14 DAY TRIAL // Edward Snowden has finally appeared in front of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) via video connection from Russia.
In a statement sent by the whistleblower ahead of the meeting, it was indicated that he would focus on the bulk surveillance activities in which the NSA was involved.
That is exactly what he did in front of the PACE, where he talked about how the NSA could and would target innocent individuals just for visiting the wrong websites, compromised the financial sector and regularly targeted leaders or staff from NGOs.
During his intervention, Snowden made an important statement, saying that there were no legal means to actually block off the NSA’s practices, but that they needed to be created. Basically, without any type of intervention from the part of the lawmakers in Europe, for instance, the NSA and the United States government cannot be held responsible for their consistent privacy violation practices.
Edward Snowden also discussed the fact that any individual could be tracked and identified and along with this, their religious groups or business interactions could be tracked as well. This eventually leads to a list of home addresses of people who match a certain criteria.
The official story that intelligence services use every time they try to justify the things they do is that everything is done for national security, but that cannot be the case when innocent people are targeted.
Hansjörg Geiger, former head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, was present at the meeting as well and he expressed his concerns with what the NSA had done. In fact, despite his background, Geiger said that he wanted the European Union to adopt a code for intelligence services that would put an end to unfettered mass surveillance practices.
If the countries didn’t comply with the code of conduct, they could be accused of wrongful actions by allies and friends.
While countries need to be able to control their own intelligence services, there are areas where not even governments can reach. Which is why, Geiger believes, there’s a need for whistleblowers.
Ever since the NSA scandal broke, the media has exposed a large number of programs that consistently violate people’s privacy, including by analyzing phone call and email metadata, Internet browsing history, as well as other type of data.