This is an excellent
question and answers session with Snowden and makes clear the process that led
to his personal action. We are clearly
informed that he took his concerns to persons able to act who all actually agreed
with the position that he takes. He was
left with the task of doing the right thing and I do not think today that
anyone honestly can challenge the real need.
Understand something
here. This capacity to strip mine all
communication data was coming and it came recently enough that no one was
really aware just how deep it had become.
The next step, now aborted, was to mine this data over the past five
years and to organize it so it could be used to operate test queries. Those test queries could be used to assume
drug dealing and to look for a statistically conforming pattern. That pattern may have a fifty - fifty
threshold but who can stand up to a focused interrogation that demands you
explain a wrong number from four years ago.
This makes 1984 look
like the Promised Land. This was going
to hit the rubber sooner or later and I think most of us are happy with sooner.
As an aside, real
criminal activity is never conducted on the phone and after this that is more
so. It is conducted face to face in a
secure location just like in the movies.
Even stupid criminals know that much let alone real terrorists. That is why our investigators almost have to
train the fools so everyone can get a promotion.
And nowhere do we see
an investigator knocking on a suspect’s door to tell him to knock it off. Rookies deserve second chances after they are
treated to a couple of days of close interrogation. Romance evaporates pretty quickly then.
#AskSnowden:
Q&A Chat with Edward Snowden
'Doing the right thing means having no regrets'
- Common Dreams staff
The forum was hosted
on the Free Snowden website here,
which is run by The Courage Foundation and is the only officially
endorsed Snowden Defense Fund.
This comes exactly one week after U.S.
President Barack Obama gave an address in response to the public concerns
raised by Snowden’s revelations about US surveillance practices. In the live
chat, Edward Snowden gave his first reaction to the President’s speech.
What follows, in order from most recent to
earliest, are the selected questions and his answers:
@mperkel #ASKSNOWDEN
They say it’s a balance of privacy and safety. I think spying makes us less
safe. do you agree?
Intelligence agencies
do have a role to play,
and the people at the working level at the NSA, CIA, or any other member of
the IC are not out to get you. They’re good people trying to do the right
thing, and I can tell you from personal experience that they were worried about
the same things I was.
I encourage you to contact your
members of congress and tell them how you feel about mass surveillance. This is
a global problem, and the first step to tackling it is by working together to
fix it at home.
The people you need to watch out for are
the unaccountable senior officials authorizing these unconstitutional programs,
and unreliable mechanisms like the secret FISA court, a rubber-stamp authority
that approves 99.97% of government requests (which denied only 11 requests out
of 33,900 in 33 years. They’re the one that get us into trouble with the
Constitution by letting us go too far.
And even the President now agrees our
surveillance programs are going too far, gathering massive amounts of private
records on ordinary Americans who have never been suspected of any crime. This violates our constitutional protection
against unlawful searches and seizure. Collecting phone and email records
for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better
spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.
I’m going to stop here. My deepest thanks to
everyone who sent questions, and whether or not we agree on where the lines
should be drawn, I encourage you to contact your members of congress and tell
them how you feel about mass surveillance. This is a global problem, and the
first step to tackling it is by working together to fix it at home.
If you’d like to more ideas on how to push
back against unconstitutional surveillance, consider taking a look at the
organizations working together to organize https://thedaywefightback.org/.
@mrbass21 Recently
several threats have been made on your life by the intelligence community. Are
you afraid for your life? Thoughts? #AskSnowden
It’s concerning, to me, but primarily for
reasons you might not expect.
That current, serving officials of our
government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell
reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th
Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts. These are the same
officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor the 4th and 1st Amendments.
This should bother all of us.
The fact that it’s also a direct threat to my
life is something I am aware of, but I’m not going to be intimidated. Doing the
right thing means having no regrets.
@ferenstein what’s the
worst and most realistic harm from bulk collection of data? Why do you think it
outweighs national security? #AskSnowden
The worst and happening-right-now harm of bulk
collection — which again, is a euphemism for mass surveillance — is two-fold.
The first is the chilling effect,
which is well-understood. Study after study has show that human behavior
changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free,
which means we effectively *are* less free.
The second, less
understood but far more sinister effect of these classified programs, is that
they effectively create “permanent records” of our daily activities, even in
the absence of any wrongdoing on our part. This enables a capability called
“retroactive investigation,” where once you come to the government’s
attention, they’ve got a very complete record
of your daily activity going back, under current law, often as far as five
years. You might not remember where you went to dinner on June 12th 2009, but
the government does.
Study after study has show that
human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we
act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free.
The power these records represent can’t be
overstated. In fact, researchers have referred to this sort of data gathering
as resulting in “databases of ruin,” where harmful and embarrassing details
exist about even the most innocent individuals. The fact that these records are
gathered without the government having any reasonable suspicion or probable
cause justifying the seizure of data is so divorced from the domain of reason
as to be incapable of ever being made lawful at all, and this view was endorsed
as recently as today by the federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties
Oversight board.
Fundamentally, a society in which the
pervasive monitoring of the sum of civil activity becomes routine is turning
from the traditions of liberty toward what is an inherently illiberal
infrastructure of preemptive investigation, a sort of quantified state where
the least of actions are measured for propriety. I don’t seek to pass judgment
in favor or against such a state in the short time I have here, only to declare
that it is not the one we inherited, and should we as a society embrace it, it
should be the result of public decision rather than closed conference.
@LukasReuter #AskSnowden
How should the community of states react to the new information concerning
surveillance? What actions have to be made?
We need to work together to agree on a
reasonable international norm for the limitations on spying. Nobody should be
hacking critical-to-life infrastructure like hospitals and power stations, and
it’s fair to say that can be recognized in international law.
We need to work together to
agree on a reasonable international norm for the limitations on spying.
Additionally, we need to recognize that
national laws are not going to solve the problem of indiscriminate
surveillance. A prohibition in Burundi isn’t going to stop the spies in
Greenland. We need a global forum, and global funding, committed to the development
of security standards that enforce our right to privacy not through law, but
through science and technology. The easiest way to ensure a country’s
communications are secure is to secure them world-wide, and that means better
standards, better crypto, and better research.
@wikileaks #AskSnowden
The Ecuadorean Consul in London, Fidel Narvaez, lost his job after his helping
you to safety was spun. Message for his family?
Fidel is an incredibly brave individual, and
he did everything that was possible to ensure that the rights of someone he had
never met would be protected. He could have turned away from a tough decision,
but instead of letting my situation become someone else’s problem, he did what
he thought was right. That kind of commitment to doing the right thing, even
knowing it could get you in trouble, is something the world needs more of.
@jaketapper #AskSnowden
Under what conditions would you agree to return to the U.S.?
Returning to the US, I think, is the best
resolution for the government, the public, and myself, but it’s unfortunately
not possible in the face of current whistleblower protection laws, which
through a failure in law did not cover national security contractors like
myself.
The hundred-year old law under which I’ve been
charged, which was never intended to be used against people working in the
public interest, and forbids a public interest defense. This is especially
frustrating, because it means there’s no chance to have a fair trial, and no
way I can come home and make my case to a jury.
Maybe when Congress comes together to end the
programs the PCLOB just announced was illegal, they’ll reform the Whistleblower
Protection Act, and we’ll see a mechanism for all Americans, no matter who they
work for, to get a fair trial.
@Valio_ch #asksnowden Do
you think that the Watchdog Report by Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight
Board will have any impact at all?
I don’t see how Congress could ignore it, as
it makes it clear there is no reason at all to maintain the 215 program. Let me
quote from the official report:
“Cessation of the program would eliminate the
privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection without
unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while ensuring that any governmental
requests for telephone calling records are tailored to the needs of specific
investigations.”
@RagBagUSA #AskSnowden
what (in your opinion) is the appropriate extent of US national security
apparatus? Surely some spying is needed?
Not all spying is bad. The biggest problem
we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance,
where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’
communication every single day. This is done not because it’s necessary —
after all, these programs are unprecedented in US history, and were begun in
response to a threat that kills fewer Americans every year than bathtub falls
and police officers — but because new technologies make it easy and cheap.
When we’re sophisticated enough
to be able to break into any device in the world we want to (up to and
including Angela Merkel’s phone, if reports are to be believed), there’s no
excuse to wasting our time collecting the call records of grandmothers in
Missouri.
I think a person should be able to dial a
number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website
without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent
record. Particularly when we now have courts, reports
from the federal government, and even statements from Congress making it clear
these programs haven’t made us any more safe, we need to push back.
This is a global problem, and America needs to
take the lead in fixing it. If our government decides our Constitution’s 4th
Amendment prohibition against unreasonable seizures no longer applies simply
because that’s a more efficient means of snooping, we’re setting a precedent
that immunizes the government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same
kind of indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the NSA
is doing.
It’s not good for our country, it’s not good
for the world, and I wasn’t going to stand by and watch it happen, no matter
how much it cost me. The NSA and the rest of the US Intelligence Community is
exceptionally well positioned to meet our intelligence requirements through
targeted surveillance — the same way we’ve always done it — without resorting
to the mass surveillance of entire populations.
When we’re sophisticated enough to be able to
break into any device in the world we want to (up to and including Angela
Merkel’s phone, if reports are to be believed), there’s no excuse to wasting
our time collecting the call records of grandmothers in Missouri.
@MichaelHargrov1
#AskSnowden Was the privacy of your co-workers considered while you were
stealing their log-in and password information?
With all due respect to Mark Hosenball, the
Reuters report that put this out there was simply wrong. I never stole any
passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers.
@auerfeld #AskSnowden do
you think it’s a shame that #Obama gave his #NSA speech before his Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board reported?
The timing of his speech seems particularly
interesting, given that it was accompanied by so many claims that “these
programs have not been abused.”
Even if we accept the NSA’s incredibly
narrow definition of abuse, which is “someone actually broke the rules so badly
we had to investigate them for it,” we’ve seen more instances of
identified, intentional abuse than we have seen instances where this
unconstitutional mass phone surveillance stopped any kind of terrorist plot at
all — even something less than an attack.
To back that up with the government’s own numbers,
according to the NSA Inspector General, we’ve
seen at least 12 specific, intentional cases of “abuse” by the NSA.
In contrast, the federal government’s
independent PCLOB report on the NSA’s mass phone surveillance today (which
stated the NSA has spied on at least 120,000,000 American phones under this
program) said this:
“We are aware of no instance in which the
program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist
plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”
At the press conference, Judge Wald stated
this program, which has been operated in secret for years, has no basis in law.
The panel determined this kind of mass surveillance is illegal and should be
ended.
When even the federal government says the NSA
violated the constitution at least 120 million times under a single program,
but failed to discover even a single “plot,” it’s time to end “bulk
collection,” which is a euphemism for mass surveillance. There is simply no
justification for continuing an unconstitutional policy with a 0% success rate.
In light of another independent confirmation
of this fact, I think Americans should look to the White House and Congress to
close the book entirely on the 215 BR provision.
@VilleThompson What do
you think about Obama’s whistleblowing protection act? #AskSnowden
One of the things that has not been widely
reported by journalists is that whistleblower protection laws in the US do not
protect contractors in the national security arena. There are so many holes in
the laws, the protections they afford are so weak, and the processes for
reporting they provide are so ineffective that they appear to be intended to
discourage reporting of even the clearest wrongdoing. If I had revealed what I
knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they
could have charged me with a felony. One only need to look at the case of
Thomas Drake to see how the government doesn’t have a good history of handling
legitimate reports of wrongdoing within the system.
My case clearly demonstrates
the need for comprehensive whistleblower protection act reform.
Despite this, and despite the fact that I
could not legally go to the official channels that direct NSA employees have
available to them, I still made tremendous efforts to report these programs
to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the proper clearance who would
listen. The reactions of those I told about the scale of the constitutional
violations ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to
risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom to go to through what
Drake did.
My case clearly demonstrates the need for
comprehensive whistleblower protection act reform. If we had had a real process
in place, and reports of wrongdoing could be taken to real, independent
arbiters rather than captured officials, I might not have had to sacrifice so
much to do what at this point even the President seems to agree needed to be
done.
@midwire How quickly can
the NSA, et. al. decrypt AES messages with strong keys #AskSnowden Does
encrypting our emails even work?
As I’ve said before, properly implemented
strong encryption works. What you have to worry about are the endpoints. If
someone can steal you keys (or the pre-encryption plaintext), no amount of
cryptography will protect you.
However, that doesn’t mean end-to-end crypto
is a lost cause. By combining robust endpoint security with transport
security, people can have much greater confidence in their day to day
communications.
@savagejen Do you think
it is possible for our democracy to recover from the damage NSA spying has done
to our liberties? #AskSnowden
Yes. What makes our country strong is our
system of values, not a snapshot of the structure of our agencies or the
framework of our laws. We can correct the laws, restrain the overreach of
agencies, and hold the senior officials responsible for abusive programs to
account.
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