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The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter who documented the scope of the U.S. governments surveillance on its own citizens after receiving leaked National Security Agency documents from Edward Snowden told Yahoo News that he believes the former NSA contractor will not be pardoned in his lifetime.

Barton Gellman, now a staff writer at the Atlantic, was one of three reporters Snowden first approached in 2013 with the archive of documents showing mass surveillance of American citizens by their own government. Gellmans book about Snowden,Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State,was released Tuesday. Gellman, who is sympathetic to Snowden but raises questions about some of his actions, said Snowden will not be able to return to America in his lifetime unless he comes in handcuffs.

Getting pardoned is going to be a very, very big lift for any president, Gellman told Yahoo News Skullduggery podcast. The intelligence community, the national security community, loathes Snowden and have long memories for this sort of thing, and I dont think hell be pardoned in his lifetime.

Gellman has spent significant time with Snowden since first meeting him in 2013 and said his books title reflects his own view of the U.S. governments surveillance capabilities and efforts.

Were transparent to our government, our government is opaque to us, and that creates distortions in the balance of power, he said.

Still, Gellman is clear that his book is not meant to be a full-throated defense of Snowden, who remains in Russia, where he has been since shortly after Gellman and other Washington Post reporters first revealed the NSAs illegal mass data collection efforts thanks to Snowdens disclosures.

Snowden had been a Hawaii-based NSA contractor before he made the decision to give Gellman the trove of documents. Snowden then traveled to Hong Kong before continuing on to Moscow in what he has said was a bid to make his way to Ecuador, which has historically refused to extradite criminal suspects to the U.S. After the Guardian and Gellman at the Washington Post first published their stories, Snowden then sharedhighly classifiedmaterial with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post revealing NSA targets inside China, a revelation that seemed unrelated to his professed concern about wanting to protect the privacy of American citizens.When asked to explain why Snowden chose to leak information about U.S. intelligence gathering efforts in China to the South China Morning Post, Gellman said he would not defend what Snowden did.

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I have no defense of the South China Morning Post story; Snowdens view was that he was showing that even universities and hospitals that is, not defense facilities or foreign ministers were a target, Gellman said of the disclosures to a hostile foreign government. I would not have published that story, because I dont publish stories that warn specific foreign targets of legitimateforeign adversaries that theyre being spied on.

Download or subscribe on iTunes:Skullduggery from Yahoo News

Over the years, Gellman and Snowden have debated the surveillance state and its importance, sometimes ending up on opposite sides of the debate. Gellman said Snowden intrigues him in part because of how far he was willing to go to reveal sensitive and previously unknown NSA practices such as the illegal bulk collection of phone records. Congress outlawed the practice in 2015, a step that almost definitely would not have happened without Snowdens revelations.

Why do people like Snowden do what they do? Gellman asked. Most people are going to go along and get along. ... It requires a supreme confidence in your own sense of right and wrong, which Snowden does have. And it requires a sensibility that cant tolerate inaction.

Gellman said that despite speculation by others that Snowden is aRussian spy, he just doesnt believe it based on his experiences with the whistleblower. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Snowden reached out to Russian diplomats based in Hong Kong during the two weeks he spent there before the story broke, but Gellman said he spent significant time investigating Snowdens relationship with Russia and has concluded that Snowden is not a Russian asset.

Gellman pointed to the fact that Snowden ended up in Moscow when his passport was revoked en route to Cuba and then Ecuador Gellman said he has seen Snowdens plane ticket, which showed a final destination in Ecuador. And Snowden urged him not to bring any of the documents he shared with him on a trip to Russia, hardly a warning one would expect from a Russian intelligence operative hoping to access as much material as possible. As for what Putin said, Gellman concludes the Russian president may have wanted to leave a false trail or to poke the Americans.

Whatever Snowdens historical relationship with the Russian government, it is evident that Putin sees tremendous value in having Snowden remain in Moscow, where U.S. authorities cant touch him. Gellman said he believes Putin enjoys his role as international human rights defender protecting a whistleblower like Snowden. Even Snowden realizes he is a prize for Putin and is open about it, Gellman said.

Snowden has also acknowledged to me, and I thought it was very interesting, that Putin has reason to protect him, because although he is not in fact a Russian agent, he might look that way to other people and Putin does not want to discourage walk-ins by foreign intelligence officers of other countries, Gellman said. If he sent Snowden back, that would make people wary ... so Snowden says, Even though I am not a spy, he is treating me as though I were so that he doesnt blow chances with somebody else.

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Edward Snowden will not be pardoned in his lifetime, says author of new book on the NSA whistleblower - Yahoo News

The coronavirus may infect NSA whistleblower Reality Winner while she is incarcerated at a womens prison hospital. She has a history of respiratory illness that makes her exceptionally vulnerable. Yet, the United States government contends they have no record of Winner ever submitting a request for relief. Prosecutors further suggesteven if the warden for Federal Medical Center Carswell received a request for release from Winnerthat she did not follow the appropriate process so her appeal should be denied.

Winner pled guilty in 2018 to one count of violating the Espionage Act when she disclosed an NSA report to The Intercept. She believed the report contained evidence that Russian hackers targeted United States voter registration systems during the 2016 election.

She has served more than half of her 63-month sentence, and her attorneys urged a federal court to release her to home confinement to serve the remaining 19 months of her sentence.

But Judge Randal Hall sided with the Justice Department on April 24 and contended the medical prison, where Winner is incarcerated, is presumably better equipped than most to deal with any onset of COVID-19 in its inmates.

Hall refused to grant Winner a hearing to present specific evidence on the risks posed to her health by the coronavirus. In response to the U.S. government, Winners attorneys said [PDF] prosecutors presented no grounds to deny Winners request to treat her motion for compassionate release as the life-and-death matter it (and COVID-19) really is. Winners request for compassionate release presents compelling and extraordinary reasons to justify the relief she seeks, they added. Her good luck thus far is the only thing that separates her from the thousands of inmates in the Bureau of Prisons custody who have contracted COVID-19 on BOPs watch.Her attorneys point out 57 people in BOP custody died and paid the ultimate price for BOPs egregious mishandling. The manner in which the government is bureaucratically seeking to thwart Winners appeal does not bode well for prisoners seeking to invoke the First Step Act to win compassionate release. Prosecutors claim [PDF], Winner alleged, without documentary support, that on April 8, 2020, she submitted a written request to the warden of FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, asking that he petition the Bureau of Prisons for a reduction of her sentence. [Note: Part of this is quoted from Winners appeal, but the government didnt include an end quote.]The government insists it inquired, and the BOP never received any request. Only in her reply brief did Winner attempt to provide evidence showing she actually submitted a request. None of the documents though were Winners actual request or detailed what the basis of the request was. This is important because the date, as well as the content, of the request determines whether the defendant has appropriately exhausted her administrative remedies prior to filing in district court, the government added.As of May 1, according to BOP, seventy percent of the prisoners, who correctional staff choose to test, have tested positive for the coronavirus. Reuters special report, Death Sentence, which documented the hidden coronavirus toll in U.S. jails and prisons, called attention to figures compiled by the U.S. government, which appear to undercount the number of infections dramatically in correctional settings. Still, the government presses on. Because Winner did not include among her reply briefs exhibits a copy of her request to BOP, neither the district court nor this court can ascertain if she (as many inmates do) asked to be placed on home confinement rather than to be compassionately released. To this argument, Winners attorneys note they had Alison Grinter, one of Winners Texas-based attorneys, submit a statement to the appeals court under penalty of perjury that she helped Winner file a request not once, but twice. Realitys BOP correctional counselor Bill Pendergraft provided Reality with the form as emailed to him by Ms. Grinter, and BOP staff-member Mary Gruszka assured Reality that she would hand-deliver the completed form to the warden.

Finally (nearly a month later and after necessitating an appeal), the government acknowledges what Reality knew all alongthat BOP received the request(s) at least as of April 20, 2020. But the government claims it was not reviewed as a request for compassionate release. This is astounding given that the written request cited to the applicable compassionate release statute, Winners attorneys declare.If the BOP is not aware that Reality is seeking compassionate release under the First Step Act, members of the press have had no trouble following along, and the district court, Reality, and the government have all briefed the issue under the compassionate release statute.

The governments response fits in with a culture at the Justice Department under Attorney General Bill Barr, which has resulted in the release of only 1.8 percent of people in BOP custody during the pandemic. On May 26, ProPublica reported the Bureau of Prisons has a secret policy that made it harder for prisoners to qualify for release. A federal judge accused officials at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio the site of a deadly coronavirus outbreak cited by Barr in his order of moving too slowly to release inmates and thumbing their noses' at a directive Barr issued on releasing prisoners into home confinement. The judge instructed the government to expand the class of inmates eligible for home confinement by including inmates not only with minimum-risk scores, but also those said to have a low risk.The same day the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from the Justice Department to halt the lower courts order. There are 837 medically vulnerable inmates potentially eligible for transfer.Aside from the game being played by the BOP and prosecutors, Winners attorneys suggest one of the reasons the government is able to shiftily claim they never received a request is because the district court did not hold a hearing on evidence relevant to the case. The court could have heard from stakeholders at BOP and FMC Carswell about the BOP response generally and specifically at FMC Carswell, her attorneys assert. Winners legal team could have introduced via subpoenaed documents or testimony Realitys more recent medical records, which are (of course) in the possession, custody, and control of the government. All of this is critical evidence the district court needed in order to actually, appropriately, and effectively exercise its discretion. Unfortunately, Judge Randal Hall was largely uninterested in exercising discretion and deferred to the arguments of prosecutors. He did not verify statements prosecutors made about the BOPs coronavirus response. Billie Winner-Davis, who is Realitys mother, remains deeply concerned about the irreparable damage that is being done to her daughters mental state.

I have heard my daughter tell me, Mom, I am not okay, and as her mother, this tears me apart.

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DOJ Tries To Thwart Reality Winner's Appeal For Release From Prison - Shadowproof

Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security of the Peoples Republic of China (Beijing) Photo: Wikimapia

As Beijing moves to impose a national security law and mainland security agencies prepare to enter Hong Kong in larger numbers, people struggling to understand the peril they may face should read Edward Snowdens new book. Permanent Record, published last year, gives a full picture of the mass surveillance the U.S. has set up of your every email, website browse, social media interaction and phone call. The Chinese Communist Party is hoovering up similar information through its agencies.

First what is coming from our compatriots in Beijing. When needed, relevant national security organs of the Central Peoples Government will set up agencies in (Hong Kong) to fullfil relevant duties to safeguard national security, Chinese official Wang Zhen told the National Peoples Congress. The new law being imposed by Beijing empowers this. Residents can expect to see the Partys tough organisations such as the Ministry for State Security, the main domestic and external intelligence service, operating openly in the city, according to the Financial Times. This ministry, modeled on the Soviet Unions KGB, has been accused of arbitrary arrests and detentions as well as torture. Soon no resident of Hong Kong will be immune from the 3:00 am knock on the door and extraordinary rendition to a mainland court and jail.

Turning to Snowdens book we learn what the intelligence agencies of the USA and doubtlessly the Chinese Community Party are doing right now. For the somewhat less than tech-savvy the book is daunting. To simplify we turn to Pages 224 and 225 to give you an insight into what is being done to you and yours every day.

Imagine you are sitting in front of a computer, about to visit a website. You open a web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSAs (National Security Agency) most powerful weapons.

Snowden, who worked for the CIA and NSA in several countries, writes that your request passes through black servers stacked one on top of another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed at private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as US embassies and military bases. They contain two critical tools. TURMOIL handles passive collection, copying data coming through. TURBINE is in charge of active collection actively tampering with the users.

You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass, Snowden writes. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. These selectors can be whatever NSA (or the Communist Party) chooses, whatever they find suspicious: a particular email address, credit card or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as democracy or protest.

If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to NSAs servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agencys exploits malware programmes to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website youre trying to visit as much as on your computers software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE, which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to whatever website you requested.

Snowden said the end result is, you get the content you want, along with all the surveillance you dont, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.

Once the exploits are in your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

Chinas Great Firewall, operated by the Cyberspace Administration of China, is the entity charged with translating the Communist Partys policies into technical specifications. Carrie Lams Government insists it does not affect Hong Kong. Only the naive will believe, given the new security law, the rising number of Party agencies that will set up in Hong Kong and Ms Lam and her ministers prostrate posture before their Party bosses, that this will be true for much longer and likely isnt even now.

Seven years ago, Edward Snowden shocked the world by busting out of the American intelligence establishment, where he worked as a brilliant young systems analyst and administrator. He revealed the USA was secretly pursuing the means to collect and store every phone call, text message, email and internet browse made by everyone on the planet. As Permanent Record explains all your personal data is now stored by American intelligence agencies and they will have it forever. Soon the Communist Party will have similar data that it can potentially use against you, if it doesnt already.

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How intelligence agencies of USA, and doubtlessly China, are hoovering up data that can be used against you - Sai Kung Buzz

Webinar: Defending the US in Cyberspace

Register today for a May 22 webinar powered by RangeForce on Defending the United States in Cyberspace. Gordon Lawson, President of Rangeforce, is driving a discussion with Former Deputy Director of the NSA, Chris Inglis.

MANASSAS, Va., May 19, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a live webinar interview conducted by RangeForce President Gordon Lawson, Chris Inglis, Former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency and member of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, will share the Commissions dramatic findings, including the risks to U.S. intellectual property, privacy, critical infrastructure, and the integrity of the American election system. Hosted by HMG Strategy, the free webinar will take place Fri., May 22, 2020, at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT.

Register for Defending the U.S. in Cyberspace here.

Created by the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act and released in March 2020, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission is a bicameral, bipartisan, intergovernmental body charged with developing and articulating a comprehensive strategic approach to defending the United States in cyberspace. The Commissions report covers a broad array of findings, including what is being done to reshape the cyber ecosystem and why liability laws are needed for companies that sell software code with known vulnerabilities.

Mr. Inglis is an advisory board member at RangeForce, a provider of scalable, cloud-based training designed to upskill cyber professionals with access to timely, on-demand content. RangeForce integrates a real-world cyber range and continuous, hands-on learning with the performance-based analytics essential for enterprises to understand and continually improve their cybersecurity and IT teams capabilities.

Webinar attendees will learn from Mr.Ingliss experiences at the NSA as well as his views on topics such as:

Inglis began his career at NSA as a computer scientist within the National Computer Security Center. His NSA assignments included service across information assurance, policy, time-sensitive operations, and signals intelligence organizations. He was promoted to NSAs Senior Executive Service in 1997 and served in a variety of senior leadership assignments culminating in his selection as the NSA Deputy Director. A 1976 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Inglis holds advanced degrees in engineering and computer science from Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University. He is also a graduate of the Kellogg Business School Executive Development Program, the USAF Air War College, Air Command and Staff College and Squadron Officers School. Inglis military career included nine years of active service with the U.S. Air Force and twenty-one years with the Air National Guard from which he retired as a Brigadier General in 2006.

Registerto attend Defending the U.S. in Cyberspace at https://hmgstrategy.lpages.co/rangeforce-webinar-registration/.

About RangeForce

RangeForcedelivers the industrys only integrated cybersecurity simulation and skillsanalysis platform that combines a virtual cyber range with hands-on advanced cybersecurity training. Cyber and IT professionals from all industry verticals use RangeForce to qualify their new-hires, train up DevOps, IT, and Security Staff, and run CyberSiege simulations to evaluate team skills. Only RangeForce can accurately show users where expertise gaps exist, fill those gaps with highly-effective simulation-based training, and accurately report on the entire process. To learn more about RangeForce, visit http://www.rangeforce.com.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9113ae84-98f4-4055-8a15-7ba09080513e

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Chris Inglis, Former Deputy Director of the NSA, to Discuss and Field Questions on Cybersecurity Solarium Commission - GlobeNewswire

With these amendments being voted down by margin of 149 on Wednesday of last week the Bill is now likely to go to the House of Lords possibly by the first week of June and then back to the Commons in early July.

NSA Chief Executive Phil Stocker comments: With the Governments manifesto commitment to protect and not compromise on our environmental and animal welfare standard in trade deals, it is highly concerning that they will not cement this in legislation.

The pledge, after all, is one that stands for the term of this Government, however, this commitment needs to be far more permanent than that. This amendment is at the top of the list that NSA, and no doubt a good number of peers within the House of Lords will be keen to examine in more detail as the Bill begins its journey in the Lords, and we are firmly behind calls for a standards commission to take responsibility for standards equivalence decisions.

NSA is also still concerned over the lack of unity over the subject of food and farming and international trade and that decisions could be made without the benefit of the completion of our national food strategy.

Mr Stocker continues: Reading some of the comments made by MPs in the debate on Wednesday it is still clear that there are entirely opposing views on our future relating to food self-sufficiency and security, and international trade.

Of course, there is a balance that has to be struck and exports are a crucial part of our industry that help keep prices up and enable full product utilisation. But it surprises me that so few people in positions of power, even when we are in the depths of huge market disruption, remember that our domestic market is always the one we fall back on in times of concern, whether its brought about by animal disease, human pandemics, or political disagreements, and then they wonder why supply chains struggle to adapt.

One thing we must learn from the recent Covid-19 problems is that food security and resilient supply chains are equal in importance to environmental protection and climate change.

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NSA now looks to the Lords to protect production standards - Farming Life