14 DAY TRIAL // Not even a former United States president agrees with what the NSA has been doing. Jimmy Carter classifies the methods used by the US Intelligence as undemocratic and described Snowden’s NSA leak as “beneficial” for the country.
Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981, became a human rights advocate after leaving office, which won him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
“America has no functioning democracy at this point,” Carter said, as Der Spiegel quotes.
Carter also believes the spying scandal is undermining democracy around the world, not just in the United States, due to the fact that people are becoming suspicious of US internet platforms, such as Google and Facebook.
While these mediums are normally associated with freedom of speech, fallout from the NSA spying scandal has dented their credibility.
Carter believes that while Snowden might have violated the United States law, he may have 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,” Carter said.
The former president hasn’t shieded away from bringing critics to the White House and the administrations that followed his. Last year, Carter condemned the Obama administration for using drone attacks through an article published in New York Times.
Also, most recently, he appeared on CNN and called the NSA programs an invasion of human rights that has gone too far.
More than a month ago, Edward Snowden’s first leaked documents reached the media and everything just snowballed from there. From spying on US citizens, it went to spying the entire world, the European Union diplomats and foreign embassies and a bunch of diplomatic problems caused by the pressures put by the United States to get the NSA whistleblower.