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https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/16/the-indispensable-truth-seeker-daniel-ellsberg/

Remembering The Legend: Indispensable Truth Seeker Daniel Ellsberg

Remembering the legendary life of a rare legend in American history. 

 

It is with great sadness that ScheerPost has learned of the death of legendary American figure Daniel Ellsberg. His work as a whistleblower, activist and advocate for government transparency is irreplaceable and without him, the country would be missing a crucial part of its history. His courage, conviction and commitment to challenging government secrecy and ensuring accountability ushered in a lasting dialogue in American politics that led to the revelations of people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. We send our condolences and best wishes to Daniel’s family and friends.

Letter from Ellsberg written after learning about his diagnosis:

Dear friends and supporters,

I have difficult news to impart. On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic cancer–which has no early symptoms–it was found while looking for something else, relatively minor). I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.

I have chosen not to do chemotherapy (which offers no promise) and I have assurance of great hospice care when needed. Please know: right now, I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years! Moreover, my cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods! And my energy level is high. Since my diagnosis, I’ve done several interviews and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues, and I have two more scheduled this week.

As I just told my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!

I feel lucky and grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life far beyond the proverbial three-score years and ten. ( I’ll be ninety-two on April 7th.) I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else).

When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action—in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses—did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.

What’s more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance.

I wish I could report greater success for our efforts. As I write, “modernization” of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas–like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.

China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war–let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out–are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.

It is long past time–but not too late!–for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I’m able, to help these efforts. There’s tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you’ll be hearing from me as long as I’m here.

As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth.

So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon’s nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway–mainly but not only from burning fossil fuels–is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.)

I’m happy to know that millions of people–including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message!–have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.

I’m enormously grateful to have had the privilege of knowing and working with such people, past and present. That’s among the most treasured aspects of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for the love and support you have given me in so many ways. Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.

My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.

Love, Dan

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-intelligence-has-amassed-sensitive-intimate-data-nearly-everyone/5822521

U.S. Intelligence Has Amassed ‘Sensitive and Intimate’ Data on ‘Nearly Everyone’

A newly declassified report confirms that the government has unprecedented insight into our lives through smartphones, cars, web browsing, and other tech.

When it comes to data privacy in our present, hyper-connected age, many of your worst fears and biggest anxieties are probably correct.

Yes, smartphones and our manifold other devices collect an incredible array of information on our habits, choices, and movements at all times.

Yes, all of this information is compiled by companies to sell for profit.

Yes, the U.S. government is among the many clients buying up that data.

And yes, it represents a significant and persistent threat to your civil liberties and safety, as confirmed in a newly released report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)—the top dog among all of our nation’s spy agencies.

The declassified document, made public on Friday, was completed in January 2022, following 90 days of assessment by an advisory panel. It was commissioned by Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence in the Biden Administration, at the behest of Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. Haines agreed to look into the issue of how U.S. intelligence uses commercially available data during her confirmation hearing, and now the result of that inquiry is fully on display.

The newly released report affirms a mounting bevy of evidence that government agencies— from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Pentagon—are compiling vast stores of for-sale data.

Taken altogether, the information that the government is easily able to purchase from data brokers rivals anything that’s been available to intelligence agencies in the past—even through warrants, wiretaps, and Fourth Amendment due process.

“Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, [commercially available information] includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection,” write the report authors. All that data “can reveal sensitive and intimate information about individuals,” the 48-page account emphasizes. “It could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.”

Though this data may be “anonymized” by brokers and sold in bulk, it does not stay anonymous in the hands of U.S. spy agencies. The government report affirmatively cites a 2019 New York Times investigation that found deanonymizing commercially available information (CAI) takes mere minutes.

“Information that previously did not exist in the public domain about US citizens now is widely available on the open market, raising privacy questions particularly when it comes to US government use of such data,” an ODNI official familiar with the matter told Gizmodo in a phone call.

• Through location tracking, your phone knows where you sleep every night.
• Via cookies, your web browser tracks the sites you visit.
• Financial data confirms what you buy and when.

Health apps, smartwatches, and motion tracking can keep tabs on everything from when you’re physically active to how you’re feeling physically and mentally.

The government report states that religious practice, political views, travel, medical info, social associations, purchase history, “speech activities” and even sexual behavior are all things that can be inferred from CAI. It references widely publicized controversies like the outing of Catholic priests enabled via purchasable data from Grindr and the government’s buy-up of data from a Muslim prayer app.

“While each data broker source may provide only a few data elements about a consumer’s activities, data brokers can put all of these data elements together to form a more detailed composite of the consumer’s life,” notes the report. Though a simple commercial transaction, government agencies can access that same composite—and they do.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, for instance, amasses information on peoples’ social media activity.

The military spy org also maintains a global location tracking database, per the newly public document, though it claims that specific authorization is required to query that database and that it’s rarely accessed. The Department of Defense, Coast Guard, Navy, CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and even the Treasury Department are among the other agencies noted as purchasing and using CAI.

Yet within and across each of these organizations, little of their CAI activities are tracked.

Intelligence agencies across the U.S. government don’t have a solid understanding of how they are collecting and using purchased data.

Because all of this data is considered publicly available, there are almost no standards or restrictions on how this info should be acquired, used, or kept secure.

None of the publicly available commercial data is currently classified as sensitive in an official capacity, though it undoubtedly is, according to the report.

The ODNI recommends that all of this needs to change, to protect peoples’ privacy, freedom, and welfare. “The intelligence community is working to develop additional standards and procedures for commercially available information,” the agency official emphasized on the phone.

But new standards and firm suggestions might not be enough. “Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations,” the authors write.

Not to mention the risk such data poses when malicious actors or “adversarial foreign governments” decide to take advantage of it. CAI “can be purchased by anyone including our adversaries,” the ODNI official said. “Such information also raises counterintelligence risk for the intelligence community.”

U.S. intelligence agencies, companies, and anyone else willing to pay can reap untold information rewards from the data economy. It’s a system the government may have long dreamed of, but could never have built on its own. Through tacit acceptance of invasive tech into our daily lives, we did this to ourselves, the report implies.

“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits,” the ODNI writes, in the declassified document. “Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation.”

Though not everyone places the blame on consumers. “This review shows the government’s existing policies have failed to provide essential safeguards for Americans’ privacy, or oversight of how agencies buy and use personal data,” Senator Wyden wrote in a Monday statement. “If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance,” he said—urging executive and legislative action.

Wyden and other senators introduced an act in 2022 intended to ban data brokers from selling location, health, and other sensitive information. It has yet to progress.