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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

Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 10/31/2013
Gellman: they're using a -- what they call a signal intelligence address or activity designator which just means a place and program from which they're tapping the data. we don't know where it is. we don't know exactly how it is. The evidence we have-- besides them saying so in their own documents that they're doing it, is that they are seeing things that don't exist on the public internet. That exist only in the cloud that belongs to Google or belong to Yahoo!
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Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 10/31/2013
Gellman: Their internal systems don't ever touch the public internet. They have private fiber optic cable, private systems that transmit the data back and forth. They're seeing things in special formats that are used by Google and Yahoo! to move their own data that they couldn't see anywhere else.
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Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 10/31/2013
Gellman: If you want to tap into communications from a place inside the united states on u.s. territory you have to have -- you have to do it under either FISA authority or what's called transit authority, but in general you can't just bulk collect information that would reside in a database of yahoo! or google. if you're doing it from overseas different rules apply. You're not relying on statutory authority. you're not relying on the FISA court. Instead you're relying solely on presidential authority under executive order 12333 and there the rules are a little bit different and when you're tapping into a foreign access point you're allowed to presume legally through the N.S.A. that the people using that foreign access point are foreigners.
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Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 10/31/2013
Ifill: What you're saying is that they did is not illegal because it involved international networks? Gellman: well, it's a rough analogy but if your -- your accountant would say you're allowed to avoid taxes not evade them. So they're taking full advantage of the rules as they interpret them. There are some outside surveillance lawyers who say it may raise some interesting questions about lawfulness but on its face I don't see any evidence they're flouting the law. They're using it in ways that the companies and public did not expect.
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Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 10/31/2013
Gellman: We've changed the law after 9/11 to say just that it's okay to –it's okay to collect information from U.S. facilities because lots of foreign traffic passes through there. We have not added restrictions because a lot of Americans' traffic passes through foreign switches. We now have this global internet and so you can be sitting in Boise and log on to your Yahoo! account or your Google account and you're actually talking to a server in Finland which is getting information from a data center in south America. So the information in your account is being synchronized across the data centers so as it moves across you can have five years of e-mails packaged up moving across the wire and this program will intercept it. Whether they keep it and under what circumstances, all those rules are classified.
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Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 10/31/2013
Gellerman: Google and Yahoo! are responding in slightly different ways. Google executives are clearly openly very angry about this and engineers I've talked to who are closely familiar with Google's internals were, as I said in the story, quite profane. They exploded in these very angry reactions when they realized what was being done to them. And Google is now accelerating the efforts to encrypt all the traffic that flows between those data centers. Yahoo! simply gave a statement that it was not aware of and did not cooperate in any of this and it has not announced any efforts efforts to prevent it.
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Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman and CEO of Google
CNNW 11/04/2013
Schmidt: it's just terrible policy. So as an example, in the Uunited States, it appears as though, according to the documents, that the National Security Agency tracked everyone's phone calls in order to identify 300 suspects. We had to track according to the disclosures, 300 million people's activities. It doesn't seem right. Seems like overreach. Over and over again this needs to be organized. There are legitimate uses of this. This is clearly an over step. In this particular case, we assume that there was monitoring between different computer systems. With encryption, we can stop that. Stout: Google is calling this overreach. You're clearly angry about this. Schmidt: We are.
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Dianne Feinstein
U.S. Senator (D-CA), Chairman of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
CNNW 11/04/2013
Blitzer: Eric Schmidt, the Google executive chairman, telling the "Wall Street Journal" this. The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It's just bad public policy and perhaps illegal. You agree with him? Feinstein: No. and I'll tell you this much. You take down that phone records program and you will increase the risk of an attack in this country. I very much believe that. these phone record programs were part of at least 12 potential arrests in the country in the past and I think because we have been saved from a major attack, I think there's a belief around well, terrorism is down.
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Eric Schmidt quoted
CEO Google
KQED 11/05/2013
Herera: One big tech executive speaking out against speaking atalligations of spying into corporate databases by the National Security Agency. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said that widespread U.S. government spying by the NSA on the company's data centers, if true, would be outragous and potentiall illegal. Schmidt told a Hong Cong newspaper that his company has registered complaints with the NSA, President Obama and Congress.
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Eric Schmidt quoted
Executive Chairman of Google
CNBC 11/26/2013
Mathison: Google's Eric Schmidt saying they're stepping up the security efforts at Google, saying, and this was an incredible statement to me, “what i can tell you is now that we're safe from the Chinese and the NSA.”
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