Americans Should Thank NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden
Our country is in the midst of a struggle between the growing surveillance state and our precious civil liberties. Now a whistleblower has boldly stepped forward to expose the National Security Agency’s vast spying on our phone records and online communications. Explaining his actions, the 29-year-old computer expert said: “I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." We thank Edward Snowden for his principled and courageous actions as a whistleblower, informing the public about vast surveillance by the National Security Agency that undermines our civil liberties.
We should thank Edward Snowden: Eugene Robinson
July 29, 2013
Eugene Robinson - Edward Snowden's renegade decision to reveal the jaw-dropping scope of the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance is being vindicated -- even as Snowden himself is being vilified.
Intelligence officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill paint the fugitive analyst as nothing but a traitor who wants to harm the United States. Many of those same officials grudgingly acknowledge, however, that public debate about the NSA's domestic snooping is now unavoidable
This would be impossible if Snowden -- or someone like him -- hadn't spilled the beans. We wouldn't know that the NSA is keeping a database of all our phone calls. We wouldn't know that the government gets the authority to keep track of our private communications -- even if we are not suspected of terrorist activity or associations -- from secret judicial orders issued by a secret court based on secret interpretations of the law.
Snowden, of course, is hardly receiving the thanks of a grateful nation. He has spent the past five weeks trapped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Russian officials, who won't send him home for prosecution, wish he would move along. But he fears that if he takes off for one of the South American countries that has offered asylum, he risks being intercepted en route and extradited. It's a tough situation, and time is not on his side.
You can cheer Snowden's predicament or you can bemoan it. But even some of the NSA's fiercest defenders have admitted, if not in so many words, that Snowden performed a valuable public service.
Less than two weeks ago, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement to announce that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government's authority to collect "metadata" about our phone calls. This was being disclosed "in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the ... collection program."
Isn't that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no "continuing public interest" in the program. We wouldn't know it exists.
The new position espoused by President Barack Obama and those who kept the NSA's domestic surveillance a deep, dark secret is that of course we should have a wide-ranging national debate about balancing the imperatives of privacy and security. But they don't mean it.
I know this because when an actual debate erupted in Congress last week, the intelligence cognoscenti freaked out.
An attempt to cut off funding for the NSA's collection of phone data, sponsored by an unlikely pair of allies in the House -- Justin Amash, a conservative Republican, and John Conyers, a liberal Democrat, both from Michigan -- suffered a surprisingly narrow defeat, 217-205. The measure was denounced by the White House and the congressional leadership of both parties, yet it received bipartisan support from 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats.
The Amash-Conyers amendment was in no danger of becoming law -- the Senate would have killed it and, if all else failed, President Obama would have vetoed it. But it put the intelligence establishment on notice: The spooks don't decide how far is too far. We do.
A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that three out of four Americans believe the vacuum-cleaner collection of phone call data by the NSA intrudes on our privacy rights. At the same time, nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said it was "more important right now" to investigate possible terrorist threats than to respect privacy. A contradiction, perhaps? Not necessarily.
It is possible to endorse sweeping and intrusive measures in the course of a specific investigation but reject those same measures as part of a fishing expedition. At the heart of the Fourth Amendment is the concept that a search must be justified by suspicion. Yet how many of those whose phone call information is being logged are suspected of being terrorists? One in a million?
Equally antithetical to the idea of a free society, in my view, is the government's position that we are not even permitted to know how the secret intelligence court interprets our laws and the Constitution. The order that Snowden leaked -- compelling a Verizon unit to cough up data on the phone calls it handled -- was one of only a few to come to light in the court's three decades of existence. Now there are voices calling for all the court's rulings to be released.
We're talking about these issues. You can wish Edward Snowden well or wish him a lifetime in prison. Either way, you should thank him.
Eugene Robinson writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.
Robert Romano - Let us take Edward Snowden at his word. For a moment, assume he disclosed publicly the National Security Agency’s (NSA) broad, sweeping surveillance of all telephone, Internet, and email communications everywhere — not to hurt people or undermine security but to stop an unconstitutionally intrusive program.
Did he do the right thing? Should we be thanking Snowden, or throwing the book at him?
That may boil down to whether the American people want to know about the type of program he is describing.
In an exclusive interview with Britains The Guardian, Snowden
explained the surveillance state of affairs in the U.S.:
“...increasingly we see that it’s happening domestically and to do that
they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It
ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters
them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for
periods of time.”
So, basically, the agency is recording everything. Every phone call, email, Internet search, chat session, financial transaction, you name it. And then if it needs to target a particular individual, the agency can request a warrant and then develop a complete record of all of his or her communications, including those from the past.
Snowden further emphasized the point, “...even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”
Simply incredible. In short, the agency is clearly violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. But do you have a right to know about it?
Because the only reason we’re finding out about it now is because the information on the program was publicly divulged to media outlets. Snowden broke the law against the disclosure of classified information.
No question.
He’s in a heap of trouble. But how else were the American people supposed to find out about it?
Undoubtedly, the program is a useful tool to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. More information on targets will always be better than less, whether it be terrorists, human traffickers, drug dealers, mobsters, etc.
The agency could probably produce multitudes of cases of foiled attacks, positive identifications of enemy communications, and networks that that have been uncovered, all derived from the database.
As Snowden admitted, the surveillance is being done “simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends.”
But that’s not the point, is it?
As Snowden noted in the interview, “while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they’re collecting your communications to do so.”
So, guilty or innocent, everyone is being caught up in this web of surveillance.
It’s unconstitutional because the searches are clearly occurring prior to any warrants being issued. That is not probable cause.
Even if officials can show that the program was helpful in unraveling terror plots, they will hard-pressed to assert it was constitutional. They’d have to argue that the exercise of war powers on the homeland including intelligence gathering somehow supersedes all other constitutional protections.
However, one struggles to find a wartime exception to the Fourth Amendment in the text of the Constitution itself.
Moreover, because of the secretive nature of the program, the American people have little choice in the program’s implementation.
Congressional oversight is done in secret, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court operates in secret, the relevant agencies operate in secret. Thus, the activities cannot be challenged publicly in any government forum even when there are abuses — precisely because nobody’s allowed to talk about it.
The question for the American people is if that’s the sort of society they want to live in. -- One where all communications public and private are being stored in a government database for later use, and when it is used against the people, there is no recourse. What if it’s ever used for malicious ends?
Snowden alleges that it is already being misused: “When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.”
What were these abuses? If they are occurring, don’t the people have a right to know and to demand that the program be reined in?
The only assurance the American people have that the military and intelligence apparatus is here to protect us is that their awesome powers will not be used against them. Once that façade slips away, all that is left is a ubiquitous police state.
This op-ed originally appeared on NetRightDaily.com.
Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.
Eugene Robinson - Edward Snowden's renegade decision to reveal the jaw-dropping scope of the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance is being vindicated -- even as Snowden himself is being vilified.
Intelligence officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill paint the fugitive analyst as nothing but a traitor who wants to harm the United States. Many of those same officials grudgingly acknowledge, however, that public debate about the NSA's domestic snooping is now unavoidable
This would be impossible if Snowden -- or someone like him -- hadn't spilled the beans. We wouldn't know that the NSA is keeping a database of all our phone calls. We wouldn't know that the government gets the authority to keep track of our private communications -- even if we are not suspected of terrorist activity or associations -- from secret judicial orders issued by a secret court based on secret interpretations of the law.
Snowden, of course, is hardly receiving the thanks of a grateful nation. He has spent the past five weeks trapped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Russian officials, who won't send him home for prosecution, wish he would move along. But he fears that if he takes off for one of the South American countries that has offered asylum, he risks being intercepted en route and extradited. It's a tough situation, and time is not on his side.
You can cheer Snowden's predicament or you can bemoan it. But even some of the NSA's fiercest defenders have admitted, if not in so many words, that Snowden performed a valuable public service.
Less than two weeks ago, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement to announce that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government's authority to collect "metadata" about our phone calls. This was being disclosed "in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the ... collection program."
Isn't that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no "continuing public interest" in the program. We wouldn't know it exists.
The new position espoused by President Barack Obama and those who kept the NSA's domestic surveillance a deep, dark secret is that of course we should have a wide-ranging national debate about balancing the imperatives of privacy and security. But they don't mean it.
I know this because when an actual debate erupted in Congress last week, the intelligence cognoscenti freaked out.
An attempt to cut off funding for the NSA's collection of phone data, sponsored by an unlikely pair of allies in the House -- Justin Amash, a conservative Republican, and John Conyers, a liberal Democrat, both from Michigan -- suffered a surprisingly narrow defeat, 217-205. The measure was denounced by the White House and the congressional leadership of both parties, yet it received bipartisan support from 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats.
The Amash-Conyers amendment was in no danger of becoming law -- the Senate would have killed it and, if all else failed, President Obama would have vetoed it. But it put the intelligence establishment on notice: The spooks don't decide how far is too far. We do.
A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that three out of four Americans believe the vacuum-cleaner collection of phone call data by the NSA intrudes on our privacy rights. At the same time, nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said it was "more important right now" to investigate possible terrorist threats than to respect privacy. A contradiction, perhaps? Not necessarily.
It is possible to endorse sweeping and intrusive measures in the course of a specific investigation but reject those same measures as part of a fishing expedition. At the heart of the Fourth Amendment is the concept that a search must be justified by suspicion. Yet how many of those whose phone call information is being logged are suspected of being terrorists? One in a million?
Equally antithetical to the idea of a free society, in my view, is the government's position that we are not even permitted to know how the secret intelligence court interprets our laws and the Constitution. The order that Snowden leaked -- compelling a Verizon unit to cough up data on the phone calls it handled -- was one of only a few to come to light in the court's three decades of existence. Now there are voices calling for all the court's rulings to be released.
We're talking about these issues. You can wish Edward Snowden well or wish him a lifetime in prison. Either way, you should thank him.
Eugene Robinson writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.
Why Americans should thank Edward Snowden
Robert Romano - Let us take Edward Snowden at his word. For a moment, assume he disclosed publicly the National Security Agency’s (NSA) broad, sweeping surveillance of all telephone, Internet, and email communications everywhere — not to hurt people or undermine security but to stop an unconstitutionally intrusive program.
Did he do the right thing? Should we be thanking Snowden, or throwing the book at him?
That may boil down to whether the American people want to know about the type of program he is describing.
Even if NSA officials can show that the phone surveillance program was helpful in unraveling terror plots, they will hard-pressed to assert it was constitutional.
So, basically, the agency is recording everything. Every phone call, email, Internet search, chat session, financial transaction, you name it. And then if it needs to target a particular individual, the agency can request a warrant and then develop a complete record of all of his or her communications, including those from the past.
Snowden further emphasized the point, “...even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”
Simply incredible. In short, the agency is clearly violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. But do you have a right to know about it?
Because the only reason we’re finding out about it now is because the information on the program was publicly divulged to media outlets. Snowden broke the law against the disclosure of classified information.
No question.
He’s in a heap of trouble. But how else were the American people supposed to find out about it?
Undoubtedly, the program is a useful tool to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. More information on targets will always be better than less, whether it be terrorists, human traffickers, drug dealers, mobsters, etc.
The agency could probably produce multitudes of cases of foiled attacks, positive identifications of enemy communications, and networks that that have been uncovered, all derived from the database.
As Snowden admitted, the surveillance is being done “simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends.”
But that’s not the point, is it?
As Snowden noted in the interview, “while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they’re collecting your communications to do so.”
So, guilty or innocent, everyone is being caught up in this web of surveillance.
It’s unconstitutional because the searches are clearly occurring prior to any warrants being issued. That is not probable cause.
Even if officials can show that the program was helpful in unraveling terror plots, they will hard-pressed to assert it was constitutional. They’d have to argue that the exercise of war powers on the homeland including intelligence gathering somehow supersedes all other constitutional protections.
However, one struggles to find a wartime exception to the Fourth Amendment in the text of the Constitution itself.
Moreover, because of the secretive nature of the program, the American people have little choice in the program’s implementation.
Congressional oversight is done in secret, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court operates in secret, the relevant agencies operate in secret. Thus, the activities cannot be challenged publicly in any government forum even when there are abuses — precisely because nobody’s allowed to talk about it.
The question for the American people is if that’s the sort of society they want to live in. -- One where all communications public and private are being stored in a government database for later use, and when it is used against the people, there is no recourse. What if it’s ever used for malicious ends?
Snowden alleges that it is already being misused: “When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.”
What were these abuses? If they are occurring, don’t the people have a right to know and to demand that the program be reined in?
The only assurance the American people have that the military and intelligence apparatus is here to protect us is that their awesome powers will not be used against them. Once that façade slips away, all that is left is a ubiquitous police state.
This op-ed originally appeared on NetRightDaily.com.
Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.
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