Until April 15th 2011, I was a
great believer in vaccines. My son was born prematurely and very ill and
in order to protect him he had every vaccination available because I trusted
the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies when they told me that vaccines
are safe and prevent diseases and death.
Now I know better – because on that April afternoon
disaster struck. My
husband, BBC Correspondent Malcolm Brabant, went across a busy road to a
vaccination-centre in a suburb of Athens, Greece, where we lived, to have a
yellow fever vaccination in order to go on a business trip to the Ivory Coast
in Africa.
20 minutes later he was back. I didn’t know it at the
time, but the vaccine had already begun its devastating journey through his
body towards his brain.
The alarm bell sounded less than 24 hours later, when I
found my husband in our living room burning up with fever. We both instantly
knew it was a reaction to the vaccination.
My husband
had been told to expect “flu like symptoms” but his fever was above 40
degrees (104 F) and his shivers were so violent that our big double bed
rocked so much that things fell off the bedside table next to it. I kept the
fever down to a bearable 38 degrees by plying my husband with Ibuprofen, but
as soon as I didn’t, the fever shot up again.
Then the insomnia started. My husband who usually passes
out the minute his head hits the pillow, could not sleep. He became irritable
and irrational. He began to do things that I found very hard to put into a
normal context – like the afternoon he decided to go and sit in the sunshine
on our patio dressed in his thick winter coat, a huge woolen scarf, shorts
and slippers because “he was going to sweat the fever out”.
My husband was hospitalized and his treating physician
knew him very well having treated him for pneumonia two years earlier. We
recently saw this doctor again and she went over the notes she wrote on his
admission.
“Confused, animated and aggressive”, was how she
described my husband’s mental state.
The morning after his admission it became even more
obvious that something was terribly wrong with my gentle giant of a husband
as he chased a doctor out of his hospital room apparently – or so my husband
said – because he had been asking inappropriate questions.
My husband’s biochemistry results were abnormal. His
liver enzymes were elevated and continued to head north over the coming days.
And the fever persisted. The doctors ran an abundance of
tests, but there was nothing that could explain the high fever and the
abnormal blood results – apart from the yellow fever vaccine.
Mentally he was disappearing into a place where it was
becoming more and more difficult to follow him. He told me his electronic
e-reader flew across the room. He started firing off crazy emails and he
cried a lot.
He began thinking that he was the Messiah and explained
to me how dear, departed friends would “buzz” him – that’s how he described
the messages he said he received – to tell him what to do.
On April 28th 2011 – 13 days after my husband had
the vaccination – the Greek doctors broke the fever using steroids, but by
then he was so far gone mentally that he was transferred to a psychiatric
clinic a few days later.
The psychiatrist diagnosed my husband with an “acute,
organic psychosis” a condition which ended up haunting my husband more than a
year after the vaccination. He has spent over 8 months in locked-up
psychiatric wards and has suffered beyond belief.
Sanofi Pasteur, the maker of the yellow fever vaccine,
denies any link between the vaccine and my husband’s illness.
However in May
2013 the vaccine-maker for the first time admitted that my husband is not the
only one who has been sent mad by the yellow fever vaccine.
Sanofi Pasteur
admitted to “fewer than 10 reports of mental disorders related to the
vaccine, including Mr Brabant’s”, but I have investigated this and found
hundreds more.
At the WHO Monitoring Centre in Uppsala they have
gathered at least 400 reports of yellow fever vaccine-related adverse events
involving mental disorders over the past ten years.
Only about 3-10 percentage of all drug-related adverse
events are reported, so there are bound to be thousands of people
around the globe who have been sent mad by the yellow fever vaccine.
I am in touch
with people from several countries who have all suffered psychotic episodes
after having Sanofi Pasteur’s yellow fever vaccine.
With so many reports of yellow fever vaccine-related
events involving mental disorders, it is fair to say that Sanofi Pasteur and
the relevant regulatory agencies have known for years that the yellow fever
vaccine can cause these problems.
Yet, they have done absolutely nothing to investigate
the vaccine and the psychiatric complications it can cause.
There is, however, a growing realization that the yellow
fever vaccine is unsafe and unstable. Doctor Thomas Monath is considered to
be one of the world’s leading experts on the yellow fever vaccine. He
recently appeared in a PBS-programme called “The Great Fevers” and said this
about the yellow fever vaccine:
“This vaccine was considered one of
the safest vaccines ever developed. And there were no real concerns about
safety. That has now changed in the last decade and we now recognize that
there are some really severe and significant, serious adverse events.”
The issue of how safe all of Sanofi Pasteur’s vaccines
really are has also surfaced recently. In 2012 the FDA issued a stern warning
letter to Sanofi Pasteur after inspections found numerous safety breaches at
their vaccine-manufacturing plants in France and Canada.
And just a few weeks ago I was contacted by a
whistleblower who shared some very disturbing internal Sanofi Pasteur
documents with me. The whistleblower alleges that Sanofi Pasteur is involved
in illegal behavior in order to cover up recurring safety issues with their
vaccines.
As soon as Sanofi Pasteur became aware that I was in
possession of this material they sent their legal attack dogs after me, but I
am not afraid of Sanofi Pasteur and have handed over these documents to the
relevant authorities.
Sanofi Pasteur has done nothing to help my husband. We
have shared all his medical records with them. They refuse to share any of
the findings of the investigation they say they have carried out.
Sanofi Pasteur asked for and received a list of my
husband’s treating physicians, but they have not contacted any of the doctors
on the list we provided – the maker of the yellow fever vaccine is simply not
interested in finding the truth.
My husband is finally doing better, but he is still
medicated and his mental prognosis is uncertain.
As a family we are slowly trying to claw our way back to
a normal existence after my husband’s vaccine-injury, but life has changed
dramatically. We take one day at a time. We dare not plan and we dare not
hope.
One thing, however, is certain. I will keep on fighting
for justice and I will not give up until Sanofi Pasteur acknowledges that its
yellow fever vaccine sent my husband mad.
.GIF)
…New
Year’s Eve 2011, and a psychedelic blaze of colour and sound erupted as a
fireworks display heralded the start of the evening’s celebrations in the
centre of Copenhagen. In his hospital room in the outskirts of the
capital, the veteran BBC correspondent Malcolm Brabant calmly removed the
belt from his trousers and tied one end around his neck, and the other to the
end of his bed. He was convinced that he was the Devil and unless he killed
himself by midnight, the apocalypse would be unleashed.
''That night I was absolutely
convinced that the only way to stop the end of the world was for me to commit
suicide,” says Brabant, 57, wryly. It was the latest of several troubling
delusions that had haunted the award-winning reporter ever since a sudden
illness in April 2011. At that time he was the Beeb’s “Man in Athens”,
reporting on the Greek economic implosion. He, his Danish wife, Trine, and
young son, Lukas, were enjoying an enviable lifestyle in a five-bedroom,
three-bathroom villa. Yet less than a year later Brabant was unemployed and
detained in a secure psychiatric ward, his family uprooted to a tiny
two-bedroomed apartment in Copenhagen.
The reason, Brabant believes, for
the catastrophic events that overtook him, was a dose of Stamaril, a yellow
fever vaccine, which he had received on April 15 2011. Since then he and
Trine, 53, have sought answers about why he should have so quickly descended
into a series of psychotic episodes after a routine jab. Now Malcolm has
written a brutally honest – and often darkly funny – account of his
breakdown: Malcolm is a
Little Unwell.
Sitting in their cramped but
spotless apartment (paid for by Trine’s mother), looking at photographs of
past assignments in trouble spots across the world, the toll of the past two
years is evident. No longer the dapper, besuited correspondent, he is dressed
in crumpled shorts and shirts. Medication has affected his thyroid so that he
has gained a significant amount of weight. There are huge gaps in his memory
and for a man with a famously outgoing personality, he appears muted. Trine
pats his arm continually and gently corrects him as we share a meal of Greek
salad – made by Brabant, in a poignant nod to their past life.
Before April 2011, Brabant was a
familiar face and voice to many via the BBC, for whom he was a regular
''stringer’’ – a freelance reporter. He had covered the siege of Sarajevo in
1993 (it was there that he met Trine, a journalist for Danish television),
and Grozny during the Chechen war in 1995, before moving to Miami and then
Athens. In the spring of 2011 he had agreed to go to the Ivory Coast on a
non-BBC assignment to make a film for Unicef. A yellow fever certificate was
required to enter the country as evidence of vaccination against a disease
which kills 30,000 of the 200,000 who get it each year in sub-Saharan Africa
and South America….
So how safe are Sanofi Pasteur’s vaccines?
According to a whistleblower Sanofi Pasteur’s vaccines are not
safe at all. They are produced under dirty conditions on old equipment by
untrained workers.
And they are failing safety tests again and again.
A few days ago someone entrusted me with documents alleging
illegal behaviour in order to cover up severe safety issues at one of Sanofi
Pasteur’s vaccine-manufacturing plants.
According to the whistleblower these safety issues are CURRENT
and are taking place even though the FDA inspected two of Sanofi
Pasteur’s plants in the Spring of 2012 and found so many breaches of safety
procedures that the world’s largest vaccine-manufacturer was sent a
very stern warning letter.
The internal Sanofi Pasteur-documents were sent to me
supposedly by a senior employee at a Sanofi Pasteur plant, but when I
contacted this individual, the person denied having sent anything to me.
However Sanofi Pasteur immediately fired off an email with
threats of all sorts of actions against me if I did not return the documents
straight away.
At this point in time, I am not returning anything. I think it
is important that these allegations of improper, illegal and dangerous
behaviour are thoroughly investigated by the regulatory agencies set up to
protect public safety.
… Concern
has been raised over the safety of the vaccine for the deadly disease
yellow fever following several deaths.
Scientists say research must be
carried out to try to understand why some people are highly sensitive to the
vaccine.
Vaccination programmes have increased
over the past 20 years as the disease has spread to urban areas in these
settings. It is also given to protect international travellers.
The
vaccine is made from a weakened form of the 17D strain of the virus. It has
been regarded as one of the safest virus vaccines, with few side-effects or
adverse events.
However,
The Lancet medical journal contains reports of people from around the world
who died after taking the vaccine.
Vaccination programmes have increased
over the past 20 years as the disease has spread to urban areas in these
settings. It is also given to protect international travellers.
The
vaccine is made from a weakened form of the 17D strain of the virus. It has
been regarded as one of the safest virus vaccines, with few side-effects or
adverse events.
However,
The Lancet medical journal contains reports of people from around the world
who died after taking the vaccine.
Two
deaths were recorded by a team from a specialist World Health Organization
centre in Brazil.
In the
first case, a five-year-old girl suffered fever, headache and vomiting three
days after being given the vaccine. She died after a five day illness.
The
second patient - a 22-year-old woman - developed a sore throat and fever,
accompanied by headache, muscle pain, nausea, and vomiting four days after
vaccination.
She
then developed symptoms including jaundice and renal failure, and died after
six days of illness.
The
cases were similar to a third fatality reported by the South Western Area
Pathology Service in Sydney, Australia.
In all
three cases the victims demonstrated symptoms of infection by the form of
yellow fever virus found in the wild.
Further
cases
Three
further deaths of elderly patients were recorded by US scientists from the
Centres for Disease Control, Atlanta.
In each
case the victims suffered from fever, muscle pain, headache and confusion
followed by a general deterioration.
However,
unlike the cases in South America and Australia, the symptoms pointed to a
new post-vaccination syndrome.
Writing
in The Lancet, Philippe Marianneau and colleagues from Institut Pasteur,
Lyons, France, suggest that the virus strain used in the vaccine may
occasionally mutate, either before or after it is administered.
Alternatively,
the problem may be that the vaccine triggers an inappropriate immune system
response in some people.
They
conclude: "The use of 17D vaccination remains highly advisable for
people living in or travelling to endemic and epidemic zones.
"However,
these three reports raise relevant questions about the mechanisms of
attenuation (weakening) of yellow fever virus that should be urgently
investigated." …
NERVOUS
SYSTEM
Nervous system side effects have
very rarely included neurotropic disease (YEL-AND, post-vaccinal
encephalitis) which has been fatal in rare instances. Symptoms have included
diaphoresis, rigors, fever, malaise, headache, confusion, expressive aphasia,
arm numbness, loss of fine motor control, severe dysarthria, loss of
consciousness, elevated WBCs and protein in CSF, and/or leukocytosis.
Immunosuppression and age < 9 months are known risk factors. The estimated
incidence for all ages is 5.3 cases per million vaccinees.
Fifteen
cases of neurotropic disease were reported before 1960, 13 of these
occurred in infants < 4 months and 2 in infants 6 and 7 months old. Six
cases were reported worldwide between 1960 and 1996, 3 of these occurred in
adults, and the other 3 in a 1-month-old infant, a 3-year-old, and a
13-year-old. A genetic variant of the
vaccine virus was isolated from the brain of the 3-year-old, who died of
encephalitis.
Seven cases of YEL-AVD were
reported between 1996 and 2001, 4 of them in U.S. residents. All patients
(ages 5 to 79 years old) were considered healthy and did not have
immunodeficiency. Six of these patients died 8 to 11 days after vaccination
(1 had been vaccinated with the 17D-204 strain and 2 with the 17DD strain). A
liver biopsy revealed rare yellow fever virus antigen within Kupffer cells.
In 3 of the fatal cases, hepatic midzonal necrosis, microvesicular fatty
change, and Councilman bodies were observed, which are characteristic of
wild-type yellow fever. Vaccine-type yellow fever virus was isolated from
blood and autopsy material.
Vaccine-associated viscerotropic
disease (YEL-AVD, multiple organ system failure), which may be fatal, has
been reported rarely. It is characterized by initial symptoms of a
nonspecific febrile syndrome with fatigue, myalgia, and headache. It quickly
progresses to severe illness including respiratory failure, elevated
hepatocellular enzymes, lymphocytopenia, thrombocytopenia,
hyperbilirubinemia, hypotension with poor tissue perfusion, and/or renal
failure requiring hemodialysis. Causality has not been clearly established.
 |
Friday, October 18, 2013
Vaccines: A Descent Into Madness: BBC Correspondent Malcolm Brabant
Monday, October 14, 2013
If you Do Not Believe In A Right Of Privacy; Just Shut Up And Let Your Every Move And Every Key Stroke Be Examined By America’s Spies! (HOWEVER)
If you
Do Not Believe In A Right Of Privacy; Just Shut Up And Let Your Every Move
And Every Key Stroke Be Examined By America’s Spies!
The Committee to
Protect Journalists has released its first-ever special report on freedom of the
press in the United States.
For many years, CPJ
has documented attacks on journalists in many countries around the world. The
report focused on how policies and practices of the Obama administration
disrupt relationships between journalists and government sources, allow
officials to circumvent scrutiny by the press, and create a chilling
environment for whistleblowers who might otherwise serve as journalistic
sources. The report also discusses the ramifications of NSA surveillance,
which leaves journalists and their sources reluctant to communicate
electronically.
The report paints a
picture of increasing press restrictions beginning just after 9/11 and
culminating with the current administration, which is described as uniquely
resistant to accountability to the press. Written by former executive editor
of the Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr and CPJ’s Sara
Rafsky, the
report relied on information gathered through extensive interviews with
dozens of members of the press. Individual journalists are cited throughout
to provide candid insights into the daily experiences of journalists in the
United States today.
In total, the report and the concomitant recommendations show that Obama Administration
policies around classification, whistle-blower prosecution, and surveillance
are threatening investigative journalism.
Among several issues the report surfaced,
the authors heavily criticized Obama’s record on classification. They called
on Obama to do more to correct the problems of overclassification, citing
concerns raised by Senator Ron Wyden and transparency advocate Steven
Aftergood. The report discussed how, despite Obama’s promises of
embracing transparency when he first took office, Freedom of Information Act
requests frequently were left unanswered, delayed, or denied.
The report also highlighted the
bureaucratic bloat that stemmed from gross overclassification, noting:
By 2011, more than 4 million Americans had security
clearances for access to classified information of one kind or another,
according to a U. S. Intelligence Community report to Congress required by
the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, and more and more information was
being classified as secret. In that year alone, government employees made 92
million decisions to classify information—one measure of what [Harvard Law
School professor Jack] Goldsmith called "massive, massive over-classification."
In addition, the report detailed the
aggressive overprosecution of whistle-blowers under the Obama administration.
The report noted that Obama’s administration had charged six government
employees and two contractors—including Edward Snowden— with felony criminal
prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act for leaking information to the
press. This is more than all of such prosecutions in all previous U.S.
administrations. The report discussed at length individual
prosecutions as well the fact that government officials were fearful and
reluctant to speak with the media.
There were also numerous examples of the
government getting subpoenas to learn more about journalists communicating
with sources.
CPJ also noted that
extensive surveillance by the NSA, which has recently been confirmed and
detailed by the Edward Snowden leaks, have "added to the fearful atmosphere surrounding contacts between American
journalists and government sources." The NSA’s dragnet data collection
programs left many journalists with doubts about their ability to protect
their sources or conduct investigations. Washington Post national
security reporter Dana Priest noted that, "People think they’re looking
at reporters’ records. I’m writing fewer things in e-mail. I’m even afraid to
tell officials what I want to talk about because it’s all going into one
giant computer."
CPJ also released a
series of recommendations to the Obama Administration,
including a call to end the practice of bringing espionage charges against
people who leak classified information to journalists and more transparency
around the scope and nature of the National Security Agency and other
surveillance activities as they are being applied to domestic and
international journalists.
Overall, CPJ’s report describes a
government actively avoiding accountability and transparency while enacting
policies that undermine an independent media. The real victim of such
policies is the general public, which relies on an informed media to hold
government officials to account. We echo CPJ’s concerns and urge the
administration to act swiftly to address the serious issues of press freedom
that were outlined in the report.
The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions
of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around
the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior
intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before,
intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging
services as they move across global data links. Online services often
transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or
synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote
servers.
Rather than targeting individual
users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a
sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts.
Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and
map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence
targets.
During a single day last year, the
NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books
from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and
22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA
PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake
in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million
per year.
Each day, the presentation said,
the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat
services as well as from the “in-box” displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
The collection depends on secret
arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence
services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s
main data routes.
Although the collection takes
place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it
sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate
but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens
of millions.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which
oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing
intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human
traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information
about ordinary Americans.”
The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added
that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the
acquisition, use, and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S.
citizen or permanent resident.
The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S.
call records, under a separate program, has generated significant
controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an
essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying “you need
the haystack to find the needle.”
Contact
lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call
records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and
e-mail addresses but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business
and family information. In-box
listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content
such as the first few lines of a message.
Metadata provides
a record of almost anything a user does online, from browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to
account details, email activity, and even some account passwords. This can be
used to build a detailed picture of
an individual's life.
The
leaders who run the internet’s technical global infrastructure say the time
has come to end U.S. dominance over it.
In response to leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden, Fadi Chehadé, who heads the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, and others have called for “an
environment, in which all stakeholders, including all governments,
participate on equal footing.”
Among other things, they were concerned “over the
undermining of the trust and confidence of internet users globally due to
recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance.”
ICANN, a nonprofit established by the U.S., has never
awarded a contract to manage the .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name space to a
company outside the United States — in fact, VeriSign of Virginia has always
held the immensely economically valuable .com handle. The Public Interest
Registry, also based in Virginia, manages the .org domain.
All of which means that both registries are under the
auspices of the U.S. government, its courts — including the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court —
and the home turf of the NSA’s snooping efforts.
ICANN was established in 1998 by the Clinton
administration, and has been under global attack to internationalize the
control of the Domain Name System ever since. A United Nations working group
in 2005 concluded that “no single government should have a pre-eminent role
in relation to international internet governance.”
Even before the Snowden leaks — which disclosed vast court-approved
NSA spying powers anddecryption efforts — governments like China, India and
Russia have distrusted ICANN. They have demanded control of the net’s naming
system to be turned over to an organization such as the International
Telecommunications Union, an affiliate of the United Nations — a proposition
scoffed at by the United States.
What’s more, who controls the internet’s infrastructure
became an issue last year after the United States began seizing hundreds of
domains across the globe for allegedly breaching federal copyright and
trademark laws.
VeriSign said it was just complying with “lawful orders”
from the U.S. courts by redirecting the DNS (Domain Name System) of a domain
to a U.S. government IP address that informs online visitors that the site
has been seized.
The Internet Governance Project, a global alliance of
academics specializing on internet governance, said the statement by Chehadé
and the others “was one of the most significant manifestations of the fallout from the Snowden
revelations about NSA spying on the global internet.”
Still, no concrete proposals from the major internet
organizations were produced at last week’s meeting in Uruguay.
“…They were thinking of new forms of multistakeholder oversight
as a substitute for U.S. oversight, although no detailed blueprint exists,”
the Internet Governance Project said.
ICAAN is developing a five-year strategic plan and is taking public comment through
January.
FORT
MEADE, Md. — The director of the National Security Agency, General Keith B.
Alexander, said in an interview that to prevent terrorist attacks he saw no
effective alternative to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone and other
electronic metadata from Americans.
But he
acknowledged that his agency now faces an entirely new reality, and the
possibility of congressional restrictions, after revelations about its
operations at home and abroad.
While
offering a detailed defense of his agency’s work, Alexander said the broader
lesson of the controversy over disclosures of secret NSA surveillance
missions was that he and other top officials have to be more open in explaining
the agency’s role, especially as it expands its mission into cyberoffense and
cyberdefense.
NSA ignored accusatory report
in personnel file
Whether or not whistleblower Edward Snowden's decision to reveal details of theU.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) spying on everyday Americans' digital lives was justifiable, it's undeniable that the leak has been a colossal source of embarassment andcontroversy for the NSA, the U.S. intelligence community, and the U.S. federal government as a whole. In that regard many at the NSA are asking themselves -- "Could we have done to stop the leak?" I. Edward Snowden's Troubles With the CIA Well the answer, according to a new report in The New York Times, is that they apparently could have -- and likely quite easily. The story began in 2006 when Mr. Snowden -- regarded by coworkers as a brilliant IT mind -- was hired by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By 2008, despite having no technical credentials, he had advanced in his new position earning a "top-secret" security clearanceand being stationed at a comfortable U.S. Department of State-affiliated CIA post in Geneva. But things would soon sour between Mr. Snowden and his government employers The report alleges that in 2009 documents in Edward Snowden's personnel file reveal that his supervisor began to notice a troubling trend in his behavior. The NYT report states: [I]n 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits... While it is unclear what exactly the supervisor’s negative report said, it coincides with a period of Mr. Snowden's life in 2009 when he was a prolific online commenter on government and security issues, complained about civil surveillance and, according to a friend, was suffering "a crisis of conscience." Mr. Snowden has indicated that he began his intelligence career blissfully naive of the scope of which the government spies on Americans, regularly violating the law and agencies own official policies. II. From "Hope to Nope" While he did not officially support the man who would become the 44th President of the United States with his vote, he felt Barack Obama would mark a major policy shift versus President George W. Bush. In his June 2013 interview with The Guardian -- the British newspaper who Mr. Snowden primarily has leaked to -- explains: You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realize that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process. A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor.
After
seeing little shift in spying policy -- including rampant violations of American privacy rights-- in President Obama's first year of
office, Mr. Snowden had completed an apparent arc from naivety to optimism to
bitter cynical realism. In a separate interview with The Guardian, he recalls:
Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good. [President Obama] advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in. I got hardened. It appears that Mr. Snowden not only was a disgruntled government employee, he decided to take the first step in actions that could make him a whistleblower, or a criminal, according to your perspective….
The NSA is
hoarding
vast quantities of metadata about millions of internet users, piecing
together records of their social networking use, locations, and other
personal details, it’s alleged, even if those individuals aren’t in any way
suspected of illegal activities. The year-long record of user data
is gathered as part of a clandestine program called Marina, The Guardian reports, with leaked documentation
about the system indicating that it uses browser tracking and more to build
up automatic summaries of “pattern-of-life” activity and movement.
“The Marina metadata
application tracks a user’s browser experience, gathers contact
information/content and develops summaries of target … This tool offers the
ability to export the data in a variety of formats, as well as create various
charts to assist in pattern-of-life development” the leaked introductory
guide to Marina claims.
“Of the more distinguishing features, Marina has the
ability to look back on the last 365 days’ worth of DNI metadata seen by the
Sigint collection system, regardless whether or not it was tasked for
collection” the document emphasizes.
Details on the tool follow claims over the weekend by The New York
Times that the NSA
was building complex models on US citizens through a combination of metadata
crunching and adding in less-regulated third-party information sourced from
private firms. Although programs like PRISM have
been known about for some time, thanks to whistleblowing actions by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Marina’s more blanket approach to data
gathering and storage comes as a surprise.
In fact, PRISM is believed to be just one of the
sources of metadata which Marina can aggregate. Where PRISM requires internet
companies to turn over legally-mandated information about users, Marina can
also pull in data from tapped undersea internet cables, not to mention
through the NSA’s deals with telecoms firms.
As much of 90-percent of the world’s online
communications are said to cross the US and thus be a potential source of
data collection.
Marina’s strength for law-enforcement agencies and
homeland security is in the breadth of its information. Since data is
gathered and stored whether the user was deliberately targeted or
incidentally, people who were not considered a potential threat initially but
whom later circled into suspects could have previous movements analyzed even
before official monitoring takes place.
Officially, the FISA Amendments Act ruling the NSA
operates much of its data collection from – and which frees them from seeking
individual warrants – requires that at least one party be a non-American and
outside of the US during the period that the data is collected. However,
while the agency is expected to “minimize” whatever information it collects
on US citizens, it can nonetheless keep “inadvertently” gathered US
communications if they’re deemed to contain intelligence material, evidence
that a crime has taken place, or if they are encrypted.
Exactly how much leeway that gives the NSA to funnel content
into Marina is unclear, but the extent of the modeling technology is a factor
above what many believed the agency had access to.
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