#edward snowden
Mass surveillance of the internet by intelligence agencies is “corrosive of online privacy” and threatens to undermine international law, according to a report to the United Nations general assembly. The critical study by Ben Emmerson QC, the UN’s special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, released on Wednesday is a response to revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of monitoring carried out by GCHQ in the UK and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US. Emmerson’s study poses a direct challenge to the claims of both governments that their bulk surveillance programs, which the barrister finds endanger the privacy of “literally every internet user,” are proportionate to the terrorist threat and robustly constrained by law. To combat the danger, Emmerson endorses the ability of Internet users to mount legal challenges to bulk surveillance. http://goo.gl/usDwXV
Film Hype #286.
In January 2013, Poitras - recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Genius Fellowship and co-recipient of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service - was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four," who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
In June 2013, she and Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely sui generis in the history of cinema: a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.
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Joe Rogan chatting to the ultimate whistleblower, Edward Snowden
On a Donald Trump presidency, Edward Snowden tells @katiecouric, “I think tomorrow is very uncertain right now, but we shouldn’t be afraid of that, we should recognize that, we should prepare for that - don’t be afraid, be ready.” Watch the complete interview
In an EXCLUSIVE interview with @katiecouric, Edward Snowden says that former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus — under consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of state — disclosed “information that was far more highly classified than I ever did” and yet never “spent a single day in jail.” Watch the complete interview tomorrow on @yahoonews.
CIA leaker Jeffrey Sterling sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for Espionage Act violations
Convicted CIA leaker Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to 42 months in prison under the Espionage Act. He was found guilty of nine counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information about a covert operation and other related charges.
Sterling was given an additional two years of supervised release after he finishes his time in jail. The government had sought a prison term of more than 20 years for Sterling, but the judge told prosecutors at the sentencing that was too harsh a punishment, according to the New York Times’ Matt Apuzzo.
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Exiled NSA Contractor Edward Snowden: ‘I Haven’t And I Won’t’ Cooperate With Russia
Snowden with Fresh Air’s Dave Davies about his first hack as a preteen, why he decided to leak the documents, and his 40 days detained in the Moscow airport. His new book is 'Permanent Record.’
On coming back to the U.S. to face trial
My ultimate goal will always be to return to the United States. And I’ve actually had conversations with the government, last in the Obama administration, about what that would look like, and they said, “You should come and face trial.” I said, “Sure. Sign me up. Under one condition: I have to be able to tell the jury why I did what I did, and the jury has to decide was this justified or unjustified.” This is called a public interest defense and is allowed under pretty much every crime someone can be charged for. Even murder, for example, has defenses. It can be self-defense and so on so forth, it could be manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. But in the case of telling a journalist the truth about how the government was breaking the law, the government says there can be no defense. There can be no justification for why you did it. The only thing the jury gets to consider is did you tell the journalists something you were not allowed to tell them. If yes, it doesn’t matter why you did it. You go to jail. And I have said as soon as you guys say for whistleblowers it is the jury who decides if it was right or wrong to expose the government’s own lawbreaking I’ll be in court the next day.
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