NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden today conducted a question-and-answer session on The Guardian's website, in which he stood by earlier statements regarding the secretive government agency and suggested the feds might murder him if they had the chance.
"The U.S. Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped," he said.
When asked if he did indeed have the authority to "wiretap anyone" - as he asserted in a video interview with The Guardian - Snowden said that was true, but did not indicate if he or anyone at the NSA had actually done it.
The filter that U.S. officials use to collect international data they believe will be helpful in national security-related investigations is "constantly out of date" and overly broad, Snowden said. Technically, the U.S. government is not supposed to collect data about American citizens without a warrant, but "even with the filter, US comm[unications] get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border," he wrote.
Snowden was asked to elaborate on what he meant when he said that the government has "direct access" to our data. His explanation suggested that in examining the data of suspected terrorists, some U.S. data will get swept up in the mix; if the suspected terrorist emails a U.S. citizen, for example. The feds "excuse this as 'incidental' collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications," Snowden wrote.
In discussing the NSA's activity recently, President Obama said that in evaluating the agency's work, his team found that "modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content ... was worth us doing." He insisted that the PRISM program does not include U.S. citizens.
The companies that reportedly participate in PRISM maintain that they evaluate all data requests individually and push back on those they do not feel are appropriate. Snowden, however, challenged them to push back even more. "If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?" he wrote.
Snowden was also asked if he has any plans to provide U.S. information to the Chinese, given that he is currently in Hong Kong. He denied it and said that was a "predictable smear."
"Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now," he wrote.
Snowden's Q&A comes one day before NSA Director Keith Alexander is scheduled to appear before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Alexander will appear before the panel at 10 a.m. Eastern tomorrow alongside James Cole, deputy Attorney General, Sean Joyce, FBI deputy director, and Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The committee's chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, penned an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press this weekend, in which he said Snowden has "grossly distorted" the reality of the NSA's work.
Snowden was "not involved in the careful execution of these programs, and [had] access to only small pieces of a larger puzzle," Rogers wrote. "He decided to break the law and the oath he took to the American people by publicly disclosing parts of these classified programs, and then fled to China. These are the actions of a felon, not a whistle-blower."
[Image: The Guardian]