Despite limitations, the NSA spies on Americans en masse

May 1, 2014 11:43 GMT  ·  By

Edward Snowden has bad news for all American citizens hoping that they get some kind of preferential treatment from the country’s spies. In fact, the whistleblower has said that the NSA gathers more data on Americans than it does on foreigners, something that, in theory, shouldn’t be allowed.

Snowden made an acceptance speech for a “truth-telling” prize and appeared via video in Washington, at the Ridenhour Prizes ceremony.

“We watch our own people more closely than anyone else in the world,” said Snowden. He also mentioned that he continued to believe that he did the right thing bringing the NSA’s mass surveillance programs to light.

While he admits that he believed that life in prison would be part of his future, he criticized the White House for failing to keep James Clapper accountable for lying in front of the Senate.

“When Clapper raised his hand and lied to the American public, was anyone tried? Were any charges brought? Within 24 hours of going public, I had three charges against me,” Snowden said, pointing out the steep differences between how he was treated and how Clapper’s case went by without even an investigation.

He was referring, of course, to Clapper’s answer to a question regarding the NSA’s collection of data inside the United States. The latter said at the time that the NSA did not wittingly gather any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.

This was proved to be false just a few weeks later when the first leaked documents made their way into the media, especially through the highly discussed metadata collection program.

This particular program has, in fact, become the most discussed program of all, despite there being plenty of other more intrusive ones that affect a lot more people. Instead, the telephony metadata collection got to be on the front page of all major American newspapers because it affected US citizens.

The White House has taken advantage of this and focused its reform plans on this program, leaving the others mostly unaddressed. Even so, the government hasn’t exactly decided to shut it down, but rather to make things a bit more difficult for the NSA.

According to the proposed reform, the data will continue to be collected, but the NSA will no longer be responsible for this, but rather third parties, which is thought to be telecommunications companies. On top of this, the NSA will actually have to get a warrant to gain access to the data.