Live Q&A with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST

[tangent4ronpaul]

Someone please YouTube this!

http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden/

Edward Snowden will be answering questions submitted by the public on his official support site, freesnowden.is, this Thursday 23 January at 8pm GMT, 3pm EST. The support site is run by The Courage Foundation and is the only endorsed Snowden Defence Fund.

This is the first Snowden live chat since June 2013 and will last for an hour starting at 8pm GMT, 3pm EST. Questions can be submitted on twitter on the day of the event using the #AskSnowden hashtag. Edward Snowden’s responses will appear at http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden

The live chat comes exactly a week after US President Barack Obama gave an address in response to the public concerns raised by Edward Snowden’s revelations about US surveillance practices. In the live chat, Edward Snowden is expected to give his first reaction to the President’s speech.

Courage (formerly the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund) is a trust, audited by accountants Derek Rothera & Company in the UK, for the purpose of providing legal defence and campaign aid to journalistic sources. It is overseen by an unrenumerated committee of trustees. Edward Snowden is its first recipient.

freesnowden.is was commissioned by the trustees of Courage to provide information on the threats Edward Snowden faces and what can be done to support him, and details all revelations made to date in a convenient central archive.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

Has anyone asked a question yet? #AskSnowden

how about posting suggested tweets and tweet um and RT others tweets. There are a bunch of kinda dumb questions by ppl that didn't do their HW, so maybe we could stack the deck with interest in some good questions.

Keep in mind that his stay in Russia is based on his promise to do no further harm to the US Gvmt. so questions like what crypto can NSA crack and what can't it crack are not a good idea. However, asking him what crypto he personally trusts/would recommend to a friend - his OPINION, should be OK.

Ones I'm thinking of:

Lets start with the really TS stuff: What brands and models of HDs have the best MTBF? Google aint talkin'... :)

If you could be dictator of IETF, how would you "fix" the Internet? Make it PRISM proof?

US concerned you have tasking docs (what we know/don't know). If you possess, will you promise to not release?

What crypto do you trust/would U rcmd to a frnd? TC, GPG, AES, Tails, OTR have been mentioned. Others?

What crypto do you personally NOT trust/would NOT recommend to a friend? - why?

What are your thoughts about the anonymity and safety of DarkNets? Tor, FREENET, i2p, etc.

Greenwald claims you gave him 40K docs, USG says up to 1.7M How much data did you walk off with?

So please find my tweets and RT and tweet some of your own, but point us at them so we can RT

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[RickyJ]

That's cool, I hope he is in an undisclosed location and that he is well guarded. Very powerful people want him dead and they tend to get what they want.

[DamianTV]

Heres my question for Snowden (if someone wants to ask on my behalf):

HOW CAN WE HELP?

[tangent4ronpaul]

Heres my question for Snowden (if someone wants to ask on my behalf):

HOW CAN WE HELP?

Several people have already asked.

WikiLeaks is taking donations for their whistle blowers defense fund which is supporting him.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

Reading through the tweets has been interesting.

So far only one hate tweet.

Lotta people just saying thank you, we <3 U, admire your courage, and so on.

Lotta people asking if he would do it again. The impact on his family. How's your Russian - stuff like that.

Asking advice on books to read, fav website, fav OS...

Some ppl asking about TOR, crypto, how to be safe on the internet.

Some people asking about <fill in the blank> spying against X country.

One producer from Dutch TV asked for an interview.

...and the usual suspects are asking about UFO's, ET, 9/11. NWO, Agenda 21 and so on...

This feed is going to turn into a fire-hose later. Maybe 35-40% of the tweets are advertising the event in about 12 languages.

What's interesting is what's NOT being asked: His thoughts on Obama's reform proposals.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

3 hours till showtime.

You can tell the DC area work force woke up. There are some real jerks tweeting.

und a Swedish groupie who tweeted him a marriage proposal...

She's been tweeting at him hot and heavy all night...

They mentioned that tweets sent closer to the start time are more likely to get answered. So if you tweeted before, re-tweet. The Free_snowden account said they would tweet a good time to start sending.

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[brandon]

I want to donate to him. Can anyone tell if definitively if that site "http://www.freesnowden.is/" is a legit way to donate? Will the money actually go to him? Will it be changed hands a dozen times first with everyone taking a little off the top for themselves?


Can I just send him bitcoins directly?

[Warlord]

tangent, can you post his responses?

[CaseyJones]

bump

[tangent4ronpaul]

responses won't be via tweet, but rather his responses will appear here and stay up after it:

http://freesnowden.is/asksnowden.html

Surprise find: NSA wall of honor pic. You see CIA's often, but I've never seen a pic of NSA's.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BeqscauCYAACcfI.jpg:large

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[ClydeCoulter]

426376077666054144

[tangent4ronpaul]

User Actions
Follow

Marianna
‏@otmarianna
#AskSnowden The committee for NSA-related issues in the Hungarian parliament would like a hearing with you. Have you heard about it?

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[tangent4ronpaul]

3 hours

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[tangent4ronpaul]

We got a second one!!! LOL!

C_Z0 ‏@Ciudadano_Zer0 1h
.@enfermarebelde Would you marry me? :) #AskSnowden

not clear who she(?) is asking, though...

Starts in just over an hour

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[tangent4ronpaul]

Starts in 15 minutes, but there is plenty of activity on the twitter channel.

#AskSnowden started trending for a bit

http://freesnowden.is/asksnowden.html

If you want to ask a question, now would be the time. I think they stop taking them after it starts.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

Free Snowden ‏@free_snowden 44s
freesnowden.is hosts the only endorsed #Snowden defence fund. Please consider making a donation: http://freesnowden.is/donate/ #AskSnowden

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[tangent4ronpaul]

Just started:

@savagejen Do you think it is possible for our democracy to recover from the damage NSA spying has done to our liberties? #AskSnowden

Yes. What makes our country strong is our system of values, not a snapshot of the structure of our agencies or the framework of our laws. We can correct the laws, restrain the overreach of agencies, and hold the senior officials responsible for abusive programs to account.

@midwire How quickly can the NSA, et. al. decrypt AES messages with strong keys #AskSnowden Does encrypting our emails even work?

As I’ve said before, properly implemented strong encryption works. What you have to worry about are the endpoints. If someone can steal you keys (or the pre-encryption plaintext), no amount of cryptography will protect you.

However, that doesn’t mean end-to-end crypto is a lost cause. By combining robust endpoint security with transport security, people can have much greater confidence in their day to day communications.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

Looks like the site is having some technical problems. Either being slammed by the invite going viral or a DDoS attack.

ok, another question:

@VilleThompson What do you think about Obama’s whistleblowing protection act? #AskSnowden

One of the things that has not been widely reported by journalists is that whistleblower protection laws in the US do not protect contractors in the national security arena. There are so many holes in the laws, the protections they afford are so weak, and the processes for reporting they provide are so ineffective that they appear to be intended to discourage reporting of even the clearest wrongdoing. If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony. One only need to look at the case of Thomas Drake to see how the government doesn’t have a good history of handling legitimate reports of wrongdoing within the system.

Despite this, and despite the fact that I could not legally go to the official channels that direct NSA employees have available to them, I still made tremendous efforts to report these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the proper clearance who would listen. The reactions of those I told about the scale of the constitutional violations ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom to go to through what Drake did.

My case clearly demonstrates the need for comprehensive whistleblower protection act reform. If we had had a real process in place, and reports of wrongdoing could be taken to real, independent arbiters rather than captured officials, I might not have had to sacrifice so much to do what at this point even the President seems to agree needed to be done.

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[Todd]

bump.

I see only three questions asked. I sure hope more are coming. This guy needs as much time as he can to get this thoughts out there.

[tangent4ronpaul]

@auerfeld #AskSnowden do you think it’s a shame that #Obama gave his #NSA speech before his Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reported?

The timing of his speech seems particularly interesting, given that it was accompanied by so many claims that “these programs have not been abused.”

Even if we accept the NSA’s incredibly narrow definition of abuse, which is “someone actually broke the rules so badly we had to investigate them for it,” we’ve seen more instances of identified, intentional abuse than we have seen instances where this unconstitutional mass phone surveillance stopped any kind of terrorist plot at all — even something less than an attack.

To back that up with the government’s own numbers, according to the NSA Inspector General, we’ve seen at least 12 specific, intentional cases of “abuse” by the NSA.

In contrast, the federal government’s independent PCLOB report on the NSA’s mass phone surveillance today (which stated the NSA has spied on at least 120,000,000 American phones under this program) said this:

“We are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

At the press conference, Judge Wald stated this program, which has been operated in secret for years, has no basis in law. The panel determined this kind of mass surveillance is illegal and should be ended.

When even the federal government says the NSA violated the constitution at least 120 million times under a single program, but failed to discover even a single “plot,” it’s time to end “bulk collection,” which is a euphemism for mass surveillance. There is no simply justification for continuing an unconstitutional policy with a 0% success rate.

In light of another independent confirmation of this fact, I think Americans should look to the White House and Congress to close the book entirely on the 215 BR provision.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

@MichaelHargrov1 #AskSnowden Was the privacy of your co-workers considered while you were stealing their log-in and password information?

With all due respect to Mark Hosenball, the Reuters report that put this out there was simply wrong. I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers.

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[jbauer]

so you guys suppose the NSA is tracking ip's of whomever visits this site today?

[tangent4ronpaul]

@RagBagUSA #AskSnowden what (in your opinion) is the appropriate extent of US national security apparatus? Surely some spying is needed?

Not all spying is bad. The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication every single day. This is done not because it’s necessary — after all, these programs are unprecedented in US history, and were begun in response to a threat that kills fewer Americans every year than bathtub falls and police officers — but because new technologies make it easy and cheap.

I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record. Particularly when we now have courts, reports from the federal government, and even statements from Congress making it clear these programs haven’t made us any more safe, we need to push back.

This is a global problem, and America needs to take the lead in fixing it. If our government decides our Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable seizures no longer applies simply because that’s a more efficient means of snooping, we’re setting a precedent that immunizes the government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same kind of indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the NSA is doing.

It’s not good for our country, it’s not good for the world, and I wasn’t going to stand by and watch it happen, no matter how much it cost me. The NSA and the rest of the US Intelligence Community is exceptionally well positioned to meet our intelligence requirements through targeted surveillance — the same way we’ve always done it — without resorting to the mass surveillance of entire populations.

When we’re sophisticated enough to be able to break into any device in the world we want to (up to and including Angela Merkel’s phone, if reports are to be believed), there’s no excuse to wasting our time collecting the call records of grandmothers in Missouri.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

so you guys suppose the NSA is tracking ip's of whomever visits this site today?

Nah - just MAC addresses...

@Valio_ch #asksnowden Do you think that the Watchdog Report by Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Board will have any impact at all?

I don’t see how Congress could ignore it, as it makes it clear there is no reason at all to maintain the 215 program. Let me quote from the official report:

“Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection without unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while ensuring that any governmental requests for telephone calling records are tailored to the needs of specific investigations.”

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[tangent4ronpaul]

I will continue into overtime
(next question coming soon…)

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ps: did start 13 min late and there have been some looooong pauses, like 10 minutes a pop....

[tangent4ronpaul]

@jaketapper #AskSnowden Under what conditions would you agree to return to the U.S.?

Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself, but it’s unfortunately not possible in the face of current whistleblower protection laws, which through a failure in law did not cover national security contractors like myself.

The hundred-year old law under which I’ve been charged, which was never intended to be used against people working in the public interest, and forbids a public interest defense. This is especially frustrating, because it means there’s no chance to have a fair trial, and no way I can come home and make my case to a jury.

Maybe when Congress comes together to end the programs the PCLOB just announced was illegal, they’ll reform the Whistleblower Protection Act, and we’ll see a mechanism for all Americans, no matter who they work for, to get a fair trial.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

@wikileaks #AskSnowden The Ecuadorean Consul in London, Fidel Narvaez, lost his job after his helping you to safety was spun. Message for his family?

Fidel is an incredibly brave individual, and he did everything that was possible to ensure that the rights of someone he had never met would be protected. He could have turned away from a tough decision, but instead of letting my situation become someone else’s problem, he did what he thought was right. That kind of commitment to doing the right thing, even knowing it could get you in trouble, is something the world needs more of.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

@LukasReuter #AskSnowden How should the community of states react to the new information concerning surveillance? What actions have to be made?

We need to work together to agree on a reasonable international norm for the limitations on spying. Nobody should be hacking critical-to-life infrastructure like hospitals and power stations, and it’s fair to say that can be recognized in international law.

Additionally, we need to recognize that national laws are not going to solve the problem of indiscriminate surveillance. A prohibition in Burundi isn’t going to stop the spies in Greenland. We need a global forum, and global funding, committed to the development of security standards that enforce our right to privacy not through law, but through science and technology. The easiest way to ensure a country’s communications are secure is to secure them world-wide, and that means better standards, better crypto, and better research.

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[EBounding]

The hundred-year old law under which I’ve been charged, which was never intended to be used against people working in the public interest, and forbids a public interest defense. This is especially frustrating, because it means there’s no chance to have a fair trial, and no way I can come home and make my case to a jury.

Isn't this basically what Rand said?

[tangent4ronpaul]

@ferenstein what’s the worst and most realistic harm from bulk collection of data? Why do you think it outweighs national security? #AskSnowden

The worst and happening-right-now harm of bulk collection — which again, is a euphemism for mass surveillance — is two-fold.

The first is the chilling effect, which is well-understood. Study after study has show that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free.

The second, less understood but far more sinister effect of these classified programs, is that they effectively create “permanent records” of our daily activities, even in the absence of any wrongdoing on our part. This enables a capability called “retroactive investigation,” where once you come to the government’s attention, they’ve got a very complete record of your daily activity going back, under current law, often as far as five years. You might not remember where you went to dinner on June 12th 2009, but the government does.

The power these records represent can’t be overstated. In fact, researchers have referred to this sort of data gathering as resulting in “databases of ruin,” where harmful and embarrassing details exist about even the most innocent individuals. The fact that these records are gathered without the government having any reasonable suspicion or probable cause justifying the seizure of data is so divorced from the domain of reason as to be incapable of ever being made lawful at all, and this view was endorsed as recently as today by the federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight board.

Fundamentally, a society in which the pervasive monitoring of the sum of civil activity becomes routine is turning from the traditions of liberty toward what is an inherently illiberal infrastructure of preemptive investigation, a sort of quantified state where the least of actions are measured for propriety. I don’t seek to pass judgment in favor or against such a state in the short time I have here, only to declare that it is not the one we inherited, and should we as a society embrace it, it should be the result of public decision rather than closed conference.

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[tangent4ronpaul]

@mrbass21 Recently several threats have been made on your life by the intelligence community. Are you afraid for your life? Thoughts? #AskSnowden

It’s concerning, to me, but primarily for reasons you might not expect.

That current, serving officials of our government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts. These are the same officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor the 4th and 1st Amendments. This should bother all of us.

The fact that it’s also a direct threat to my life is something I am aware of, but I’m not going to be intimidated. Doing the right thing means having no regrets.

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[Deborah K]

This seems like it belongs somewhere on the front page of this forum.

[tangent4ronpaul]

@mperkel #ASKSNOWDEN They say it’s a balance of privacy and safety. I think spying makes us less safe. do you agree?

Intelligence agencies do have a role to play, and the people at the working level at the NSA, CIA, or any other member of the IC are not out to get you. They’re good people trying to do the right thing, and I can tell you from personal experience that they were worried about the same things I was.

The people you need to watch out for are the unaccountable senior officials authorizing these unconstitutional programs, and unreliable mechanisms like the secret FISA court, a rubber-stamp authority that approves 99.97% of government requests (which denied only 11 requests out of 33,900 in 33 years http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request . They’re the one that get us into trouble with the Constitution by letting us go too far.

And even the President now agrees our surveillance programs are going too far, gathering massive amounts of private records on ordinary Americans who have never been suspected of any crime. This violates our constitutional protection against unlawful searches and seizure. Collecting phone and email records for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.

I’m going to stop here. My deepest thanks to everyone who sent questions, and whether or not we agree on where the lines should be drawn, I encourage you to contact your members of congress and tell them how you feel about mass surveillance. This is a global problem, and the first step to tackling it is by working together to fix it at home.

If you’d like to more ideas on how to push back against unconstitutional surveillance, consider taking a look at the organizations working together to organize https://thedaywefightback.org/ .

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[CaseyJones]

This seems like it belongs somewhere on the front page of this forum.

it was posted, I bumped it up

[ClydeCoulter]

@mperkel #ASKSNOWDEN They say it’s a balance of privacy and safety. I think spying makes us less safe. do you agree?

Intelligence agencies do have a role to play, and the people at the working level at the NSA, CIA, or any other member of the IC are not out to get you. They’re good people trying to do the right thing, and I can tell you from personal experience that they were worried about the same things I was.

The people you need to watch out for are the unaccountable senior officials authorizing these unconstitutional programs, and unreliable mechanisms like the secret FISA court, a rubber-stamp authority that approves 99.97% of government requests (which denied only 11 requests out of 33,900 in 33 years http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request . They’re the one that get us into trouble with the Constitution by letting us go too far.

And even the President now agrees our surveillance programs are going too far, gathering massive amounts of private records on ordinary Americans who have never been suspected of any crime. This violates our constitutional protection against unlawful searches and seizure. Collecting phone and email records for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.

I’m going to stop here. My deepest thanks to everyone who sent questions, and whether or not we agree on where the lines should be drawn, I encourage you to contact your members of congress and tell them how you feel about mass surveillance. This is a global problem, and the first step to tackling it is by working together to fix it at home.

If you’d like to more ideas on how to push back against unconstitutional surveillance, consider taking a look at the organizations working together to organize https://thedaywefightback.org/ .

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Seems that thedaywefightback has a counter problem with their countdown timer, 16,113 days left?

[Deborah K]

it was posted, I bumped it up

Cool. Thank you, Casey.

Can someone rep Casey for me?

[tangent4ronpaul]

Cool. Thank you, Casey.

Can someone rep Casey for me?

rep'd!

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[ClydeCoulter]

Anyone able to get the video at thedaywefightback to work?

[Philhelm]

The first is the chilling effect, which is well-understood. Study after study has show that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free.

This isn't necessarily true in every case. It makes me actually want to flaunt my disdain for them now that I am 100% certain that I can gain an audience with certain key words. Perhaps I'll begin every phone conversation with, "Bomb, terrorist, 9/11, President, Washington D.C., fuck the NSA."

[tangent4ronpaul]

bump!