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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

Zoe Lofgren
U.S. Representative (D-CA)
CSPAN 05/22/2014
Lofgren: The transparency provisions have also been weakened. The 702 Section would no longer be reportable by companies who receive orders, and instead of the attorney general noting decisions that change the law, it's now sent over to the director of national intelligence. Regrettably, we have learned that if we leave any ambiguity in the law, the intelligence agency will run a truck right through that ambiguity. i think that's why all the civil liberties groups have withdrawn their support from this bill. The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, CDT, Open Technology. I would add freedom works and other libertarian groups have also pulled their support. Companies like Facebook and Google have pulled their support of the bill. Now, I hope that we will defeat this bill and come back together, because we do work together well here in the judiciary committee, and fix the problems that were created.
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: The federal court I referenced earlier that ruled that the NSA was violating the rights of Americans said about the claim that it was for terrorism, quote,
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: Three democratic senators in President Obama's own party who are on the intelligence committee and have access to all classified information wrote an op-ed in November 25th in the New York Times, and they wrote, quote,
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Michael Hayden
Former Director of the NSA and Director of the CIA
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Hayden: What happens to the billing records is actually really important. I didn't make this phrase up but I'm going to use it. They're put in a lockbox, all right? They're put in a lockbox at NSA. Twenty-two people at NSA are allowed to access that lockbox. The only thing NSA is allowed to do with that truly gajillion record data field sitting there is that when they have what's called a seed number, a seed number about which they have reasonable articulable suspicion that that seed number is affiliated with al Qaeda, you roll up a safe house in Yemen, he's got pocket litter and it says here's his al Qaeda membership card, he's got a phone you've never seen before - gee, I wonder how this phone might be associated with any threats in the united states?
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Edward Snowden
Whistleblower
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Snowden: So this is a part of what today's state surveillance looks like. But it's important to remember it doesn't stop with phone calls. It covers your e-mails, it covers your text messages, your web history, every Google search you’ve ever made and every plane ticket you bought, the books you buy at amazon.com that are the transactions that are sent in plain text and unencrypted. And anyone whether the NSA or some other foreign intelligence service can collect this and it store it for increasing periods of time. It includes who your friends are and how you communicate with them. It shows where you go and what you want to be. It also shows people in charge of state surveillance who you love. And it shows them where these people live.
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Edward Snowden
Whistleblower
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Snowden: Now defenders of this kind of unconstitutional dragnet surveillance might say that there's no room for abuse because we have policies in place to address these concerns. But can policies that change with every new President and every new Congress and every new director of the NSA, really address the threat of building inside our own country this kind of architecture of oppression. What about other countries that don't abide by our policies? Is leaving our communications insecure so that the NSA can monitor them and those of our adversaries, really worth the cost? And we have to remember the policies aren’t perfect, and despite policies, I, as an NSA analyst sitting at my desk had the technical authority to wiretap anyone from a federal judge to the President of the United States without getting out of my chair as long as I had a private email address and that's not a boast.
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: U.S. national security state officials are very adept and skillful at presenting a public image that is wildly different than the reality. And of course the whole NSA scandal began when James Clapper the director of National Intelligence went before our Senate and was asked whether or not the NSA is mass collecting data about millions of Americans, and he looked senators in the eye and said, no, sir. And then the very next -- the very first story we reported from the Snowden archives two months later prove that the NSA was doing exactly that, which, the top national security official in the united states government, falsely denied to the Senate and to the public. So when you hear things like Mr. Snowden, who whatever else you think of him, has never been proven to prevaricate, is not telling the truth when he says that him sitting at his desk he could have wire tapped anyone. I can guarantee you that's exactly what the NSA analysts have the capability to do that that.
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: And the evidence for it (Snowden had the capability to wiretap anyone )-- don't rely on my word or his: It’s the XKEYSCORE program which we reported on in The Guardian September of 2013 with ample documents that show an analyst training manual, walking them through and saying when you want to eavesdrop on a particular e-mail, here's the screen where you do it, and you enter the e-mail and the justification. Nobody checks what it is that you're doing. You simply then start getting the e-mails exactly as Mr. Snowden said.
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: The question of whether there's really any safeguards. He (Hayden) said it's in a lock box. Don’t worry we're collecting all your data but it's very well-protected. Aside from the fact that history proves you cannot trust governments to collect that information and not abuse it, think about this fact. The NSA is an agency where Edward Snowden sat for many months and downloaded all of their most sensitive documents. They had no idea that he was doing it. To this day, they have no idea what he took. They say that all the time, even though they spent tens of millions of dollars trying to figure it out. Does that sound like a very well managed system to you, that you can trust with all of your data not to be abused?
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: (General Hayden) keeps asking for facts, and I think I presented facts, a lot in this debate. But let me just leave you with a few more. In 2009, the global new service McClatchy characterized the threat of terrorism this way, quote, undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than terrorism. Harpers, in March 2011, offered this statistic. The number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year, eight. The minimum number who two died after being struck by lightning, 29. Terrorism is a real threat that is not to be made light of. But there are all sorts of threats that we guard against and keep ourselves safe from, not by dismantling our fundamental liberties like the right to privacy or the limitations on the government's ability to know what we're saying but by balancing them and by affirming the values that we're trying to protect in the first place. thank you.
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