Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old computer systems administrator who worked as a contractor for the CIA and NSA, perpetrated the greatest assault on American intelligence in US history. Yet the select brotherhood of adversarial journalists, radical activists and anarchist hackers who have been admitted into his close confidence have succeeded in keeping the attention away not only from their own long-time crusade against the US government, but Snowden’s own increasing damage to national security, particularly to relations with allies. Far from merely promoting privacy rights and government accountability and the rights of “whistleblowers,” Team Snowden's major actors are really part of a long-standing cyberwar demanding invincible encryption for activists even as they insist on radical state transparency as part of an extremist political agenda to take power. This work pulls back the curtain on the long-time connections of some of the people producing and promoting Snowden’s leaks and scrutinizes their involvement in WikiLeaks, the anarchist collective that has collaborated with the Kremlin, and Tor Project, a community of open-source encryption software developers whose circumvention tools may be useful to Iranian and Chinese dissidents, but more often than not are used by illegal drug dealers and child abusers -- leading to massive crackdowns by the FBI. Then there are the greatest Tor use cases of all: Julian Assange's WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning's Cablegate and now Snowden devastating NSA hack.
This book probes deeply into the coopted individuals and organizations in Russia’s “managed democracy” that have received and helped Snowden, bringing to light material not previously translated in the Western press. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows he has a windfall in Snowden, and has cunningly exploited the fugitive for his own agenda of creating a state-controlled “sovereign Internet”. The story also tracks the secretive hacker movements that were actively recruiting someone like Snowden and once he came to them, laid the groundwork for helping move, store and ultimately leak his classified files. The little-known controversies over the Tor software used by WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and now Snowden and his helpers are outlined to make the argument of how government programs to assist espionage ultimately backfired on them and must get more critical public examination.
The disturbing links are exposed between the US military and the very forces that have undermined national security so dramatically. The Snowden story crosses through a number of cities around the globe, where again and again we find the troubling convergences and coincidences that let us know there is far more to the Snowden enigma than we have been told, and much more to be investigated.
From the virtual world of Second Life, whose founding CTO was a former Naval and NSA officer, to the crypto party at New York’s fashionable Whitney Museum where Snowden’s helpers performed, to the high-rises of Hong Kong and the Moscow airport and suburban safe houses, Privacy for Me and Thee chronicles the “infowars” that are now our reality in the great cyberspace conflict that is only just beginning.
This book probes deeply into the coopted individuals and organizations in Russia’s “managed democracy” that have received and helped Snowden, bringing to light material not previously translated in the Western press. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows he has a windfall in Snowden, and has cunningly exploited the fugitive for his own agenda of creating a state-controlled “sovereign Internet”. The story also tracks the secretive hacker movements that were actively recruiting someone like Snowden and once he came to them, laid the groundwork for helping move, store and ultimately leak his classified files. The little-known controversies over the Tor software used by WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and now Snowden and his helpers are outlined to make the argument of how government programs to assist espionage ultimately backfired on them and must get more critical public examination.
The disturbing links are exposed between the US military and the very forces that have undermined national security so dramatically. The Snowden story crosses through a number of cities around the globe, where again and again we find the troubling convergences and coincidences that let us know there is far more to the Snowden enigma than we have been told, and much more to be investigated.
From the virtual world of Second Life, whose founding CTO was a former Naval and NSA officer, to the crypto party at New York’s fashionable Whitney Museum where Snowden’s helpers performed, to the high-rises of Hong Kong and the Moscow airport and suburban safe houses, Privacy for Me and Thee chronicles the “infowars” that are now our reality in the great cyberspace conflict that is only just beginning.
