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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

Glenn Greenwald
Guardian Reporter
KQED 05/20/2014
Narrator: The document directly contradicted what Director of National Intelligence General James Clapper had said before Congress just a few months earlier. Wyden: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? Clapper No, sir. Wyden: It does not? Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly. Greenwald: I think for Snowden, the Clapper testimony was the final nail in the coffin. Watching President Obama's top national security official go before the Senate Intelligence Committee and outright lie about what the NSA was doing convinced him, I think, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the only hope for public discussion and reform was for him to do what he was going to do.
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Barack Obama
President
KQED 05/20/2014
Harding: In Hong Kong, Snowden was sitting with three people under contract with the Guardian. They were sitting there on the bed watching the reaction on CNN. Obama: They are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content. Greenwald: Obama was saying the NSA isn't listening to the telephone calls or reading the emails of Americans, which is absolutely wrong. There were documents that we had that proved President Obama's claims in that regard were false. And we just could tell, as well, that he at that moment didn't have any idea of the true magnitude of what was coming, given how dismissive and casual his tone was. Obama: Thank you very much, guys.
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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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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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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: (The reason that) I really wanted to write the book to tell that story is because so much has been said about all of those events and so much of what has been said has been wildly false. And one of the really interesting things is that if you’re somebody who really likes to bash the American media and I'm definitely somebody who likes to do that, it's one of my most favorite pastimes it doesn't really come as a surprise to learn that much of what the media turns out is misleading in all sorts of ways. But when you’re actually at the center of a story like this and you’re reading in the newspaper claims about what it is that happened, when you actually know the truth because you are at those events and were a part of them your appreciation for their capacity to mislead expands wildly. It really is shocking to have seen some of the things that have been said given my firsthand knowledge (of how false they are)
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
CSPAN2 05/24/2014
Greenwald: I remember in particular in Hong Kong when we revealed Edward Snowden's identity on his insistence on June 10 of last year. From June 10 until June 23 the instant consensus of the American national security elite here in Washington and in large numbers of the American media was that there was no question but that this is almost certainly a Chinese espionage operation that Edward Snowden has almost certainly a spy of the government in Beijing. And then on June 24 when he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow on his way to Ecuador and got trapped in Moscow by the U.S. government which revoked his passport, and bullied the Cubans to rescind their offer of safe passage, the very same people who'd been accusing him of being a Chinese spy instantly transformed their smear campaign into oh he's obviously an agent of Vladimir Putin. I mean that's been obvious all along.
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