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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

James Cole
Deputy Attorney General
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Cole continued: where the courts say that does meet the standard of relevance. To have it all and then have the restrictions. But the further thing that is very important, is what we are doing today. It is worth having a debate about, is there a better way to do it. – it’s worth having a debate about where we strike that balance between security for the nation and making people’s privacy and civil liberty rights are being honored. That's a tough balance to find, but it’s a balance worth talking about and It is a process we are welcoming and engaging in right now.
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Mike Lee
U.S. Senator, R-Utah
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Lee: thank you. I see my time has expired. i appreciate your insight. I do think it is worth discussing publicly. We need to consider from a constitutional standpoint. We have been relying on a 34 year-old supreme court case, Smith VS. Maryland, to get at this idea that metadata is somehow beyond the reach of the fourth amendment. But we have to remember that Smith did not involve collection on hundreds of millions of Americans. Involved collection on a single
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Mike Lee
U.S. Senator, R-Utah
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Lee continued 1A : target. It involved collection in a manner that is completely archaic by today’s standards and that by today’s standards would involve a miniscule amount of information. I think at some point when you collect this much data on that many people, whether it’s that much data on one person. That might create some problem. That much data on hundreds of millions of people creates an even bigger problem and not considered by the Supreme court of the United States in Maryland VS. Smith. And one we need to revisit.
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Mike Lee
U.S. Senator, R-Utah
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse: I hope the executive branch takes a lesson from this experience about the value of classification, or what i would consider over classification. I've seen this over and over. When we were fighting with the Bush administration about the torture program, the executive branch got to tell its side of the story because
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Sheldon Whitehouse
U.S. Senator, D-Rhode Island
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse continued 1: the executive branch were the declassifiers. And we were stuck with facts that we knew that blew up the argument that was being made by the executive branch but that we could not articulate because they were classified. We’ve seen it on cyber where so much of the American pubic are unaware of the cyber threat we’re facing. Now thankfully
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Sheldon Whitehouse
U.S. Senator, D-Rhode Island
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse continued 2: we are becoming more aware. But for a long time we were just in the dark about what was going on because the private sector, companies didn't want to talk about it for fear of aggravating their regulators, their consumers, their clients, even giving their competitors advantage and the government just wildly over classified everything. Now we have, I think, a terrific article that Senator Feinstein wrote. We have I think
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Sheldon Whitehouse
U.S. Senator, D-Rhode Island
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse continued 3: We have very good testimony by Bob Mueller. We have a lot of good information out there that helps the American public understand these programs. But it all came out late. It all came out in response to a leaker. There was no organized plan for how we rationally declassify this so that the American people can participate in the debate. I think there’s an
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Sheldon Whitehouse
U.S. Senator, D-Rhode Island
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse continued 4: executive branch reaction towards classification. I think that reaction is in part because of the advantage it gives the executive branch relative to the legislative branch, which can’t be classified. And I think over and over again we found that looking back we’re worse off for that effort in the first instance. So I would really urge you to take a look at this. And you know when this thing burst, there is this old saying of, I'm not going to get exactly right, but there’s something about, the rumor
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Sheldon Whitehouse
U.S. Senator, D-Rhode Island
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse continued 5: is all the way across town before the truth can even get its boots on. You’ve lived that experience in the last couple of months. I hope this has an effect on you because this it is a recurring problem. And we really need to be balancing much more carefully the value of declassification against the value of classification. I think you guys are terribly one-sided, in favor of classification. And then something like this comes and pow, you’re still trying to get your boots on
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Sheldon Whitehouse
U.S. Senator, D-Rhode Island
CSPAN 07/31/2013
Whitehouse continued 6: because you never took the appropriate steps to put news out about this program that would have avoided, I think, a lot of this. And I’d like you to have a chance to react to that. Cole: I think you make a valid point. These are all topics that we need to debate. They’re not easy topics because they involve again that same balancing. The same balancing that we are trying to do between
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