As members of the Hong Kong mediascrambled to locate Edward Snowden on Monday, journalists in the U.S. flew to Hawaii to learn more about the life the former National Security Agency contracter left behind.
Snowden revealed his identity on Sunday as the person responsible for giving The Guardian and The Washington Post top-secret documents uncovering the NSA's secret surveillance programs. In an interview with The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, Snowden said that he lived a comfortable life in Hawaii with his girlfriend, but was willing to give that all up to protect "basic liberties for people around the world."
Snowden also said that he told his girlfriend that he had to be away for a few weeks, but was vague about the reason. "That is not an uncommon occurrence for someone who has spent the last decade working in the intelligence world," Snowden told Greenwald. Snowden then boarded a flight to Hong Kong on May 20. The Associated Press reported that a real estate agent said Snowden and his girlfriend moved out of the home they shared on May 1.
Inside Edition reportedly identified Snowden's alleged girlfriend, a 28-year-old dancernamed Lindsay Mills. Multiple sources reported that Mills was a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She took to her blog on Monday to seemingly describe her current situation:
My world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me lost at sea without a compass. Surely there will be villainous pirates, distracting mermaids, and tides of change in this new open water chapter of my journey. But at the moment all I can feel is alone.
Mills' blog carries the title "L's Journey," with the subtitle "Adventures of a world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero." Buzzfeed put together a post titled "This Might Be The Girlfriend Edward Snowden Left Behind" that featured multiple photos from Mills' blog, including photographs of her boyfriend she described as "E."
Russia would consider granting asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.
Snowden fled the United States after leaking information about the NSA's secret surveillance of phone records and information collected by Internet providers. Afterrevealing his identity to the public, he said that he had sought refuge in Hong Kong, and was hoping "to seek asylum in a country with shared values."
Snowden has not made any requests for asylum yet, but Peskov told Russian newspaper Kommersant, "If such an appeal is given, it will be considered."
"We'll act according to facts," he said. The Guardian reported Tuesday that the statement prompted other Russian officials to declare their support for Snowden. As the newspaper noted, the country has a poor record for human rights and free speech, but has been known to support critics of the United States.
The revelation that Snowden fled to Hong Kong ignited debate about whether it was a wise choice. Some experts argued that Hong Kong's government will likely hand him over to the United States, citing the treaty that guarantees extradition with the exception of outstanding circumstances. Snowden is believed to have checked out of the hotel where he was staying on Monday, and his current whereabouts are unknown.
NEW YORK -- The U.S. government monitors threats to national security with the help of nearly 500,000 people like Edward Snowden – employees of private firms who have access to the government's most sensitive secrets.
When Snowden, an employee of one of those firms, Booz Allen Hamilton, revealed details of two National Security Agency surveillance programs, he spotlighted the risks of making so many employees of private contractors a key part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, called Snowden's leak "gut wrenching."
The leak could lead the nation's intelligence agencies to reconsider their reliance on outside contractors, said Joseph Augustyn, a former senior CIA official and principal at Booz Allen.
"I think it would call into question the role of the defense contractors," Augustyn said.
Booz Allen, based in McLean, Va., provides consulting services, technology support and analysis to U.S. government agencies and departments. Last year, 98 percent of the company's $5.9 billion in revenue came from U.S. government contracts. Three-fourths of its 25,000 employees hold government security clearances. Half the employees have top secret clearances.
The company has established deep ties with the government – the kinds of ties that contractors pursue and covet. Contractors stand to gain an edge on competitors by hiring people with the most closely held knowledge of the thinking inside agencies they want to serve and the best access to officials inside. That typically means former government officials.
The relationship often runs both ways: Clapper himself is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm's vice chairman, John "Mike" McConnell, held Clapper's position under George W. Bush.
"That really illustrates the ingrown nature of the relationship of NSA and its contractors," said Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
The ties between government and contract workers are so pervasive in Washington that those on each side are known by nicknames: Contractors are called "green badgers" for the color of their identification badges. Government workers, who sport blue, are known as "blue badgers."
The reliance on contractors for intelligence work ballooned after the 9/11 attacks. The government scrambled to improve and expand its ability to monitor the communication and movement of people who might threaten another attack.
"After 9/11, intelligence budgets were increased, new people needed to be hired," Augustyn said. "It was a lot easier to go to the private sector and get people off the shelf."
The reliance on the private sector has grown since then, in part because of Congress' efforts to limit the size of federal agencies and shrink the budget.
Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access "confidential and secret" government information, 1.1 million, or 21 percent, work for outside contractors, according to a report from Clapper's office. Of the 1.4 million who have the higher "top secret" access, 483,000, or 34 percent, work for contractors.
Applying for a security clearance requires disclosing one's job history, residences, education, spouses, relatives, friends, mental health, criminal activity, finances and allegiance. Investigators use that information to probe an applicant's past five years for confidential and secret clearance and 10 years for top secret clearance.
Investigators check with local law enforcement officials where applicants lived, worked or attended school. Sometimes, they issue lie-detector tests and psychological evaluations. A top secret clearance costs the government $4,005 per investigation, according to the Government Accountability Office. Lower-level security clearances cost $260.
Once given security clearance, workers can access offices, files and, most important, dedicated communications and computer networks that are walled off from the public.
Snowden previously worked for the CIA and likely obtained his security clearance there. But like others who leave the government to join private contractors, he was able to keep his clearance after he left and began working for outside firms.
Because clearances can take months or even years to acquire, government contractors often recruit workers who already have them.
Snowden says he accessed and downloaded the last of the documents that detailed the NSA surveillance program while working in an NSA office in Hawaii for Booz Allen, where he says he was earning $200,000 a year.
Analysts caution that any of the 1.4 million people with access to the nation's top secrets could have leaked information about the program – whether they worked for a contractor or the government. It was a government employee – U.S. Army Soldier Bradley Manning – who was responsible for the last major leak of classified material, in 2010.
But critics say reliance on contractors hasn't reduced the amount the government spends on defense, intelligence or other programs. Rather, they say it's just shifted work to private employers and reduced transparency. It becomes harder to track the work of those employees and determine whether they should all have access to government secrets.
"It's very difficult to know what contractors are doing and what they are billing for the work – or even whether they should be performing the work at all," said Scott Amey, an expert in contractor oversight and government transparency at Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan government accountability organization based in Washington. "It has muddied the waters."
Booz Allen has long navigated those waters well.
The firm was founded in 1914 and began serving the U.S. government in 1940, helping the Navy prepare for World War II. In 2008, it spun off the part of the firm that worked with private companies and abroad. That firm, called Booz & Co., is held privately.
Booz Allen was then acquired by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with its own deep ties to the government. In November 2010, Booz Allen went public. The Carlyle Group still owns two-thirds of the company's shares.
The firm is only moderately profitable, but profits have been rising fast. Booz Allen earned $240 million in profit on its $5.9 billion in revenue last year. That's up from $85 million in profit in 2011 and $25 million in 2010.
Investors haven't been impressed: The company's opening stock price in 2010 was $17. On Monday, it closed just a shade above that, at $17.54. Over the same period, the broader stock market has risen 27 percent.
Booz Allen relies far more on government contract work than do other major consultants such as Bain & Company, Accenture and Boston Consulting Group because it ceded its private-company work to Booz & Co. when the firms split.
Booz Allen has been trying to attract non-government work in hopes of diversifying its base of clients.
In a statement Sunday, the firm said Snowden had been employed for "less than three months" and was assigned to a team in Hawaii. It called the leaks "shocking" and a "grave violation" of the firm's code of conduct.
The firm declined to offer additional comment Monday.
A U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity said this is the second blow to the company in recent months: Booz Allen sought but failed to obtain a lucrative contract known as "Ramp" earlier this year.
The contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was to fill jobs at the CIA's National Clandestine Service, the agency's spy arm. The U.S. official asked not to be named because the official was not authorized to discuss the classified contract.
Former TransCanada Corp. employee Evan Vokes' impassioned testimony before a Canadian Senate committee last week painted "a very, very bleak picture of the pipeline industry in Canada, and probably by extension, the States," according to Sen. Betty Unger.
Vokes' allegations on Thursday against TransCanada, the Canadian company leading the controversial proposal to send tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast via theKeystone XL pipeline, were sobering: a "culture of noncompliance" and "coercion," with "deeply entrenched business practices that ignored legally required regulations and codes" and carries "significant public safety risks."
"It's organized crime, in my opinion," Vokes, an expert in pipeline welding and now whistleblower against his ex-employer, told The Huffington Post after the hearing. "The source of revenue is legal, but how they go about it isn't legal."
TransCanada quickly came to its own defense after learning of the attack.
"We take great exception to the claims by Mr. Vokes that we do not take safety and compliance issues seriously," company spokesman Shawn Howard told HuffPost. "Our track record and the safety of our energy infrastructure network shows that we do."
Vokes worked for TransCanada for five years until May 2012, when he said he was fired without cause. From his first days at the company, Vokes recalled raising concerns, or as he put it, "pointing out the obvious." He provided the Canada Senate with evidence supporting complaints of what he said were shoddy safety practices, including management pressure to retract a welding code violation on a natural gas line feeding a tar sands project in Alberta, and the use of "substandard materials" in the original Keystone pipeline that carried the heavy, molasses-like oil into U.S. Midwest markets.
"What I have documented is a mix of politics and commercial interests that has resulted in the false public claims of exceptional industry practice," Vokes told the Senate committee.
Today, Vokes said, he sees the same "breaches of construction quality" in portions of TransCanada's Keystone XL already laid in Texas. The advocacy group Public Citizen Texas posted a video highlighting what it says are dents, faulty welds and other anomalies that have been unearthed in recent weeks.
"What else are they cutting corners on? No one knows," said Vokes.
Damon Hill, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Safety Administration, said the agency is "in contact with TransCanada to discuss the results of recent inspections, the excavations of certain portions of the newly constructed pipeline, and to monitor the operator's activities to make any necessary repairs."
The anomalies that have been uncovered don't raise immediate concern for Richard Kuprewicz, president of the Redmond, Wash.-based pipeline safety firm Accufacts Inc. Still, Kuprewicz suggested that the industry is far from immune to safety issues.
"There is a tendency that the bigger the project, the harder it is to maintain control," Kuprewicz said. "You're just trying to do more things and so you've got to be sure management team has appropriate quality-control checks and balances."
One pressure, Kuprewicz added, is the "time value of money." The $7 billion Keystone XL project has now been stalled for three years as it awaits a permit from the Obama administration for the northern portion that crosses the U.S.-Canada border.
"Cash is only flowing when you're moving oil," Kuprewicz said.
Vokes said this industry reality showed itself to him as pressure to "step into unsound practice" and to "stop investigations." He said TransCanada managers forced him to take "stress leave" before he could finish submitting all of his documentation during an internal audit at the company.
"When he brought issues forward, TransCanada took Mr. Vokes' concerns seriously and believes it has treated him fairly and appropriately," said Howard, who would not provide a reason for Vokes' dismissal. "For legal reasons, we are unable to comment any further."
Don Wishart, a senior operations and major projects adviser at TransCanada, spoke in front of the same Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources on Feb. 12. In response to questions about an unnamed whistleblower, Wishart said the allegations were "administrative." He went on to suggest that tar sands oil "floats on water," which some scientists refute.
"What they presented to the Canadian Senate was a lie," Vokes told HuffPost.
"You don't know you're a whistleblower until the retaliation starts," he said. "The wrong-doers in positions of authority will do everything they can to discredit you."
Kuprewicz acknowledged the whistleblower label is something people "want to be careful about seeking," adding that it typically "doesn't go well in industry."
The Canadian senators expressed similar sentiments as they questioned Vokes on Thursday.
"I have enormous respect for you and the courage it's taken to come forward," said Sen. Judith Seidman. "I'm worried about Canadian safety as we look at building an increasingly larger infrastructure across the country."
At the same time, senators also demonstrated the Canadian government's push to get more tar sands oil flowing. "It's important for this country to get bitumen to the U.S.," said Sen. Michael MacDonald. "I also think it's important to do it safely."
On this point, Vokes doesn't disagree. He called oil and gas the "lifeblood" and said he believes it is possible to pipe it all safely. "I don't have a problem with what's in pipeline," said Vokes. "I have a problem if it comes outside the pipeline."
In an interview in April, Joe Oliver, Canada's minister of natural resources, told HuffPost that 99.9996% of oil going through U.S. pipelines is delivered safely.
Unger underscored this safety record, and asked Vokes to "rationalize" his seemingly incongruous allegations.
"I've been on several projects that were very nearly disasters. I'm surprised there aren't more accidents," Vokes responded, noting that pipeline problems may not result in accidents until decades later -- often "long after designers and those that constructed them have retired."
"There's thousands of cracks in the system -- it's just which ones will become the problem? It's low probability, high consequence," Vokes said.
"Regardless of my poor experiences with some individuals, there are still a lot of people that would like to do it right," added Vokes. "That's the only thing that is saving us."
ISTANBUL — Hundreds of riot police overran improvised barricades at Istanbul's Taksim Square on Tuesday, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon in running battles with protesters who have been occupying the area for more than a week.
The police raid, which came on the 12th day of nationwide protests, sparked clashes with groups of protesters well into the afternoon. Many other protesters fled into the adjacent Gezi Park, where hundreds have been camping out to stop developers from cutting down trees in the park.
As police moved in, bulldozers began demolishing the barricades and the makeshift shelters.
A peaceful demonstration against the park's redevelopment has morphed into a test of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan' authority and a rejection of what some see as his autocratic ways.
Erdogan, however, made it more than clear Tuesday that he had come to the end of his patience with the protesters, whom he accused of sullying Turkey's image abroad.
"To those who ... are at Taksim and elsewhere taking part in the demonstrations with sincere feelings: I call on you to leave those places and to end these incidents and I send you my love. But for those who want to continue with the incidents I say: `It's over.' As of now we have no tolerance for them," Erdogan said, speaking in the capital, Ankara as the raid was taking place.
"Not only will we end the actions, we will be at the necks of the provocateurs and terrorists and no one will get away with it," he added.
The unrest – which has spread to 78 cities across Turkey – has been inspired in part by what some see as Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style of governing and his perceived attempts to impose a religious and conservative lifestyle in a country with secular laws.
Erdogan, a devout Muslim, says he is committed to Turkey's secular laws and denies charges of autocracy. Yet as he defended his tough stance , he gave critics little hope of a shift in his position.
PHNOM PENH, June 11 (Reuters) - Nearly 300 Cambodian garment workers who produce clothing for U.S sportswear company Nike have been dismissed for taking part in strikes seeking higher pay that turned violent, according to their union and dismissal notices.
Low-cost labour has attracted Western brands to the Southeast Asian country and garments now account for around 75 percent of its exports, but strikes over pay and working conditions have become common.
Thousands of workers at Sabrina (Cambodia) Garment Manufacturing Corp went on strike for higher pay from May 21.
On Tuesday, hundreds of them protested at a provincial court to demand the release of eight workers and unionists arrested on June 3, when around 4,000 workers forced their way into the factory, clashing with colleagues who had remained on the job.
A union grouping some of the workers at the plant said 288 workers had been fired on June 6 and 7. It says they were dismissed for going on strike.
"This is completely illegal," Free Trade Union President Chea Mony said of the dismissals, adding the company had only fired people who said they had witnessed violence by the authorities.
"The strikes are legal," he said, adding Sabrina had repeatedly refused to hold negotiations.
According to dismissal letters seen by Reuters, the workers were sacked for flouting labour law and the factory's internal rules during the protests on June 3 and on May 27, when strikers clashed with police outside the plant.
A Sabrina official declined to comment.
The workers want the company, which employs more than 5,000 people at the plant, to give them $14 a month to help pay for transport, rent and healthcare costs on top of their $74 minimum wage.
Many of the strikers have drifted back to work in recent days. According to trade unionists, less than 1,000 remain out.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) monitors pay and working conditions at many factories in Cambodia but strikes and sometimes violent protests have been on the rise as unions emboldened by a shortage of skilled workers push for higher wages and improved safety.
The number of strikes by the country's more than 300,000 garment workers nearly quadrupled last year to 134, according to the Garment Manufacturers Association of Cambodia, the main industry body. The 48 strikes so far this year are already more than in the whole of 2010 or 2011. (Reporting by Prak Chan Thul; Editing by Alan Raybould)
As Germany and a large portion of Central Europe deal with devastating floods, photographer Thomas Peter captured this surreal image of a garden and intact swimming pool, inundated by dirty flood waters:
A garden with a swimming pool is inundated by the waters of the Elbe river during floods near Magdeburg in the federal state of Saxony Anhalt, June 10, 2013.(Thomas Peter/Reuters)
The image serves as a reminder that no matter how developed a nation may be, Mother Nature often still reigns supreme. At least 22 people have lost their lives in the crisis, and more than and more than 23,000 residents of the German city of Magdeburg were forced to evacuate their homes on Sunday alone.
