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Curated research library of TV news clips regarding the NSA, its oversight and privacy issues, 2009-2014

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Primary curation & research: Robin Chin, Internet Archive TV News Researcher; using Internet Archive TV News service.

Speakers

Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: We also saw a story last year reported in
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: These were people who on the basis of secret judgments made by a secret agency with no public oversight and with no authorizing legislation had decided that a certain brand of political viewpoints would authorize the intrusive monitoring, collection, eventual disbursement of your private records related to your sexual activities. This is a fundamentally unamerican thing. We have to ask ourselves, why do we allow this in the first place? Okay. Maybe it happened. Maybe mistakes were made. How do we hold people to account for this?
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: He (Bob Litt, General Counsel Office of DNI) said something that was fundamentally concerning in regards to the false testimony of James Clapper. He said that the real problem was not that the most senior official in the United States intelligence community committed a crime in front of Congress because it doesn't have to be perjury, it doesn’t have to be a willful lie. Giving a false statement to Congress in itself, providing false testimony, is also a crime under U.S.C. 1001 U.S.C. 18-1001. That false statement is itself is a crime. Now he was not concerned about the crime and he was not concerned about the impact this had on the public. He was concerned that the question had been asked at all. And it is this kind of paucity of concern for the public's role in the function of American government. It is the real danger represented by these programs.
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: He (Bob Litt, General Counsel Office of DNI) spoke quickly and that is not a representation of his true intent, but the reality is we see this consistently and it becomes increasingly concerning. It is this incautious language that causes them to lose credibility, that causes us to lose faith in institutions of government upon which Americans must rely. He said something such as, it is indisputable that the disclosures of last year caused damage, that terrorists had changed their communications and that we lost reporting as a result of this. But the evidence on the public records shows this is in fact not the case. It is entirely contrary. There is no evidence on the record that this has been caused as a result of the disclosures that were made last year.
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: Now, I do believe him (Bob Litt) when he asserts that, you know, some sources of intelligence have gone dark. Some caps that we had up are no longer producing. But this is ordinary to the process of signals intelligence collection. People change their route and methods of communication all the time. As anyone knows, correlation do not imply causation. We also know from the evidence on record that there is no reason to suspect causation in the first place. And that there is actually no evidence for a correlation at all. Al Qaeda’s encryption methods have changed at the same rate in the same manner, in the last year that they had in years prior. The only study that has ever shown anything contrary was actually done by a contractor that is funded by the central intelligence agency's investment arm And so we really need to be careful about these kinds of things and the representations they make.
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: It is entirely in dispute that damage has been caused at all by these revelations but the benefits of the disclosure are not in dispute. In fact, the Director of National Intelligence himself argues that it is necessarily in the public interest to know about these policies about these processes and the fact that they should not have been classified in the first place in the justifications that are being to disclose these programs. So how can it be that we use sort of the language it’s indisputable -- we haven't reaped the benefits. The answer is politics. And their understanding, you know, this is an agency, a community that sort of feels itself under threat. But this is unnecessary. If they were more open we wouldn't have these problems in the first place.
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: What happened last year was preventable. It was avoidable. In the same way that the torture program itself was avoidable. I mean one of the things that was not well understood in the torture program was that individuals throughout the CIA and other factions within the government knew these programs were wrong on both a moral basis and on a legal basis, and they raised concerns about it. You know the second bullet point there showed people were concerned about how long it could go on for. The third bullet point shows that individuals were actually brought to tears as result of being confronted with the reality of these programs. Others transferred away, and others said prepare for something that has been never previously, this is unprecedented. And what is the response to this? When these whistleblowers within the agency raised concerns, as this shows, it went into official traffic. Which is extraordinary at the CIA.
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: Because having worked at the CIA, the only things that go into official cable traffic are things that have been coordinated and agreed upon by a number of individuals. Typically only the chief of station in a country has release authority. The analysts write the report, the officers write the report, then they send it to their superiors who sends to his superior who talks a round table about, he sends it to the chief of station and it finally goes out. And they were questioning not just the legality of the programs -- The questions were rejected, they were buried and the head of the counter terrorism program said that these things, these concerns need to stop being put in official cable traffic. They need to stop being put on the official record. They need to be buried because such language is not helpful.
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: And I think these are things that we as a society need to think about, how do we correct, how do we restructure the incentives to ensure when individuals have these serious concerns, when we see clearly unlawful activities occurring, as is still the case today, regardless of the justification that are being put forth by this, that, or the other. When you look at them on their face and they are clearly at least in dispute as to legality, how can we ensure they are protected and these decisions can be made not behind closed doors, but in public?
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Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: But we have also seen that mass surveillance is not beneficial in the context of terrorism. Despite all the mass surveillance that happened (Stellar Wind?)—in the wake of 2001, they did not, you know all of this 215 collection, all of this internet collection, all of this stuff that’s happening with retrospective search where you can go through the Gmail boxes. Or you can go to Facebook, I want to see your contacts, I want to see what you wrote. I want to see all your pictures, I want to see every IP address you ever checked in at, every device ID you used, all these things. They did not stop the Boston marathon bombings. In fact they may have contributed to causing them because they gave us a false sense of security. They made us think these individuals were not associated with terrorism despite the fact that we had intelligence from human sources, including actually from the Russians, we saw this guy going into Chechnya and saw this guy associating with terrorists, know terrorists, and said, hey, you might want to look at this guy. We didn’t do a good job.
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