Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 47

Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT’s 1967 Attack on MLK’s Anti-War Speech

John Oliver’s Monday night interview of Edward Snowden — which in 24 hours has been viewed by 3 million people on YouTube alone — renewed all the standard attacks in Democratic circles accusing Snowden of being a traitor in cahoots with the Kremlin. What’s most striking about this— aside from the utter lack of evidencefor any of it— is how identical it isto what Nixon officials said to smear the last generation’s greatest whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg (who is widely regarded by Democrats as...

Why John Oliver Can’t Find Americans Who Know Edward Snowden’s Name (It’s Not About Snowden)

On his HBO program last night, John Oliver devoted 30 minutes to a discussion of U.S. surveillance programs, advocatinga much more substantive debate as the June 1 deadline for renewing the Patriot Act approaches (the full segment can be seen here). As part of that segment, Oliverbroadcast an interview he conducted with Edward Snowden in Moscow, and to illustrate the point that an insufficientsurveillance debate has been conducted, showed video of numerous people in Times Square saying they h...

Britain Used Spy Team to Shape Latin American Public Opinion on Falklands

Faced with mounting international pressure over the Falkland Islands territorial dispute, the British government enlisted its spy service, including a highly secretive unit known for using “dirty tricks,” to covertly launch offensive cyberoperations to prevent Argentina from taking the islands.

A shadowy unit of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO” since atleast 2009. Documents provided to The Inte...

Obama Personally Tells the Egyptian Dictator that U.S. Will Again Send Weapons (and Cash) to his Regime

Yesterday, the Egyptian regime announced it was prosecuting witnesses who say they saw a police officer murder an unarmed poet and activist during a demonstration, the latest in a long line of brutal human rights abuses that includes imprisoning journalists, prosecuting LGBT citizens, and mass executions of protesters. Last June,Human Rights Watch said that Egyptian“security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak...

Court Accepts DOJ’s ‘State Secrets’ Claim to Protect Shadowy Neocons: a New Low

A truly stunning debasementof the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint effortsof the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability.The detailsare crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here.

At the center of it isan anti-Iranian group calling itself“United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI),which isvery likelya front for some combin...

Netanyahu’s Spying Denials Contradicted by Secret NSA Documents

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterdayvehemently denied a Wall Street Journal report, leaked by the Obama White House, that Israel spied on U.S.negotiations with Iran and then fedthe intelligence to Congressional Republicans. His office’s denial was categorical and absolute, extending beyond this specific story to U.S.-targeted spying generally, claiming: “The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies.”

Israel’sclaim is not only...

US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblowerEdward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said.

The vice chancellor delivered a speech in which he praised the journalists who worked on the Snowden archive, and then lamented th...

What’s Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?

The French Interior Ministry on Monday ordered that five websitesbe blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism.“I do not want to see sites that could lead people to take up arms on the Internet,” proclaimed Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

(David Thompson)

When the block functions properly, visitors to those banned sites, rather than accessing the content of the sites they chose to visit, will be automatically redirected to the Interior Ministry website. There,they w...

The Orwellian Re-Branding of “Mass Surveillance” as Merely “Bulk Collection”

Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled “torture”with the Orwellian euphemism“enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, thegovernments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand “mass surveillance” as “bulk collection” in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal). In the past several weeks, this is the clearly coordinated theme that has arisen in theU.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the last d...

UK Parliament Committee, Calling For Reform, Shows Its “Evidence” to Justify Mass Surveillance

The Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament (ISC) issued a lengthy report today on the surveillance practices of GCHQ. Invoking the now-standard Orwellian tactic of claiming that “bulkcollection” is not “mass surveillance,” the Committee predictably cleared GCHQ of illegality, but it did announce that it has “serious concerns” over the agency’s lack of transparency and oversight. Citing the Snowden disclosures, it called for a significantoverhaul of the legal framework govern...