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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: Beyond that we need end to end encryption that Google is well on it’s way to do it, but many of us on the internet need to do it. They need to commit to guaranteeing they will protect the certificates that protect sort of their, these sort of end to end communications. Eric Schmidt made a reference to sort of 28 bit encryption certificates. And this is for the HTTX a little lock icon you’ve seen-- If the government or any government or any criminal group or adversary can gain access to this certificate, suddenly that encryption is meaningless. I think if you commit that, to saying alright we’ll make best efforts to protect this within our network, to make sure it’s not hacked, but they also need to say if we receive a secret order from any government, any jurisdiction, we will fight this publicly to the highest court of appeals to prevent that. I think those are the obvious best step with relatively less effort.
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: (Section 309) Some could read, to be providing sort of a legislative halo, sort of a congressional recognition of EO 12333. That is an authority that only exists on an old piece of paper signed by a couple of Presidents. It basically says you can do whatever you want overseas. Don’t sweat it. If it’s not happening over there, it’s fine to do whatever you want. The problem with that authority is that it actually collects Americans' communications as well, because of the global internet of course. Our own communications go to, for example, Google’s data centers, mentioned earlier, that are outside our borders and then they bounce back and come to us. So the NSA has in the past used this authority to sort of do an end run around congress and collect information about Americans, although they’ll say it was not targeted, of course, that not need to be reported, because EO 12333 is not required, there’s no congressional reporting requirements on how it’s applied -- because it is not provided through legislature.
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: But we do have, again, Mr. Litt, from the DNI who has said on the record, and I hope everybody makes a historical footnote of this, that there was no legislative intent in providing that kind of halo. So if we’re to have any faith in our institutions, we have to assume that this will be accepted and that his statements can be accepted and -- relied upon. If that’s the case then let’s go with that. Maybe it just does restrict the activities but not authorize them.
Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman of Google
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Schmidt: Encryption in the hands of individuals is very empowering. And encryption is an incredibly powerful tool for freedom fighters in repressive regimes. But it also does allow people who are evil or nasty to communicate bilaterally. Now the good news is that these are systems are not that easy to use. We argue in the book and I'll say again that you're probably winning when the evil person is using a cell phone. Because, trust me, those cell phones if you're trying to find them and you're a government and you're willing to look for them, you can find them. The cell phones emit where they are. And, indeed, this is how Osama bin Laden was tracked down ultimately is through cell phone tapping according to the reports. So I'm not as sensitive to this argument that this is the only way to solve this problem.
Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman of Google
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Schmidt: I have my own issues with the Patriot Act cause it’s a secret court and I think one of the great strengths of America has been an independent court system, proper balance of rights in individuals and I'll give you an example. I'm not advocating this so please don't say this. We can end essentially all crime in this city in a very short period of time except for emotional crime, that is spur of the moment crime, by massive surveillance. Now we should not do this. Other countries may choose to do that. The fact that you can do it, the fact that you can, for example, put cameras in every street corner and do face detection which is indeed what is happening in Britain is not something we should do. But I can assure you it'll effect crime. You want to be careful about these tools. They can be very seriously misused and, again, so we're clear that kind of mass surveillance is completely counter to what America is and counter to the American constitution.
Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman of Google
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Schmidt: I am not a fan of the Patriot Act and the reason is the secret court part of it. I understand secrecy has its purpose and so forth but our country over secrefies, whatever you want to call it, a lot of things. A lot of things are classified etc. etc. We would be a stronger country in almost all matters if we were less obnoxious about some of the classifications and some of the ways in which we collect data. I am quite convinced of it. The greatness of America is the speed with which we address problems and the way to do that is you do that with knowledge. So the answer is I was referring to the patriot act. I was not referring to general privacy. I actually care a lot about privacy and Google has worked very hard to improve your privacy.
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