- Spitfire List - https://spitfirelist.com -

FTR #771 The Adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook, Part 13: Beware of Libertarians Bearing Gifts (1934 Coup Attempt Redux)

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. [1] (The flash dri­ve includes the anti-fas­cist books avail­able on this site.)

Lis­ten: MP3

Side 1 [2]  Side 2 [3]

CORRECTION: On Side 1, Mort Sahl’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy is mis­tak­en­ly referred to as “Home­land.” The cor­rect title is Heart­land.

Intro­duc­tion: In this pro­gram, we explore “L’Af­faire Snow­den” as a step toward bring­ing about the end of The New Deal, in effect ful­fill­ing the 1934 coup attempt [4] against Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt [5].

We also under­score the sedi­tious, neo-seces­sion­ist nature of the forces embod­ied in Eddie the Friend­ly Spook.

Excerpt­ing some of Snowden’s 2009 online musings–crafted dur­ing the same time peri­od in which he decid­ed to leak NSA documents–gives us insight into his true nature. We’ve men­tioned Snowden’s embrace of the gold stan­dard, belief that we should elim­i­nate Social Secu­rity and deep affin­ity for Ron Paul. Per­haps exam­in­ing his actu­al pro­nounce­ments will prove edu­ca­tion­al.

EXAMPLE:  “. . . Snow­den wrote that the elder­ly ‘wouldn’t be fuck­ing help­less if you weren’t send­ing them fuck­ing checks to sit on their ass and lay in hos­pi­tals all day.’ ”

Snow­den is a nasty lit­tle fas­cist and peo­ple should care­fully con­sider the rest of his behav­ior in the con­text of his ide­o­log­i­cal pro­nounce­ments.

After exam­in­ing Eddie Snow­den, Unplugged, we take a look at some of Cit­i­zen Green­wald’s polit­i­cal utter­ances. (“Cit­i­zen Green­wald” is our nick­name for Glenn Green­wald, whom we strong­ly sus­pect is a spook, just like Snow­den.)

We have dis­cussed Cit­i­zen Greenwald’s legal work [6], in which he spent years run­ning legal inter­fer­ence [7] for Nazi mur­der­ers and doing most of the work pro bono [8]. One of his legal vic­to­ries involved aid­ing two white suprema­cists [9] who had attacked two Lati­no day labor­ers.

In the past, Cit­i­zen Green­wald has had some deeply inflam­ma­tory things to say in the past con­cern­ing “ille­gal immi­grants.” [10] We won­der if his stat­ed views on the evils of ille­gal immi­gra­tion might be relat­ed to his work defend­ing the attack­ers of the day labor­ers.

In his intem­per­ate remarks about immi­grants (which he lat­er uncon­vinc­ingly recant­ed), Green­wald also defend­ed for­mer Col­orado con­gress­man Tom Tan­credo, a fel­low trav­eler of some noto­ri­ous white suprema­cists. [11]

Tancredo’s asso­ciates include Don Black, David Duke asso­ciate and cre­ator of the Storm­front web­site. Black is among the numer­ous white suprema­cist and Nazi asso­ciates of Edward Snowden’s Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of choice, Ron Paul. [12] Tancredo’s fel­low trav­el­ers also include mem­bers of the neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment and the League of the South, also net­work­ing ele­ments of Ron Paul.

Fol­low­ing dis­cus­sion of Tan­cre­do, we exam­ine more of the same neo-Con­fed­er­ate, neo-seces­sion­ist ele­ments that are part and par­cel to the Snow­den milieu.

very impor­tant sto­ry [13] high­lights what we feel is a major thrust of the psy-op for which Edward Snow­den–the Peach Fuzz Fas­cist [14]–is fronting. A right-wing lib­er­tar­ian polit­i­cal milieu is work­ing to have states cut-off elec­tric­ity to the NSA, this in response to the Snow­den dis­clo­sures.

As the authors of the sto­ry note: “The bill is root­ed in a the­ory that, in James Madison’s words, would speed­ily put an end to the Union itself. [15] More imme­di­ately, it could empow­er con­ser­v­a­tive state law­mak­ers to cut off Medicare, Med­ic­aid or Social Secu­rity, to frus­trate civ­il rights enforce­ment or even to pre­vent fed­eral law enforce­ment from inves­ti­gat­ing crim­i­nals.”

Advanced by the Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter, the leg­is­la­tion; “pos­es a seri­ous threat to that lib­eral touch­stone, a fed­eral reg­u­la­tory and wel­fare state equal to the prob­lems of grow­ing cor­po­rate pow­er and pover­ty.

Not sur­pris­ingly, the Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter [16] heav­ily over­laps ele­ments asso­ci­ated with the League of the South and the neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment. Those ele­ments, in turn, are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Lud­wig von Mis­es Insti­tute [17], the“Paulis­tin­ian Lib­er­tar­ian Orga­ni­za­tion” [12] and The Peach Fuzz Fas­cist him­self [Snow­den]. As not­ed above, Cit­i­zen Green­wald [7] has defend­ed birds of the same feath­er [18].

Next, we note the RNC’s intent to sup­port the move against the NSA [19], using it as a vehi­cle for fur­ther under­min­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. [20] (In FTR #762 [21], we exam­ined the Snow­den actions as a desta­bi­liza­tion oper­a­tion against the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.)

Much of the pro­gram fur­ther high­lights the pro­found links between Wik­iLeaks and the Snow­den “op.”

We also dis­cuss Snow­den’s alle­ga­tions of NSA spy­ing on Siemens [22], itself deeply con­nect­ed to Ger­man intel­li­gence, as well as Snow­den’s attack on the Five Eyes alliance [23], to which Angela Merkel is seek­ing admis­sion.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Tom Tan­cre­do’s links to the Tea Par­ty [24]; Cit­i­zen Green­wald’s pos­i­tive out­look on Ron Paul; Wik­iLeaks’ jour­nal­ist James Bal­l’s assis­tance to the cement­ing of the Snowden/Greenwald/Poitras con­nec­tion [25]; Bal­l’s break with Wik­iLeaks over Julian Assange’s asso­ci­a­tion with Joran Jer­mas; Jer­mas’ son Johannes Wahlstrom’s role as a defense wit­ness for Julian Assange [25]; Wik­iLeaks’ pos­si­ble role [26] in mov­ing Snow­den from Hawaii to Hong Kong; fur­ther indi­ca­tions that Assange may have belonged [27] to the San­tiki­te­nan Park Asso­ci­a­tion (also known as “The Fam­i­ly”), an intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed, fas­cist mind-con­trol cult; Snow­den’s asser­tion that BND (Ger­man intel­li­gence) has access to the NSA’s X Key Score data­base [23]; Siemens’ devel­op­ment of the con­trol sys­tems [28]attacked by the Stuxnet worm.

1a. Excerpt­ing some of Snowden’s 2009 online musings–crafted dur­ing the same time peri­od in which he decid­ed to leak NSA documents–gives us insight into his true nature. We’ve men­tioned Snowden’s embrace of the gold stan­dard, belief that we should elim­i­nate Social Secu­rity and deep affin­ity for Ron Paul. Per­haps exam­in­ing his actu­al pro­nounce­ments will prove edu­ca­tion­al.

EXAMPLE:  “. . . Snow­den wrote that the elder­ly ‘wouldn’t be fuck­ing help­less if you weren’t send­ing them fuck­ing checks to sit on their ass and lay in hos­pi­tals all day.’ ”

Yeah, if ONLY those 75 and 80-year-olds lying in hos­pi­tal beds would get up and find jobs like every­body else, right Eddie? Snow­den is a nasty lit­tle fas­cist and peo­ple should care­fully con­sider the rest of his behav­ior in the con­text of his ide­o­log­i­cal pro­nounce­ments.

“Would You Feel Dif­fer­ently About Snow­den, Green­wald, and Assange If You Knew What They Real­ly Thought?” by Sean Wilentz; The New Repub­lic; 1/19/2014. [10]

[Snow­den is post­ing under the moniker “The True­HOOHA”] At the time the stim­u­lus bill was being debat­ed, Snow­den also con­demned Obama’s eco­nomic poli­cies as part of a delib­er­ate scheme “to deval­ue the cur­rency absolute­ly as fast as the­o­ret­i­cally pos­si­ble.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the Unit­ed States to return to the gold stan­dard.) The social dis­lo­ca­tions of the finan­cial col­lapse both­ered him not at all. “Almost every­one was self-employed pri­or to 1900,” he assert­ed. “Why is 12% employ­ment [sic] so ter­ri­fy­ing?” In anoth­er chat-room exchange, Snow­den debat­ed the mer­its of Social Secu­ri­ty:

<TheTrue­HOOHA> save mon­ey? cut this social secu­rity bull­shit

<User 11> haha­hayes

<User 18> Yeah! Fuck old peo­ple!

<User 11> social secu­rity is bull­shit

<User 11> let’s just toss old peo­ple out in the street

<User 18> Old peo­ple could move in with [User11].

<User 11> NOOO

<User 11> they smell fun­ny

<TheTrue­HOOHA> Some­how, our soci­ety man­aged to make it hun­dreds of years with­out social secu­rity just fine . . . .

<TheTrue­HOOHA> Mag­i­cally the world changed after the new deal, and old peo­ple became made of glass.

Lat­er in the same ses­sion, Snow­den wrote that the elder­ly “wouldn’t be fuck­ing help­less if you weren’t send­ing them fuck­ing checks to sit on their ass and lay in hos­pi­tals all day.”

1b. Cit­i­zen Green­wald has also giv­en qual­i­fied polit­i­cal sup­port to Ron Paul. The “Paulis­tin­ian Lib­er­tar­i­an Orga­ni­za­tion” [12] is at the foun­da­tion of the Snow­den milieu and oper­a­tion.

“Would You Feel Dif­fer­ently About Snow­den, Green­wald, and Assange If You Knew What They Real­ly Thought?” by Sean Wilentz; The New Repub­lic; 1/19/2014. [10]

. . . . Green­wald had iden­ti­fied a vehi­cle for a polit­i­cal realign­ment: the pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy of the old lib­er­tar­i­an warhorse Ron Paul. In Novem­ber 2007, Green­wald called Paul “as vig­i­lant a defend­er of America’s con­sti­tu­tion­al free­doms ... as any nation­al fig­ure in some time.” . . . . Still, he believed Paul to be a rare truth-teller, pre­pared to buck a cor­rupt bipar­ti­san con­sen­sus.

This por­tray­al required high­ly selec­tive polit­i­cal rea­son­ing, not to men­tion a basic igno­rance of U.S. his­to­ry. Paul, a long­time sup­port­er of the John Birch Soci­ety, is a quin­tes­sen­tial pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tive, hold­ing prej­u­dices and instincts that pre­date the post–World War II con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment found­ed by William F. Buck­ley Jr. and oth­ers. Pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tives, in their hatred of cen­tral­ized gov­ern­ment and con­se­quent iso­la­tion­ism, regard U.S. his­to­ry as a long series of cat­a­stro­phes, start­ing with the defeat of the Con­fed­er­a­cy. . . .

2a. We have dis­cussed Cit­i­zen Greenwald’s legal work [6], in which he spent years run­ning legal inter­fer­ence [7] for Nazi mur­der­ers and doing most of the work pro bono [8]One of his legal vic­to­ries involved aid­ing two white suprema­cists [9] who had attacked two Lati­no day labor­ers.

In the past, Cit­i­zen Green­wald has had some deeply inflam­ma­tory things to say in the past con­cern­ing “ille­gal immi­grants.” [10] We won­der if his stat­ed views on the evils of ille­gal immi­gra­tion might be relat­ed to his work defend­ing the attack­ers of the day labor­ers.

“Would You Feel Dif­fer­ently About Snow­den, Green­wald, and Assange If You Knew What They Real­ly Thought?” by Sean Wilentz; The New Repub­lic; 1/19/2014. [10]

. . . . Greenwald’s oth­er clients includ­ed the neo-Nazi Nation­al Alliance, who were impli­cated in an espe­cially hor­ri­ble crime. Two white suprema­cists on Long Island had picked up a pair of unsus­pect­ing Mex­i­can day labor­ers, lured them into an aban­doned ware­house, and then clubbed them with a crow­bar and stabbed them repeat­edly. The day labor­ers man­aged to escape, and when they recov­ered from their injuries, they sued the Nation­al Alliance and oth­er hate groups, alleg­ing that they had inspired the attack­ers. . . .

. . . . On cer­tain issues, though, his [Greenwald’s] prose was suf­fused with right-wing con­ceits and catch­phrases. One exam­ple was immi­gra­tion, on which Green­wald then held sur­pris­ingly hard-line views. “The parade of evils caused by ille­gal immi­gra­tion is wide­ly known,” Green­wald wrote in 2005. The facts, to him, were indis­putable: “ille­gal immi­gra­tion wreaks hav­oc eco­nom­i­cally, social­ly, and cul­tur­ally; makes a mock­ery of the rule of law; and is dis­grace­ful just on basic fair­ness grounds alone.” Defend­ing the nativist con­gress­man Tom Tan­credo from charges of racism, Green­wald wrote of “unman­age­ably end­less hordes of peo­ple [who] pour over the bor­der in num­bers far too large to assim­i­late, and who con­se­quently have no need, moti­va­tion or abil­ity to assim­i­late.” Those hordes, Green­wald wrote, posed a threat to “mid­dle-class sub­ur­ban vot­ers.” . . . .

2b. In his intem­per­ate remarks about immi­grants (which he lat­er uncon­vinc­ingly recant­ed), Green­wald also defend­ed for­mer Col­orado con­gress­man Tom Tan­credo, a fel­low trav­eler of some noto­ri­ous white suprema­cists. [11]

Tancredo’s asso­ciates include Don Black, David Duke asso­ciate and cre­ator of the Storm­front web­site. Black is among the numer­ous white suprema­cist and Nazi asso­ciates of Edward Snowden’s Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of choice, Ron Paul. [12] Tancredo’s fel­low trav­el­ers also include mem­bers of the neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment and the League of the South, also net­work­ing ele­ments of Ron Paul.

“For­mer Con­gress­man Tan­credo to Address White Suprema­cists” by Ryan Lenz;  Hate Watch [South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter]; 6/19/2012. [11]

. . . . The for­mer Repub­li­can con­gress­man from Col­orado, known for his bit­ing anti-immi­gra­tion rhetoric and cam­paign ads sug­gest­ing Lati­no immi­grants are rapists and drug deal­ers, is sched­uled to be the lun­cheon speak­er at next month’s annu­al con­fer­ence for the white suprema­cist Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens (CCC). [Tan­credo wound up canceling–D.E.] The theme of the con­fer­ence? “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism – the Death of Amer­i­ca.”

Shar­ing the dais with Tan­credo will be a rogue’s gallery of the racist right, includ­ing James Edwards, who hosts the white nation­al­ist Polit­i­cal Cesspool radio show; Don Black, the for­mer Klans­man best known for cre­at­ing Stormfront.org, the first major Inter­net hate site; and Leonard Wil­son, a long­time seg­re­ga­tion­ist and Alaba­ma com­man­der for the Sons of Con­fed­er­ate Vet­er­ans, a neo-Con­fed­er­ate group that, like Tan­credo, staunch­ly oppos­es immi­gra­tion.

For those who have watched Tan­credo go through end­less con­tor­tions to dis­tance him­self from his racist friends, speak­ing at a CCC con­fer­ence seems to be a turn­ing point. The time has passed to apol­o­gize for the com­pany he keeps.

And what com­pany it is.

Tan­credo was already hon­orary chair­man of Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (YWC), an ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dent group that has active­ly cul­ti­vated rela­tion­ships with white nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions such as the racist League of the South (LOS), whose leader Michael Hill recent­ly penned an essay describ­ing how white peo­ple are endowed with a “God-ordained supe­ri­or­ity” and pro­fess­ing that it was a “mon­u­men­tal lie” that all men are cre­ated equal. In 2006, Tan­credo deliv­ered an anti-immi­grant speech and sang “Dix­ie” at a bar­be­cue adver­tised by the South Car­olina chap­ter of the LOS. . . . .

2c. Tan­cre­do is also an asso­ciate of the Tea Par­ty.

“Tan­credo Kicks Off Tea Par­ty Con­ven­tion with Racist Com­ments” by Imag­ine 2050 Edi­tors; Imag­ine 2050; 2/5/2010. [24]

. . . . Tan­credo stood smil­ing at the crowd and wav­ing before start­ing off his speech with “I’m Tom Tan­credo and I dri­ve a Harley!” He quick­ly moved on from the top­ic of motor­cy­cles, how­ever, to get to his main tar­get: immi­grants.

He stat­ed that many of the peo­ple who vot­ed Oba­ma into office “can’t even spell the word vote or even speak Eng­lish,” which brought loud applause from the crowd. He said that it was a good thing that McCain didn’t win the elec­tion oth­er­wise we would be see him and Rep. Gutier­rez receive awards from NCLR for intro­duc­ing and imple­ment­ing an amnesty bill. He went on to talk about the “cult of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” which is “aid­ed by left­ists.”

He issued a warn­ing to the crowd that “our cul­ture is at stake” and that our cul­ture “is based on Judeo-Chris­t­ian val­ues whether peo­ple like it or not!” Near the end of his speech Tan­credo announced to the crowd that he was going to be work­ing with Roy Beck, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Num­ber­sUSA (an anti-immi­grant group with strong ties to white nation­al­ists) at their break­out ses­sion on Fri­day. He encour­aged peo­ple to attend the ses­sion and thanked Roy Beck and Num­ber­sUSA for all their good work. . . .

3a. very impor­tant sto­ry [13] high­lights what we feel is a major thrust of the psy-op for which Edward Snow­den–the Peach Fuzz Fas­cist [14]–is fronting. A right-wing lib­er­tar­ian polit­i­cal milieu is work­ing to have states cut-off elec­tric­ity to the NSA, this in response to the Snow­den dis­clo­sures.

As the authors of the sto­ry note: “The bill is root­ed in a the­ory that, in James Madison’s words, would speed­ily put an end to the Union itself. [15] More imme­di­ately, it could empow­er con­ser­v­a­tive state law­mak­ers to cut off Medicare, Med­ic­aid or Social Secu­rity, to frus­trate civ­il rights enforce­ment or even to pre­vent fed­eral law enforce­ment from inves­ti­gat­ing crim­i­nals.”

Advanced by the Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter, the leg­is­la­tion; “pos­es a seri­ous threat to that lib­eral touch­stone, a fed­eral reg­u­la­tory and wel­fare state equal to the prob­lems of grow­ing cor­po­rate pow­er and pover­ty.

“Beware Of Lib­er­tar­i­ans Bear­ing Gifts: Why A Bipar­ti­san Move Against The NSA Could Kill The New Deal” by Zack Beauchamp and Ian Mill­hiser; Think Progress; 1/24/2014. [13]

. . . . What does the NSA need if it wants to spy on you? Even before legal per­mis­sion [29], there’s the basics: elec­tric­ity to run its com­put­ers and water to feed the servers that stores the reams of data they acquire. Enter­pris­ing state leg­is­la­tors in six states [30] have seized upon this almost-too-obvi­ous insight, and used it to draft leg­is­la­tion that would quite lit­er­ally turn off the NSA’s lights in their states.

This might seem like a good idea to NSA crit­ics unhap­py [31] with Pres­i­dent Obama’s reform pro­pos­als, but the con­sti­tu­tional the­ory it depends on is pro­foundly dan­ger­ous. It pos­es a seri­ous threat to that lib­eral touch­stone, a fed­eral reg­u­la­tory and wel­fare state equal to the prob­lems of grow­ing cor­po­rate pow­er and pover­ty.

Ulti­mately, this pro­posal to depow­er the NSA reveals that there’s only so much that can be accom­plished by right-left coali­tions. Unless each side can agree to aban­don tac­tics that threat­en the other’s sacred cows, the mem­bers of these coali­tions must con­stantly be on guard against the man stand­ing behind them wait­ing to stick a knife in their back.

Turn­ing Off The Lights

Each of the six states (Kansas, Indi­ana, Mis­souri, Wash­ing­ton, Okla­homa, and Cal­i­for­nia) base their pro­pos­als on mod­el leg­is­la­tion [32] devel­oped by the OffNow coali­tion, a group orga­nized by the rad­i­cally lib­er­tar­ian Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter. So too will leg­is­la­tors in the next three states (Michi­gan, Ari­zona, and Utah) that plan to pro­pose lights-off leg­is­la­tion [33]. So OffNow, and by exten­sion the Tenth Amend­ment cen­ter, is more-or-less run­ning the show here.

How does the leg­is­la­tion work? Basi­cally, it pro­hibits any state enti­ty and many cor­po­ra­tions from:

Provid[ing] ser­vices, or participat[ing] or assist[ing] in any way with the pro­vid­ing of ser­vices to a fed­eral agency, fed­eral agent, or cor­po­ra­tion pro­vid­ing ser­vices to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment which is involved in the col­lec­tion of elec­tronic data or meta­data of any person(s) pur­suant to any action not based on a war­rant that par­tic­u­larly describes the person(s), place(s) and thing(s) to be searched or seized.

Else­where, the leg­is­la­tion pro­vides that any cor­po­ra­tion “that pro­vides ser­vices to or on behalf of this state [32]” which vio­lates this pro­hi­bi­tion “shall be for­ever inel­i­gi­ble to act on behalf of, or pro­vide ser­vices to, this state or any polit­i­cal sub­di­vi­sion of this state.” So if a state’s util­i­ties — elec­tric­ity, water, sewage and so forth — are owned by the state, they are for­bid­den from pro­vid­ing any ser­vice to the NSA [34]. And if a state’s util­i­ties are pri­vately owned, they must choose between cut­ting off ser­vice to the NSA or per­ma­nently los­ing their abil­ity to do busi­ness with the state.

In most states, this would be large­ly sym­bolic: the NSA doesn’t have instal­la­tions every­where. But bothWash­ing­ton [35] and Utah [36] house sig­nif­i­cant NSA facil­i­ties, and it would actu­ally be quite painful for the agency to move them.

. . .

The Pow­er To Destroy

The bill is root­ed in a the­ory that, in James Madison’s words, would speed­ily put an end to the Union itself. [15] More imme­di­ately, it could empow­er con­ser­v­a­tive state law­mak­ers to cut off Medicare, Med­ic­aid or Social Secu­rity, to frus­trate civ­il rights enforce­ment or even to pre­vent fed­eral law enforce­ment from inves­ti­gat­ing crim­i­nals.

The Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter is one of the lead­ing pro­po­nents of “nul­li­fi­ca­tion,” an uncon­sti­tu­tional the­ory [15] which claims that states can uni­lat­er­ally inval­i­date fed­eral laws sim­ply by pass­ing their own law claim­ing that the fed­eral pro­vi­sion is invalid. Yet their pro­posal to cut of water and pow­er to the NSA rests on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent con­sti­tu­tional the­ory than pure nul­li­fi­ca­tion. Under some­thing known as the “anti-com­man­deer­ing doc­trine [37],” the Supreme Court gen­er­ally does not per­mit the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to com­mand a state to take a par­tic­u­lar action. Thus, for exam­ple, if the fed­eral gov­ern­ment wants to crim­i­nal­ize mar­i­juana, then it can order fed­eral agents to arrest mar­i­juana users, or it can encour­age states to pros­e­cute mar­i­juana users by offer­ing them fed­eral funds if they do so, but it can­not sim­ply order a state to pros­e­cute some­one the state does not wish to pros­e­cute. Wash­ing­ton and Col­orado get to have their own drug laws [38] and their police force is under no oblig­a­tion to enforce fed­er­al law.

Apply this rule to the NSA, and it fol­lows that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment can­not force a state to have its own domes­tic spy­ing pro­gram, or to loan its own agents to the NSA. If the fed­eral gov­ern­ment wants to engage in sur­veil­lance, it must use its own mon­ey and its own offi­cers to do so unless a state vol­un­tar­ily agrees to pro­vide assis­tance.

But what if a state orders its state-owned pow­er com­pany to deny elec­tric­ity to the NSA? Or if the state refus­es to con­tract with any com­pany that also pro­vides basic ser­vices to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment? On the sur­face, these deci­sions seem to be cov­ered by the anti-com­man­deer­ing doc­trine as well. Why should the fed­eral gov­ern­ment be allowed to direct the state’s busi­ness rela­tions any more than it directs its police force?

Chief Jus­tice John Mar­shall pro­vided a real­ly good answer to this ques­tion near­ly two cen­turies ago. In the land­mark case of McCul­loch v. Mary­land, the state of Mary­land attempt­ed to tax a fed­er­ally char­tered bank. Mar­shall wrote for a unan­i­mous Court to explain why state tax­a­tion of fed­eral enti­ties was not allowed. “[T]he pow­er to tax involves the pow­er to destroy,” he explained, and “the pow­er to destroy may defeat and ren­der use­less the pow­er to cre­ate” the bank that the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion entrust­ed to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. More recent Supreme Court deci­sions have explained that states may not enact laws that “stand . . . as an obsta­cle to the accom­plish­ment and exe­cu­tion of the full pur­poses and objec­tives of Con­gress. [39]

If the pow­er to tax includes the pow­er to destroy, so too does the pow­er to cut off water, pow­er and oth­er essen­tial ser­vices to a fed­eral agency such as the NSA. Fed­eral offices could not pos­si­bly man­age the kind of record keep­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions nec­es­sary to oper­ate in a mod­ern soci­ety with­out access to elec­tric­ity. Indeed, the OffNow coalition’s web­site is quite explic­it about the fact that they believe that the pow­er to cut off util­i­ties is the pow­er to destroy the NSA’s abil­ity to oper­ate — the NSA’s “mas­sive super­com­put­ers mon­i­tor­ing your per­sonal infor­ma­tion are water-cooled. They can’t func­tion with­out the resources to keep them at oper­at­ing tem­per­a­ture [40]. That water is sched­uled to be pro­vided by the Jor­dan Val­ley Riv­er Con­ser­vancy Dis­trict, ‘a polit­i­cal sub­di­vi­sion of the state of Utah.’”

This tac­tic, of using state pow­er to pre­vent the fed­eral gov­ern­ment from oper­at­ing, should trou­ble pro­gres­sives regard­less of how they feel about the NSA’s sur­veil­lance pro­gram. If Utah can cut of water or elec­tric­ity to the NSA, what’s to pre­vent Texas from cut­ting off pow­er to fed­eral agen­cies that pro­vide health care to poor peo­ple [41], or North Car­olina from turn­ing the lights off on fed­eral vot­ing rights attor­neys chal­leng­ing theircom­pre­hen­sive vot­er sup­pres­sion law [42]?

Burn­ing It Down

Don’t doubt for a minute that, if the Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter suc­ceeds in estab­lish­ing a prece­dent for nul­li­fi­ca­tion-via-pow­er-out­ages, they will imme­di­ately deploy this and sim­i­lar tac­tics to imple­ment oth­er parts of their sweep­ing lib­er­tar­ian agency. Some of their oth­er ini­tia­tives include bills pur­port­ing to nul­lify fed­eral gun laws [43] and the Afford­able Care Act [44], as well as a tru­ly sur­real pro­posal to under­mine the Fed­eral Reserve by requir­ing cit­i­zens to pay their state tax­es in gold or sil­ver [45].

Nor are these the least of the Tenth Amend­ment Center’s ambi­tions. A res­o­lu­tion intro­duced in the New Hamp­shire leg­is­la­ture and pushed by the Cen­ter [46] lays out an expan­sive list of poten­tial fed­eral laws that it objects to on con­sti­tu­tional grounds — one of them is “pro­hi­bi­tions of type or quan­tity of arms or ammu­ni­tion” — and then claims that the Con­sti­tu­tion shall become null and void [47] if the fed­eral gov­ern­ment enacts any of the laws the res­o­lu­tion deems objec­tion­able, and “all pow­ers pre­vi­ously del­e­gated to the Unit­ed States of Amer­ica by the Con­sti­tu­tion for the Unit­ed States shall revert to the sev­eral States indi­vid­u­al­ly.”

The Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter, in oth­er words, is not sim­ply dis­trust­ful of cen­tral­ized pow­er. They fear the fed­eral gov­ern­ment with such patho­log­i­cal inten­sity that they’ve actu­ally sug­gested dis­solv­ing the Union in its entire­ty if Con­gress, the Pres­i­dent or the fed­eral judi­ciary takes any action that vio­lates their idio­syn­cratic view of the Con­sti­tu­tion. Their posi­tion on states’ rights makes John C. Cal­houn [48] look like a mod­er­ate.

So how­ever attrac­tive rein­ing in the NSA this way might seem, it’s a Tro­jan Horse: a legal strat­egy that has the poten­tial to bring down the major fed­eral accom­plish­ments lib­er­als most deeply cher­ish. Good thing the depow­er bills are unlike­ly to pass in any state [33]Regard­less, how­ever, this inci­dent tells us some­thing impor­tant about the var­i­ous pro­pos­als for a left-lib­er­tar­i­an alliance to rein the secu­rity state you see bandied about.

Real­is­ti­cally, that’s the alliance you’d need you take seri­ous, nation­wide action on spy­ing out­side of the exec­u­tive branch; see the vote count [49] on Rep. Justin Amash (R‑MI)’s just-bare­ly defeat­ed bill to end NSA meta­data col­lec­tion. It’s the same coali­tion that could help accom­plish wor­thy goals like reform­ing fed­eral drug laws or racist prison sen­tenc­ing guide­lines.

On issues like those — where the pol­icy fix is legal­ly sim­ple, and the goals are ful­ly shared — the left-lib­er­tar­i­an alliance has the poten­tial to do a lot of good. But the state-lev­el dri­ve to turn off the NSA’s lights demon­strates the lim­its of this mar­riage. Law­mak­ing nec­es­sar­ily sets prece­dents. In some cas­es, those prece­dents come from the judi­ciary — giv­ing offi­cial sanc­tion to tac­tics once acknowl­edged to be uncon­sti­tu­tional. But the mere act of enact­ing a law and get­ting away with it can nor­mal­ize rad­i­cal tac­tics as well. Hid­den pro­vi­sions of a law or the legal the­ory behind it can change the coun­try as sure­ly as the legislation’s intend­ed end. . . .

3b. Not sur­pris­ingly, the Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter [16] heav­ily over­laps ele­ments asso­ci­ated with the League of the South and the neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment. Those ele­ments, in turn, are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Lud­wig von Mis­es Insti­tute [17], the“Paulis­tin­ian Lib­er­tar­ian Orga­ni­za­tion” [12] and The Peach Fuzz Fas­cist him­self [Snow­den]. As not­ed above, Cit­i­zen Green­wald [7] has defend­ed birds of the same feath­er [18].

“‘Nul­li­fi­ca­tion’ Con­fer­ence Attracts Far-Right Extrem­ists” by Hate­watch Staff; Hate Watch [South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter]; 10/24/2011. [16]

On the eve of a Nul­li­fi­ca­tion Now! con­fer­ence in Jack­sonville, Fla., last week, the Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter issued a warn­ing: The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter was send­ing some­one to report that “those of us who want polit­i­cal decen­tral­iza­tion as the Con­sti­tu­tion requires [are] ‘dan­ger­ous.’” Then, when the con­fer­ence began, every speak­er repeat­ed the warn­ing. Some­one from the SPLC was there, they said.

And you know what? We were.

We were there when Oath Keep­ers founder Stew­art Rhodes warned that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment was lay­ing the ground­work to freely kill Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. We were there when John Bush, who runs the Foun­da­tion for a Free Soci­ety in Austin, Texas, stoked the audience’s already inflamed fears that a one-world gov­ern­ment was com­ing in the form of a U.N. plan for sus­tain­able growth. We were there when Doug Tjaden, direc­tor of the Sound Mon­ey Cen­ter, called for the nul­li­fi­ca­tion of the Fed­eral Reserve. “Nul­li­fi­ca­tion of any fed­eral law will only have long last­ing effect if we take away the bankers’ abil­ity to buy back our lib­erty,” he said with a thump of his fist on the podi­um.

Rough­ly 100 peo­ple attend­ed the con­fer­ence orga­nized by the Los Ange­les-based Tenth Amend­ment Cen­ter, a group focused on how to weak­en the reach of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment through nul­li­fi­ca­tion. Their cen­tral idea—that each state has the con­sti­tu­tional right to inval­i­date and dis­re­gard vir­tu­ally any fed­eral law—relies on a spu­ri­ous inter­pre­ta­tion of the Tenth Amend­ment, which reserves to the states and the peo­ple any pow­er not explic­itly giv­en to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, and flies in the face of more than two cen­turies of jurispru­dence.

Much of the con­fer­ence seemed to be focused on dis­tanc­ing the move­ment from those mem­bers of the extreme right that tend to be the most attract­ed to the nul­li­fi­ca­tion con­cept.

That’s hard to do when the League of the South (LOS) has a table at the event, which it did. It was attend­ed by Michael Tubbs, a for­mer Green Beret demo­li­tions expert who, in 1987, robbed two fel­low sol­diers of their M‑16 rifles dur­ing a rou­tine exer­cise at Fort Bragg, N.C., in the name of the Ku Klux Klan. Tubbs is pres­i­dent of the Flori­da chap­ter of the LOS, which envi­sions a sec­ond South­ern seces­sion and holds to a dis­tinctly white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy.

There were also rep­re­sen­ta­tives from groups advo­cat­ing for the legal­iza­tion of raw milk—to lim­it the government’s reg­u­la­tory pow­er to ensure food safety—and for the Oath Keep­ers, a group that ped­dles antigov­ern­ment “Patri­ot” para­noia about fed­eral tyran­ny.

The force behind much of that para­noia is Rhodes, a for­mer Army para­trooper and Yale-edu­cat­ed lawyer who found­ed Oath Keep­ers. Rhodes cau­tioned that the recent killing of Anwar al-Awla­ki, a rad­i­cal, U.S.-born Mus­lim cler­ic who had been des­ig­nated by the U.S. gov­ern­ment as a glob­al ter­ror­ist, was mere­ly a pre­view of what will even­tu­ally befall Amer­i­cans cit­i­zens at home. Assas­si­na­tion? Kid­nap­ping? Intern­ment? All will be pos­si­ble in the tyran­ni­cal future the far right fears is unavoid­able. “I’m not being para­noid. I’m just con­nect­ing the dots,” Rhodes said. “It will be done at home. Mark my words.” . . . .

. . . . The high­light of the day was Thomas E. Woods Jr., the author of Nul­li­fi­ca­tion: How to Resist Fed­eral Tyran­ny in the 21st Cen­tury. He argued that nul­li­fi­ca­tion was the prin­ci­ple tool of the north­ern abo­li­tion­ists who com­bated slavery—a fact, he said, the pro­gres­sive left con­ve­niently dis­miss­es.

Woods couldn’t avoid call­ing out the SPLC “agent provo­ca­teur” in the audi­ence. To do so, he some­what mock­ingly employed Godwin’s Law to dis­miss any crit­i­cism of nul­li­fi­ca­tion. Godwin’s Law states, essen­tially, that as any dis­cus­sion pro­gresses, the odds increase that some­one will even­tu­ally invoke Hitler. Woods warned that the SPLC and oth­ers would seek to mar­gin­al­ize nul­li­fi­ca­tion by cre­at­ing neg­a­tive asso­ci­a­tions.

Woods was once a mem­ber of the LOS and remains a senior fel­low at the Lud­wig Von Mis­es Insti­tute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank in Auburn, Ala., that views social jus­tice as destruc­tive. Who needs Hitler when para­noid antigov­ern­ment fig­ures, hair-trig­ger Aryan mil­i­tants and an aca­d­e­mic extrem­ist are there to glad-hand the audi­ence?

3c. Fur­ther­ing their goal of desta­bi­liz­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, the GOP plans on hold­ing hear­ings on the NSA [19] in order to gen­er­ate polit­i­cal cap­i­tal.

“The New, Snow­den-Lov­ing Repub­li­can Par­ty” by David Weigel; Slate; 1/24/2014. [19]

Ben­jy Sar­lin has a nice read [50] on the oth­er news emerg­ing from the RNC meet­ing. Sup­port­ers of Ron Paul, chiefly Nevada’s Diana Orrock, were able to sell the whole com­mit­tee on a res­o­lu­tion “renounc­ing” the NSA’s data col­lec­tion pro­grams. As of today, the RNC “encour­ages Repub­li­can law mak­ers to call for a spe­cial com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate, report, and reveal to the pub­lic the extent of this domes­tic spy­ing” and “calls upon Repub­li­can law­mak­ers to imme­di­ately take action to halt cur­rent uncon­sti­tu­tional sur­veil­lance pro­grams and pro­vide a full pub­lic account­ing of the NSA’s data col­lec­tion pro­grams.” It basi­cally endors­es Rep. Justin Amash’s leg­is­la­tion in the House.

Andrew Kaczyn­ski com­mem­o­rates the occa­sion [51] with a flash­back to the August 2006 RNC attack on the “lib­eral judge” who ruled against anoth­er NSA pro­gram, and was “praised by Dems.” Not long after that, one of the party’s endan­gered mod­er­ates, Con­necti­cut Rep. Nan­cy John­son, attacked her Demo­c­ra­tic oppo­nent for dar­ing to oppose the pro­gram.

So it’s tak­en sev­en-odd years for the GOP to come ful­ly around and real­ize the groovy pol­i­tics of civ­il lib­er­ties, but that should have been obvi­ous even before Snow­den.

3d. In FTR #762 [21], we exam­ined the Snow­den actions as a desta­bi­liza­tion oper­a­tion against the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. Going into his State of the Union address, that effort appears to have drawn a con­sid­er­able amount of polit­i­cal blood.

“Obama’s Puz­zle: Econ­o­my Rarely Bet­ter, Approval Rarely Worse” by Jack­ie Calmes; The New York Times; 1/27/2014. [20]

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma will pro­nounce on the state of the union for the fifth time on Tues­day, and nev­er dur­ing his time in office has the state of the econ­o­my been bet­ter — yet rarely has he got­ten such low marks from the pub­lic for his han­dling of it. . . .

. . . . Eco­nom­i­cal­ly speak­ing, said Scott A. Ander­son, chief econ­o­mist at Bank of the West, “the state of the union is the best we have seen in years.”

Mr. Oba­ma and his speech­writer could not phrase it bet­ter, or sim­pler. Yet tak­ing cred­it is com­pli­cat­ed, giv­en the clear evi­dence in nation­al polls that most Amer­i­cans are not in a mood to give him any.

Mr. Obama’s rat­ings for his han­dling of the econ­o­my, nev­er high since his first months in office, slipped through­out 2013 in nation­al polls. As he began this year, near­ly six in 10 Amer­i­cans dis­ap­proved, near­ly match­ing his low­est marks in 2011, a year of repeat­ed and dam­ag­ing fis­cal fights with the new Repub­li­can House major­i­ty. Advis­ers said the decline was a reflec­tion of Mr. Obama’s dimin­ished stand­ing more broad­ly after months of pub­lic atten­tion to issues that have dom­i­nat­ed news cov­er­age: the administration’s bun­gled intro­duc­tion of the web­site for the insur­ance mar­ket­places cre­at­ed by his sig­na­ture Afford­able Care Act, and the con­tro­ver­sy over intel­li­gence gath­er­ing by the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency.

“For the aver­age per­son sit­ting at home watch­ing news on TV and the Inter­net, they have seen their pres­i­dent spend the last six months or so deal­ing with N.S.A., a gov­ern­ment shut­down and a mal­func­tion­ing web­site,” said Mr. Obama’s chief strate­gist, Dan Pfeif­fer. . . .

4a. In a video appear­ance by Assange at a Chaos Com­put­er Club con­fer­ence in ear­ly Jan­u­ary of this year, a ques­tion about Wik­iLeaks’ role in get­ting Snow­den out of the U.S. enhances sus­pi­cion that Wik­iLeaks may have been involved with Snow­den’s jour­ney to Hong Kong.

Giv­en the Snow­den time­line and the role Har­ri­son and Wik­iLeaks have played since Snowden’s time in Hong Kong [52], choos­ing to have Assange field that ques­tion was an odd choice for Har­ri­son because there’s nev­er been any indi­ca­tion that Snow­den required any help to leave Hawaii. Apple­baum had a birth­day par­ty in Hawaii with 20 friends and returned in April of 2013 [53], short­ly before Eddie the Friend­ly Spook takes off for Chi­na.

“Julian Assange Gave A Very Pecu­liar Response When He Was Asked About ‘Get­ting Snow­den Out Of The US’” by Michael Kel­ley; Busi­ness Insid­er; 1/4/2014. [26]

A strange exchange occurred when mem­bers of the rene­gade pub­lish­ing orga­ni­za­tion Wik­iLeaks were asked about the flight of Edward Snow­den at a Chaos Com­puter Club con­fer­ence [54] last week.

Wik­iLeaks has been cred­ited with help­ing [55] Snow­den escape extra­di­tion to the U.S. after the 30-year-old left Hawaii with at least hun­dreds of thou­sands [56] of clas­si­fied NSA files and flew to Hong Kong on May 20.

At the CCC con­fer­ence on Dec. 29, Assange said that “Wik­iLeaks was able to res­cue Edward Snow­den because we are an orga­nized insti­tu­tion with col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence.”

Top Wik­iLeaks advis­er Sarah Har­ri­son, who met Snow­den in Hong Kong and accom­pa­nied him to Moscow, then answered the last ques­tion com­ing from the Inter­net:

“What was the most dif­fi­cult part on get­ting Snow­den out of the U.S.?“

Assange, Har­ri­son and “Amer­i­can Wik­iLeaks Hack­er [57]” Jacob Appel­baum all laughed, and then Appel­baum said: “That’s quite a loaded ques­tion.”

Assange then said: “Yeah, that’s inter­est­ing to think whether we can actu­ally answer that ques­tion at all. I’ll give a vari­ant of the answer because of the legal sit­u­a­tion it is a lit­tle bit dif­fi­cult.”

That is a very pecu­liar (and seem­ingly nat­ural) col­lec­tive response. Most peo­ple [58] have not con­sid­ered that Wik­iLeaks may have become involved [59] with Snow­den before [60] June 12, when the for­mer CIA tech­ni­cian con­tacted [61] the orga­ni­za­tion after out­ing him­self.

So the “loaded” ques­tion could have eas­ily been point­ed out as unsound, and Assange could have denied that Wik­iLeaks con­tacted Snow­den before he reached out from Chi­na.

Instead, the 42-year-old Aus­tralian ques­tioned whether it could be answered at all [62]. . . .

4b. We have dealt at great length with the exten­sive degree of over­lap between Snow­den’s “op” and the Wik­iLeaks milieu. The gen­e­sis of the Greenwald/Poitras/Snowden rela­tion­ship fea­tured a Wik­iLeaks-con­nect­ed jour­nal­ist named James Ball.

“How Edward Snow­den Led Jour­nal­ist and Film-Mak­er to Reveal NSA Secrets” by Roy Greenslade; The Guardian; 8/19/2013. [25]

. . . . And two weeks after that she flew to Brazil. It was there, in a Rio de Janeiro hotel, that Maass met her along with Green­wald, where they were work­ing with MacAskill and anoth­er Guardian jour­nal­ist, James Ball. . . .

4c. Ball had pre­vi­ous­ly worked for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-dom­i­nat­ed Al Jazeera. Even­tu­al­ly, Ball quit Wik­iLeaks because of Assange’s con­tin­ued asso­ci­a­tion with Johannes Wahlstrom, the son of Assange’s fas­cist cohort Joran Jer­mas aka “Israel Shamir.” (We have dis­cussed Wahlstrom, Jer­mas and their fas­cist pol­i­tics in FTR #‘s 732 [63], 745 [64], 755 [65].)

“Exclu­sive: For­mer Wik­iLeaks Employ­ee James Ball Describes Work­ing With Julian Assange” by James Ball; The Dai­ly Beast; 5/30/2013. [66]

. . . . For me, the film was more like déjà vu—something I’d lived once already. From sum­mer 2010, Wik­iLeaks became my life for months. First, at the U.K.-based Bureau of Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism, I was part of the team work­ing for 10 weeks inves­ti­gat­ing the Iraq War Logs for Al Jazeera Eng­lish and Ara­bic, Chan­nel 4’s flag­ship Dis­patches doc­u­men­tary, and iraqwarlogs.com.

I then went a step fur­ther, work­ing direct­ly for Wik­iLeaks for sev­eral months on the embassy cables—analyzing the cables, dis­trib­ut­ing them to staff, writ­ing press releas­es, appear­ing on TV, and more.

. . . . Dis­turbingly, Assange seems to have a per­sonal moti­va­tion for stay­ing friend­ly with Shamir. Shamir’s son, Johannes Wahlstrom, is appar­ently being called as one of Assange’s defense wit­nesses in his Swedish tri­al. That’s not the only time self has come before prin­ci­ple. . . .

5. In FTR #724 [67], we looked at the San­tiki­te­nan Park Asso­ci­a­tion (also known as “The Fam­i­ly”), an intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed, fas­cist mind-con­trol cult to which Julian Assange may well have belonged. A TIME review of the recent  [27]movie [27] about WikiLeaks–“The Fifth Estate”–reinforces that work­ing hypoth­e­sis. It is not clear what the writer’s source is for that asser­tion.

Pho­tos of Assange, chil­dren of the cult are at right. Note the one child bear­ing strik­ing resem­blance to Assange. For more about the Assange/Family work­ing hypoth­e­sis, see FTR #745 [64].

“Julian Assange and The Fifth Estate: Wiki Wacky Who?” By Richard Corliss; Time; 9/08/2013. [27]

. . . . Tall, drawl­ing and white-maned (he has dyed his hair ever since being induct­ed into an Aus­tralian cult as a child), Assange radi­ates a star qual­i­ty that impress­es all spec­ta­tors, espe­cial­ly him­self. . . .

6. We note that, accord­ing to Snow­den, BND has access to the NSA’s XKeyscore data­base.

“Snow­den Asks ‘How Rea­son­able’ It Is to Assume only Merkel Was Tapped?”; Deutsche Welle; 1/27/2014. [23]

. . . . The rela­tion­ship between the NSA and its Ger­man equiv­a­lent the BND was described by Snow­den as “inti­mate.” He allud­ed, among oth­er things, to the BND’s abil­i­ty to access the NSA’s “X Key Score” data­base, which Snow­den described as a “one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s infor­ma­tion.” . . . .

7a. In an inter­view with Ger­man TV, Snow­den men­tioned that NSA engages in indus­tri­al espi­onage against, among oth­er com­pa­nies, Siemens. (Siemens is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with Ger­man intel­li­gence.) Note that indus­tri­al espi­onage is stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for the world’s major intel­li­gence ser­vices.

Note, also, that Snow­den’s state­ment keeps indus­tri­al espi­onage on the front burn­er. We won­dered in FTR #769 [68] if U.S. inter­net com­pa­nies were being held hostage to Ger­many’s inclu­sion in the Five Eyes spy­ing net­work.

“Snow­den Says NSA Engages in Indus­trial Espi­onage: TV” by Erik Kirschbaum; Reuters ;1/26/2014. [22]

The U.S. Nation­al Secu­rity Agency is involved in indus­trial espi­onage and will grab any intel­li­gence it can get its hands on regard­less of its val­ue to nation­al secu­rity, for­mer NSA con­trac­tor Edward Snow­den told a Ger­man TV net­work.

In text released ahead of a lengthy inter­view to be broad­cast on Sun­day, ARD TV quot­ed Snow­den say­ing the NSA does not lim­it its espi­onage to issues of nation­al secu­rity and he cit­ed Ger­man engi­neer­ing firm, Siemens as one tar­get.

“If there’s infor­ma­tion at Siemens that’s ben­e­fi­cial to U.S. nation­al inter­ests — even if it doesn’t have any­thing to do with nation­al secu­rity — then they’ll take that infor­ma­tion nev­er­the­less,” Snow­den said, accord­ing to ARD, which record­ed the inter­view in Rus­sia where he has claimed asy­lum.

Snow­den also told the Ger­man pub­lic broad­cast­ing net­work he no longer has pos­ses­sion of any doc­u­ments or infor­ma­tion on NSA activ­i­ties and has turned every­thing he had over to select jour­nal­ists. . . . .

7b. Siemens’ con­trol sys­tems were a tar­get of the Stuxnet worm. Note that this arti­cle sup­ple­ments the dis­cus­sion in FTR #769 [68] about Snow­den’s “op“as an assault on U.S. inter­net com­pa­nies.

“The Great Escape: How the NSA Is Dri­ving Com­pa­nies out of U.S. Clouds” by Ser­dar Yeg­u­lalp; InfoWorld; 1/27/2014. [28]

. . . . In the inter­view, Snow­den was asked if Ger­man engi­neer­ing con­glom­er­ate Siemens AG was one of the NSA’s espi­onage tar­gets. Snowden’s reply, accord­ing to Inter­na­tional Busi­ness Times, was that “the agency would take infor­ma­tion even though it was not relat­ed to nation­al secu­rity con­cerns.”

It’s pos­si­ble Siemens did con­sti­tute a legit­i­mate intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing tar­get in the NSA’s eyes — espe­cially after many of its cus­tomers were hit with the Stuxnet worm, which seemed specif­i­cally designed (by whom, is anoth­er sto­ry) to tar­get Siemens’s indus­trial automa­tion soft­ware. (Siemens did not respond imme­di­ately to a request for com­ment.) . . . .

7c. Snow­den attacked the Five Eyes alliance in his Ger­man TV inter­view. He also said that he had giv­en his doc­u­ments to jour­nal­ists and had retained none of them. This, sup­pos­ed­ly, because he fears for his life.

We believe that this actu­al­ly puts Snow­den’s life in dan­ger. Under­ground Reich ele­ments would do far more dam­age to the U.S., the NSA and the GCHQ by mak­ing Snow­den a mar­tyr. The jour­nal­ists with whom he has placed the doc­u­ments would then, pre­sum­ably, “spill the beans.”

“Snow­den in Ger­man TV Inter­view Said He Believes the U.S. Gov­ern­ment Wants Him Dead” by George Chi­di; Raw Sto­ry; 1/26/2014. [69]

. . . . Snow­den made note of his objec­tions to the Five Eyes alliance between the intel­li­gence ser­vices of Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries, which he said sub­verts the pro­hi­bi­tion against domes­tic spy­ing by exchang­ing sur­veil­lance data, with Britain spy­ing on Amer­i­cans and Amer­ica spy­ing on the British. . . .

. . . . . adding dur­ing the inter­view that he no longer has any of the doc­u­ments, which have been parceled out to “trust­wor­thy” jour­nal­ists around the world. Their pos­ses­sion of the Snow­den files are the “life insur­ance” keep­ing him from being killed, he said. . . .