Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg appeared on the first episode of Al Jazeera series UpFront on 4 Sepember 2015.
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US formally demanded Norway extradite Edward Snowden
Norwegian state broadcaster NRK has published a series of diplomatic notes sent to the Norwegian government by their US counterparts in June and July 2013.
Happy Birthday Edward Snowden!
Sunday 21 June marks Edward Snowden’s 32nd birthday. We’re happy to cohost the tumblr CODEPINK made for Snowden to show our appreciation for the extraordinary sacrifices he made so we would know the truth about government spying.
People around the world have already left a birthday message for Edward Snowden – add yours below!
Courage launches full Edward Snowden document search
To mark the second anniversary of the first of Edward Snowden’s revelations, Courage and Transparency Toolkit are launching a full text search of all the documents released to date. The Snowden Document search can be accessed at search.edwardsnowden.com
Edward Snowden wins 2015 Bjørnson Prize
In the week that Edward Snowden’s disclosures prompted the first rollback of US surveillance powers since the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, the NSA whistleblower has been announced as the winner of Norway’s prestigious Bjørnson Prize.
US Patriot Act’s bulk collection provision expires
Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which authorises bulk collection of phone records, has expired as of 1 June 2015, halting for the time being one of the government’s major tools for mass surveillance.
As EFF notes,
Section 215 now—at least temporarily—reverts to its pre-Patriot Act form, which doesn’t permit any collection of financial or communications records, and requires the Government to provide “specific and articulable facts” supporting a reason to believe that the target is an agent of a foreign power.
Last month, a a three-judge panel in New York ruled that Section 215 does not provide the authority for the bulk collection of domestic phone records.
Journalists, activists and even some politicians widely recognise that Section 215 only became controversial, and therefore subject to reform and expiration, thanks to Edward Snowden’s disclosures of NSA records, generating global debate on the government’s power and how to curb it.
Despite the temporary lapse, the US Senate plans to move forward with a vote this week on the USA Freedom Act, which would move collected phone metadata from government control to that of telecoms.
House of Representatives passes USA Freedom Act
On 13 May, the US House of Representatives passed the latest version of the USA Freedom Act – the most prominent piece of legislation to have been introduced in the US in the wake of the Snowden revelations. The bill has had a long and complicated legislative history that we have traced over the past two years and it still needs to be approved by the Senate. If passed it would end the bulk collection of domestic phone metadata that was the subject of the very first Snowden revelation.
WikiLeaks releases transcripts from German surveillance inquiry
We’ve been tracing the progress of Germany’s inquiry into NSA and BND surveillance since it was launched in March last year. While revelations from the inquiry have resulted in important stories about the the BND (Germany’s signals intelligence agency) and its cooperation with the NSA, there is no official transcript of proceedings, even those hearings that have taken place in open session.
Edward Snowden responds to US appeal court ruling
Edward Snowden has hailed the recent US appeal court ruling on the legality of the US telephone metadata collection that was the subject of the first of his mass surveillance revelations. Speaking to security researcher Runa Sandvik at the Nordic Media Festival on 8 May, Snowden said that the importance of the ruling “in the United States’ legal and policy communities really can’t be overstated… [marking] a radical sea change in the level of resistance that the United States government has faced thus far” and that “it will affect every other mass surveillance program in the United States going forward.”
Edward Snowden’s full comments follow below.
Runa Sandvik: The first document that was published by The Guardian in June almost two years ago revealed that the NSA was collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily. Shortly after this document was published, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit. On May 7, we learned that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that the statue the government is relying on to justify this–Section 215 of the Patriot Act–does not permit the gathering of this information and that the surveillance program is unlawful. What was your reaction when you first heard about this?
This is significant and the importance of it in the United States’ legal and policy communities really can’t be overstated. When we look at the actual ruling and what it held, it was that the program, which had originally started as warrantless wiretapping under President George Bush in the 9/11-era, had never been lawful to begin with, and yet they did it anyway. What’s extraordinary about this is the fact that in 2013, prior to the leaks, Amnesty International brought the same challenge against the same individuals, and they thew it out of court saying the organization could not prove it had been spied on. Because of this, whether or not the programs were lawful, whether or not they were a violation of rights, they would not allow them in the court room.
The first story that was published by Glenn Greenwald and the other journalists working on this showed that there was a secret court order, from a secret court, that basically said you can monitor the phone calls, intercept the call detail records, collect all the metadata. Metadata being analogous to the kind of information the Private Eye would collect if they were following you around. Not necessarily a record of every single word that you said in conversation with someone else, because you might notice them, but they know where you traveled, who you had met with, where the meeting took place, what time it occurred, how long it went on for, so on and so forth. That is metadata in the phone context. It’s not what you say on the call, it’s who you’re calling, how long, association records, basically who your friends are. But this secret program authorized that to occur, in secret, by a secret court, and it wasn’t something where it authorized any particular targeting of any particular individual. Rather, it said they can collect the phone records of all 330 million Americans in the country without having any criminal suspicion, without having any reasonable suspicion even of wrongdoing of any kind. Rather, they would collect it all in advance of any criminal investigation or criminal act.
This being struck down is really a radical sea change in the level of resistance that the United States government has faced thus far. So far, courts have said “it’s not our place, our role, to tell the Executive Branch of the government how to do their job.” It is extraordinarily encouraging to see the courts are beginning to change their thinking to say “if Congress will not pass reasonable laws, if the executive will not act as a responsible steward of liberty and rights in how they execute the laws, it falls to the courts to say this has gone too far.” No fair reading of the law would authorize this, even if that had occurred it is not reasonable to expect the public to have known that this was the law, and it must change. And that’s really significant and I think that this decision will not affect only the phone metadata program, it will affect every other mass surveillance program in the United States going forward.
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US appeals court rules NSA phone records collection illegal
It’s been a while since we’ve had a ruling on the legality of the NSA’s call records programme from a US federal court. Back in December 2013, judges in two federal courts gave conflicting verdicts on whether the domestic collection that was the subject of the very first Snowden revelation was constitutional.