spying dragnet that was collecting private data profiles on ordinary citizens– not only in the US, but throughout the world.

Ten months later, halfway around the world, Edward Snowden was monitoring the systems that were collecting this illegally accessed very private citizen data. And the data was not just from ordinary Americans and Chinese, but from all our friends and allies — Germany, Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, Latin and South America, and many others.

It took three months for Snowden to decide to put a stop to this illegal activity.

If Snowden were a criminal, he could have exploited the data. Or sold it to identity thieves. Or, even sold it to a foreign enemy.

But in order to do the right thing — and expose the crime — Snowden would have to give up his own life and throw himself on the mercy of the ordinary citizens of the world.

Yes, the collection of this kind of personal data is illegal in almost every nation in the world.

The right to privacy from electronic surveillance is granted in most national constitutions. This expectation of privacy has been declared a human right by the UN. It is a crime to collect it secretly.

It may be hard for Americans to wrap their minds around this concept because, in their case, human rights are not directly conferred upon them, constitutionally — and can be suspended by the Executive Branch or the high court at any time, if it is deemed (often secretly) to be in the best interest of the “defense” of the nation.

Read that last sentence again.

You are living in that reality. The citizens of other nations are not. Their constitutions declare and affirm human rights that are specific to the 21st century issues.

Americans have have little expectation of general human rights, many of which were circumvented by the Patriot Act. But, right npw, the rest rest of the world is dismayed and outraged that the US has illegally breached their sovereign laws to spy on their citizens and businesses.

The world regards what the NSA is doing as an international crime and a direct violation of their human rights.

Here’s the Problem with the US that the World is going to Fix:The world is looking at an international crisis — as a result of Edward Snowden’s description of an illegal data theft “Process” — perpetrated against their own citizens. The US is engaged in ongoing criminal activity against their sovereignty. And they are scrambling to put a stop to it.

The United States can no longer be trusted, never, ever again.

This is a watershed moment that changes everything. You are witnessing an epic geopolitical shift that will profoundly effect the United States standing throughout the world. It will certainly affect your future.

Before this is over, the entire architecture of the Internet will be rebuilt. Here’s why:

A huge proportion of all global Internet traffic flows through networks controlled by the United States. This is because eight of fifteen global tier 1 telecommunications companies are American owned — companies like AT&T, CenturyLink, and Verizon. Furthermore, the social media services are also mostly provided by giants headquartered in the United States, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Twitter.

All of these companies are subject to U.S. law, including the provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act, no matter where their services are offered or their servers located.

Having the world’s Internet traffic routed through the U.S. and having those telecommunications companies under its jurisdiction compromises the constitutionally guaranteed privacy rights of citizens of all other sovereign nations.

This will end.

The rest of the world will not stand for it.

It’s a simple fact and an economic black swan for the US.

Here’s what Edward Snowden told the world:

“We hack network backbones — like huge Internet routers, basically — that gives us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one.”

Actually, it’s hundreds of millions of computers, and billions of phone calls, that are routed through the NSA’s data collection traps — from every corner of the world — every minute of the day. Even though most of them are not communicating to anyone in the US, the Internet’s current architecture allows the NSA to capture them all. Potentially, that means every single soul on earth who uses electronic communication is being tracked.

Other nations understood this immediately. They are well aware that their citizens have been caught in the illegal NSA dragnet. This is a completely unacceptable act by the US — just as it would be if the world’s Internet backbone was located in Russia and Moscow was mining the rich personal data of every American citizen.

The United States has inadvertently declared itself to be a rogue, predatory Police State. When the story broke, officials in European capitals demanded immediate answers from their US counterparts and denounced the practice of secretly gathering digital information on Europeans as unacceptable, illegal and a serious violation of basic human rights.

There were heated and outraged discussions at the G-8 summit in Ireland. Eric Holder was flown to Brussels for questioning by the European Union. When Holder left, they were even more outraged. The Germans openly liken the United States actions to the actions of the Cold War-era Stasi.

Here’s what the Nations of the World are saying to each other:The United Nations:

Surveillance programmes that trample on people’s right to privacy in the name of security actually risk damaging the fight against terrorism, UN rights chief Navi Pillay warned Thursday.

“Concerns have been expressed over surveillance regimes adopted by some states without adequate safeguards to protect individuals’ right to privacy,” Pillay told a UN counter-terrorism conference in Geneva.

“If our goal in countering terrorism is to provide for the security of individuals and preserve the rule of law, such practices are… counterproductive,” she said.

::

UN Under Secretary General Jeffrey Feltman said: “If we allow compromise on human rights, we are not countering terrorism but letting it get its way.

“When the principles enshrined in the human rights instruments are disrespected, extremism tends to thrive,” said Feltman, who heads the world body’s Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force Office (CTITF).

Switzerland:

Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter told the conference: “The quest for security must not lead to excessive infringements of the right to privacy.”

Switzerland this week asked Washington for explanations about Snowden’s revelations, especially on an alleged CIA blackmail operation to spy on its banks while he was stationed in Geneva as a diplomatic attache from 2007 to 2009.

“Would we have a better society if honest citizens were subjected to constant surveillance by governments, with all the abuses that this may bring?” Burkhalter said. “In Switzerland’s view, the answer is definitely no.”

In Switzerland, at least one lawmaker has demanded that Internet giant Google be forced to be more transparent about the user data it retains.

Germany:

At the G-8 this week, Merkel’s spokesman has said she will press Obama for answers on the US surveillance programme. Berlin wants assurances from Obama that the on-line exchanges of its own citizens are not being monitored from Washington.

Reports about the apparent sophistication and long reach of US surveillance have also caused anxiety in continental Europe, particularly in Germany, where there are memories of the former East Germany’s Stasi intelligence service.

The country’s data commissioner has said he expects the government to put a stop to any American surveillance of German citizens, while worried lawmakers from across the political spectrum have said they want to know more.

“No one has a problem with the USA keeping terrorists under surveillance — that has prevented terrorist attacks in Germany before now too,” said Thomas Oppermann, a senior lawmaker from the opposition Social Democrats (SPD).

“(But) total surveillance of all citizens by the USA is completely inappropriate. The German government must protect the privacy of Germans from the USA too.”

“This affair looks like it will be one of the biggest scandals in data sharing … Merkel cannot just look away and act like nothing has happened,” added Renate Kuenast, a senior Green lawmaker.

Peter Schaar, Germany’s federal data protection commissioner told the Guardian that it was unacceptable that US authorities have access to the data of European citizens “and the level of protection is lower than what is guaranteed for US citizens.”

Privacy-focused Germany was quick to condemn their co-operation with the US security services.

“The US government must provide clarity regarding these monstrous allegations of total monitoring of various telecommunications and Internet services,” said Peter Schaar, German data protection and freedom of information commissioner.

“Statements from the US government that the monitoring was not aimed at US citizens but only against persons outside the United States do not reassure me at all.”

Some of the companies named in the article have denied the government had “direct access” to their central servers. Nevertheless, the justice minister for the German state of Hesse, Joerg-Uwe Hahn, called for a boycott of the companies involved.

“I am amazed at the flippant way in which companies such as Google and Microsoft seem to treat their users’ data,” he told the Handelsblatt newspaper. “Anyone who doesn’t want that to happen should switch providers.”

Brussels and the European Union:

European companies using services from U.S. Internet companies must now be concerned about whether they are in breach of EU Data Protection laws. Those laws require companies to ensure only authorized personnel have access to any personal information of individuals.

The fact that U.S. government agencies may be accessing this data could result in many European organizations being unable to satisfy their data protection obligations.

The European Union has struggled to assert its citizens’ rights to privacy in the United States for almost a decade.

Transatlantic agreements on sharing the financial and travel data of European citizens have taken years to complete, and the European Union is now trying to modernise an almost 20-year-old privacy law to strengthen Europeans’ rights.

Fears about the security of data held on U.S. servers have already been a major factor in slow European adoption of “cloud” computing services, in which computing-intensive applications are done by central providers in large server farms.

“You hear more concerns in Europe than in the US, about the Patriot Act in particular. PRISM just enhances those concerns,” said Mark Watts, a partner in London law firm Bristows specialising in privacy and data compliance.

“The main players that are mentioned are much more on the consumer cloud end… but it may be that emotionally it adds to the concerns about US cloud providers,” said Watts, whose clients include several large US internet firms.

The EU said Friday that US Attorney General Eric Holder had agreed to share information about Washington’s huge Internet spy programme after Brussels expressed concerns about the privacy of European citizens.

Holder meanwhile said that US authorities had full oversight over the so-called PRISM programme, even through the US was easily undermined by contract worker, Edward Snowden.

The talks came just days after the EU demanded answers from Holder and warned of a “grave” threat to the rights of European citizens from the intelligence programme.

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding and Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem said the EU and US had agreed to set up a group of experts to exchange information and look at better safeguards. Reding said the US attorney general had addressed their fears of “big brother intrusion on privacy”.

“I welcome Attorney General Holder’s proposal to convene, in the short-term, a meeting of experts from the US and from the EU in order to clarify together the remaining matters — and I think there are remaining matters,” Reding said.

“There are still questions to be answered.

European Justice Commissioner and Vice President Viviane Reding said: “This case shows that a clear legal framework for the protection of personal data is not a luxury or constraint but a fundamental right.”

Reding, who has been trying to push through an update to Europe’s data protection laws for 18 months, noted that EU government leaders meeting in the European Council had been able to agree the Data Retention Directive relatively quickly.

Their action on the 2006 directive, which stipulates that phone and internet companies must store records to help in fighting serious crime, showed they could act fast when limiting civil liberties.

“It is time for the Council to prove it can act with the same speed and determination on a file which strengthens such rights,” she said in an emailed statement.

Ireland:

In Dublin, Holder tried to play down Ireland’s fears about the extent of the surveillance programme. The top-secret intelligence dragnet operated by the US National Security Agency (NSA) collects and analyses data from Internet and phone users around the world.

Holder said the US government could not force Internet companies to provide information on individuals unless there was an “appropriate and documented” foreign intelligence threat. Holder added that there was an “extensive oversight regime” on the spy programmes.

He took a stern tone on Snowden, saying that, “This case is still under investigation and I can assure you that we will hold accountable the person responsible for those extremely damaging leaks.”

But the 29-year-old Snowden is expected to resist any bid to extradite him from Hong Kong.

Italy:

Leader Antonello Soro, said that the data dragnet “would not be legal in Italy.”

It would be contrary to the principles of our legislation and would represent a very serious violation.

Australia:

Fears about the security of data held on U.S. servers have already been a major factor in slow European adoption of “cloud” computing services, in which computing-intensive applications are done by central providers in large server farms.

Unease over a clandestine US data collection programme has rippled across the Pacific to two of Washington’s major allies, Australia and New Zealand, raising concerns about whether they have cooperated with secret electronic data mining.

Both countries are members of the so-called ‘five eyes’ collective of major Western powers collecting and sharing signals intelligence, set up in the post-war 1940s. Five Eyes also includes the UK, Canada, and the US.

In Australia, the conservative opposition said it was “very troubled” and had voiced concern to U.S. diplomats in Canberra about what it called large-scale, covert surveillance of private data belonging to foreigners.

“There is a massive global trend to cloud services,” said opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull, noting that the vast majority of providers were U.S. firms.

The opposition, poised to win September elections, said it was concerned that data stored by Australians in the computer servers of US Internet giants like Facebook and Google could be accessed by the NSA,  echoing fears voiced in Europe last week over the reach of US digital surveillance in the age of cloud computing.

Australia’s influential Greens party called on the government to clarify whether Canberra’s own intelligence agencies had access to the NSA-gathered data, which according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper included search history, emails, file transfers and live chats.

“We’ll examine carefully any implications in what has emerged for the security and privacy of Australians,” Australia’s Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in a television interview on Sunday, when asked whether Canberra had cooperated with Washington’s secret initiative.

New Zealand:

Responding to the government-surveillance controversy engulfing New Zealand’s security-alliance partners in Washington,

Prime Minister John Key said Tuesday his country doesn’t use foreign intelligence agencies to circumvent local laws and illegally spy on its citizens.

But Key declined to say exactly what help New Zealand does get from agencies like the US National Security Agency. He said any help the South Pacific nation has received from foreign intelligence agencies would have been lawful and in the country’s national interest.

Key was responding in Parliament to questions raised by opposition lawmakers. They’ve raised fears the NSA may have spied on New Zealanders under an intelligence-sharing alliance known as Five Eyes that includes the US, Canada, the UK and Australia.

Revelations in recent days about US spy programs that track phone and Internet messages around the world have created an international uproar.

Canada:

In Canada, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said Monday she would look into the implications for her country, saying the scope of information reportedly collected raises “significant concerns.”

In 2011, I was on a panel, organized by the security company RSA, with two retired National Security Agency directors, Michael Hayden and Kenneth Minihan. During the course of our debate, I raised concerns, as the only non-American on the panel, that their plans and preferences for having the NSA secure cyberspace for the rest of us were not exactly reassuring. To this, Minihan replied that I should not describe myself as “Canadian” but rather “North American.”

As jarring as his response was, the fact of the matter is when it comes to communications, he’s right. Practically speaking, there is no border separating Canadian from U.S. telecommunications — though that’s not true the other way around. Primarily, this one-way dependence is a product of history and economics. Canadians’ communications are inextricably connected to networks south of the border and subject to the laws and practices of the U.S. over which we, as foreigners, have no say or control.

Norway:

Norwegian lawmakers debated a ban on the use by public officials of Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud computing services. Although shelved temporarily, this type of debate will almost certainly be resurrected and spread throughout Europe and other regions as the full scope of U.S.-based “foreign directed” wiretapping and metadata collection sinks in.

Finland:

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish software security firm F-Secure, said outrage was the appropriate response to the US revelations.

“What we have in our hands now is the first concrete proof of US-based high-tech companies participating with the NSA in wholesale surveillance on us, the rest of the world, the non-American, you and me,” he said.

But he added there was little that individuals could do, with precious few alternatives to the popular services offered by US firms Facebook, Google or Apple.

“The long term solution is that Europe should have a dot.com industry just like the United States, which would give us economic benefits but more importantly would make us independent of the wholesale surveillance of the US intelligence agencies.”

Hong Kong:

Pro-democracy lawmakers Gary Fan and Claudia Mo urged the Obama administration not to penalise Snowden for what they said was serving the public good.

In a joint letter to the US president, they said Snowden may have “done liberal democracy a service by stimulating serious discussion in many countries of the extent to which surveillance is acceptable”.

“Obama should consider letting him go,” Mo said in a press conference, while urging Beijing not to interfere if an extradition case goes to the Hong Kong courts.

“This is shocking because while the US has accused China of hacking, they have also been doing the same thing, particularly when Hong Kong ordinary citizens are involved,” Fan told reporters.

Snowden does have the option of applying for asylum or refugee status in Hong Kong, which maintains a Western-style legal system. If Snowden chose to fight it, his extradition to the US could take years to make its way through Hong Kong’s courts.

::

Details about PRISM were leaked by former US security consultant Snowden and revealed by The Guardian and the Washington Post last week.

China’s Internet security chief, who told state media that Beijing has amassed huge amounts of data on US-based hacking.

Air Force Col. Dai Xu, known for the hawkish opinions he voices on his Sina Weibo microblog, wrote: “I have always said, the United States’ accusations about Chinese hacking attacks have always been a case of a thief crying for another thief to be caught.”

The ACLU:

The American Civil Liberties Union branded the program, authorized by a top secret court order, as “beyond Orwellian.”

The invasive domestic spying revelations have divided Congress and led civil liberties advocates and some constitutional scholars to accuse Obama of crossing a line in the name of rooting out terror threats.

Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, strove to calm Americans’ fears but also to remind them that Congress and the courts had signed off on the surveillance.

The ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion on Monday asking for secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions on the Patriot Act to be made public in the light of the Guardian’s revelations.

The motion asks for any documents relating to the court’s interpretation of the scope, meaning and constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act – which authorises government to obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations – to be published “as quickly as possible” and with only minimal redaction.

“In a democracy, there should be no room for secret law,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director.

“The public has a right to know what limits apply to the government’s surveillance authority, and what safeguards are in place to protect individual privacy.”

Finally, the ACLU is going to court.

On Monday it filed a motion with the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) seeking the release of secret court opinions on the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which has been interpreted to authorize this warrantless and suspicionless collection of phone records.

And on Tuesday it filed a lawsuit charging that the program [the NSA’s mass surveillance of phone calls] violates Americans’ constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy.

Executive Summary:As we can see, the American Bubble has no awareness or perspective of how Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing has affected the entire world and the future of its digital communications infrastructure. Americans think it is all about them — but the fact is, the global community doesn’t care how the US treats its own citizens. This is completely immaterial to the sovereign security crisis the world is actually facing as a result of Snowden’s revelations.

::

In the US, where the concerns of other sovereign nations are not a factor, pressure is growing at the White House to explain whether there is effective congressional oversight of the domestic spying programs revealed by Snowden. This is a conversation that the government cannot have with the American people. Every time they make a statement, the global blowback gets worse.

The administration hopes that the American public will be easily distracted by the drama of charging Snowden with espionage and the years long extradition kabuki. This way, they can stonewall the people’s inquiries with “ongoing case” and “national security” tropes — until the new season of American Idol begins again in September.

Personally, I don’t believe that any elected figure at the Federal Government has the will or the authority to stop the NSA, even if that was a desired goal. It was a different America when over-reach like like J. Edgar Hoover’s could be somewhat contained. Everything changed after September 11th, which was certainly a fortuitous event for the Neocons and the signers of PNAC.

No, it’s too late to stop the NSA’s Orwellian mission. Are your phone calls recorded? The NSA absolutely has the capability to do so.

Would they lie about that?

We now live in the America the Neocons fantasized about. We will be in the business of war for the rest of your lives. The entire continent of Africa, rich with resources, is prize this time. Our advance “special” forces from the Africom command center are already busy planting the Libyan/Syrian Rebel Scenario Seeds in every single resource-rich country. That’s the next place that current American teens will be sent to die for the corporations.

::

In March,2012, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines emailed an Associated Press reporter about a story that described the NSA as a monitor of worldwide Internet data and phone calls.

“NSA collects, monitors, and analyzes a variety of FOREIGN signals and communications for indications of threats to the United States and for information of value to the US government,” she wrote. “FOREIGN is the operative word. NSA is not an indiscriminate vacuum, collecting anything and everything.”

Then, just last week, President Obama make it clear that the NSA statement was a lie:

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,”  Obama assured the nation after two days of reports that many found unsettling. What the government is doing, he said, is digesting phone numbers  and the durations of calls, seeking links that might “identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.”

If there’s a hit, he said, “if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.”

“I think the American people understand that there are some trade-offs involved,” Obama said when questioned by reporters at a health care event in San Jose, California.

“It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. And what I can say is that in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.”

The above passage may put your mind at ease.

Or, it may do exactly the opposite.

If you are inside the US, it really doesn’t matter. The immediate future is set. The ball is in the global court. American businesses will be the first to feel the blowback..

The NSA revelations pose an immediate economic problem for US cloud providers on the international market — the big name telecoms. Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, wrote in Forbes that this kind of, “vast foreign and domestic spying & threatens the global competitiveness of U.S. tech companies.”

Internet traffic to the United States from Asia, Africa and even Latin America has been in decline, a trend that is almost certainly going to accelerate as those regions ramp up their own network exchange points and local services to minimize dependence on networks and media services under US control.

The global imperative is to contain and isolate the criminal NSA data-mining exploits solely to the United States. That is, to quarantine this Orwellian infection to North America.

That’s what the world is talking about today.

…………………………

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The conspicuously nonsensical efforts by President Barack Obama and NSA spy chief Alexander to assure Americans massive corporate-government spy operations had prevented terrorist attacks were supported by only a few easily disproved lies. More broadly, the history of recent decades has government spy agencies hiring ‘private’ companies to carry out the activities they are legally prohibited from carrying out. This makes government assertions regarding spying on citizens a game of three-card monte—the testimony of government officials is calculated to be irrelevant to actual activities.

In a narrow sense the implied purpose of the spy program that remains—political-economic domination and control by corporate and government technocrats, suffers from the internal paradox of too many spies having too much spying power. In the effort to ‘monetize’ information gathered through spy operations, which good capitalist will forego using spy capabilities against competitors? Which bureaucratic climber will forego the advantage of catching his / her competitor in flagrante delicto with an under-aged prostitute? Which political Party will forego certain knowledge of the strategies of its ‘competitor?’

But internal paradox doesn’t mean the spy programs aren’t incredibly dangerous—left unstated is why the corporate state feels the need to surveil and control the populace? And like the surveillance technocracy, from the Bill Clinton era to today, Wall Street has gotten absolutely everything it asked for—deregulation, increased leverage, bankruptcy ‘reform,’ freedom from legal culpability, rights of predation through Federal supercedence of local laws, and of course, large and ongoing public subsidies. The result, following its near self-immolation in 2008, is a larger, more inter-connected, and ultimately more fragile financial system than existed before its wish list was fulfilled.

While the idea of ironic justice—the consequences to Wall Street of the next financial meltdown or corporate-government spies turning on one another, has a certain appeal, actual human lives are finite and the unwinding, following from history, will cause harm and misery in inverse proportion to existing social power. The (rapidly) disappearing middle class is evidence of the consequences of political passivity. The (rapidly) disappearing concept of freedom from corporate- government intrusion into, and intermediation of, all social relations is another. And the well-sold notion of corporate-consumer ‘partnership’ is seeing its political fruition as the telecom and Internet companies to whom paying large monthly bills was previously seen as a virtue reveal themselves as child-hipster fronts for unimagined totalitarian power.

That Mr. Obama has apparently lost some of his competence at lying, as illustrated by his domestic spying apologetics, has consequences beyond incrementally awakening the perpetually zombified ‘dismal center’ that constitutes his base. How many fewer citizens this week still imagine a political leader from either Party ever acting in the public interest? How many more charismatic charlatans—Party hacks acting in plutocrat interests against those of the citizenry, can successfully manage the fifth, sixth, seventh… terms of the George W. Bush administration? Americans have always had a genius, possibly our dominant skill, for creating better iterations of bullshit, but how many more times will we dance in the streets, as occurred in Cambridge, MA upon Mr. Obama’s election, knowing the infrastructure of the spy-murder state remains intact?

Put another way, at what point does the abject refusal of the American people to act politically become a liability for the corporate state? It was the relative balance of political-economic power Franklin Roosevelt achieved with the New Deal that saved capitalism from itself. And it was the internal and external threats to the political-economic order that led the plutocracy of that day to give a little to keep a lot – the wisdom to do so was not self-generated by corporate titans and financiers. With all of the political institutions of today dedicated to giving the plutocracy—financiers, corporate executives, and their partners in technocratic totalitarianism, what it wants, where is an FDR to tell it what it needs?

And where does this leave the internal contradictions of the existing corporate-state? Wall Street is a bigger and ‘better’ finance-bomb just waiting to go off. How many more times will a stock market crash leave the citizenry fearful not saving Wall Street is more destructive than saving it? Corporate executives are ever more effectively impoverishing their customers to pay themselves. At what point is the inflection hit where executive self-enrichment leads to diminishing returns for even themselves? And where does that leave a political leadership that perceives itself immune from political retribution because it can always find personal redemption by moving to the ‘private’ sector? Again, the ironic justice of corporate-state cannibalism leaves contrived and real dependencies—the mutual dependence of citizens and corporate state institutions, to drive us down a totalitarian path until a functioning political economy can be recovered from the ruins.

The role of Internet companies in developing the technocracies of totalitarianism provides a different shade of irony. Current framing has the government forcing tech companies to comply with government demands they provide ‘private’ data. But who incubated these tech companies from infancy, delivered products developed in government labs for them to commercialize, subsidized the ‘math and science’ curriculums in their support, subsidized the building of the telecommunications infrastructure on which tech depends and winked and nodded at fraudulent employment schemes to underpay immigrant labor in their service? More directly, who subsidized these companies as they grew? And fundamentally, who built the Internet? From the bowels of the Pentagon to the playground idiocy of Silicon Valley, there exists nary a tech millionaire or billionaire not by degree living on the people’s dime.

So far this framing posits the single direction of government subsidizing tech for its own nefarious intent—paying for the privilege, but extracting its due in blood. But what commercial genius lay behind convincing several generations of children, the dependents whose psychologies aren’t yet developed by history and experience to beware the intentions of cynical technocrats bearing toys, that delivering their life-secrets to self-serving capitalists would leave them safe? Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs thought nothing of using the advantages of history and strategies of planned destitution to squeeze those making ‘his’ computers for everything he could take. The major Internet companies span the globe to find captive workforces to labor in slave conditions to program their technologies of global domination, or more likely, the latest moronic ‘app’ that notifies one of the need to use the toilet. These are the capitalists and capitalist enterprises bravely standing between ‘the government’ and totalitarian intrusion? And who, exactly, do they run to to protect their privilege?

Were ‘the government’ in control, why would all of ‘its’ power and resources be dedicated to making the lives and bank accounts of this technerati, public largess dependent financiers, and the sociopathic tools occupying executive suites, so remunerative and comfortable? There is tension, no doubt, between the self-interest of plutocrat tools in government and their plutocrat masters—the largest neighborhood of the largest houses I ever saw being built was in suburban Washington, DC at the very height of the most recent economic calamity. But given the theorized power of government, why don’t self-interested bureaucrats take what the plutocrats have for themselves? This question is for my friends with anarchist and libertarian tendencies. As Lenin had it, and the late Hugo Chavez understood, the way to restrain totalitarian government is to restrain capitalist imperialism. The NSA and CIA are but tools, aspects, of imperialist capitalism.

Framed differently, it requires improbably separating method from purpose to argue ‘private’ and government data mining and statistical analysis developed from the symbiosis of government and business serve fundamentally different purposes. ‘Private’ data collection and use, e.g. stores that use ‘store cards’ to track and analyze customer purchases, is intended to provide economic advantage. Given the NSA can only give implausible and absurd explanations for why it tracks and uses similar data from the citizenry, what possible explanation, aside from mindlessly squandering public resources, is possible than to gain political advantage from it? Again, if the claim they’ve interrupted terrorist plots is demonstrably bullshit and bluster, what use value does the data they’re collecting have?

If giving self-interested sociopaths—the definition of successful capitalists, everything they wanted the roaring twenties and debt-fueled 2000s would have led to self-sustaining economic outcomes. But they led instead to financial and economic crashes. The move to consolidate political-economic power through the technocratic corporate state is likewise leading to increasing political dysfunction. One of the only political leaders in the U.S. with retained credibility, Barack Obama, appears to be losing his ability to serve as front for plutocrat interests. And technocratic overreach is leading to increasing skepticism of the corporate state nexus. The right-wing revolution started in the 1970s worked by demonizing government to the benefit of global capital. With both government and capital losing credibility, technocratic control and police repression are the tools remaining to sustain corporate state power.

The capacity for FDR style rejuvenation of Western capitalism probably existed when Mr. Obama first entered office as President. The crisis of confidence the financial meltdown and related Great Recession initially caused, if used in conjunction with the delivery of public resources, provided the opening for reframing government as the solution to unstable—and destabilizing, unfettered capitalism. The problem of leadership was, and remains, Mr. Obama and Congress are tools for narrow plutocrat interests when restoring political-economic stability requires understanding plutocrat interests, not serving them. Even were a competent leader to arise, a modern day FDR, the question of what historical opportunity remains is prominent.

The existing corporate state, complete with the infrastructure of totalitarian surveillance and control, is currently one step removed from full-blown fascism. The prevailing wisdom is the corporate-state technocracy has capabilities derived from economic interests overtaking the mechanics of modern democratic governance. This view requires isolating the technocracies of surveillance and control from changes in laws and interpretations of laws designed to consolidate political-economic control behind walls of impermeability. It also presumes the locus of totalitarian control is singularly political when by all evidence the state serves plutocrat (economic) interests. The willingness of top spy agency officials to openly lie about agency goals, intentions and practices suggests perceived vulnerability by those at the top. As history has it, perceived vulnerability by those in power is not necessarily fact and misplaced perceptions rarely lead to socially constructive outcomes.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York. His book, “Zen Economics,” will be published by CounterPunch / AK Press in 2014.

Links:
[1] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/war-against-libya
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/war-against-iraq
[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/war-against-syria
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/humanitarian-military-intervention
[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/responsibility-protect
[6] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/r2p
[7] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/somalia-invasion
[8] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/african-union
[9] http://www.blackagendareport.com/taxonomy/term/1292
[10] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/international-criminal-court
[11] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/edward-snowden
[12] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/nsa-spying
[13] http://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/Obama-Wars3.jpg
[14] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
[15] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Flies-empire-don%25E2%2580%2599t-believe-word-they-say&linkname=The%20Lies%20of%20Empire%3A%20Don%E2%80%99t%20Believe%20a%20Word%20They%20Say

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• War Against Libya [1] | 
• War Against Iraq [2] | 
• War Against Syria [3] | 
• humanitarian military intervention [4] | 
• Responsibility to Protect [5] | 
• R2P [6] | 
• Somalia invasion [7] | 
• African Union [8] | 
• Congo genocide [9] | 
• International Criminal Court [10] | 
• Edward Snowden [11] | 
• NSA Spying [12]

MR. GREENWALD: Right. This is what the U.S. government, what you just– what you just– that the claim that you just referenced has been saying for decades. They said the same thing about Daniel Ellsberg. They said the same thing about whoever leaked the Bush NSA eavesdropping program to The New York Times in 2005 or who told The Washington Post’s Dana Priest about CIA black sites. This is how the government always tries to protect themselves from transparency is by accusing those who bring it of endangering national security. There’s been nothing that has been revealed that has been remotely endangering of national security. The only thing people who have learned anything are the American people, who have learned the spying apparatus is directed at them. But let me just quickly say it isn’t Edward Snowden who’s making the decisions about what has published. He didn’t simply upload these documents to the internet or pass them to adversary governments, which is what he could have done, had he been inclined or had his motive been to harm the United States. He came to two newspapers The Guardian and The Washington Post and said I want you to be extremely careful about what it is that you publish and what it is that you don’t publish. Only publish what Americans should know, but don’t harm national security. And we have withheld a majority of things that he gave us pursuant not only to his instruction, but to our duty as journalists. That’s what whistleblowers and journalists do every single day, David. That’s how Americans have learned about wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. government, through this process.

GREGORY: All right, Glenn Greenwald, I really appreciate you coming on this morning and for your views. Thank you very much.

Joining me now, Democratic Senator from Illinois, the Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin; Republican Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn; Republican Congressman from Michigan, the Chair of the Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers; and the Democratic Congresswoman from California, Loretta Sanchez. Welcome to all of you. I want to go through some of the hot topics on Capitol Hill right now and move through some of these things. But I’ve got to start here with this breaking news. And let me go with you, Chairman Rogers, reaction to what you’ve heard in to the developments this morning.

REP. MIKE ROGERS (R-MI/Chair, House Intelligence Committee): Well, it’s concerning. Obviously, what appears to be as of today that he is flying– will– will catch another flight from Moscow, many believe to Cuba. We know that there is air traffic from Moscow to Cuba, then on to Venezuela. And when you look at it, every one of those nations is hostile to the United States. I mean if he could go to North Korea and Iran, he could round out his government oppression tour by Snowden. So you think about what he says he wants and what his actions are, it defies logic. He has taken information that does not belong to him, belongs to the people of the United States. He has jeopardized our national security. I disagree with the– The Reporter. Clearly, the bad guys have already changed their way. Remember, these were counterterrorism programs essentially, and we have seen that bad guys overseas, terrorists who are committing and plotting attacks on the United States and our allies, have changed the way they operate. We’ve already seen that. To say that that is not harmful to the national security of the United States or our safety is just dead wrong.

GREGORY: And Greenwald mentioned the FISA opinion, some eighty pages long. He doesn’t have the opinion but he’s– he’s got documents supporting it essentially saying that the government overreached, went beyond its authority, and– and in fact, he says, we can establish illegality as opposed to what I suggested to him, which was– it was a judicial review and then a change was made. What do you say?

REP. ROGERS: This is obviously why the program works. There is judicial review and there is judicial pushback, and rightly so. This is the problem with having a thousand-piece puzzle, taking three or four pieces and deciding that you’re now an expert on what that picture looks like. You’re going to get it wrong. They’re getting it wrong and it’s dangerous. So what happened was the court looked at it and said because of a technical difficulty, you’re collecting more information than you’re allowed to collect. You have to fix it. They came back, they stopped collection, they went back, they reviewed it, they figured out how to correct that. That’s exactly the kind of thing you want to do. And by the way, it was reported to Congress as well. We reviewed it. We agreed that they had over collected, and we also agreed the– the mitigation, the way that they tech– used technology to make sure they weren’t collecting certain bits of information was adhered to. That’s the way you want a classified system to work when you’re not trying to tell the bad guys how we do things.

GREGORY: Before I bring everybody else in, what lengths should this administration go to track Snowden down? The diplomatic route as Pete Williams reported on could be very difficult if he ends up in Venezuela. You’re chairman of the– the House Intelligence Committee. What should this administration do?

REP. ROGERS: They should use every legal avenue we have to bring him back to the United States. And, listen, if he believes that he’s doing something good–and by the way, he went outside all of the whistleblower avenues that were available to anyone in this government, including people who have classified information. We get two or three visits from whistleblowers every single week in the committee, and we– we investigate every one thoroughly. He didn’t choose that route. If he really believes he did something good, he should get on a plane, come back, and face the consequences of his actions.

GREGORY: Is he gone? Do you think he’s gone? Not to return?

REP. ROGERS: I– I don’t– I’m not sure I would say gone forever. I do think that we’ll continue with extradition activities wherever he ends up and we could– should continue to find ways to return him to the United States and get the United States’ public’s information back.

GREGORY: Let me bring in Senator Durbin, and we– this is obviously being reported widely on Twitter this morning, Senator, as you can understand, WikiLeaks tweeting that he has just landed in Moscow. Edward Snowden has just las– landed in Moscow. So, he’s gone from Hong Kong and on his way potentially to Venezuela, perhaps somewhere else. Specifically react to Glenn Greenwald who says this administration is criminalizing investigative journalism, criminalizing the release of information that could really contribute to a healthy debate about this kind of surveillance, and that Snowden is not guilty of espionage.

SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL/Assistant Majority Leader): Well, listen, every president of both political parties, first responsibility is to keep America safe, period, but to do it within the confines of the constitution. And that’s exactly the debate we’re engaged in now. I’ve been a critic of this bulk collection for years. I’ve offered amendments in the judiciary committee and on the floor. I believe that it should be restricted. I don’t think it currently is– is serving our nation because it goes way too far. If there’s a suspect in the city of Washington with some linkage to a terrorist, will we collect the phone records of everyone who makes a phone call in area code 202 for five years? If there’s a reasonable and specific suspicion, we should go after those who are thought to be complicit in any act that could jeopardize America. Having said that, though, this administration has an awesome responsibility to keep us safe and when it comes to classified information has to take care that we don’t jeopardize the lives of Americans, our troops, our allies and friends around the world by releasing these sorts of things in a public fashion.

GREGORY: Senator Tom Coburn, you’re following events this morning. How important is it at this juncture to get Edward Snowden back to the United States so that he can face justice? Because what’s clear is that he is not only seeking to avoid that but that he plans to stay in hiding and continue to leak information to bolster his own case for being a whistleblower and not a criminal and to continue to try to press the debate here on this issue.

SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK): Well, I don’t know that– that we’re going to have a lot to influence that, David. I think the more important thing is what is– is NSA, how well is it looked at? It’s– it’s the most over sighted program in the federal government. I’m known as a pretty good critic of most of the programs of the federal government. I believe that this is a well run within the constitutional framework of its guidelines and that we, in fact, if you– if we could talk about everything, which we can’t, which is one of the problems with this, Americans would be pretty well satisfied. The other thing that I think is, is that if you look at the institutions that are trusted in this country– and we have a real waning of confidence in the institution of government. When you look at the– the scale, Congress is on the bottom and the U.S. Army is on the top. And our military has done a great job running this program within the confines of the program as it was set out in Congress. And also, just to counter what Senator Durbin said, we don’t listen to anybody’s phone calls. We don’t– we don’t go and monitor the phone calls until we have a connection with a terrorist. And that’s– that’s the key point with which you can even go to access this. So it’s a whole different story than what has been blown out of proportion of what actually happens.

GREGORY: All right. Congressman Sanchez, you’ve been critical of these programs. You heard Glenn Greenwald this morning saying that there– that it’s not as targeted as you may think, that the government is, in effect, sucking up information from e-mails and from phone calls that goes way, way beyond the Patriot Act. There have been Republicans who have said this, James Sensenbrenner, that goes beyond the Patriot Act. How concerned are you?

REP. LORETTA SANCHEZ (D-CA/Homeland Security Committee): Well, as you know, I have not voted in favor of any Patriot Act or any of the FISA Amendments or anything else that goes with it particularly because I have been concerned in this area. You know, I mean the Supreme Court has been pretty straightforward about the Fourth Amendment. They’ve let it err on the sense of national security. It’s the Congress actually who can rein it in, but it’s the Congress who’s actually allowed it to be much broader and have collection happen. And my biggest point is that not everybody in the Congress is given access to what is really happening. And so when our American public says, hey, we don’t know about this and why are you doing this, I mean, maybe we can’t tell everybody in our nation, but you would think that 435 members of the House and a 100 senators should have access and ability to understand what the NSA is doing, what all the other agencies, intelligence agencies are doing. And actually have a good debate and maybe it has to be behind closed doors, but certainly with all deference to– to our chairman here, he may have information, I doubt he has everything and knows everything, but certainly I am limited even when I ask.

GREGORY: What about– what about Snowden? Do you think, as Glenn Greenwald does, that it’s preposterous to charge him with espionage? Is that your view?

REP. SANCHEZ: Clearly under the laws that the Congress has set and that the Supreme Court under its prior rulings he has broken the law. I mean, that’s where we are.

GREGORY: You’d like to see him brought to justice here in the United States?

REP. SANCHEZ: I am very worried about what else he has and what else he may put out there. I am worried about our national security.

GREGORY: Chairman, let me bring you in on this. Senator Schumer saying this morning that there are some indication that Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, had advanced knowledge of Snowden’s flight and his travel plans. What are the ramifications of that if it’s true?

REP. ROGERS: You know I– it wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t have information to that effect, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Putin has been playing a thorn in the world’s side in Syria. We think that they may not be playing honest with their adherence to the nuclear treaty. They’re very aggressive around the world trying to regain their influence. They’ve modernized their nuclear fleet. Listen, Russia is a country that wants to get back on the world stage and I don’t think they really care if they do it in a way that’s in the best interest of good citizenship around the world. This shouldn’t surprise us. They have a very aggressive intelligence operation in the United States. I’m sure they would love to have a little bit of coffee and a few conversations with Mister Snowden. That’s why this is so serious and why we need to be so aggressive about making sure that people understand the difference between somebody who betrays their country and gives secrets away that will protect American lives at the expense for whatever he hopes to gain in the company of the Russians, in the– in company of the Chinese Intelligence Services, in the company of what you can only imagine is Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services, as well.

GREGORY: Senator Durbin, Howard Dean, a progressive, who ran for president, of course at a time when there were progressives meeting out west this weekend in the Netroots conference. He said something on Thursday that I want to show and get your reaction too. This is about what the president ought to do. He said, “I think the American people are willing to give us some privacy– give up some privacy in exchange for safety, but I think the president has to essentially ask our permission… This reason this country works is because we are governed with the consent of the governed… I think the American people support the president, but he’s got to go on television and explain what the program is, why he thinks we need it, and what it has accomplished.” Do you think the president needs to do more now to keep Americans onboard with what we’re doing?

SEN. DURBIN: Well, the president’s already started that. He had the first meeting with the Civil Liberties Oversight Board which has that specific responsibility within the federal government. There should be more activity, more statements by the president, and engage the public. To go back to Senator Coburn’s point, I never said that they had access to the conversations, only to the phone records. But it’s still a significant piece of information about each of us. David, we live in a world where people are tweeting every random thought that comes into their head and going to Facebook every night and disclosing things about their personal lives. We are sacrificing giving up voluntarily our privacy, the public sector and private sector gathering information which could limit our privacy. And it’s time for a national conversation, where should we draw these lines?

GREGORY: I want to switch gears. I’ve just got a couple of minutes left. Again, I appreciate you all bearing with me the fact that this breaking news has come up. But Senator Coburn, let me get your views on immigration right now at a critical time, as we’re heading toward a vote, as the Senate is moving on this, the House will take it up, what do you think in the end we’re going to end up with, if anything, on immigration reform?

SEN. COBURN: Well, my hope would be that we have a cogent border security plan, that we solve the– the difficulty of those living in the shadows, that they can come out, and that we don’t ask the American people to trust us but we actually put out a cogent plan that actually solves the problem–border with walls but also with doors, much like Reagan had espoused, and a way to where we continue this grand experiment where we have a mix of everybody coming here to better their families, better our country, and secure and enhance both their freedom and ours.

GREGORY: Congresswoman, is whatever’s being debated on terms of border security in the Senate, is it enough to affect what’s going to happen in the house? If you look at the experience of the farm bill here, are you going to be able to overcome conservative opposition to the idea of reform in a pathway to citizenship to get meaningful reform?

REP. SANCHEZ: Well, that’s really Speaker Boehner’s job to get his votes out of his conference. But I believe if you’re going to look at 30 billion dollars more into border security, I mean, that’s– that’s not been put aside, this whole issue of border security, because we’ll have the money to do that. The whole issue that’s it’s an economic drain, we just found out this week, hey, it’s about 900 billion dollars in the positive. So I believe from three standpoints, we need to get this done and now is the time. We need to get it done from a homeland security perspective, we need to get it done because it’s better for our economy, and we need to get it done because it’s about traditional American family values, keeping our families together. These are families that are deacons in our church, PTA moms, little league coaches. They are part of our American fabric, already.

GREGORY: All right. We’re going to leave it there. Again, I appreciate it. Other topics that I wanted to cover including the economy and more on immigration, but we’ve run out of time and, especially, with this Snowden news. Chairman, Congresswoman, thank you. Senators, thank you both. Look forward to having you back on soon to talk about some of these other issues. We’re going to come back here with our political roundtable. It’s been a rough ride for the president of late to have these controversies surrounding the IRS and, obviously, the NSA surveillance stories just to name a few. And we’re only five months past the inauguration. Is this second term now starting to slip away? We’re going to talk about the politics with our roundtable, Former Press Secretary for the President, Robert Gibbs; Republican Strategist, Mike Murphy; the Democratic Mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed; Former Chair and CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina; and NBC’s chief White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd here, as well. We’re coming back right after this.

(Announcements)

GREGORY: The president’s approval rating takes a dip, and Speaker John Boehner suffers a surprising defeat this week. Coming up, the leadership challenges for both men as Washington prepares to take on one of the biggest issues yet, immigration reform.

Plus, are we closer to being able to use one of these on flights during takeoff and landings? We’ll talk about it with our roundtable after this brief commercial break.

ANNOUNCER: Now, it’s your turn to bring something to the table. Viewer’s today’s question. Weigh in now at Facebook.com/meetthepress.

(Announcements)

GREGORY: We are back with all this breaking news about Edward Snowden with our roundtable. Joining me, the Former White House Press Secretary, now NBC News political contributor Robert Gibbs; Republican Strategist, Mike Murphy; the Democratic Mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed; Former Chair and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina; and our NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd. Welcome to all of you. Chuck, this is something of an embarrassment and certainly a concern for this administration that thought it had an extradition– an agreement worked out.

MR. CHUCK TODD (Political Director, NBC News/Chief White House Correspondent, NBC News): It is and when you’re hearing Pete’s reporting about what happened in this diplomatic back and forth with Hong Kong, this is clearly a– the– the U.S. government is kind of have to figure out, is there going to be retribution against Hong Kong, what is that that’s going to– what is the fallout over that? And let’s not pretend the minute now that he’s in Moscow and the– and the way he’s going to go, he is not coming back anytime soon. And the ability to get that done, I mean, I saw firsthand this relationship between the United States and Russia specifically between President Obama and President Putin, it’s– it’s– it’s cheap to say it’s cold war-like…

GREGORY: Mm-Hm.

MR. TODD: …but it’s cold. It is a relationship that is chilly. So the idea that somehow Moscow is going to be cooperative with United States and the U.S. government wants– wants an (Unintelligible). It’s not going to happen. And in– in many ways, Putin always looks for little ways that he can stick a thumb in the U.S. government’s eyes and– and Obama’s eyes and this is a little way to do it.

GREGORY: Robert Gibbs, you have been in the middle of these kind of delicate situations before when you were inside the White House. Not a lot of great options right now as…

MR. ROBERT GIBBS (White House Press Secretary, 2009-2011/Former Senior Adviser, Obama 2012 Re-election Campaign/NBC News Political Contributor): No.

GREGORY: …you have somebody who is perhaps going to a place that it would be difficult to get him from and who is working with journalists like Glenn Greenwald and others to put out information that will continue to shed light on these programs and push the debate.

MR. GIBBS: Yeah. There is no question these are– are a lot of bad options. And as Chuck said, I don’t think landing in Havana or Caracas is going to increase our likelihood that Mister Snowden will be flying on a government plane back to the United States anytime soon. I think to build off of what Senator Durbin said, I think, you know, it is incumbent upon this administration and this White House to have a more robust conversation about these programs. I don’t know that this is a huge debate that it’s taking place outside of the beltway, but it is obviously one this morning that’s raging inside the beltway and a greater discussion as much as you can about transparency and about what these programs are and what they aren’t. I will say you have– you listen to a lot of the coverage and you would think we had literally millions and millions of FBI agents listening to every single call that every single American is making. That’s simply not true.

GREGORY: Mm-Hm.

MR. GIBBS: And I think having that discussion actively with the American people is an important thing to do.

GREGORY: You know, part of the tactics of this and part of the debate is frankly around journalism. And Glenn Greenwald referenced it when I asked him a question about whether he should or will face charges, which has been raised. And, you know, I want to acknowledge there is a– a debate on Twitter that goes on online about this even as we are speaking and here’s what Greenwald has tweeted after this appearance this morning, “Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?” And I want to directly take that on because this is the problem with somebody who claims that he is a journalist, would object to a journalist raising questions which is not actually embracing any particular point of view. And that’s part of the tactics of the debate here when, in fact, lawmakers have questioned him. There is a question about his role in this, The Guardian’s role in all of this. It is actually part of the debate rather than going after the questioner, he could take on the issues and he had an opportunity to do that here on– on MEET THE PRESS. What is journalism, Mike Murphy, and what is appropriate is actually part of this debate?

MR. MIKE MURPHY (Republican Strategist): Absolutely. And the great irony to me in all this is so-called whistleblower can only go to almost rogue nations to hide, because then with this rule of law, he’d get extradited. He’s a felony. He’s a fugitive. It’s a bad sign for Hong Kong that has built an image of having its own independence from the PRC with its own system of law. That’s up in smoke today and that’s going to have repercussions in our relationship, I think, with the Chinese. So we’ll see what happens. He may wind up on the run in Caracas, but it’s clear he’s a felony and a fugitive and he will not have a good life now.

GREGORY: Kasim Reed, mayor of Atlanta, you’re outside the beltway dealing with issues like the economy and– and government regulation and implementation of Obamacare.

MR. KASIM REED (Mayor of Atlanta, GA): Yes.

GREGORY: But you’ve got and you heard it from Glenn Greenwald this morning, you’re hearing it from Edward Snowden, they want to keep a debate alive to get people focused on what they believe is not just controversial but actual abuse.

MR. REED: Well, here’s where we are. What we know is we have a president that wants to have a path for law-abiding citizens to be removed from this process. Listen, all of these members of Congress, put a bill on the floor. All of the chatter and debate that we’ve been listening to can be addressed by putting a bill on the floor, but the reason that people won’t put a bill on the floor is because with that bill would come responsibility. And the fact of the matter is both presidents, Bush and Obama, have done a pretty significant job, strong job of keeping this country safe. If you’re the House– House member or senator that puts a bill on the floor to address these issues, you know what, you’re going to own it.

GREGORY: Right.

MR. REED: And if you think of how the country felt on the day of the Boston bombings, that horrific incident, amplify that times 25 or 50, which are the number of terrorist incidents that we have been able to interrupt because of these kind of programs. So they need to be reined in, but these folks there making all these commentaries from– from the cheap seats, should put a bill on the floor.

GREGORY: Carly Fiorina, you know, I think the point is important because what Congress has failed to do is actually have the guts to have a debate. If you want to debate these things, then don’t pass the Patriot Act in perpetuity, don’t give the president authority to wage a military campaign without coming back and saying, hey, maybe we ought to review this. But Mike Hayden, who ran the NSA, was on this program last week, and he made the point that there has– these programs cannot operate in the dark. They have to be politically sustainable. And here’s what he said last week that I thought was quite interesting. We’ll show it to you.

(Videotape; 16 June 2013)

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN (Ret. Former NSA Director/Former CIA Director): I think it’s living in this kind of a democracy we’re going to have to be a little bit less effective in order to be a little bit more transparent to get to do anything to defend the American people.

(End videotape)

GREGORY: Your thoughts.

MS. CARLY FIORINA (Former Chair & CEO, Hewlett-Packard/Founder & Chair, Good360): Well, Mike Hayden was a great NSA leader and he’s a great friend, and I agree with both him and the Mayor. I think there is a moment of opportunity here. When we get past the specific of Edward Snowden, there is a moment of bipartisan opportunity to step back and say, how is it that we should be holding these vast complicated agencies accountable? I actually think the IRS and the NSA scandal have something in common. Whatever you think, you don’t need to think the president politically motivated the IRS and you don’t need to be against the NSA program to raise the profound question of when you have such vast bureaucracies. How do we hold them accountable? How does Congress meet its oversight responsibility? How do the American people come to trust government again knowing that big bureaucracies actually are held in check somehow and we have a way of determining that the people who work in them are not abusing power but are competent and ethical? That’s an important debate to have.

GREGORY: Chuck– Chuck, your comment on this, also this– the Glenn Greenwald issue and the journalism debate that’s underway this morning.

MR. TODD: Well, first of all, we’ve changed culturally. There is a culture of transparency. We live with it now, social media. There is this expectation particularly with a certain generation that we should know more. And the government has been slow. Government institutions have been slow to respond to that. So I think that they have to– when the– when the– when the country changes culturally, government should respond to the cultural change in that– in the country and when it comes to transparency and when it comes to what the government’s doing, how much information we as a– as a governed people expect to have, we expect to have more information, not less. We expect this so I think that’s a case where the president in particular, but Congress has also failed to sort of respond to the country culturally. This issue of– of journalism and whistleblowers, you know, I’m hesitant, you know, on one hand, I do– I do think that the– the Justice Department was overbearing on what they did with a– with a number of these folks, what they did at the Associated Press, what they did to Snowden. And I’ve– I’ve had people who are uncomfortable having phone conversations now with different sources, even on the– the smallest of levels. So in that respect I understand the– the skittishness on the other hand. On the other hand, you know, Glenn Greenwald, you know, how much was he involved in the plot? It’s one thing as a source, but what– what was his role– did he have a role beyond simply being a receiver of this information? And is he going to have to answer those questions? You know, there is– there is– there is a point of law. He’s a lawyer, I mean, he attacked the premise of your question. He didn’t answer it.

MR. MURPHY: Yeah, and the one thing I was saying that– two big points to this. One, it’s never been easier in human history to be a whistleblower than now…

GREGORY: Right.

MR. MURPHY: …like departments of whistleblowing. So the– I know, there’s not a legitimate path to hear these grievances, but I think the other point people have to understand…

MR. TODD: I disagree that– that the path within government stinks. It is not a protected path.

MR. MURPHY: Well, I– we disagree on that.

MR. TODD: I don’t think it’s great.

MR. MURPHY: The digital world has changed everything. The internet is an incredibly effective tool for terrorists and outlaws. So it’s not surprising that the security side of the state is trying to compete with that. So people have to understand the miracle of being able to send your cat photo around the world in a nanosecond and having all your information online, changes everything. And government is struggling with how to not let that be a free channel for bad people to use as a tool and on the other hand not be, you know, ubiquitous in– in shattering privacy. It’s a very complicated debate because of the digital revolution.

GREGORY: Robert, one of the things that– that Chuck and his team wrote on First Read this morning is about the– the notion of being leaderless in Washington. And one of the struggles for the leader of the government, the president, is finding his voice on this. I mean, he has spoken, but rather cryptically about the– the utility of these programs and his view about it. Is that a problem?

MR. GIBBS: Well, one, it is hard to talk about these programs without being in some ways cryptic because…

GREGORY: Sure.

MR. GIBBS: …as you– as you heard Michael Hayden talk about, as the more transparency that we give– and we do need to give a necessary amount in order to sustain these programs politically and in public opinion, but you have to be careful as to not just talk about what Mike talked about, which is give terrorists basically the playbook for how we’re monitoring their communications. But, you know, I– I think it is– it is important to have this debate. We do have to have something that in the end comes out of this that is– that is politically sustainable. And, you know, you saw it beginning this week with the current head of the NSA talking about the plots that have been disrupted. I do think, again, an honest conversation about what is and what isn’t being collected so that, like I said, I don’t turn on the TV and I hear people talk about they literally– there must be the millions and millions of FBI agents that are listening to every single phone call in this country. Not only is that…

MR. TODD: Congress have done that.

MS. FIORINA: Well, I…

MR. TODD: And you’re responsible…

MR. GIBBS: But not only is that not…

MR. MURPHY: But a lot of them (Unintelligible) agents.

MR. GIBBS: Right. But not only is that not happening, it’s incapable of happening.

MS. FIORINA: I do think one of the reasons it’s important to step back and kind of begin to talk about some of these profound questions, distrust is created when people can’t square the circle. So on the one hand, you hear people say, oh, we’ve disrupted 50 terrorist plots, and on the other hand Boston happens, we were warned about this person twice, and yet somehow that occurred. And we know that terrorists get on the internet all the time and get a how-to book to do all kinds of things. So I think people are having trouble reconciling what appears to be a lot of oversight with something like Boston. And in the end, as we all know, it’s human nature. If you don’t know something, you assume the worst. The American people have woken up to the fact that they don’t know a whole lot about…

GREGORY: Right.

MS. FIORINA: …what government is involved in.

GREGORY: Let– let me do this– let me do this. Let me…

MR. REED: …bought to justice in five days.

MS. FIORINA: But they also killed and wounded many.

MR. REED: No– absolutely, but over a ten-year period, I would take the– take the hand that the United States has had and the diligence that law enforcement has displayed since 9/11 and it is essential to Americans that when– when something terrible like that happens, those individuals be brought to justice.

MS. FIORINA: I agree.

MR. REED: All of these– all of these– all of these measures were necessary as it relates to Boston.

MS. FIORINA: I agree with you.

GREGORY: Let me get a quick– well, let me do this. I got to get a break in here. I want to come back with our roundtable, talk about the immigration fight.

Also another big story this weekend, Paula Deen–her apology, what it means for her future after using racist language. We’re back with our roundtable right after this.

(Announcements)

GREGORY: We have a live picture from Moscow. A media spectacle there now as the flight that believes– believed to have Edward Snowden on it is being greeted by, you know, people waiting for the flight but also journalists as this will be an evolving story about Snowden’s arrival in Moscow, where he eventually goes and one that will be getting a lot of attention as we move forward. Chuck Todd, yes the other question that’s going to be getting a lot of attention as we move forward is, what’s happening on Capitol Hill this week over immigration and whether, in fact, reform is really at hand and what we end up with in the end?

MR. TODD: I have been one of these people that says oh don’t pay attention to all the chatter that immigration could get killed in the House, it may not get through the House. Then once the Senate gets 70-plus votes it will move its way. And then watching the debacle on the foreign bill, watching Speaker Boehner bring a bill– the entire leadership bring a bill to the floor that they thought they had the votes for and they couldn’t do it, I do– you know, and it goes through this point you were bringing up with Robert, which is this– I saw the president overseas essentially neutered, inability to do really much on Syria, not– there isn’t this sense of urgency, how do you get Russia to move off of its support of Assad and sort of this stalemate that’s going there, inability to use the platform of as leader of the free world there, watching the speaker of the House, totally not being able to lead the House. Well, it makes you wonder how does immigration get the through? The Senate is working. Senate’s a lonely, tiny little body here that seems to be working with some sort of diligence here. They’re going to get something through. I still think it will get 70 to 75 votes. I’m no longer believing that it can get through the House.

GREGORY: Well, that’s– I mean, you know, Lindsey Graham on this program last week, Mike, was saying it’s a death spiral for the GOP if they don’t get reform done. But there are a lot of people in the House who might be willing to take him on on that.

MR. MURPHY: Yeah. No, look, I’ve been a fanatic for this issue for a long time. I’m a huge supporter of immigration reform and now the bill has been kind of loaded up with this border surge, which is a political maneuver, an expensive one, to try to get it through the conservative wing in the House and its dicey. I’m hoping it passes because I’m tired of watching democratic inaugurations in Washington, but it could very well fail.

MR. GIBBS: Leaving aside the irony that to get conservatives to support immigration reform, we should double the size of a government bureaucracy in the Border Patrol. But I do think one of the things that Mike and many Republicans that are supportive of this are going to have to face is the reality of if this dies in the House with this huge amount of border security in it, they’re going to have really tough conversations with Latinos and Hispanics about what this party stands for, do they really want people to come out of the shadows.

GREGORY: Hold on. Let– I just want to get Mayor– Mayor Reed in on something with Paula Deen. Again, an abrupt switch– switching of gears, but a big story this weekend–Paula Deen, of course, the– the Food Channel has been (Unintelligible) apologizing for using the N-word in the past, really a– a– a debacle here from your– from your home state, what do you make of it?

MR. REED: Well, one, I want to remind folks that if the president hadn’t been re-elected, we wouldn’t be having a debate about immigration. We’d be on to something else. So I don’t think he’s been neutered. But regarding Paula Deen, I just think it’s very unfortunate. What she’s basically said is she used language from her childhood and growing up in the past, but we all have to change. So I think folks are going to be hearing what she has to say over the next few weeks. I think she has apologized once– she’s going to continue to do that. But it is very unfortunate and totally unacceptable language.

GREGORY: All right. We’ll take another break here. Come back in just a moment.

(Announcements)

GREGORY: That is all for today. I want to thank everybody very much. You can watch this week’s PRESS Pass conversation with economist and author Jeffrey Sachs on his new book To Move the World about John F. Kennedy’s push for peace with the Soviet Union during the last year of his presidency. That is on our blog MeetThePressNBC.com. We will be back next week. If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.