VICE got an 800 page FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) dump from the NSA (National Security Agency) Friday evening. It contains no smoking gun, but does indicate that NSA's denials that Edward Snowden had tried to follow so-called proper channels are pretty flimsy and, in part, depend on a very self-forgiving interpretation of events. It's a long read.
takyon: The PDF is reachable here. The download is around 43.3 megabytes.
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Multiple publishers are reporting that Micky Dolenz, the last surviving member of the made-for-tv band, The Monkees, is suing the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. He aims to get as much of the FBI's file on The Monkees as possible with the goal of uncovering what they may have on higher priority surveillance targets of the era, such as John Lennon or the MC5. According to a limited file release from 2011, The Monkees are only mentioned in two FBI documents, one of which remains fully redacted.
The Monkees may not be seem like the kind of band that would attract the FBI's attention, especially during a time when groups like Country Joe and the Fish and the MC5 were leading the movement against the Vietnam War. But the Monkees were one of the most popular bands in America in 1966 and 1967, and they sprinkled anti-war sentiments into songs like "Ditty Diego-War Chant" and even "Last Train to Clarksville," a song about a man headed off to war that fears he'll never see his love again.
"The Monkees reflected, especially in their later years with projects like [their 1968 art house movie] Head, a counterculture from what institutional authority was at the time," Zaid tells Rolling Stone. "And [J. Edgar] Hoover's FBI, in the Sixties in particular, was infamous for monitoring the counterculture, whether they committed unlawful actions or not."
-- https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-monkees-micky-dolenz-fbi-1234584299/
In the intervening decades, making and distributing music has become highly centralized and corporate.
Covered at:
BBC: Micky Dolenz: Last living Monkees member sues FBI for secret files on band
Bloomberg: Last of the Monkees Wants Their FBI Records Turned Over
The Los Angeles Times: The FBI had a file on the Monkees, and now Micky Dolenz is suing to find out why
TMZ: Micky Dolenz Demanding FBI File on The Monkees!!! (Yes, There Actually Is One)
Rolling Stone: The Monkees' Micky Dolenz Would Like a Word With the FBI
NBC: Surviving Monkees member Micky Dolenz sues the FBI, asks for files on him and his bandmates
Previously:
(2019) The FBI "Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny" That It Monitors Your Social Media Posts
(2019) U.S. Government Using Secretive FISA Rules to Spy on Journalists
(2017) EFF Sues FBI to Obtain Records About Geek Squad/Best Buy Surveillance
(2016) Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal
(2014) Already a Winner in EFF's "Most Outrageous Response to a FOIA Request" Contest?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 05 2016, @08:22PM
Updated the summary with a direct link to the PDF. The documents are hosted on both DocumentCloud and Scribd.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2016, @08:40PM
I like to make claims to and then dump an 800 page document on someone and say "See, I'm right, right in here. Just read it."
How about a page or section reference, numbnuts?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2016, @08:43PM
I like to make claims to and then dump an 800 page document on someone and say "See, I'm right, right in here. Just read it."
Sorry, you are not allowed to do so. You are an Anonymous Coward. Only editors can do such things. Go read the *.pdf, you lazy sot!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2016, @08:44PM
You want the page that contains no smoking gun?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 05 2016, @09:00PM
The article is already a summary of the 800 page release, and includes several of the pages for illustration. Sometimes you have to RTFA. I have skimmed it and provided some quotes below.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2016, @05:13AM
This was too rude of a reply for this site! :/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2016, @08:42PM
Two things that jumped out at me:
(1) It seems like none of their internal whistleblower processes even conceived of the possibility that their entire mission might be questioned. They were focused on things like LOVEINT, abuse of authority, waste, etc. But had basically no concept of self-doubt. At least not from the perspective 'whistleblowing.' So when people say he could have followed protocol, there really was no protocol for the kind of issue he was trying to raise.
(2) All the times the government people refer to snowden as a liar. This stuff wasn't meant for public consumption either, it was internal emails. And it wasn't just in reference to his claim of trying to raise his concerns internally. Its like they've got a completely different narrative than practically anyone outside of the government and its apologists.
IMO that is the real face of corruption - not mr burns rubbing his hands and grinning evily, but an insular group of people who are all so sure of their correctness that telling them otherwise is like trying to convince someone that water is not wet. That's one of the problems over-sight is meant to reduce by bringing in multiple viewpoints from outside the organization. But because its so secretive those outsiders (like feinstein) are essentially just insiders who are slightly less inside.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mr Big in the Pants on Sunday June 05 2016, @09:13PM
"who are all so sure of their correctness that telling them otherwise is like trying to convince someone that water is not wet."
Oh the irony...
It is not metaphorically like that, it is EXACTLY like that. They were so sure they were right, the leak caused some news for a while and then it blew over, and they went back to doing it with the government making it a priority to make sure it was legal (if useful) in the future.
So in other words water was wet, they were right and the apathetic/ignorant public go on grazing.
Oh the egg on the NSA's face...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 06 2016, @02:18PM
trying to convince someone that water is not wet
the leak
then it blew over
So...many...puns! Let's see...up a creek without a paddle? Finger in the dike? Something about hurricanes...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2016, @09:25PM
Glorious Leader Obummer and his cronies lied? Say it ain't so!!! What next? You're gonna tell me that water is wet?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2016, @09:45PM
The next thing I might tell you is Bush the Younger, boy-type Clinton, Bush the Elder, St. Reagan, etc, etc, and their cronies were all liars too.
But never mind that. The gay Kenyan vegan D-team moooooslims are gonna getcha!
Disclaimer: this comment makes no guarantees that Trump the Dealmaker, girl-type Clinton, and all their cronies aren't also liars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2016, @12:21AM
But, but ... water is in fact wet. Isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2016, @02:04AM
All the times the government people refer to snowden as a liar. This stuff wasn't meant for public consumption either, it was internal emails. And it wasn't just in reference to his claim of trying to raise his concerns internally. Its like they've got a completely different narrative than practically anyone outside of the government and its apologists.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Probably the most insightful thing ever posted on this website.
There's a reason that this guy failed out of High School, the Army, Anne Arundel Community College, the CIA, the University of Liverpool, Dell, and the NSA. The last thing he ever completed successfully (that we know for sure, not some embellished record he made up) was middle school. He always makes it out to be someone else's fault, but he is the common denominator. WE ALL KNOW PEOPLE LIKE THIS. We all know people who think they are smarter than they really are, who always find something or someone else to blame when they fuck up. The difference with Snowden is: this guy had well connected family [wikipedia.org] who would bail him out with a cushy government contract any time he fucked up. THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EDWARD SNOWDEN AND THE 30 YEAR OLD CASHIER AT YOUR LOCAL SUPERMARKET.
We should all be so lucky to have family like that.
The boy genius that we are told about in the media continues to make outrageous claims about new products THREE YEARS since he's had access to any classified information. You people eat it up. We've never seen a single line of code written by this guy. He's never participated in community forums (outside of a few inconsequential posts to ars technica), never posted to a mailing list, never did anything remotely technical that makes him out to be the genius that he claims and that some of you tout him to be. All he did was flunk out of everything in life, use his grandfather to get jobs that everybody here would love to have, and then did a piss-poor job at stealing documents in such a manner that showed how in over his head he really was.
Maybe those internal emails referring to Snowden as a liar, those emails which were never meant to be made public, have some merit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2016, @02:13AM
Many of those aren't examples of "failed out of" but "moved on from". Lots of people homeschool and self-educate, so merely not graduating from high school or university is irrelevant.
In any case, I'm quite sure that all of your accomplishments pale in comparison to him actually standing up for freedom by revealing the government's wrongdoing. It's easy to Just Follow Orders, but less easy to challenge powerful authorities in any meaningful way. No one cares about whether or not he is a "genius"; that is just your straw man.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2016, @02:33AM
> Maybe those internal emails referring to Snowden as a liar, those emails which were never meant to be made public, have some merit.
If the NSA had legitimate reasons for believing snowden is a liar they would have made them public. So far, all they've done are issue denials and half-truths. This FOIA dump literally proves that their most vociferous claim - that snowden lied about trying official channels first was, at best, a half-truth.
It is quite fascinating how you spun that into Snowden actually being a liar. Its like you purposely set out to demonstrate how being locked into a narrative can leave someone mentally incapable of comprehending that other perspectives exist.
Thank you for posting, really. You made a much larger contribution than you realize.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 06 2016, @03:10AM
It's obvious that you don't think very highly of Snowden. As the AC ahead of me states, many of those "failures" you speak of, are simply "job changes" and "moving on". I can identify with Snowden's "moving on". I've done enough of that in my own lifetime. What is obvious is, Snowden is not one of the sheep, to graze in the same pasture all his life, to be fleeced repeatedly, and ultimately be led to the slaughterhouse, to be packaged up for meat.
Do you fear those who are not sheep?
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday June 06 2016, @03:47AM
And it's self-knowing corruption.
The NSA has a dedicated lawyer, with top secret clearance, whose sole job is to indicate "is this program is legal?"
For some reason, the NSA doesn't run all their programs by him, like they are supposed to.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 05 2016, @08:58PM
After the Vanity Fair article, NBC News does an interview with Snowden in which he claims to have raised concerns internally, directly disputing public statements by the NSA:
Emphasis mine, found that funny.
There doesn't seem to be a smoking gun that shows that Snowden definitely raised concerns internally, but this is a selective and redacted release that does prove that the NSA was bumbling and scrambling to fact check Snowden back in 2013, and had problems with its record keeping. And as we know, Snowden had already seen past NSA whistleblowers get crushed [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 1) by pinchy on Sunday June 05 2016, @10:53PM
There was some amusing correspondence between ed and someone about viewing an RTF file.
Apparently he sent some higher up a RTF formatted file and got the old 'waah I cant open it' routine.
He obviously spent some time doing help desk support. He had super detailed instructions on how to "open with" and explaining the difference of rtf and regular doc files.
I imagine whatever attempts to blow the whistle would have been face to face.
Firing off an email to your superiors about how you think the entire organization is a sham right off the bat wouldn't be the best route.
(Score: 1) by Chromium_One on Monday June 06 2016, @01:43AM
Based on my own experiences ... when the organization as a whole understands that The Emporer Has No Clothes, anyone you had those conversations with will refuse to remember that those conversations took place. Admitting that you told someone not to rock the boat is too much for some careers to take.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2016, @03:16AM
This is why I chose to "whistleblow" where nerds congregate online regarding he medical research community's confusion over p-values.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2016, @02:14PM
I did RTFA, and it was plenty long. I'm not going to read an 800 page FOIA dump.
I'm still looking for the evidence that he "tried to tell NSA about surveillance concerns." The article, aside from talking about the question-to-a-training-question, which as reported had nothing immediately apparent to do with surveillance, makes no mention I see justifies the headline or the summary claims.
(And none of that has much to do with my opinion of Snowden in any event. But how do we leap from question-in-training about EOs and law to he raised concerns about surveillance?) I understand that after the sensational headline the summary says, "there no smoking gun." But in the article I read, there is no gun and there is no evidence reaching the level of Snowden's claims. There is great concern on the part of the officials to make sure that the story is not, "He never complained," but rather that they have no evidence of complaint.
Finally.... a legitimate FOIA denial reason is harm to national security, which would include methodology of intelligence acquisition. If Snowden did raise concerns, legitimate or otherwise, would they not have fallen into automatically redacted territory? (Or would we still get communications that are 100% blacked out?)