What follows is a statement addressed to an investigative panel of the European Parliament looking into the nature and scope of U.S. surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency and its partner agencies in Europe. Subsequent to the statement are specific answers to written questions posed by the panel to Mr. Snowden. The original statement from which this was reproduced is available here as a pdf.

--Introductory Statement--

I would like to thank the European Parliament for the invitation to provide testimony for your inquiry into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens. The suspicionless surveillance programs of the NSA, GCHQ, and so many others that we learned about over the last year endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the foundation of liberal societies.

The first principle any inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political pressure to do so, no western government has been able to present evidence showing that such programs are necessary. In the United States, the heads of our spying services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass surveillance, but two independent White House reviews with access to the classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was untrue, as did a Federal Court.

Looking at the US government's reports here is valuable. The most recent of these investigations, performed by the White House's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined that the mass surveillance program investigated was not only ineffective -- they found it had never stopped even a single imminent terrorist attack -- but that it had no basis in law. In less diplomatic language, they discovered the United States was operating an unlawful mass surveillance program, and the greatest success the program had ever produced was discovering a taxi driver in the United States transferring $8,500 dollars to Somalia in 2007.

After noting that even this unimpressive success - uncovering evidence of a single unlawful bank transfer -- would have been achieved without bulk collection, the Board recommended that the unlawful mass surveillance program be ended. Unfortunately, we know from press reports that this program is still operating today.

I believe that suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe. By squandering precious, limited resources on "collecting it all," we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at the expense of traditional, proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified.

Despite the extraordinary intrusions of the NSA and EU national governments into private communications world-wide, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "Underwear Bomber," was allowed to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United States in 2009. The 290 persons on board were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he failed to detonate the device. While even Mutallab's own father warned the US government he was dangerous in November 2009, our resources were tied up monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary tip-off didn't get Mutallab a dedicated US investigator. All we gave him was a US visa.

Nor did the US government's comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite the Russians specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn't do more than a cursory investigation -- although they did plenty of worthless computer-based searching - and failed to discover the plot. 264 people were injured, and 3 died. The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on monitoring the call records of everyone in America.

This should not have happened. I worked for the United States' Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency. I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue. And I have risked my life, my family, and my freedom to tell you the truth.

The NSA granted me the authority to monitor communications world-wide using its mass surveillance systems, including within the United States. I have personally targeted individuals using these systems under both the President of the United States' Executive Order 12333 and the US Congress' FAA 702. I know the good and the bad of these systems, and what they can and cannot do, and I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under penalty of perjury that this is true.

These are not the capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety, and threatens our way of life.

If even the US government, after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and unnecessary, continues to operate to engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem. I consider the United States Government to be generally responsible, and I hope you will agree with me. Accordingly, this begs the question many legislative bodies implicated in mass surveillance have sought to avoid: if even the US is willing to knowingly violate the rights of billions of innocents -- and I say billions without exaggeration -- for nothing more substantial than a "potential" intelligence advantage that has never materialized, what are other governments going to do?

Whether we like it or not, the international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by the work of bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience of spies is more valuable than the rights of their citizens, the inevitable result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe. Thank you.

I will now respond to the submitted questions. Please bear in mind that I will not be disclosing new information about surveillance programs: I will be limiting my testimony to information regarding what responsible media organizations have entered into the public domain. For the record, I also repeat my willingness to provide testimony to the United States Congress, should they decide to consider the issue of unconstitutional mass surveillance.

--Rapporteur Claude Moraes MEP, S&D Group--

Given the focus of this Inquiry is on the impact of mass surveillance on EU citizens, could you elaborate on the extent of cooperation that exists between the NSA and EU Member States in terms of the transfer and collection of bulk data of EU citizens?

One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers. These efforts to interpret new powers out of vague laws is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers' insistence that legal limits be respected, effects the GCHQ internally described in its own documents as "damaging public debate."

In recent public memory, we have seen these FAD "legal guidance" operations occur in both Sweden and the Netherlands, and also faraway New Zealand. Germany was pressured to modify its G-10 law to appease the NSA, and it eroded the rights of German citizens under their constitution. Each of these countries received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under the guise of the US Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries' communications. The ultimate result of the NSA's guidance is that the right of ordinary citizens to be free from unwarranted interference is degraded, and systems of intrusive mass surveillance are being constructed in secret within otherwise liberal states, often without the full awareness of the public.

Once the NSA has successfully subverted or helped repeal legal restrictions against unconstitutional mass surveillance in partner states, it encourages partners to perform "access operations." Access operations are efforts to gain access to the bulk communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions, normally beginning with those that handle the greatest volume of communications. Sometimes the NSA provides consultation, technology, or even the physical hardware itself for partners to "ingest" these massive amounts of data in a manner that allows processing, and it does not take long to access everything. Even in a country the size of the United States, gaining access to the circuits of as few as three companies can provide access to the majority of citizens' communications. In the UK, Verizon, British Telecommunications, Vodafone, Global Crossing, Level 3, Viatel, and Interoute all cooperate with the GCHQ, to include cooperation beyond what is legally required.

By the time this general process has occurred, it is very difficult for the citizens of a country to protect the privacy of their communications, and it is very easy for the intelligence services of that country to make those communications available to the NSA -- even without having explicitly shared them. The nature of the NSA's "NOFORN," or NO FOREIGN NATIONALS classification, when combined with the fact that the memorandum agreements between NSA and its foreign partners have a standard disclaimer stating they provide no enforceable rights, provides both the NSA with a means of monitoring its partner's citizens without informing the partner, and the partner with a means of plausible deniability.

The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn't search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn't search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national government's spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.

The Parliament should ask the NSA and GCHQ to deny that they monitor the communications of EU citizens, and in the absence of an informative response, I would suggest that the current state of affairs is the inevitable result of subordinating the rights of the voting public to the prerogatives of State Security Bureaus. The surest way for any nation to become subject to unnecessary surveillance is to allow its spies to dictate its policy.

The right to be free unwarranted intrusion into our private effects -- our lives and possessions, our thoughts and communications -- is a human right. It is not granted by national governments and it cannot be revoked by them out of convenience. Just as we do not allow police officers to enter every home to fish around for evidence of undiscovered crimes, we must not allow spies to rummage through our every communication for indications of disfavored activities.

Could you comment on the activities of EU Member States intelligence agencies in these operations and how advanced their capabilities have become in comparison with the NSA?

In terms of the mass surveillance programmes already revealed through the press, what proportion of the mass surveillance activities do these programmes account for? Are there many other programmes, undisclosed as of yet, that would impact on EU citizens rights?

--Shadow Rapporteur Sophie Int'Veld MEP, ALDE Group--

Are there adequate procedures in the NSA for staff to signal wrongdoing?

The first were well-meaning but hushed warnings not to "rock the boat," for fear of the sort of retaliation that befell former NSA whistleblowers like Wiebe, Binney, and Drake. All three men reported their concerns through the official, approved process, and all three men were subject to armed raids by the FBI and threats of criminal sanction. Everyone in the Intelligence Community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations.

The second were similarly well-meaning but more pointed suggestions, typically from senior officials, that we should let the issue be someone else's problem. Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns, no one at NSA could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.

Do you feel you had exhausted all avenues before taking the decision to go public?

It is important to remember that this is legal dilemma did not occur by mistake. US whistleblower reform laws were passed as recently as 2012, with the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but they specifically chose to exclude Intelligence Agencies from being covered by the statute. President Obama also reformed a key executive Whistleblower regulation with his 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 19, but it exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.

Do you think procedures for whistleblowing have been improved now?

What is your relationship with the Russian and Chinese authorities, and what are the terms on which you were allowed to stay originally in Hong Kong and now in Russia?

Could we help you in any way, and do you seek asylum in the EU?

As for asylum, I do seek EU asylum, but I have yet to receive a positive response to the requests I sent to various EU member states. Parliamentarians in the national governments have told me that the US, and I quote, "will not allow" EU partners to offer political asylum to me, which is why the previous resolution on asylum ran into such mysterious opposition. I would welcome any offer of safe passage or permanent asylum, but I recognize that would require an act of extraordinary political courage.

Can you confirm cyber-attacks by the NSA or other intelligence agencies on EU institutions, telecommunications providers such as Belgacom and SWIFT, or any other EU-based companies?

--Shadow Rapporteur Cornelia Ernst MEP, GUE Group--

In your view, how far can the surveillance measures you revealed be justified by national security and from your experience is the information being used for economic espionage? What could be done to resolve this?

The UK's GCHQ is the prime example of this, due to what they refer to as a "light oversight regime," which is a bureaucratic way of saying their spying activities are less restricted than is proper. Since that light oversight regime was revealed, we have learned that the GCHQ is intercepting and storing unprecedented quantities of ordinary citizens' communications on a constant basis, both within the EU and without. There is no argument that could convince an open court that such activities were necessary and proportionate, and it is for this reason that such activities are shielded from the review of open courts.

In the United States, we use a secret, rubber-stamp Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that only hears arguments from the government. Out of approximately 34,000 government requests over 33 years, the secret court rejected only 11. It should raise serious concerns for this committee, and for society, that the GCHQ's lawyers consider themselves fortunate to avoid the kind of burdensome oversight regime that rejects 11 out of 34,000 requests. If that's what heavy oversight looks like, what, pray tell, does the GCHQ's "light oversight" look like?

Let's explore it. We learned only days ago that the GCHQ compromised a popular Yahoo service to collect images from web cameras inside citizens' homes, and around 10% of these images they take from within people's homes involve nudity or intimate activities. In the same report, journalists revealed that this sort of webcam data was searchable via the NSA's XKEYSCORE system, which means the GCHQ's "light oversight regime" was used not only to capture bulk data that is clearly of limited intelligence value and most probably violates EU laws, but to then trade that data with foreign services without the knowledge or consent of any country's voting public.

We also learned last year that some of the partners with which the GCHQ was sharing this information, in this example the NSA, had made efforts to use evidence of religious conservatives' association with sexually explicit material of the sort GCHQ was collecting as a grounds for destroying their reputations and discrediting them. The "Release to Five Eyes" classification of this particular report, dated 2012, reveals that the UK government was aware of the NSA's intent to use sexually explicit material in this manner, indicating a deepening and increasingly aggressive partnership. None of these religious conservatives were suspected of involvement in terrorist plots: they were targeted on the basis of their political beliefs and activism, as part of a class the NSA refers to as "radicalizers."

I wonder if any members of this committee have ever advocated a position that the NSA, GCHQ, or even the intelligence services of an EU member state might attempt to construe as "radical"? If you were targeted on the basis of your political beliefs, would you know? If they sought to discredit you on the basis of your private communications, could you discover the culprit and prove it was them? What would be your recourse?

And you are parliamentarians. Try to imagine the impact of such activities against ordinary citizens without power, privilege, or resources. Are these activities necessary, proportionate, and an unquestionable matter of national security? A few weeks ago we learned the GCHQ has hired scientists to study how to create divisions amongst activists and disfavored political groups, how they attempt to discredit and destroy private businesses, and how they knowingly plant false information to misdirect civil discourse.

To directly answer your question, yes, global surveillance capabilities are being used on a daily basis for the purpose of economic espionage. That a major goal of the US Intelligence Community is to produce economic intelligence is the worst kept secret in Washington.

In September, we learned the NSA had successfully targeted and compromised the world's major financial transaction facilitators, such as Visa and SWIFT, which released documents describe as providing "rich personal information," even data that "is not about our targets". Again, these documents are authentic and unmodified - a fact the NSA itself has never once disputed.

In August, we learned the NSA had targeted Petrobras, an energy company. It would be the first of a long list of US energy targets. But we should be clear these activities are not unique to the NSA or GCHQ. Australia's DSD targeted Sri Mulyani Indrawati, a finance minister and Managing Director of the World Bank. Report after report has revealed targeting of G-8 and G-20 summits. Mass surveillance capabilities have even been used against a climate change summit.

Recently, governments have shifted their talking points from claiming they only use mass surveillance for "national security" purposes to the more nebulous "valid foreign intelligence purposes." I suggest this committee consider that this rhetorical shift is a tacit acknowledgment by governments that they recognize they have crossed beyond the boundaries of justifiable activities. Every country believes its "foreign intelligence purposes" are "valid," but that does not make it so. If we are prepared to condemn the economic spying of our competitors, we must be prepared to do the same of our allies. Lasting peace is founded upon fundamental fairness.

The international community must agree to common standards of behavior, and jointly invest in the development of new technical standards to defend against mass surveillance. We rely on common systems, and the French will not be safe from mass surveillance until Americans, Argentines, and Chinese are as well.

The good news is that there are solutions. The weakness of mass surveillance is that it can very easily be made much more expensive through changes in technical standards: pervasive, end-to-end encryption can quickly make indiscriminate surveillance impossible on a cost- effective basis. The result is that governments are likely to fall back to traditional, targeted surveillance founded upon an individualized suspicion. Governments cannot risk the discovery of their exploits by simply throwing attacks at every "endpoint," or computer processor on the end of a network connection, in the world. Mass surveillance, passive surveillance, relies upon unencrypted or weakly encrypted communications at the global network level.

If there had been better independent and public oversight over the intelligence agencies, do you think this could have prevented this kind of mass surveillance? What conditions would need to be fulfilled, both nationally and internationally?

The oversight of intelligence agencies should always be performed by opposition parties, as under the democratic model, they always have the most to lose under a surveillance state. Additionally, we need better whistleblower protections, and a new commitment to the importance of international asylum. These are important safeguards that protect our collective human rights when the laws of national governments have failed.

European governments, which have traditionally been champions of human rights, should not be intimidated out of standing for the right of asylum against political charges, of which espionage has always been the traditional example. Journalism is not a crime, it is the foundation of free and informed societies, and no nation should look to others to bear the burden of defending its rights.

Shadow Rapporteur Axel Voss MEP, EPP Group

Why did you choose to go public with your information?

That our governments are even today unwilling to allow independent review of the secret policies enabling mass surveillance of innocents underlines governments' lack of faith that these programs are lawful, and this provides stronger testimony in favor of the rightfulness of my actions than any words I might write.

Did you exhaust all possibilities before taking the decision to go public?

It is important to remember that this is legal dilemma did not occur by mistake. US whistleblower reform laws were passed as recently as 2012, with the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but they specifically chose to exclude Intelligence Agencies from being covered by the statute. President Obama also reformed a key executive Whistleblower regulation with his 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 19, but it exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.

Are you aware that your revelations have the potential to put at risk lives of innocents and hamper efforts in the global fight against terrorism?

The ongoing revelations about unlawful and improper surveillance are the product of a partnership between the world's leading journalistic outfits and national governments, and if you can show one of the governments consulted on these stories chose not to impede demonstrably fatal information from being published, I invite you to do so. The front page of every newspaper in the world stands open to you.

Did the Russian secret service approach you?

But I didn't take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I'm sure they were disappointed, it doesn't take long for an intelligence service to realize when they're out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly fearless journalist with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high.

I would also add, for the record, that the United States government has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence at all of any relationship between myself and the Russian intelligence service.

Who is currently financing your life?

--Shadow Rapporteur, Timothy Kirkhope MEP, ECR Group--

You have stated previously that you want the intelligence agencies to be more accountable to citizens, however, why do you feel this accountability does not apply to you? Do you therefore, plan to return to the United States or Europe to face criminal charges and answer questions in an official capacity, and pursue the route as an official whistle-blower?

Fortunately, we live in a global, interconnected world where, when national laws fail like this, our international laws provide for another level of accountability, and the asylum process provides a means of due process for individuals who might otherwise be wrongly deprived of it. In the face of the extraordinary campaign of persecution brought against me by my the United States government on account of my political beliefs, which I remind you included the grounding of the President of Bolivia's plane by EU Member States, an increasing number of national governments have agreed that a grant of political asylum is lawful and appropriate.

Polling of public opinion in Europe indicates I am not alone in hoping to see EU governments agree that blowing the whistle on serious wrongdoing should be a protected act.

Do you still plan to release more files, and have you disclosed or been asked to disclose any information regarding the content of these files to Chinese and Russian authorities or any names contained within them?

BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is very good at making speeches, especially to Jews, neocons and such, who jump up and applaud wildly at everything he says, including that tomorrow the sun will rise in the west.

The question is: is he good at anything else?

HIS FATHER, an ultra-ultra-Rightist, once said about him that he is quite unfit to be prime minister, but that he could be a good foreign minister. What he meant was that Binyamin does not have the depth of understanding needed to guide the nation, but that he is good at selling any policy decided upon by a real leader.

(Reminding us of the characterization of Abba Eban by David Ben-Gurion: "He is very good at explaining, but you must tell him what to explain.")

This week Netanyahu was summoned to Washington. He was supposed to approve John Kerry's new "framework" agreement, which would serve as a basis for restarting the peace negotiations, which so far have come to naught.

On the eve of the event, President Barack Obama gave an interview to a Jewish journalist, blaming Netanyahu for the stalling of the "peace process" - as if there had ever been a peace process.

Netanyahu arrived with an empty bag - meaning a bag full of empty slogans. The Israeli leadership had striven mightily for peace, but could not progress at all because of the Palestinians. It is Mahmoud Abbas who is to blame, because he refuses to recognize Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

What...hmm...about the settlements, which have been expanding during the last year at a hectic pace? Why should the Palestinians negotiate endlessly, while at the same time the Israeli government takes more and more of the land which is the substance of the negotiations? (As the classic Palestinian argument goes: "We negotiate about dividing a pizza, and in the meantime Israel is eating the pizza.")

Obama steeled himself to confront Netanyahu, AIPAC and their congressional stooges. He was about to twist the arms of Netanyahu until he cried "uncle" - the uncle being Kerry's "framework", which by now has been watered down to look almost like a Zionist manifesto. Kerry is frantic for an achievement, whatever its contents and discontents.

Netanyahu, looking for an instrument to rebuff the onslaught, was ready to cry as usual "Iran! Iran! Iran!" - when something unforeseen happened.

NAPOLEON FAMOUSLY exclaimed: "Give me generals who are lucky!" He would have loved General Bibi.

Because, on the way to confront a newly invigorated Obama, there was an explosion that shook the world:

Ukraine.

It was like the shots that rang out in Sarajevo a hundred years ago. The international tranquility was suddenly shattered. The possibility of a major war was in the air.

Netanyahu's visit disappeared from the news. Obama, occupied with a historic crisis, just wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible. Instead of the severe admonition of the Israeli leader, he got away with some hollow compliments. All the wonderful speeches Netanyahu had prepared were left unspeeched. Even his usual triumphant speech at AIPAC evoked no interest.

All because of the upheaval in Kiev.

BY NOW, innumerable articles have been written about the crisis. Historical associations abound.

Though Ukraine means "borderland", it was often at the center of European events. One must pity Ukrainian schoolchildren. The changes in the history of their country were constant and extreme. At different times Ukraine was a European power and a poor downtrodden territory, extremely rich ("the breadbasket of Europe") or abjectly poor, attacked by neighbors who captured their people to sell them as slaves or attacking their neighbors to enlarge their country.

The Ukraine's relationship with Russia is even more complex. In a way, the Ukraine is the heartland of Russian culture, religion and orthography. Kiev was far more important than Moscow, before becoming the centerpiece of Muscovite imperialism.

In the Crimean War of the 1850s, Russia fought valiantly against a coalition of Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia, and eventually lost. The war broke out over Christian rights in Jerusalem, and included a long siege of Sevastopol. The world remembers the charge of the Light Brigade. A British woman called Florence Nightingale established the first organization to tend the wounded on the battlefield.

In my lifetime, Stalin murdered millions of Ukrainians by deliberate starvation. As a result, most Ukrainians welcomed the German Wehrmacht in 1941 as liberators. It could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but unfortunately Hitler was determined to eradicate the Ukrainian "Untermenschen", in order to integrate the Ukraine into the German Lebensraum.

The Crimea suffered terribly. The Tatar people, who had ruled the peninsula in the past, were deported to Central Asia, then allowed to return decades later. Now they are a small minority, seemingly unsure of where their loyalties lie.

THE RELATIONSHIP between Ukraine and the Jews is no less complicated.

Some Jewish writers, like Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand, believe that the Khazar empire that ruled the Crimea and neighboring territory a thousand years ago, converted to Judaism, and that most Ashkenazi Jews are descended from them. This would turn us all into Ukrainians. (Many early Zionist leaders indeed came from Ukraine.)

When Ukraine was a part of the extensive Polish empire, many Polish noblemen took hold of large estates there. They employed Jews as their managers. Thus the Ukrainian peasants came to look upon the Jews as the agents of their oppressors, and anti-Semitism became part of the national culture of Ukraine.

As we learned in school, at every turn of Ukrainian history, the Jews were slaughtered. The names of most Ukrainian folk-heroes, leaders and rebels who are revered in their homeland are, in Jewish consciousness, connected with awful pogroms.

Cossack Hetman (leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who liberated Ukraine from the Polish yoke, and who is considered by Ukrainians as the father of their nation, was one of the worst mass-murderers in Jewish history. Symon Petliura, who led the Ukrainian war against the Bolsheviks after World War I, was assassinated by a Jewish avenger.

Some elderly Jewish immigrants in Israel must find it hard to decide whom to hate more, the Ukrainians or the Russians (or the Poles, for that matter.)

PEOPLE AROUND the world find it also hard to choose sides.

The usual Cold-War zealots have it easy - they either hate the Americans or the Russians, out of habit.

As for me, the more I try to study the situation, the more unsure I become. This is not a black-or-white situation.

The first sympathy goes to the Maidan rebels. (Maidan is an Arab word meaning town square. Curious how it travelled to Kiev. Probably via Istanbul.)

They want to join the West, enjoy independence and democracy. What's wrong with that?

Nothing, except that they have dubious bedfellows. Neo-Nazis in their copycat Nazi uniforms, giving the Hitler salute and mouthing anti-Semitic slogans, are not very attractive. The encouragement they receive from Western allies, including the odious neocons, is off-putting.

On the other side, Vladimir Putin is also not very prepossessing. It's the old Russian imperialism all over again.

The slogan used by the Russians - the need to protect Russian-speaking people in a neighboring country - sounds eerily familiar. It is an exact copy of Adolf Hitler's claim in 1938 to protect the Sudeten Germans from the Czech monsters.

But Putin has some logic on his side. Sevastopol - the scene of heroic sieges both in the Crimean War and in World War II, is essential for his naval forces. The association with Ukraine is an important part of Russian world power aspirations.

A cold-blooded, calculating operator, of a kind now rare in the world, Putin uses the strong cards he has, but is very careful not to take too many risks. He is managing the crisis astutely, using Russia's obvious advantages. Europe needs his oil and gas, he needs Europe's capital and trade. Russia has a leading role in Syria and Iran. The US suddenly looks like a bystander.

I assume that in the end there will be a compromise. Russia will retain a footing in the coming Ukrainian leadership. Both sides will proclaim victory, as they should.

(By the way, for those here who believe in the "One-State Solution": Another multicultural state seems to be breaking apart.)

WHERE WILL this leave Netanyahu?

He has gained some months or years without any movement toward peace, and in the meantime can continue with the occupation and build settlements at a frantic pace.

That is the traditional Zionist strategy. Time is everything. Every postponement provides opportunities to create more facts on the ground.

Temple University took on the wrong adjunct professor when they terminated Dr. Anthony Monteiro's contract, without warning, in January. And Dr. Molefi Asante, the proponent of "Afrocentricity" who Monteiro and his student and community allies propelled to the chairmanship of the African American Studies Department after a bitter struggle with the administration, last year, chose the wrong man - and the wrong movement - to stab in the back.

Hundreds of community, labor and student activists gathered on Temple's North Philadelphia campus, on Monday, in a rally that began with the demand for Monteiro's reinstatement, and ended with a call for a "new paradigm" for the university and its relationship to the surrounding Black community. The activists' anger was directed as much at Asante as at Teresa Soufas, the Dean of Liberal Arts who fired Monteiro. University president Neil D. Theobald confirmed that it was Asante who asked Soufas to kick Monteiro off the faculty. Asante's name is now, deservedly, mud.

Dr. Monteiro was no stranger to the crowd outside Sullivan Hall, where Temple's board of trustees was meeting. They had participated with him in countless acts of solidarity with Mumia Abu Jamal and other political prisoners, and against imperial wars, perpetually high Black unemployment, police brutality, and Temple's own huge role in the gentrification of the city's neighborhoods. Many of these same activists had answered Monteiro's call for help in maintaining the autonomy of the African American Studies Department, after Dean Soufas appointed a white woman as interim chairman. The confrontation ended in Dr. Asante's appointment as chairman, with Monteiro's steadfast support.

"We are committed to alleviating poverty, alleviating sexism and racism, and how can we do that without appointing our own professors that we know will give us the quality education that we need to go out into these fields?" said Temple student Kashara Omira White, a member of PURP, People Utilizing Real Power, a student-community youth organization. "We're here trying to learn, trying to get this knowledge. So, we need Dr. Monteiro to be reinstated with tenure."

Henry Nicholas, the venerable president of Local 1199c of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, the largest representative of workers on campus, urged the crowd to take their grievances directly to the university's leadership. "We should be at the trustee's meeting right now, not here," he said.

Veteran Philadelphia anti-hunger and homelessness activist Sacaree Rhodes agreed. She blasted both Asante and Soufas as enemies of the people. "Soufas is a goddamn racist," said Sacaree.

"Her friend Dr. Asante needs to atone for what he's done. Dean Soufas stated that Dr. Asante came to her and asked for her to fire Dr. Monteiro. If you are romancing about what Dr. Asante did [when he created the first doctoral program in African American Studies, in 1987], he didn't do it by himself. If it wasn't for the Black community, this department wouldn't be here. We can't let Asante or anybody else, Black, purple or blue, bullshit Black people and poor people in this community. Now, if he is working with her [Soufas], he's gonna have to atone. Because Dr. Monteiro came to me and the community almost in tears, begging and pleading, asking us to stand up for Asante. Then [Asante] turns around and takes a knife, and stabs him in his back - and he's working in concert with Dean Soufas, who said there is no Black community.

"Asante knows what he did is wrong. We're demanding that Soufas' ass be put out, and she's gonna say, He ain't got no game no more. Do you think she's gonna leave him here?

"People like Asante sit around and plot on Black people. And then use the word African-centricity. What the fuck is that? You've got to stop romanticizing about treachery.

"This man [Monteiro] has been an honorable Black man in this community.

"We need to let them know that we know where they are and that we demand justice for Dr. Monteiro, we demand justice for those children in public housing, we demand justice for these Black men in the City of Philadelphia that who don't get none of this goddamn work when they're building all these ivory towers. We demand justice for all the Black people who are being gentrified in this city. You cannot stand here, you have to take the fight to them."

"Now, you Temple police, come on, 'cause I'm going in this damn building."

"We're demanding that Soufas' ass be put out."

More demonstrators poured into the building, staging a sit-in in the second-floor hallway. Dr. Monteiro and a handful of student and community representatives were allowed to be part of a second meeting, this one presided over by university president Neil Theobald, who confirmed Dr. Asante's role in Monteiro's dismissal. Theobald agreed that holding regularly scheduled meetings with community representatives was "a great idea - I'm in favor of it," but balked at Rhodes' contention that it was his duty to discuss whatever issues the community thought pertinent, including raging gentrification. He congratulated himself on deigning to meet with community members ("This just shows you how open we are to listening to you") and promised to review Monteiro's firing.

Afterwards, Dr. Monteiro, who had maintained a low-key presence at the meeting, called the events a "game changer" because "they saw there was a wide representation of people from the community who were supporting the students."

Corporate Globalism in Higher Education

Monteiro had earlier shared his comprehensive vision of the struggle at Temple with the massed protesters outside Sullivan Hall. It was a tour de force:

"In recent decades, Temple has become a powerful institution, with large real estate holdings as they gentrify north-central Philadelphia. Temple now has a global reach extending into Asia and Europe.... It sees itself as a 21st century university and a global force. Pride, rather than the spirit of service to humanity, is the culture that guides most of the top administration of this university. They see themselves as part of the global 1%. We, on the other hand, constitute a part of the global 99%.

"Indeed, Temple is a powerful institution. But Temple is not a great institution. Temple cannot be great unless Temple commits itself to serve.

"Temple has existed in North Philadelphia for over a hundred years. It is a neighbor to Black Philadelphia. Russell Conwell, the founder of Temple, founded this university on the principle of serving the poor and working class. However, his vision was incomplete because he did not see the Black poor and the Black working class.... In the late 1950s, Temple hired a president, Marvin Wachman, a Jewish socialist who had previously been the president of the university that I graduated from, Lincoln University. I was particularly proud that Temple had decided to appoint as its president, not only a socialist but an anti-racist. Marvin Wachman attempted to extend and deepen the philosophy of Russell Conwell. However, several presidents since Wachman have whittled away at a moral vision of inclusion and service to the poor and working class. We are, therefore, where we are today, because of the abandonment of the vision of service to the working class; a university that wants to be a player in a global order that oppresses billions of people.

"Along with the demand for my reinstatement with tenure, is the demand that Dean Soufas be removed from her position. Her tenure has been troubled. It has been based upon a demonstrable misperception, a demonstrable lack of knowledge, and a flawed racial philosophy. It is time for a new beginning in the College of Liberal Arts."

Dean of Liberal Arts Teresa Soufas, who infamously waved her finger in Dr. Molefi Asante's face at the height of the battle over her choice of a white woman academic with no expertise in African American studies as interim head of the department, personified the university's contempt for Black people, said Montiero.

"Her own statement that she did not see a Black community in the center of this great city...this all manifested a flawed racial philosophy that suggested that the poor were poor because there was something wrong with them.

"If you don't see a Black community, you're saying that they can't be stakeholders in what this university becomes."

"Temple strides the two poorest zip codes in the city of Philadelphia. A poor zip code in the City of Philadelphia means that you have extreme poor people and extremely poor children. And, as they build tall buildings, they look down upon poverty and they don't see it, because they don't see a Black community. But, if you don't see a Black community, you're saying that they can't be stakeholders in what this university becomes. You're saying, they have no moral vision that has any significance for this university. You're saying that they should forever be marginalized, imprisoned, impoverished, and made unemployed.

"But, to this problem of the pointing of fingers in the faces of Black men, and this assumption that Black men are, in essence, a threat to academic normalcy. That if you want to take the African American Studies Department, or the Philosophy Department, or the Sociology Department, or the College of Liberal Arts, in a creative direction, think about eliminating the number of Black men because they represent something that is pathological and abnormal in American society, and therefore, you can justify pointing a finger in the face of a Black colleague of yours."

Red-baiting has all along been the subtext of the university's - and Molefi Asante's - hostility to Monteiro. He addressed the issue, directly:

"If it's a question of, Dr. Monteiro, you're too political - well, if I'm too political when I'm standing with Mumia and political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, then are you telling me I should not have stood with Nelson Mandela?

"Some will say, You're a Marxist and a socialist (cheers). That you teach W.E.B. Dubois' magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America. That you teach C.L.R. James and Amiri Baraka. Are you telling me that you can have a Department of African American Studies without teaching the radical tradition and the traditions of socialism? And, if that's what you're telling me, then you're telling me that you want a department built on a lie.

"I am not going to back up and say that my life-world is going to be transformed because rich people now want to inhabit the cities. I'm going to fight that. And, in fighting against gentrification, we are fighting against poverty; we're fighting against the prison industrial complex.

"A lot of people want to study the prison industrial complex but not study the effect of neoliberal, corporatized universities upon communities. These institutions are as negative in the life of communities as the prison industrial complex is.

Dr. Molefi Asante, the proponent of Afro-centricity, initially claimed to have been passive in Monteiro's termination, adding that he considered his colleague and one-time ally's presence in the department superfluous. However, Asante was outed as an instigator of the firing by both Soufas and university president Theobald. Although Dr. Monteiro avoided speaking Asante's name, everyone knew who he was talking about:

"It has been said by some, even written in newspapers, that Dr. Monteiro's not that important, that we can replace him with scores of professors; they're out there.

"They say that they're moving in a new direction, ill-defined though it be. And in this new direction we don't need the Black radical tradition. I think, to those people, we would ask that they come forward with their proposal, not just for African American Studies but for the university as a whole. And if you think that African American Studies can go forward without the African American community, you must believe that you can have Black art and Black music without Black people."

It will be a long struggle, said Monteiro, one that requires that community and students take the offensive and envision the reinvention of the university.

"I propose that that person proceed from the philosophical grounding that I call the Russell Conwell, Marvin Wachman, WEB Dubois paradigm for higher education.

"Russell Conwell's commitment to the poor and working class, all be they immigrant and white.

"Marvin Walkman's socialism, arising out of the European holocaust against the Jews, teaching and heading an historically Black college, Lincoln University, and then coming here to Temple to infuse that ideology, and extend Russell Conwell's vision.

"But then, higher education cannot be higher education without W.E.B. Dubois, without his understanding of the function and purpose of higher education.

"And so I would propose that a project for all of us that we think of the type of Dean of the College of Liberal Arts that we need, and that Philadelphia needs, and that North Philadelphia needs. And that person should be acquainted when they come here with the philosophy of Russell Conwell, Marvin Wachman and W.E.B. Dubois. I don't care how long your resume is, but if you don't understand basic principles you can't do the job."

One of the more bizarre aspects of the last nine months of Snowden revelations is how top political officials in other nations have repeatedly demonstrated, or even explicitly claimed, wholesale ignorance about their nations' cooperation with the National Security Agency, as well as their own spying activities. This has led to widespread speculation about the authenticity of these reactions: Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be, in order to distance themselves from surveillance operations that became highly controversial once disclosed?

In Germany, when Der Spiegel first reported last June that the NSA was engaged in mass spying aimed at the German population, Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior officials publicly expressed outrage - only for that paper to then reveal documents showing extensive cooperation between the NSA and the German spy agency BND. In the Netherlands, a cabinet minister was forced to survive a no-confidence vote after he admitted to having wrongfully attributed the collection of metadata from 1.8 million calls to the NSA rather than the Dutch spying agency.

In the UK, Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until 2012, insisted that ministers were in "utter ignorance" about even the largest GCHQ spying program, known as Tempora, "or its US counterpart, the NSA's Prism," as well as "about their extraordinary capability to hoover up and store personal emails, voice contact, social networking activity and even internet searches." A similar controversy arose in the U.S., when the White House claimed that President Obama was kept unaware of the NSA's surveillance of Merkel's personal cell phone and those of other allied leaders. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein claimed the same ignorance, while an unnamed NSA source told a German newspaper that the White House knew.

A new NSA document published today by The Intercept sheds considerable light on these questions. The classified document contains an internal NSA interview with an official from the SIGINT Operations Group in NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate. Titled "What Are We After with Our Third Party Relationships? - And What Do They Want from Us, Generally Speaking?", the discussion explores the NSA's cooperative relationship with its surveillance partners. Upon being asked whether political shifts within those nations affect the NSA's relationships, the SIGINT official explains why such changes generally have no effect: because only a handful of military officials in those countries are aware of the spying activities. Few, if any, elected leaders have any knowledge of the surveillance.

Are our foreign intelligence relationships usually insulated from short-term political ups and downs, or not?

(S//SI//REL) For a variety of reasons, our intelligence relationships are rarely disrupted by foreign political perturbations, international or domestic. First, we are helping our partners address critical intelligence shortfalls, just as they are assisting us. Second, in many of our foreign partners' capitals, few senior officials outside of their defense-intelligence apparatuses are witting to any SIGINT connection to the U.S./NSA [emphasis added].

The implications for democratic accountability are clear. In an October Guardian op-ed, Huhne, the British former cabinet minister, noted that "when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ and the [NSA], the depth of my 'privileged information' has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian." Detailing what appears to be the systematic attempt to keep political officials in the dark, he wrote: "The Snowden revelations put a giant question mark into the middle of our surveillance state. It is time our elected representatives insisted on some answers before destroying the values we should protect."

The dangers posed by a rogue national security state, operating in secret and without the knowledge of democratically elected officials, have long been understood. After serving two terms as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower famously worried in his 1961 Farewell Address about the accumulated power of the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry," warning of what he called the "grave implications" of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He urged citizens: "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

A secret GCHQ memo, reported by the Guardian in October, demonstrates that the agency's primary motive for concealing its surveillance activities is that disclosure could trigger what it called "damaging public debate," as well as legal challenges throughout Europe. Those fears became realized when, in the wake of Snowden revelations, privacy lawsuits against the agency were filed in Europe, GCHQ officials were forced to publicly testify for the first time before Parliament, and an EU Parliamentary inquiry earlier this year concluded NSA/GCHQ activities were likely illegal. The British agency was also concerned about "damage to partner relationships if sensitive information were accidentally released in open court," given that such disclosures could make citizens in other countries aware, for the first time, of their government's involvement in mass surveillance.