life-style, books,

I still blame Alec Guinness. Before becoming a Jedi knight and a knight of the realm to boot, Guinness starred as John le Carre's master spy, George Smiley, in two BBC television series. He inhabited that character with such guile and finesse as to appropriate Smiley from his rather vexed creator. In my view, Guinness as Smiley did more besides. He was the forerunner of Netflix noir, starting the transfer of high-quality, long-form, morally ambiguous thrillers from print to small screen. Spy novels have never been the same. Guinness' posthumously pernicious impact is evident throughout Alan Furst's 15 nuanced and atmospheric stories about Europe in the 30s and 40s, but nowhere more so than in the last volume, Under Occupation (Weidenfeld and Nicholson). Although only one of Furst's books has been adapted for television (tritely and tediously), all his work is distinctly cinematic. Furst's palette is shades of grey. Grey dominates his repeated scenes of drizzle, fog, rain and shadows. Grey also catches the flaws, hesitations and betrayals which entrap his characters. Any spy story set in the Nazi era must be a morality tale. Good must battle evil, decent people remain brave enough to hope for a better world, and the machinations of the Gestapo - however dastardly and deft - be thwarted. Furst's dilemma is that he cannot adequately depict evil. Take this last book. Characters walk out of prison after a murder charge,and blithely board a ship for Sweden to escape pursuing Nazis. A purloined torpedo miraculously appears, to be hidden on a tugboat which turns up just as providentially. The cartoon cast includes "a Falstaff with a black eye patch" and an author who muses at inordinate length about writing spy novels set during the 1930s. Furst used to display a Zen-like gift for building up both seedy atmosphere and emotional intensity. He continues to do that, but at the expense of suspense and surprise. Odd though this sounds, as mortal enemies of civilisation the Nazis deserve better. They were utterly committed, implacably ruthless, and rather smart as well. Blundering buffoons would not have lasted in Gestapo ranks. At the other end of the spectrum, le Carre always respected the "principal adversary", to borrow a Russian term. Guinness never played Karla, Smiley's KGB adversary in a deadly espionage duel. Karla is commended for precisely those attributes which Furst's Nazis lack. He is a step ahead, deploying any tool to hand, utterly determined to win. Hidden within the State security apparatus in Beijing must be lots more Karlas. For spy novelists, however, those Chinese espiocrats remain indecipherable. One exception to that judgement is the excellent Night Heron by Adam Brookes, a tense, tough-minded tale of Beijing conspiracies which benefits from first-hand knowledge of China. For others, the new espionage adversary might well resemble a leering Bond villain or Dr Fu Manchu in a Mao suit - inscrutable, foreign in every way, acknowledging no scruples. If our adversaries are now unintelligible, our own side has become distinctly boring. Where le Carre argued that spying was watching and waiting, the craft now entails watching - a screen. Imagine creating a novel around a figure like Edward Snowden, hunched down behind his computer, lost in algorithms. Hacking and phishing only come to life if the computer techo also has a hidden life, as does Lisbeth Salander with her dragon tattoo and zippy motorbike. Again, television shows how to make technology intriguing; the heavily-armed hacker with an odd past in Unit 42 is the star on Belgium's police payroll. Those spy novels which still work recognise the truth of Pogo's maxim: "we have met the enemy and he is us". Here, Stella Rimington, who once ran the domestic intelligence service in London (her most recent is The Moscow Sleepers), lets the side down by making her hunters and gatherers twee, homely, as if they paused for afternoon tea or a stroll in Green Park. Despite all her actual experience, Rimington's narratives read like old-fashioned country house whodunnits. By contrast, Mick Herron has now published eight stories (up to Joe Country) about misanthropic losers exiled from Ms Rimington's old agency, derisorily named the Slow Horses. Their eccentric gifts are used most to fend off treachery from their erstwhile colleagues. Mainstream spies want the Slow Horses expelled, forgotten and, if possible, erased. Post-Smiley and therefore post-Cold War, John le Carre has had the same Pogo'esque intuition about perfidy at home. His new novel, Agent Running in the Field, assumes that British espionage agencies still harbour spies (nave and silly ones, in this case), that spy hunters fall into love with their prey, and that adroit use of a marriage registry can foil all the surveillance techniques of MI5, MI6 and MI whatever. A simple yearning is evident, not unlike Furst's, for good to be given a fair go.

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/ae5a0d0c-3c43-43a3-acd8-19fa2b3d1df7.jpg/r12_0_4987_2811_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

I still blame Alec Guinness.

Before becoming a Jedi knight and a knight of the realm to boot, Guinness starred as John le Carre's master spy, George Smiley, in two BBC television series. He inhabited that character with such guile and finesse as to appropriate Smiley from his rather vexed creator.

Modern spies are often hackers. Picture: Shutterstock

In my view, Guinness as Smiley did more besides. He was the forerunner of Netflix noir, starting the transfer of high-quality, long-form, morally ambiguous thrillers from print to small screen. Spy novels have never been the same.

Guinness' posthumously pernicious impact is evident throughout Alan Furst's 15 nuanced and atmospheric stories about Europe in the 30s and 40s, but nowhere more so than in the last volume, Under Occupation (Weidenfeld and Nicholson).

Although only one of Furst's books has been adapted for television (tritely and tediously), all his work is distinctly cinematic. Furst's palette is shades of grey. Grey dominates his repeated scenes of drizzle, fog, rain and shadows. Grey also catches the flaws, hesitations and betrayals which entrap his characters.

Any spy story set in the Nazi era must be a morality tale. Good must battle evil, decent people remain brave enough to hope for a better world, and the machinations of the Gestapo - however dastardly and deft - be thwarted.

Furst's dilemma is that he cannot adequately depict evil. Take this last book. Characters walk out of prison after a murder charge,and blithely board a ship for Sweden to escape pursuing Nazis. A purloined torpedo miraculously appears, to be hidden on a tugboat which turns up just as providentially.

The cartoon cast includes "a Falstaff with a black eye patch" and an author who muses at inordinate length about writing spy novels set during the 1930s.

Furst used to display a Zen-like gift for building up both seedy atmosphere and emotional intensity. He continues to do that, but at the expense of suspense and surprise.

Odd though this sounds, as mortal enemies of civilisation the Nazis deserve better. They were utterly committed, implacably ruthless, and rather smart as well.

Blundering buffoons would not have lasted in Gestapo ranks.

At the other end of the spectrum, le Carre always respected the "principal adversary", to borrow a Russian term.

Guinness never played Karla, Smiley's KGB adversary in a deadly espionage duel. Karla is commended for precisely those attributes which Furst's Nazis lack.

He is a step ahead, deploying any tool to hand, utterly determined to win.

Imagine creating a novel around a figure like Edward Snowden, hunched down behind his computer, lost in algorithms. Hacking and phishing only come to life if the computer techo also has a hidden life.

Hidden within the State security apparatus in Beijing must be lots more Karlas. For spy novelists, however, those Chinese espiocrats remain indecipherable.

One exception to that judgement is the excellent Night Heron by Adam Brookes, a tense, tough-minded tale of Beijing conspiracies which benefits from first-hand knowledge of China.

For others, the new espionage adversary might well resemble a leering Bond villain or Dr Fu Manchu in a Mao suit - inscrutable, foreign in every way, acknowledging no scruples.

If our adversaries are now unintelligible, our own side has become distinctly boring.

Where le Carre argued that spying was watching and waiting, the craft now entails watching - a screen.

Imagine creating a novel around a figure like Edward Snowden, hunched down behind his computer, lost in algorithms. Hacking and phishing only come to life if the computer techo also has a hidden life, as does Lisbeth Salander with her dragon tattoo and zippy motorbike.

Again, television shows how to make technology intriguing; the heavily-armed hacker with an odd past in Unit 42 is the star on Belgium's police payroll. Those spy novels which still work recognise the truth of Pogo's maxim: "we have met the enemy and he is us".

Here, Stella Rimington, who once ran the domestic intelligence service in London (her most recent is The Moscow Sleepers), lets the side down by making her hunters and gatherers twee, homely, as if they paused for afternoon tea or a stroll in Green Park. Despite all her actual experience, Rimington's narratives read like old-fashioned country house whodunnits.

By contrast, Mick Herron has now published eight stories (up to Joe Country) about misanthropic losers exiled from Ms Rimington's old agency, derisorily named the Slow Horses. Their eccentric gifts are used most to fend off treachery from their erstwhile colleagues. Mainstream spies want the Slow Horses expelled, forgotten and, if possible, erased.

Post-Smiley and therefore post-Cold War, John le Carre has had the same Pogo'esque intuition about perfidy at home. His new novel, Agent Running in the Field, assumes that British espionage agencies still harbour spies (nave and silly ones, in this case), that spy hunters fall into love with their prey, and that adroit use of a marriage registry can foil all the surveillance techniques of MI5, MI6 and MI whatever.

A simple yearning is evident, not unlike Furst's, for good to be given a fair go.

Link:
Since the days of John le Carre, it's been hard to find a good spy in crime thrillers - The Canberra Times

Saturday, February 8th 2020 - 11:29 UTC Judge Ricardo Soares Leite for now, has held off on accepting cybercrimes charges against U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald.(Pic)

A Brazilian judge indicted six people accused of hacking the phones of prosecutors in the countrys biggest corruption case on Thursday but held off for now on accepting cybercrimes charges against U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The judge, Ricardo Soares Leite, said the Supreme Court had to rule first on an earlier injunction shielding Greenwald from investigation before he could decide on the indictment, which charges Greenwald, editor of news website The Intercept, with allegedly abetting the hacking as it published leaked information.

I decline, for now, to receive the complaint against Glenn Greenwald, due to the controversy over the extent of the injunction granted by Minister Gilmar Mendes, the judge wrote.

The damaging leaks showed then-judge Sergio Moro, who is now justice minister, advising prosecutors in the graft case against former leftist President Lula da Silva, who was jailed for corruption but released 18 months later.

Intercept Brasil, edited by Greenwald, published the leaked conversations that pointed to collusion between the judge and the prosecuting team. He was charged last month with criminal association with the group of six people accused of hacking the phones of members of the prosecutors team in the so-called Car Wash investigation.

Greenwald welcomed the judges decision not to proceed with the charges, but said it was insufficient to guarantee the rights of a free press.

This is not enough. We seek a decisive rejection from the Supreme Court of this abusive prosecution on the grounds that it is a clear and grave assault on core press freedoms, he said in a statement.

Greenwald, a resident of Brazil and fierce critic of far right President Jair Bolsonaro, is best known for his work on the disclosures of Edward Snowden, the American former National Security Agency contractor who leaked secret documents about U.S. telephone and internet surveillance in 2013.

Greenwalds lawyers argued that he should not have been charged because an injunction by Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes had barred prosecutors from investigating him for information published in the media.

Mendes cited Greenwalds constitutional right to the protection of journalistic sources.

See more here:
Freedom of expression and cybercrime case controversy in Brazilian court - MercoPress

Yes, Homeland is still on.

In conversation and on social media, the longevity of Showtimes counterterrorism drama, which begins its eighth and final season Sunday, often comes as a surprise. After all, its been more than eight years since its gripping first season which premiered almost exactly one decade after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 dominated the cultural conversation, and its favor with Emmy voters and viewers alike peaked shortly thereafter. But theres a reason the series, created by 24" veterans Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa from Gideon Raffs Israeli Prisoners of War, has survived a sea change or several in both the medium of television and the so-called war on terror.

Homeland is the most adaptable show on television.

Conceived as the dual portrait of a mentor Mandy Patinkins Saul Berenson shepherding his protg Claire Danes Carrie Mathison through the thornbush of the Central Intelligence Agency, the series has since been a cat-and-mouse game, a fraught romance, a stripped-down spy thriller and a domestic political drama; a critics darling, a disappointment, a comeback kid. It embodies, perhaps more than any series to emerge from the mediums recent Golden Age, the feature that differentiates TV from most other art forms: evolution over time.

The image that comes to mind is origami, Danes says. You can keep refolding the paper, and it can take a different shape.

Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody in Homeland.

(Kent Smith / Showtime)

Even at the outset, the shape of Homeland was far from certain. The first series under both Showtime chief David Nevins and Fox 21 head Bert Salke, Homeland attracted an onerous amount of attention, Gansa says particularly in the form of tremendous opposition to Danes as Mathison, a bipolar intelligence officer, and Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody, an American POW she suspects of being a sleeper agent for the terrorist Abu Nazir.

I dont think anyone wanted me to play him, Lewis laughs.

Lewis, of course, landed the role, and Gansa and company ultimately held off executives desire to cast Robin Wright or Maria Bello in the lead arguing that the characters bipolar disorder necessitated a younger actress, because by her 40s a person with the disorder would typically have devised a way to manage it, or not. Once production was underway, what swiftly emerged was the electric chemistry between Danes and Lewis to the point that a key scene in the pilot was rescripted and reshot to take advantage of the dynamic, according to writer and executive producer Chip Johannessen. Gansa remembers his assistant imploring him to watch the dailies of an early scene: It was so visceral and apparent on the screen that [it] wound up changing the course of the show, he says. We started writing to that in a way that we hadnt necessarily expected to before.

The resulting arc, in which Brody and Carrie mix an illicit relationship with mutual mistrust, helped make the series an object of intense fan interest. Season 1 earned universal acclaim from critics, according to the review-aggregation site Metacritic, and eventually won Emmys for drama series, lead actress, lead actor and writing for a drama series.

The first season started airing as we were filming, so I got pretty direct confirmation just from people on the street, Danes recalls. Insane enthusiasm. People were literally running out of buildings and grabbing me and saying, Im obsessed with your show! It was hard to ignore the impact.

For Patinkin, the confirmation came closer to home. A screening of the pilot episode at a party in the Hamptons led his own children to warn him that Homeland was about to be a very big deal: They turned to me and they said, You better be prepared that your private life is over.

Mandy Patinkin, photographed on the grounds of the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, plays veteran intelligence officer Saul Berenson in Homeland.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Though Brodys abortive attempt on the life of the president of the United States in the Season 1 finale attracted more attention, the main characters romantic arc culminates in Carries unbearably tense interrogation of Brody in the Season 2 entry Q&A one of the finest hours of television produced in the last decade. (I got the script and I went into pure panic, because it was 40 pages in one room, says the episodes director, Homeland executive producer Lesli Linka Glatter.) But Q&A is also the moment to which a number of Homeland veterans trace the series ensuing struggles: By the end of Season 3, scarcely two years after it was hailed as one of TVs best shows, the New Yorker wondered, Where Did Homeland Go Wrong?

After we wrote [Q&A], it became much more difficult to write the show, Gansa admits, describing as strained a subsequent subplot in which Brody turns double agent, with Carrie as his handler. It became really hard to tell as compelling Brody stories as we did before that interrogation episode, because now everybody was on the same page.

Complicating matters was Showtimes interest in continuing the relationship that had fueled its smash hit for as long as possible. The writers had seen dramatic potential in extending Brodys arc, originally planned for one season, into a second. But extending it beyond that came at executives behest.

I remember the guys writing the end of Season 2 with me dying and going to pitch it to Showtime and Showtimes jaws hitting the floor and [them] saying, What do you mean? Brodys not going anywhere, Lewis says.

Keeping that thing going yet another year was very much a studio/network negotiation, Johannessen recalls. They said, Well pick you up for two more seasons if you agree to keep that relationship in play.

As writing Homeland became more challenging in the face of these constraints, so did watching it: With the air let out of Brody and Carries relationship, Carrie and Saul on the outs and Brodys daughter, Dana (Morgan Saylor), embroiled in teenage mischief with Timothe Chalamet! more appropriate to a family melodrama, critics and fans alike began to turn against the series. Its impressionistic main titles and Carries crying jags even came in for satire via Anne Hathaway on Saturday Night Live.

Lewis blames the abrupt change to his characters fate for the improbable situations and narrative leaps that followed criticisms of which the writers were acutely, even painfully, aware. It was flattering that they wanted to keep Brody around, he says. But I was also aware that I was the problem.

Rupert Friend as black ops specialist Peter Quinn in Homeland.

(Joe Alblas / Showtime)

The solution came in the Season 3 finale, The Star, in which Brody is hanged in Tehran for killing the head of Iranian intelligence a decision made against the networks wishes. At that point, there was some begging that went on, Gansa says. Please dont do this.

It also left the writers to face that most seductive, and terrifying, opportunity: the clean slate.

Enter spy camp, an annual meeting at Washington, D.C.'s City Tavern Club between the Homeland team and an array of current and former intelligence officers, State Department officials and journalists. (One year, Edward Snowden was among the speakers.) Both Gansa and Johannessen say that the conclave was crucial to the next stage of the series evolution.

Since the start of Season 4, Homeland, inspired by these marathon sessions with the trades top insiders, has metamorphosed into a slim, spry thriller structured almost like an anthology, with each 12-episode arc focused on a new challenge and set in a new locale: drone warfare in Pakistan, for instance, or ISIS sympathizers in Berlin.

At the start of the fourth season, Carrie, now the CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, green-lights a strike on a Pakistani wedding, killing dozens of civilians but not her intended target, Taliban leader Haissam Haqqani. In reprisal, Haqqani kidnaps Saul, creating a diversion for his real endgame: a devastating attack on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. The season climaxes with a pair of the series strongest episodes, Theres Something Else Going on and 13 Hours in Islamabad, a riveting, two-part indictment of Americas conduct of the war on terror that felt like Homelands return to form.

The biggest triumph of the show, apart from the first season, was the fourth season, Gansa says. The show could have ended much more quickly if that season didnt work.

Though Season 4 constituted proof of concept, per Johannessen, this new narrative approach also forced Homeland to become even more nimble shifting the focus to Berlin, ISIS and Russian interference in Season 5, and then to domestic politics and locations in Seasons 6 and 7.

Usually, with series TV, it gets easier year by year. You have it dialed in, Glatter explains, comparing the experience to making a pilot episode every year. Homeland never got easier, because we were always starting over.

While the success of Seasons 4 and 5 revived the series critical reputation, and may have stanched the flight of its fans following Brodys death, the same period saw increased scrutiny of Homelands depiction of Muslims. Detractors called it bigoted and Islamophobic, Pakistani officials complained that it maligned a close U.S. ally, and graffiti artists hired to create background art for Season 5 wrote Homeland is racist in Arabic in a scene that made it to air. As if in response, the next two seasons turned their attention to Russian meddling, the deep state and the American far right.

I think there was some validity to those criticisms, Danes says. It was unfortunate that we were a little too glib or a little too reductive in our portrayal of those characters, but I think our response to it was quick and sincere.

Gansa agrees, adding that the criticisms 100%" made the series creative team more cognizant of the messages it conveyed about Muslims. I thought that was great, he says of the graffiti incident. It was a nonviolent, subversive way of getting a message across.

Still, the accusations of Islamophobia left a lasting mark on Homeland. According to Johannessen, two scribes set to join the writers room for the final season one of Lebanese background and the other Iranian dropped out at the last second, which he believes was a result of pressure from people in their communities not to support Homeland.

The diversity of our writers room was not great. And we made an effort all the time to bring in writers, and we had trouble staffing, Johannessen says. By the time its maybe keeping you from getting people you want, thats not good.

Elizabeth Marvel as President-elect Elizabeth Keane in a scene from Homeland.

(JoJo Whilden / Showtime via AP)

After filming consecutive seasons on location in South Africa (standing in for Pakistan) and Germany, Danes, Patinkin and the rest of the team were ready to come home. A discussion at that years spy camp about the practice of briefing the president-elect on national security issues inspired the New York-set Season 6, in which Carrie advises Sen. Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel), newly elected president on an antiwar platform that antagonizes the intelligence community. And, as with a number of key moments in Homelands evolution, the timing of the series homecoming was serendipitous: The season premiered on Jan. 15, 2017, five days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Though Gansa, Johannessen and Glatter maintain that Keane was not specifically modeled on Trump or his opponent, Hillary Clinton, the real-life campaign cast an unavoidable shadow over Season 6 one that resulted, yet again, in exasperated critics wondering what went wrong. They were not alone in the sense that the series had, for once, been outflanked by events.

There was definitely a feeling like, You cannot match the craziness of this situation, so you just have to stay away from it, Johannessen says, citing HBOs Veep as another series to face the same problem.

That was the hardest moment for us, actually that period during the election, when we were waiting to see who was going to actually come into office, Danes recalls of developing the season. "[The writers] were really stymied. I felt them to be creatively frustrated because of that lack of direction.

Both Keanes character and the deep state machinations that propel the seasons plot are an awkward fit, too far from the facts to seem prescient and too near to feel original. Even so, certain aspects of the production dovetailed eerily closely with events on the ground.

There was a moment that we were staging a protest outside of the Intercontinental Hotel in New York, Glatter says. It was probably 300 people with signs saying Not my president. Meanwhile, there was a rally at Trump Tower with signs saying Not my president. And people walked into our rally, normal people, going, Whats going on here? What rally is this? And we were shooting Homeland. That was very discombobulating, to say the least.

Mandy Patinkin and Claire Danes in the final season of Homeland.

(Sifeddine Elamine / Showtime)

As Homelands penultimate season began, with near self-parodic bluster, now-President Keane has imprisoned hundreds of members of the intelligence community in retaliation for an attempt on her life. Absent longtime ally Peter Quinn (fan favorite Rupert Friend), who sacrifices himself to save her and Keane at the end of Season 6, Carrie must take the fight to the woman in the Oval Office all by her lonesome. By the seventh seasons brilliant end, with Keanes resignation and our heroine released to Saul after an extended stint in Russian captivity, Homeland returns to its foundational bond and recaptures the taut terms of its finest hours.

It also sets up the final seasons elegant conceit, as Danes describes it. Though Carries bipolar disorder is a running theme throughout the series, coming in and out of focus as her circumstances change, it returns to the forefront after her stint in prison, during which she has been denied her medication. The possibility that she has revealed sensitive information while under such duress, and does not remember it, leads some in the intelligence community to question her allegiance.

Or, as Danes puts it, Carrie becomes Brody. This effect is underscored by the title sequence, which combines sounds and images from the first seven seasons, and the seasons plot, which Gansa says is designed in part to tie up loose ends from Season 4, including the fate of Haissam Haqqani. Very purposefully, in other words, the series closing arc conjures the feeling of vintage Homeland.

The list of TV series to survive long enough, in enough configurations, for such a phrase to be applicable at all is vanishingly short. Certainly, none in the past decade have swung quite so wildly from the ridiculous to the sublime as Homeland. But the series end has a valedictory quality: As perhaps the last of the Golden Age dramas to go off the air, Homeland is an emblem of a form the ongoing, prestige drama that appears to be in decline.

In Homelands case, its not for lack of material; if anything, as we approach 20 years of the war on terror, the series continued relevance has become an objective correlative of the conflicts endlessness. As Patinkin suggests during the course of our conversation, by turns tearful at the significance of the journey and relieved by its conclusion, Homelands ability to evolve in tandem with its troubled times is also what left those involved too drained to continue.

It could go on forever, a show like this, he says. If you can endure it.

More:
'Homeland' on Showtime is TV's most adaptable show - Los Angeles Times

Sen. Rand Paul is hesitant to believe that his colleagues will call the alleged Ukraine whistleblower to testify even as the Senate Intelligence Committee may be gearing up to investigate the origins of the impeachment case against President Trump.

The Kentucky Republican, who read aloud the name of the alleged whistleblower on the Senate Floor Tuesday after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts refused to do so last week during the question phase of the impeachment trial, suspects the person will remain in his current post as an intelligence analyst without oversight concerning his past actions.

The problem is that they've played it artfully where he'll probably never be called, and nothing ever happen[s] to him. He'll serve for 50 years over there, and everybody who's his boss will be worried that he's somebody who will inform on you at the drop of a hat, Paul told the Washington Examiner. And I consider him so much different than, like, Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden revealed something. No one would reveal this guy, reveal something that 400 people already knew. And most of them didn't have a problem with a phone call," he added, referring to the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked highly classified surveillance information and fled the United States in 2013.

Paul is not a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but a fellow Republican who is, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, shares similar concerns about the whistleblower and where this person is stationed.

And if we ever find out that there was a group of people within the government that were working together to craft something like this, that elements of which may turn out to be disproven, then we've got a big problem," Rubio told the Washington Examiner.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham told Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures that "the Senate Intel Committee under Richard Burr has told us that we will call the whistleblower." He added, "I want to find out how all this crap started."

I'm looking at the whistleblower process, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told reporters Monday when asked about the investigation. He added, You know, I've never done investigations in public and won't be either.

Other committee members are interested in finding out more about the genesis of the whistleblower complaint filed with the inspector general on Aug. 12 about a July 25 phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Under pressure, Trump released the transcript of what he describes as the "perfect call" and claimed he was only interested in rooting out alleged corruption.

Democrats, who charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, accused the president of improperly pressuring Kyiv to announce investigations into his political rivals, including Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, by leveraging congressionally approved military aid and a White House meeting. Trump's legal team has argued that his actions are not impeachable, and the president is expected to be acquitted in a vote scheduled for Wednesday.

According to Rubio, the whistleblower issue has been on the committees agenda since the news of the complaint went public.

The committee has been following the whistleblower issue since the [complaint was filed on Aug. 12]. The initial meeting was with the interim director of national intelligence. It is in the intelligence committee. My sense is thatll continue," the senator said.

Some Republicans believe the whistleblower is CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella and want to know if there was any coordination prior to the filing of the complaint with aides for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.

One particular Schiff aide, Sean Misko, previously worked with the alleged whistleblower at the National Security Council, the Washington Examiner reported, and sat behind Schiff, the lead impeachment manager, during open hearings for the House impeachment investigation as well as on the Senate floor during the trial.

Well, I think beyond the allegations that were made, there are legitimate questions that should be answered about the genesis of the complaint. Whose idea was it? Who helped write it? How much communication was there between members of staffers on the House Intelligence Committee and the whistleblower and so forth, Rubio contended.

And you can't hide behind the argument that, Well, we can't discuss that, or you'll out the whistleblower. These people most certainly have a right to go forward and talk to the Intelligence Committee, but Chairman Schiff lied about it. He's been telling us for two weeks that if you're hiding something or you're lying about it, it's evidence of wrongdoing, so at a minimum, it's a legitimate question," he added.

Schiff has disputed accusations that he knows the identity of the whistleblower and excoriated his opponents for questioning his staff's involvement. "I will not dignify those smears," the California Democrat said last week in response to an impeachment question about why he hired Misko.

Sen. Jim Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican and Intelligence Committee member, told the Washington Examiner the whistleblower issue is not an intelligence matter.

I don't know of anything that I need to know on the whistleblower at this point. There hasn't been a question on the process they went through to be able to determine. Who he was is not the issue. It's did they go through the right legal process? It looks pretty obvious they did. Where you've got the filing of the whistleblower reports, it went through review and determined this is not an intel-related issue, he said.

This needs to go to a different lane," Lankford said. "The one big unknown there that we've got to be able to resolve is even after it was determined by the Department of Justice, 'This is not correct. This is not an actual intel-related item,' they pulled it back over anyway and said, 'No, we're declaring this urgent' and pulled it out through those channels anyway. So that's the inspector general issue to resolve.

He added, When you were told by someone above you, 'hey, you're in the wrong lane here,' you typically get in the right lane, not try to be able to find a way to force it out.

Follow this link:
'He'll serve for 50 years': Rand Paul worried Ukraine whistleblower unaccountable to bosses - Washington Examiner

Edward Snowden, arguably the worlds most famous whistle-blower, is a man who lived behind plenty of pseudonyms before putting his true name to his truth-telling: When he was first communicating with the journalists who would reveal his top-secret NSA leaks, he used the names Citizenfour, Cincinnatus, and VeraxLatin for truthful and a knowing allusion to Julian Assanges old hacker handle Mendax, the teller of lies.

But in his newly published memoir and manifesto, Permanent Record, Snowden describes other handles, albeit long-defunct ones: Shrike the Knight, Corwin the Bard, Belgarion the Smith, squ33ker the precocious kid asking amateur questions about chip compatibility on an early bulletin-board service. These were online videogame and forum personas, he writes, that as a teenager in the 1990s hed acquire and jettison like T-shirts, assuming new identities on a whim, often to leave behind mistakes or embarrassing ideas hed tried out in online conversations. Sometimes, he notes, hed even use his new identity to attack his prior self, the better to disavow the ignoramus hed been the week before.

That long-lost internet, Snowden writes, offered its inhabitants a reset button for your life that could be pressed every day, at will. And he still pines for it. To be able to expand your experience, to become a more whole person by being able to try and fail, this is what teaches us who we are and who we want to become, Snowden told WIRED in an interview ahead of his books publication tomorrow. This is whats denied to the rising generation. Theyre so ruthlessly and strictly identified in every network they interact with and by which they live. Theyre denied the opportunities we had to be forgotten and to have their mistakes forgiven.

Snowden's memoir revisits his youthful, freewheeling days on the internet. Buy on Amazon

No one has exposed more than Snowden how that individualistic, ephemeral, anonymous internet has ceased to exist. Perhaps it was always a myth. (After all, at least one trove of Snowdens chatroom musings on everything from guns to sex advice, under the pseudonym TheTrueHooha, remained online after his rise to notoriety.)

But for the former NSA contractor and many of his generation, that idea of the internet is a foundational myth, enshrined in Neal Stephenson novels and in The Hacker Manifestoboth of which Snowden describes reading as a teenager in a mononucleosis hazeand John Perry Barlows Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which Snowden writes that he holds in his memory next to the preamble to the Constitution. The internet of the 90s, which Snowden describes as the most pleasant and successful anarchy Ive ever seen, was his community and his education. He even met his future wife on Hotornot.com.

Snowden says documenting that prehistoric digital world and its disappearance was part of what drove him to write Permanent Record, overcoming his own aversion to sharing details of his personal life. And in doing so, he may have also helped the world understand him better than ever before. This is actually more than a memoir from my perspective, he says. The way I got through it was by telling, yes the history of myself as a person, but also the history of a time and a changein technology, in a system, in the internet, and in American democracy.

The IT Guy Ascendant

The resulting autobiography is split roughly into thirds: Snowdens life before joining the world of spies, his whirlwind seven years in the intelligence community, and his experience as a whistle-blower and international fugitive. Against all odds, the first of these, a full hundred pages largely describing the very least unique part of Snowdens lifea hyper-intelligent but relatively unremarkable high school dropoutis not at all a waste of time.

See more here:
After 6 Years in Exile, Edward Snowden Explains Himself ...

Why are we still looking to America first when it comes to our decisions on which countries to engage with, asks former MP Keith Locke.

Britains decision to resist American pressure and let Huawei into its 5G network is embarrassing for New Zealand.

Earlier our government had fallen into line with Washington and Canberra and blocked Spark from using the Chinese firm in its 5G rollout. The minister in charge of our electronic spy agency, Andrew Little, said the ban had nothing to do with him. The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) had, on its own, determined that Huaweis involvement endangered national security and no further explanation was required.

To my mind this is absurd. China is our biggest trading partner, and Huawei its foremost telecommunications company. Accepting or rebuffing Huawei is ultimately a political decision, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shown.

In the light of the British concession, it may be that Spark re-submits an application for Huawei to help with the Radio Access Network (RAN) equipment in the non-core part of the 5G network. Participation in the non-core features (cellphone towers, etc) is what the British have granted, and Huawei NZ has never asked for more than that. 2 Degrees, which worked closely with Huawei in building its 4G network, may also submit an application.

The main scaremongering has been about the possibility that the Chinese government will use Huaweis involvement in 5G to spy on us. Of course, China, like all big powers, is heavily into spying.

But the downside of China using Huawei for espionage or sabotage is great. The company says it would be suicidal for them to participate in spying because they would lose business all around the world. A few years ago the American telecom firm, Cisco, lost significant market share after the Edward Snowden documents showed the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been intercepting communications through its routers. Incidentally, the GCSB has allowed Cisco to be part of Sparks 5G core.

If we are worried about people using 5G for nefarious purposes, then we should worry first about the NSA, the biggest and boldest spy agency. Amid all the talk about Huawei being pressured to do the bidding of the Chinese government we should recognise that American telecom companies work closely with the NSA.

In 2015 the New York Times disclosed a partnership whereby the AT&T telecom company forwarded as many as 400 billion internet metadata records a month to the NSA. The Times also reported that in 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone phone calling records a day to the NSA.

Unfortunately, much of the reporting on Huawei and 5G has failed to note that Donald Trump has a broader agenda, which is to slow the development of Chinas high tech companies, particularly Huawei. Over the past year there have been presidential edicts banning US companies from selling electronic goods (both hardware and software) to the Chinese company. This had hit Huaweis smartphone production hard, because the company is finding it hard to sell phones outside of China without embedded Googles apps (including Google Maps and Google Play).

However, the Trump administrations bans may be counterproductive. They have only encouraged Chinese tech firms to speed up their development programs. Huawei might be shut out of the American telecommunications market, but it is prospering in the rest of the world, particularly in China itself.

We shouldnt be going along with the Trump administrations efforts to weaken China and divide the world into American and Chinese spheres of influence. We all need to be working together to address common problems, like global warming, or a virus epidemic.

We should also rethink whether we stay in the Five Eyes. It pulls us too much into the American camp and weakens our ability to have an independent foreign policy.

The Spinoff politics section is made possible by Flick, the electricity retailer giving New Zealanders power over their power. With both spot price and fixed price plans available, you can be sure youre getting true cost and real choice when you join Flick. Support us by making the switch today.

The Spinoff Weekly compiles the best stories of the week an essential guide to modern life in New Zealand, emailed out on Monday evenings.

See the original post here:
NZ shouldnt get caught up in the US game over Huawei - The Spinoff

Sen. Rand Paul submitted a question to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Thursday afternoon that included the possible name of the intelligence community whistleblower. Roberts passed on reading the question to the chamber. Immediately after, Paulleft the chamber and held a news conference reading the question in front of the TV cameras.

Paul read the question aloud, pertaining to the contact between a staffer for House Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff and a person who has been speculated by other parties to be the whistleblower.

Paul claimed his question had nothing to do with the whistleblower and that he didnt know his or her identity.

My question is about two people who are friends who worked at the National Security Council, Paul said.

Manager Schiff says he has no knowledge. If he has no knowledge, the rest of us can have no knowledge of who the whistleblower is. The presidents team says they have no knowledge of who the whistleblower is, Paul said.

Paul then highlighted his support for Edward Snowden.

You shouldnt be able to use statutes to somehow make a whole part of the discussion over this impeachment go away. Look, Im the biggest defender of the whistleblower statute. Ive been one saying that Edward Snowden was the greatest whistleblower of all-time, Paul said. Half of these people down here who say they support the whistleblower statute want to put Edward Snowden to death or in jail forever.

Unlike Snowden, the whistleblower whose report is at the center of the allegation, requested anonymity and went through appropriate and legal channels for reporting concerns related to national security.

Paul said he opted against prolonging Thursdays session by forcing a debate on whether or not to overrule the decision by the chief justice to decline to read the question as drafted.

That was a debate I made up until the very last minute, and I decided that were going to have enough voting tomorrow, the Kentucky Republican said. I decided that we're going to have enough voting tomorrow, that rather than delay the proceeding I think were going to have 12 hours of voting tomorrow.

Get breaking news alerts and more from Roll Call on your iPhone.

Read the original:
Roberts blocks Rand Paul's attempt to name alleged whistleblower - Roll Call

A British bulldog toy and other souvenirs are pictured at a souvenir store, near Parliament Square, on Brexit day, in London, Britain Jan 31, 2020. [Photo/Agencies]

The Tuesday decision by the British government led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to allow Huawei to participate in the country's 5G network has dealt a major blow to those in Washington who have been hysterically trying to pressure and intimidate the United States' allies to exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant.

While the United Kingdom is only allowing Huawei to provide equipment for the non-core part of its 5G network and has put a 35-percent cap on market share, it sent a strong signal to other European nations which will make their 5G decisions soon.

It also sent a clear signal that countries don't want to be forced to choose between China and the US, a message that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong repeated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

It's not the first time for UK to take such a lead. Back in 2015, UK resisted US pressure by joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank initiated by China. Many other European nations then followed suit, and many in the US criticized their government for not joining the AIIB and for trying to block others from joining.

And the UK's decision on Huawei was made despite the incessant US fearmongering about the Chinese company, including a trip to London two weeks ago by deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger to make the final plea with a so-called dossier of evidence.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has led the smear campaign against Huawei. He has made several trips to Europe and sent tweets hyping up a Huawei threat days before UK's decision. He clearly has not given up after arriving in London on Wednesday.

But Europeans have shown that they are able to make their own decisions despite decades of dependence on the US. Just a day after UK's decision, the EU, in announcing its toolbox for 5G deployment, also did not ban Huawei as the US had urged.

The UK and some other European countries paid a heavy price for blindly following the US into the disastrous Iraq War. And they well remember that according to the whistle-blowing of NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency conducts wide-ranging surveillance, including on European leaders,

In Davos last week, Israeli historian Yuval Harari appearing on a panel alongside Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, pointed out that it is not that there is no surveillance in the US, it is just that it has a very sophisticated surveillance mechanism.

Despite US' exaggerating the threat posed by China's National Security Law, Europeans have found that the US Patriot Act and US CLOUD Act are no different in requiring US companies to comply with government requests under certain circumstances.

Europeans are clear-eyed and show no appetite to join the US in its geopolitical campaign against China and risk another Cold War, or tech Cold War.

China of course does not resemble a Cold War enemy. It is not exporting revolution and ideology but promoting multilateralism, globalization, world peace and the fight against climate change.

At the Davos forum, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that any decoupling between China and US, whether in technology or trade, will make everyone worse off. He believes the way forward is for China, US and EU to talk about a set of rules and norms.

With Europeans showing they want to make their own decisions, hopefully it will convince the US administration to ditch its zero-sum Cold War mentality toward China and Huawei and engage in win-win cooperation.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.

Read the original here:
Europe shows it will not blindly do US bidding - Opinion - Chinadaily USA

Journalist and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to controversy and has been at or near the center of some of the most important American news stories since he left his law practice and started writing full time in 2005. Despite this, until recently, although hes certainly made powerful enemies over the years, it hasnt seemed as if he were in real danger of imprisonment or worse.

Even in the case of whistle blower Edward Snowden, whose 2013 leaks of government surveillance programs catapulted Greenwald to international fame, it was the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor whose arrest has been demanded by American authorities, not the journalist responsible for very carefully bringing the secrets he exposed to the world.

Due to his often adversarial tone, Greenwald has been loved and hated at different times by both conservatives and the neoliberal center. Most recently, it was liberals decrying the journalist for casting a critical eye on claims that Kremlin interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was what swung the vote in the favor of the current occupant of the White House.

In fact, although it wasnt always the most popular of opinions, Greenwald was far from the only reporter who thought that the self identified liberal American press, the Clinton campaign and a Democratic party that was almost completely in her camps thrall, might have more productively engaged in a bit of self reflection and analyzed, among other things, how the electoral college had facilitated, in terms of the popular vote, minority Republican presidencies twice this century,

Still, it was strange for many of us to see him finding a platform for these views on Fox News, especially on nerdy libertarian turned nativist Tucker Carlsons show rather than the other cable networks who have been breathlessly extolling the anonymous whistle-blower who first brought Trumps dealings with Ukraines government to light. The entirely plausible argument the journalist has made for this numerous times is that Carlson offered a platform to address a wider audience that the other networks denied him.

Evidence of the bias against him was offered just this past Sunday, as Greenwald, who is facing serious cyber crime charges in his adopted country, Brazil, had an appearance on CNNs Reliable Sources canceled at the last moment to allow the show to exclusively cover the ridiculously aggressive behavior of Mike Pompeo to an NPR reporter who had the audacity to ask him if he had supported former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in his role as Secretary of State (he didnt). This story was undoubtedly newsworthy, but some time on CNNs equivalent to Meet the Press could have been devoted to the case of a Pulitzer prize winning American journalist facing imprisonment for doing his job.

As the reporter told the conservative Washington Examiner after his invitation to appear was rescinded, I find it disappointing that CNN cant devote 6 minutes to a major attack on a free press by the worlds fifth largest country that every major media outlet in the world has extensively covered, but being disappointed isnt the same as being surprised.

The case being built against Greenwald, by Brazils far right government and its demagogic leader, Jair Bolsonaro, deals with leaked documents, mostly comprised of hacked phone messages, provided by a still anonymous source that proved the countrys Justice Minister, Sergio Moro, who was supposedly an impartial judge at the time, worked behind the scenes with prosecutors to help them coordinate their media strategies as part of what was called Operation Car Wash, an anti-corruption investigation that most famously resulted in the jailing of the countrys former socially democratic president, Lula da Silva, who, along with his Workers Party, made significant strides in fighting poverty in the country beginning in 2003.

The leaks proved that Moros crusade, which emboldened Brazils far right and personally elevated him into an almost untouchable figure in the countrys politics, was built on an edifice of lies, leading to Lulas release from prison in November.

One thing that may work in Greenwalds favor is that the cyber crime charges, which Federal Police had already dropped months ago, have instead been laid by the countrys equivalent of the U.S. Justice Department. Just as in the United Sates, this institution is under control of the president, but uniquely, the charges will still have to receive the approval of a judge, which might create a hurdle for the governments case going forward, considering that many in the countrys judiciary, deeply embarrassed by the revelations of the journalists and his colleagues at the Intercept Brasil, may be hoping to publicly display their independence, as the Supreme Court did most recently in releasing Lula.

Even if the case were to move forward, the defense will be able to show that Greenwald could teach a master class in both legally obtaining information from leakers and protecting his sources from the Snowden affair (although the same couldnt be said of the Intercept itself, which truly failed in its duty to Reality Winner in 2017).

A chilling parallel to the charges facing Greenwald is the ongoing persecution of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, who remains in jail in the UK despite having served his time for jumping bail in the Summer of 2012. Assange is also facing cyber-crimes charges in the United States related to the leaks provided to him by Chelsea Manning a decade ago. In both cases the charges against the men seem intended to do an end run around protections offered to journalists in both countries.

As Greenwald wrote in regards to this in a statement released last week by the Intercept, Less than two months ago, the Federal Police, examining all the same evidence cited by the Public Ministry, stated explicitly that not only have I never committed any crime but that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist never even to get close to any participation. Even the Federal Police under Minister Moros command said what is clear to any rational person: I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist ethically and within the law.

An even greater fear than facing prison is the very real danger Greenwald, his husband David Miranda and their children are in, forcing them to use armed guards for protection. This isnt from an excess of caution when one considers the assassination of the couples friend and Mirandas colleague, a popular city councilwomen, Mireille Franco, on March 14th, 2018. The case is still ongoing, with four arrested so far for the killing

The arrests came as reportsalleged Bolsonaros son, Flavio, now a member of the countrys Senate, had employed members of a far-right militia composed of police and former members of the Brazilian military implicated in Francos assassination and even pointing a finger of accusationat the president himself, who appeared in a picture hugging one ofthe accused.

On a larger scale,as Greenwalf himself has reminded readers since Bolsonaro, a proud racist, misogynist and enemy of his countrys LGBTQ communities came topower, the danger he represents is a return to dictatorship in acountry where military rule only ended in 1985 and some are stillnostalgia for it. The first steps towards bringing back this era orcreating a hybrid of it are already underway with political opponentsof Bolsonaro and his cronies jailed or taking flight and a powerful, contrarian journalistic voice targeted for retribution pn trumped up charges. Itsunlikely that Greenwald, who at least has the benefit of widespreadfame and international support, will be the last journalist to be targeted.

FALL FUNDRAISER

If you liked this article, please donate $5 to keep NationofChange online through November.

Follow this link:
First Assange, now Greenwald: The growing attacks on adversarial journalism - NationofChange

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) presents Philip Glass and Jerry Quickley's Whistleblower on Saturday, March 21 at 8 p.m. at The Theatre at Ace Hotel in Downtown LA. Tickets starting at $28 are available now at cap.ucla.edu, 310-825-2101 and The Theatre at Ace Hotel box office.

Whistleblower employs an original text by spoken word artist Jerry Quickley and a live score performed by legendary contemporary composer Philip Glass. Quickley and Glass use this performance as a vehicle to share their personal and visceral musings, reflections and emotions about a significant moment in history. In 2013, Edward Snowden copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) that revealed numerous global surveillance programs.

Even though the extent and breadth of the government programs were shocking, this whistleblower act punctuated the sweeping change in society and its relationship to privacy. The March 21st evening will be paired with a work entitled Is Infinity Odd or Even? with text by Arturo Bejar, spoken word by NYC/London based performer Tara Hugo and music written and performed by Glass. The show had its European Premiere at the Amsterdam Dance Event in the fall of 2016.

Quickley is one of the most well-regarded performance poets in the United States, he has received multiple commissions from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and was the recipient of the prestigious $600K Irvine Foundation Creators Grant. Glass commissioned Quickley to write melodramas with him about the modern human condition as part of Glass' yearly arts festival in Big Sur, CA, The Days and Nights Festival. Glass, as a composer, weaves reiterations of brief, elegant melodic fragments in and out. He has composed more than twenty-five operas, twelve symphonies, three piano concertos and several albums and has participated in a variety of collaborations.

Tickets: Starting at $28 Online: cap.ucla.edu Phone: 310-825-2101 The Theatre at Ace Hotel box office: Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; day of the show, 90 minutes prior to the event start time.

Read more:
UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) presents Philip Glass and Jerry Quickley's WHISTLEBLOWER - Broadway World