One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.
We watch our own people more closely than anyone else in the world.
What we need to do, is restore those tools that have been taken away by the president [Barack Obama] and others, restore those tools to the NSA and to our entire surveillance and law enforcement community.
Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.
We're now more than a year since my NSA revelations, and despite numerous hours of testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an ax to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government, has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that former NSA director Keith Alexander said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation.
Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.
You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.
There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That's making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies.
What is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests.
I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged. At the very least, we should debate. We should debate whether or not we are going to relinquish our rights, or whether or not we are going to have a full and able debate over whether or not we can live within the Constitution, or whether or not we have to go around the Constitution.
I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.
The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the 'consent of the governed' is meaningless. . . The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.
NSA, the only part of government that actually listens.
We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It's a basic protection.
The president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive. The reality is the NSA has saved thousands of lives not just in the United States but in France, Germany and throughout Europe.
Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President
It is no surprise that the Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee has once again caved in to the wishes of the White House and refused even to open an investigation. We cannot effectively legislate on the NSA spying issue if we do not know the facts, and we will not know them if the Republican-controlled intelligence committee persists in refusing to do its job.
Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That's not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he's got another think coming.
I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA - many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it - how little fighting we did.
It's clear the CIA was trying to play 'keep away' with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that's a serious constitutional concern. But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another 'Merkel Effect,' where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.