14 DAY TRIAL // Edward Snowden claims that NSA agents commonly pass around pictures intercepted by its programs, especially if they depict people in the nude or sexually compromising situations.
During an interview with the Guardian which will be made public in full later today, Snowden made the startling claim about the culture within the NSA, exposing some seriously troublesome details.
Upon stumbling across intimate nude pictures of people, NSA agents apparently act like 15-year-olds and pass the images around. Snowden says that this happened so often it can be considered a “routine” and many saw it even as a “fringe benefit” to their surveillance jobs.
“You’ve got young guys enlisted – 18-22 years old. They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all your private records. During the course of their work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense, for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation. But they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do?” Snowden asks.
Well, according to his statement, it looks like they turn around in their chairs and show a coworker who then sends it down to another one and so on.
The NSA, on the other hand, slammed Snowden’s statement. While the agency shies away from actually denying anything like this happened.
“NSA is a professional foreign-intelligence organization with a highly trained workforce, including brave and dedicated men and women from our armed forces,” Vanne Vines, the agency’s spokesperson, told Forbes.
“As we have said before, the agency has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities or professional standards, and would respond as appropriate to any credible allegations of misconduct.”
It should be pointed out, however, that the agency’s employees have been known to make use of their surveillance programs to spy on their significant others, their exes or their new love interests, which isn’t exactly ethical either.
The issue with NSA’s statement on the topic is the fact that the agency continues to seem disconnected from the things going on in its own back yard. The fact that this type of thing happens isn’t exactly a surprise given the fact that the NSA collects content from anyone and everyone across the planet, which means that naked selfies are bound to show up on their screens at one point or another.
The fact that the agency said it would investigate this if any “credible allegations of misconduct” were reported isn’t too reassuring. On one hand, they’re effectively dismissing Snowden as a credible source, although most of everything he’s said so far has proven to be true, while on the other it promises investigations that the whistleblower says never happen.
According to his claims, he personally discussed the issue with some higher-ups, but things didn’t go anywhere. “It’s never reported. Nobody every knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak,” he states in the interview.
Snowden also stresses that private images are taken from people and put into a government database, which is an obvious violation of human rights. “Why is that in a government database?” Snowden asks.