12/22/16 – Marcy Wheeler on HPSCI’s deeply flawed report on Edward Snowden – The Scott Horton Show

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So they're smearing Ed Snowden on Twitter this morning.
So I thought I'd get Marcy Wheeler on the line.
Hi, Marcy.
How are you doing?
Hey, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us today.
And I won't keep you too long here.
And I know that, actually, when it comes to Snowden, your angle is much more explaining to us how this XKeyscore thing works and all this and that, the real substantive stuff, as opposed to all the gossip about Snowden and what he's supposedly up to.
On the other hand, you're really bright and they're lying about him and you're on the case already.
So might as well take you a little bit off your usual beaten path here.
This new House Intelligence Committee report, well, it says a lot of things.
But one of the things that it says is that Snowden has had contact with the Russians and he continues to have contact with Russian intelligence services.
But then, jeez, most of the rest is blacked out other than a reference to a claim by a Russian politician that, in fact, that's the case.
What can you tell us about this?
Well, the Russian politician has been questioned elsewhere.
And the underlying...
I mean, first of all, this is not a new report.
It was released in summary form kind of in September.
And it was laughably bad even then.
And now we get to see more details.
And it hasn't gotten any better.
I mean, there's stuff like I've spent five minutes on it and I can already see places where either HPSE was given an incorrect date, which would be highly misleading, or where HPSE couldn't get basic dates correct.
So it's clear that the people who did this report are for whatever reason, and I've written in the past about how this report was set up to not give HPSE a direct understanding of what happened.
It's great.
HPSE is the House committee.
Oh, yeah.
HPSE, sorry, House Intelligence Committee who did this report.
So it's clear that this, I mean, as I said, I've written in the past about how this entire report was scoped to ensure that HPSE was only getting mediated answers.
And that's even more clear now because we can see obvious errors in the text.
We can see passages that are completely redacted that have already been declassified.
So I think if you could see a completely unclassified copy of this report, it would be really clear either that HPSE does really shoddy work or that NSA is lying to HPSE, one or the other.
And so I think that's how to look at the foreign intelligence thing.
Yeah, Snowden lives in Russia and therefore it is quite likely the FSB follows him around.
And he has a lawyer who has ties to the FSB, that's known.
And to be honest, that is not a good look, right?
That is problematic.
But the intelligence community has also consistently said that they have no evidence that Snowden is actually working for Russia.
And so what the government does, what people like HPSE do is kind of latch on to public reports of somebody saying something casually who doesn't know and using that to implicate Snowden.
There may be evidence there, but thus far their utter lack of ability to show any evidence, even in what was originally a classified document, kind of says it's not there.
Well, you know, I actually should have, I should see if I can find the clip and have the wife translate it because in Snowden's interview with Katie Couric from what, a week or two ago, she asked him about that statement by the Russian politician.
And he said, actually, that's a bad translation.
I mean, basically what he said was that he assumes that I must be or whatever, but not that he really knows anything like that.
Right.
That's what I've seen as well.
I mean, I don't, you know, but don't get the wife to translate it until she's done translating what I want her to translate.
You guys take care of your business.
Get in line, buddy.
I asked her first.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
You know, it's just the absence of evidence in some of these places is pretty remarkable because if this is the best they can do, I mean, don't get me wrong.
There are clearly programs that the NSA relied on that were compromised by Snowden.
And, you know, things like telling us that the NSA has been compromising encryption, that surely sucked for the NSA.
That surely sucked for the NSA, but it's also a really important disclosure to make.
And so that's important to remember.
Right.
Revealing that, you know, there's a really important story.
A New Zealand activist who literally was about democracy promotion in Fiji was spied on under PRISM. That's an important fact to know.
It's important to know that many of the U.S.'s top Muslim community leaders, not even political, were also spied on.
I'm sure that counts as a compromise to the NSA.
But you know what?
It's really important for us to know.
Right.
And of course, what's most important here is that what was not in there were a bunch of lists of names of spies around the world to be rolled up and executed in this kind of thing, which is basically kind of how they portrayed it.
Like this was costing American lives.
The same thing they did with Chelsea Manning.
Blood on your hands, blood on your hands, and that kind of thing.
And that sort of emotionalism obscures the actual questions of, well, just what did he reveal?
Is it possible that he could reveal the way that they're violating your rights and my rights without, you know, yes, cluing in the Chinese and the Russians to a couple of facts, too.
But I mean, what's the other side of that argument?
That it could never be worth it to reveal to us how they're violating our rights when supposedly they're our servants?
Right.
Right.
I mean, you know, and there's one other key detail that people should keep in mind as they read this.
You know, again, as I as I pointed out in September, when when this when the summary of this first came out, the the HPSE defaults in a number of places to what it got in briefings from the Defense Intelligence Agency, as opposed to what the IC, after learning more, later used as an approach for doing damage assessments from Snowden.
So in other words, a DIA said, let's think of the worst case scenario.
But the IC as a whole said, let's think about what's realistic.
Well, the first one used as a number for to describe how many files Snowden had taken, anything he possibly saw, including documents that earlier in his in his time at the NSA, it was his job to move them from Maryland to Hawaii.
So in other words, anything he ever touched, they assume he took.
And I think you're saying, which is fair enough, if your job on the inside of the government is to be paranoid about what may he have disclosed, what all code names do we have to change these kinds of things.
But you're just saying it's not quite fair to then make that the basis of all your public accusations against the guy when it's far from what you can prove.
The person who who who chose to pursue that approach is Mike Flynn, General Mike Flynn, the new national security adviser, the new national security adviser to Donald Trump, who every journalist out there now agrees is crazy, is is you know, he's also meeting with Putin and Nazis and yada, yada, yada as well.
But people just think he's people agree now that he is crazy, yet they are kind of unquestioningly replicating analysis from this report that we know comes from him.
So in other words, it's like he's crazy when it serves their purposes to bash Trump, but he's completely sane when their purposes are to bash Snowden.
Right.
You know, I admit I like to cite him when it's that DIA memo from August of 2012 saying, hey, look, we're accidentally helping to create an Islamic state, everybody.
True.
Absolutely true.
I mean, which is, by the way, when he was sharing classified information with other people, but whatever, you know, but he is, as any number of profiles have written since he's paranoid, he believes whatever he declares are the facts are the facts.
He believes what Michael Ledeen tells him.
Right.
And so when you're reading this report, stuff that is sourced to DIA, you should in your head say, did Michael Ledeen tell him that?
And for those who don't know, Michael Ledeen got us into the Iraq war key player in that, you know, he's so and totally not completely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
So.
So some of this report is based on what a complete and total nut has to say about Snowden and somebody who is a known paranoiac freak.
So keep that in mind.
I mean, there are things in here and I think they should be taken seriously that the general I.C. argues, although, as I said, you know, it's clear hipsies either got told bad information or isn't very good at its work.
So you shouldn't trust it blindly.
And I'm going to read this and everyone can read my what I write on it.
But but yeah, it's there are there are many reasons on top of the the long list of ones that Bart Gelman gave in September when this report first came out and that I gave and other people gave.
There are a long list of reasons why this report is is dodgy.
And let me mention here your your previous article from September and children, put your fingers in your ears for a second.
It's called Why Hipsy Snowden Report.
No.
Why is Hipsy Snowden Report so inexcusably shitty?
And that is that empty wheel dot net from September the 19th, 2016.
And just to zero in on that, because there are a lot of reasons, as you cite the one point five million is an important one.
But, you know, a lot of reasons that you cite to to be skeptical or to really, as you just said, you know, to show how sloppy the accusations and so-called investigation is here.
But specifically on the Russia thing, to be, you know, devil's advocate as best as possible kind of thing.
And do you think that, you know, there's any kind of percent chance 10 or five or 25 that Snowden actually has compromised American secrets directly to the Russian agencies as like in the accusations as, for example, you know, payback for them giving him asylum there in the country, at least temporarily?
It's unlike I mean, look, a we know that a Canadian spy already handed a lot of this stuff to Russia the year he was he was prosecuted the year before Snowden.
So Russia already had a lot of this stuff.
In all of the DNC hack stories, and the shadow brokers releases, there's actually good reason to believe that that would seem to reinforce Snowden's point rather than this kind of blind claim that he was giving stuff to Putin.
And, you know, so I'm not really answering your question.
I think we should not dismiss the claims out of hand.
It is impossible for somebody like Snowden to live in Russia and not have him under the constant watch of the FSB.
That's reality.
I mean, but the equivalent person here in the United States would be under the constant watch of FBI and CIA, right?
But, but, but thus far, the argument that he shared all of the documents that he gave to to to grant Glenn Greenwald, thus far, there's actually a remarkable lack of evidence to that case.
And so I think that's how we should approach it that it's sort of surprising.
They don't have evidence now after three years.
Yeah.
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Well, and, you know, I don't know if this is just sort of a category thing, subjective in my own mind or what, but it does kind of seem like the accusations against Snowden here are just kind of part and parcel with whatever the right wing mythology of the day is that never necessarily has any kind of basis.
In fact, if you know, whether it's Obama birtherism or whatever the hell it is, hey, everybody, this is how you signal that you're part of the right wing consensus is, you know, that Snowden is a bad guy and that he must have given this stuff to Russia and China.
As far as I know, nobody but John Schindler, the raving loon, is that allowed?
Tries to even really demonstrate this in any way.
Oh, yeah.
No.
Dan Murphy from the Christian Science Monitor as well, you know, loves to argue this point, but they don't ever really demonstrate anything except to say that, well, geez, he just must have.
And yet, on the other hand, the other side of that argument is, oh, man, I gave everything I had to first to Gelman and then to Greenwald, and then I didn't even have anything when I got on the plane to try to get to Latin America.
I didn't even have anything to give him and I didn't have any relevant passwords.
I didn't have, you know, so I guess they could debrief him about what he knows if he was willing to go along with that.
But he swears he hasn't been willing to go along with that.
He swears that he doesn't even have any actual data to share with them, not even a single thumb drive or anything like that.
It just seems very believable to me, his side of the story, as compared to, come on, everybody, we've decided that we hate this guy.
He's not a whistleblower.
He's a traitor pretending to be a whistleblower.
And it's sort of narrative first and evidence second.
Which, you know, confirmation bias all around.
I'm guilty of it, too.
But yeah, look, I mean, here's the thing is that I read stuff like this.
I read stuff about the Russia hack, which, you know, I believe more than you do that the Russia hack, that it was actually Russia.
Although I'm, you know, always keeping an open mind and I've got, I'm rethinking it sort of.
But regardless, the discussion of these events, of these compromises, always involves a great deal of CYA from the spooks, right?
There was a lot that was going haywire inside NSA.
And so when they go to HPSC and describe to HPSC, they give a story about Snowden, they have to make it as damning as possible about Snowden because otherwise HPSC should buy all rights.
They should anyway.
I mean, one of the, I've just started reading it, but one of the details in there is like, oh, they suggest, I think they say that Snowden used WGET to scrape all the NSA servers.
Well, that's exactly what Chelsea Manning used, right?
Three years earlier.
So what that says, and people should be going, what?
You know, after Chelsea Manning stole hundreds of thousands of documents from defense department computers, Snowden was able to do the same on even more sensitive defense department computers three years later.
And so what that should tell you as citizen is WTF, right?
Like, why is it that, because after Manning, everyone was like, oh my gosh, we have to make sure this never happens again.
We have to prepare.
We have to do everything.
We have to prepare.
And yet in three years time, DOD hadn't even secured its most sensitive computers, right?
And that's, you know, and both, you know, whatever you think about Manning and Snowden, at least they came, you know, you may think they're the worst spies ever, but at least they came out and publicly shared these documents.
We should assume if it was so easy for them, then Russia and China and Iran and Israel and France all have people doing the same, but not telling us about it and, and remaining in the networks, right?
Or somebody like Hal Martin, who stole orders of magnitude, more documents than they accused Snowden of.
But as long as you get me all upset saying, shoot Snowden, that traitor, then I'm not asking these questions about these people at the highest levels of our government, who might as well be traitors.
They're so damn sloppy with all our secrets.
Well, I, you know, look, I think that all their secrets.
Yeah.
And, and a lot, I mean, again, I think this HPSC report is, is remarkable for a lot of the redactions, because I think the redactions would make it easy to show this report is verifiably false.
And that should concern people, because if, if the intelligence community's response to being, to having this, you know, this catastrophic thing happened to them is to CYA, rather than say, make it impossible for somebody else to come in and use WGET three years down the road.
That's a problem.
Like, even if you're the biggest security hawk out there, that's a problem.
And, and that is what I think this report really does.
It doesn't, you know, it may include some damning details from Snowden, although Snowden is already talking about how they invented these claims.
Maybe those are also Mike Flynn claims, because he, because we know he likes to invent stuff.
But, but, but we really need, as a country, to be saying, look, you know, our, our spooks continue to CYA to their, their congressional overseers.
And that's a problem.
That's, that's a real problem.
Well, and especially, you know, as you say here, the role of the committee is to not put up with that kind of stuff.
And yet, instead, they basically just become the spokesman for the executive branch on this stuff.
Right, right.
And, and not just the spokesperson, but, but really the PR people.
And, uh, yeah.
And both parties, too.
If somebody wants to say, well, you know, the Republicans or the Democrats ought to be the check on the other, you talk here about how they got the oversight committee got the full rubber stamp from the whole committee for this piece of crap, right?
Yeah.
And that, that, that really should concern anybody.
I mean, if, if this is the, if this, you know, either they need to tell us why this report is so crummy, or they, or we need to move away from this, uh, totally ineffective means of oversight, because this is shoddy work.
It really, I mean, it was clear that it was shoddy work in September.
It's even more clear now.
And, um, and if this is what counts as oversight of the intelligence community, we're in trouble.
Yep.
Well, and you know, I saw a poll recently that, uh, I don't know the numbers, but Snowden was losing the American people by and large have been convinced that this is a bad guy.
I don't know if they think that he acted, you know, as a traitor out of nefarious purposes, or they think that he just made a terrible judgment call in telling us this stuff.
But, um, it was something like, you know, 65, 25 and whatever the remainder didn't know kind of thing.
Um, it was really bad.
Um, and so that just, it really goes to show the power of, you know, the, I guess the intelligence community, their so-called oversight committees in Congress, our representatives and the media to continue to frame this narrative when, I mean, I don't know, Marcy, is it okay if I ask you to remind us for a minute, just what it was that Snowden revealed about what they were doing, how they were treating our rights back in three years ago, three and a half years ago.
Right.
I mean, people, people like to claim the only thing of worth that's Snowden revealed is that the NSA was getting all the phone records or attempting to get, they still are by the way.
Um, but they were, but they were doing it domestically and in, until 2000, um, until last year, basically that they were going to AT&T and Verizon and say, hand us all your phone records.
Um, now in reality, they weren't getting all because Verizon had found a way not to comply domestically, but they were getting all the same.
I mean, those same records are largely available overseas.
Um, now they have switched and they're getting more records on more innocent Americans that gets dumped into NSA and sloshed around forever.
And, and, you know, then they can be spooked on.
Um, but in addition to that, they, you know, again, lots of spying on Americans overseas, Dianne Feinstein tried to get them to rein that in.
They refused.
Uh, they're chipping away at encryption.
They are, um, the, the way in which they're using prism or section 702, which we've long known about basically means that the FBI can use stuff they've collected without a warrant and go and say, Hey, I wonder where the Somalis live in St. Paul, or, Hey, I wonder what American Chinese American scientists have, have been discussing with, uh, their counterparts in China about science, right?
So they're snooping on these.
We know that they're snooping on these academic conversations, um, using what is supposed to be a foreign intelligence thing targeted at spies.
And they're, they're picking up a lot of Americans, uh, to boot there.
Um, you know, so it's, it's, it's crazy.
Snowden revealed a lot about what is hubris and what is far more extensive spying than needs to take place to protect America.
Um, and you know, people want to make it out to be just that one phone drag net and it, and it's far more.
And, um, you know, the one that I think will really get people, cause this is the one that really gets me where they say for at least five years, the location data of all of our cell phones, which means literally they know when we go into the kitchen to get a pickle and come back to the office again, in my case, uh, or whatever it is, they know whose car you rode in the backseat of and where you went.
Right.
I mean, um, and you know, the question is how much domestic stuff do they get, but it's really, I mean, what people need to know is what they do is they collect all of this data, um, whether it's location data or metadata content, often things like porn videos that you're sending through phone sex on Yahoo.
Um, they're collecting all of that and they have ways of gluing them all together, uh, into say dossiers so that if they one day say that Scott Horton seems like an interesting fellow, they can hit a few buttons and pull all of that together.
And all of a sudden they know about your crazy pickle habit.
And, and that is terrifically scary, um, because it gets, you know, they have so much data and so much information on people, um, just sitting there waiting to decide that they're interested in Scott Horton or Marcy Wheeler.
Well, and we can see from the wars and it all is directly translatable, um, just how willing they are to use this metadata to jump to insane conclusions and then kidnap and or kill people based on them.
That this phone number is connected to this phone number is connected to this phone number.
I mean, if you were just a computer program, you might conclude that all of Marcy's friends know all of Scott's friends or whatever, but that's not true.
These things have nothing to do with each other, but Oh, look, we're linked.
Look at the links.
Oh, and you know, my wife too.
So God knows what the computer thinks of that.
It's just a stupid computer.
It doesn't know anything.
But then, you know, if we're Afghans, here comes the Delta force.
So in, in the American context, here comes the SWAT team, maybe, uh, that kind of thing.
And, and all it is, is, you know, mechanized conspiracy theorizing, really all data, no knowledge.
Right.
And yeah, I mean, it's not like we're winning wars.
It's not like, you know, one of the things that I, that, that is really rich is, um, these attacks that happen increasingly, like in France, uh, the IC knew those guys.
They were, their final conversation before the attack was on Skype.
We know that they can just dial up Microsoft and get Skype content, and yet they didn't prevent the attack.
And so, you know, we really need to start asking what all of this data serves, if for something like the, the, I mean, I'm talking the Bataclan attack, where they had, they knew these guys, they knew they were dangerous.
They knew, they, they knew what kind of communications they were using.
Many of those communications were accessible to the NSA.
So why is it that the NSA didn't stop that attack?
Well, it was because they were busy messing with everybody else and they couldn't tell the difference between what was important and what was new coming in the, the flood.
They're, as, uh, James Bamford wrote in his book back 10 years ago, um, they're drowning in an ocean of data.
They're trying to surf on it, but they just can't.
They're, you know, they're at the bottom of the sea.
They don't know what to make of anything.
So, yeah, expect that to just keep happening and happening.
That's the whole story of Thin Thread.
That's even in the movie of Snowden, right?
Hey, we invented this great program that actually does the job.
No, no, no, that's canceled.
We don't want to do that.
That's not in the interest of the bureaucracy to have it work that way.
Right.
Amazing.
All right.
Hey, listen, you're a great journalist.
I sure appreciate your time on the show, Marcy, as always.
Good to chat with you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler.
She's at EmptyWheel.net.
And again, this one is called Why is HPSCI's Snowden report so inexcusably shitty?
And that is from last September.
And she's got a new one coming out because they released, I guess, before the summary and now the rest of the report, this new house report.
Again, EmptyWheel.net and follow her on Twitter at Empty Wheel as well.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Thanks very much.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and at LibertarianInstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show.
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