14 DAY TRIAL // In a long-distance appearance at the TED conference in Vancouver, Edward Snowden said that the NSA used its PRISM program to deputize corporate America to do its snooping in its place.
The NSA whistleblower appeared at the conference thanks to a telepresence robot since he continues to be stuck in Russia.
Snowden pointed out that much of the debate in the United States has been about the phone call metadata program, but that PRISM, the program that involves troves of content being collected has been largely ignored there.
“Even though some companies did resist — I think Yahoo did challenge this in court — they lost. But this was never tried by open court, only by secret court. This has been a talking point in the US government, that 15 federal judges reviewed the programs and found them to be lawful. What they don’t tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court making secret interpretations of the law,” Snowden said.
Proof of how this court works stands the fact that it has received 34,000 requests to access information and only turned down less than a dozen.
Snowden also took the time to somewhat take a stand for all the companies listed as collaborating with the NSA in one of the first PRISM slides released last summer. He states that just because the names of these companies appear on the file (Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, etc.), it doesn’t mean that they actually collaborated by their own free will.
“When we talk about this information and how it’s given, it’s given by the companies themselves, it’s not stolen. Even though companies push back and say, ‘Hey, let’s do this through a warrant process, we have some legal review and basis for handing over users’ data.’ We saw stories in the Washington Post that said the NSA broke into the data center communications between Google to itself, Yahoo to itself,” Snowden states.
Even though these companies are forced to comply with government requests, the NSA isn’t satisfied, which is why everyone should use encryption.
When it comes to oversight, Snowden points out that the Congress, which has a dedicated team to look over the intelligence community, was not even aware of all the times the NSA violated privacy rules.
“One event out of 2,776 affected more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington DC — by accident. What’s amazing about this report is not only were there 2,776 abuses but the chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not even seen the report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment. She then requested a copy from the NSA. What does that say about the state of oversight in the Senate when the chairman of the Intelligence Committee has no idea about thousands of abuses?” Snowden wonders.
This coincides with a statement coming from the Pentagon watchdog who admitted that it had no idea of the NSA’s mass phone data collection.