The statement in full:

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

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The United States spied on European Union offices and broke into private computer networks of EU officials in the US and Europe, according to a new report.

German magazine Der Spiegel claims that top secret documents from 2010 leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden show that the US bugged offices in Washington, New York and Brussels.

The NSA also tapped European Union private computer networks to read e-mails and listen to phone calls and meetings by government officials.

The NSA document refers to the European Union as "a target."

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Facing threatened investigations and sanctions from Europe, U.S. intelligence officials plan to discuss the new allegations — reported in Sunday's editions of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel — directly with EU officials.

But "as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations," concluded a statement issued Sunday from the national intelligence director's office.

It was the latest backlash in a nearly month-long global debate over the reach of U.S. surveillance that aims to prevent terror attacks. The two programs, both run by the National Security Agency, pick up millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks each day. Reports about the programs have raised sharp concerns about whether they violate public privacy rights at home and abroad.

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From Der Spiegel, translated to English by Google Translate:

In a "top secret" classified NSA paper in September 2010 describes how the intelligence attacked the EU's diplomatic representation in Washington.

Thus, not only bugs were installed in the building in the U.S. capital, but also the internal computer network was infiltrated. In this way, the Americans not only get access to meetings at the premises of the EU , but also to e-mails and internal documents on the computers.

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When Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, gave a presentation at the Gel 2013 conference in April, he couldn't have foreseen the bombshell news revelations about the vast extent to which the government was surveilling and hoarding communications data. What he did make clear, though, was just how prevalent the collection of such data was already by tech giants like Google; the ability to pass on such personally identifiable data is intrinsic to Google's financial model. Weinberg pointed out that these online giants are designed in such a way as to track you (that's how they monetize through targeted advertising) -- but this has led to an increasing demand, via court orders, from law enforcement and government agencies for this already tracked online data.

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Blaze explains that, given the scale of data collection, the government has amassed what could be called "a National Relationship Database." He writes:

Metadata is our context. And that can reveal far more about us — both individually and as groups — than the words we speak.

Context yields insights into who we are and the implicit, hidden relationships between us. A complete set of all the calling records for an entire country is therefore a record not just of how the phone is used, but, coupled with powerful software, of our importance to each other, our interests, values, and the various roles we play.

The better understood the patterns of a particular group’s behavior, the more useful it is. This makes using metadata to identify lone-wolf Al Qaeda sympathizers (a tiny minority about whose social behavior relatively little is known) a lot harder than, say, rooting out Tea Partiers or Wall Street Occupiers, let alone the people with whom we share our beds.

It is, in effect, a National Relationship Database.

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I write to you about the idea of identity, particularly my identity as an American in the wake of the NSA warrantless wiretapping and PRISM program. Growing up, perhaps naively, I have carried this ideal of America, freedom, liberty and the right to privacy as absolutes. The First Amendment of free speech and the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches provided a base that shaped my understanding of my place and role in society. As a citizen I could anonymously say within reason almost any idea or thought without repercussions from the government. As a citizen I expected my communications and personal life free of government intrusion and inspection. If a government action or program started to run afoul of these rights the judiciary would step in and make the necessary corrections.

The recent revelations about widespread government warrantless spying including recording phone conversations, email, and Internet traffic -- programs that have been blessed by secret courts created by secret laws -- have shaken my belief in what it means to live in a free society, about the basic ideals of America.

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So far, the select intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has already delivered a series of mini-panegyrics to the NSA's PRISM and phone metadata hoarding programs, and to Alexander himself.

Via the Guardian:

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“I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said on Monday. The commissioner didn't criticize the surveillance programs themselves, just the secrecy surrounding them:

I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone, it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government... I think the public can understand that. I see no reason why that program was placed in the secret category.

Kelly -- who again and again has rejected greater oversight for his department -- suggested too that the NSA may need more oversight. Azi Paybarah of Capital New York noted the irony in his morning brief:

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A roundup of major takeaways:

On why he waited to release the documents until now 

Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

On Google and Facebook denials about providing government officials direct access to servers

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The revelations of NSA’s collection of “metadata” -- as cybersecurity expert Susan Landau explained on "Democracy Now" -- is, in fact, even more invasive than actual content collection. She gives an example of how that can be the case: Even if all the NSA does is trace the one or more calls from your home to your doctor on a day when you would normally be at work, followed by one or more calls from your phone that is now located at the doctor’s office to your family, that information strongly suggests that the content of the call was bad news.

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Appearing on NBC News with Andrea Mitchell, Clapper scrambled on the defensive with barely plausible excuses for his comments to Congress, which stand at direct odds with recent revelations about the NSA's vast dragnets. Via HuffPo:

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Facing a global uproar over the programs that track phone and Internet messages around the world, the Justice Department continued to investigate whether the disclosures of Edward Snowden, 29, an employee of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, were criminal.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament planned to debate the spy programs Tuesday and whether they have violated local privacy protections. EU officials in Brussels pledged to seek answers from U.S. diplomats at a trans-Atlantic ministerial meeting in Dublin later this week.

The global scrutiny comes after revelations from Snowden, who has chosen to reveal his identity. Snowden has fled to Hong Kong in hopes of escaping criminal charges as lawmakers including Senate intelligence chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California accuse him of committing an "act of treason" that should be prosecuted.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., explained on ABC’s "This Week" Sunday that in one of the signature uses of the dragnet collection of every American’s phone records, the NSA managed to track one of our own informants, David Headley, as he helped Islamic terrorists plan attacks. She did not mention that it did nothing to prevent the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed 166 -- and in which Headley had a role in planning.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the effort to track Headley – which did manage to thwart Headley’s 2009 plans to attack a Danish newspaper – a success, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell. Such is the value of these programs, it appears, that top proponents of the program celebrate the tracking of a DEA informant gone bad as their main talking point.

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Edward Snowden and his girlfriend moved out of their home in a quiet neighborhood near Honolulu on May 1, leaving nothing behind. Century 21 real estate agent Kerri Jo Heim says Sunday that the owner of the house wanted the couple out so that the home could be sold. Heim says police came by on Wednesday to ask where the couple went. She told them she didn't know.

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In the latest in a series of bombshell scoops, the Guardian revealed Sunday -- based on top-secret documents -- that Boundless Informant, a metadata categorizing tool, "details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks."

The discovery sits at odds with administration claims that too much metadata is collected daily to be processed in a sense that could be called "spying." Boundless Informant illustrates the method and easy by which the government could easily pick out information from within its hoarded metadata. Boundless Informant, as the leaked government document details, the tool shows "How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country."

Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill noted too that other documents obtained "further demonstrate that the NSA does in fact break down its surveillance intercepts which could allow the agency to determine how many of them are from the US. The level of detail includes individual IP addresses."

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"I’m going to be asking all of the Internet providers, all of the phone companies, to ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe things will change in Washington,” Paul said.

Here's where Paul's free market libertarianism falls short, though: Although Internet giants like Facebook and Google have denied their participation in the top secret PRISM program, these firms have an established history of acquiescing to government demands for user data. Paul's idea that tech corporations will join en masse misses the cemented practice of communications corporations working in cahoots with government efforts to render every individual trackable. Perhaps, however, Paul's gambit will pay off if  Internet providers and phone companies believe the public relations benefits of fighting the NSA outweigh the burden of public outrage at the government's sprawling dragnet.

Via Fox News Sunday:

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Defending the National Security Agency's massive intelligence gathering operation on U.S. soil today, President Obama said the courts are an important "safeguard."

“If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, then we're going to have some problems here,” Obama said.

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, added that "all information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling." Indeed, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established in 1978 in response to government abuses uncovered by a congressional report, reviews and approves intelligence gathering requests.

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Let's start with straw men. First, Obama reassured the press that Congress has been informed for some years of the surveillance programs, which enable the NSA to collect metadata on pretty much every call, email and instant message made and sent in and from the U.S. He said:

[The programs are] classified but they're not secret in the sense that, when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program... With respect to all these programs, the releveant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. And so, I think at the outset, it's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we're doing.

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