UPDATE:
THE US ARMY BLOCKS ACCESS TO THE GUARDIAN FROM THEIR COMPUTERS
A spokesman for the U.S. Army has said that they have blocked access to The Guardian's website following their publication of leaked NSA documents.
Gordon Van Vleet, a spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, toldThe Monterey Heraldon Thursday that they are filtering 'some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks.'
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'We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security, however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information,' he wrote via email.
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For their part, editors and reporters for The Guardian are publicly revelling in the ban. Writer Glenn Greenwald, who published the initial Snowden article on June 5, called the move
'flattering'.
MORE:
Sydney Morning Herald,
29 June 2013
Ecuador to Scrap US Trade over Snowden Case
Ecuador, the South American nation considering an asylum request from fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, renounced its US trade benefits, saying they were being used as "blackmail."
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"Ecuador doesn't accept pressure or threats from anyone and doesn't barter its principles and sovereignty or submit to mercantile interests," President Rafael Correa said on Thursday in a speech in the central province of Los Rios. What Mr Snowden revealed "is a terrible case of massive espionage, both nationally and internationally that clearly threatens the right to intimacy and the sovereignty of states".
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The announcement comes a day after US Senator Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would lead the effort to block renewal of trade preferences for Ecuador if it granted Mr Snowden asylum.
The Andean nation has been lobbying the US congress to renew the preferences, known as ATPDEA, which are due to expire next month.
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"Our government will not reward countries for bad behaviour," Senator Menendez said. "Trade preferences are a privilege granted by the US to nations, not a right."
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Ecuador would lose at least 40,000 jobs if the trade preferences aren't renewed, the nation's Ambassador to the US Nathalie Cely said last year. While most of the $US1.01 billion in exports to the US in April was oil, shipments also included more labour intensive products such as cut flowers, broccoli and shrimp. Exports fell from $US1.14 billion in April 2012, according to US Census data.
Never shy of taking on the West, the pugnacious Mr Correa last year granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to help him avoid extradition from Great Britain to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sexual assault accusations.
The 50-year-old US-trained economist won a landslide re-election in February on generous state spending to improve infrastructure and health services, and his Alianza Pais party holds a majority in the legislature.
Ecuadorean officials said Washington was unfairly using the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, which provides customs benefits in exchange for efforts to fight the drug trade, as a political weapon.
The program was set to expire at the end of this month.
An OPEC nation of 15 million people, Ecuador exported $US5.4 billion worth of oil, $US166 million of cut flowers, $US122 million of fruits and vegetables and $US80 million of tuna to the United States under the Andean trade program in 2012.
Termination of the benefits could hurt the cut flower industry, which has blossomed under the program and employs more than 100,000 workers, many of them women.
Supporters of Correa say he has simply taken on media and business elites who were trying to erode what the president calls his "Citizens' Revolution."
Ecuador's Communications Secretary Fernando Alvarado, who called the trade preferences a "new instrument of blackmail," said the government is offering the US $US23 million, an amount similar to what the US provides under ATPDEA, to provide human rights training to combat torture, illegal executions and attacks on peoples' privacy.
Mr Snowden, a former worker for government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who Russian President Vladimir Putin has said is in the transit area of a Moscow airport, disclosed top-secret US National Security Agency programs that collect phone and Internet data.
US Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, urged President Barack Obama to "act swiftly" and cancel Ecuador's preferential access to US markets. Among the reasons he cited was Ecuador's "disregard for the rule of law."
The ATPDEA trade preferences, enacted in 1991, sought to combat cocaine production in the Andes through incentives for farmers to stop producing coca.
END
***It has been reported on Al Jazeera News that it costs the US and American Taxpayers trillions of $$$ to operate the NSA/PRISM.
It is also reported by the Russian Press that Russia has made an offer to Edward Snowden; "Let us help you".
Quote:
Russia Debates Letting Snowden in "From the Cold"
Snowden's presence has not passed unnoticed in Moscow political circles, where a growing number of voices are suggesting that he should be brought in from the cold and offered asylum in Russia
One prominent theme is the jarring notion that the old cold war paradigm – the US-led "free world" versus the Soviet "evil empire" – is being been stood on its head, and the US now looks like a ponderous, bureaucratic police state, while modern Russia has morphed into a beacon of hope for Western freedom-seekers.
"Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Snowden are not spies who sold classified information for money. They acted on their beliefs. They are new dissidents, fighters against the system," the head of the State Duma's international affairs committee, Alexei Pushkov, tweeted
A somewhat different tack was taken by the head of the Kremlin's in-house human rights commission, Mikhail Fedotov, who told journalists that Snowden "deserves protection" and should file a request for refuge in Russia.
"If Mr. Snowden files such a request, then it can be considered by the president," Fedotov told the independent Interfax agency on Thursday.
"This situation is utterly clear to me from the point of view of human rights protection: a person, disclosing secrets concealed by special services, if these secrets are a threat to the society, a threat to millions people – which refers to the total surveillance of the Internet – such a person does deserve political asylum in this or that country," Fedotov said.
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Russia may well work with Edcuador to transfer Snowden from that airport transit hotel to the Ecuadorean Embassy in Moscow. Ecuador has already held talks with Russia about the situation.
