It was the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre who finally admitted before an Australian Parliament committee that she had unilaterally directed and pressured CyberCon to drop myself and anacademic research professor (an Australian citizen) from the University of Melbourne as speakers.

I viewed the extraordinary pressure exerted by the Australian Cyber Security Centre to block me as an already-accepted speaker a week before the start of a high visibility public interest conference oncybersecurity as a most alarming and Orwellian development and a distinct form of brazen censorship for the express purpose of outright silencing me.

The head of the ACSC misled the committee when she said the reason she wanted my talk canned was because of a proposal for me to participate on a panel with Edward Snowden that never wentforward.

It appears she dissembled and used the apparent floating of the idea of a proposed Edward Snowden panel (for which I had NO prior knowledge whatsoever) as a convenient foil and cover to justify andexcuse the barring of me as a speaker from CyberCon with the very heavy hand of her higher authority as the head of the ACSC over the conference organizers (Australian Information SecurityAssociation).

In addition, the reason she gave before the committee is not the reason given to me when I formally followed up with the AISA organizers.

On 29 September (4 days before I departed the United States), I received an e-mail message to contact the Board Director for AISA as a matter of urgency.

In a subsequent phone call from the same AISA Board Director, I was told that I was no longer a speaker on the conference agenda, but I could still attend the conference as a delegate and that they (AISA)would honor the flight and accommodations arranged for me many months early.

I followed up formally and asked for the specific reason I was dropped as a speaker from CyberCon. I was informed on 7 October, in an e-mail from the Board Director of AISA, that AISA works with aconference partner in respect of CyberCon. Our conference partner has determined your presentation is incongruent with the conference.

Furthermore, this egregious canning of me as a speaker fed right into the current debate in Australia about press freedom and whistleblowing laws because their public interest disclosure process (theirlegal way for public servants to blow the whistle) has been described as impenetrable by their Federal Court.

The current debate in Australia regarding press freedom and whistleblowing laws strikes at the heart of any country claiming it is a democracy.

The recent raids by the Australian government against major media outlets and whistleblowers have broken open the tension between openness and transparency versus secrecy and closed-doorgovernment too often hiding itself (and its actions) away from accountability and the public interest.

Something has to give. The debate centers on the public interest knowing what the government is doing behind closed doors and often in secret in the name of and under the veil and banner of nationalsecurity.

The dramatic 21 October Right to Know campaign with the redacted front pages on all major newspapers in Australia as I woke up in Melbourne before returning to the United States that very day demonstrates beyond the shadows of secrecy, censorship and press suppression that sunshine is the best antidote for a healthy and robust democracy increasingly held hostage by the national security state.

Efforts from on high seek to justify the actions of that national security state under the color of public safety for more and more autocratic powers while stoking fear and hyping the danger to society yet going after whistleblowers who disclose actions that clearly rise to the level of wrongdoing, violations of law, coverup and endangering public safety, health and the general welfare.

What is happening in Australia is most concerning to me as fundamental democratic values and principles are increasingly under direct attack around the world from the rise of increasing autocratictendencies and raw executive authorities bypassing, ignoring and even undermining the rule of law under the exception of national security and government fiat.

Australian public interest disclosure laws are also a mixed bag a conflicted patchwork with huge carve-outs for national security and immigration. Nor do they adequately protect a whistleblower fromreprisal, retaliation or retribution.

It is quite clear that not all disclosures (even when done in the public interest) are protected by law in Australia, and the whistleblower is in danger of exposure as a result.

At the federal level, whistleblowers face career suicide for public interest disclosures. And if deemed by the government to be unauthorized disclosures, those disclosures are even considered criminal.

As it happened, my removal as a speaker from CyberCon is the first time I was ever censored anywhere.

The trend lines of increased secrecy around the world by governments does not bode well for societies at large. History is not kind.

What I do see improving is public-interest concern regarding just how far government can or should go. People are discussing what society sacrifices in the name of secrecy and national security when toooften the mantra is the ends justifies the means and government says to just trust us, while secret power is too often unaccountable, even to itself.

The price I paid as a whistleblower was very high. I just about lost it all and came close to losing my liberty and freedom. I was declared indigent by the court, am still in severe debt, have no pension asmy career and personal life were turned inside-out and upside-down because the government treated me as a traitor for my whistleblowing on the mass domestic surveillance program that violated the U.S.Constitution. I also exposed 9/11 intelligence failures and subsequent coverup plus massive multibillion-dollar fraud, waste and abuse. The government then turned me into an insider threat and Enemy ofthe State and prosecuted me as a criminal for allegedly violating the U.S. Espionage Act.

If it is left up to the government to determine what are state secrets, then the government is perversely incentivized to declare as state secrets any disclosures made in the press it does not like. This thinkingcan only lead to more prosecutions of publishers to protect the State. In the absence of meaningful oversight of the secret side of government, how does the public trust its own government to operate andfunction in the public interest and not for special or private interests?

But then again, if the press is not doing its job holding government and the public sector to account, why should they be surprised when the public holds even the media in lower regard?

Government should earn the publics trust and not take it for granted or abuse that trust. The heart of democracy rests on a civil society that it is not undermined by the very government that represents it.

Once the pillars of democracy are eroded away, it is quite difficult to restore them. The misuse of the concept of national security as the primary grounds to suppress democracy, the press and the voicesof whistleblowers speaking truth to and about power increases authoritarian tendencies in even democratic governments.

The real danger to civil society in Australia is that these same tendencies give rise to extralegal autocratic behavior and state control over the institutions of democratic governance under the blanket ofnational security with the excuse of protecting the state.

As I continue with this work as chair of the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign, Im mindful that my efforts are only possible because of support from so many concerned people.

Thomas Drake is an NSA whistleblower who chairs the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign.

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Kafka Down Under: the Threat to Whistleblowers and Press Freedom in Australia - CounterPunch

Whataboutism and its near twin What if? can be instructive. What if this were a Democratic president? What if the party majorities all lined up? What if the Senate majority were Democrats and the House Republicans? What if, what if?

After all, todays hypotheticals will likely become tomorrows realities. A little foresight now could help break the ongoing revenge cycles for Nixon, for Clinton.

But the comparison of then-Vice President Joe Biden pressing for Ukraine to police itself better with President Trumps translucent shakedown for personal gain is just silly, and pretty obviously so. I cringe at the Republicans putting this one forward with straight faces. They know better now, as they did back then.

That and calling out the whistleblower whose report proved to be perfectly in line with the rough transcript the president pulled from his double-secret vault and made available to the public. Um, guys, it wouldnt be less true if Edward Snowden or Julian Assange had revealed it.

Blind loyalty, like blind hatred, is just the flip side of the same coin.

But the biggest howler has to be the complaints that the people who were actually there havent testified. Well, only because they were ordered to disobey subpoenas. The president could make his closest advisers available just as he did with the transcript. I think we all know exactly why he hasnt.

Does anyone doubt what the eyewitnesses would have to say under oath? Those who couldnt duck certain questions by taking the Fifth, that is.

Still, the current GOP rhetoric seems to fly with the Fox News crowd for the moment, though history is unlikely to be so kind. Blind loyalty, like blind hatred, is just the flip side of the same coin. Such is the political psychosis, the big problem with partisanship today.

But there are better arguments, ones that persuade even me a never Trumper that impeachment is not the best remedy, at least not yet.

One is straight-up realpolitik: The Republicans are unmoved, and they have the majority in the Senate, where a trial on the removal of the president from office requires a two-thirds vote. Not going to happen.

Another ties to procedure. I think its ultimately right that both parties should agree on an impeachment before it goes further. This inquiry, like the even faster one in the case of President Clinton, has been too expedient, lets say, for such a momentous step.

More crucial for the health of the republic than a rash, rushed impeachment is working fully through the courts to compel eyewitness testimony. Let the election year play out as it will. Thats less important than doing this right, with all the checks and balances.

Instead, the Democrats have set up a bums rush to a show trial of another sort in the Republican Senate, which will end in total exoneration and such rhetoric. The proceeding should be a serious, measured affair, full of gravitas rather than kangaroos and bananas, courtesy of the House so far.

As for evidence, theres plenty of foul smoke, all right, and the Republicans labor to explain how theres no fire underneath. The Moral Majority has grown feckless with its values, eager even to trade for what, naked power?

Too bad the Democrats in their own zeal are enabling them, between rushing the proceedings and fielding such a weak, off-putting field of presidential candidates.

The presidents supporters should be well pleased. The Democrats are right on pace to help deliver what they dread most: a second term for President Trump.

Don Rogers is the publisher of The Union, Lake Wildwood Independent, and Sierra Sun. He can be reached at drogers@theunion.com or 530-477-4299.

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Don Rogers: Dems rash to impeach - The Union of Grass Valley

Edward Snowden told Trevor Noah recently, during a beamed-in appearance on his show, that the United States governments announcement that he was criminally liable for breaking his nondisclosure agreement with the states security agencies helped push his book, PERMANENT RECORD (Macmillan), up the bestseller lists.

So the US government shot itself in the foot a bit there. Surely it didnt want Snowdens story to be more widely read? But it gave him that publicity spike.And, surely, breaching his nondisclosure agreement is a minor offence compared to what he did when he revealed to the world the vast surveillance and data-gathering capability he had helped the US government to construct?

For that is what Snowden did, in 2013, and today he is trapped in Moscow because any travel makes him vulnerable to being snatched by the CIA, something it has shown itself quite willing to do. Being stuck in Moscow (where he was offered at least minimal protection) is why his appearance on Noahs show was beamed in.

The descendant of American pioneers and the child of two people in government service, Snowden put a drifting youth behind him after 9/11 when he started working for the US security agencies. In the wake of 9/11, he felt he had to get involved in the USs self-defence. Officially employed by computer company Dell, he was seconded to the agencies to help bring them up to date in a rapidly digitising world, to develop new data and surveillance capacity in the age of the internet.

The agencies, he writes, were hiring tech companies to hire tech kids, and then they were giving them the keys to the kingdom, because as Congress and the press were told the agencies didnt have a choice. No one knew how the keys, or the kingdom, worked.

After 9/11, however, and the declaration of the war on terror, then-president George W Bushs Patriot Act, along with other legislation, went way beyond the matter of helping the NSA and other agencies catch up with the new tech. The Patriot Act and executive orders such as the Presidents Surveillance Program (PSP) ballooned into programmes to monitor and collect every bit of data about US citizens and their communications as it could, and to store that data (and metadata) for as long as possible. The PSP made George Orwells Big Brother look positively amateurish.

Snowden describes his growing awareness of why such programmes were wrong, and how they violated the rights of American (and other) citizens. They were in fact illegal in US law and contravened the Constitution, which led to various legal machinations such as the Protect America Act of 2007 to retroactively legalise the PSP, employing intentionally misleading language to do so.

When Snowden stumbles upon the deeply classified report of the NSAs inspector general, setting out precisely what was really going on, the movement towards his decision to reveal all this publicly begins. In a detailed but straightforward way, and often with some eloquence, Snowden tells the story of that journey, and what happened when, in 2013, he finally told the world what the US security agencies were up to.

The fallout was immense, and not just for Snowden himself. He remains in Moscow, ironically the unwilling guest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is perhaps the central figure in the information wars of the present. Putin has driven the Russian capacity for online surveillance, hacking and data theft, and its ability to infiltrate social media all over the world and thereby to influence the outcome of elections such as the 2016 poll that brought Donald Trump to power in the US. The techniques of international power plays have changed, and Snowden and his riveting story, at the centre of that change, help us understand this dangerous new world.

Likewise Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, who tells his story in MINDF*CK: INSIDE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICAS PLOT TO BREAK THE WORLD (Profile Books). Cambridge Analytica was the company, funded by right-wing US plutocrats and the odd Russian oligarch, that developed the means to manipulate voters in the US and in Britain (in the run-up to the Brexit referendum). It learned to get into their heads, as it were, and how to target them as voters and look how successful that was. And it was all thanks to the data contained in the profiles of the 87-million Facebook users that was handed over to them by the social media behemoth.

Wylie, famously a pink-haired (or, latterly, green-haired too) gay man who overcame childhood disability to become a geek running election technology in his native Canada, tells a story that in outline is similar to Snowdens: his gradual realisation that what he was doing was profoundly wrong, was undermining the democracy and personal freedom he believed in, and his progress towards blowing the whistle on the whole thing.

Read more:
Steal my data, feed me lies | Arts and Culture | Books - Mail and Guardian

Comparing Howard Zinn and Yogi Berra in the same sentence probably leaves most on the left with their mouths wide open. But not so with baby boomers still on the left, and others who cling to sanity near the ninth circle of hell. Historian and Professor Howard Zinn and the great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra knew something not only about how history often irregularly repeats itself, but also how consistent that repetition is in general. Howard Zinn said that governments lie and Yogi said, Its like dj vu all over again.

It grieves me greatly that in just over a month the tenth anniversary of Howard Zinns death arrives. How can that be? Time does not wait for the great, even great historians and catchers.

Yesterday, December 9, 2019, newspapers (Afghanistan papers reveal US public were misled about unwindable war) reported that the war in Afghanistan has been a lost cause from its beginning in 2001, and for anyone with a historical perspective, since the Soviet invasion there in the 1980s and the US support of warlords, many of whom would soon become the Taliban. Well over a trillion dollars of wasted money, over 2,000 US lives, and who knows how many deaths of Afghani civilians. The newspaper of record, that has supported the vast majority of US wars without question, publishedDocuments Reveal U.S. Officials Misled Public on War in Afghanistan,(December 9, 2019). Recall that newspapers lies about going to war in Iraq in 2002-2003? That paper seems to love to occasionally collude with those in power with the expected outcomes.

Heres a quote from the article that could have come out of General William Westmorelands mouth during the Vietnam War. The words short-term may have given way to long-term for Westmoreland:

The United States military achieved a quick but short-term victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda in early 2002, and the Pentagons focus then shifted toward Iraq. The Afghan conflict became a secondary effort, a hazy spectacle of nation building, with intermittent troop increases to conduct high-intensity counterinsurgency offensives but, over all, with a small number of troops carrying out an unclear mission.

Even as the Taliban returned in greater numbers and troops on the ground voiced concerns about the American strategys growing shortcomings, senior American officials almost always said that progress was being made.

Its amazing that US leaders are so consistent. Recall General Colin Powell making the case for war against Iraq at the UN?

Daniel Ellsberg has been in the news lately as the noose grows tighter around Chelsea Mannings and Julian Assanges necks. Those in power already have banished Edward Snowden for telling the simple truth that the government of the US knows every single move we make, what that move is, and where we made it!

Ellsberg could have been jailed for life just like so many members of minority groups in the so-called land of the free have been for decades. But Richard Nixon and his cronies were so stupid they broke into Ellsbergs physicians office to get dirt on him and so the Pentagon Papers case went down the governments drain.

Dj vu, readers? The fools in the government lied about Vietnam from its inception until the last US helicopter flew away from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975. That gave some solace to the war resisters among us from the Vietnam era, but probably little to the memory of over 58,000 US dead and those who cared about them, the masses of the wounded, and the millions who died in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

And so we arrive on the stage of history present for those who enjoy this holiday season. Andhistorypresent in Afghanistan has been a completely bipartisan effort from Bush II to Obama, and now Trump! The government lied about Afghanistan again and again and that may be why the court jester Donald Trump is trying to negotiate a way out of that debacle. Who will negotiate a way out of the lethal mess that the Middle East is now?

Continue reading here:
The One Thing That US Leaders Seem to Do Well is Lie - CounterPunch

There is a thin line between hypocrisy and stupidity, as the US Congress ably demonstrated this week when it locked horns with Facebook and Apple over encryption.

A group of lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Encryption argued passionately that end-to-end encryption used by messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage is brilliant if you're a goodie, but it also helps baddies. Ergo, law enforcement must be given some kind of backdoor access so they can get a warrant and gather evidence.

The Committee is chaired by Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator for South Carolina. The same Lindsey Graham who has spent a fair amount of time this year warning everyone that the Chinese government could easily force Huawei to provide backdoor access to its networks.

"I'm not about to create a safe haven for criminals where they can plan their misdeeds and have information stored in a fashion [so] that law enforcement can never be allowed to access it. That is a bridge too far for me," he said during this week's hearing, adding that the authorities equipped with the appropriate warrant must be able to access encrypted messages. "How we do this, I don't know. I hope the tech community working with law enforcement can find a way to do it."

Doing his best scary headmaster impression, he warned: "If y'all don't; we will."

Watch the video here. He really did say "y'all."

Graham would probably argue there's a difference between using backdoor access to prevent crime and using it for espionage. But it's two sides of the same coin, and Graham's track record suggests he's not that bothered about spying on innocent civilians in the name of national security. He has previously branded NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a traitor, and called on Russia to return him to the US so he could face prosecution. Last month he called for the identity of the whistleblower that kick-started the impeachment inquiry into Trump to be made public.

On this evidence, if you were to ask Facebook and Apple why they rolled out end-to-end encryption in the first place, they could just point at people like Lindsey Graham.

Instead though, they highlighted that any backdoor access into their messaging services intended to help law enforcement could also help criminals.

"We do not know of a way to deploy encryption that provides access only for the good guys without making it easier for the bad guys to break in," testified Erik Neuenschwander, director of user privacy at Apple.

"Every day, over a trillion transactions from financial transactions to the exchange of healthcare records occur safely over the Internet because of encrypted communications. Utilising 5G networks, connected devices will play an even larger role in the operation and maintenance of our critical infrastructure, running our electric grids, transportation networks, and healthcare and financial systems," he continued. "Encryption is needed to protect from malicious actors whose attacks are growing exponentially in scope, frequency, and sophistication."

Jay Sullivan, Facebook's product management director for privacy and integrity in Facebook Messenger, went a little further, putting on record that encryption also protects dissidents from authoritarian regimes. He also warned that if US-based platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage can't guarantee their services are secure, then users will flock to one that is.

"If the United States rolls back its support for privacy and encryption, foreign application providers including those who may be outside the reach of our legal system and not nearly as committed to or capable of preventing, detecting, and responding to bad behaviour will fill the vacuum and provide the private and secure communications that people expect and demand," he said.

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Encryption spat sees backdoor back-and-forth between tech firms, Congress - TelecomTV