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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

Ryan Gallagher
Reporter for The Intercept
KCSM 08/28/2014
Gallagher:(The military ban on viewing The Intercept) This is a continuation of what has happened to Wikileaks in 2010 and then what happened to the guardian last year. The military has this completely absurd policy to just block any public news website that is publishing stories based on classified information. Actually these kind of draconian warnings to their staff that if they dare to read these news reports that they’ll have dire security consequences and all the rest of it.
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Ryan Gallagher
Reporter for The Intercept
KCSM 08/28/2014
Gallagher: We know for a fact there are people within the military, who are disturbed by this. It is based on a policy the DOD has in place that says you can't view classified information on an unclassified computer until the information is formally declassified. But that kind of policy in the age of Manning and the age of Snowden just is totally archaic and it doesn't fit the modern world. They need to review it because you can have a situation where an intelligence analyst within the government with top security clearance is in a position that he can't read public news reports. Now if that is the case, how can that intelligence analyst whose job is to make sense of the world from inside the government, how can they do that properly if he can't even read news websites? So it is a counterproductive policy that I find personally completely absurd.
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Brian Ross
Chief Investigative Reporter ABC News
LINKTV 08/29/2014
Maté: It’s been over a year since Edward Snowden exposed mass surveillance by the NSA. Now comes the most comprehensive look to date at how unchecked government spying is impacting two fields we all rely on to curb abuses of power and defend basic rights. The results are chilling. In a new report, Human Rights Watch and The American Civil Liberties Union, warn "large-scale surveillance is seriously hampering U.S. based journalists and lawyers in their work." The report is based on interviews with dozens of reporters and lawyers. This is Brian Ross, chief investigative correspondent for ABC News. Ross: We sometimes feel, or I feel at least, like you’re operating like somebody in the mafia. Gotta go around with a bag full of quarters, and if you can find a pay phone, use it. Or use like drug dealers use, throw away burner phones. These are all then steps to take to get rid of an electronic trail. To have to take those kind of steps, makes journalists feel like we’re criminals, like we’re doing something wrong, and I don’t think we are. I think we’re providing a useful service to Americans to know what’s going on in their government and what’s happening.
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Jonathan Landay
Senior National Security and intelligence Correspondent, McClatchy Newspapers
LINKTV 08/29/2014
Landay: What we found out from the Snowden disclosures is that the United States Government is collecting all of our metadata which shows who your social and professional networks are, where your connections are, where you are at a particular time, where, perhaps, a source is. They do not need to know what you were talking about. They’ve got enough to be able to go to your source to say why were you talking to this journalist. When it comes to protecting a source, I’ve had to teach myself using an encryption engine, this kind of thing. I don’t take my iphone with me when I go to meet a source. Unless you take the battery out, you can still be tracked. I was leaked classified intelligence community documents last year that cataloged quite a few years of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. I went to considerable lengths to protect my source and I’m not going to tell you what I did.
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Jeremy Scahill
Co-Founder, The Intercept
LINKTV 08/29/2014
Scahill: I read in the report, my colleague, Alan Goldman, who’s a fantastic reporter for The Washington Post said we are forced to sort of act like we are spies and we’re not spies. We’re journalists, and we shouldn’t be forced to do all this but there is a war on journalism around the world, and in some countries it comes in the form of journalists being murdered. Here, it comes in the form of our communications being surveilled, phone records been seized, our communications being monitored. There’s something a little bit funny about this, but it is also creepy. When we spoke to the National Counterterrorism Center, the other day, one of the things they said early on in the call, is Jeremy, we know you’ve been making a bunch of phone calls throughout Washington, D.C., today. Thank you for acknowledging that, but it’s like I think the Obama administration's posture is only state propaganda belongs in the public domain and if you want to cultivate your own sources and you want to challenge assertions made by officials in Washington by developing your own sources, we’re going to go after you with the full extent of the law.
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Jeremy Scahill
Co-Founder, The Intercept
LINKTV 08/29/2014
Scahill: Go online, and find the warrant that was served on Google for the emails of James Rosen of FOX News, who, of course was leaked information allegedly by a Federal employee, who’s now serving a prison sentence. But if you read what the government did to justify seizing all of James Rosen’s gmails, not his fox news account, his gmail, it’s incredible. They basically said, and they knew this wasn’t true, that James Rosen is basically in a conspiracy to commit a very very serious crime and we need to get all of his e-mails. Now James Rosen was also an imbecile in how he dealt with his source, and that is clear in that subpoena, in that warrant. Read that warrant, it’s chilling for press freedom.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Angwin: The biggest harm from government surveillance actually is that it leads us to be less free with our speech. So I write about this guy in my book who was surveilled of by the FBI. He and his friend, they’re both teenage young men in Santa Clara, and his friend had written a kind of sassy post on a social network called reddit. And he basically said I don't know why the TSA is so crazy at airports. You know I could just go to a mall and bomb it, no problem, right, which is actually true, but you know, may be unwise to say, but he said it. So, a couple of weeks later this guy and his friend were at a car shop getting an oil change and the friend, Yaser, saw that there was something under his car, it was a tracking device and the FBI had put this on his car to surveil him. And he later found out it was because of his friend's comment.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Angwin: (continued) But what I really found disturbing was what happened afterwards. So after they found out they were being surveilled by the FBI, their friendship fell apart. Yasir didn't want to be friends with a guy who might put him in danger, right? He became incredibly circumspect in his actions and he doesn't feel free to talk about anything subversive and he is Muslim American and he now uses a different name, Aladin, because he feels like it’s less Muslim. And he's still detained everytime he comes across international borders. And he doesn't feel like he has the same free speech rights that I feel like is a central part of our country.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Rosen: You argue so powerfully in that chapter that it's not just privacy but free speech that’s at stake, that at the core of what the framers were concerned about was enough practical obscurity to be able to engage in political dissent. And yet as you say the Supreme Court has not been sympathetic to claims that mass surveillance violates free-speech. Angwin: No, The Supreme Court has not. There are a number of reasons why they've taken that path but largely it's been over the issue of standing, which is you can't prove you’re surveilled and so that you can’t show any harm. You know we have an interesting case coming up which is now after Snowden, people can prove that they were surveilled. So it will be interesting to see whether the Supreme Court revisits that.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Angwin: but we do have a history of protecting freedom of association, right. The NAACP vs. Alabama case where Alabama wanted the list of numbers of the NAACP and the Supreme Court upheld the right to keep that list private. Now the thing is those lists are no longer private because you don’t have to join, the young Muslim man of Santa Clara, anymore. Yasir was automatically entered into that by the digital trail that he left behind.
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