edward snowden

A screenshot of the warning screen from a purported ransomware attack, as captured by a computer user in Taiwan, is seen on laptop in Beijing, Saturday, May 13, 201. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)
Apparent National Security Agency (NSA) malware has been used in a global cyber-attack, including on British hospitals, in what whistleblower Edward Snowden described as the repercussion of the NSA’s reckless decision to build the tools.

James Comey got the official ‘you’re fired’ from Donald Trump. Hours later, he got a new job offer from an interesting place.

WikiLeaks would be happy to consider hiring James Comey to help lead its DC office should he like to properly investigate the US government.
— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) May 9, 2017

Director Oliver Stone © Vincent West / ReutersThe man behind three films about American presidents, Oliver Stone, says his upcoming feature about Russian President Vladimir Putin “opens up a whole viewpoint that we as Americans haven’t heard,” and could help prevent “a dangerous situation – on the brink of war.”

21st Century Wire says…
Apathy and apologism for the continued encroachment on digital/electronic privacy rights in the United Kingdom is still very high. We are told that it’s ‘for our safety’, in case of ‘terrorist attack’ at home or the threat of it from abroad. Many people still run with the programmed line of ‘nothing to fear if you’ve nothing to hide’.
Glenn Greenwald said it well in a discussion on ‘Why Privacy Matters’…

Every phone call, no matter the device is recorded, every image, website visited, personal details such as medical and financial records, contacts, everything private to you is no longer private. Under just one of dozens of surveillance programmes, one was called “Optic Nerve” that captured millions of images via webcams, illegally taken and stored. An undisclosed number, but estimated to be around one fifth of the population were images that were “compromising in nature” including that of naked young children in their homes and intimate images between consenting adults.

The CIA tool purportedly relies on Microsoft Office to track leaked documents and the whistle-blowers that release them. (Photo: Nigel Treblin/AP)
As the latest installment of it’s ‘Vault 7’ series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as ‘Scribbles’ (a.k.a. the “Snowden Stopper”), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of ‘web beacon’ tags into documents “likely to be stolen.”

21st Century Wire says…
Here’s something quite ‘Pavlovian’ to think about. What ‘if’ it were a goal of government and their security services to ensure that we ‘feel’ we’re being watched at every turn, in every-way feasible;  but reality is not exact what we ‘think’ it is and we’re doing most of the censoring all by ourselves.

This June 6, 2013 file photo shows the sign outside the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md.
A new set of documents published by a group calling itself TheShadowBrokers suggests that the U.S. National Security Agency has burrowed deep into the Middle East’s financial network.
TheShadowBrokers, which startled security experts last year by releasing some of the NSA’s hacking tools, has resumed pouring secrets into the public domain, this time by publishing purported details of the NSA’s operations against banks across the Arab world.

The media is awash with enthusiastic reports that the US military has employed the largest conventional bomb ever designed, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb or “MOAB” (18,000 lbs. of explosive, 22,000 lbs. total weight) on a cave-bunker complex in near Tora Bora in Afghanistan – the same place Osama bin Laden was supposedly hiding not long after 9-11.
The US says the complex was being used by ISIS.

21st Century Wire says…
Out of all the intelligence agencies in the United States, we’ve come across stories where not everyone is on the ‘same page’. Indeed we’ve also heard about factions embroiled in competition, and rivalry. Moral compass, personal principles, and ethics being challenged which lead to inner conflict; just some of the reasons that gave us former NSA whistleblower William Binney and more recently in the last few years, Edward Snowden.