Skip to main content

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

Click "More / Share / Borrow" for each clip's source context and citation link. HTML5 compatible browser required

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

Speakers

James Comey
Director of the FBI
KYW 10/12/2014
Pelley: He's (James Comey) worried now that Apple and Google have the power to upend the rule of law. Until now, a judge could order those companies to unlock a criminal suspect's phone. But their new software makes it impossible for them to crack a code set by the user. Comey: The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law troubles me a lot. As a country, I don't know why we would want to put people beyond the law-- that is, sell cars with trunks that couldn't ever be opened by law enforcement with a court order, or sell an apartment that could never be entered, even by law enforcement. Would you want to live in that neighborhood? This is a similar concern. The notion that people have devices, again, that, with court orders based on a showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism, we could never open that phone? My sense is that we've gone too far when we've gone there.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
James Comey
Director of the FBI
KYW 10/12/2014
Pelley: With what the FBI can do expanding so rapidly, James Comey keeps this memo right on his desk to remind him of what the bureau shouldn't do. Marked "secret," it's a 1963 request from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover titled: "Martin Luther King, Jr. security matter - communist." Hoover requests authority for "technical surveillance" of King. The approval is signed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And there was no court order. It was the signature of the FBI Director and the signature of the attorney general? Comey: Yep. And then, open-ended-- no time limit, no space restriction, no review, no oversight. Pelley: And given the threats in the world today, wouldn't that make your job so much easier? Comey: In a sense, but in... also in a sense, we would give up so much that makes sure that we're rooted in the rule of law that I'd never want to make that trade.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
WTXF 10/13/2014
Murphy: Edward Snowden says the U.S. government is denying his request to stand trial in the U.S. But Snowden says he wants to plead his case before a jury about leaking government documents. The whole Wikileaks scandal in an interview with The New Yorker, he says he is confident that the Supreme Court would eventually rule the NSA surveillance program is unconstitutional.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
James Comey
Director of the FBI
WPVI 10/17/2014
Taff: The Director of the F.B.I. is unhappy with new data security features from Apple and Google. James Comey says the new encryption so strong that it could actually help criminals by hindering investigations. He says he’s only speaking for the F.B.I. and not other organizations like N.S.A. and homeland security. Tech companies say it is clear people want their data secured. Google released a statement saying they will still turn over data to law enforcement as long as that law enforcement has a proper warrant.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
KQED 10/25/2014
Rose: Snowden wrote you and he said you asked me why I chose you. He said I didn't, you chose yourself. What did he mean? Poitras: What he was referring to was the fact that I had been put on this government watch list, and so I had been for six years I had been, for six years, every time I traveled and returned back to the United States, I would be pulled aside, there would be border agents who would come to the airplane and pull me aside and ask me what I was doing, where I had traveled. And I had gone through this a long time, starting in 2006. When it began, I was naive. I answered questions, I said well, I had been making a film about the Iraq war. And then it became Increasingly, they photocopied my notebooks and I became a little less friendly at the border and had written about it. So Snowden might have seen it in two ways. I had written about it for the "New York Times," I had published a short video about N.S.A. whistle blower William Binney that was published in summer of 2012
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
KQED 10/25/2014
Poitras: I had published a short video about N.S.A. whistle blower William Binney that was published in summer of 2012 and wrote about the experience of being on a watch list and what does it mean for a journalist to have that a kind of scrutiny and Glenn had written about the fact I was on a watch list. And so when I was asking Snowden in the first e-mails, well, why me, because, you know, at first you see somebody contacts you out of blue, it's good to be a little skeptical, who are they, is it entrapment, is it some kind of -- and he just said, well, you know, it's work you have been doing is why I'm contacting you, and I think that he also -- he knew I was working on the topic of N.S.A. because of what I'd done in the
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
WHYY 10/25/2014
Trailer from
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Trailer for CitizenFour: Ewen MacAskill: So I don’t know anything about you. Snowden: OK. I work for MacAskill: Sir I don’t know your name. Snowden: Oh, sorry. My name is Edward Snowden. I go by Ed. Edward Joseph Snowden is the full name. Rose: Poitras received the Polk Award and The Pulitzer for Public Service for her work on the Snowden leaks. She’s also the Co-Founder of the Intercept. It is a news venture funded by Piere Omidyar.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Rose: What do you hope the film accomplishes? Poitras: For me, it's a documentary or story about journalism, about what happens, journalists working on a story. It's very much a story of the sort of era of crackdown on sources and whistleblowers and journalism that we've seen in the last years where you have people like my friend and colleague James Risen who's being subpoenaed and potentially trying to, potentially will go to jail because he's not going to testify against a source, and the government is doing a lot of these things. We know they subpoenaed the phone records of the AP so I think it's also a portrait of journalism done in difficult circumstances and I think it's a story about somebody willing to take personal risks, sacrifices to expose information they think the public has a right to know.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: He's (Edward Snowden) definitely an idealist. He's somebody who very much grew up on the internet. He is a generation that came of age on the internet. And he came of age and says this in the film, where the internet was kind of a free place and he believes it was one of the most beautiful things that humanity ever had that you could have a means from which people from all over the world, from all, you know ages, communicating freely with each other. And I think that that’s what really motivated him. That to see that be something that was sort of taken away from people and used for other means -- means of surveillance, means commercial means. So I think he saw something that he thought was really profound and to be protected and that was slipping away. Rose: So that was his motivation? Poitras: I think that's the core motivation, yeah.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Showing 1431 through 1440 of 1708