Stephen Lendman

General Keith Alexander is NSA director. He's US Cyber Command head. He's in charge of lawlessly spying. He directs illegal hacking. He does both globally. He's a serial lawbreaker. He violates fundamental constitutional law. He testified before Congress. More on that below.

Edward Joseph Snowden revealed what vital to know. He exposed unconstitutional spying. He said more. He accused NSA of lawless hacking. He knows. He was there. He revealed what he saw firsthand. On June 14, Russia Today headlined "Snowden's asset: NSA hacking exposer knows secrets China wants," saying: He's currently in Hong Kong. He's a wanted man. Washington wants him extradited, arrested, prosecuted, disappeared or murdered. He fears for his safety. According to the Chinese daily Global Times:

"The US is accumulating all the advanced powers of the Internet to forge a state-level 'fist' in order to launch cyber attacks on other countries." "The unparalleled power of this 'fist' is beyond our imagination, which should be an alarm bell for us to catch up with the development of the internet."

On June 14, the South China Morning Post headlined "Edward Snowden: Classified US data shows Hong Kong hacking targets." Records show specific NSA-hacked Hong Kong and mainland dates and IP addresses over a four year period. According to Snowden:

"The primary issue of public importance to Hong Kong and mainland China should be that the NSA is illegally seizing the communications of tens of millions of individuals without any individualised suspicion of wrongdoing." "They simply steal everything so they can search for any topics of interest." Exposure "demonstrated (America's) hypocrisy and arrogance" on matters regarding cyber warfare.

More »

Deniz Erkmen

Here we go: I have been attacked; yet again, tear-gassed brutally by my own government. By my government, which is supposed to protect me. By my government which is supposed to work for me. By police officers whose salaries, armors, batons and ammunition is paid by my friends’, by our families’, and by my taxes.

Make no mistake. We were not exactly protesting when the police started attacking us. Not that it is illegal to protest democratically in Turkey – though you would be hard pressed to believe that seeing how we are treated. We were just a lot of people standing together at the Taksim Square. We were not even chanting. I was talking to two friends standing next to me; an architect and a historian. The square was full with people arriving after work. We were in a good mood; worried, as there have been continuous police interventions during the day after police moved in onto the square, claiming they wanted to take some banners down; but with friends, running into people we know, just chatting; debating if we should move into the park where more friends were hanging out.

That’s when the gas canisters appeared, without any warning, like comets in the sky. I saw the white cloud afar on the other side of the square; I saw some commotion. But by now, we, the protestors of Turkey, are very much familiar with this particular sight and sound; tear gas canisters being fired – so I didn’t start moving immediately.

More »

Wayne Madsen

Recent revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency is conducting massive meta-data vacuuming of the phone calls and Internet transactions of tens of millions of Americans and, perhaps, billions of people around the world, with little or no effective oversight by President Obama, the U.S. Congress, or the federal court system means that the intelligence agency has become, in its own right, a global superpower.

NSA acts like a virtual «state within a state». The director of NSA, a four-star flag officer, also wears the hat of Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, the chief cyber-warfare echelon within the Department of Defense. Just as any nation-state, NSA also has alliances with similar signals intelligence and cyber-warfare agencies around the world, including Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), and the Government Communications Security Board (GCSB) of New Zealand. These English-speaking partners are known as the «Five Eyes» countries and the signals intelligence alliance began after World War II and grew in scope during the Cold War.

NSA also has «third party» intelligence sharing agreements with a number of other signals intelligence agencies, but these smaller agencies are like NSA;’s very own colonial territories. Third party signals intelligence agencies of countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Thailand are expected to feed their intelligence «take» into the massive computer databases NSA maintains at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, but these Third Party entities receive very little intelligence in return. In fact, the Five Eyes «Second party» partners of NSA receive relatively little intelligence from NSA in exchange for the massive amounts of intercepted communications they make available to NSA. Even more secretive are NSA’s «Fourth Party» partners, including neutral Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Switzerland and, in what may pose a problem for Snowden, last reportedly in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has been a «Fourth Party» partner of NSA since the early 1980s. NSA maintained two eavesdropping stations in western China directed against the nuclear testing facilities of the Soviet Union and then Russia.

More »