14 DAY TRIAL // Jimmy Carter may have been a United States president, but it doesn’t mean he likes the way things are currently happening in the country, especially when it comes to the National Security Agency. In the past, he went as far as to say that there was no functioning democracy in the United States.
Now, the former president admits that he sometimes felt that his own communications were being monitored.
“When I want to communicate with foreign leader privately, I type or write a letter myself, put it in the post office and mail it,” Carter said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He explains that he chooses old-fashioned snail mail because he believes that if he sends an email, it will be monitored. Using regular mail should help Carter keep some of his privacy, although it’s not exactly uncommon for letters to be intercepted and opened too.
The NSA has stated time and time again that all its actions are done to protect the American nation. Carter believes that the policies have been extremely liberalized and abused by the United States’ intelligence agencies.
As mentioned, back in July, Carter expressed his support for Edward Snowden. While he believes the whistleblower may have violated the law, he has ultimately done the country a lot of good.
“I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial,” the former president said.
Carter was president from 1977 to 1981 and he became a human rights advocate after leaving the White House. This eventually earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Given his stance on human rights, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when he came out as a critic of the NSA mass surveillance programs that most often than not violate the right to privacy, free expression and speech of millions of people all around the world, not just in the United States.
The NSA scandal broke through last summer, after Edward Snowden took thousands of documents from the NSA database and shared them with several media outlets in an effort to let everyone see what the intelligence agency had really been doing.
Snowden chose to do this after making his views known to his superiors and being shut down countless times, as they tried to continue to keep things a secret.