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Big data is no longer a tool reserved solely for big businesses. (Alan Brandt/AP)
Parental
concerns about student privacy have been rising in recent years amid
the growing use by schools, school districts and states use technology
to collect mountains of detailed information on students. Last year, a
controversial $100 million student data collection project funded by the
Gates Foundation and operated by a specially created nonprofit
organization called inBloom was forced to shut down because of these
concerns, an episode that served as a warning to parents about just how
much information about their children is being shared without their
knowledge.
Here’s an important piece on the issue by Leonie
Haimson and Cheri Kiesecker. Haimson was a leading advocate against the
inBloom project who then, along with Rachael Stickland, created the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy,
a national alliance of parents and advocates defending the rights of
parents and students to protect their data. Kiesecker is a member of the
coalition.
By Leonie Haimson and Cheri Kiesecker
Remember that ominous threat from your childhood, “This
will go down on your permanent record?” Well, your children’s permanent
record is a whole lot bigger today and it may be permanent. Information
about your children’s behavior and nearly everything else that a school
or state agency knows about them is being tracked, profiled and
potentially shared.
During a February 2015 congressional hearing on “How Emerging Technology Affects Student Privacy,”
Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin asked the panel to “provide a summary
of all the information collected by the time a student reaches graduate
school.” Joel Reidenberg, director of the Center on Law & Information Policy at Fordham Law School, responded:
“Just
think George Orwell, and take it to the nth degree. We’re in an
environment of surveillance, essentially. It will be an extraordinarily
rich data set of your life.”
Most student data is gathered at school via
multiple routes; either through children’s online usage or information
provided by parents, teachers or other school staff. A student’s
education record generally includes demographic information, including
race, ethnicity, and income level; discipline records, grades and test
scores, disabilities and Individual Education Plans (IEPs), mental
health and medical history, counseling records and much more.
Federal
drug agents have built a massive wiretapping operation in the Los
Angeles suburbs, secretly intercepting tens of thousands of Americans’
phone calls and text messages to monitor drug traffickers across the
United States despite objections from Justice Department lawyers who
fear the practice may not be legal.
Nearly all of that
surveillance was authorized by a single state court judge in Riverside
County, who last year signed off on almost five times as many wiretaps
as any other judge in the United States. The judge’s orders allowed
investigators — usually from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration —
to intercept more than 2 million conversations involving 44,000 people,
federal court records show.
The eavesdropping is aimed
at dismantling the drug rings that have turned Los Angeles’ eastern
suburbs into what the DEA says is the nation’s busiest shipping corridor
for heroin and methamphetamine. Riverside wiretaps are supposed to be
tied to crime within the county, but investigators have relied on them
to make arrests and seize shipments of cash and drugs as far away as New
York and Virginia, sometimes concealing the surveillance in the
process.
The surveillance has raised concerns
among Justice Department lawyers in Los Angeles, who have mostly refused
to use the results in federal court because they have concluded the
state court's eavesdropping orders are unlikely to withstand a legal
challenge, current and former Justice officials said .
“It was made very clear to the agents that if you’re going to go the
state route, then best wishes, good luck and all that, but that case
isn’t coming to federal court,” a former Justice Department lawyer said.
The lawyer and other officials described the situation on the condition
of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the
department’s internal deliberations.
NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden has voiced his opposition to the
Investigatory Powers Bill, which was unveiled Wednesday by the British
government, saying ministers are “taking notes on how to defend the
indefensible.”
His remarks come
as Home Secretary Theresa May has admitted that UK spy agencies MI5,
MI6 and GCHQ secretly collected communications data for decades to
protect “national security.”
Snowden, who sought asylum in Russia
after leaking top-secret documents about American and British mass
surveillance techniques, posted a series of tweets condemning the new
bill.
He said the powers given to security agencies in the bill amounted to access to “the activity log of your life.”
May
announced on Wednesday that internet companies would be required to
store a record of every website accessed by users for a year. The new
bill also targets encrypted messaging services, such as WhatsApp and
iMessenger, which allow users to evade hackers and data collection.
While people were in a daze of reverie following the lunar eclipse and the Pope’s U.S. visit, a very important yet overlooked announcement was made by the Department of Justice.
“Launch of Strong Cities Network to Strengthen Community Resilience Against Violent Extremism”
rang the bell to usher in a global-local initiative to ferret out
extremism at the local level – yes, in the United States. Symbolically,
it could also signal a turning point when it comes to local authorities
and their treatment of the residents at large. Indeed, it is a global enmeshment that most Americans are either a) in the total dark about, or b) going hysterical over, if they’ve heard about it.
Honestly,
either of those reactions is understandable when you start digging into
the announcements and its sponsors only to find the typical convoluted,
global-psycho-babble that signals to the astute that they are about to
lose their rights and be perceived as domestic terrorists. But can
anyone really say for sure? Of course not. Not when the message is written in Newspeak gibberish.
What is the Strong Cities Network and why did some U.S. cities join up?
On
the face of it, SCN is to strengthen the bond between cities in the
U.S. and global cities in the fight against violent extremism,
internationally and at the local level. It will funnel help to local
authorities of those cities which hop on board.
So
many politicians blatantly push for policies that harm all of us, just
because the special interests that fund their campaigns want them to.
Because
of this, Congress tries to hide -- taking vague positions, pushing for
watered down legislation, or remaining silent at critical moments.
This
week, they’re expected to renew debate on CISA, the Cybersecurity
Information Sharing Act, a bill that would give corporations sweeping
legal immunity when they share your data with the government.
Now more than ever, it’s so important that we don’t let our lawmakers hide in the shadows.
P.S.
As much as we’ve talked about how bad CISA is for expanding mass
surveillance, there’s another side to the law that just made it even
worse. Late last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island
introduced an amendment to expand the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the
law that has been used time and again to persecute digital activists,
including our friend Aaron Swartz. That’s despicable, and needs to be quashed immediately — so take action now to help kill CISA.
A
conscientious father in Nevada received shocking news when he requested
to see the permanent records of his four children from state education
officials: His request would cost $10,194.
John Eppolito, the
father, was concerned about a recent decision in Nevada to join a
multi-state consortium that would share student data.
Fox News
explains, "Nevada has spent an estimated $10 million in its
seven-year-old System of Accountability Information in Nevada, known as
SAIN. Data from county school systems is uploaded nightly to a state
database, and, under the new arrangement, potentially shared with other
counties and states."
Eppolito was interested in
accessing his children’s records in order to learn what information had
been compiled on his children. It was then that he learned that he would
have to pay significant fees as well as special programming costs to
run a report of that kind.
The total, Eppolito was told, would come to $10,194.
“The
problem is that I can’t stop them from collecting the data,” said
Eppolito. “I just wanted to know what it was. It almost seems
impossible. Certainly $10,000 is enough reason to prevent a parent from
getting the data.”
Department of Public Information officer Judy
Osgood attempted to explain the reason for such a high price: “Please
understand that the primary purpose of the Department of Education’s
database it to support required state and federal reporting, funding of
local education agencies, education accountability, and public
reporting,” Osgood states. “The system currently is not capable of
responding to the type of individual student data request you have
presented.”
Eppolito was not satisfied with the response. “This data is for everyone except the parents. It’s wrong,” he asserts.
The
federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) allows
parents to view their children’s records and permits small fees to be
issued in order to access those records. Ironically, under the act, the
fees are not supposed to be so substantial that they ultimately prevent
parents from obtaining them.
“Unless the imposition of a fee
effectively prevents a parent or eligible student from exercising the
right to inspect and review the student's education records, an
educational agency or institution may charge a fee for a copy of an
education record which is made for the parent or eligible student,”
reads a section of the act. “An educational agency or institution may
not charge a fee to search for or to retrieve the education records of a
student.”
According to the regulations, the above criteria apply to “any state educational agency and its components.”
The state, by requiring the fee of over $10,000, appears to be acting in violation of FERPA.
“They
are supposed to provide [parents] the opportunity to inspect and review
[records] upon request,” explained one official at the Family Policy
Compliance Office (FCPO), the federal agency over FERPA. “There
shouldn’t be a fee for inspecting and reviewing the records.”
But
Osgood does not view it that way. “NDE does provide free access to
education records,” she said. “SAIN was not designed for student-level
inspection. Our understanding of FERPA is that this level of inspection
applies to the LEA [local education authority—i.e., school district] and
school.”
House
judiciary committee Bob Goodlatte has agreed to support the
surveillance overhaul bill. Photograph: Alex Milan Tracy/Corbis
The
chairman of a key committee in the House of Representatives agreed to
move on a major surveillance overhaul on Monday, after months of delay.
The
decision, by the Republican chairman of the House judiciary committee,
Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, breathes new life back into the USA Freedom
Act, a legislative fix favoured by privacy advocates to prevent the US
government from collecting domestic data in bulk.
The judiciary
committee is expected to take action on an amendment encapsulating the
provisions of the USA Freedom Act on Wednesday at 1pm. Congressional
aides expected it to pass the committee with bipartisan support, setting
up a fight on the House floor.
Goodlatte, who had been hesitant
to endorse the bill, written by former committee chairman James
Sensenbrenner, will now vote for it personally.
Goodlatte’s
decision comes despite pressure by the House Republican leadership,
which preferred an alternative bill, written by the House intelligence
committee leadership, that would permit the government to acquire
Americans’ data without a specific prior judicial order for it.
Additional pressure came from a desire on all sides to avoid
surveillance-related amendments to unrelated, critical bills slated for floor consideration later this month.
An
attempt by the intelligence committee and the House leadership to
circumvent Goodlatte’s committee and pass the rival bill is said by
observers to have galvanised Goodlatte’s decision to move forward on the
USA Freedom Act. Internal committee negotiations on modifying the USA
Freedom Act for passage intensified after the House intelligence committee unveiled its bill in March.
The
Obama administration has yet to take a public position on the House
judiciary bill or the House intelligence bill, although President Barack
Obama endorsed getting the National Security Agency out of the business of bulk domestic phone records collection in March.
“This will start to look like a reasonable path forward for surveillance reform,” said a congressional aide.
Barely
an hour after the judiciary committee announced its move on the USA
Freedom Act, the House intelligence committee announced that it will
mark up its alternative bill, the Fisa Transparency and Modernization
Act, on Thursday.
"This bill directly addresses the privacy
concerns many Americans have expressed over bulk collection. The bill
ends bulk collection of telephone metadata and increases transparency
while maintaining the tools our government needs to keep Americans and
our allies safe. We believe this bill responds to the concerns many
members of Congress have expressed and can be the compromise vehicle to
reform Fisa while preserving important counterterrorism capabilities,"
said the intelligence committee leaders, Republican Mike Rogers of
Michigan and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, in a joint
statement on Monday.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). (Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post)
A
key House committee has approved a package of NSA reforms that would
end the spy agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records, nearly
a year after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed the
program's existence.
The House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0
Wednesday to rein in the NSA with the USA FREEDOM Act, a measure that
places new requirements on the government when it comes to gathering,
targeting and searching telephone metadata for intelligence purposes.
In
addition to prohibiting the NSA from engaging in what the bill's
sponsors have called "dragnet surveillance," the bill would also require
authorities to get permission from the secret Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court on a case-by-case basis. It would establish a panel
of privacy experts and other officials to serve as a public advocate at
the court. And it would also give businesses more latitude to tell the
public about requests it receives from the government for user data.
Defiant Apple, Facebook, other firms to inform public of govt surveillance requests
Published time: May 02, 2014 01:07 Edited time: May 02, 2014 06:42
The
same technology companies that the US intelligence community has relied
upon to disclose email records are now refusing to keep surveillance
requests secret and informing customers when they are the subject of
such requests.
In the nearly ten months since former US National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed extensive
surveillance efforts on everyday Americans’ online activity, the
companies that were forced to facilitate that surveillance have come
under harsh public scrutiny.
The embarrassment ignited a series of
comments from executives at Google and Facebook, among others, calling
on the NSA and other agencies to either stop forcing them to provide the
communications that customers trust them with, or allow them to be more
transparent.
Now, according to a Thursday report in the Washington Post,
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have updated their policies to
routinely notify customers when law enforcement has requested
information about them.
Yahoo enacted such a change in July, with the Post reporting Thursday that companies “have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.”
Major
U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly
complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other
online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when
their information is targeted for government seizure.This
increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of
thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal
investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent
disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may
undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy
vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.
Graphic
How the NSA is infiltrating private networks
Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance
of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are
updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about
government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other
legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced
similar changes in July.As this position becomes uniform across the
industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on
the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data
requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify
users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid
having suspects learn of inquiries.
“It serves to chill the
unbridled, cost-free collection of data,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a
partner at Perkins Coie who represents several technology companies.
“And I think that’s a good thing.”
The Justice Department
disagrees, saying in a statement that new industry policies threaten
investigations and put potential crime victims in greater peril.
“These
risks of endangering life, risking destruction of evidence, or allowing
suspects to flee or intimidate witnesses are not merely hypothetical,
but unfortunately routine,” department spokesman Peter Carr said, citing
a case in which early disclosure put at risk a cooperative witness in a
case. He declined to offer details because the case was under seal.
The
changing tech company policies do not affect data requests approved by
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which are automatically
kept secret by law. National security letters, which are administrative
subpoenas issued by the FBI for national security investigations, also
carry binding gag orders.
The government traditionally has
notified people directly affected by searches and seizures — though
often not immediately — when investigators entered a home or tapped a
phone line. But that practice has not survived the transition into the
digital world. Cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon typically
do not tell customers when investigators collect their call data.
Many
tech companies once followed a similar model of quietly cooperating
with law enforcement. Courts, meanwhile, ruled that it was sufficient
for the government to notify the providers of Internet services of data
requests, rather than the affected customers.
Twitter, founded in
2006, became perhaps the first major tech company to routinely notify
users when investigators collected data, yet few others followed at
first. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation began issuing its
influential “Who Has Your Back?”
report in 2011 — rating companies on their privacy and transparency
policies — Twitter was the only company to get a star under the category
“Tell users about data demands.” Google, the next mostly highly rated,
got half a star from the civil liberties group.
NSA Said to Exploit Heartbleed Bug for Intelligence for Years
By Michael RileyApr 11, 2014 11:00 PM CT
The
U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw
in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the
Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence,
two people familiar with the matter said.
The agency’s reported
decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security
interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the
government’s top computer experts. The NSA, after declining to comment
on the report, subsequently denied that it was aware of Heartbleed until
the vulnerability was made public by a private security report earlier
this month.
“Reports that NSA or any other part of the government
were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before 2014 are
wrong,” according to an e-mailed statement from the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence.
Heartbleed appears to be
one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history, affecting the basic
security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s websites. Its discovery
and the creation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompted
consumers to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend
electronic tax filing and computer companies including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) to Juniper Networks Inc. to provide patches for their systems.
Photographer: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
A computer workstation bears the National Security Agency (NSA) logo inside the Threat... Read More
Putting
the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords
and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated
hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions
of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’
intelligence arms and criminal hackers.
Controversial Practice
“It
flies in the face of the agency’s comments that defense comes first,”
said Jason Healey, director of the cyber statecraft initiative at the
Atlantic Council and a former Air Force cyber officer. “They are going
to be completely shredded by the computer security community for this.”
Experts
say the search for flaws is central to NSA’s mission, though the
practice is controversial. A presidential board reviewing the NSA’s
activities after Edward Snowden’s leaks recommended the agency halt the
stockpiling of software vulnerabilities.
NSA Denies Report It Knew About And Exploited Heartbleed For Years
Updated with NSA denial
Bloomberg is reporting that
the National Security Agency knew about the Heartbleed flaw for at
least two years and “regularly used it to gather critical intelligence,”
according to two sources. NSA denial
The
NSA has denied the Bloomberg report. “Reports that NSA or any other part
of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability
before April 2014 are wrong. The Federal government was not aware of the
recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL until it was made public
in a private sector cybersecurity report,” according to a blog post from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
If
the Bloomberg story is true, it would be a major bombshell that is
certain to add fuel to the already contentious debate about the NSA’s
role in surveillance. Last year it was reported that the NSA paid
security firm RSA $10 million to intentionally weaken an encryption
algorithm and had circumvented or cracked other encryption schemes. Reuters recently reported that “NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought.”
Bloomberg said that the NSA was able to use the Heartbleed flaw to obtain passwords and other user data. Is NSA making us less secure?
Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say
Edward J. Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker, speaking to European officials via videoconference last week.Credit Frederick Florin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON
— Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence
agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security
Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most
circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather
than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or
cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.
But
Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or
law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to
allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack
encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.
The
White House has never publicly detailed Mr. Obama’s decision, which he
made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a
presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent
disclosures about the National Security Agency.
But
elements of the decision became evident on Friday, when the White House
denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly
known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week
to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that
when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government
to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a
remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers.
Caitlin
Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the
review of the recommendations was now complete, and it had resulted in a
“reinvigorated” process to weigh the value of disclosure when a
security flaw is discovered, against the value of keeping the discovery
secret for later use by the intelligence community.
“This process is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities,” she said.
Until
now, the White House has declined to say what action Mr. Obama had
taken on this recommendation of the president’s advisory committee,
whose report is better known for its determination that the government
get out of the business of collecting bulk telephone data about the
calls made by every American. Mr. Obama announced last month that he
would end the bulk collection, and leave the data in the hands of
telecommunications companies, with a procedure for the government to
obtain it with court orders when needed.
But
while the surveillance recommendations were noteworthy, inside the
intelligence agencies other recommendations, concerning encryption and
cyber operations, set off a roaring debate with echoes of the Cold War
battles that dominated Washington a half-century ago.
One
recommendation urged the N.S.A. to get out of the business of weakening
commercial encryption systems or trying to build in “back doors” that
would make it far easier for the agency to crack the communications of
America’s adversaries. Tempting as it was to create easy ways to break
codes — the reason the N.S.A. was established by Harry S. Truman 62
years ago — the committee concluded that the practice would undercut
trust in American software and hardware products. In recent months,
Silicon Valley companies have urged the United States to abandon such
practices, while Germany and Brazil, among other nations, have said they
were considering shunning American-made equipment and software. Their
motives were hardly pure: Foreign companies see the N.S.A. disclosures
as a way to bar American competitors.
Attorney
General Eric Holder said on Friday that gun tracking bracelets are
something the Justice Department (DOJ) wants to “explore” as part of its
gun control efforts.
When discussing gun violence prevention
programs within the DOJ, Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee
that his agency is looking into technological innovations.
“I
think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get
passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I
had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about how
guns can be made more safe,” he said.
“By making them either
through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or
something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person
who is lawfully in possession of the weapon.”
“It’s those kinds of
things that I think we want to try to explore so that we can make sure
that people have the ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights, but
at the same time decreasing the misuse of weapons that lead to the
kinds of things that we see on a daily basis,” Holder said.
Edward Snowden warns of personal data vulnerability
The
former NSA contractor takes part in a video conference at the South by
Southwest tech event in Texas and answers questions via Twitter to an
enthusiastic audience.
...
Former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden speaks remotely to
the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas,
superimposed over an image of the Constitution. (Spencer Bakalar / Los Angeles Times / March 10, 2014)
By Steve Appleford
March 10, 2014, 9:31 p.m.
AUSTIN, Texas — Edward Snowden
brought no bombshells when he arrived to an excited round of applause
Monday, his stubbled face relaxed as it was beamed in from across the
continents for a "virtual conversation" about the vulnerability of
personal data. His presence was event enough.
Public appearances by the former National Security Agency
contractor and U.S. exile are rare, and this one was beamed in from an
undisclosed location in Russia via several online proxies for his own
security, a bit of technological cloak-and-dagger that could only add to
his mystique for the three roomfuls of international tech specialists
struggling to hear his words in video that was choppy and often
inaudible.
His message still got through: Personal information is
vulnerable not only to government prying but to growing numbers of
outside infiltrators because companies have failed to adequately protect
the data of their customers. His own exile after leaking to reporters
secret information he had gathered while an NSA consultant has made him a
central figure in that conversation, and he says he has no regrets.
"Would
I do it again? Absolutely," Snowden said into the camera, in response
to one of several questions submitted to him via Twitter (#AskSnowden)
and screened backstage at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.
"I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. And I saw the
Constitution was being violated on a massive scale."
He warned,
"If we allow the NSA to continue unrestrained, every other government
will accept that as a green light to do the same."
The chosen
Twitter questions were notably nonconfrontational for a figure often the
subject of heated debate even among supporters. One asked whether the
mass surveillance was driven by privatization. Another wondered about
the potential for society to "reap benefits" from the "big data." None
asked about his life in Russia, or what further revelations might be
coming.
The first question came from Timothy John Berners-Lee, a
British scientist known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, who asked
Snowden how he would create an accountability system for governance.
Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whose unprecedented leak of
top-secret documents led to a worldwide debate about the nature of
surveillance, insisted on Monday that his actions had improved the
national security of the United States rather than undermined it, and
declared that he would do it all again despite the personal sacrifices
he had endured.
In remarks to the SXSW culture and technology
conference in Texas, delivered by video link from his exile in Russia,
Snowden took issue with claims by senior officials that he had placed
the US in danger. He also rejected as demonstrably false the suggestions
by some members of Congress that his files had found their way into the
hands of the intelligence agencies of China or Russia.
Snowden
spoke against the backdrop of an image of the US constitution, which he
said he had taken an oath to protect but had seen “violated on a mass
scale” while working for the US government. He accepted praise from Sir
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, accorded the first
question via Twitter, who described him as “acting profoundly in the
public interest”.
The session provided a rare and extensive
glimpse into the thoughts of Snowden, granted temporary asylum by Russia
after the US revoked his passport. He struck back strongly against
claims made again last week by the NSA director, General Keith
Alexander, that his release of secret documents to the Guardian and
other outlets last year had weakened American cyber-defences.
“These
things are improving national security, these are improving the
communications not just of Americans, but everyone in the world,”
Snowden said. “Because we rely on the same standard, we rely on the
ability to trust our communications, and without that, we don’t have
anything.”
He added later that thanks to the more secure
communication activity that had been encouraged by his disclosures, “the
public has benefited, the government has benefited, and every society
in the world has benefited”.
![USA Today]({"default":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBktIIJ.img?h=43&w=43&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=t&l=f&f=png","dpi":1.8}){kind=small}
![Miniature DEA badges are displayed for sale in the gift shop at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Museum in Arlington, Virginia.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"73","h":"49","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAa2NvB.img?h=875&w=1310&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=1451&y=965"},"dpi":1.8,"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAa2NvB.img?h=751&w=1123&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=1451&y=965"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAa2NvB.img?h=751&w=1123&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=1451&y=965"}})
