A Quote by Michael Gerson
The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.
Related Quotes
What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.
What I said was, ‘the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails.’ I stand by that.
There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation's laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens.
NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative.
I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it.
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.
I think one of the most shocking things is how little our elected officials knew about what the NSA was doing. Congress is learning from the reporting and that's staggering. Snowden and [former NSA employee] William Binney, who's also in the film as a whistleblower from a different generation, are technical people who understand the dangers.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apparently called President Obama directly to complain about NSA and how it spies on ordinary Americans. That's right, the guy who runs Facebook got mad at the NSA for spying on people. Talk about the pot unfriending the kettle!
According to The Washington Post, the NSA has been monitoring phone calls and emails of people in Mexico. So apparently it's not enough to spy on American citizens, they feel they have to spy on FUTURE American citizens as well.
I believe there is significant overreach by the NSA in how it monitors American citizens.
I was reading through all these NSA programs that Snowden has revealed, and one of the ones that fascinated me was that smart TVs can be used to look at you in your room. That is totally like the telescreen from 1984. It's not sort of like it, it's not a lot like it, it is it. And the ability of the NSA to turn on your cell phone, even if it's powered down, and listen to you in your home - that's insane to me. People had been warning that 1984 was just around the corner. Well, it has arrived, and Snowden has proven that.
The TSA tears through your bags at the airport and the NSA watches what books you buy and what you say over the telephone and online. It doesn't feel like anything is private anymore.
You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.
If you were watching CNN, they were saying the NSA is listening to your phone calls. It's reading your emails. When you call your grandma in Arkansas, the NSA knows. All total bulls - t. They made the public more concerned about the privacy issue than the legitimate facts should have done.
The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.
The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes.
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