Is NSA Spy Leak Edward Snowden a Manufactured Hero?

Booz Allen Hamilton, like its rival SAIC, is involved in virtually every aspect of the modern intelligence enterprise, from advising top officials on how to integrate the 16 agencies within the Intelligence Community (IC), to detailed analysis of signals intelligence, imagery and other critical collections technologies…

Booz itself it now owned by the Carlyle Group, one of the nation’s most politically-connected private equity funds.

So this guy had no high school diploma, worked for intelligence his entire professional life, his boss was the Carlyle Group and he was getting paid more than a U.S. senator… and he decided to be a whistle-blower around the same time all this other stuff was coming out and just after Astroturf Adam announced his big “Final Revolution of America” psyop?

hmmm…..

UPDATE: He was a Ron Paul supporter in 2012   (wasn’t RP outed as a phony as well?)

UPDATE: Kenny from Kenny’s Sideshow uploaded the video of Glenn’s interview with our new hero. My biggest gripe with most of these guys has been they are pretty bad actors. This guy however seems pretty good. Notice how he keeps talking about coming from a position of comfort and wealth and that it’s difficult for people to give that up to stand up and do what’s right. He claims that it’s his unusual access to a comprehensive view of the workings of the intelligence complex that gave him the ability to see what was really going on. Well, sitting way out here on the outside, people like myself and many others (like Kenny for one) have been able to see this fascist shift developing for over a decade. Hell, William Cooper saw it long before that.

He took off on May 20th huh? Why does that seem important?

Obviously, I stand by my original theory on all of this… it’s part of an elaborate scheme by the intelligence complex themselves to create unrest or at least the narrative of unrest prior to the summer of discontent in America. The “hero” whistle-blower is actually a career NSA agent, former CIA spook who trained to be Special Forces (unconventional warfare)

He is breathlessly revered by the Guardian as the next best thing to happen to democracy since Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning yet what he “leaked” is well known to anyone paying attention over the past few years.

The paper describes him as having a bumper sticker on his laptop that reads “I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation” as well as having a copy of Angler, the biography of former vice-president Dick Cheney sitting on his hotel bed. Oh, the duality of the guy. Does anyone wonder how he was working at the NSA and the CIA for a company like Booz Allen Hamilton with an Electronic Frontier Foundation bumper sticker on his laptop?

Glenn Greenwald’s secret whistle-blower has exposed himself for reasons yet unknown. Well, I’ll tell you one of the reasons, they got sick of Greenwald doing all those interviews, now they got “their guy” front and center to take the spotlight off Glenn.

His name is Edward Snowden and by his own account he is a very high-paid employee of NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s been with them for at least 4 years working at the NSA facility in Hawaii.

According to a Guardian article which revealed his name, the guy is now hiding out in Hong Kong, which he readily offers up himself, in a “nice” hotel, sitting in his room with some kind of blanket hood over his head and laptop.

He claims he doesn’t want to live in a world like this… but it didn’t seem to bother him for 4 years while he was raking in $200,000 a year living like a king in Hawaii with his girlfriend.

The Guardian story is full of praise of this guy and they make sure to tell you to consider him a hero. Here’s our new hero’s background:

“In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces.”

“After that, he got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland. From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.

By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.”

“He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan” Guardian

Aside from the obvious sticky sweet nature of the Guardian article and the ham-handed props they adorned his hotel room with, he does give a few clues as to both his where-abouts and his mission:

“On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since.”

“It is a plush hotel and, what with eating meals in his room too, he has run up big bills.”

“”We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”"  Guardian

So he’s in a plush hotel right up the road from the CIA station in Hong Kong “running up bills” on his credit card. That shouldn’t take the CIA or the NSA or ANYONE more than a few minutes with Google to figure out where he is.

For those of you who don’t know, FACEBOOK isn’t just a company that agreed to help out the NSA under their Prism operation, it was created by the NSA and handed over to a couple of guys who played their part and cashed the checks. There have been very few major innovations in the tech world that didn’t come out of military and intelligence R&D over the past few decades, FACEBOOK is certainly no exception.

Edward Snowden is quickly becoming the FACEBOOK HERO of the year. Previous honorees were the likes of Malala (Global privatized education systems for the Middle East) and STOP KONY 2012 (recolonization of the whole of Africa for the benefit of 45 major corporations including Monsanto.

I received an email from World Can’t Wait. Apparently they are running their own Edward The Great campaign. Debra Sweet wrote a long email talking about this guy like he was the reincarnation of Howard Zinn and Martin Luther King Jr. all rolled into one.

She proudly announces the Stand With Edward Snowden campaign and accusingly asks:

“What are you willing to risk for real change?”

What am I willing to risk? I’ve been doing this for 7 years under my own name. When the various and sundry exploits of the NSA and the CIA and the lies of the Pentagon to go to war came out, when they FIRST came out, I was here writing about all of them, under my real name. False flags, staged color revolutions, fake congressional actions which only support the neoliberalizing of America. Even the marketing of the CHANGE candidate, the fake liberal who was nothing more than “George W. Obama” as he was recently called. I was there from the start to the finish and I’ve lost jobs, friends, family members turned their backs on me… all for what? To tell the truth to people about the growing police state and the neoliberalizing of America and the world.

While I was doing that over the past 6 years, Edward Snowden was helping create the lies, helping to sweep up anything and everything all of you said wrote bought and did…  and he was getting paid $200,000 a year to do it while I have had potential employers ask me about American Everyman before telling me I not the right “fit” for the job.

What the fuck am I willing to “risk”? What haven’t I risked? What did Aaron Swartz risk? There was a real activist and look at what it got him. Where’s the calls to Stand With Aaron?

Anyway, that said, the FACEBOOK page for the new Snowden (snowjob?) Movement is up and running called “I Stand with Edward Snowden” (created by Yoni Jakob Brombacher Miller ) so I thought I would share some of the marketing campaign’s choicer quotes (one guy seems to have the right idea though he’s not getting many “likes” on the page “We should be more concerned about organizing around the issue instead of trying to create a hero...”):

Talk about setting the allowed parameters of debate (gate keepers):

“The results of an early Business Insider reader poll suggest that Snowden has won the hearts and minds of people worldwide. Two-thirds of those who responded to the poll think Snowden is a “hero.”" SFGATE

Those are the only choices huh? Hero or traitor? How about option 3 – an intelligence contractor employee doing what intelligence contractors do, “winning hearts and minds”? How bout that for an option?

What exactly did he reveal anyway?

USA Today – 2006

“The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews..

… The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.” May 10th, 2006

WIRED -2006

“AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens

31 December 2005

I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it’s been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.

---

AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network– 16 January, 2004

In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.” May 17th, 2006

Remember Mark Klein? Remember the FISA bill of 2008 that no one wanted to pass because it gave the telecoms blanket retroactive immunity for committing crimes on behalf of the Bush administration and it kept us from knowing exactly WHAT had been swept up in their blanket surveillance program?

Anybody remember that?

So what has our “hero” really told us that we didn’t already know?

Hell, give him a FACEBOOK hero campaign. Collect money for him. Have a Di$info Jone$ “moneybomb” to pay his “plush hotel” bill “right up the road from the CIA offices in Hong Kong.

But he ain’t no fuckin hero. Sorry to burst your bubble. He’s told us nothing we didn’t already know and if he weren’t being marketed by the MSM like CNN, Guardian, BBC and the New York Times (along with Twitter and FACEBOOK) he would be just another “conspiracy theorists” with the only difference being he’s about 13 years too late with his big revelation.

He’s a product just like “CHANGE” was in 2008!

He’s probably being marketed by the same PR firm.

I saw through that before most and lost friends for that little bit of accurate analysis, and I will probably loose a few here today as well. But that’s a part of the price you pay when you don’t just hop on the KONY 2012 or the LOVE MALALA bandwagons. And I am so far off of this bandwagon apparently FACEBOOK doesn’t want to publish my automatic feeds from WordPress anymore. What a surprise, huh?

What would I be willing to risk for real change?

please…

The girlfriend of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is devastated by his decision to flee to Hong Kong without her.

Lindsay Mills, who described her boyfriend as her "man of mystery", said she has planned to spend the rest of her life with Snowden, who revealed top secret US government documents, before he went on the run.

The 28-year-old pole dancer said his decision had meant her "world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me lost at sea without a compass".

"As I type this on my tear-streaked keyboard I’m reflecting on all the faces that have graced my path. But sometimes life doesn’t afford proper goodbyes.

"At the moment all I can feel is alone. And for the first time in my life I feel strong enough to be on my own. Though I never imagined my hand would be so forced."
Mills, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, is said to have doted on Snowden and spent the last four years following him around the world.

The couple had taken a romantic break to Hong Kong - where he is now a fugitive after leaking documents from the National Security Agency’s Prism program, which trawls millions of online user accounts in the name of national security.

Snowden revealed that the US government kept tabs on its citizens through telecommunications companies. He had, he said, an "obligation to help free people from oppression".

"I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things. I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he said.

The 29-year-old analyst reportedly told Mills that he was going on a business trip shortly after divulging details of the top-secret government surveillance program.

Before he abandoned her, Mills shared her excitement over her and "E" getting ready to move in together. Source