Edward Snowden Quotes
It's OK if we wiretap Osama bin Laden. I want to know what he's planning - obviously not him nowadays, but that kind of thing. I don't care if it's a pope or a bin Laden. As long as investigators must go to a judge - an independent judge, a real judge, not a secret judge - and make a showing that there's probable cause to issue a warrant, then they can do that. And that's how it should be done.
vanden Heuvel, Katrina, and Stephen F. Cohen. "Edward Snowden: A 'Nation' Interview." The Nation, 28 Oct. 2014.
Hayden was then ordered to go ahead with several of the ideas for which “no authority existed” including massive secret wiretapping of phone calls that were against the law as it existed. Cheney and the President decided not to ask Congress for a legal change, but took the position that if the President says to do it, it cannot be illegal as he is the Commander in Chief. The lower Federal Courts and the Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine was preposterous and un constitutional.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The NSA had hacked into the servers of these firms and others that were located out of the country. (They would need to have a warrant if inside the country.) The companies had never known it until Edward Snowden made this practice public. The result was, the public was learning that there was no privacy in any of their e-mail, social media activity, exchange of photos or videos or anything else. The companies feared that this would then harm their business, and that the techniques NSA used to hack there servers would then be discovered and used by others to steal identities, credit cards and do such other damage to customers. Even if the particular hacking methods were not leaked to the bad guys, they, knowing that the servers were vulnerable, would be encouraged to work to figure it out.
He was trying to assuage the anger and anxiety when it became public that the NSA had been monitoring all the calls of American citizens and not only suspected terrorists. He made the distinction between metadata and content. He claimed NSA was gathering the phone numbers of the parties on the call, the time and duration, but not listening in to the contents. Critics asked how he could be sure and that if the agency were gathering all the data, they could easily listen to any. Later the agency admitted that it had “inadvertently” examined the content of some communications.
The call for embedding the balance in the law is in contrast to the past where the balance was left to the discretion of the intelligence agency leadership but technological limitations curtailed their ability to unbalance things too much.
Edward Joseph Snowden is a former computer intelligence consultant who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
