Tag Moscow

Shhhcretly is pleased to have the exclusive rights to release the English version of this coverage on Edward Snowden.

This original article was first published 1 December 2018 in German in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, which reserves the publishing rights.

Shhhcretly would like to thank Der Standard and Steffen Arora for their kind permission to share the translated piece exclusively on this blog.

(Above) Photo credit: Lindsay Mills 2018.

Edward Snowden’s warning cry
By Steffen Arora
Der Standard, 1st December 2018

Former CIA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations shone a light on the western world’s surveillance practices. But he, and those who helped him, are paying a high price. He talks to Der Standard about the need to fight on.

“This is retaliation.” In an interview with Der Standard, Edward Snowden spoke in no uncertain terms about the authorities’ treatment of the people who saved his life. In June 2013, the former US intelligence services contractor became a hounded whistleblower after he exposed the extent to which the US and its allies carry out global surveillance of the internet and digital communications, regardless of suspicious activity. He made these revelations from Hong Kong, never expecting that the moment they were published, he would become the world’s most wanted man.

It was the same moment that Robert Tibbo’s telephone rang. The Canadian had made a name for himself in the city as a dedicated human rights lawyer. He fought for the rights of asylum seekers living a pariah existence in Hong Kong – with next to no chance of their status being recognized and leading a decent life there. Tibbo saw Snowden as another refugee who needed help. To hide him from his pursuers, Tibbo found shelter for Snowden with some of his other clients; asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

“They were warm, welcoming and kind. When I had fallen to the bottom of the world, they helped me up without giving a damn about who I was,” Snowden says. In the current political climate, loaded with the fear of outsiders, Snowden holds the refugees’ actions in even higher regard. “Their example, their humanity, it gave me a reason to keep fighting.”

Refugees and their lawyer under pressure

Not only Snowden, but also those who helped him, are now paying a high price for their actions. The US continues to accuse Snowden of spying and demand his extradition – and President Donald Trump would like to see him executed. Meanwhile, the seven refugees and their lawyer Mr. Tibbo are under pressure from the Hong Kong authorities.

In 2018, it is no longer an exception that human rights lawyers like Tibbo become the object of persecution themselves, says Manfred Nowak, Austrian human rights lawyer and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. Not only lawyers, but also journalists and activists from NGOs are being increasingly targeted, he says, even murdered, as records such as Russia’s show. “Human rights have not been in a crisis like this since the end of the Second World War,” Nowak says.

For Snowden’s helpers, the situation has deteriorated to the extent that this week, Tibbo turned for help to a selection of media outlets including the New York Times, Paris Match and Der Standard. He himself was forced to leave Hong Kong under diplomatic protection. He had to leave the seven refugees behind.

Effectively in exile, he continues working for his clients, who are living in constant fear of deportation. No country wants to take them in. Even Canada, which showed willingness to do so back in 2016, appears to have retreated in the face of pressure from abroad.

“Death by delay” is how lawyers such as Pascal Paradis from the NGO Lawyers Without Borders, which has been working on the case, describes this process. Snowden himself, fleeing US authorities, was left stranded in Moscow. Since then he has faced accusations that he is a Russian spy.

In fact he was aiming for Latin America, he says. “The Department of State failed to cancel my passport in time to keep me from leaving Hong Kong. But once they realized I was in the air en route to Latin America, they made public announcements to put every government around the world on notice that they intended to block my freedom of movement.”

No asylum in Austria

When he landed in Moscow for a stopover, he was stuck and could not travel further. All of his asylum applications in Europe were rejected, including by Austria. “This more than anything else is what prevents me from leaving Russia,” Snowden says in response to his critics. “If major powers of Europe can be induced by this or that secret promise to be violators of the asylum right rather than its guarantor, you can’t help but question the whole system. If you can’t count on a right now, can you count on a law?”

Manfred Nowak also sees this danger. “Democracy as a form of government is increasingly coming under pressure, as we can see in the US, Great Britain, Hungary, Poland or Italy. These countries are governed by populists, who came to power through democratic channels, but are now attacking democracy.” Nowak sees Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, as a particularly stark example of a fascist being voted in to lead a democracy.

Nowak stresses the importance of learning from history: Free elections have destroyed democracies time and time again. “Strident democracies” urgently need to defend themselves against “pseudo- democracies,” he says, pointing to leaders such as Trump, Viktor Orban and Bolsonaro.

The western world is currently experiencing a backlash, meaning human rights defenders must go on the offensive, Nowak says. “Everyone must do their bit,” he warns emphatically. “Otherwise it could be too late.”

Nowak sees this backlash in Austria too, where the center-right and far-right are governing in coalition. “Measures are being taken which are being seen, and therefore criticized, as restrictions on the constitutional state, democracy and human rights.”

“There’s a machine behind it”

Snowden sees the refugees’ treatment and his own as telling. “You can’t look at something like this without getting a sense that the mask has dropped, and behind all the pretense of civility and process we like to believe governs our little day to day, there’s a machine behind it that would burn everything we love to the ground without a tear if it meant making a problem go away.”

Snowden is convinced it’s no coincidence that those who helped him are now being targeted. “They’re worried about the example of these families, the symbol their moral choice represents. Anybody can look at this situation and see at a glance who is right and who is wrong.”

But if the “big governments” manage to rewrite this story with an unhappy ending for those involved, they will also succeed in changing the positive message of his work with a single blow, Snowden warns. He says he does not know how far state institutions would go to achieve this, “but they’ve already gone too far.”

Human rights lawyer Nowak has first-hand experience of the conditions in Hong Kong, where the seven migrants are currently stuck. He trained lawyers there; Tibbo was one of his students.

Nowak says he knew the Hong Kong Bar Association, which is putting the Canadian lawyer under pressure and sabotaging his mandate for the refugees, as an “independent institution.” He can only assume the bar’s current treatment of Tibbo is a result of “enormous pressure from outside.”

Snowden has called on his supporters not to give up on the fight for a free world. And above all the fight for those who helped him. “Take a look at the world. Before long, we’ll all feel like refugees.”

NOTE: Documents evidencing the Hong Kong Bar Association egregious treatment of Mr Tibbo can be found in the Der Standard article as embedded PDFs: https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000092725390/pressure-mounts-on-edward-snowdens-lawyer-robert-tibbo?ref=article

Photo (above) credit: http://www.freakingnews.com

Here’s a breaking news (below) from the CNN:

How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House

By Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, CNN
Updated 0037 GMT (0737 HKT) April 8, 2015

Washington (CNN)Russian hackers behind the damaging cyber intrusion of the State Department in recent months used that perch to penetrate sensitive parts of the White House computer system, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.

While the White House has said the breach only affected an unclassified system, that description belies the seriousness of the intrusion. The hackers had access to sensitive information such as real-time non-public details of the president’s schedule. While such information is not classified, it is still highly sensitive and prized by foreign intelligence agencies, U.S. officials say.

The White House in October said it noticed suspicious activity in the unclassified network that serves the executive office of the president. The system has been shut down periodically to allow for security upgrades.

The FBI, Secret Service and U.S. intelligence agencies are all involved in investigating the breach, which they consider among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems. ​The intrusion was routed through computers around the world, as hackers often do to hide their tracks, but investigators found tell-tale codes and other markers that they believe point to hackers working for the Russian government.

National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh didn’t confirm the Russian hack, but he did say that “any such activity is something we take very seriously.”

“In this case, as we made clear at the time, we took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” he said. “As has been our position, we are not going to comment on [this] article’s attribution to specific actors.”

Neither the U.S. State Department nor the Russian Embassy immediately responded to a request for comment.

Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said the White House’s use of a separate system for classified information protected sensitive national security-related items from being obtained by hackers.

“We do not believe that our classified systems were compromised,” Rhodes told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday.

“We’re constantly updating our security measures on our unclassified system, but we’re frankly told to act as if we need not put information that’s sensitive on that system,” he said. “In other words, if you’re going to do something classified, you have to do it on one email system, one phone system. Frankly, you have to act as if information could be compromised if it’s not on the classified system.”

To get to the White House, the hackers first broke into the State Department, investigators believe.

The State Department computer system has been bedeviled by signs that despite efforts to lock them out, the Russian hackers have been able to reenter the system. One official says the Russian hackers have “owned” the State Department system for months and it is not clear the hackers have been fully eradicated from the system.

As in many hacks, investigators believe the White House intrusion began with a phishing email that was launched using a State Department email account that the hackers had taken over, according to the U.S. officials.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in a speech at an FBI cyberconference in January, warned government officials and private businesses to teach employees what “spear phishing” looks like.

“So many times, the Chinese and others get access to our systems just by pretending to be someone else and then asking for access, and someone gives it to them,” Clapper said.

The ferocity of the Russian intrusions in recent months caught U.S. officials by surprise, leading to a reassessment of the cybersecurity threat as the U.S. and Russia increasingly confront each other over issues ranging from the Russian aggression in Ukraine to the U.S. military operations in Syria.

The attacks on the State and White House systems is one reason why Clapper told a Senate hearing in February that the “Russian cyberthreat is more severe than we have previously assessed.”

The revelations about the State Department hacks also come amid controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business during her time in office. Critics say her private server likely was even less safe than the State system. The Russian breach is believed to have come after Clinton departed State.

But hackers have long made Clinton and her associates targets.

The website The Smoking Gun first reported in 2013 that a hacker known as Guccifer had broken into the AOL email of Sidney Blumenthal, a friend and advisor to the Clintons, and published emails Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton’s private account. The emails included sensitive memos on foreign policy issues and were the first public revelation of the existence of Hillary Clinton’s private email address​ now at the center of controversy: hdr22@clintonemail.com. The address is no longer in use.

Wesley Bruer contributed to this report

Here’s the video clip of Edward Snowden’s latest public appearance (via video conference) on 14 February 2015 at the The Davis Levin First Amendment Conference, to a sold-out audience at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.

Previous speakers at this event include Daniel Ellsberg, Kenneth Starr, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Ralph Reed, Nadine Strossen and Jay Sekulow.

The decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to leave the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia prematurely earlier this week, following a cold reception by other world leaders for his incursion into Ukraine, hit the global headlines but Putin, who bailed himself out on sleep deprivation grounds, might actually be laughing on his flight back to Moscow: his recognition of the rapidly deteriorating relations with the West and fear of being surrounded by enemies have probably justified his decision to beef up Russia’s espionage operations.

But it was probably for the same reason – the increased efforts in intelligence gathering – and its consequences that also prompted Putin to rush back to the Krelim.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry earlier this week, Poland “made such an unfriendly and incomprehensible step” to expel some of its diplomats and subsequently:

Russia undertook adequate response measures. Several Polish diplomats have left the territory of our country for the activities not compatible with their status.

The Russian media reported last weekend that Moscow has deported former Latvian parliamentarian Aleksejs Holostovs after its intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), alleged Holostovs of spying for both Latvia and America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine also reported last weekend that a female diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow was expelled after a Russian diplomat working in Bonn was forced to leave amid media reports the latter was a spy.

There could be more to come following these sudden frenzies on the deportations of suspected Russian spies, and Russia’s (usual) tit-for-tat response, much reminiscent of the Cold War era.

And speaking of the Cold War, here’s a nice wrap up (below) from The Moscow Times about 6 spies who have defined that era.

One lasting impression I had on Robert Hanssen (below) – a former US Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001 – was the book Spy: The Inside Story of How FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America which described Hanssen’s initial reaction when he was eventually caught:

“What took you so long?!”

Six Spies Who Defined the Cold War Era
The Moscow Times Nov. 17 2014 21:54

1. Aldrich Ames

Plagued by drinking problems and a propensity toward extramarital affairs, Ames was lured into spying for the Soviet Union by the promise of money. Over the course of nine years, he received $4.6 million for revealing at least eight CIA sources. He was arrested in 1994 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

2. Robert Hanssen

Also motivated by the siren’s song of money, Hanssen worked for both the Soviet Union and Russia. He was suspected of acting as a double agent on a number of occasions, but was only arrested in 2001 while dropping off a garbage bag full of information in a park near Washington D.C. The failure to identify him for several decades was described by the U.S. Justice Department as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.” Hanssen was sentenced to life imprisonment.

3. Dmitri Polyakov

Both Hanssen and Ames reportedly exposed Polyakov’s work as a CIA agent. A Soviet major general and a high-ranking GRU military intelligence officer, Polyakov served as a CIA informant for 25 years, ultimately becoming one of the best sources for the agency, providing information on the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China. He was arrested by the KGB in 1986, sentenced to death and executed in 1988. According to CIA officers who worked with him, he provided the information out of principle, not for money.

4. Kim Philby

Philby was the most successful member of the Cambridge Five, a group of British spies who — driven by their socialist beliefs — defected to the Soviet Union. Philby was MI-6’s director for counter-espionage operations. In particular, he was responsible for fighting Soviet subversion activities in Western Europe. After arousing suspicion that he might be a defector, Philby was dismissed from his post and from MI-6 overall in 1956. He fled to the Soviet Union in 1963, where he lived until his death from heart failure in Moscow in 1988.

5. Oleg Gordievsky

After growing disenchanted with the KGB and the Soviet Union, Gordievsky, a KGB colonel, became a longtime high-ranking spy for MI-6. In 1982, he was promoted to manage Soviet espionage in Britain as a resident in the London Embassy. He was called back to Moscow on suspicion of working for a foreign power, but the British managed to smuggle him out of the country. He has lived in England ever since.

6. Arkady Shevchenko

Shevchenko was one of the highest-ranking Soviet officials to defect to the West. Working as undersecretary general of the United Nations, he became a CIA informant in 1975. Shevchenko was often referred to as a triple agent: While working as a Soviet diplomat at the UN, he was allegedly passing secrets to the U.S. In 1978 he fled to the U.S., dying of cirrhosis of the liver there in 1998.

Or was Dick Cheney looking for a cheap excuse to play politics?

Edward Snowden with his sudden departure from Hong Kong for Moscow and eventually elsewhere, possibly a country hostile to the US, would reignite the question if he’s a spy or double agent.

But the allegations made last week by former US vice president Dick Cheney that the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden could be a spy for China is off track, and he knows it, and are a deliberate public distraction as the Obama administration searches for scapegoats in the midst of defending the NSA surveillance programs with their one and only trump card.

Snowden left with his passport annulled, a warrant on his head plus criminal charges of espionage, theft and communicating classified intelligence to unauthorized persons.

But here is the dichotomy: While the corporate world is still coping with US regulations on better corporate governance practices, where does the notion of whistleblowing stand right now?

Please read the entire column here.