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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment. 

Intro­duc­tion: Undoubt­ed­ly, many lis­ten­ers have been puz­zled by Mr. Emory’s take on “Eddie the Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den. We note that the “Snow­den op” is a high­ly com­pli­cat­ed affair, with lev­els and ram­i­fi­ca­tions extend­ing around the world. We can­not do jus­tice to the entire­ty of “L’Af­faire Snow­den” in the con­text of this pro­gram and its descrip­tion.

Snow­den is actu­al­ly the oppo­site of what he is rep­re­sent­ed as being.

In this pro­gram, we scru­ti­nize Edward Snow­den from the per­spec­tive of Colonel L. Fletch­er Prouty, the Air Force “Focal Point Offi­cer” who devel­oped a CIA-con­trolled net­work inside of the branch­es of the mil­i­tary and oth­er agen­cies of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. (We note in this con­text that Snow­den was work­ing for CIA when he under­took his leak­ing oper­a­tion.)

We first present mate­r­i­al culled from Prouty’s book The Secret Team.

The analy­sis begins with an excerpt from The Guns of Novem­ber, Part I, review­ing the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the U‑2 inci­dent in May of 1960. On the cusp of a sum­mit con­fer­ence between then Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er and then Sovi­et Pre­mier Niki­ta Khr­uschev, a U‑2 spy plane pilot­ed by Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers came down in the heart of the for­mer Sovi­et Union. The inci­dent caused the can­cel­la­tion of the sum­mit con­fer­ence, which was to be a pre­lude to detente between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

This por­tion of the pro­gram was record­ed as a pre­lude to a lengthy dis­cus­sion of “The Adven­tures of Eddie the Friend­ly Spook”–Edward Snow­den, begun in 2013. Just before Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s meet­ing with Mr. Xi,  pres­i­dent of Chi­na, Snow­den decamps to Hong Kong (in Chi­na) and leaks infor­ma­tion about the hack­ing of Chi­nese com­put­ers. This caused enor­mous embar­rass­ment to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, and neu­tral­ized any attempt he might have been able to make to reduce Chi­nese hack­ing of Amer­i­can com­put­ers, as well as oth­er points of dis­pute between the two nations.

Next, Snow­den’s leak­er of choice–“Cit­i­zen Green­wald”–pub­lished arti­cles in The Guardian dis­clos­ing exten­sive NSA spy­ing on Ger­many, which the NSA views as “a third class part­ner.” These arti­cles were pub­lished just before Pres­i­dent Oba­ma was to meet with Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel of Ger­many. Again, it caused enor­mous dam­age to Oba­ma and harmed U.S. rela­tion­ships with Ger­many and oth­er Euro­pean nations. (Note that Green­wald, as an attor­ney, was a fel­low trav­el­er of some of the most heinous and mur­der­ous neo-Nazi and white suprema­cist groups).

Hit­ting the tri­fec­ta, Eddie the Friend­ly Spook [Snow­den] then decamps to Moscow in Rus­sia (like Chi­na, Rus­sia is not renowned as a bas­tion of free speech or inter­net free­dom.) This occurred just before Oba­ma’s meet­ing of the G20 in Moscow and in the run-up to a sched­uled sum­mit con­fer­ence with Putin. That sum­mit con­fer­ence was can­celed, not unlike the 1960 con­fer­ence between Khr­uschev and Eisen­how­er, which was destroyed by the U‑2 inci­dent. Colonel Prouty would not have failed to note the sim­i­lar­i­ty.

Snow­den’s trip to Moscow, like his jour­ney to Hong Kong/China could only have been intend­ed to harm Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s admin­is­tra­tion and U.S. diplo­ma­cy.

Fun­da­men­tal to this analy­sis is the fact that, in 2009, Snow­den was work­ing for the CIA when he decid­ed to leak NSA infor­ma­tion. Colonel Prouty would not have failed to note this, nor would he have over­looked Snow­den’s vul­gar, ultra-right wing views. 

It also appears to have made the NSA vul­ner­a­ble to pos­si­ble manip­u­la­tion by the CIA, as key fea­tures of the NSA’s oper­a­tional blue­print were obtained by Snow­den. Bear in mind that the “Earth Island Boo­gie” is in full swing.

Elec­tron­ic intel­li­gence about the Russ­ian “non-inva­sion” of Ukraine, the “non-shoot­down” of Malaysian Air­lines Flight 17 by Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists and the ambush­ing of Russ­ian Su-24 fight­er bomber by Turk­ish F‑16s would all be (lit­er­al­ly) on the NSA’s radar screen. Reign­ing in pos­si­ble NSA whistle­blow­ers on these mat­ters, as well as see­ing to it that NSA would not dis­close CIA back­ing for jihadist ter­ror­ist groups in the Earth Island would be rea­son enough for the CIA to want to gain the upper hand on NSA.

The infor­ma­tion gleaned by Snow­den would fun­da­men­tal­ly com­pro­mise NSA, per­mit­ting the hold­er of the doc­u­ments to “evade or repli­cate” the NSA’s sur­veil­lance!

We note that Snow­den’s “op” direct­ly pre­ced­ed aggres­sive U.S. moves against both Chi­na and Rus­sia, both mil­i­tar­i­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly. In the Pacif­ic, the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship (which excludes Chi­na) is in the off­ing and U.S. naval forces are con­fronting Chi­na in the Pacif­ic.

In Europe, the Snow­den “op” sig­naled the end of the “reboot with Rus­sia” and the onset of the Maid­an covert oper­a­tion, the war in Ukraine and the eco­nom­ic sanc­tions imposed on Rus­sia.

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at Jacob Apple­baum, one of the tech­nocrats involved both with the Wik­iLeaks and Snow­den “ops.” Apple­baum, like so many of the so-called “pri­va­cy activists” has a record of col­lab­o­rat­ing with the very U.S. intel­li­gence appa­rat they pro­fess to oppose.

” . . . Read­ers might find it odd that a US gov­ern­ment agency estab­lished as a way to laun­der the image of var­i­ous shady pro­pa­ganda out­fits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund tech­nolo­gies designed to pro­tect us from the US gov­ern­ment. More­over, it might seem curi­ous that its mon­ey would be so warm­ly wel­comed by some of the Internet’s fiercest antigov­ern­ment activists. . . . You’d think that anti-sur­veil­lance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appel­baum, Cory Doc­torow and Jil­lian York would be staunch­ly against out­fits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and con­tinue to play — in work­ing with defense and cor­po­rate inter­ests to project and impose U.S. pow­er abroad. Instead, these rad­i­cal activists have know­ingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become will­ing pitch­men for a wing of the very same U.S. Nation­al Secu­rity State they so adamant­ly oppose. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er’s order to sus­pend all U‑2 over­flights of the Sovi­et Union (Pow­ers’ flight was dis­patched against Pres­i­den­tial orders); the fact that Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers had poi­son and a nee­dle with which to take his own life, in order to pre­vent cap­ture (which he did not do); the fact that Pow­ers had exten­sive per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion pin­point­ing him as a U.S. intel­li­gence agent, oper­at­ing under civil­ian cov­er (in direct con­tra­ven­tion of stan­dard “san­i­ti­za­tion” pro­ce­dures); the fact that the U‑2 flew at an alti­tude which no Sovi­et or Amer­i­can inter­cep­tor air­craft or sur­face-to-air mis­sile could reach; the U‑2’s use of a spe­cial hydro­gen tech­nol­o­gy to per­mit its engine to oper­ate at that alti­tude; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that hydro­gen star­va­tion forced down Pow­ers’ plane; the rel­a­tive­ly undam­aged state of the U‑2 air­craft, call­ing into ques­tion the asser­tion that a sur­face-to-air mis­sile could have been respon­si­ble for the down­ing of Pow­ers’ plane; Pow­ers’ asser­tion that Lee Har­vey Oswald was respon­si­ble for the down­ing of his U‑2 plane (this pre­sum­ably cen­tered on Oswald’s access to radar fre­quen­cies, which had noth­ing to do with the down­ing of the plane!); Jacob Apple­baum’s links to Gene Sharp, at the cen­ter of the so-called “col­or rev­o­lu­tions;”.

2a. We note that Snow­den was work­ing for CIA in the sum­mer of 1969, when he was sud­den­ly vis­it­ed by the Angel of Mer­cy, who imbued him with the spir­it of altru­ism. So inspired, he sal­lied res­olute­ly for­ward, deter­mined to make any nec­es­sary sac­ri­fice for “truth, free­dom and the Amer­i­can way.”

“In 2009, Ed Snow­den Said Leak­ers “Should Be Shot.” Then He Became One” by Joe Mullin; Ars Tech­ni­ca; 6/26/2013.

. . . . Hired by the CIA and grant­ed a diplo­matic cov­er, he was a reg­u­lar old IT guy whose life was ele­vated by a hint of inter­na­tional intrigue. . . .

. . . . But as his first spring dawned in Switzer­land, it must have felt cold, for­eign, and expen­sive. Two days after his arrival in Switzer­land, Snow­den logged onto #arsi­fi­cial, a chan­nel on Ars Technica’s pub­lic Inter­net Relay Chat (IRC) serv­er. He’d been fre­quent­ing this space for a few months, chat­ting with whomev­er hap­pened to be hang­ing out. . . .

. . . . Snow­den logged on to the pub­lic IRC chat room with the same user­name he used across the Web: TheTrue­HOOHA. The chat room was a place he would return to on dozens of occa­sions over his years in Switzer­land, and his writ­ings fill in details about the man who may go down as the most famous leak­er in US his­tory. Over the years that he hung out in #arsi­fi­cial, Snow­den went from being a fair­ly insu­lated Amer­i­can to being a man of the world. He would wax philo­soph­i­cal about mon­ey, pol­i­tics, and in one notable exchange, about his uncom­pro­mis­ing views about gov­ern­ment leak­ers.

Four years lat­er, Snow­den took a job with a gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor for the spe­cific pur­pose of gath­er­ing secret infor­ma­tion on domes­tic spy­ing being done by the Nation­al Secu­rity Agency (NSA). In May, he hopped a plane to Hong Kong before the NSA knew where he was going. Once there, Snow­den began a process of leak­ing top-secret doc­u­ments to jour­nal­ists. Snowden’s first leak con­firmed what activists had sus­pected but couldn’t prove: there was a drag­net gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance pro­gram col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on every American’s phone calls. [This is man­i­fest­ly false, obvi­ous­ly, this was known well before.–D.E.]. . .

. . . . And he could be abra­sive. Snow­den didn’t short stocks just to make money—he did it because it was the right thing to do. He saw him­self as a pal­adin of the mar­kets, bring­ing “liq­uid­ity” to all. As for those who didn’t agree with him about the right­ness of the gold stan­dard or the need to elim­i­nate Social Secu­rity, they weren’t just mistaken—they were “retards.” . . .

. . . . A Ron Paul man and a short-sell­er

If Snow­den was get­ting com­fort­able in Gene­va, he was ful­ly at home in #arsi­fi­cial. In a depar­ture from his near­ly 800 posts in oth­er Ars forums, here he spoke blunt­ly on mat­ters of state. In the months fol­low­ing the 2008 elec­tion, he dis­cussed his embrace of a return to the gold stan­dard and his admi­ra­tion of its high­est-pro­file cham­pi­on.

In his more hyper­bolic moments, Snow­den spoke about the fall of the dol­lar in near-apoc­a­lyp­tic terms. “It seems like the USD and GBP are both like­ly to go the way of the zim­babwe dol­lar,” he sug­gested in March 2009. “Espe­cially with that cock­bag Bernanke decid­ing to mag­i­cally print 1.2T more dol­lars.” . . .

. . . . The high unem­ploy­ment rate that was on the way for the US didn’t phase Snow­den; those wring­ing their hands and seek­ing con­ven­tional Key­ne­sian solu­tions seemed soft­headed to him. Oba­ma was “plan­ning to deval­ue the cur­rency absolute­ly as fast as the­o­ret­i­cally pos­si­ble,” he wrote. Ris­ing unem­ploy­ment was a mere “cor­rec­tion,” a “nec­es­sary part of cap­i­tal­ism.” . . .

2b.  It was while work­ing for the CIA in 2009 that Snow­den made his deci­sion to leak NSA doc­u­ments. This puff-piece from Rolling Stone is use­ful only that it dis­clos­es that Snow­den chose to become a “leak­er” dur­ing the same time peri­od that he said that the elder­ly “would­n’t be fuck­ing help­less if you stopped send­ing them fuck­ing checks so they can sit on their ass and lie in hos­pi­tals all day.”

“Edward Snow­den and Glenn Green­wald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets” by Janet Reit­man; Rolling Stone; 12/04/2013.

 . . . . Anoth­er per­son who was both­ered by the Times’ treat­ment of the war­rant­less-wire­tap­ping sto­ry – and a num­ber of oth­ers based on clas­si­fied leaks – was Edward Snow­den, a patri­ot­ic young man who dreamed of a life in for­eign espi­onage. “Those peo­ple should be shot in the balls,” Snow­den, then a 25-year-old com­put­er tech­ni­cian, post­ed to an online forum in 2009, crit­i­ciz­ing both the anony­mous sources who leaked and the pub­li­ca­tions that print­ed the infor­ma­tion. “They’re report­ing clas­si­fied shit,” he said. “You don’t put that shit in the news­pa­per. . . . That shit is clas­si­fied for a rea­son.” . . . .

. . . . Pri­or to 2009, Snow­den had con­sid­ered leak­ing gov­ern­ment secrets when he was at the CIA, but held off, he lat­er said, not want­i­ng to harm agents in the field, and hop­ing that Oba­ma would reform the sys­tem. His opti­mism did­n’t last long. “[I] watched as Oba­ma advanced the very poli­cies that I thought would be reined in,” he lat­er said. As a result, he added, “I got hard­ened.” The more Snow­den saw of the NSA’s actu­al busi­ness – and, par­tic­u­lar­ly, the more he read “true infor­ma­tion,” includ­ing a 2009 Inspec­tor Gen­er­al’s report detail­ing the Bush era’s war­rant­less-sur­veil­lance pro­gram – the more he real­ized that there were actu­al­ly two gov­ern­ments: the one that was elect­ed, and the oth­er, secret regime, gov­ern­ing in the dark. “If the high­est offi­cials in gov­ern­ment can break the law with­out fear­ing pun­ish­ment or even any reper­cus­sions at all, secret pow­ers become tremen­dous­ly dan­ger­ous.” . . . .

3. Against the back­ground of the Snow­den “op,” we high­light the devel­op­ment of “focal point” per­son­nel by the CIA. Infil­trat­ed into oth­er branch­es of gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the mil­i­tary, they con­sti­tut­ed a “gov­ern­ment with­in a gov­ern­ment.” Was Snow­den one such “focal point?”

JFK and the Unspeak­able: Why He Died and Why It Mat­ters by James W. Dou­glass; Touch­stone Books [SC]; Copy­right 2008 by James W. Dou­glas; ISBN 978–1‑4391–9388‑4; pp. 196–197.

. . . . One man in a posi­tion to watch the arms of the CIA pro­lif­er­ate was Colonel Fletch­er Prouty. He ran the office that did the pro­lif­er­at­ing. In 1955, Air Force Head­quar­ters ordered Colonel L. Fletch­er Prouty, a career Army and Air Force offi­cer since World War II, to set up a Pen­ta­gon office to pro­vide mil­i­tary sup­port for the clan­des­tine oper­a­tions of the CIA. Thus Prouty became direc­tor of the Pen­tagon’s “Focal Point Office for the CIA.”

CIA Direc­tor Allen Dulles was its actu­al cre­ator. In the fifties, Dulles need­ed mil­i­tary sup­port for his cov­er cam­paigns to under­mine oppos­ing nations in the Cold War. More­over, Dulles want­ed sub­ter­ranean secre­cy and auton­o­my for his projects, even from the mem­bers of his own gov­ern­ment. Prouty’s job was to pro­vide Pen­ta­gon sup­port and deep cov­er for the CIA beneath the dif­fer­ent branch­es of Wash­ing­ton’s bureau­cra­cy. Dulles dic­tat­ed the method Prouty was to fol­low.

“I want a focal point,” Dulles said. “I want an office that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a sys­tem in the Pen­ta­gon. But the sys­tem will not be aware of what ini­ti­at­ed the request–they’ll think it came from the Sec­re­tary of Defense. They won’t real­ize it came from the Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence.

Dulles got Prouty to cre­ate a net­work of sub­or­di­nate focal point offices in the armed ser­vices, then through­out the entire U.S. gov­ern­ment. Each office that Prouty set up was put under a “cleared” CIA employ­ee. That per­son took orders direct­ly from the CIA but func­tioned under the cov­er of his par­tic­u­lar office and branch of gov­ern­ment. Such “breed­ing,” Prouty said decades lat­er in an inter­view, result­ed in a web of covert CIA rep­re­sen­ta­tives “in the State Depart­ment, in the FAA, in the Cus­toms Ser­vice, in the Trea­sury, in the FBI and all around through the government–up in the White House . . . Then we began to assign peo­ple there who, those agen­cies thought, were from the Defense Depart­ment. But they actu­al­ly were peo­ple that we put there from the CIA.”

The con­se­quence in the ear­ly 1960’s, when Kennedy became pres­i­dent, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employ­ees through the entire U.S. gov­ern­ment. It was account­able to no one except the CIA, head­ed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy, the CIA’s Deputy Direc­tor of Plans, Richard Helms, became this invis­i­ble gov­ern­men­t’s imme­di­ate com­man­der. No one except a tight inner cir­cle of the CIA even knew of the exis­tence of this top-secret intel­li­gence net­work, much less the iden­tiy of its deep-cov­er bureau­crats. These CIA “focal points,” as Dulles called them, con­sti­tut­ed a pow­er­ful, unseen gov­ern­ment with­in the gov­ern­ment. Its Dulles-appoint­ed mem­bers would act quick­ly, with total obe­di­ence, when called on by the CIA to assist its covert oper­a­tions. . . .

4b. Snow­den’s vast doc­u­ment theft make NO sense in terms of pro­tec­tion of per­son­al pri­va­cy or civ­il lib­er­ties. It appears that his “data dump” of some 1.7 mil­lion doc­u­ments would per­mit a would-be male­fac­tor to defeat NSA sur­veil­lance. Pur­loin­ing files on the mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ties of for­eign coun­tries and the per­son­al lives of GCHQ oper­a­tives (which Snow­den has done) have noth­ing to do with civ­il lib­er­ties.

Note that there is NO WAY that Snow­den could pos­si­bly have reviewed all 1.7 mil­lion doc­u­ments.

Snow­den’s “op” is a hos­tile counter-intel­li­gence oper­a­tion.

“Snow­den Still Hold­ing ‘Keys to the King­dom’ ” by Wal­ter Pin­cus; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 12/18/2013.

We’ve yet to see the full impact of for­mer Nation­al Secu­rity Agency con­trac­tor Edward Snowden’s unau­tho­rized down­load­ing of high­ly clas­si­fied intel­li­gence doc­u­ments.

Among the rough­ly 1.7 mil­lion doc­u­ments he walked away with — the vast major­ity of which have not been made pub­lic — are high­ly sen­si­tive, spe­cific intel­li­gence reports, as well as cur­rent and his­toric require­ments the White House has giv­en the agency to guide its col­lec­tion activ­i­ties, accord­ing to a senior gov­ern­ment offi­cial with knowl­edge of the sit­u­a­tion.

The lat­ter cat­e­gory involves about 2,000 unique task­ings that can run to 20 pages each and give rea­sons for selec­tive tar­get­ing to NSA col­lec­tors and ana­lysts. These orders alone may run 31,500 pages.

If dis­closed, that infor­ma­tion would reveal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties with­in U. S. intel­li­gence gath­er­ing at the strate­gic lev­el, the offi­cial said.

...

Where the copies of these sen­si­tive task­ing doc­u­ments are is an unan­swered ques­tion.

Snow­den, in Hong Kong, dis­trib­uted NSA doc­u­ments dur­ing the first week in June to three jour­nal­ists — Glenn Green­wald, doc­u­men­tary film­maker Lau­ra Poitras and Bar­ton Gell­man. Gellman’s sto­ries based on them have been pub­lished in The Wash­ing­ton Post.

Snow­den went pub­lic June 9, after the first sto­ries appeared. Then he went into hid­ing.

On June 24, the South Chi­na Morn­ing Post pub­lished a sto­ry based on a June 12 inter­view with Snow­den in which he indi­cated that he had more doc­u­ments to leak. “If I have time to go through this infor­ma­tion, I would like to make it avail­able to jour­nal­ists in each coun­try to make their own assess­ment, inde­pen­dent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowl­edge of U.S. net­work oper­a­tions against their peo­ple should be pub­lished,” Snow­den was quot­ed as say­ing.

On July 14, the Asso­ci­ated Press pub­lished a sto­ry in which Green­wald said that Snow­den — then in Moscow at the air­port — had “lit­er­ally thou­sands of doc­u­ments” that con­sti­tute “basi­cally the instruc­tion man­ual for how the NSA is built.” Green­wald, who said he had spo­ken to Snow­den hours ear­lier, told the AP that in order to prove his cred­i­bil­ity Snow­den “had to take ones that includ­ed very sen­si­tive, detailed blue­prints of how the NSA does what they do.”

These doc­u­ments, Green­wald said, “would allow some­body who read them to know exact­ly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that sur­veil­lance or repli­cate it.”

But, Green­wald added, Snow­den had insist­ed they not be made pub­lic. On July 19, Green­wald told Ger­man pub­lic broad­caster ARD that Snow­den in June in Hong Kong had giv­en him and Poitras about 9,000 to 10,000 top-secret doc­u­ments.

On Oct. 17, the New York Times’ James Risen pub­lished a sto­ry based on an inter­view with Snow­den in which he said he did not take any NSA doc­u­ments with him to Rus­sia, where he now has a year-long res­i­dency per­mit.

Green­wald recent­ly told ABC News, “We pub­lished only a small frac­tion of the ones that we have been giv­en so far because we have gone through each of them and made sure that noth­ing we are pub­lish­ing endan­gers human lives.”

Still, there are “a lot of very sig­nif­i­cant sto­ries that are yet to be report­ed,” he said dur­ing an inter­view for an ABC News spe­cial to be aired this month.

So where are the task­ing doc­u­ments? I’ve not asked Gell­man, Green­wald or Poitras because were I in their posi­tions I would not say one way or the oth­er.

The NSA’s Led­gett con­sid­ers them so impor­tant that the secu­rity of those doc­u­ments is worth hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with Snow­den about amnesty.

“My per­sonal view is, yes, it’s worth hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion about. I would need assur­ances that the remain­der of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assur­ances would be very high,” Led­gett said. . . .

5a. Jacob Appel­baum, the Wik­ileaks hack­er/data-pri­va­cy activist/Cyper­punk utopi­an who has been one of the key tech­ni­cal ana­lysts to review and write about the Snow­den cache, had a series of tweets back in 2011 singing the prais­es of soft-rev­o­lu­tion expert Gene Sharp, whose the­o­ries have been a cen­ter­piece of the “con­ga-line ops” we spoke of in FTR #885.

In light of his activ­i­ties fund­ed by the very U.S. gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence agen­cies he osten­si­bly oppos­es, this sug­gests that there may be far more to Apple­baum than we have been told.

Apple­baum has been deeply involved with both the Wik­iLeaks and Snow­den “ops,” sug­gest­ing that the pos­si­bil­i­ty that he may have been anoth­er of the CIA’s plants.

See here:

Jacob Appel­baum
@ioerror

The high­light of my day was meet­ing Gene Sharp and dis­cussing rev­o­lu­tions. I feel real­ly inspired.

4:33 PM — 18 Feb 2011

here:

Jacob Appel­baum
@ioerror

While ask­ing ques­tions, they locat­ed Gene Sharp books about author­i­tar­i­an­ism and obe­di­ence. Appar­ently, some­thing some pas­sen­gers lack.

12:58 AM — 12 Apr 2011

and here:

Jacob Appel­baum
@ioerror

If any­thing — Gene Sharp deserves cred­it for his help with many of the col­or rev­o­lu­tions; those influ­enced mod­ern events. #Gene­Sharp­TaughtMe

12:17 PM — 15 Apr 2011

5b. Appel­baum is just one of many hack­tivists who are build­ing today’s cut­ting-edge pri­vacy tools and they’re not doing it for free. No, these Cypher­punk utopi­ans are work­ing for the same enti­ty Gene Sharp has assist­ed so ably over the years: the US intel­li­gence com­mu­nity.

” . . . Read­ers might find it odd that a US gov­ern­ment agency estab­lished as a way to laun­der the image of var­i­ous shady pro­pa­ganda out­fits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund tech­nolo­gies designed to pro­tect us from the US gov­ern­ment. More­over, it might seem curi­ous that its mon­ey would be so warm­ly wel­comed by some of the Internet’s fiercest antigov­ern­ment activists. . . . . In 2012, just a few months after Radio Free Asia’s 24/7 pro­pa­ganda blitz into North Korea failed to trig­ger regime change, RFA sent folks from the Tor Project — includ­ing core devel­oper Jacob Appel­baum (pic­tured above) — into Bur­ma, just as the mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship was final­ly agree­ing to hand polit­i­cal pow­er over to US-backed pro-democ­ra­cy politi­cians. The stat­ed pur­pose of Appelbaum’s RFA-fund­ed expe­di­tion was to probe Burma’s Inter­net sys­tem from with­in and col­lect infor­ma­tion on its telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions infra­struc­ture — which was then used to com­pile a report for West­ern politi­cians and “inter­na­tional investors” inter­ested in pen­e­trat­ing Burma’s recent­ly opened mar­kets. Here you can see Appelbaum’s visa— pub­lished in the report as evi­dence of what you need­ed to do to buy a SIM card in Bur­ma.

Bur­ma is a curi­ous place for Amer­i­can anti-sur­veil­lance activists fund­ed by Radio Free Asia to trav­el to, con­sid­er­ing that it has long been a tar­get of US regime-change cam­paigns. In fact, the guru of pro-West­ern “col­or rev­o­lu­tions,” Gene Sharp, wrote his famous guide to non-vio­lent rev­o­lu­tions, “From Dic­ta­tor­ship to Democ­racy”, ini­tially as a guide for Burma’s oppo­si­tion move­ment, in order to help it over­throw the mil­i­tary jun­ta in the late 1980s. . . .

. . . . Jacob Appelbaum’s will­ing­ness to work direct­ly for an old CIA cutout like Radio Free Asia in a nation long tar­geted for regime-change is cer­tainly odd, to say the least. Par­tic­u­larly since Appel­baum made a big pub­lic show recent­ly claim­ing that, though it pains him that Tor takes so much mon­ey from the US mil­i­tary, he would nev­er take mon­ey from some­thing as evil as the CIA. . . . 

. . . . Appelbaum’s finan­cial rela­tion­ships with var­i­ous CIA spin­offs like Radio Free Asia and the BBG go fur­ther. From 2012 through 2013, Radio Free Asia trans­ferred about $1.1 mil­lion to Tor in the form of grants and con­tracts. This mil­lion dol­lars comes on top of anoth­er $3.4 mil­lion Tor received from Radio Free Asia’s par­ent agency, the BBG, start­ing from 2007. . . .You’d think that anti-sur­veil­lance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appel­baum, Cory Doc­torow and Jil­lian York would be staunch­ly against out­fits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and con­tinue to play — in work­ing with defense and cor­po­rate inter­ests to project and impose U.S. pow­er abroad. Instead, these rad­i­cal activists have know­ingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become will­ing pitch­men for a wing of the very same U.S. Nation­al Secu­rity State they so adamant­ly oppose. . . .”

“Inter­net Pri­vacy, Fund­ed by Spooks: A Brief His­tory of the BBG” by Yasha Levine; Pan­do Dai­ly; 3/01/2015. 

For the past few months I’ve been cov­er­ing U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing of pop­u­lar Inter­net pri­vacy tools like Tor, Cryp­to­Cat and Open Whis­per Sys­tems. Dur­ing my report­ing, one agency in par­tic­u­lar keeps pop­ping up: An agency with one of those real­ly bland names that masks its wild, bizarre his­tory: the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, or BBG.

The BBG was formed in 1999 and runs on a $721 mil­lion annu­al bud­get. It reports direct­ly to Sec­re­tary of State John Ker­ry and oper­ates like a hold­ing com­pany for a host of Cold War-era CIA spin­offs and old school “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” projects: Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí, Voice of Amer­ica, Radio Lib­er­a­tion from Bol­she­vism (since renamed “Radio Lib­erty”) and a dozen oth­er gov­ern­ment-fund­ed radio sta­tions and media out­lets pump­ing out pro-Amer­i­can pro­pa­ganda across the globe.

Today, the Con­gres­sion­al­ly-fund­ed fed­eral agency is also one of the biggest back­ers of grass­roots and open-source Inter­net pri­vacy tech­nol­ogy. These invest­ments start­ed in 2012, when the BBG launched the “Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund” (OTF) — an ini­tia­tive housed with­in and run by Radio Free Asia (RFA), a pre­mier BBG prop­erty that broad­casts into com­mu­nist coun­tries like North Korea, Viet­nam, Laos, Chi­na and Myan­mar. The BBG endowed Radio Free Asia’s Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund with a mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar bud­get and a sin­gle task: “to ful­fill the U.S. Con­gres­sional glob­al man­date for Inter­net free­dom.”

It’s already a mouth­ful of prover­bial Wash­ing­ton alpha­bet soup — Con­gress funds BBG to fund RFA to fund OTF — but, regard­less of which sub-group ulti­mately writes the check, the impor­tant thing to under­stand is that all this fed­eral gov­ern­ment mon­ey flows, direct­ly or indi­rectly, from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors.

Between 2012and 2014, Radio Free Asia’s Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund poured more than $10 mil­lion into Inter­net pri­vacy projects big and small: open-source encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion apps, next-gen­er­a­tion secure email ini­tia­tives, anti-cen­sor­ship mesh net­work­ing plat­forms, encryp­tion secu­rity audits, secure cloud host­ing, a net­work of “high-capac­i­ty” Tor exit nodes and even an anony­mous Tor-based tool for leak­ers and whistle­blow­ers that com­peted with Wik­ileaks.

Though many of the apps and tech backed by Radio Free Asia’s OTF are unknown to the gen­eral pub­lic, they are high­ly respect­ed and extreme­ly pop­u­lar among the anti-sur­veil­lance Inter­net activist crowd. OTF-fund­ed apps have been rec­om­mended by Edward Snow­den, cov­ered favor­ably by ProP­ub­lica and The New York Times’ tech­nol­ogy reporters, and repeat­edly pro­moted by the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion. Every­one seems to agree that OTF-fund­ed pri­vacy apps offer some of the best pro­tec­tion from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance you can get. In fact, just about all the fea­tured open-source appson EFF’s recent “Secure Mes­sag­ing Score­card” were fund­ed by OTF.

Here’s a small sam­ple of what the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors fund­ed (through Radio Free Asia and then through the Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund) between 2012 and 2014:

* Open Whis­per Sys­tems, mak­er of free encrypt­ed text and voice mobile apps like TextSe­cure and Signal/RedPhone, got a gen­er­ous $1.35-million infu­sion. (Face­book recent­ly start­ed using Open Whis­per Sys­tems to secure its What­sApp mes­sages.)
* Cryp­to­Cat, an encrypt­ed chat app made by Nadim Kobeis­si and pro­moted by EFF, received $184,000.
* LEAP, an email encryp­tion start­up, got just over $1 mil­lion. LEAP is cur­rently being used to run secure VPN ser­vices at RiseUp.net, the rad­i­cal anar­chist com­mu­ni­ca­tion col­lec­tive.
* A Wik­ileaks alter­na­tive called Glob­aLeaks (which was endorsed by the folks at Tor, includ­ing Jacob Appel­baum) received just under $350,000.
* The Guardian Project — which makes an encrypt­ed chat app called Chat­Se­cure, as well a mobile ver­sion of Tor called Orbot — got $388,500.
* The Tor Project received over $1 mil­lion from OTF to pay for secu­rity audits, traf­fic analy­sis tools and set up fast Tor exit nodes in the Mid­dle East and South East Asia.

In 2014, Con­gress mas­sively upped the BBG’s “Inter­net free­dom” bud­get to $25 mil­lion, with half of that mon­ey flow­ing through RFA and into the Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund. This $12.75 mil­lion rep­re­sented a three-fold increase in OTF’s bud­get from 2013 — a con­sid­er­able expan­sion for an out­fit that was just a few years old. Clear­ly, it’s doing some­thing that the gov­ern­ment likes. A lot.

With those resources, the Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund’s moth­er-agency, Radio Free Asia, plans to cre­ate a ver­ti­cally inte­grated incu­ba­tor for bud­ding pri­vacy tech­nol­o­gists around the globe — pro­vid­ing every­thing from train­ing and men­tor­ship, to offer­ing them a secure glob­al cloud host­ing envi­ron­ment to run their apps, to legal assis­tance.

...

Read­ers might find it odd that a US gov­ern­ment agency estab­lished as a way to laun­der the image of var­i­ous shady pro­pa­ganda out­fits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund tech­nolo­gies designed to pro­tect us from the US gov­ern­ment. More­over, it might seem curi­ous that its mon­ey would be so warm­ly wel­comed by some of the Internet’s fiercest antigov­ern­ment activists.

But, as folks in the open-source pri­vacy com­mu­nity will tell you, fund­ing for open-source encryp­tion/an­ti-sur­veil­lance tech has been hard to come by. So they’ve wel­comed mon­ey from Radio Free Asia’s Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund with open pock­ets. Devel­op­ers and groups sub­mit­ted their projects for fund­ing, while lib­er­tar­i­ans and anti-gov­ern­men­t/an­ti-sur­veil­lance activists enthu­si­as­ti­cally joined OTF’s advi­sory coun­cil, sit­ting along­side rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Google and the US State Depart­ment, tech lob­by­ists, and mil­i­tary con­sul­tants.

But why is a fed­er­al­ly-fund­ed CIA spin­off with decades of expe­ri­ence in “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” sud­denly blow­ing tens of mil­lions in gov­ern­ment funds on pri­vacy tools meant to pro­tect peo­ple from being sur­veilled by anoth­er arm of the very same gov­ern­ment? To answer that ques­tion, we have to pull the cam­era back and exam­ine how all of those Cold War pro­pa­ganda out­lets begat the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors begat Radio Free Asia begat the Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund. The sto­ry begins in the late 1940’s.

The ori­gins of the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors

The Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors traces its begin­nings to the ear­ly Cold War years, as a covert pro­pa­ganda project of the new­ly-cre­at­ed Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency to wage “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” against Com­mu­nist regimes and oth­ers deemed a threat to US inter­ests.

George Ken­nan — the key archi­tect of post-WWII for­eign pol­icy — pushed for expand­ing the role of covert peace­time pro­grams. And so, in 1948, Nation­al Secu­rity Coun­cil Direc­tive 10/2 offi­cially autho­rized the CIA to engage in “covert oper­a­tions” against the Com­mu­nist Men­ace. Clause 5 of the direc­tivee defined “covert oper­a­tions” as “pro­pa­ganda, eco­nomic war­fare; pre­ven­tive direct action, includ­ing sab­o­tage, anti-sab­o­tage, demo­li­tion and evac­u­a­tion mea­sures; sub­ver­sion against hos­tile states, includ­ing assis­tance to under­ground resis­tance move­ments, guer­ril­las and refugee lib­er­a­tion groups, and sup­port of indige­nous anti-com­mu­nist ele­ments in threat­ened coun­tries of the free world.”

Pro­pa­ganda quick­ly became one of the key weapons in the CIA’s covert oper­a­tions arse­nal. The agency estab­lished and fund­ed radio sta­tions, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, his­tor­i­cal soci­eties, emi­gre “research insti­tutes,” and cul­tural pro­grams all over Europe. In many cas­es, it fun­neled mon­ey to out­fits run and staffed by known World War II war crim­i­nals and Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors, both in Europe and here in the Unit­ed States.

Christo­pher Simp­son, author of “Blow­back: America’s Recruit­ment of Nazis and Its Destruc­tive Impact on Our Domes­tic and For­eign Pol­icy”, details the extent of these “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare projects”:

CIA-fund­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare projects employ­ing East­ern Euro­pean émi­grés became major oper­a­tions dur­ing the 1950s, con­sum­ing tens and even hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. . . .This includ­ed under­writ­ing most of the French Paix et Lib­erté move­ment, pay­ing the bills of the Ger­man League for Strug­gle Against Inhu­man­ity , and financ­ing a half dozen free jurists asso­ci­a­tions, a vari­ety of Euro­pean fed­er­al­ist groups, the Con­gress for Cul­tural Free­dom, mag­a­zines, news ser­vices, book pub­lish­ers, and much more. These were very broad pro­grams designed to influ­ence world pub­lic opin­ion at vir­tu­ally every lev­el, from illit­er­ate peas­ants in the fields to the most sophis­ti­cated schol­ars in pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties. They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, adver­tis­ing agen­cies, col­lege pro­fes­sors, jour­nal­ists, and stu­dent lead­ers, to name a few. [empha­sis added]

In Europe, the CIA set up “Radio Free Europe” and “Radio Lib­er­a­tion From Bol­she­vism” (lat­er renamed “Radio Lib­erty”), which beamed pro­pa­ganda in sev­eral lan­guages into the Sovi­et Union and Sovi­et satel­lite states of East­ern Europe. The CIA lat­er expand­ed its radio pro­pa­ganda oper­a­tions into Asia, tar­get­ing com­mu­nist Chi­na, North Korea and Viet­nam. The spy agency also fund­ed sev­eral radio projects aimed at sub­vert­ing left­ist gov­ern­ments in Cen­tral and South Amer­ica, includ­ing Radio Free Cuba and Radio Swan— which was run by the CIA and employed some of the same Cuban exiles that took part in the failed Bay of Pigs inva­sion. Even today, the CIA boasts that these ear­ly “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” projects “would become one of the longest run­ning and suc­cess­ful covert action cam­paigns ever mount­ed by the Unit­ed States.”

Offi­cially, the CIA’s direct role in this glob­al “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” project dimin­ished in the 1970s, after the spy agency’s ties to Cold War pro­pa­ganda arms like Radio Free Europe were exposed. Con­gress agreed to take over fund­ing of these projects from the CIA, and even­tu­ally Wash­ing­ton expand­ed them into a mas­sive fed­er­al­ly-fund­ed pro­pa­ganda appa­ra­tus.

The names of the var­i­ous CIA spin­offs and non­prof­its changed over the years, cul­mi­nat­ing in a 1999 reor­ga­ni­za­tion under Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton which cre­ated the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, a par­ent hold­ing com­pany to group new broad­cast­ing oper­a­tions around the world togeth­er with Cold War-era pro­pa­ganda out­fits with spooky pasts—including Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib­erty, Voice of Amer­ica and Radio Free Asia.

Today, the BBG has a $721 mil­lion bud­get pro­vided by Con­gress, reports to the Sec­re­tary of State and is man­aged by a revolv­ing crew of neo­cons and mil­i­tary think-tank experts. Among them: Ken­neth Wein­stein, head of the Hud­son Insti­tute, the arch-con­ser­v­a­tive Cold War-era mil­i­tary think tank; and Ryan C. Crock­er, for­mer ambas­sador to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syr­ia.

Although today’s BBG is no longer covert­ly fund­ed via the CIA’s black bud­get, its role as a soft pow­er “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” oper­a­tion hasn’t real­ly changed since its incep­tion. The BBG and its sub­sidiaries still engage in pro­pa­ganda war­fare, sub­ver­sion and soft-pow­er pro­jec­tion against coun­tries and for­eign polit­i­cal move­ments deemed hos­tile to US inter­ests. And it is still deeply inter­twined with the same mil­i­tary and CIA-con­nect­ed intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tions — from USAID to DARPA to the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy.

Today, the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors runs a pro­pa­ganda net­work that blan­kets the globe: Radio Martí (aimed at Cuba), Radio Far­da (aimed at Iran), Radio Sawa (which broad­casts in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Moroc­co, and Sudan), Radio Aza­di (tar­get­ing Afghanistan), Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib­erty (which has tai­lored broad­casts in over a dozen lan­guages into Rus­sia, Ukraine, Ser­bia, Azer­bai­jan, Ukraine, Belarus, Geor­gia, and Arme­nia), and Radio Free Asia (which tar­gets Chi­na, North Korea, Laos, and Viet­nam).

The BBG is also involved in the tech­nol­ogy of post-Cold War, Inter­net-era pro­pa­ganda. It has bankrolled satel­lite Inter­net access in Iran and con­tin­ues to fund an SMS-based social net­work in Cuba called Piramideo — which is dif­fer­ent from the failed covert Twit­ter clone fund­ed by USAID that tried to spark a Cuban Spring rev­o­lu­tion. It has con­tracted with an anonymi­ty Inter­net proxy called SafeWeb, which had been fund­ed by the CIA’s ven­ture cap­i­tal firm In-Q-Tel. It worked with tech out­fits run by prac­ti­tion­ers of the con­tro­ver­sial Chi­nese right-wing cult, Falun Gong — whose leader believes that humans are being cor­rupted by invad­ing aliens from oth­er planets/dimensions. These com­pa­nies — Dynaweb and Ultra­reach — pro­vide anti-cen­sor­ship tools to Chi­nese Inter­net users. As of 2012, the BBG con­tin­ued to fund them to the tune of $1.5 mil­lion a year.

As the BBG proud­ly out­lined in a 2013 fact sheet for its “Inter­net Anti-Cen­sor­ship” unit:

The BBG col­lab­o­rates with oth­er Inter­net free­dom projects and orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing RFA’s Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund, the State Depart­ment, USAID, and DARPAs SAFER Warfight­er Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Pro­gram. IAC is also reach­ing out to oth­er groups inter­ested in Inter­net free­dom such as Google, Free­dom House and the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democracy’s Cen­ter for Inter­na­tional Media Assis­tance.

BBG is also one of the Tor Project’s biggest fun­ders, pay­ing out about $3.5 mil­lion from 2008 through 2013. BBG’s lat­est pub­licly-known Tor con­tract was final­ized in mid-2012. The BBG gave Tor at least $1.2 mil­lion to improve secu­rity and dras­ti­cally boost the band­width of the Tor net­work by fund­ing over a hun­dred Tor nodes across the world — all part of the US government’s effort to find an effec­tive soft-pow­er weapon that can under­mine Inter­net cen­sor­ship and con­trol in coun­tries hos­tile to US inter­ests. (We only know about the BBG’s lucra­tive fund­ing of Tor thanks to the dogged efforts of the Elec­tronic Pri­vacy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, which had to sue to get its FOIA requests ful­filled.)

As men­tioned, last year Con­gress decid­ed the BBG was doing such a good job advanc­ing America’s inter­ests abroad that it boost­ed the agency’s “Inter­net free­dom” annu­al bud­get from just $1.6 mil­lion in 2011to a whop­ping $25 mil­lion this year. The BBG fun­neled half of this tax­payer mon­ey through its Radio Free Asia sub­sidiary, into the “Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund” — the “non­profit” respon­si­ble for bankrolling many of today’s pop­u­lar open-source pri­vacy and encryp­tion apps.

Which brings me to the next star­ring agency in this recov­ered his­tory of Wash­ing­ton DC’s pri­vacy tech­nol­ogy invest­ments: Radio Free Asia.

Radio Free Asia

The CIA launched Radio Free Asia (RFA) in 1951 as an exten­sion of its glob­al anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­ganda radio net­work. RFA beamed its sig­nal into main­land Chi­na from a trans­mit­ter in Mani­la, and its oper­a­tions were based on the ear­lier Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib­er­a­tion From Bol­she­vism mod­el.

The CIA quick­ly dis­cov­ered that their plan to foment polit­i­cal unrest in Chi­na had one major flaw: the Chi­nese were too poor to own radios.

...

Bal­loons, hold­ing small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia’s fre­quency, were loft­ed toward the main­land from the island of Tai­wan, where the Chi­nese Nation­al­ists had fled after the Com­mu­nist takeover of the main­land in 1949. The plan was aban­doned when the bal­loons were blown back to Tai­wan across the For­mosa Strait. The CIA sup­pos­edly shut­tered Radio Free Asia in the mid-1950s, but anoth­er Radio Free Asia reap­peared a decade lat­er, this time fund­ed through a CIA-Moonie out­fit called the Kore­an Cul­ture and Free­dom Foun­da­tion (KCFF) — a group based in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. that was run by a top fig­ure in South Korea’s state intel­li­gence agency, Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who also served as the “prin­ci­ple evan­ge­list” of cult leader Rev. Sun-Myung Moon of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church.

This new Moonie iter­a­tion of Radio Free Asia was con­trolled by the South Kore­an gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the country’s own CIA, the “KCIA.” It enjoyed high-lev­el sup­port from with­in the first Nixon Admin­is­tra­tion and even fea­tured then-Con­gress­man Ger­ald Ford on its board. Accord­ing to an FBI file on Rev. Moon, Radio Free Asia “at the height of the Viet­nam war pro­duced anti-com­mu­nist pro­grams in Wash­ing­ton and beamed them into Chi­na, North Korea and North Viet­nam.”

Radio Free Asia got bust­ed in a wide­spread cor­rup­tion scan­dal in the late 1970s, when the South Kore­an gov­ern­ment was inves­ti­gated for using the Moonie cult to influ­ence US pub­lic opin­ion in order to keep the US mil­i­tary engaged against North Korea. Back in the 1970s, the Moonies were the most noto­ri­ous cult in the Unit­ed States, accused of abduct­ing and “brain­wash­ing ”count­less Amer­i­can youths. How it was that the CIA’s Radio Free Asia was hand­ed off to the Moonies was nev­er quite explained, but giv­en laws ban­ning the CIA (or the KCIA) from engag­ing in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare in the US, the obvi­ous thing to do was to bury Radio Free Asia long enough for every­one to for­get about it.

No soon­er had Radio Free Asia van­ished amid scan­dal than it reap­peared again, Ter­mi­na­tor-like, in the 1990s — this time as a legit “inde­pen­dent” non­profit whol­ly con­trolled by the BBG and fund­ed by Con­gress.

Although this lat­est ver­sion of Radio Free Asia was sup­posed to be a com­pletely new orga­ni­za­tion and was no longer as covert and B‑movie spooky, its objec­tives and tac­tics remained exact­ly the same: To this day it beams pro­pa­ganda into the same Com­mu­nist coun­tries, includ­ing North Korea, Viet­nam, Laos, Cam­bo­dia, Chi­na, and Bur­ma, and fid­dles around in the same sorts of spooky adven­tures.

...

Radio Free Asia and Anti-gov­ern­ment Hack­tivists

Which brings us up to the present, when the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, Radio Free Asia and its off­shoot, the Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund, find them­selves in bed with many of the very same pri­vacy activist fig­ures whom the pub­lic regards as the pri­mary adver­saries of out­fits like Radio Free Asia and the BBG. And it’s tech­nol­ogy that brings togeth­er these sup­posed adver­saries — the US Nation­al Secu­rity State on the one hand, and “hack­tivist”, “anti-gov­ern­ment” lib­er­tar­ian pri­vacy activists on the oth­er:

“I’m proud to be a vol­un­teer OTF advi­sor,” declared Cory Doc­torow, edi­tor of Boing­Bo­ing and a well-known lib­er­tar­ian anti-sur­veil­lance activist/author.

“Hap­py to have joined the Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund’s new advi­sory coun­cil,” tweet­ed Jil­lian York, the Direc­tor for Inter­na­tional Free­dom of Expres­sion at the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion. (York recent­ly admit­ted that the OTF’s “Inter­net free­dom” agen­da is, at its core, about regime change, but bizarrely argued that it didn’t mat­ter.)

In 2012, just a few months after Radio Free Asia’s 24/7 pro­pa­ganda blitz into North Korea failed to trig­ger regime change, RFA sent folks from the Tor Project — includ­ing core devel­oper Jacob Appel­baum (pic­tured above) — into Bur­ma, just as the mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship was final­ly agree­ing to hand polit­i­cal pow­er over to US-backed pro-democ­ra­cy politi­cians. The stat­ed pur­pose of Appelbaum’s RFA-fund­ed expe­di­tion was to probe Burma’s Inter­net sys­tem from with­in and col­lect infor­ma­tionon its telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions infra­struc­ture — which was then used to com­pile a report for West­ern politi­cians and “inter­na­tional investors” inter­ested in pen­e­trat­ing Burma’s recent­ly opened mar­kets. Here you can see Appelbaum’s visa— pub­lished in the report as evi­dence of what you need­ed to do to buy a SIM card in Bur­ma.

Bur­ma is a curi­ous place for Amer­i­can anti-sur­veil­lance activists fund­ed by Radio Free Asia to trav­el to, con­sid­er­ing that it has long been a tar­get of US regime-change cam­paigns. In fact, the guru of pro-West­ern “col­or rev­o­lu­tions,” Gene Sharp, wrote his famous guide to non-vio­lent rev­o­lu­tions, “From Dic­ta­tor­ship to Democ­racy”, ini­tially as a guide for Burma’s oppo­si­tion move­ment, in order to help it over­throw the mil­i­tary jun­ta in the late 1980s. Sharp had crossed into Bur­ma ille­gally to train oppo­si­tion activists there — all under the pro­tec­tion and spon­sor­ship of the US gov­ern­ment and one Col. Robert Helvey, a mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cer.

Jacob Appelbaum’s will­ing­ness to work direct­ly for an old CIA cutout like Radio Free Asia in a nation long tar­geted for regime-change is cer­tainly odd, to say the least. Par­tic­u­larly since Appel­baum made a big pub­lic show recent­ly claim­ing that, though it pains him that Tor takes so much mon­ey from the US mil­i­tary, he would nev­er take mon­ey from some­thing as evil as the CIA.

Igno­rance is bliss.

Appelbaum’s finan­cial rela­tion­ships with var­i­ous CIA spin­offs like Radio Free Asia and the BBG go fur­ther. From 2012 through 2013, Radio Free Asia trans­ferred about $1.1 mil­lion to Tor in the form of grants and con­tracts. This mil­lion dol­lars comes on top of anoth­er $3.4 mil­lion Tor received from Radio Free Asia’s par­ent agency, the BBG, start­ing from 2007.

But Tor and Appel­baum are not the only ones hap­py to take mon­ey from the BBG/RFA.

Take com­puter researcher/privacy activist Har­ry Halpin, for exam­ple. Back in Novem­ber of 2014, Halpin smeared me as a con­spir­acy the­o­rist, and then false­ly accused me and Pan­do of being fund­ed by the CIA — sim­ply because I report­ed on Tor’s gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Turns out that Halpin’s next-gen­er­a­tion secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions out­fit, called LEAP, took more than $1 mil­lion from Radio Free Asia’s Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund. Some­what iron­i­cally, LEAP’s tech­nol­ogy pow­ers the VPN ser­vices of RiseUp.Net, the rad­i­cal anar­chist tech col­lec­tive that pro­vides activists with email and secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools (and forces you to sign a thin­ly veiled anti-Com­mu­nist pledge before giv­ing you an account).

Then there’s the ACLU’s Christo­pher Soghoian. A few months ago, he had vicious­ly attacked me and Pan­do for report­ing on Tor’s US gov­ern­ment fund­ing. But just the oth­er day, Soghoian went on Democ­racy Now, and in the mid­dle of a seg­ment crit­i­ciz­ing the U.S. government’s run­away hack­ing and sur­veil­lance pro­grams, rec­om­mended that peo­ple use a suite of encrypt­ed text and voice apps fund­ed by the very same intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed U.S. gov­ern­ment appa­ra­tus he was denounc­ing. Specif­i­cally, Soghoian rec­om­mended apps made by Open Whis­per Sys­tems, which got $1.35 mil­lion from Radio Free Asia’s Open Tech­nol­ogy Fund from 2013 through 2014.

He told Amy Good­man:

“These are best-of-breed free appli­ca­tions made by top secu­rity researchers, and actu­ally sub­si­dized by the State Depart­ment and by the U.S. tax­payer. You can down­load these tools today. You can make encrypt­ed tele­phone calls. You can send encrypt­ed text mes­sages. You can real­ly up your game and pro­tect your com­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

When Good­man won­dered why the U.S. gov­ern­ment would fund pri­vacy apps, he acknowl­edged that this tech­nol­ogy is a soft-pow­er weapon of U.S. empire but then gave a very mud­dled and naive answer:

CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Because they’re tools of for­eign pol­icy. You know, the U.S. gov­ern­ment isn’t this one machine with one per­son, you know, dic­tat­ing all of its poli­cies. You have these dif­fer­ent agen­cies squab­bling, some­times doing con­tra­dic­tory things. The U.S. gov­ern­ment, the State Depart­ment has spent mil­lions of dol­lars over the last 10 years to fund the cre­ation and the deploy­ment and improve­ment to secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions and secure com­put­ing tools that were intend­ed to allow activists in Chi­na and Iran to com­mu­ni­cate, that are intend­ed to allow jour­nal­ists to do their thing and spread news about democ­racy with­out fear of inter­cep­tion and sur­veil­lance by the Chi­nese and oth­er gov­ern­ments.

AMY GOODMAN: But maybe the U.S. gov­ern­ment has a way to break in.

CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Well, you know, it’s pos­si­ble that they’ve dis­cov­ered flaws, but, you know, they have—the U.S. gov­ern­ment hasn’t been writ­ing the soft­ware. They’ve been giv­ing grants to high­ly respect­ed research teams, secu­rity researchers and aca­d­e­mics, and these tools are about the best that we have. You know, I agree. I think it’s a lit­tle bit odd that, you know, the State Department’s fund­ing this, but these tools aren’t get­ting a lot of fund­ing from oth­er places. And so, as long as the State Depart­ment is will­ing to write them checks, I’m hap­py that the Tor Project and Whis­per Sys­tems and these oth­er orga­ni­za­tions are cash­ing them. They are cre­at­ing great tools and great tech­nol­ogy that can real­ly improve our secu­rity. And I hope that they’ll get more mon­ey in the future. It’s con­ve­nient and nice to believe that one hand of the U.S. Nation­al Secu­rity State doesn’t know what the oth­er hand is doing — espe­cially when the liveli­hoods of you and your col­leagues depends on it. But as the long and dark covert intel­li­gence his­tory of the Broad­cast­ers Board of Gov­er­nors and Radio Free Asia so clear­ly shows, this think­ing is naive and wrong. It also shows just how effec­tively the U.S. Nation­al Secu­rity State brought its oppo­si­tion into the fold.

You’d think that anti-sur­veil­lance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appel­baum, Cory Doc­torow and Jil­lian York would be staunch­ly against out­fits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and con­tinue to play — in work­ing with defense and cor­po­rate inter­ests to project and impose U.S. pow­er abroad. Instead, these rad­i­cal activists have know­ingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become will­ing pitch­men for a wing of the very same U.S. Nation­al Secu­rity State they so adamant­ly oppose.