The Morning Roar: UN Defends Snowden, Lerner Emails Lead to NSA, and NSA Employees Pass Around Nude Photos
Welcome to your Friday edition of The Morning Roar! Todays' Roar is dedicated to everyone's favorite tyrannical spy agency, the NSA!UN Human Rights Official Defends Edward SnowdenIt's not often we find reason to praise the United Nations, but gosh darn it when someone is right, they're right, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, was spot-on in her defense of Edward Snowden yesterday. Pillay slammed the United States for attempting to prosecute Snowden, and insisted that he should not even face the threat of a trial for the service he has provided to the world, by exposing the NSA's secret, massive, worldwide spying apparatus. Reuters reports:
"Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected, we need them," Pillay told a news conference."I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation," she said. "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information.""As a former judge I know that if he is facing judicial proceedings we should wait for that outcome," she said. But she added that Snowden should be seen as a "human rights defender"."I am raising right here some very important arguments that could be raised on his behalf so that these criminal proceedings are averted," she said.
Everyone is entitled to their "day in court" so to speak, but Edward Snowden, by all accounts, has done nothing criminal. Quite the opposite, he has exposed the criminal activity being undertaken by his own government, at great personal expense to himself, as documented in Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
The House Armed Services Committee has come up with a creative approach to look for emails from embattled former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner that were apparently lost in a computer crash: they're asking the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department.The panel approved a resolution Wednesday authored by Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, that directs the Secretary of Defense to send the House of Representatives "copies of any electronic communication in the possession of the Secretary, the Director of the National Security Agency, or any office that reports to the Secretary or the Director that was transmitted to or from any electronic mail account(s) used by former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner at any time between January 1, 2009, and April 30, 2011."The IRS said last month that it could not locate many emails sent and received by Lerner - the official at the heart of the controversy over the agency's targeting of conservative groups - because her computer crashed in 2011. They were ultimately able to generate 24,000 emails from 2009 to 2011 by finding message where she had copied other employees.The resolution hopes that perhaps the NSA - which apparently collected as many as 56,000 emails and other communications from Americans who had no connection to terrorism prior to 2013 - might have picked up some of the lost communications.
First I praise a UN Commissioner, and now the House Armed Services Committee? Maybe I'm a statist after all!This idea really does a great service to highlight government abuses at all levels. If the IRS can't find the emails, it certainly stands to reason that the NSA, with it's massive spying apparatus, should have no problem finding them at all. Or, perhaps they will claim that they can't release them to protect sweet little Lois Lerner's privacy, as they did with their refusal to release Edward Snowden's own internal emails expressing his concerns over spying abuses.NSA Employees Routinely Pass Around Intercepted Nude PhotosIt wouldn't be right to dedicate The Morning Roar to the NSA without some words from NSA whistleblower-extraordinaire, Edward Snowden. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden revealed one of the "perks" of being an NSA analyst:
"You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they're extremely attractive.“So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and show their co-worker. The co-worker says: ‘Hey that's great. Send that to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George and George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It's never reported. Nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communications stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in a government database?”
This one goes out to the "nothing to hide" crowd. Just because you aren't a terrorist or criminal, does not mean that you have "nothing to hide." Everybody has private emails or photos that they don't want the rest of the world to see. That's why we have passwords and personal devices in the first place, not just one public digital bulletin board for our personal thoughts and exchanges.So next time you defend NSA spying, think about the 22 year old kid passing around pictures of your wife/daughter/sister, and then tell me again whether you have "nothing to hide."Read The Morning Roar every weekday Monday-Friday!The Lions of Liberty are on Twitter, Facebook & Google+Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!
