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

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

 

Micah Lee | The Intercept | Reader Supported News | November 13, 2015

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.

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The Fear of Being Gay in Russia

https://screen.yahoo.com/fear-being-gay-russia-083821984.html?format=embed

 

Wochit | Yahoo News | August 2, 2015

Moscow’s first gay pride parade was held in May 2006, thirteen years after homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia. It was supposed to be a joyous occasion, the beginning of a new era of openness for the LGBT community. It didn’t quite work out that way. LGBT marchers that day clashed with riot police, who tried to stop the event. “We disturbed something very deeply rooted in Russian society, some very evil power of intolerance and violence,” says Nikolai Baev, a prominent LGBT rights activist who attended the march. Only a few months later, Russia saw its first regional anti-gay law passed in Ryazan, 200 miles east of Moscow. It was the first official sign that the Russian authorities would resist the LGBT movement—a resistance that has grown and become increasingly violent as LGBT activism has grown over the last decade.

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UN approves Russia’s resolution on Ukraine, doubts still prevalent

Edward Snowden, the Dark Prophet

Image by None via CrunchBase

Michael Scherer | TIME Magazine | Reader Supported News | December 12, 2013

e pulled off the year’s most spectacular heist. Exiled from his country, the 30-year-old computer whiz has become the doomsayer of the information age

To avoid surveillance, the first four Americans to visit Edward Snowden in Moscow carried no cell phones or laptops. They flew coach on Delta from Washington with tickets paid for by Dutch computer hackers. After checking into a preselected hotel not far from Red Square, they waited for a van to pick them up for dinner.

None could retrace the ride that followed, driven by anonymous Russian security men, nor could any place the side door of the building where the trip ended. They passed through two cavernous ballrooms, the second with a painted ceiling like the Sistine Chapel, and emerged into a smaller space with salmon-colored walls and oil paintings in golden frames-like Alice in Wonderland, remembers one of the group. There at the bottom of the rabbit hole, in rimless glasses, a black suit and blue shirt with two open buttons at the collar, stood the 30-year-old computer whiz who had just committed the most spectacular heist in the history of spycraft.

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NBC Will Turn A Spotlight On Russia’s Antigay Abuses During Winter Olympics

Matt Baume  | Queerty | December 10, 2013

It is seldom that we have good news to report about Russia, so we’re pleased to note that NBC is starting to pay more attention to the country’s antigay abuse.

They’ve hired the delightful David Remnick to cover the politics beat during the Olympics, and that’s huge. Remnick is the former Moscow Bureau Chief for the Washington Post; he won a Pulitzer in 1994 and a bunch of other awards since then; and he’s an all-around unrelenting journalist.

His coverage for NBC will include the country’s recent violence towards LGBTs. This ought to be good.

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Elton John blasts anti-gay law during Moscow concert (video)

English: Elton John attending the premiere of The Union at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

John Aravosis | America Blog | December 6, 2013

Elton John sharply criticized Russia’s new anti-gay “propaganda” law onstage during his concert in Moscow this evening.

Elton’s criticism of the law is itself illegal under the law, which bans any speech or actions that might influence a child into thinking that being gay is less than evil.

Here’s the video, and below, thanks to Joe Jervis at JoeMyGod, we have the transcript.

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Moscow gay club attacked with poison gas

Moscow From the Air (Photo credit: Andrey Belenko)

Joe Morgan | Gay Star News | November 25, 2013

A Moscow gay club was attacked with poisonous gas, forcing several people to seek medical attention. On Saturday night (23 November), unknown attackers sprayed the chemical weapon inside club Central Station.

Around 500 clubbers were escorted outside of the building where some were told to go to hospital.

After the staff turned on a smoke removal machine, it eliminated the gas in a matter of minutes.

Police are investigating the attack and currently have no suspects.

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Putin’s Dreams of Empire Are Pretty Gay

Vladimir Putin – Caricature (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Randy Potts | Box Turtle Bulletin | November 12, 2013

With all the recent noise coming out of Russia these days on gay rights (or the lack thereof) it’s easy to lose sight of why Putin has gone along with the anti-gay legislation when it has only caused problems for him in the West.  If Sochi is all about projecting a vision of Russia as a nation worthy of investment and a leader in world affairs, why risk letting the “gay problem” overwhelm the message?

This Buzzfeed piece by J. Lester Feder is a good introduction, although the title is misleading.  What Feder documents is how existing anti-gay sentiment is being used by pro-Russian forces within former Soviet bloc countries to tie those countries closer to Russia and, more importantly, steer them away from the EU and into Putin’s “Customs Union” instead — not a very prosaic name, that — sounds a bit like the Trade Federation in Star Wars.  A more straightforward name like “Russian Union” might remind everyone of that Soviet one they had 20 years ago.

What many Western gay rights activists too often miss is that anti-gay sentiment is not being created or fomented by Putin or the anti-western, pro-Russian crowd.  Anti-gay sentiment already exists, at about the same levels it existed here in the US 50 or 60 years ago.  The comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis are also inept — unlike Hitler whose party platform identified Jews as the problem from the get go, anti-gay legislation in Russia has been grass roots and Putin merely stood by while it spread from oblast to oblast in the early 2000s. It was only this past June that a federal law was finally passed, only 9 months after the New York Times was reporting massive anti-Putin marches in Moscow – that is to say, these anti-Putin protests created a little spark in Putin’s eye and, 9 months later, a federal anti-gay law was born.

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Russian group visits the Castro to discuss LGBT Human Rights

Melanie Nathan | Oblogdeeoblogda | November 11, 2013.

Signs Reading ” “I am a human being and not propaganda” “-Russian Visitors, with S.F. Activists, Standing from left to right, Bill Wilson, Melanie Nathan, Michael Petrelis, Mila Pavlin, Lee Jewel and Rebecca Rolfe, from SF LGBT Center. Russian Visitors in front- Photo Hannah Ponder

I was privileged today to attend a meeting with the the group of LGBT Russians and organizers, at the San Francisco LGBT Center in the Castro, to discuss LGBT human rights in Russia.  The group is visitng the United States under the auspices of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, as arranged by the Institute of International Education.

Two interpreters accompanied the team, all representing different organizations and interests from Russia. The group will be in the U.S.A. until November 22. The team included Mr. Aleksandr Viktorovich Berezekin, a Professor’s Assistant in Humanitarian Sciences from Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok,  Mr. Gleb Yuzefovich Latnik  an LGBT Activist from Pervouralsk,  Mr. Yury Maksimov,  the leader and founder of Light of Universe ( an LGBT organization based in Moscow), Mr. Andrey Obolenskiy, the head of Rainbow Association (LGBT rights group), Moscow and Evgeny Aleksandrovich Pisemskiy.

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From Syria to Iran: Will Obama Do a Nuclear Deal with Tehran?

English: States parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Parties of the Chemical weapons Convention Parties which have declared chemical weapon stockpiles and/or have known chemical weapon facilities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Weissman | Reader Supported News | Reader Supported News | September 22, 2013

“Let’s Make a Deal” seems to be the new White House riff, which beats rattling sabers and sending in the Tomahawk missiles. But it’s too early for undue enthusiasm.

First, the Syrian deal could easily fall apart. Who will provide the boots on the ground to secure Assad’s chemical weapons? Who will pay for the destruction of the weapons, their chemical precursors, and their production facilities?  How much longer will Team Obama insist that the Security Council resolution include the threat of force, a blank check the Russians would be fools not to veto? And, when, if ever, will both Moscow and Washington stop their one-sided assertions of guilt? The Syrian tragedy has more than one bad guy, and the world needs an objective look at all the suspected uses of chemical weapons in Syria, whether by the loathsome Basher al-Assad and his partners in crime, lesser elements of the Syrian army, or the Sunni rebels and their Saudi-led suppliers.

Second, the world faces a momentous contradiction between demands for justice at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the compelling need to find a messy compromise that will end the Syrian slaughter.

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