On February 20, 2016, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden addressed more than 500 attendees at the Free State Project’s 9th annual NH Liberty Forum in Manchester, NH.

People gathered from across the globe to discuss practical ways to expand social and economic liberties. The conference also provided an opportunity for attendees to learn more about the Free Stater community in New Hampshire, where 20,000 libertarians are now moving.

Nick Gillespie of Reason TV interviewed Snowden live via Google Hangouts. Snowden was greeted by audience members holding masks bearing his likeness–this homage was received with a wide smile from Snowden in Russia.

During the 50 minute talk, Snowden covered several topics, including the recent revelations by Apple that the FBI has requested a “back door” to enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data on endpoint devices. Snowden also addressed a question submitted by Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who has been sentenced to double life in prison without the possibility of parole. The question was: “Do you think the NSA could have been involved with the Silk Road investigation?” Watch the interview to hear Snowden’s stunning answer.

Liberty Forum has become a place where whistleblowers can tell their stories.

In 2014, Thomas Drake, former senior executive of the NSA and decorated U.S. Air Force and Navy veteran, spoke out about being accused under the Espionage Act of mishandling government documents. Although Drake eventually plead guilty to one misdemeanor count for exceeding “authorized use of a computer,” all ten original charges were dropped. In his defense, Drake stated he refused to “plea bargain with the truth.” Jesselyn Radack, who has served as Edward Snowden’s attorney, called Drake’s actions “civil disobedience.” You can watch the panel discussion, “The Social and Civic Importance of Whistleblowing,” with Thomas Drake, national security and human rights lawyer Jesselyn Radack, now of Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts, Trevor Timm of Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Devon Chaffee, executive director of New Hampshire’s Civil Liberties Union.

This year, in addition to the historic talk by Edward Snowden, drone technician Cian Westmoreland was Liberty Forum’s closing speaker. Westmoreland is one of 4 former U.S. Air Force servicemembers to claim targeted drone killings and remote-control bombings fuel the very terrorism the government says it is trying to destroy. In a 2015 interview with Democracy Now, Westmoreland said: “I’m saying it wasn’t all enemies. It was civilians, as well.” Westmoreland’s talk on Sunday was an emotional appeal to seek better solutions to indiscriminate drone bombings. When an audience member called out: “Skynet is coming!” Westmoreland replied: “Skynet is here.” A video of Westmoreland’s talk will be available soon.

– See more at: https://freestateproject.org/blogs/snowden-speaks-free-state-projects-liberty-forum-libertarian-nh#sthash.qcEXiROe.dpuf

The support by Bernie Sanders for the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which he voiced during Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, is a damning exposure of the pro-imperialist politics of this self-described “socialist” politician.

Sanders attempted to distinguish himself from his fellow candidates only by calling for a “lenient” sentence for Snowden. “He did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that,” Sanders declared. “But I think what he did in educating us should be taken into consideration.”

In fact, the Vermont senator’s arguments were essentially similar to those of the other four candidates on the Las Vegas stage, all of whom sought, in one way or another, to distance themselves from the widely hated NSA programs while at the same time reaffirming their support for the military-intelligence apparatus.

Sanders’ call for leniency in the case of Snowden rings false, since once in the clutches of the American criminal “justice” system, he would face the full vengeance of the state machine. And there are clear warnings. Chelsea Manning was tortured while in military custody, and is currently serving over three decades of jail time for leaking diplomatic documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The editor of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been forced to seek asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid being extradited to the United States on espionage charges.

In the case of Snowden, given calls for his murder by officials within the state apparatus, there is no guarantee that once in custody he would even live to see a courtroom.

The argument that Snowden’s courageous stand is a crime deserving of punishment reveals far more about Sanders than his rhetorical denunciations of government spying. While calling for a lesser sentence for Snowden’s “crimes,” he has not called for the arrest and prosecution of the government officials responsible for actual crimes against the people of the United States and the world, through the dragnet surveillance program. These include above all Obama himself, whom Sanders is seeking to succeed as president. Nor did he offer any criticism on this score Tuesday of Hillary Clinton, who as Obama’s secretary of state for four years was directly involved in these and countless other crimes.

Sanders, like the entire political establishment, views the precedent set by Snowden, as well as the outpouring of mass support for him among the population, as extremely dangerous. This support reveals the depth of popular hostility to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA after a generation of unending war and repression. Such fears have only been further fueled by the revelations that have followed Snowden, including a large-scale leak this week of documents related to Obama’s drone war program.

At a Vermont town hall meeting in February 2014, Sanders said, “Look, you don’t want to have a situation where everybody who works for the government suddenly wakes up and says, ‘you know, I think I’ve gotta reveal this information despite any oath or agreement that I made.’ You’re gonna have chaos.” He continued, “He broke the law. I think that clearly…there should be an effort to enter into a plea agreement.”

Conscious of the danger presented by these social tensions to the American political establishment, expressed in near-record-low voter turnout and a deep disaffection with the entire political establishment, Sanders has intervened in the 2016 elections to corral the leftward shift in mass sentiments back into the safe channels of the Democratic Party. His oft-repeated call for a “political revolution,” although it is obviously directed to workers and youth looking for an alternative to the corporate-controlled political system, has been defined down by Sanders to a call for improved voter turnout in order to elect more Democrats to public office.

Nevertheless, he is appealing to broad layers of the population, particularly the youth, who consider Snowden to be a hero. This is what accounts for his more ambivalent rhetoric on government spying, calling for various “reforms” while making a less strident denunciation of Snowden than his fellow candidates.

In reality however, Sanders completely supports American imperialism’s twin policies of war abroad and repression at home. Indeed, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Sanders issued bellicose threats against Russia, called for a major escalation of the war in Syria using Saudi ground troops (a stance he reiterated at Tuesday’s debate), and declared his support for the drone warfare of the Obama administration. When asked whether “counterterrorism” under a Sanders presidency would include “drone strikes and special forces,” Sanders replied, “Well, all of that and more.”

Much of Sanders’ appeal derives from his longstanding claim to be a “socialist.” But his support for the prosecution of Snowden, which ultimately reflects his support for American imperialism, is incompatible with the basic principles of socialism. For well over a century, genuine socialists have fought to develop an opposition to imperialism within the working class internationally, counseling workers that the “main enemy is at home.”

Socialists have sought to base this opposition on the scientific understanding that imperialist war abroad is inextricably bound up with the bourgeoisie’s class war at home, and that imperialism, as Lenin said, was reaction “all down the line.” Thus, the erection of the scaffolding of a police state in the United States, exposed most graphically by the courageous revelations made by Edward Snowden, is the necessary consequence of the drive by American capitalism for world domination.

It is impossible to oppose inequality within the United States, as Sanders claims to do, while supporting American aggression abroad. Indeed, it is highly significant in this regard that under the banner of the “War on Terror” the ruling elite have erected a surveillance infrastructure directed in the first instance against the American population.

Workers should take Sanders’ call for the prosecution of Edward Snowden as a warning. Sanders is opposed not only to the right of workers to know about the crimes committed by “their” government. Above all, he is determined to prevent a political break by the working class with the two-party system.

By Tom Hall for wsws.org

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”

He said that the library board of trustees will vote on whether to turn the service back on at its meeting on Sept. 15.

Used in repressive regimes by dissidents and journalists, Tor is considered a crucial tool for freedom of expression and counts the State Department among its top donors. But Tor has been a thorn in the side of law enforcement; National Security Agency documents made public by Snowden have revealed the agency’s frustration that it could only identify a “very small fraction” of Tor users.

The idea to install Tor services in libraries emerged from Boston librarian Alison Macrina’s Library Freedom Project, which aims to teach libraries how to “protect patrons’ rights to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive, unfettered by the pernicious effects of online surveillance.” (The Library Freedom Project is funded by Knight Foundation, which also provides funding to ProPublica.)

After Macrina conducted a privacy training session at the Kilton library in May, she talked to the librarian about also setting up a Tor relay, the mechanism by which users across the Internet can hide their identity.

The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina’s plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.

A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.

DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”

When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”

Deputy City Manager Paula Maville said that when she learned about Tor at the meeting with the police and the librarians, she was concerned about the service’s association with criminal activities such as pornography and drug trafficking. “That is a concern from a public relations perspective and we wanted to get those concerns on the table,” she said.

Faced with police and city concerns, library director Fleming agreed to turn off the Tor relay temporarily until the board could reconsider. “We need to find out what the community thinks,” he said. “The only groups that have been represented so far are the Police Department and City Hall.”

Fleming said that he is now realizing the downside of being the first test site for the Tor initiative.

“There are other libraries that I’ve heard that are interested in participating but nobody else wanted to be first,” he said. “We’re lonesome right now.”

Published by Julia Angwin at www.propublica.org

Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appears live via video during a student organized world affairs conference at the Upper Canada College private high school in Toronto, February 2, 2015.

NSA documents leaked to the Guardian in 2013 described a covert program called XKeyscore, which involved a searchable database for intelligence analysts to scan intercepted data.

Now, new documents show the breadth of this program and just what sort of data XKeyscore catalogs.

According to a new report from The Intercept, the amount of data XKeyscore scoops up as well as the sort of data it collects is much larger than originally thought.

Here are a few highlights from the new report:

• The XKeyescore database is “fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the back of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing,” the new report writes. Its servers collect all of this data for up to five days, and store the metadata of this traffic for up to 45 days.
• Web traffic wasn’t XKeyscore’s only target. In fact, according to the documents posted by The Intercept, it was able to gather data like voice recordings. A list of the intercepted data included “pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.“
• How the search works is very advanced. The new documents detail ways that analysts can query the database for information on people based on location, nationality, and previous web traffic.
• XKeyscore was also used to help hack into computer networks for both the US and its spying allies. One document dated in 2009 claims that the program could be used to gain access into unencrypted networks. 
• Using XKeyscore was reportedly insanely easy. “The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds,” security researcher Jonathan Brossard told The Intercept. “Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

While XKeyscore has been known as an intelligence tool for years now, these new documents highlight just how advanced and far-reaching the program’s surveillance is.

The NSA, in a statement to The Intercept, claims that all of its intelligence operations are “authorized by law.” It added, “NSA goes to great lengths to narrowly tailor and focus its signals intelligence operations on the collection of communications that are most likely to contain foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information.”

Written by Solarina Ho for Reuters, with additional reporting and writing by Alastair Sharp and editing by Chris Reese and Peter Galloway

UK intelligence agents have been moved because Russia and China can read files stolen by a US whistleblower, a senior government source has told the BBC.

The Sunday Times is reporting that Russia and China have cracked the encryption of the computer files.

The government source told the BBC the countries “have information” that led to agents being moved but added there was “no evidence” any had been harmed.

Edward Snowden, now in Russia, leaked intelligence data two years ago.

The former CIA contractor left the US in 2013 after leaking details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by American intelligence to the media.

His information made international headlines in June 2013 when the Guardian newspaper reported that the US National Security Agency was collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans.

Mr Snowden is believed to have downloaded 1.7 million secret documents before he left the US.

‘Hostile countries’

The government source said the information obtained by Russia and China meant that “knowledge of how we operate” had stopped the UK getting “vital information”.

Intelligence officials have long warned of what they see as the dangers of the information leaked by Mr Snowden and its potential impact on keeping people in the UK safe – a concern Prime Minister David Cameron has said he shares.

According to the Sunday Times, Western intelligence agencies have been forced to pull agents out of “hostile countries” after “Moscow gained access to more than one million classified files” held by Mr Snowden.

“Senior government sources confirmed that China had also cracked the encrypted documents, which contain details of secret intelligence techniques and information that could allow British and American spies to be identified,” the newspaper added.

‘Huge setback’

Tim Shipman, who co-wrote the Sunday Times story, told the BBC: “Snowden said ‘nobody bad has got hold of my information’.

“Well, we are told authoritatively by people in Downing Street, in the Home Office, in the intelligence services that the Russians and the Chinese have all this information and as a result of that our spies are having to pull people out of the field because their lives are in danger.

“People in government are deeply frustrated that this guy has been able to put all this information out there.”

The newspaper quoted Sir David Omand, former director of UK intelligence agency GCHQ, saying the fact Russia and China had the information was a “huge strategic setback” that was “harming” to Britain, the US and their Nato allies.

It comes two days after the UK’s terrorism watchdog David Anderson QC published a review into terrorism legislation, which was set up amid public concerns about surveillance sparked by Mr Snowden’s revelations.

He said the country needed clear new laws about the powers of security services to monitor online activity and concluded that the current situation was “undemocratic, unnecessary and – in the long run – intolerable”.

by Virgil Vaduva

You may not know it yet, but there is a reason why the NSA was in favor of the USA Freedom Act, which was successfully passed in the U.S. Senate with a final vote of 67-32.  This was preceded by a tumultuous weekend of Rand Paul throwing sticks into the wheels of other senators willing to renew an un-ammended version of the original Patriot Act which allegedly was the only document allowing for the NSA and other federal agencies to perform mass-surveillance on millions of unsuspecting Americans.

Consequently, the newly shaped and misnamed “Freedom Act” (which has nothing to do with freedom) is turning out to be just another joke pulled on the Americans who are now too busy debating the sexual exploits of Bruce Jenner to pay too much attention to how their freedom is slowly being strangled by the sadists in Washington DC.  The scene is nothing short of a comedy put on full display in front of a public unaware of the fact they are in fact watching a snuff film where Liberty will pay the final price.

Mainstream media outlets are excitedly describing the passage of this bill as a win for the American people, outlining how the NSA is now facing an uphill battle in collecting bulk digital data about all of us. Even Reason Magazine, who should be a beacon for common sense and “reason” is describing the bill as a “win” that does not end mass surveillance (a bit of a bipolar conclusion if you ask me):

No, it does not end mass metadata collection entirely, but it does require more selective search terms for records, collecting them from the telecom and Internet companies using these terms, not just trying to collect all records and then searching through them for the ones they want.

I’m quite confused as to how a few additional search attributes makes it more difficult to spy on us, but I am sorry to be the one to inform you that this bill will not increase your freedom as an American, nor will it end mass surveillance by the federal government.  Not only does the Freedom Act not increase freedom, but it is actually making it easier for the NSA and other federal agencies to monitor Americans without oversight.

It is a well-known fact among Information Security Professionals that the NSA has been in bed with telecommunication companies for decades, even well before 9/11.  For example the existence of Room 641A at 611 Folsom St. in San Francisco was exposed well before Edward Snowden’s revelations, but nothing could be done about the existence of this surveillance facility as it was the result of a voluntary relationship between AT&T and the National Security Agency.

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency that commenced operations in 2003 and was exposed in 2006

Worse, the information about the blatant partnership between the NSA and AT&T was made public in graphic details by Mark Klein, an AT&T employee who blew the whistle on the existence of the surveillance facility.  Klein even swore under oath the following:

While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. I saw this in a design document available to me, entitled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco” dated Dec. 10, 2002. I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the “splitter” cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.

In 2006 the story fizzled out into a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, with the Supreme Court refusing to hear the case in 2011 after it was dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court based on the retroactive grant of immunity the Congress used to protect telecommunication companies who were willing to partner up with the NSA voluntarily.

The revelation of Room 641A is just the tip of the iceberg. The NSA has hundreds, if not thousands of commercial agreements with corporations who are voluntarily assisting them with surveillance activities. The “beauty” of these agreements is that they do not require warrants and they are not subject to congressional oversight. The money is what speaks loudest here, and when 70% of the U.S. intelligence budget goes to private corporate NSA partners, the picture becomes very clear: everyone is in bed with the NSA, and the passage of the U.S.A. Freedom Act is just masturbation to please the masses.

The FISA court which was handling surveillance requests under the Patriot Act has no authority to dictate the extent of the private and voluntary agreement between telcos like AT&T and Verizon and the NSA.  The metadata or bulk data that these telcos are collecting and turned over to the NSA voluntarily is also not subject to any warrants or permissions given by the FISA court.

In essence, the passage of the Freedom Act is actually making things worse for Americans from a state surveillance perspective as it is now forcing the NSA to use unscrutinized side-channels to collect data.

The NSA has the money and the motivation to bribe and pay their way into your phone, home or bedroom, regardless of the laws passed by Congress. The $10 million paid to RSA to insert a backdoor into their encryption products is a drop in the bucket.  Billions of dollars flow to companies like Microsoft, Booze Allen, Orange, Stratfor and Vodafone that allow for the backdooring of products or outright tapping into the lives of unsuspecting Americans.  The CIA has even retained In-Q-Tel in order to place investments into high-tech startups in order to retain their technologies or place backdoors into their products in exchange for money.

And when the NSA cannot legally spy on Americans, they retain the services of companies like Palantir Technologies, which will spy on us on their behalf.  Wikileaks provided documents showing that Palantir employees, together with consultants from the defunct HB Gary Federal will provide software able to collect, analyze and correlate information from the general public while also being able to create public streams of misinformation aimed at discrediting critics of the federal government, such as Glenn Greenwald.

It is not necessary for me to continue explaining why America has yet again been suckered into supporting the illusion of freedom while in fact losing freedom on every single front. This is my desperate attempt to throw a little bit of light and cold water on the spectacle that continues to unfold before our eyes, the both sadistic and masochistic relationship between the American people and their government. It’s a bizarre, pseudo-religious display of flag worship and patriotism which is repaid by the State with more pain, tyranny, taxation and war.

The scandalous display will continue unabated until principled whistle blowers and technology, not Congress, will save us from the ever-present eyes of the NSA.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

Dressed in reflective yellow construction gear while working under the cover of darkness early Monday, a small group of artists installed a tribute to NSA-leaker Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park.

The Snowden bust stands atop a column at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a site built to honor more than 11,000 American prisoners of war who died aboard British ships during the American Revolutionary War.

The location is no coincidence.

Speaking to Mashable on the condition of anonymity, the artists said they chose the spot because it is “loaded with significance and meaning and reverence of others.” It positions Snowden, they said, “as a continuation of a story that began at the beginning of this country” — one represented in the plight of the captured Americans.

“We feel that Snowden’s actions really continue that story,” said the artists. “It is built upon a set of ideals to live freely, not be confined or surveilled or monitored by your government. You can’t have freedom of expression to pursue liberty if you feel like you’re doing it under a watchful eye.”

The three artists — two of whom who planned the idea while a third created the “museum-quality” sculpture itself — spent the better part of year on the project.

Their hard work paid off: Animal New York’s Bucky Turco, who exclusively documented the installation Monday morning, said it looks so official that “over a dozen people walking their dogs passed by the new bust on Monday morning without noticing the unsanctioned piece.”

While they originally considered other locations to install the sculpture — Belvedere Castle was one of them — they felt the Martyrs Monument offered them the best chance to convey the ideals that Snowden’s revelations are all about.

“It’s not just about Snowden. It’s about the ideals that he was trying to work towards and push others to care about.” The monument to the POWs, “who were fighting for the same ideals that Snowden is fighting for” gave them a bridge to make their case.

“This is a guy who some of the traditional mass media has portrayed as a traitor, or a terrorist, and the very same thing would have been said about these POWs in the Revolutionary War times,” they said. “But with 200 years of perspective, we realized they were fighting for something all of us are very grateful for. We hope it will shift people’s perceptions, or open their eyes, that there could be a different story than what they’e been told.”

While others have created Snowden statues before, they’ve primarily been mobile installations. The sculpture that now stands in Fort Greene Park is permanent — or at least until the Parks Department removes it.

The artists said they hope the city will considering leaving the sculpture where it is — they said it was designed specifically for its current location, so it “feels organic” and doesn’t ruin the “vibe and the flow” — though they recognize that’s probably not going to happen.

Ideally, for the artists, the city would preserve the statue and make it accessible to people, allowing New Yorkers to continue the conversation that began when Snowden leaked batches of NSA documents to Glenn Greenwald.

“If you look at history, the people we honor with statues now — certainly the people rebelling against the British rules — were criminals one day,” the artists said. “Now they’re heroes.”

“We’re wondering if on the long arc of time Snowden will be considered a hero, too.”

Update 11:45 a.m. ET: Instagram user Justine Williams says park rangers had already removed the “Snowden” sign from the monument. We’ve reached out to the Parks Department to see if they have plans to remove the sculpture, too.

Update: 12:30 p.m. ET: Vine’s Jeremy Cabalona has video of NYC Parks Department workers covering up the Snowden statue with a blue tarp.

Update 1:30 p.m. ET: Workers are working on taking the statue down.

Originally published on http://mashable.com/2015/04/06/snowden-sculpture-fort-greene-brooklyn

Barack Obama smoking Marijuana

by Virgil Vaduva

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In what is turning out to be a very poorly timed April 1, 2015 press release, the White House announced a new executive order signed by Barack Obama.  The order titled “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities” is a very generic and vaguely written executive order allowing the Federal Government to confiscate all property of persons engaging in cyber activities which may be deemed inappropriate.

The order allowed for the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, to confiscate all property of persons which are deemed to be responsible for or complicit in “cyber-enabled activities.”

It is not very clear what “cyber-enabled activities” means, however the actions resulting in the following seem to be banned by this order:

(A) harming, or otherwise significantly compromising the provision of services by, a computer or network of computers that support one or more entities in a critical infrastructure sector;

(B) significantly compromising the provision of services by one or more entities in a critical infrastructure sector;

(C) causing a significant disruption to the availability of a computer or network of computers; or

(D) causing a significant misappropriation of funds or economic resources, trade secrets, personal identifiers, or financial information for commercial or competitive advantage or private financial gain; or

(A) to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have engaged in, the receipt or use for commercial or competitive advantage or private financial gain, or by a commercial entity, outside the United States of trade secrets misappropriated through cyber-enabled means, knowing they have been misappropriated, where the misappropriation of such trade secrets is reasonably likely to result in, or has materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States;

(B) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of, any activity described in subsections (a)(i) or (a)(ii)(A) of this section or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order;

(C) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(D) to have attempted to engage in any of the activities described in subsections (a)(i) and (a)(ii)(A)-(C) of this section.

By using “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” as the vehicle to push this agenda, Barack Obama has bypassed all the Constitutional rights to due process that an American citizen has.  Just like the Patriot Act has done, this order allows for government agents to take someone’s private property or the contents of a bank account without due process and without criminal charges being brought against someone.

As the order clearly defined who it affected by this promulgation, the term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

The language of the order also includes persons which are deemed to be complicit in such actions language which is believed to be aimed at punishing financial supporters of Edward Snowden or other detractors and whistle blowers that have exposed the criminal and unconstitutional activities in which the United States government has been engaging.

The language clearly specifies that those targeted under this order will receive no prior notification of their funds and property being confiscated: “…there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1 of this order.“

Fortunately there are alternative means to pseudo-anonymously provide financial support to Edward Snowden.  An official legal support fund has been created which accepts Bitcoin donations: https://blockchain.info/address/1snowqQP5VmZgU47i5AWwz9fsgHQg94Fa

 While the Obama administration claims to be the most transparent administration in history, reality paints a different picture.  The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based journalist advocacy organization, released Washington Post’s Leonard Downie’s findings in its first comprehensive look at press freedom in the United States: “The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America.”

The conclusion is shocking.  In the words of David Sanger, a correspondent for The New York Times, “this is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered.”  Marcus Brauchli, the former Washington Post executive editor, said the Bush administration had a worse reputation” for transparency, but “in practice, it was much more accepting of the role of journalism in national security.”

“What I see here is that Obama campaigned against excessive secrecy, promised to have the most transparent government in American history, signed presidential directives in his first day of office with a lot of fanfare, continues to say in speeches and interviews and press conferences that transparency is a high priority for him, and it hasn’t happened,” Leonard Downie said. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a Republican or Democrat. It matters what he has promised and has not delivered.”

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak.  He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.