Politics

Edward Snowden: 'Privacy Is Pivotal to Maintaining a Free and Open Society'

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32965">Micah Lee, The Intercept</a>

Friday, 13 November 2015 14:46

Lee writes: "In most of Snowden's interviews he speaks broadly about the importance of privacy, surveillance reform, and encryption. But he rarely has the opportunity to delve into the details and help people of all technical backgrounds understand opsec and begin to strengthen their own security and privacy."

Edward Snowden with Intercept technologist Micah Lee. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Edward Snowden: 'Privacy Is Pivotal to Maintaining a Free and Open Society'

By Micah Lee, The Intercept

13 November 15

ast month, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square. It was the first time we�d met in person; he first emailed me nearly two years earlier, and we eventually created an encrypted channel to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, to whom Snowden would disclose overreaching mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ.

This time around, Snowden�s anonymity was gone; the world knew who he was, much of what he�d leaked, and that he�d been living in exile in Moscow, where he�s been stranded ever since the State Department canceled his passport while he was en route to Latin America. His situation was more stable, the threats against him a bit easier to predict. So I approached my 2015 Snowden meeting with less paranoia than was warranted in 2013, and with a little more attention to physical security, since this time our communications would not be confined to the internet.

Our first meeting would be in the hotel lobby, and I arrived with all my important electronic gear in tow. I had powered down my smartphone and placed it in a �faraday bag� designed to block all radio emissions. This, in turn, was tucked inside my backpack next to my laptop (which I configured and hardened specifically for traveling to Russia), also powered off. Both electronic devices stored their data in encrypted form, but disk encryption isn�t perfect, and leaving these in my hotel room seemed like an invitation to tampering.

Most of the lobby seats were taken by well-dressed Russians sipping cocktails. I planted myself on an empty couch off in a nook hidden from most of the action and from the only security camera I could spot. Snowden had told me I�d have to wait awhile before he met me, and for a moment I wondered if I was being watched: A bearded man wearing glasses and a trench coat stood a few feet from me, apparently doing nothing aside from staring at a stained-glass window. Later he shifted from one side of my couch to the other, walking away just after I made eye contact.

Eventually, Snowden appeared. We smiled and said good to see you, and then walked up the spiral staircase near the elevator to the room where I would be conducting the interview, before we really started talking.

It also turns out that I didn�t need to be quite so cautious. Later, he told me to feel free to take out my phone so I could coordinate a rendezvous with some mutual friends who were in town. Operational security, or �opsec,� was a recurring theme across our several chats in Moscow.

In most of Snowden�s interviews he speaks broadly about the importance of privacy, surveillance reform, and encryption. But he rarely has the opportunity to delve into the details and help people of all technical backgrounds understand opsec and begin to strengthen their own security and privacy. He and I mutually agreed that our interview would focus more on nerdy computer talk and less on politics, because we�re both nerds and not many of his interviews get to be like that. I believe he wanted to use our chats to promote cool projects and to educate people. For example, Snowden had mentioned prior to our in-person meeting that he had tweeted about the Tor anonymity system and was surprised by how many people thought it was some big government trap. He wanted to fix those kinds of misconceptions.

Our interview, conducted over room-service hamburgers, started with the basics.

Micah Lee: What are some operational security practices you think everyone should adopt? Just useful stuff for average people.

Edward Snowden: [Opsec] is important even if you�re not worried about the NSA. Because when you think about who the victims of surveillance are, on a day-to-day basis, you�re thinking about people who are in abusive spousal relationships, you�re thinking about people who are concerned about stalkers, you�re thinking about children who are concerned about their parents overhearing things. It�s to reclaim a level of privacy.

The first step that anyone could take is to encrypt their phone calls and their text messages. You can do that through the smartphone app Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. It�s free, and you can just download it immediately. And anybody you�re talking to now, their communications, if it�s intercepted, can�t be read by adversaries. [Signal is available for iOS and Android, and, unlike a lot of security tools, is very easy to use.]

You should encrypt your hard disk, so that if your computer is stolen the information isn�t obtainable to an adversary � pictures, where you live, where you work, where your kids are, where you go to school. [I�ve written a guide to encrypting your disk on Windows, Mac, and Linux.]

Use a password manager. One of the main things that gets people�s private information exposed, not necessarily to the most powerful adversaries, but to the most common ones, are data dumps. Your credentials may be revealed because some service you stopped using in 2007 gets hacked, and your password that you were using for that one site also works for your Gmail account. A password manager allows you to create unique passwords for every site that are unbreakable, but you don�t have the burden of memorizing them. [The password manager KeePassX is free, open source, cross-platform, and never stores anything in the cloud.]

The other thing there is two-factor authentication. The value of this is if someone does steal your password, or it�s left or exposed somewhere � [two-factor authentication] allows the provider to send you a secondary means of authentication � a text message or something like that. [If you enable two-factor authentication, an attacker needs both your password as the first factor and a physical device, like your phone, as your second factor, to login to your account. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, GitHub, Battle.net, and tons of other services all support two-factor authentication.]

We should armor ourselves using systems we can rely on every day. This doesn�t need to be an extraordinary lifestyle change. It doesn�t have to be something that is disruptive. It should be invisible, it should be atmospheric, it should be something that happens painlessly, effortlessly. This is why I like apps like Signal, because they�re low friction. It doesn�t require you to re-order your life. It doesn�t require you to change your method of communications. You can use it right now to talk to your friends.

Lee: What do you think about Tor? Do you think that everyone should be familiar with it, or do you think that it�s only a use-it-if-you-need-it thing?

Snowden: I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today. I use Tor personally all the time. We know it works from at least one anecdotal case that�s fairly familiar to most people at this point. That�s not to say that Tor is bulletproof. What Tor does is it provides a measure of security and allows you to disassociate your physical location. �

But the basic idea, the concept of Tor that is so valuable, is that it�s run by volunteers. Anyone can create a new node on the network, whether it�s an entry node, a middle router, or an exit point, on the basis of their willingness to accept some risk. The voluntary nature of this network means that it is survivable, it�s resistant, it�s flexible.

[Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you�re on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network.]

Lee: So that is all stuff that everybody should be doing. What about people who have exceptional threat models, like future intelligence-community whistleblowers, and other people who have nation-state adversaries? Maybe journalists, in some cases, or activists, or people like that?

Snowden: So the first answer is that you can�t learn this from a single article. The needs of every individual in a high-risk environment are different. And the capabilities of the adversary are constantly improving. The tooling changes as well.

What really matters is to be conscious of the principles of compromise. How can the adversary, in general, gain access to information that is sensitive to you? What kinds of things do you need to protect? Because of course you don�t need to hide everything from the adversary. You don�t need to live a paranoid life, off the grid, in hiding, in the woods in Montana.

What we do need to protect are the facts of our activities, our beliefs, and our lives that could be used against us in manners that are contrary to our interests. So when we think about this for whistleblowers, for example, if you witnessed some kind of wrongdoing and you need to reveal this information, and you believe there are people that want to interfere with that, you need to think about how to compartmentalize that.

Tell no one who doesn�t need to know. [Lindsay Mills, Snowden�s girlfriend of several years, didn�t know that he had been collecting documents to leak to journalists until she heard about it on the news, like everyone else.]

When we talk about whistleblowers and what to do, you want to think about tools for protecting your identity, protecting the existence of the relationship from any type of conventional communication system. You want to use something like SecureDrop, over the Tor network, so there is no connection between the computer that you are using at the time � preferably with a non-persistent operating system like Tails, so you�ve left no forensic trace on the machine you�re using, which hopefully is a disposable machine that you can get rid of afterward, that can�t be found in a raid, that can�t be analyzed or anything like that � so that the only outcome of your operational activities are the stories reported by the journalists. [SecureDrop is a whistleblower submission system. Here is a guide to using The Intercept�s SecureDrop server as safely as possible.]

And this is to be sure that whoever has been engaging in this wrongdoing cannot distract from the controversy by pointing to your physical identity. Instead they have to deal with the facts of the controversy rather than the actors that are involved in it.

Lee: What about for people who are, like, in a repressive regime and are trying to �

Snowden: Use Tor.

Lee: Use Tor?

Snowden: If you�re not using Tor you�re doing it wrong. Now, there is a counterpoint here where the use of privacy-enhancing technologies in certain areas can actually single you out for additional surveillance through the exercise of repressive measures. This is why it�s so critical for developers who are working on security-enhancing tools to not make their protocols stand out.

Lee: So you mentioned that what you want to spread are the principles of operational security. And you mentioned some of them, like need-to-know, compartmentalization. Can you talk more about what are the principles of operating securely?

Snowden: Almost every principle of operating security is to think about vulnerability. Think about what the risks of compromise are and how to mitigate them. In every step, in every action, in every point involved, in every point of decision, you have to stop and reflect and think, �What would be the impact if my adversary were aware of my activities?� If that impact is something that�s not survivable, either you have to change or refrain from that activity, you have to mitigate that through some kind of tools or system to protect the information and reduce the risk of compromise, or ultimately, you have to accept the risk of discovery and have a plan to mitigate the response. Because sometimes you can�t always keep something secret, but you can plan your response.

Lee: Are there principles of operational security that you think would be applicable to everyday life?

Snowden: Yes, that�s selective sharing. Everybody doesn�t need to know everything about us. Your friend doesn�t need to know what pharmacy you go to. Facebook doesn�t need to know your password security questions. You don�t need to have your mother�s maiden name on your Facebook page, if that�s what you use for recovering your password on Gmail. The idea here is that sharing is OK, but it should always be voluntary. It should be thoughtful, it should be things that are mutually beneficial to people that you�re sharing with, and these aren�t things that are simply taken from you.

If you interact with the internet � the typical methods of communication today betray you silently, quietly, invisibly, at every click. At every page that you land on, information is being stolen. It�s being collected, intercepted, analyzed, and stored by governments, foreign and domestic, and by companies. You can reduce this by taking a few key steps. Basic things. If information is being collected about you, make sure it�s being done in a voluntary way.

For example, if you use browser plugins like HTTPS Everywhere by EFF, you can try to enforce secure encrypted communications so your data is not being passed in transit electronically naked.

Lee: Do you think people should use adblock software?

Snowden: Yes.

We�ve seen internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, or whoever it is, insert their own ads into your plaintext http connections. � As long as service providers are serving ads with active content that require the use of Javascript to display, that have some kind of active content like Flash embedded in it, anything that can be a vector for attack in your web browser � you should be actively trying to block these. Because if the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response.

Lee: Nice. So there�s a lot of esoteric attacks that you hear about in the media. There�s disk encryption attacks like evil maid attacks, and cold-boot attacks. There�s all sorts of firmware attacks. There�s BadUSB and BadBIOS, and baseband attacks on cellphones. All of these are probably unlikely to happen to many people very often. Is this something people should be concerned about? How do you go about deciding if you personally should be concerned about this sort of attack and try to defend against it?

Snowden: It all comes down to personal evaluation of your personal threat model, right? That is the bottom line of what operational security is about. You have to assess the risk of compromise. On the basis of that determine how much effort needs to be invested into mitigating that risk.

Now in the case of cold-boot attacks and things like that, there are many things you can do. For example, cold-boot attacks can be defeated by never leaving your machine unattended. This is something that is not important for the vast majority of users, because most people don�t need to worry about someone sneaking in when their machine is unattended. � There is the evil maid attack, which can be protected against by keeping your bootloader physically on you, but wearing it as a necklace, for example, on an external USB device.

You�ve got BadBIOS. You can protect against this by dumping your BIOS, hashing it (hopefully not with SHA1 anymore), and simply comparing your BIOS. In theory, if it�s owned badly enough you need to do this externally. You need to dump it using a JTAG or some kind of reader to make sure that it actually matches, if you don�t trust your operating system.

You can go to any depth, you can drive yourself crazy thinking about bugs in the walls and cameras in the ceiling. Or you can think about what are the most realistic threats in your current situation? And on that basis take some activity to mitigate the most realistic threats. In that case, for most people, that�s going to be very simple things. That�s going to be using a safe browser. That�s going to be disabling scripts and active content, ideally using a virtual machine or some other form of sandboxed browser, where if there�s a compromise it�s not persistent. [I recently wrote about how to set up virtual machines.] And making sure that your regular day-to-day communications are being selectively shared through encrypted means.

Lee: What sort of security tools are you currently excited about? What are you finding interesting?

Snowden: I�ll just namecheck Qubes here, just because it�s interesting. I�m really excited about Qubes because the idea of VM-separating machines, requiring expensive, costly sandbox escapes to get persistence on a machine, is a big step up in terms of burdening the attacker with greater resource and sophistication requirements for maintaining a compromise. I�d love to see them continue this project. I�d love to see them make it more accessible and much more secure. [You can read more about how to use Qubes here and here.]

Something that we haven�t seen that we need to see is a greater hardening of the overall kernels of every operating system through things like grsecurity [a set of patches to improve Linux security], but unfortunately there�s a big usability gap between the capabilities that are out there, that are possible, and what is attainable for the average user.

Lee: People use smartphones a lot. What do you think about using a smartphone for secure communications?

Snowden: Something that people forget about cellphones in general, of any type, is that you�re leaving a permanent record of all of your physical locations as you move around. � The problem with cellphones is they�re basically always talking about you, even when you�re not using them. That�s not to say that everyone should burn their cellphones � but you have to think about the context for your usage. Are you carrying a device that, by virtue of simply having it on your person, places you in a historic record in a place that you don�t want to be associated with, even if it�s something as simple as your place of worship?

Lee: There are tons of software developers out there that would love to figure out how to end mass surveillance. What should they be doing with their time?

Snowden: Mixed routing is one of the most important things that we need in terms of regular infrastructure because we haven�t solved the problem of how to divorce the content of communication from the fact that it has occurred at all. To have real privacy you have to have both. Not just what you talked to your mother about, but the fact that you talked to your mother at all. �

The problem with communications today is that the internet service provider knows exactly who you are. They know exactly where you live. They know what your credit card number is, when you last paid, how much it was.

We need means of engaging in private connections to the internet. We need ways of engaging in private communications. We need mechanisms affording for private associations. And ultimately, we need ways to engage in private payment and shipping, which are the basis of trade.

These are research questions that need to be resolved. We need to find a way to protect the rights that we ourselves inherited for the next generation. If we don�t, today we�re standing at a fork in the road that divides between an open society and a controlled system. If we don�t do anything about this, people will look back at this moment and they�ll say, why did you let that happen? Do you want to live in a quantified world? Where not only is the content of every conversation, not only are the movements of every person known, but even the location of all the objects are known? Where the book that you leant to a friend leaves a record that they have read it? These things might be useful capabilities that provide value to society, but that�s only going to be a net good if we�re able to mitigate the impact of our activity, of our sharing, of our openness.

Lee: Ideally, governments around the world shouldn�t be spying on everybody. But that�s not really the case, so where do you think � what do you think the way to solve this problem is? Do you think it�s all just encrypting everything, or do you think that trying to get Congress to pass new laws and trying to do policy stuff is equally as important? Where do you think the balance is between tech and policy to combat mass surveillance? And what do you think that Congress should do, or that people should be urging Congress to do?

Snowden: I think reform comes with many faces. There�s legal reform, there�s statutory reform more generally, there are the products and outcomes of judicial decisions. � In the United States it has been held that these programs of mass surveillance, which were implemented secretly without the knowledge or the consent of the public, violate our rights, that they went too far, that they should end. And they have been modified or changed as a result. But there are many other programs, and many other countries, where these reforms have not yet had the impact that is so vital to free society. And in these contexts, in these situations, I believe that we do � as a community, as an open society, whether we�re talking about ordinary citizens or the technological community specifically � we have to look for ways of enforcing human rights through any means.

That can be through technology, that can be through politics, that can be through voting, that can be through behavior. But technology is, of all of these things, perhaps the quickest and most promising means through which we can respond to the greatest violations of human rights in a manner that is not dependent on every single legislative body on the planet to reform itself at the same time, which is probably somewhat optimistic to hope for. We would be instead able to create systems � that enforce and guarantee the rights that are necessary to maintain a free and open society.

Lee: On a different note � people said I should ask about Twitter � how long have you had a Twitter account for?

Snowden: Two weeks.

Lee: How many followers do you have?

Snowden: A million and a half, I think.

Lee: That�s a lot of followers. How are you liking being a Twitter user so far?

Snowden: I�m trying very hard not to mess up.

Lee: You�ve been tweeting a lot lately, including in the middle of the night Moscow time.

Snowden: Ha. I make no secret about the fact that I live on Eastern Standard Time. The majority of my work and associations, my political activism, still occurs in my home, in the United States. So it only really make sense that I work on the same hours.

Lee: Do you feel like Twitter is sucking away all your time? I mean I kind of have Twitter open all day long and I sometimes get sucked into flame wars. How is it affecting you?

Snowden: There were a few days when people kept tweeting cats for almost an entire day. And I know I shouldn�t, I have a lot of work to do, but I just couldn�t stop looking at them.

Lee: The real question is, what was your Twitter handle before this? Because you were obviously on Twitter. You know all the ins and outs.

Snowden: I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of other Twitter accounts.

3 comments

How Far-Right Nationalism Fuels Jerusalem's Temple Mount Controversy

Friday, 13 November 2015 14:38

Gorenberg writes: "Netanyahu's choice of a national spokesman who's on record as wanting to build the Third Temple couldn't be more damaging. Friction at the Mount, that is, Al-Aqsa, helped set off the latest wave of violence."

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men stand in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City. (photo: Sebastian Scheine/AP)

How Far-Right Nationalism Fuels Jerusalem's Temple Mount Controversy

By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect

13 November 15

Netanyahu's awful choice of PR chief reveals how nationalism feeds the conflict at Jerusalem's holiest spot.

ust before Benjamin Netanyahu took off for Washington, he flew straight into a political storm at home. Israel's prime minister announced his choice of Ran Baratz for the post of public diplomacy director�the government's spin czar, responsible for Israeli PR globally. Netanyahu and Baratz, a right-wing Internet pundit and ex-philosophy professor, had hit it off personally and politically. No one at the Prime Minister's Office bothered with an obscure vetting tool called Google.

Reporters did use that tool, however, and immediately turned up provocative pronouncements on Baratz's Facebook page and in op-eds in the mainstream media. Netanyahu canceled plans to bring Baratz with him to Washington, dissociated himself from the statements, and said he'd deal with the mess when he got home. None of this erased the impression that Baratz writes the thoughts that Netanyahu represses.

Here's a quiz. Below are four of Baratz's controversial comments. Please underline the one that you think is the biggest headache for Netanyahu. Then circle the one that sheds the most light on long-term issues affecting Israel's situation:

a) On John Kerry: "After his term as secretary of state, he has a promising career as a stand-up comedian in a club in Kansas City."

b) On President Reuven Rivlin, Israel's ceremonial head of state, known for not-so-veiled criticism of Netanyahu's anti-democratic tendencies: "I think it says a lot that the president flies economy class ... mainly that he's such a marginal figure that there's no threat to his life."

c) On President Obama: "His response to Netanyahu's speech [to Congress in March] is what modern anti-Semitism looks like in liberal Western countries."

d) On Jerusalem's most contested holy site: "The Temple Mount is the place most sacred to the Jewish nation, not to religious Jews. The Temple ... is the principle symbol not just of religion but of sovereignty. ... The desire to build the Third Temple is worthy, Jewish, and Zionist on the first order."

If you answered d to both questions, you aced the quiz.

In the immediate context of Palestinian terror attacks, Netanyahu's choice of a national spokesman who's on record as wanting to build the Third Temple couldn't be more damaging. The location would be the same as that of the ancient First and Second Temples�the Temple Mount, the raised expanse in Jerusalem's Old City. For Muslims, that same space is Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary�or Al-Aqsa, using the name of the mosque there for the entire compound.

Friction at the Mount, that is, Al-Aqsa, helped set off the latest wave of violence. The wide Palestinian consensus appears to be that Israel is changing the delicate status quo at the site to limit Muslim worship and to allow Jewish worship, putting the future of Al-Aqsa in doubt.

In principle, the quasi-formal rules set down by Israel after it conquered the Old City in 1967 remain in force: Jews pray at the Western Wall, a historic place of Jewish worship, alongside and below the Mount. Muslims administer and worship at the Haram. Jews may visit but not worship there. The subtext is that the two religions get separate holy space, but Jews who want to visit the Mount out of historical interest or fascination may do so.

Feeding Palestinian fears have been visits by Israeli politicians who belong to the governing coalition and a rise in the once-tiny trickle of religious Jews entering the compound, some with the intent of working in a defiant, or provocative, act of worship. One element of what used to maintain a fragile balance at Al-Aqsa, which is to say the Mount, was a consensus among Orthodox rabbis that Jews should not set foot there. (The reasons took me a good part of a book to explain.) Ultra-Orthodox still adamantly maintain that ban. But the most nationalistic of other rabbis have shifted position.

In a bid to reduce tensions, Kerry met last month with Netanyahu, then with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan's King Abdullah. Afterward, Netanyahu promised to maintain the status quo, and banned members of parliament from entering the holy site. Almost immediately, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, a rising star in Netanyahu's Likud Party, said on television that Israel should raise its flag on the Temple Mount, since "this is the center of Israeli sovereignty ... the holiest place to the Jewish nation." Netanyahu censured her. Then he chose Baratz as national spinmeister.

But Baratz's comment is even more important as a clue to what has driven the conflict over the Temple Mount for the past century. That's because Baratz himself identifies as a secular Jew, and his stance isn't a religious one.

This doesn't fit a common media narrative that the tension at Al-Aqsa reflects a transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a religious struggle�and therefore an intractable one, since for many people "religious" is a synonym for irrational and inflexible.

The narrative is wrong several times over. Religion isn't a new element in the conflict; it's been there all along. But so has the use of formerly religious symbols and myths by secular nationalists whose program was to be done with God and replace faith communities with national communities. Their ideas seeped back into religion, which is actually quite protean.

The Temple Mount has been the object of national tensions at least since Britain took Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I. When Britain appointed Hajj Amin al-Husseini as mufti of Jerusalem, it was trying�unsuccessfully�to co-opt a nationalist firebrand. Instead, he used the Jewish efforts to ease Ottoman-era restrictions on prayer at the Western Wall�and the supposed threat to Al-Aqsa�to build Arab opposition to the British and Zionism. Meanwhile, the Western Wall activists came mainly, if not entirely, from the secular Zionist right.

Conquerors have seen control of Jerusalem's holy places as somehow demonstrating the truth of their religion since there was a Jerusalem. Modern nationalism added the powerful illusion that a holy place's "true" identity, and ownership of it, demonstrated a nation's claim to sovereignty over the whole land. In 1967, right-wing songwriter Naomi Shemer's ballad "Jerusalem of Gold" portrayed Israel's conquest of the Temple Mount as the climax of Jews' return to their homeland.

For the vast majority of Israelis, even on the right, this never meant that Jews had to pray on the Mount, much less evict the Muslims. But the extreme fringe that wanted to do exactly that initially sprung from the remains of the pre-state radical right. Gershon Salomon, who created the Temple Mount Faithful, was a secular rightist who imagined the Mount as the setting for grand-national pageantry.

Ideas and feelings leak back and forth across the uncertain border between religion and modern political ideologies. Today's far-right Israeli activists concerned with the Mount are mostly religious. But they represent the stream of Israeli Judaism that has most thoroughly absorbed radical nationalism's concern with power, glory, and territory.

And the secular hard right hasn't lost interest. One of the politicians leading the demand for a change at the Temple Mount (Al-Aqsa) is the Likud's rabble-rousing Culture Minister Miri Regev. Then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon's tour of the Mount in September 2000 asserted his dedication to permanent Israeli sovereignty there. It was the immediate spark for the Second Intifada. Soon after, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Sharon crassly dismissed any Islamic connection to the place.

On the Palestinian side, Al-Husseini's contemporary successor is Sheikh Raed Salah, who has built his hardline faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel on the slogan, "Al-Aqsa Is in Danger." But in a rally in the Israeli Arab town of Sakhnin in October, a Knesset member from Balad, a secular party in the old pan-Arabist mold, joined in warnings about Israeli government actions at the mosque compound. Soon afterward, a Christian Arab Knesset Member defied Netanyahu's ban to visit Al-Aqsa.

Holy places are symbols, and symbols act like parabolic mirrors: They reflect energy and focus it on a single overheated spot. On the Israeli right, the Temple Mount has become a symbol of the gap between what it thought that possession of the homeland would mean and the reality of dealing with another people. For Palestinians, Al-Aqsa is a symbol of Palestine under occupation and threat. These are nationalist sentiments. When re-absorbed into religion, they produce harsher religions. To describe the conflict around the contested holy site, and the contested country, as a battle of religions is to miss much of what is happening and to make it seem much more comfortably distant from modern Western ideologies than it is.

14 comments

The 7 Things You Need to Know Now About the Keystone XL Pipeline

Friday, 13 November 2015 14:37

Hymas writes: "Keystone XL is mostly just a symbol. Which isn't to say it doesn't matter. Au contraire, it means it matters all the more."

Keystone XL protesters. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The 7 Things You Need to Know Now About the Keystone XL Pipeline

By Lisa Hymas, Grist

13 November 15

1) President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline on Nov. 6.

Obama positioned America as a global leader on climate change and said approving the project would undercut that leadership: �If we�re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we�re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them.� This is the real decision we�ve all been waiting for. (You might have heard that Obama �vetoed� the pipeline back in February, but he didn�t � he vetoed a congressional bill that would have forced approval of the pipeline because he wanted to make the decision himself on his own time line.)

2) This is a huge win for the climate movement.

Hardly anyone had heard of the Keystone XL pipeline before Bill McKibben and his climate action group 350.org decided to launch a national campaign opposing it in 2011. If they hadn�t done so, Keystone would have been quietly approved years ago. 350 teamed up with allies who had been fighting the project previously � Native American tribes and farmers and ranchers along the proposed pipeline route, as well as mainstream green groups and grassroots environmental activists � and successfully used the project as a focal point for organizing to fight climate change, staging several high-profile protests in Washington, D.C., and around the country. That tangible focus helped the climate movement grow into a real political force, and today the power of that movement is on display as never before. Put another way: The Keystone fight helped the climate movement grow stronger, and because the movement grew stronger, the fight against Keystone succeeded.

3) Keystone XL is mostly just a symbol.

Which isn�t to say this decision doesn�t matter. Au contraire, it means it matters all the more. To climate hawks, Keystone has come to represent everything society should be moving away from: infrastructure that will enable and encourage extraction of the dirtiest oil on the planet for decades to come. To the oil industry and the �drill, baby, drill� crowd, Keystone has come to represent everything they want to cling on to: more drilling, more piping, continued reliance on fossil fuels. Obama felt so much pressure from climate activists that he chose their side in this epic fight, and that�s a big deal.

4) Still, the Keystone XL rejection will have some real climate impact.

Though its symbolic significance outweighs its greenhouse gas significance, Keystone would have led to increased emissions. It�s hard to say how big those increases would have been, but a study published in Nature Climate Change last year estimated that the pipeline could increase CO2 emissions by as much as 110 million tons per year � or about 1.7 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2012. By way of comparison, Obama�s new Clean Power Plan is expected to lead to a 6 percent cut in total U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions from today�s levels by 2030, according to calculations by Vox�s Brad Plumer. So the direct climate impact of stopping Keystone is, shall we say, notable but not enormous.

5) Keystone XL is not permanently dead.

Not by a long shot. All 15 of the Republican presidential candidates are in favor of the pipeline and now they�ll be trumpeting its alleged virtues even more loudly and promising to OK it if they make it to the White House. If Canadian company TransCanada resubmits its application to build the pipeline � which would be no small feat of paperwork � a GOP president could promptly approve it. TransCanada has even floated the idea of challenging Obama�s decision under NAFTA.

6) Obama endorsed half of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2012, and now it�s built and pumping oil.

When TransCanada first proposed the Keystone XL pipeline in 2008, it consisted of two parts � a northern leg to carry tar-sands oil from Hardisty, Alberta, down to Steele City, Neb., and a southern leg from Cushing, Okla., down to the Texas Gulf Coast. (The segment in the middle � called the Cushing Extension, stretching from Steele City to Cushing � was already in the works.) In 2012, after activists had targeted the pipeline and gummed up the approval process, TransCanada decided to break XL into two separate projects. The southern leg didn�t cross an international border and therefore didn�t need an OK from the State Department or the White House, so it would be relatively easy to push through on its own. Even though this southern portion, which TransCanada renamed the Gulf Coast Pipeline, didn�t require a stamp of approval from Obama, it got one: During his reelection campaign in 2012, the president came to Cushing, bragged about the expansion of oil drilling and oil pipelines during his first term, and directed his administration to expedite processing for the Gulf Coast Pipeline. It was completed and started pumping oil in late 2013. It was only after Obama won reelection that he started making skeptical noises about Keystone XL � and by then he only meant the northern leg of it.

7) The Keystone rejection does not make Obama a climate hero.

This Keystone XL decision is one highly visible move that Obama made at the behest of very vocal climate activists, but it�s just a small part of the president�s overall record on the issue. He�s done some good stuff to fight climate change: regulating CO2 emissions from power plants for the first time, making cars and trucks more efficient, steering stimulus funds to clean energy, plus lots of smaller climate-friendly initiatives. He�s also been negotiating bilateral climate deals with China and other countries, laying the groundwork for a global climate agreement to be reached at U.N. talks in Paris this December (though there�s no chance the agreement will be as strong as it should be).

On the other hand, Obama has done plenty of bad stuff, from encouraging construction of the southern half of Keystone XL and other pipelines, as mentioned above, to opening up new areas to offshore oil drilling, including the Arctic Ocean, and allowing continued coal mining on public lands. This Keystone move improves Obama�s climate legacy, but he�ll still come out with a pretty mixed bag.

If he wants to burnish that legacy further, he should make a full-court press to ensure the Paris talks are a big success.

7 comments

FOCUS: Bring It On

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7122">Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News</a>

Friday, 13 November 2015 12:39

Warren writes: "If the financial industry wants to push rollbacks, then I want to make it easier to send bankers to jail when they launder money for drug cartels, or rig foreign exchange markers, or cheat pension funds out of desperately needed money. If the financial industry wants to chip away at the CFPB and financial oversight, then I want to have a serious, on-the-record conversation about breaking up the biggest banks."

Senator Elizabeth Warren. (photo: ElizabethWarren.com)

Bring It On

By Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News

13 November 15

have a question -

When is the last time someone mentioned to you that they really wished banks could load more fine print on credit cards? When did someone say they hoped Wall Street would get another chance to blow up the mortgage market? When did you hear that customers were hoping for another chance to get cheated by a payday lender?

Never?

So why is a right-wing group is spending $500,000 to attack me and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? And why right now?

Think about this: Before the end of the year, Congress must pass two pieces of legislation, a highway bill and a government funding bill. That's like ringing the dinner bell for the Wall Street banks. The lobbyists are swarming this place.

Two bills are moving in Washington, and the big banks see a chance to weaken the CFPB and the Dodd-Frank oversight rules. Their plan is to quietly slip the rollbacks into the legislation that must pass, like the government funding bill. That way Wall Street gets what it wants, and their friends in Congress get lots of cover when they vote for it.

That's what those crazy, Commie dictator attack ads are all about. Wall Street knows that if they can soften up support for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Republicans - and honestly, some Democrats - will feel a little safer voting to weaken the rules that protect consumers and hold big banks accountable. Since closed-door discussions are going on right now, this is the time.

If Republicans really think it's time to talk about financial reform, then lets not do it through shady attack ads funded by secret, unnamed corporations. Let's put it all out on the table. And let's have everyone in Congress - Democrats and Republicans - declare publicly where they stand.

I say: Bring It On.

If the industry wants to push rollbacks, then I want to make it easier to send bankers to jail when they launder money for drug cartels, or rig foreign exchange markers, or cheat pension funds out of desperately needed money. If the financial industry wants to chip away at the CFPB and financial oversight, then I want to have a serious, on-the-record conversation about breaking up the biggest banks.

Let's put it to the American people: Are you ready to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Dodd-Frank, to give the biggest banks in the country more chances to take more risks and leave you holding the bag? Or is it time for a little more accountability - accountability for large financial institutions that month after month are in the headlines for breaking the law?

We need to vote on a highway bill. We need to vote on a government funding bill. And if there's anyone in Congress - Republican or Democrat - who thinks they can slip goodies for Wall Street into these bills without a fight, they are very, very wrong.

Thank you for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

Donate: https://donate.elizabethwarren.com/page/contribute/nowallstreetriders?source=20151113db

19 comments

FOCUS: Fighting Terrorism Was the Biggest Weakness of the Bush Administration

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</a>

Friday, 13 November 2015 11:34

Chait writes: "The impression that Bush was successful, or even especially well-focused, on protecting Americans from terrorism is an inversion of reality, and the fact that it is still asserted with a straight face is the residue of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in American history."

President Bush was bad at a lot of the parts of being president, but none worse than fighting terrorism. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Fighting Terrorism Was the Biggest Weakness of the Bush Administration

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

13 November 15

hen Donald Trump impugned the honor of his brother earlier this year, Jeb Bush proudly fell back on the achievement of the Dubya administration that has endured in public memory, despite his other failures: �He kept us safe.� Even in 2008, at the nadir of Bush�s presidency, Americans still gave him a fair measure of credit in this area. But the impression that Bush was successful, or even especially well-focused, on protecting Americans from terrorism is an inversion of reality, and the fact that it can still be asserted with a straight face is the residue of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in American history.

Chris Whipple�s revelations about the CIA�s urgent, ignored pleas to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda before 9/11 flesh out an increasingly consistent portrait drawn by Kurt Eichenwald and other reporters. A broad and consistent body of evidence had persuaded intelligence officials that Al Qaeda was poised to carry out a devastating attack against the United States. It was not just the famous August memo, �Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.� � the one Bush dismissed at the time as ass-covering � but a much longer and more desperate campaign to wake up Bush�s inner circle. Whipple reports, �Months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.�

But the Bush White House was dominated by neoconservatives, who were ideologically fixated on the threat posed by states and dismissed the threat of non-state actors. The administration�s defenders tend to gloss over the wee problem of Bush�s abject failure before the attack by treating it as a passing transitional problem, a matter of getting one�s feet wet, often speaking of the Bush presidency as if did not really begin until September 12. This willfully erases the administration�s gross negligence before the attacks.

It also ignores the reality that Bush and his closest advisers clung to their state-focused neoconservative dogma even after the attacks. That is why the administration began planning to invade Iraq immediately � not because they had some sinister conspiracy to distract the public into going along with their scheme, but because their misguided ideology left them unable to comprehend the power of a threat that did not emanate from a state. As Charles Krauthammer, a leading Republican intellectual, wrote in a column weeks after the attacks:

Yes, we need to get Osama bin Laden. Yes, we need to bring down the terrorist networks. But the overriding aim of the war on terrorism is changing regimes. And it starts with the Taliban. Searching Afghan caves for bin Laden is precisely the trap he would wish us to fall into. Terrorists cannot operate without the succor and protection of governments. The planet is divided into countries. Unless terrorists want to camp in Antarctica, they must live in sovereign states.

Krauthammer was expressing the convictions that blinded the Bush administration to the threat of a band of terrorists unmoored from a government. That same blindness caused the Bush administration to woefully mismanage its response. Having surrounded Osama bin Laden and some 2,000 of his most committed fighters in Tora Bora, the Bush administration left the task of killing them to weak Afghan pseudo-allies. The administration was already shifting its military resources and attention to Iraq. After all, the Afghan government had already fallen. Why bother, as Krauthammer scoffed, searching a bunch of caves? There was a government to topple in Iraq.

Of course everything about the Iraq war served to further weaken the American position against terrorism. The invasion, with its chaotic and almost completely unplanned occupation, left an anarchic void that has given rise to a newer and even more virulent Sunni terrorist movement in Iraq�s north, the threat of which has rippled out. The invasion, and revelations of American torture, helped radicalize Muslims against the United States while alienating potential allies.

In retrospect, Bush�s ability to portray himself to America as a committed and triumphant vanquisher of terrorism rested almost entirely on emotional manipulation. Bush standing on the rubble at Ground Zero; Bush throwing a strike at Yankee Stadium before a cheering crowd; Bush landing on an aircraft carrier � it was all brilliant political theater. And it supported a conclusion 180 degrees from reality. Of the manifold failures the Bush administration wrought, its handling of the terrorist threat should rank as the worst.

40 comments

More Articles...

<< Start < Prev 2261 2262 2263 2264 2265 2266 2267 2268 2269 2270 Next > End >>

Page 2267 of 3432

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

Name:	*
Username:	*
E-mail:	*
Password:	*
Confirm password:	*
Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.