Lars says that it #39;s time for Edward Snowden to come home and face the music...
Lars on America #39;s Newsroom 05/29/14.

By: Lars Larson

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Lars says that it's time for Edward Snowden to come home and face the music... - Video

TIME Politics Congress Edward Snowden and the NSA Can Both Be Right US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks to European officials via videoconference during a parliamentary hearing on improving the protection of whistleblowers, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, eastern France, on June 24, 2014. Frederick FlorinAFP/Getty Images Two reports raise the possibility that on balance, both the NSA collection programs and Snowdens revelations have done more to advance the public good than to harm it

The yearlong debate over the leak of National Security Agency documents by former contractor Edward Snowden has divided the world into two camps. One sees Snowden as a patriotic public servant and believes the NSA programs he revealed are unjustified threats to civil liberties. The other sees Snowden as a traitor and views the NSA programs as necessary for national security.

Two reports this week raise a third possibility: that on balance, both the NSA collection programs and Snowdens revelations have done more to advance the public good than to harm it.

On July 1, the independent agency charged with overseeing U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism programs to ensure they dont infringe on privacy and civil liberties found the core of the NSAs Internet collection programs did neither. In a 196-page report, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found both the NSAs collection of Internet traffic from service providers, and the agencys tapping of undersea cables, complied with the Constitution and Congresss privacy protections for U.S. persons, and were therefore legal. It further found that the programs were valuable (two board members called them extremely valuable) for foreign intelligence and counterterrorism:

Presently, over a quarter of the NSAs reports concerning international terrorism include information based in whole or in part on Section 702 collection.

On the other side of the equation, the PCLOB report comes less than a week after Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the NSA, told the New York Times that while the damage done by Snowden was real, he did not believe the sky is falling as a result. Earlier in June, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Washington Post that we think that a lot of what [Snowden] looked at, he couldnt pull down, and that it doesnt look like [Snowden] took as much as first thought.

Taken together, the reports raise the possibility that the NSA programs continue to contribute to U.S. national security and that the damage done by Snowdens leaks is offset by the public awareness of and debate about surveillance.

There are, of course, qualifiers to such a best-of-both-worlds view. For starters, the PCLOB report raised concerns about how the NSA, CIA and FBI search the data once it is collected from the Internet and recommended in some cases curtailing those searches. In January, the PCLOB found that the NSAs telephone metadata records program was effectively illegal and should be ended. And no one can seriously look at the Snowden revelations without considering the possibility that they damaged national security. A large majority of security experts recently polled by National Journal believe the damage caused by the leaks is greater than the public value of Snowdens revelations.

But the PCLOB said it had not seen any evidence of bad faith or misconduct in either the NSAs Internet collection program or the telephone metadata program: for all the speculative fear of a dystopian future, no one has been maliciously targeted, and the programs havent been hijacked by a malevolent Nixonian seeking political advantage. At the same time, Snowdens revelations have initiated a broad, bipartisan public debate over government surveillance, and he has advanced the idea that in the digital age, privacy is always in play (including the commercial collection and sale of data on virtually every household in the country, as the Federal Trade Commission recently reported).

This may all sound Panglossian, but it fits with the conclusions of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scourge of secrecy, who believed there were many things that should be made secret, but then released as soon as the immediate need has passed. Standing at the threshold of the digital age in 1997, Moynihan declared:

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Edward Snowden and the NSA Can Both Be Right - TIME

Provided conversations: Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Photo: Reuters

Washington: Ordinary internet users far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from US digital networks.

Nine out of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided to The Washington Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimised", more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but nearly 900 additional email addresses were found unmasked in the files, which could be strongly linked to US citizens or residents.

There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages but also collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

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Among the most valuable contents whichthe Post didnot describe in detail, to avoid harm to continuing operations are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture of Pakistan-based bomb maker Muhammad Tahir Shahzadand Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have an intimate quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

About 160,000 intercepted email and instant message conversations were reviewed, along with 7900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.

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Nine out of 10 people in Edward Snowden's NSA intercepts were not targets

WASHINGTON - The Washington Post said on Saturday a study of a large collection of communications intercepted by the US National Security Agency showed that ordinary Internet users, including Americans, far outnumbered legally targeted foreigners caught in the surveillance. "Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else," the Post said.

Nearly half of the files "contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents," it said.

The paper said the files also contained discoveries of considerable intelligence value, including "fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks." Tracking the communications led to the capture of some terrorism suspects, including Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali, it said.

Many other files were retained although, described as useless by analysts, they were about intimate issues such as love, illicit sexual relations, political and religious conversions and financial anxieties, the Post said.

The paper said it reviewed about 160,000 emails and instant-message conversations and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts, collected between 2009 and 2012.

US intelligence officials declined to confirm or deny in general terms the authenticity of the intercepted content provided by Snowden to the Post.

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Ordinary people outnumber targeted foreigners in NSA data