President Barack Obama said former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden’s “sensational” revelations of classified spying programs could impact U.S. operations for years to come. Photo: Getty Images.
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U.S. officials believe Snowden could have more than 1.5 million classified documents still in his possession.
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The whistleblower names the ‘worst offenders’ of mass surveillance without oversight and also calls for the United States to stop criminalizing him.
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ICANN and other core Internet companies are calling for more international control over the Internet in the wake of the NSA’s surveillance revelation
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Dilma Rousseff called off a state visit to the White House after rumors emerged the NSA was spying on her communications and more.
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AFP
July 7, 2013
Fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said the US National Security Agency operates broad secret spying partnerships with other Western governments now complaining about its programs, in an interview published Sunday.
Snowden said in comments made before his exposure of US espionage practices came to light last month and printed in German news weekly Der Spiegel that NSA spies are “in bed together with the Germans and most other Western states”.
In remarks published in German, Snowden said an NSA department known as the Foreign Affairs Directorate coordinated work with foreign secret services.
This article was posted: Sunday, July 7, 2013 at 11:38 am
Tags: big brother
This live chat thing is catching on.
Two days after Edward Snowden, the source of recently leaked top secret National Security Agency documents, answered questions in an open-to-the-public live chat on The Guardian’s website, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, participated in a similar forum.
Drummond, who also holds the title of senior vice president of corporate development at Google, answered questions from Guardian readers for almost an hour on Wednesday. In his answers (Google was picking the questions), Drummond emphasized that Google is not allowing the government “direct access” to its servers and laid out ways that Google is now calling for greater transparency from the government.
“I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported,” Drummond wrote, in response to the first question. “Note that I say ‘originally’ because you’ll see that many of those original sources corrected their articles after it became clear that the PRISM slides were not accurate. Now, what does happen is that we get specific requests from the government for user data. We review each of those requests and push back when the request is overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process. There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box.”
Asked point blank if Google “is lying to us,” Drummond replied that, “We’re not in the business of lying and we’re absolutely telling the truth about all of this.”
“Our business depends on the trust of our users,” Drummond continued. “And I’m an executive officer of a large publicly traded company, so lying to the public wouldn’t be the greatest career move.”
Read the whole thing here.
Eric Lach Eric Lach is a reporter for TPM. From 2010 to 2011, he was a news writer in charge of the website’s front page. He has previously written for The Daily, NewYorker.com, GlobalPost and other publications. He can be reached at ericl(at)talkingpointsmemo.com
Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters file
David Drummond, senior vice president of Google, in 2011.
By Michael Isikoff
National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News
Google’s chief legal officer said Wednesday “we’re not in cahoots with the NSA” as the company stepped up its efforts to reassure customers that their gmail and Internet browsing history are safe from government prying.
“There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box,” said David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer, in a live webchat with The Guardian newspaper. During the chat, Drummond forcefully denied media reports that an NSA surveillance program known as PRISM had given the agency “direct access” to the servers of major Internet companies. “There’s no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported,” he said.
Drummond’s comments come the day after the company filed suit in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court alleging that long-standing gag orders prohibiting Google from telling customers about data it turns over to the NSA violate the company’s First Amendment rights.
Company lawyers claimed in their filing that “Google’s reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media” about its cooperation with the NSA.
Drummond said that Google only turns over user data to the government in response to “legitimate” requests relating to criminal investigations or suspected terror plots. “We review each of those requests and push back when the request is overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process,” said Drummond.
During the webchat, some questioners said they had lost trust in Google over the revelations about the NSA’s data-collection program. “I will cease using Google Mail, and use non-tracked search tools like duckduckgo,” wrote one questioner. “I, like millions of other Americans have nothing to hide, but we value our basic privacy … there is no excuse for a company as powerful as Google to not look out for the basic freedoms and liberty of American citizens.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” replied Drummond. “We do push back where we can, and do everything we can to protect our users’ data. But we don’t write the laws. Maybe one positive outcome of all this will be to have a deeper debate on this and come up with laws that are more transparent to the public.”
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