20committee posted: "In the two years since the Edward Snowden saga went
public, a handful of people who actually understand the Western signals
intelligence system have tried to explain the many ways that the Snowden
Operation has smeared NSA and its partners with salacious "
New post on The XX Committee
(http://20committee.com/author/20committee/)
_Snowden is a Fraud_
(http://20committee.com/2015/06/12/snowden-is-a-fraud/)
by _20committee_ (http://20committee.com/author/20committee/)
In the two years since the Edward Snowden saga went public, a handful of
people who actually understand the Western signals intelligence system
have tried to explain the many ways that _the Snowden Operation_
(http://20committee.com/2014/05/31/the-xx-committee-snowden-reader/) has
smeared NSA
and its partners with salacious charges of criminality and abuse. I've been
one of the public faces of what may be called the Snowden Truth movement,
and finally there are signs that reality may be intruding on this debate.
No American ally was rocked harder by Snowden's allegations than Germany,
which has endured a bout of _hysteria _
(http://20committee.com/2013/10/27/nsa-germany-and-handygate-a-reality-check/)
over charges that NSA was
listening in on senior German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Although these stories included a good deal of _bunkum _
(http://20committee.com/2013/10/28/update-merkels-real-cellphone-is-secure/)
from the start,
they caused a firestorm in Germany, particularly the alleged spying on
Merkel, which was termed Handygate by the media.
In response, Germany charged Federal prosecutors with looking into the
matter and, they if determined there was sufficient evidence, to press
charges against NSA for breaking stringent German privacy laws. The
investigation, led by Harald Range, Germany's attorney general, has been slow
and
diligent, examining all possible evidence about NSA spying on Germany. Here
Snowden's purloined information would play a key role.
However, the matter has become politically fraught. In the first place,
senior German security officials were _circumspect_
(http://20committee.com/2014/07/29/german-counterintelligence-and-the-american-threat/)
about the
case, since Berlin is heavily dependent on NSA for intelligence on vital
matters like terrorism. Worse, follow-on Snowden revelations showed that the
BND, German's foreign intelligence service, and NSA are close partners,
and the BND has itself been spying on EU neighbor states that are friendly
to Germany such as _Austria_ (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32596510)
, _Belgium, and the Netherlands_
(http://www.thelocal.de/20150530/belgium-netherlands-probe-german-spy-claims) .
To top it off, last month's major hack of the Bundestag, Germany's
parliament, turns out to have been the work of _Russians_
(http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-accused-of-hacking-german-bundestag-2015-6)
, apparently
state-sponsored. In reality, the major spy threats to Germany are not NSA,
but Russians and Chinese, as I've been saying for some time -- and, to be
fair, _so have German security officials_
(http://20committee.com/2014/08/11/berlin-nsa-is-not-spying-on-german-industry/)
, though they got drowned out
in the public hysteria over Snowden.
And now we learn that Range's prosecutors are dropping their year-long
Handygate inquiry, for want of hard evidence. Federal prosecutors in
Karlsruhe aren't saying much, beyond that they simply don't have evidence of
spying that would stand up in court. Back in December, Attorney General Range
offered a warning about the dubious nature of much of the "evidence" against
NSA:
The document presented in public as proof of an actual tapping of the
mobile phone is not an authentic surveillance order by the NSA. It does not
come from the NSA database. There is no proof at the moment which could lead
to charges that Chancellor Merkel's phone connection data was collected or
her calls tapped.
Got that? That's the polite, legalistic way of saying the Snowden claims
are backed by faked NSA documents, as has been clear for some time to
anybody who understands counterintelligence and the SIGINT system. This should
surprise no one, since using fake or doctored Western intelligence
documents to embarrass democracies is_ a venerable tradition for Russian
intelligence_
(http://20committee.com/2014/10/01/diamonds-and-disinformation-are-forever/)
-- the proper espionage term is _Active Measures_
(http://20committee.com/2014/07/08/active-measures-havana-style/) -- and since
Snowden's
been in Moscow for the last two years and shows no signs of going anywhere
else anytime soon, two and two can be added together here.
To make matters worse for Snowden's fans, a _report _
(http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/abgehoertes-merkel-handy-generalbundesanwalt-stellt-e
rmittlungen-ein-a-1038458.html) about the Handygate inquiry being dropped
in the magazine Der Spiegel, which has been a key player in the Snowden
Operation, includes the painful truth. While some have clamored to get
Snowden out of Moscow to testify before prosecutors, Berlin understood how
politically tricky that would be. Moreover, prosecutors determined that Ed
simply didn't have much to say.
As a prosecutor explained, Snowden provided "no evidence that he has his
own knowledge" (keine Hinweise dafür, dass er über eigene Kenntnisse
verfügt). In other words, Ed doesn't actually know what he's talking about.
This is not news to anybody who understands how NSA and the Allied SIGINT
system actually work.
Snowden was an IT guy, not a SIGINT analyst, and in his final position he
was working as a contracted infrastructure analyst for NSA's Information
Assurance arm, i.e. the Agency's defensive side, which protects classified
U.S. communications networks. Snowden was never a SIGINTer, working on the
intelligence collection side of the house, and he doesn't seem to
understand how that complex system, built over decades, actually functions.
This is why Snowden has made so many odd, contradictory, and even
outlandish statements over the past couple years about SIGINT, which have
caused
those who actually understand how NSA works scratch their heads ... Ed
doesn't know any better.
It's been obvious for some time to insiders that, for reasons we still
don't fully understand, Snowden decided to steal something like 1.7 million
classified documents from NSA servers through internal hacks. About
_900,000_
(https://news.vice.com/article/exclusive-inside-washingtons-quest-to-bring-down-edward-snowden)
of those documents came from the Pentagon and have
nothing to do with intelligence matters.
There's no way Snowden could have read more than a tiny fraction of what
he stole, nobody has that much time, and it's clear now that Ed, an IT guy
and a thief, who was never any sort of "spy" as he portrays himself, would
not have understood all those NSA documents he made off with anyway.
Snowden's been living under the protection of Putin's Federal Security
Service now for two years, functioning as a pawn of Russian intelligence.
When his secret relationship with the Kremlin started remains _an open
question_
(http://20committee.com/2014/05/31/when-did-snowden-go-over-to-the-russians/) ,
but that he has one now can only be denied by the foolish (witness
the _weak lies_
(http://20committee.com/2015/01/12/snowden-and-russian-intelligence-an-update/)
told by his supporters about Ed's FSB ties), since
when you defect, you wind up in the care of that country's security service.
That's how it works in America, and I don't hear anybody seriously
suggesting that Putin's Kremlin is more liberal in these matters than the FBI
or
CIA.
In light of these revelations from Germany, it's worth pondering whether
Ed was always just a pawn, a talking head, for others with agendas to harm
Western security. As we're now in the_ Cold War 2.0_
(http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/new-cold-war-russia-104954.html#.VXrQsUbyvYA)
with Russia that I warned you about after Putin's theft of Crimea, this seems
like a more than academic question.
For two years now, I've been trying to inform the public about what's
really going on behind the Snowden Operation, using my understanding of how
the _SpyWar_
(http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/snowden-the-us-russian-spywar-8668)
actually functions, and I've gotten a lot of grief for it
from Ed's hardcore fans. News out of Germany can't help my point out that,
well ... _I told you so_ (http://20committee.com/2015/05/28/i-told-you-so/) .
_20committee_ (http://20committee.com/author/20committee/) | June 12,
2015 at 08:38 | Categories: _Counterintelligence_
(http://20committee.com/?cat=1354826) , _Espionage_
(http://20committee.com/?cat=88698) , _USG_
(http://20committee.com/?cat=1126077) | URL: http://wp.me/p2zHUk-Dx
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