The NSA contractor turned leaker says that Americans shouldn’t have to adopt new habits in order to evade government surveillance — nor should anyone stop sharing their personal, x-rated images.
Snowden, the former NSA analyst attributed with facilitating one of the biggest intelligence leaks in United States history, told talk show host John Oliver that revelations about the NSA’s spy programs shouldn’t stifle free expression.
“The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities that we have ever seen in history,” Snowden told Oliver during an interview that aired on the comedian’s Sunday evening episode of “Last Week Tonight.”
“Now what they will argue is that they don’t use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens. In some ways that’s true. But the real problem is that they’re using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them and then saying, well, ‘I have gun pointed at your head. I’m not going to pull the trigger. Trust me.’”
Oliver introduced his interview with Snowden by acknowledging during Sunday’s episode that provisions contained in the US PATRIOT Act—including some that make up the supposed legal basis for the spy agency’s surveillance operations—are set to expire on June 1 if Congress fails to re-authorize the legislation.
Now in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures and the subsequent international backlash, Congress might be closer than ever to reining in the NSA. According to the former contractor, pulling the plug on any of the agency’s eavesdropping programs would roll back the powers of a state-sanctioned spy machine unmatched anywhere on Earth.
But while, according to Oliver, the PATRIOT Act might serve as “basically a blank check” for the government to collect intelligence on seemingly everyone, the comedian argued with Snowden that the ordinary American isn’t interested—or even understands—the complexities surrounding the ongoing surveillance issue.
“There's no doubt it is a critical conversation. But is it a conversation that we have the capacity to have?” Oliver asked. “Because it's so complicated that we don't fundamentally understand it.”
“It is a challenging conversation. It's difficult for most people to even conceptualize. The problem is the internet is massively complex and so much of it is invisible,” Snowden said in response.
John Oliver is asking Edward Snowden about the NSA’s capacity to spy on “dick pics.” This is not a joke.
— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) April 6, 2015
“The question is, are these programs valuable. Are we going to be safer when we are spying on UNICEF and lawyers who are talking about the price of shrimp and clove cigarettes,” Snowden said.
In Oliver’s view, revelations concerning international charities and attorneys aren’t what Americans are most interested in. “The most visible line in the sand for people,” Oliver said, is whether or not any x-rated images sent from cell phones or email accounts can be intercepted by the NSA.
“The bad news is they are still collecting everyone’s information,” Snowden said, “including your dick pics.”
Indeed, Snowden explained to Oliver that the NSA’s vast ability when it comes to scooping up electronic data knows no bounds, even when inappropriate images are at hand. Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s 2008 amendments, Snowden said, “your junk ends up in the [NSA’s] database” should an image, in theory, be sent over international borders.
“Even if you send it to somebody in the United States,” Snowden explained. “Your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go to New York to London and back and get caught up in the database.”
The NSA’s PRISM program, first revealed by Snowden in 2013, “is how the pull your junk out of Google with Google’s involvement,” he explained, and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—the contentious metadata collection program—allows the agency to “tell who you are sharing your junk pictures with.”
Oliver responded by saying he was “horrified” by the news, but Snowden said that shouldn’t be any reason for Americans to censor themselves.
“You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing,” he said. “If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.”
No comments:
Post a Comment