Category Archives: Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden tells NBC: I’m a patriot – CNN.com

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(CNN) -- Traitor or patriot? Low-level systems analyst or highly trained spy?

Slammed by top U.S. government officials and facing espionage charges in the United States, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden defended his decision to leak documents about classified surveillance programs during an interview with NBC "Nightly News" broadcast Wednesday.

"I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire," Snowden said. "They don't walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives ... for no reason."

Speaking to anchor Brian Williams in a Moscow hotel, Snowden said he considers himself a patriot, and he wouldn't have gone to such lengths to reveal secret U.S. government surveillance programs if he didn't have to.

"The reality is, the situation determined that this needed to be told to the public. The Constitution of the United States had been violated on a massive scale," Snowden told Williams. "Now, had that not happened, had the government not gone too far and overreached, we wouldn't be in a situation where whistleblowers were necessary."

10 things we learned from his interview

The U.S. government, Snowden said, is using the threat of terrorism "to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up and our Constitution says we shouldn't give up."

NSA analysts, he said, "can actually watch people's Internet communications, watch their Internet correspondence, watch their thoughts as they type," he said, describing such government surveillance as an "extraordinary intrusion ... into the way you think."

He didn't specify when such a program would be used by the agency, but said seeing that program when he worked for the NSA astonished him.

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Edward Snowden tells NBC: I'm a patriot - CNN.com

NSA Releases Edward Snowden Email To Push Back At …

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Edward Snowden is interviewed via a BEAM remote pressence system during the 2014 TED confernece March 18, 2014, in Vancouver, Canada. Snowden said the biggest revelations have yet to come out of the estimated 1.7 million documents he acquired from the National Security Agency. (Photo by Steven Rosenbaum/Getty Images) | Steven Rosenbaum via Getty Images

The NSA on Thursday released an email sent by former contractor Edward Snowden that the agency says undermines his claim to be a whistleblower. But a Snowden legal adviser immediately dismissed the email as a red herring and said Snowden "raised many complaints over many channels."

The agency's release of the email comes a day after Snowden appeared for the first time on a U.S. television program -- an appearance that could humanize him to American viewers and improve his chances of receiving some sort of a plea deal on Espionage Act charges. The agency asserts that the short email exchange from April 2013, between Snowden and an employee of the NSA's Office of General Counsel, shows he made no effort to raise concerns internally about wrongdoing or abuse.

In the email below, Snowden asks whether presidential executive orders have precedence over congressional statutes. He receives a brief response from an employee whose name has been redacted, who told Snowden that executive orders cannot override a law -- but are generally treated on an equal footing within the intelligence committee.

"The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed," a NSA spokesperson said in an accompanying statement. "There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims."

In an email to HuffPost, Snowden's legal adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union, Ben Wizner, dismissed the email exchange as irrelevant.

"This whole issue is a red herring," he wrote. "The problem was not some unknown and isolated instance of misconduct. The problem was that an entire system of mass surveillance had been deployed -- and deemed legal -- without the knowledge or consent of the public."

"On the specific issue: Snowden raised many complaints over many channels. The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange -- after previously claiming that no evidence existed."

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NSA Releases Edward Snowden Email To Push Back At ...

Edward Snowden responds to release of e-mail by U.S …

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An e-mail released by U.S. officials shows that Edward Snowden asked National Security Agency lawyers about legal authorities for NSA surveillance.

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In an hour-long television interview, Snowden portrayed himself as a patriot who broke the law in an act of civil disobedience.

Q: How do you respond to todays NSA statement and the release of your email with the Office of General Counsel?

The NSAs new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers - after more than a year of denying any such contact existed - raises serious concerns. It reveals as false the NSAs claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year, that after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowdens contention that he brought these matters to anyones attention.

Todays release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorates Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities - such as breaking into the back-haul communications of major US internet companies - are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.

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