Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden
Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower
Edward Snowden
People's privacy is violated without any suspicion of
wrongdoing, former National Security Agency contractor claims
theguardian.com, Saturday 3 May 2014 01.27 EDT
The US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has
warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under
constant surveillance.
“It's no longer based on the traditional practice of
targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” he said. “It
covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your
friends are, where you go, who you love.”
Snowden made his comments in a short video that was
played before a debate on the proposition that surveillance today is a
euphemism for mass surveillance, in Toronto, Canada. The former US National
Security Agency contractor is living in Russia, having been granted temporary
asylum there in June 2013.
The video was shown as two of the debaters – the former
US National Security Administration director, General Michael Hayden, and the
well-known civil liberties lawyer and Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz –
argued in favour of the debate statement: “Be it resolved state surveillance is
a legitimate defence of our freedoms.”
Opposing the motion were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist
whose work based on Snowden’s leaks won a Pulitzer Prize for the Guardian last
month, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social media website Reddit.
The Snowden documents, first leaked to the Guardian last
June, revealed that the US government has programs in place to spy on hundreds
of millions of people’s emails, social networking posts, online chat histories,
browsing histories, telephone records, telephone calls and texts – “nearly
everything a typical user does on the internet”, in the words of one leaked
document.
Greenwald opened the debate by condemning the NSA’s own
slogan, which he said appears repeatedly throughout its own documents: “Collect
it all.”
“What is state surveillance?” Greenwald asked. “If it
were about targeting in a discriminate way against those causing harm, there
would be no debate.
“The actual system of state surveillance has almost
nothing to do with that. What state surveillance actually is, is defended by
the NSA's actual words, that phrase they use over and over again: 'Collect it
all.’ ”
Dershowitz and Hayden spent the rest of the 90 minutes of
the debate denying that the pervasive surveillance systems described by Snowden
and Greenwald even exist and that surveillance programs are necessary to
prevent terrorism.
“Collect it all doesn't mean collect it all!” Hayden
said, drawing laughter.
Greenwald sparred with Dershowitz and Hayden about
whether or not the present method of metadata collection would have prevented
the terrorist attacks on 11 September, 2011.
While Hayden argued that intelligence analysts would have
noticed the number of telephone calls from San Diego to the Middle East and
caught the terrorists who were living illegally in the US, Greenwald argued
that one of the primary reasons the US authorities failed to prevent the
attacks was because they were taking in too much information to accurately sort
through it all.
Before the debates began, 33% of the audience voted in
favour of the debate statement and 46% voted against. It closed with 59% of the
audience siding with Greenwald and Ohanian.
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