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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
Journalist at The Intercept
CNNW 02/09/2014
Stelter: Yet every time we talk, every time you're on television, people on twitter call you a traitor. What is that like to hear the word traitor at the same time you hear hero from other people? Greenwald: Yeah. You know, I think that it's always the case that if you are adversarial to the U.S. government there are certain people who view criticizing the government or exposing bad acts that are done in secret of the government, as being treasonous. If you go back and look at what was said about one of my political heroes, Daniel Ellsberg, who everybody now regards as a hero, but 40 years ago you had the Mike Rogers and James Clappers of that era calling him a Russian spy and a traitor and engaging in treason and endangering the United States. It's really just a very similar pattern. And I knew a long time ago when I went into journalism that it wasn't the profession to go into if you want to be universally loved. If you do it the right way it means you're going to make a lot of powerful people and their loyalists unhappy and I'm perfectly okay with that.
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Jeremy Scahill
Co-Founder, The Intercept
CNNW 02/10/2014
Scahill: this is effectively what amounts to death by metadata. We're living in an era of precrime where we're using analysis of signals, intercepts of the activity that is registered on behalf of a s.i.m. card or a telephone handset. We don't necessarily have evidence that the individuals holding that s.i.m. card or that moble phone handset are in fact the individuals that we're targeting. And so what is effectively happening is that instead of confirming that target x is in fact this individual that the U.S. is trying to kill, they are effectively killing the cell phones. And this is a system that is rife with error and what we see is that the U.S.. has basically outsourced its human intelligence capacity, so called human capacity and it's now relying in some cases 90% or more on the use of signals intelligence or imagery intelligence and that leaves the door open for killing of phones not targeting of individuals.
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Edward Snowden
Whistleblower
LINKTV 02/10/2014
Goodman: U.S. intelligence officials are claiming Edward Snowden stole internal NSA documents by using cheap and widely available software that still went mostly undetected. Speaking to "The New York Times," investigators looking into Snowden’s case, say he deployed a simple web crawler that automatically downloaded some 1.7 million files. In a statement, Snowden responded “It’s ironic that officials are giving classified information to journalists in an effort to discredit me for giving classified information to journalists. The difference is that I did so to inform the public about the government’s actions, and they’re doing so to misinform the public about mine,” he said.
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Jeremy Scahill
Co-Founder, The Intercept
LINKTV 02/10/2014
Scahill: What we have seen also over the past month is a very serious escalation in the threats coming from the Obama Administration and from Capitol Hill against journalists. There is this attempt on the part of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper to imply that the journalists who are reporting on the Snowden documents are accomplices to a crime-- my understanding from a confidential source in the intelligence community is that Clapper two weeks before he publicly used that term of accomplice, that he also said that in a top-secret classified briefing within the intelligence community sort of floating it.
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Jeremy Scahill
Co-Founder, The Intercept
LINKTV 02/10/2014
Scahill: Mike Rogers also has just been on a rampage against journalists, also against Snowden, making totally unfounded allegations about Snowden being somehow a Russian agent or cooperating with Russian agents. And so the timing of this site and why we felt it was so urgent to start reporting on these stories right now is to push back against this climate of fear and to say we as independent journalist are not going to back down in the face of government threats. That in fact, this is when it is most important to stand up for a truly free and independent press is when those in power start to try to push their fist down upon you.
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Daniel Ellsberg
Author of
LINKTV 02/14/2014
Ellsberg: nondisclosure agreement in this case and the secrecy, conflicted with his oath, so help me God, to defend and support the constitution of the united states, and was superseding authority there that was his responsibility really to inform the public because as he said, he could see that no one else would do it. He saw the head of the NSA but also the Director of National Intelligence who quoted here, Clapper, lie to Congress. And actually what he’s mostly revealed in particular is not that Mr. Clapper was violating his oath in the sense of trying to deceive congress. Clapper knew that the false statements he was making, that they were not collecting data on millions, any data, on millions of Americans were false, but he knew that Congress knew they were false that, the people that he was talking to.
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Daniel Ellsberg
Author of
LINKTV 02/14/2014
Ellsberg: What we saw, what Snowden saw, what we all saw was that we couldn’t rely on the so-called oversight committee of congress to reveal, even when they knew that they were being lied to, and that’s because they were bound by secrecy, NSA secrecy and their own rules. Secrecy in other words has totally corrupted the checks and balances on which our democracy depends. I am grateful to Snowden for having given us a constitutional crisis, a crisis instead of a silent coup, as after 9/11. An executive coup. A creeping usurpation of authority
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Daniel Ellsberg
Author of
LINKTV 02/14/2014
Ellsberg: He’s (Snowden) confronted us. He’s revealed documents that prove that the oversight process, both in the judiciary in the FISC, the secret court, and the secret committees in congress who keep their secrets from even when two them, Wyden and Udall felt these were outrageous, were shocking, probably unconstitutional, and yet did not feel they could inform even their fellow colleagues or their staff of this. What Snowden has revealed is a broken system of our constitution and he has given us the opportunity to get it back, to retrieve our civil liberties, but more than that to retrieve the separation of powers here on which our democracy depends.
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James Clapper (quoted)
Director of National Intelligence
CNNW 02/18/2014
Baldwin: Now back to James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, made these candid remarks about the phone data collection by the government. This is what he said in this interview here. Let me quote him. He said, Clapper (quoted): "Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11, we wouldn't have had the problem we had with the explosive public reaction." Baldwin: It is worth pointing out, phone data collection proceeds the Obama administration, so Clapper wasn't there to make those early decisions. Do you think he's shoving blame for the heat he’s taken on to the Bush Administration here? Tapper: Well obviously there's some of that, because he's talking about this needing to have been done ten years ago. But I think more theoretically, and obviously, President Obama could have come in and Clapper, when he was appointed Director of National Intelligence, could have come in and announced (that this program section 215, the collection of metadata, the surveillance on Americans, they could have announced it at the time.)
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James Clapper (quoted)
Director of National Intelligence
CSPAN2 02/18/2014
Henry: on national security. James Clapper, you probably saw comments he made to "The Daily Beast" where he at one point said he said quote Clapper (quoted): “I probably shouldn't say this but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11,” Henry: which is the genesis of the 215 program, he’s talking about the metadata and said both to the American people and their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap. He said if we have been more transparent "we wouldn't have these problems." That Edward Snowden's leak's wouldn’t have had as much of an impact on the American people if the intelligence community had been more transparent. Does the President agree with that assessment? Carney: Well, I certainly don't think that Director Clapper is saying anything that should come as a surprise. I mean he’s going all the way back to the event that led to the creation of some of these programs. Henry: He’s talking about both administrations I should point out.
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