Edward Jay Epstein attempts to answer the question ‘Who Helped Snowden Steal State Secrets?‘ [tip of the fedora to Ezra Levant][worth quoting in full]:
In March 2013, when Edward Snowden sought a job with Booz Allen Hamilton at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, he signed the requisite classified-information agreements and would have been made well aware of the law regarding communications intelligence.
Section 798 of the United States Code makes it a federal crime if a person “knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States” any classified information concerning communication intelligence.
Mr. Snowden took that position so he could arrange to have published classified communications intelligence, as he told the South China Morning Post earlier this month. The point of Mr. Snowden’s penetration was to get classified data from the NSA. He subsequently stated: “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked, that is why I accepted that position.”
My question would be, then: Was he alone in this enterprise to misappropriate communications intelligence?
Before taking the job in Hawaii, Mr. Snowden was in contact with people who would later help arrange the publication of the material he purloined. Two of these individuals, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald, were on the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that, among other things, funds WikiLeaks.
In January 2013, according to the Washington Post, Mr. Snowden requested that Ms. Poitras get an encryption key for Skype so that they could have a secure channel over which to communicate.
In February, he made a similar request to Mr. Greenwald, providing him with a step-by-step video on how to set up encrypted communications.
So, before Mr. Snowden proceeded with his NSA penetration in March 2013 through his Booz Allen Hamilton job, he had assistance, either wittingly or unwittingly, in arranging the secure channel of encrypted communications that he would use to facilitate the publication of classified communications intelligence.
On May 20, three months into his job, Mr. Snowden falsely claimed to his employer that he needed treatment for epilepsy. The purpose of the cover story was to conceal his trip to Hong Kong, where the operation to steal U.S. secrets would be brought to fruition.
Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras also flew to Hong Kong. They were later joined by Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks representative who works closely with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Mr. Snowden reportedly brought the misappropriated data to Hong Kong on four laptops and a thumb drive. He gave some of the communications intelligence to Mr. Greenwald, who had arranged to publish it in the Guardian, and Mr. Snowden arranged to have Ms. Poitras make a video of him issuing a statement that would be released on the Guardian’s website. Albert Ho, a Hong Kong lawyer, was retained to deal with Hong Kong authorities.
This orchestration did not occur in a vacuum. Airfares, hotel bills and other expenses over this period had to be paid. A safe house had to be secured in Hong Kong. Lawyers had to be retained, and safe passage to Moscow—a trip on which Mr. Snowden was accompanied by WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison—had to be organized.
The world now knows that the misappropriation of U.S. communications intelligence began appearing in the Guardian and other publications on June 5, and Mr. Snowden left Hong Kong for the Moscow airport on June 21. A question that remains to be answered: Who, if anyone, aided and abetted this well-planned theft of U.S. secrets?
Perhaps Mr. Soros or his many money laundering stooges will be so kind as to answer that question.
FYI: Some background on the Freedom of the Press Foundation via Andy Greenberg back in December over at Forbes:
When Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and others abruptly cut off all payments to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks last year, they offered a lesson in how financial giants can use their purse strings to choke controversial media. Now Daniel Ellsberg and a group of digital liberties advocates hope to prevent that kind of financial blockade on information from ever occurring again.
On Monday, Ellsberg and a group of staffers from the digital-rights-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) plan to announce the creation of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an independent organization aimed at raising money and channeling it to the sort of edgy media groups that might suffer from a WikiLeaks-style embargo–including WikiLeaks itself.
“We’re trying to crowd-fund the right to know,” says John Perry Barlow, the co-founder of the EFF, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and free speech advocate who will serve on the board of the Foundation. “This isn’t just a way to support WikiLeaks. It’s a way to support a principle… We feel there will be more groups like WikiLeaks, and we want to inspire them as quickly as possible, because there’s a lot the public needs to know.”
On the Foundation’s website, any user will be able to make a donation through an encrypted form, specifying which organization under the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s umbrella will receive the funds. By mixing groups together under its banner, the Foundation hopes to make it more difficult for funding to be cut off to any one of them, and to also offer donors a way to make a contribution to a controversial group like WikiLeaks without publicly revealing that they’ve done so.
Barlow and fellow EFF staffers reached out to Daniel Ellsberg more than a year ago with the idea of creating that financial proxy for media groups and donors, and the Ellsberg immediately offered his support.
“A lot of people would rightly be hesitant to go on record sending money to WikiLeaks because they think they could be questioned, blacklisted or prosecuted,” says Ellsberg, citing politicians like Joe Biden and Sarah Palin that have compared WikiLeaks at times to a terrorist organization. “With this the individual will have his or her anonymity preserved. It’s like WikiLeaks itself. WikiLeaks facilitated anonymous leaking. This is to facilitate anonymous donations.”
Initially, the Freedom of the Press Foundation will funnel donations to four groups: WikiLeaks, the investigative journalism outfits Muckrock and the National Security Archives, and the citizen journalism group UpTake. But the group’s executive director Trevor Timm says more organizations will be added over time. “Ultimately we’d like to have ten organizations that have anonymous submissions systems, and ten organizations lik Muckrock and ten like Pro Publica, for instance,” he says. “There’s no magic bullet for solving the problem of government secrecy, so we want to tackle it with death by a thousand cuts.”
Ellsberg and Barlow aren’t the only big names involved with the group: Its board will also include Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, and MacArthur-award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras.
WikiLeaks has been suffering financially for nearly two years since Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, PayPal, and Western Union all stopped processing payments to the group in response to its announcement that it would release a quarter million secret State Department cables. Assange has said that 95% of the group’s funding dried up as a result, and it has yet to publish documents with the same impact as those it released in 2010, or even to rebuild its anonymous submissions system that went offline late that year.
Despite finding a workaround to receive funds through the French non-profit Fund for the Defense of Net Neutrality in July, the group has continued to struggle to raise cash. In October it added an interstitial fundraising page to the site when users click on any of its leaked documents, a move that many saw as a “paywall” that fundamentally contradicted its idea of free information.
Ellsberg says he hopes the Foundation can put WikiLeaks back on its feet. “We’re definitely trying to resuscitate WikiLeaks, and I think WikiLeaks will be back in action,” says Ellsberg.
In other words, the FPF is nothing but a money laundering organization. Hmmm…why does the word ‘racketeering’ come to mind?
BTW: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a Soros funded organization.
