Pardon Edward Snowden
On 6 June 2013, the Guardian broke the news National Security Agency (NSA) had ordered Verizon to provide it with the phone records of its customers. As the story developed it became clear that the two other major telephone networks, as well as credit card companies, were doing the same thing; and that the NSA and FBI were being provided with access to server systems operated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Skype.
On 11 June the Guardian reported the source as Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old who had been working at the NSA for four years.
Snowden believed it was important for him to publicly acknowledge his role in order to provide a human face to the story. He knew he was putting his life at risk and exposing himself to decades of incarceration. “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he explained. Snowden hoped to trigger a debate “about the kind of world we want to live in”. The US government began an immediate campaign to track, harass and silence him.
More revelations followed that exposed a massive national security complex that spies on virtually everyone, everywhere. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), which is a secret court that was supposed to protect our privacy rights, was rubber-stamping every NSA request for the authority to spy without any real oversight. The US government was spying on foreign leaders, working with British spies to collect massive amounts of global data across the planet, and collecting over 200 million text messages daily. And the NSA was working to stop encryption (a technology developed to protect the privacy of both private individuals and businesses).
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NSA director James Clapper was forced to acknowledge that he had given false testimony to Congress about NSA spying on Americans and that Snowden’s leaks had created a healthy public debate about the balance between privacy and national security. “It’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen,” he said. Even Barack Obama admitted that the revelations required the US to re-think how we uphold “the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals – and our Constitution – require.”
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