The Least Secretive Of Nations Is The Strongest Of Nations Update-4 Updated 08162020

Originally Published October 28, 2013; Last Updated  August 16, 2020; Last Republished August 11, 2020: 

Our government's unmeasured and unconstrained psychotic pursuit of secret surveillance initiatives undermines and threatens both our democracy and its foundational First Amendment.

Only after the intervention of a courageous young whistleblower-leaker, competitive China and cantankerous Russia has some of our government's representatives begun to acknowledge that our government's secret surveillance initiatives require constraints.

Our government representatives' acknowledgement that its secret surveillance initiatives require constraints is a good beginning. However, the acknowledgement must be coupled with government transparency, significant whistleblower-leaker reforms and inviolable reporter shields, but that will require the intervention of our increasingly concerned citizenry.

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The Least Secretive Of Nations Is The Strongest Of Nations Update-2

The Least Secretive Of Nations Is The Strongest Of Nations Update-3

The Least Secretive Of Nations Is The Strongest Of Nations Update-1

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UPDATED 08/16/2020 Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman, Penguin Press 2020

"...Google accelerated plans to encrypt all its services for consumer and business customers, and it tightened up security inside its cloud, too...The year after our Google cloud exploitation story, Grosse’s team released the source code for a new software library called End-to-End. It was a free tool that other software developers could use for encryption of email. Google security engineers left a blunt fuck-you for the NSA in a comment embedded in the source code, harking back to the smiley face in the cloud cartoon: --ssl-added-and-removed-here-;-)..."--Dark Mirror--

...Gellman's latest book is a timely reminder that our nation must replace its national security paradigm...a replacement paradigm¹ that does not need infinite intercept capacity, weak encryption, government accessible keys or policymakers that think surveillance can cut the probability of a surprise to near zero...

 

1...name the replacement paradigm ("PEAD")...People for the Elimination of Authoritarian Dictates)...especially ones that operate with secrecy...

Atlantic, The Alarming Scope of the President's Emergency Powers (2019)

UPDATED 06/09/2020 NYT Me and My Whistle-Blower

"...Here’s the thing about whistle-blowers: They tend to be flawed messengers. Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden — each of them was dismissed as selfish, damaged, reckless and crazy. Yet all of them, regardless of motivation, used secret documents to change the course of history.

For more than five years, Val Broeksmit has been dangling his Deutsche Bank files in front of journalists and government investigators, dreaming of becoming the next great American whistle-blower. He wants to expose what he sees as corporate wrongdoing, give some meaning to his father’s death — and maybe get famous along the way. Inside newsrooms and investigative bodies around the world, Mr. Broeksmit’s documents have become something of an open secret, and so are the psychological strings that come attached. I pulled them more than anyone, as part of my reporting on Deutsche Bank for The New York Times and for a book, Dark Towers, published next year. It has been the most intense source relationship of my career... " --David Enrich, October 2019--

Unsurprisingly, the sociopath and pathological liar occupying our White House has told our  Supreme Court, such as it is, that he has an absolute right to ignore congressional subpoenas for Deutsche Bank documents. The Court is cogitating the crazy case!