Glenn Greenwald Quotes

Snowden, was a contract worker for Booz Allan assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA). He felt that some of the NSA activities were illegal and unethical and tried to complain to NSA officials who rebuffed him. Despite the fact that he had signed an agreement not to do so, he copied many critical, classified documents that exposed much of the NSA activities that the NSA officials had denied existed—including lying under oath to the Senate. He then made many of them public, violating his oath, breaking the law, and opening up an entire area of government spying which most Americans knew nothing about and about which senior government officials had lied under oath to Congress. They of course wanted to prosecute Snowden who had told the truth, while they had lied. For many Americans, this became a moral and ethical conundrum.

Snowden, was a contract worker for Booz Allan assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA). He felt that some of the NSA activities were illegal and unethical and tried to complain to NSA officials who rebuffed him. Despite the fact that he had signed an agreement not to do so, he copied many critical, classified documents that exposed much of the NSA activities that the NSA officials had denied existed—including lying under oath to the Senate. He then made many of them public, violating his oath, breaking the law, and opening up an entire area of government spying which most Americans knew nothing about and about which senior government officials had lied under oath to Congress. They of course wanted to prosecute Snowden who had told the truth, while they had lied. For many Americans, this became a moral and ethical conundrum.

to enhance its ability to conduct surveillance

The Great Firewall of China is the digital control system whereby the Chinese government can block the Chinese public from seeing web sites that are considered dangerous. Generally, these either involve pornography of political viewpoints unacceptable to the government.

Hayden was then ordered to go ahead with several of the ideas for which “no authority existed” including massive secret wiretapping of phone calls that were against the law as it existed. Cheney and the President decided not to ask Congress for a legal change, but took the position that if the President says to do it, it cannot be illegal as he is the Commander in Chief. The lower Federal Courts and the Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine was preposterous and un constitutional.

He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

See {635177} for the event that triggered the statement.

Snowden, was a contract worker for Booz Allan assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA). He felt that some of the NSA activities were illegal and unethical and tried to complain to NSA officials who rebuffed him. Despite the fact that he had signed an agreement not to do so, he copied many critical, classified documents that exposed much of the NSA activities that the NSA officials had denied existed—including lying under oath to the Senate. He then made many of them public, violating his oath, breaking the law, and opening up an entire area of government spying which most Americans knew nothing about and about which senior government officials had lied under oath to Congress. They of course wanted to prosecute Snowden who had told the truth, while they had lied. For many Americans, this became a moral and ethical conundrum.

Major leaks made public the fact that the NSA was hacking into the European and other foreign servers of Google, Microsoft and other technology companies and vacuuming up 500 million internet communications every day. (It would be illegal for them to do this in the United States, but via the outside USA servers they capture the information of US Citizens sending E-mail within the United States. The reaction of many foreign government was outrage as their citizen’s private communications were being captured as well. They began to take steps to curtain their country’s high utilization of American company data storage and transmission and regulate the American firms much more extensively. So American company business and profits were damaged by the NSA surveillance programs which the companies did not know about.

The NSA in defending their program stated that they were looking for a “needle in a hay stack”. Logically, her criticism would seem to make great sense. However, the new computer technology makes looking for “needles” very fast and inexpensive. Therefore, they argue, the size of the haystack does not matter.

He was referring to the massive surveillance NSA program whereby all telephone calls and most digital communications for every American was secretly tapped and stored in an NSA data base. The Senators of the Intelligence Oversight Committee received information in Classified executive sessions but they were not allowed to disclose anything that they learned in the briefings—even something as huge and probably unconstitutional as this program. Moreover, even when officials of the Intelligence Services lied under oath (see {634917}) in open session, the Senators could not disclose this fact.

the name of the judge or senator XXKEYSTORE is an NSA Secret Database. This quotation is very important because after Snowden had stolen some secret files to disclose the CIA practices to the Congress and public, many of the NSA and other government officials stated that Snowden was a very low level person. They accused him of aggrandizing his role and importance to the agency. The also claimed that NSA only captures meta data, not the data content of the documents or messages they intercept. Snowden’s quote casts suspicion on the first and belies the second. If Snowden were such a low level employee, why did he have access to the data base that stores the content of the e-mail (and attachments) of the Congress and many other public officials. For the second, if only meta data was captured and stored, how could Snowden see the e-mails which he then disclosed to the press.