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

Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: I am broadly satisfied with what’s happened in the last year. We've seen an extraordinary change in public awareness. we have seen an increased openness. i would say innovative spirit in government, not by choice, but by necessity. I believe we had Bob Litt speaking earlier which was great to have him with us. And he mentioned they've decided to be more transparent in the future because they recognize these policies of over classification, over secrecy, are not helpful and, in fact, are damaging. I think we should really scrutinize the value of not just the government's, shall we say improvement, and not just around the world in the court systems, a number of panelists have spoken about beneficial things we're seeing in the united states court system.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: The first open federal courts review of programs found they're likely unconstitutional and even call them Orwellian in scope. The European Court of Justice struck down the European version of sort of the Smith v. Maryland, said the date of attention directed is unallowable, It’s a fundamental violation of rights. We've seen The United Nations issue reports that said mass surveillance is not permissible under any circumstances. It’s necessarily, it’s a contradiction of sort of our fundamental values and it's an inherent violation of rights. And we see a lot of things like that happen. But beyond that we see the real change that's happening is actually occurring outside of courts, outside of congress, outside of the executive agencies entirely and this is happening through things like technology companies.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: On the technological side sort of in the fabric of the internet where immediately upon the public awareness of the problem technologists, academics, engineers around the world all came together and they went, this is a serious concern and how do we address this? How do we solve these problems? How do we make sure we don’t have to deal with this in the future? And we see that individuals as well are taking action and taking steps to try to retrieve their rights that have been sort of unnecessarily taken out of their hands, out of their domain. This is a poll done by a Canadian group. They don’t really have dog in the fight, so this is why I sight them. They got a representative sample of internet users around the world and they found 60% of them around the world had heard of the revelations of the last year. And of those 60%, 39% of those had taken active steps to improve the security of their privacy of communications online.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: It was interesting how the media interpreted this. They said, well, this is a minority. People must not care that much. Nobody is really making changes. When you actually do the math of the 39% of the 60% of the world's internet users is, that is 702 million people around the world who are now safer today than a year navel ago. This is, I think really where we begin to see the framework of how we can move forward in the absence of political and legal reform and this is good.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: Because what we've seen politically around the world throughout the development of human civilization and history is that politics is about power (lost some audio). When you have people in great power positions, when you have super states, they will not cede any sort of authority that they’ve claimed back to the public, back to civil society, unless hey are afraid of a more undercutting alternative. And this is what is setting us up to really have a sort of renaissance of security, and of liberty in the way we associate the way we speak, the way we research online. And this is critical. Because when we think about reforms, when we think about all the challenges we have in the United States, these are big picture problems but at the same time these are only the things that are happening within the United States.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: And as bad as the policies of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency and F.B.I. have been, in regard to respecting sort of the boundaries of our rights, they are good, relative to many other governments around the world. And so we have to think about not just how to protect the rights of Americans but protect the rights of individuals around the world who live under regimes who are much less liberal, and much more authoritarian. The only way we can do that is to ensure that there are international standards that are well agreed upon as to what behavior is proper or improper. We have court mechanisms that can enforce these. And ultimately, fundamentally, we can enforce these through technology. On the basis of all of this I would say I'm tremendously satisfied.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: There are a number of business interests that have been referenced by some of the other panelists Massie, the ACLU, Matt Greene, John Hopkins professor and many others who have referenced the fact that there are commercial incentives today to actually find vulnerabilities, to find weaknesses in our systems. And rather than work to fix those, rather than work to secure our systems, they actually leave those open. They will sell them to the highest bidder, and use those to enable the exact kind of masquerade attacks, spoofing attacks, phishing attacks that you were describing.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: More concerningly. we see agencies of government for example the National Security Agency which has
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: We can understand the incentives for why the National Intelligence Agency would want to seek to do this. Give them access in novel places, places previously denied but at the same time those same vulnerabilities can be used against the American government, the American people, allies in other cities and other systems and other countries around the world but also in our products and services. Google has had a pretty big presence here. This is not just about Google but every American service around the world and product.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Edward Snowden
whistleblower
CSPAN 12/12/2014
Snowden: if we're creating phones that have inherent insecurities, if we're creating flaws in our standards and protocols that every interoperable system relies upon to communicate, we are weakening the basis of our modern economy because America relies more on the internet for productivity, for trade, for economic gains in comparison advantage, than any other nation on earth. And, yes, while inserting flaws into standards may give us some sort of comparative advantage in spying on China, once they discover it they'll be able to use the same thing against us.
More / Share / Borrow
Add to Popcorn
Showing 1531 through 1540 of 1708