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Tag: leaks
#EndorseThis: Trump’s Worried Aides Leaking All Over His New Presidency

#EndorseThis: Trump’s Worried Aides Leaking All Over His New Presidency

Donald Trump has yet to complete the first week of his presidency, and already his worried aides are leaking all over him with unattributed quotes that depict the man as a childish ignoramus who spends too much time on Twitter and watching cable TV, and too little time on policy and governance. In other words, the same narcissistic, intellectually stunted clown whose election we warned against months ago.

What the torrent of leaks suggests is that those same worried aides — the GOP appartchiks who lie publicly on Trump’s behalf about voter fraud, the size of the Inauguration Day crowd on the National Mall, and scores of other topics — are now telling the truth “off the record” to the Washington reporters despised by their boss.

Seth Meyers takes “a closer look” at the weird fugue state of the White House, truly “unpresidented” (as Trump might tweet)  in the annals of any new administration. Scary and weird, but somehow still funny.

Latest U.S. Media Intel Scoop Suggests New Leaker

Latest U.S. Media Intel Scoop Suggests New Leaker

Washington (AFP) – The latest media scoop about the internal workings of the U.S. intelligence community has convinced officials they have a new leaker feeding information to journalists, reports said Tuesday.

The concerns came after The Intercept, a news site that has access to documents from known leaker Edward Snowden, published new revelations about the scope of the U.S. terrorism watchlist.

The Intercept report was “obtained from a source in the intelligence community.” Previously, it has not hidden when Snowden was its source, suggesting the latest scoop came from someone else.

News network CNN, citing only “U.S. officials,” reported that national security officers fear that they are now faced with a second source leaking classified intelligence from within their own ranks.

The Intercept, which is edited by U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first revealed some of Snowden’s secret documents, published a 12-page text marked “secret/noforn,” meaning it is not to be shared with allied governments and entitled: “Directorate of Terrorist Identities Strategic Accomplishments 2013.”

The document is dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left Hawaii — where he was working as a contractor for the National Security Agency — and fled first to Hong Kong and then to Russia.

Produced by the National Counterterrorism Center, the document reveals that there are at least 680,000 names of individuals around the world that U.S. officials suspect of involvement in terrorism.

Of these, 280,000 people have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” Others are alleged members or supporters of groups regarded as terrorist by Washington such as Al-Qaeda or Hamas.

A larger database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment or TIDE, not has a million names, officials told CNN

The Intercept report also revealed that since President Barack Obama took office he has boosted the number of suspects on the “no-fly list” banning them from aviation ten fold to 47,0000.

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan

Snowden Declares ‘Mission Accomplished’ On Leaks

Snowden Declares ‘Mission Accomplished’ On Leaks

Washington (AFP) – Just six months after first leaking National Security Agency secrets in a move that triggered a revaluation of U.S. surveillance policies, Edward Snowden is declaring “mission’s already accomplished.”

Snowden told The Washington Post in his first in-person interview since his June arrival in Russia, which granted him temporary asylum, that he was satisfied because the public is now informed about the U.S. government’s massive sweep of Internet and phone records.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said in the the interview published Tuesday.

“I already won.

“As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated,” Snowden told the Post.

“Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

The NSA’s collection of communications data has grown dramatically since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

On Friday, President Barack Obama said he welcomed a debate about the NSA’s role as he weighs possible changes to its broad powers amid a public outcry over rights to privacy. The president said he would make a “pretty definitive statement” in January about how the NSA should be overhauled.

A panel of legal and intelligence experts chosen by the White House has recommended curbing the agency’s powers among 46 proposed changes, warning that its sweeps in the war on terror have gone too far.

And a federal judge has warned that the NSA’s routine collection of nearly all Americans’ phone records was probably unconstitutional.

Snowden was interviewed in Moscow by Barton Gellman, a Post reporter who has received leaks from the former NSA contractor. The leaker’s first revelations were initially published by the Post and the Guardian in June.

“He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry,” Gellman said of Snowden.

Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Snowden, charging him with espionage and felony theft of government property.

But the 30-year-old said he was not being disloyal.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

The leaker said it was lawmakers’ decision to keep the NSA programs hidden and their failure to ask probing questions that entitled him to spill the secrets.

“The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility,” he said.

Snowden’s revelations have outraged civil liberties advocates and even U.S. allies, angered by reports that the United States was monitoring their leaders’ cellphone calls and other virtual communications.