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Curated research library of TV news clips regarding the NSA, its oversight and privacy issues, 2009-2014

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Primary curation & research: Robin Chin, Internet Archive TV News Researcher; using Internet Archive TV News service.

Speakers

Barack Obama
President
CSPAN 05/02/2014
Obama: it has pained me to see the degree to which the Snowden disclosures have created strains in the relationship. But more broadly, I've also been convinced for a very long time that it is important for our legal structures and our policy structures to catch up with rapidly advancing technologies. And as a consequence through a series of, you know, steps, what we try to do is reform what we do and have taken these issues very seriously. Domestically we tried to provide additional assurances to the American people that their privacy is protected.
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Barack Obama
President
CSPAN 05/02/2014
Obama: But what I've also done is taken the unprecedented step of ordering our intelligence communities to take the privacy interests of non-U.S. persons into account in everything that they do. Something that's not been done before and most other countries in the world do not do. What I've said is that the privacy interests of non-U.S. citizens are deeply relevant and have to be taken into account and we have to have policies and procedures to protect them, not just U.S. persons. And we are in the process of implementing a whole series of those steps. We have shared with the Germans the things that we are doing.
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Barack Obama
President
CSPAN 05/02/2014
Obama: I will repeat what I've said before, that ordinary Germans are not subject to continual surveillance, are not subject to a whole range of bulk data gathering. I know that the perceptions I think among the public sometimes are that the United States has capacities similar to what you see on movies and in television. The truth of the matter is, is that our focus is principally and primarily on how do we make sure that terrorists, those who want to proliferate weapons, transnational criminals, are not able to engage in the activities that they're engaging in. And in that, we can only be successful if we're partnering with friends like Germany. We won't succeed if we're doing that on our own.
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Barack Obama
President
CSPAN 05/02/2014
Obama: So what I’ve pledged to Chancellor Merkel has been in addition to the reforms that we've already taken, in addition to saying that we are going to apply privacy standards to how we deal with non-U.S. persons as well as U.S. persons, in addition to the work that we're doing to constrain the potential use of bulk data, we are committed to a U.S.-German cyber dialogue to close further the gaps that may exist in terms of how we operate, how German intelligence operates to make sure that there's transparency and clarity about what we're doing and what our goals and our intentions are.
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Barack Obama
President
CSPAN 05/02/2014
Obama: These are complicated issues and, you know, we're not perfectly aligned yet, but we share the same values and we share the same concerns. You know, this is something that is deeply important to me and I'm absolutely committed that by the time I leave this office, we're going to have a stronger legal footing and international framework for how we are doing -- how we're doing business in the intelligence sphere. I will say, though, that I don't think that there is an inevitable contradiction between our security and safety and our privacy.
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
KNTV 05/12/2014
Snow: Glenn Greenwald has a new book revealing more allegations of widespread surveillance by NSA employees. Greenwald: Internally when they thought they were talking in private they boast about the fact that they are a system of ubiquitous spying, collecting all forms of communication between everybody on the planet. Snow: This never-before-seen power point slide from the NSA says sniff it all, know it all, collect it all. And with this secret form, Greenwald says any NSA employee can search a giant database. Greenwald: All they need to do literally is enter the e-mail address, pick from a pulldown menu, a “justification” that entitles them to do it and then hit search. Snow: Greenwald writes the NSA had been able to tap into skype video chats, a broad range of facebook data, even e-mails sent by people using wifi on an airplane. Greenwald: The mindset of the NSA is that there should never be a place on the planet that you can go where you are able to evade their surveillance net.
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Glenn Greenwald
Co-Founder The Intercept
KNTV 05/12/2014
Snow: An internal NSA newsletter brags that shipments of computer routers and servers headed all over the world are intercepted by the NSA and redirected to a secret location so they can implant surveillance devices. No way of knowing how widespread this is? Greenwald: We know that it's systematic. That there are divisions in the NSA and teams in the NSA devoted to doing this. Snow: The NSA says the implication that NSA’s foreign intelligence collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false. NSA's activities are focused on valid foreign intelligence targets. Greenwald says he still has thousands of documents and plans to reveal more on the intercept, a digital magazine whose parent company has a collaboration agreement with NBC News. Greenwald: Several of the top, say, 5 or 10 are stories that are left to be told. Ones that will really shock the world.
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Gwen Ifill
Co-Anchor and Managing Editor, PBS NewsHour
KQED 05/13/2014
Ifill: Europe's highest court has issued a ruling that could shake up the search-engine industry. The court said that in some cases, Google must remove personal information from search results linked to someone's name, if the person requests it. A Spanish man had found his name still linked to debts from 1998. One of the judges said privacy is paramount. Judge da Cruz Vilaça: ( translated ): as the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights request that the information in question no longer be made available to the general public. It should be held that those rights override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the interest of the general public in finding that information. Ifill: The ruling is not subject to appeal. In the U.S., some limited search deletions are already required, especially regarding crimes by minors. But it's up to the site that published the information, not the search engine, to remove the link.
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Barton Gellman
Journalist, contributing to the Washington Post
KQED 05/13/2014
Narrator: On October 4, in a secret signing with Cheney, the president officially authorized "The Program." Gellman: That order is written by David Addington, the vice president's lawyer. It's not written by the president's lawyer. And this is not only unusual but probably unique in the history of major U.S. intelligence operations: it's written by the Vice President's lawyer and stored in his own safe. Narrator: Addington worked out of a small office next to the White House in the old Executive Office Building. Baker: This order is one of the most closely kept secrets of the Bush/Cheney administration for four years. It's kept so secret that many people involved in national security inside the White House and the government don't know about it.
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Robert Deitz
NSA General Counsel, 1998-2006
KQED 05/13/2014
Narrator: Now General Hayden wanted the sign-off of his top lawyer, Robert Deitz. Deitz: I think he was concerned and wanted my view of whether this program was lawful. I spent a kind of sleepless night pondering the legality of it. This was a very hard call. It was a very hard call. Gellman: The NSA has a general counsel and about 100 lawyers. And they were told, "The President has signed it, it's been certified as lawful, and once all the signatures are there, that's it, we salute. We say, 'Okay, it's lawful, we're going to go ahead.'" Deitz: In the intel world, if a president says to you, "I need this in order to keep the American people safe," you need to try to figure out where that line is constitutionally and march right up to it.
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Showing 1071 through 1080 of 1708