Edward Snowden interview

Wed. Feb 5 Update : Video removed at source from Vimeo last night, leaving the above note in its place on Creekside. Alternate copy of Snowden interview can be seen here.

Great interview recorded a week ago, including a few choice words applicable to recent revelations about CSEC scooping up Canadians' IP IDs and tracking them across airports, hotels, conference centres, coffee shops, and libraries, and DefMin Rob Nicholson's response.

"What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a circling of the wagons of government ...  Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights, the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights."

"The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artefact of the post-WW2 era where the anglophone countries of the major powers banded together to co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure. So we have the UK's GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada's CSEC, we have Australia's Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand's DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades was a supranational intelligence organization that doesn't answer to the laws of its own countries." 

"The key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn't occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place."

There have been complaints of this interview disappearing off Vimeo and being entirely erased from Youtube, the latter possibly for copyright reasons. Should this one go down however, here's an alternate copy.
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"Black shroud of secrecy" Walk of Shame

Yesterday, led by Harper's Parliamentary Secretary Paul Calandra, all seven Con MPs on the Ethics Committee voted to go in camera so the Canadian public wouldn't see them vote against conducting an investigation into what happened to those disappearing/reappearing emails of former PMO legal advisor Ben Perrin in the Senate scandal. 

This is the Ethics Committee, the Ethics Committee, and the Con members didn't want to be seen publicly covering up for the PMO.
With a majority on committee, their motion to hide out in what committee chair Pat Martin called "the black shroud of secrecy" passed 7-4. 



Chair Pat Martin : 

"I am struggling to see what possible justification, Mr. Calandra, you could have for asking this particular item of business to be moved in camera. The in-camera rule, as I understand it, is that it's to be used in cases of national security, invasion of privacy, commercial interests. It's not supposed to be the default position to save embarrassment to the government. 

[The public] have a right to know what their legislators are doing, and they have a right to know how their legislators are voting."

 Shame on all of those Cons above. 


A second black shroud of secrecy was revealed today by anonymous Hill whistleblower, Nanker Phelge - a lifetime Conflict of Interest, Loyalty, and Confidentiality Agreement gagging government staffers from ever disclosing what goes on in their ministry, even though their MPs are not similarly gagged.

Staffers must sign it in order to receive pay increases. At least one has refused so far : 

Self-muzzled Con MPs on the Ethics Committee at top, take note : This is what integrity looks like.

Perhaps we should drop them all a line reminding them about that :

paul.calandra@parl.gc.ca    jacques.gourde@parl.gc.ca   colin.mayes@parl.gc.ca    
earl.dreeshen@parl.gc.ca   John.Carmichael@parl.gc.ca   pat.davidson@parl.gc.ca
tilly.oneillgordon@parl.gc.ca

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Thursday Update : And on twitter :
https://twitter.com/PaulCalandra     https://twitter.com/JacquesGourde 
https://twitter.com/earl_dreeshen    https://twitter.com/JohnBCarmichael         
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The Whistleblower vs Watership Down Syndrome

So that's what a real hero sounds like.

We don't talk much about freedom vs security up here in Canada, do we?
Sure we were taken aback when a 2009 RCMP mission statement colour-coded its surveillance subjects in advance of the G8/20 summit, warning of :

"notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations' resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc."

... following which the Harper Government™ spent nearly $1-billion deploying 19,000 security personnel to make the largest mass arrest of 1,100 peaceful protesters in Canadian history.

But mostly we are pretty contented sufferers of Watership Down Syndrome : as long as the farmer supplies us with carrots on a more or less regular basis, we accept that some random noisome bunnies are going to get slipped a noose from time to time and, in exchange for a continued supply of carrots, we will never mention them again.

Then again, as Edward Snowden points out above, what happens when a new farmer makes changes to his end of the deal and it's too late for us to change ours?
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Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now : A Massive Surveillance State

The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major internet companies -- including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook

The Guardian : The NSA Files

Michael Geist : Why Canadians Should Be Demanding Answers About Secret Surveillance Programs

The Sixth Estate : The Obama Snooping Scandal and the Inevitability of the Surveillance State and Mass Surveillance: Shamrock, Prism, and Supercomputers

Ian Welsh : The Logic of the Surveillance State

Juan Cole : PRISM : The US Government is mad at Bradley Manning for doing to it what it is doing to all of us

Ronald Diebert in the Star: U.S. online snooping: What Canadians need to know

Update : Touché from Purple Library Guy in comments :

"... except actually the bunnies got a better deal. In our case, we have a farmer who isn't actually supplying any carrots, just propagandizing us into fearing that if we don't let him keep doing his thing, some evil terrorist/commie/feminist/whatever will take our carrots away."

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Julian Assange on TED

h/t WestEnd Bob, who knows that goodness is sexy.

Long and short versions of Wikileaks "Collateral Murder". Assange has said he was more appalled at the shelling of the surrounding buildings than at the more widely shown event.

From the blog of Ethan McCord, the US ranger who pulled the two surviving children out of the van that was shelled for stopping to help the "Collateral Murder"survivors. h/t Wikileaks .

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