Edward Snowden to SXSW: NSA Leaders Have Harmed Our National Security ‘More Than Anything’ Else
The fugitive leaker, appearing by video conference, attacked virtually every corner of the national security apparatus during a Q&A session at the festival.
America’s most high-profile fugitive visited one of the country’s most popular entertainment festivals in Texas on Monday, drawing thunderous applause from a crowded room filled with his adoring fans.
Edward Snowden, appearing from Russia through a live video stream, told attendees of the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin that Congress had fundamentally failed to do its job as an overseer of the government’s bulk surveillance programs, declaring that “we need a watchdog that watches Congress.
The former National Security Agency contractor, in a conversation with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Soghoian and Ben Wizner, also charged the current and most recent chief of the NSA as the two people most responsible for jeopardizing the country’s national security due to their preference for aggressive collection of data rather than protection of it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“More than anything, there are two officials who have harmed our Internet security and national security,” Snowden said, his image backdropped by an enlarged copy of the U.S. Constitution. “Those two officials are Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander.”
Websites look to ‘harness the outrage’
February 09, 2014, 06:00 am
By Julian Hattem
Thousands of websites on Tuesday will take a stand against government surveillance by plastering protests across their home pages.
Tech companies and civil liberties organizations are hoping the demonstration, called The Day We Fight Back, will replicate their success in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in 2012.
This time activists are focusing their energy on supporting the USA Freedom Act, which would end or curtail many of the most controversial surveillance programs at the National Security Agency (NSA) and elsewhere.
“The idea is to really harness the outrage of the Internet community in speaking out in one big voice on Feb. 11,” said Rainey Reitman, the director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The protest comes nearly a month after President Obama announced a handful of changes to the embattled spy agency’s most controversial practices. Critics said the changes weren’t nearly enough.
If the U.S. Supreme Court applies an appropriate constitutional analysis the NSA’s program of wholesale collection of data will be dismantled
I just read the Constitutional Law section of the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board’s January 23, 2014 Report on the NSA’s Telephone Records Program. I also skimmed the other sections, including one that analyzes the policy aspects of the program. The entire document can be found at: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1008957-final-report.html
As an attorney, I found the Constitutional law section to be well-written, incisive, and balanced. As a citizen and patriot, I appreciate the fact that the authors of this report appear to have a firm grip on the fact that the ultimate authority in this country resides in the citizens themselves (We the People), regardless of what anyone vocationally associated with the Federal Government, or philosophically committed to promoting statism, may believe to the contrary.
I am now convinced that the NSA’s program of wholesale collection and long-term storage of U.S. citizens’ telephone data is a vastly expensive and expansive sitting duck that will be dismantled and cast onto the ash heap of history as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court applies an appropriate constitutional analysis to it, if not sooner (e.g., pursuant to a lawful order of a lower court). It is absolutely unconscionable that such a program was allowed to proceed as far as it did, and our federal government should be ashamed of itself.
Regardless of what anyone believes the definition of the terms ‘traitor’ and ‘treason’ to be, Edward Snowden did all U.S. citizens a solid favor by so clearly bringing the scope and details of this program to the attention of the U.S. public at large. Why? Because without the enormous amount of concentrated critical attention on the NSA that Snowden triggered, this behemoth of a government program and system could well have closed the loop on all of our freedoms and important constitutional rights in a very short period of time (e.g., before the end of the Obama Administration), permanently altering the relationship between ordinary U.S. citizens and the federal government, and leaving us powerless to force the federal government to reverse course or enact necessary reforms. So if time was truly of the essence, and Snowden acted in a timely fashion, are we the law-abiding duty-bound to condemn him?
Highly-placed members of the George W. Bush administration involved in national security, and Bush-era government lawyers who should have been (and likely were) aware of the clear unconstitutionality of the program as it was designed and run prior to Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, should be roughly ignored if they persist in supporting the NSA’s bulk telephone data collection program. They are compromised from a political and professional standpoint and will never admit that what they did was wrong. Going forward, they will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a corrected view of reality in which our constitutional rights and liberties are abruptly restored, and the federal government is forced to take its medicine.
