Edward Snowden wins Sam Adams award

From WikiLeaks:

This week Edward Snowden received the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. These videos from the award ceremony are the first of Mr Snowden after being granted asylum in Russia. The videos show Mr Snowden as he was given the award by Ray McGovern (ex-CIA) who said "Sam Adams Associates are proud to honor Mr. Snowden’s decision to heed his conscience and give priority to the Common Good over concerns about his own personal future. We are confident that others with similar moral fiber will follow his example in illuminating dark corners and exposing crimes that put our civil rights as free citizens in jeopardy.... Just as Private Manning and Julian Assange exposed criminality with documentary evidence, Mr. Snowden’s beacon of light has pierced a thick cloud of deception. And, again like them, he has been denied some of the freedoms that whistleblowers have every right to enjoy." Also present at the ceremony was WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison who took Mr Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow and obtained his asylum. The previous award winners, all United States Government whistleblowers, Thomas Drake (NSA), Jesselyn Raddack (DoJ) and Coleen Rowley (FBI), were also in attendance. These videos were filmed on the October 9 and are released for the first time today.

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I have nothing to hide

Film Maker Laura Poitras responds as follows to those who say (in reaction to revelations regarding the surveillance state) "I have nothing to hide":

If someone says, “I have nothing to hide,” does that mean they want a camera in their bedroom? Or that they want their computer to be a two-way camera, feeding information into a government office? Do they want a switch that can be flipped so that your phone becomes a microphone streaming your personal conversations to the government? Most people who make the argument “I have nothing to hide” don’t fully understand the technical capabilities that the government has. They are vast. All these devices that we carry around with us can, at the flip of a switch, be turned against us. Our most intimate moments, our beings, ourselves... It can become an Orwellian nightmare where all these tools that we surround ourselves with can beam our whole life to people sitting in some secret government facility. It’s not that the government is necessarily interested, it’s that there’s nothing to stop them, legally or technologically. And a person would never know when it’s happening. They won’t tell you because it’s all a secret. I have a Gmail account, and I assume that everything is being handed over, probably in real time, to the government, and I think I should have a right to know that that’s happening. There are no technical constraints to this becoming a full surveillance state. And we hardly have any oversight, and any laws that exist are all happening in secret.

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Hostile BBC reporter tries to bait Glenn Greenwald

In this interview/inquisition, Glenn Greenwald puts up with more establishment media questioning, i.e., reporters who feel that their job is to do the bidding of their governments rather than to shed light on government abuses and corruption.

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Encryption tools for journalists

Glenn Greenwald recently answered questions on Reddit, including the following: Reddit comment: "Thanks for doing this. At the university I work at, we are putting together a workshop for Media Professionals, including journalists regarding IT security. We plan on covering: PGP, truecrypt, TOR, OTR, and strongbox. What tools, concepts, or techniques should we be teaching aspiring journalists?" Glenn Greenwald: "That's so great to hear. One of the most gratifying things I've seen since this all started is how many journalists now communicate using PGP, Pidgen, OTR, TOR and similar instruments of encryption. Just as was true for me, so many national security journalists - including some of the most accomplished ones at large media outlets, the ones who work on the most sensitive materials - had no idea about any of that and used none of it. Now they do. In this age of a War on Whistleblowers and sources and ubiquitous surveillance, it's absolutely vital that journalists learn advanced encryption methods and use it." It's a shame that modern day journalists need to spend so much time learning about and using encryption technology to protect their sources from spying by the United States and other governments. What would the founding fathers have said about this more than 200 years ago, that the federal government is spying on its own citizens without probable cause and even spying on journalists?

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Thank you, NSA

David Meyer "thanks" the NSA for making us all insecure. His analysis is spot on, and it should outrage everyone who has tried to password protect anything on the Internet:

What is so jaw-droppingly idiotic about your actions is that you have not only subverted key elements of modern cryptography, but you have also appointed yourself as the guardian of the knowledge that the resulting vulnerabilities exist. And if your own security systems were up to the task, then those secrets wouldn’t be sitting in the offices of the New York Times and ProPublica. One must possess a Panglossian view on things to assume that Edward Snowden was the first person out of the many thousands in his position to make away with such material. He brought it to the public, and without that move there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have even known he took it. So who else has it? Bet you have no idea. So well done; you’ve probably put your own citizens at risk.

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