Jun 05, 2016 · Tom Devine: There has been a sea change in the legal roles of the game in the US. The government no longer can directly collect everything that we communicate with each other electronically. That is a major change. What has really happened is that Mr. Snowden changed the course of history, and that is what whistleblowers do.
Jun 11, 2013 · NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' Glenn Greenwald , Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong Tue 11 Jun 2013 09.00 EDT
Jun 05, 2016 · The leaks were thanks in large part to whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has been living in Russia for the last three years, unable to return to the United States for fear of spending his life behind bars. Faced with charges under the Espionage Act, Snowden would be charged as if he were an agent of a foreign power who had given secrets to ...
That, however, doesn’t change the fact that he could not have “gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower.” To continue to assert that, as Hilary Clinton and others seem willing to do, is to subvert, through misinformation, the important conversation that we should continue to have about both the ethics of Snowden’s choices ...
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the …
For example, we know that companies including Facebook, Google and Microsoft were forced to handover customer data under secret orders from the NSA. And that the NSA recorded, stored and analysed ‘ metadata ’ relating to every single telephone call and text message transmitted in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.
The UK extended its powers in 2014 to retain people’s personal communications data and has further surveillance legislation on the horizon. This year has also seen sweeping new surveillance powers proposed in Pakistan, France and Switzerland, while in the Netherlands a new intelligence bill is expected imminently.
Technology companies and software engineers are building privacy into software. Several major companies including Apple, Google and Whatsapp have improved the default security and encryption provided to users. Greater consumer pressure has pushed the industry to strengthen its approach to protecting users’ privacy.
We’ve since learned that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been monitoring the internet and phone activity of hundreds of millions of people across the world. We take a look at how the landscape has changed thanks to the documents Snowden released.
Companies are standing up to governments. For example, ten of the world’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo, have launched a campaign calling for an end to the bulk collection of personal data. 7. There is increased scrutiny of the laws underpinning mass surveillance.
In the UK, a government committee has called for an overhaul of the laws governing intelligence agencies, so that the whole process would be more transparent. Over in the USA, the government has passed the USA Freedom Act, which attempts to end government bulk collection of US phone records.
A number of international bodies have warned that mass surveillance poses a threat to our human rights. The UN expert on counter-terrorism and human rights said: “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the internet altogether.”.
He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA.
Three weeks ago, Snowden made final preparations that resulted in last week’s series of blockbuster news stories. At the NSA office in Hawaii where he was working, he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose.
He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan.
Snowden did not always believe the US government posed a threat to his political values. He was brought up originally in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His family moved later to Maryland, near the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade.
T he individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National ...
By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.
From 8,000 miles away, the leaker looked on impassively, not even indulging in a wry smile. Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
Faced with charges under the Espionage Act, Snowden would be charged as if he were an agent of a foreign power who had given secrets to enemies of the United States , rather than as a whistleblower who worked with a team of reputable, award-winning journalists to bring public attention to a corrupt surveillance system.
The Snowden leaks caused a sea change in the policy landscape related to surveillance. EFF worked with dozens of coalition partners across the political spectrum to pass the USA Freedom Act, the first piece of legislation to rein in NSA spying in over thirty years—a bill that would have been unthinkable without the Snowden leaks.
Three years ago today, the world got powerful confirmation that the NSA was spying on the digital lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people. It started with a secret order written by the FISA court authorizing the mass surveillance of Verizon Business telephone records—an order that members of Congress quickly confirmed was similar ...
He did not complete the training due to bilateral tibial stress fractures, and was discharged on September 28, 2004.
He contacted Greenwald anonymously as "Cincinnatus" and said he had sensitive documents that he would like to share. Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications, such as encrypting email, too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013. According to Poitras, Snowden chose to contact her after seeing her New York Times article about NSA whistleblower William Binney. What originally attracted Snowden to both Greenwald and Poitras was a Salon article written by Greenwald detailing how Poitras's controversial films had made her a target of the government.
NSA Director Keith Alexander initially estimated that Snowden had copied anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 NSA documents. Later estimates provided by U.S. officials were in the order of 1.7 million, a number that originally came from Department of Defense talking points. In July 2014, The Washington Post reported on a cache previously provided by Snowden from domestic NSA operations consisting of "roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts." A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report declassified in June 2015 said that Snowden took 900,000 Department of Defense files, more than he downloaded from the NSA.
Snowden applied for political asylum to 21 countries. A statement attributed to him contended that the U.S. administration, and specifically then–Vice President Joe Biden, had pressured the governments to refuse his asylum petitions. Biden had telephoned President Rafael Correa days prior to Snowden's remarks, asking the Ecuadorian leader not to grant Snowden asylum. Ecuador had initially offered Snowden a temporary travel document but later withdrew it, and Correa later called the offer a mistake.
On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill.
On May 7, 2015, in the case of ACLU v. Clapper, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the NSA to collect Americans' calling records in bulk, as exposed by Snowden in 2013.
In 2013, Donald Trump made a series of tweets in which he referred to Snowden as a "traitor", saying he gave "serious information to China and Russia" and "should be executed". Later that year he added a caveat, tweeting "if it and he could reveal Obama's [birth] records, I might become a major fan".
As part of his initial disclosures, Snowden leaked a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order to Verizon from April 2013 to supply the NSA with daily domestic phone records of millions of American customers.
In 2013, Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor with Booz Allen, blew the whistle on the secret program when he leaked documents proving its existence to The Guardian.
Under the Obama administration, the original NSA program was replaced by another system under the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2015. Though the program was meant to resolve some of the privacy issues with the old system, millions of records continued to remain in government hands.
The shuttering of the program came to light when a senior Republican congressional aide, Luke Murray, indicated that the federal government had discontinued use of the program while speaking on the Lawfare podcast.
The program stemmed from the George W. Bush administration’s aggressive efforts after 9/11 to collect information about Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks. The Bush White House created the secret Stellarwind surveillance program, one part of which involved the extensive collection of Americans’ phone call logs.
After all, it was AT&T that originally got sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF, my former employer) in 2006 for criminally allowing the NSA to copy huge portions of its internet traffic in secret. But even the two phone giants could not fully avoid the Snowden Effect.
Meanwhile, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Cispa), an "information sharing" bill that purportedly would address cybersecurity, was indefinitely shelved thanks to the Snowden leaks.
Since the second day of the Snowden revelations, when both the Guardian and Washington Post revealed the now-infamous Prism program, the tech giants of Silicon Valley and beyond have been scrambling to rescu e their reputations with users around the world.
'Gmail can't do it alone.' Illustration via Google Photograph: Illustration via Google
But even the two phone giants could not fully avoid the Snowden Effect. After shareholders threatened lawsuits, they both decided to release transparency reports to customers after years of resisting, and Verizon made a half-hearted attempt to challenge the phone dragnet program.
In truth, the second year of Snowden may be more important than the first. It's when we'll see if global privacy rights get protected for the better – or if mass surveillance becomes more entrenched in our laws than ever before. For now, it's important to take stock in looking ahead to the next chapter.
A New York City police officer, Serpico exposed police corruption in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which prompted a landmark investigation into the NYPD. His story was made into a movie in 1973, starring Al Pacino .
He was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 1999 film “The Insider.”
In the 1990s, Whitacre worked with the Feds to expose price fixing in agriculture by his own company, ADM. He spent eight-and-a-half years in prison after it was discovered he embezzled money. His story was made into 2009’s “The Informant!” starring Matt Damon.
A chemical technician, Silkwood became famous for exposing corporate practices related to health and safety of workers in a nuclear facility. She died mysteriously in 1974. Her story was later made into a movie starring Meryl Steep.
Born Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private was convicted in 2013 after releasing nearly three-quarters of a million classified or sensitive documents to WikiLeaks. Manning, a transgender woman, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the offense.