The events in the 52 weeks since have proven him to be the most significant whistleblower in American history – and have reverberated throughout the world. But along with the changes Snowden sparked, vital questions remain about how and if the National Security Agency and its global spy apparatus will truly be reformed.
However, Snowden still faces U.S. criminal charges for violating the Espionage Act, despite the fact that such a prosecution is unconstitutional. The law is vague and over-broad with a long and sordid history of suppressing legitimate dissent.
Additionally, included in Snowden’s exposures was an NSA court order compelling internet service provider, Verizon, to turn over metadata for millions of its users.
In June 2013, the U.S. government charged Snowden with espionage under the Espionage Act and attempted to extradite him. However, with the Hong Kong government not taking any action with regard to his extradition, Snowden fled to Russia where he has since remained.
Media disclosure of PRISM PRISM was publicly revealed when classified documents about the program were leaked to journalists of The Washington Post and The Guardian by Edward Snowden – at the time an NSA contractor – during a visit to Hong Kong.
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Based on above analysis, Snowden's actions were ethically justified even if legally prohibited. Government cannot break the trust reposed by people. If such surveillance is in national interest then government must pass a law on it and inform people. This will ensure apolitical use of it, only for national interest.
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Briefly, (1) the firm's actions will do serious and considerable harm to others; (2) the whistle-blowing act is justifiable once the employee reports it to her immediate supervisor and makes her moral concerns known; (3) absent any action by the supervisor, the employee should take the matter all the way up to the ...
Complaints that count as whistleblowing a criminal offence, for example fraud. someone's health and safety is in danger. risk or actual damage to the environment. a miscarriage of justice.
Most ethicists agree whistleblowing is an ethical action. According to the “standard theory” on whistleblowing, whistleblowing is morally required when it is required at all; people have a moral obligation to prevent serious harm to others if they can do so with little costs to themselves.
In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA ), revealed the existence of previously highly classified intelligence-gathering surveillance programs run by the NSA and the U.K.’s equivalent, the GCHQ. While working at the NSA, Snowden began accumulating information on NSA surveillance programs and activities while contracted there from 2009 to 2013.
In 2019, Snowden released his memoir, Permanent Record.
In August 2013, President Obama announced proposed reforms to increase transparency of NSA and other agency programs, including updating sections of the Patriot Act and reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Additionally, President Obama convened an independent panel of outside experts to examine the U.S. government’s surveillance technologies and practices. In December 2013, the panel found that the NSA should not be permitted to collect personal data and information from Internet service providers and phone carriers, among other recommendations.
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.
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.
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.
National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.K.’s intelligence organization, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). For this, Snowden was charged with espionage by the U.S.
Finally, as Joe Davidson of the Washington Post noted, procedures for the directive were not implemented until July 2013 – after Snowden had made his disclosures. These tenuous protections may have precipitated Snowden’s disclosure to the press.
Whistleblowers in the intelligence community must be afforded real protections and clear avenues of reporting in order to bring forth evidence of misconduct to appropriate authorities.
The National Whistleblower Center is working tirelessly to make sure future whistleblowers who do report can do so safely and without fear of retaliation, because as Snowden said in a 2019 interview: “You have to be ready to stand for something if you want it to change.”. News & Press Releases.
Antiquated laws like the Espionage Act and ineffective protections like PPD-19 only serve to push whistleblowers with legitimate concerns for American safety away from proper channels . The case of Edward Snowden exemplifies the many hurdles whistleblowers can face when stepping forward.
NWC co-founder and leading whistleblower attorney, Stephen M. Kohn, said of the Espionage Act in a 2010 Guardian article that “ [t]here are responsible mechanisms policing truly abusive leaks. The Espionage Act is not such a tool.”.
government and, subsequently, fled the country. Snowden’s exposure of NSA surveillance is a controversial subject; supporters claim he is a hero, while detractors say he is un-American.
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 ...
Undoubtedly Snowden's biggest tangible impact has been on the security of ordinary internet users. After shocking stories of the NSA vacuuming up hundreds of thousands of buddy lists from Yahoo, breaking into the data links in between Google's servers, and having a disturbingly close relationship with Microsoft's product teams, service providers have raced to prove which can protect their users' data better. Yahoo, after years of being the joke of security researchers, hired a top security expert and shored up its systems in multiple ways. Google, after two of its employees "exploded in profanity" upon hearing about one of the NSA stories, has not only led the way in providing encryption in all aspects of its service, but just announced on Tuesday night that it will begin to provide a truly end-to-end email encryption plug-in – and that it will be naming and shaming other companies who don't encrypt messages sent between different email providers. As Microsoft chief lawyer wrote on Wednesday, "much more needs to be done".
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.
Cut to a year later: multiple major lawsuits challenging key portions of the NSA's powers are now alive and well. The first judge to rule on the mass phone metadata surveillance program in an adversarial proceeding called it "almost Orwellian" and "likely unconstitutional". We learned the Justice Department undoubtedly lied to the US supreme court last year. Court orders in multiple Freedom of Information Act cases have pried loose hundreds of pages of previously secret Fisa court rulings, including one declaring a part of NSA's surveillance apparatus unconstitutional. What has been called "the magistrate’s revolt" is now beginning among judges in lower courts, where there is a renewed interest in pushing back on government claims and invoking the Fourth Amendment. (Internationally, the UN started an investigation into NSA and GCHQ practices, and on Wednesday, German prosecutors announced the opening of a criminal inquiry into bulk spying on Germany's citizens – and the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone.)
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.
During the first weeks of the Snowden revelations, it wasn't clear legislators cared. Then public opinion changed, and now there's a bill. Will we ever get real reform? Illustration: Kyle Bean for the Guardian Photograph: Kyle Bean for the Guardian
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.
Snowden himself commented on the program’s shutdown on twitter, writing, “I used to take a victory lap every time one of these stories came out. It felt good to see history vindicate my decision to expose the government’s wrongdoing. Nowadays I just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to speak up. If only I hadn’t been so afraid.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until Snowden’s disclosures, however, it was unclear whether the Obama administration had continued pursuing terrorists using the same aggressive tactics as the preceding administration. In the first story published by The Guardian in June 2013, however, Snowden demonstrated the Obama administration had further expanded the federal government’s reach. 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. Without Snowden’s disclosures, most Americans would have remained unaware of the program’s vast reach.