NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no stranger to the press. He’s appeared in dozens of interviews with major media outlets as well as an Oscar nominated documentary called Citizen Four.

But HBO funnyman John Oliver provided what is no doubt the toughest interview yet for Snowden. Granted there was plenty of light banter, such as if the NSA can intercept your “dick picks”, but there were a number of sharp, pointed questions on whether Snowden’s mass disclosure of documents was well-warranted whistleblowing or reckless behavior.

John Oliver – Edward Snowden interview

“How many of those documents have you actually read?” Oliver asked.

“I’ve evaluated all the documents that are in the archive,” Snowden responded.

Pressed he elaborated further: “I do understand what I turned over.”

But for Oliver that wasn’t good enough.

“There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents. Because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver said. “So The New York Times took a slide, didn’t redact it properly, and in the end it was possible for people to see that something was being used in Mosul on al Qaeda.”

“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.

“Well, that’s a fuckup,” said Oliver.

The interview is hard hitting and well worth the watch. Check it out in the video embedded above.

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CitizenFour, a documentary on Edward Snowden and the surveillance state by filmmaker Laura Poitras, took home the top Oscar for documentary features Sunday night with Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend, accepting the Oscar on stage with Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald.

“The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed don’t only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself,” Poitras said in her acceptance speech. “Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage and for the many other whistleblowers.”

The bulk of CitizenFour is from footage Poitras shot over the course of eight days in Hong Kong, where Snowden first hid after making contact with Poitras and Greenwald. Once Snowden was offered political asylum in Russia, Poitras travelled there to interview him on his life after he revealed himself to the public.

Snowden sent his best wishes to Poitras for the Oscar win in a statement via the American Civil Liberties Union.

“When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant. I’m grateful that I allowed her to persuade me,” Snowden said in the statement. “The result is a brave and brilliant film that deserves the honor and recognition it has received. My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.”

Poitras earned two previous Oscar nominations for her Iraq war documentary My Country, My Country, released in 2006, and 2010’s The Oath, about prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

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The Intercept is reporting that the NSA is unsurprisingly spying on countless American citizens without there being any reasonable justification for doing so. This is being reported based on the documents that Edward Snowden gave Glenn Greenwald including a “FISA recap” spreadsheet that details thousands of email addresses being monitored. Out of those email accounts being monitored, 202 addresses were marked as US persons, while 1,782 were marked as non-US persons and 5,501 were marked as unknown or simply left blank. The Intercept identified five Americans on the list from their email addresses and helped build the story that we’re reporting on today.

The NSA is monitoring the emails (and likely more) of multiple Muslim-Americans even though they have never had any ties to any terrorist groups or anti-American sentiment. There was, however, one lawyer involved in the spying on Americans who represented clients in terrorism cases, but that is merely a breach of due process. A breach where the NSA could pass on confidential information to the prosecution and help create a case where there is none. Obviously, such lawyers would probably suspect that they’re already being watched, but not by the NSA. Even so, he is one of five Americans basically put on a ‘watch list’ for who they are and what they do, not a justification for being spied on as an American.

The five Americans that are being spied on were discovered in Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents. These five men, that are Americans, Faisal Gill, Asim Ghafoor, Hooshang Amirahmadi, Agha Saeed and Nihad Awad are all obviously people that could easily be considered Muslim Americans. But the fact is that with the exception of Asim Ghafoor, none of these men have ANY remote ties with terrorists in any way, shape, or form. In fact, Asim Ghafoor only does because its part of his job as a lawyer to represent them, which is still an American thing to do in order to ensure due process.

FISA Recap Spreadsheet

These men’s email addresses were found in a FISA recap spreadsheet which basically broke down who was and wasn’t being spied on and whether or not their account owners were American, non-American or unknown. Unfortunately for all of us Americans, it doesn’t really seem to make much of a difference whether or not people are American if the NSA really wants to spy on them. Because the truth is that the FISA courts are basically granting the NSA any and all permissions that they need to ‘do their job’. In the 35 years that the FISA court (FISC) has been in existence, the court has approved 35,434 government requests for surveillance, while rejecting only 12. Giving you merely a small idea of how strictly these requests are really being ‘judged’.

What’s worse is that some of these men have grown up and served their country, like Faisal Gill, who has served in the military and worked for the White House under President George W. Bush. In fact, he was a staunch supporter of the Republican party and their ideals. He also did lots of work under the Department of Homeland security and after he was done working there, the NSA spied on him, while George W. Bush was still president. In fact, after he left the Department of Homeland security, where he had very high level security clearance, the spying on him began.

The Intercept interviewed some of these men to talk about the spying and their experiences, and there are some really powerful words being said, especially towards the end.

The problem with all of this is that our government, The NSA, the FBI and the FISA courts that enable them are really toeing a very dangerous line. If it is okay to spy on American citizens with basically no supporting evidence (as it appears that these men were) then what prevents the NSA, CIA, FBI and other government agencies from monitoring everything we do, waiting until we trip up?

Just because these men are Muslim-Americans should not mean that they are suddenly dangerous to Americans and our freedom. In fact, singling them out because of what religion they are might be one of the most grave transgressions the NSA has committed so far. We already know that the NSA is spying on people that use Tor, so who’s next? Tor Users, American Muslims… Communists? Chinese-American Immigrants? Mexican-Americans? Where does it end?

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The Washington Post is reporting via documents obtained from Edward Snowden that the NSA is collection hundreds of thousands of records, upwards of 160,000 communications, most of which are completely irrelevant to the target person or people. After spending four months analyzing the data which included 22,000 reports and 160,000 data intercepts, the Washington Post was able to discern that a whopping 89% of the total data collected was from non-targets or mere bystanders.

The records obtained by Edward Snowden and passed on to the Washington post spanned 4 years of records that started in 2009 and ended in 2012. Obviously, they are merely a sliver of what was actually collected, but gave a fairly good idea of what kind of net the NSA has been casting with their programs and how unabashedly they are collecting innocent people’s data.

Washington Post Diagram of Data Collection

The data above also shows a vast increase in spying on people as Obama took office, indicating that the NSA’s activities only increased under his presidency. This would make a lot of Obama’s own biggest supporters very worried as he was supposedly working to curtail such programs as a senator. Nonetheless, the Washington Post and Edward Snowden never disclosed that they had these reports and documents which detail the scope and detail of the NSA’s spying from 2009 to 2012.

Ultimately, these programs are a self-fullfilling prophecy where the government continues to spy on more and more people without any probable cause and doing so on such a scale that it becomes almost impossible to control. These programs, like many other government programs seek to enlarge themselves from year to year and in many cases result in larger and larger bureaucracies that seek to increase their own size regardless the cost. A good example of that is with the war on drugs, many agencies involved in such programs are become ever more militarized and as a result have stepped up the scale of the war on drugs which results in needing more funding to maintain competitiveness. The real truth is that the NSA spent $1.5 billion on a data center to warehouse all of the data they’re collecting on us and it won’t be the last either. If we continue to allow the NSA to spy with the use of FISA as a vehicle, they will only become more and more invasive and dangerous.

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The German government has announced that they will be switching away from Verizon for internet services as an ISP for the German government. They noted that the reasons for this decision had to do with increased demands on the network and the prevalence of the NSA in Verizon’s business. Based on the translation that was available, it appears as though the German government is merely using this as an opportunity to switch internet services to a company that is German. Sure, the likelihood that their networks will get snooped on by the NSA will probably go down, or at least become more difficult.

However, usually, such moves are usually just being used by the companies not involved to gain an upper hand on their competition, which is in this case Verizon. While the German government hasn’t quite made it clear who they intend to replace Verizon with, it is quite clear that the NSA’s snooping and relationship with Verizon has made doing business in Germany difficult for Verizon. This will likely not be the end of such moves by European governments and I suspect there will be more companies that will lobby their governments to switch to local ISPs or technology companies in order to ‘better protect’ themselves. While simultaneously taking an opportunity of bad PR on the part of American companies to snatch away their business.

According to an AP report, Verizon was unable to keep the contract (which they’ve held since 2010) due to the fact that they weren’t able to meet some core requirements of the German government put on the company, likely as a result of the NSA’s snooping revealed by Edward Snowden and publications like Der Spiegel. As a result of not meeting the German government’s demands on these requirements, Verizon is losing the contract in 2015 to another company, likely one based in Europe or even Germany.

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As a result of the Snowden revelations regarding the NSA’s spying on basically the whole world, some privacy advocates have filed lawsuits against the NSA in US courts. Naturally, this results in the NSA having to gather evidence by subpoena to prove their side of the story. This is especially true when you consider that James Clapper, the Director of the NSA, lied to Congress about exactly what the NSA was and wasn’t doing. Yet, somehow the guy is still in power and has not faced any repercussions for his lies. As such, there are multiple lawsuits claiming that the NSA has overstepped the boundaries of what the law permits and require the NSA to provide evidence of this one way or another.

Now, according to the Washington Post, the NSA claims that their systems are far too complex and as a result of that, they are unable to save evidence that is being required for them to hold by the court. This is because of court cases like Jewel v NSA and the EFF’s countless lawsuits against the NSA as well. In a hearing in the US District for California’s Northern District court, Judge Jeffrey S. White reversed an emergency order he had issued earlier the same week barring the government from destroying data that the EFF had asked be preserved for the case. The data is collected under Section 702 of the Amendments Act to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

The NSA argued that it would be too much of a burden on them to hold the data. The NSA’s Deputy Director, Richard Ledgett, in a court filing stated, “A requirement to preserve all data acquired under section 702 presents significant operational problems, only one of which is that the NSA may have to shut down all systems and databases that contain Section 702 information.”

He states that the complexity of the NSA’s systems means that preservation efforts might not work, but would have “an immediate, specific, and harmful impact on the national security of the United States.” After dropping that NSA standard tagline, which the department regularly uses to protect their programs, he stated that part of the complexity of these systems has to do with the privacy restrictions placed on the programs by the FISA court. Which, if their scope were not so wide, would be believable, but I have a feeling it has a lot more to do with the amount of data they collect and the amount of warehousing they have. I don’t think anyone honestly buys the fact that the NSA’s respecting our privacy is the reason why we can’t get evidence from automatically getting deleted. Plus, if they can’t back up what they’re doing in court with evidence, maybe they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place?

The amount of data the NSA goes through on a daily basis is probably nearing petabytes, if it isn’t petabytes of data. So, naturally, they would need to delete data they do not believe is relevant fairly quickly in order to be able to store the more important data for longer periods of time. After all, they don’t have millions of hard drives at their disposal to store everything they record, even if they wish they could. They probably do have close to that, though.

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As we come closer and closer to Edward Snowden’s interview tonight with none other than Brian Williams of NBC, Glenn Greenwald has said (while promoting his new book) that he will be publishing a list of Americans (likely high profile individuals) that are being spied upon by the NSA. This list of NSA targets that are American citizens (something the NSA cannot really do without specific permission) will likely open up exactly who the NSA is spying on in terms of people inside the US. We will discover what kinds of groups they’re targeting and where those people come from as well, and it will likely make the NSA look a lot worse than they already do with the American public. After all, the people of Aghanistan and The Bahamas probably aren’t very happy with the NSA either once they found out that all of their calls were being recorded by the NSA.

Additionally, I have a very strong feeling that many of the Americans that the NSA is spying on are probably the very people that are cooperating with them, including the employees of 80-some companies that are cooperating with them, according to a recent Wikileaks disclosure. Greenwald also said that the NSA’s data security isn’t necessarily the greatest when you consider that Edward Snowden had successfully stolen 1.7 million files from their systems and was not caught  during his entire process. This alone should be a grave worry of anyone that believes that the NSA should be allowed to capture and then warehouse billions of records across the world, including those of American citizens. Ultimately, the NSA should not be trusted to the degree that they are today and that there should be more oversight of the agency, more than the recently passed USA Freedom Act which was gutted the day before it was passed in order to give the US security apparatus more freedoms than were originally intended in the bill.

Glenn Greenwald hasn’t given a specific date or time when he will release these names, but there’s a good chance he’ll do it after Edward Snowden’s interview with Brian Williams airs on NBC tonight. This will be the first interview that Edward Snowden has with any American network since his disclosures of NSA spying last year and will be aired at 10pm/9pm central on NBC. While we don’t know the details of that interview, we can assume that it’ll probably rehash a lot of things that have already been disclosed and won’t likely talk much about any new disclosures since Snowden has left many of those to be released by journalists. Although don’t forget, Brian Williams is a journalist and there’s a good chance we could hear something new during that interview, we simply don’t know what Snowden wants to say about the NSA directly to the American public.

Either way, this week sounds like it should pan out to be pretty interesting if both Snowden and Greenwald release new info.

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According to the latest release by Wikileaks, the NSA is recording all calls coming in and out of Afghanistan. They reported this even though other publications and journalists strictly opposed to releasing the name of Afghanistan in their disclosures that the NSA was recording all calls in the Bahamas. Under a week ago, The Intercept (Glenn Greenwald and co.) along with Wikileaks and a few other publications had disclosed that all cellular calls were being recorded by the NSA and that there was another country that had yet to be named that was getting a similar treatment. However, The Intercept refused to publish the name of the second country for fear that it would cause actual and gave harm to people’s lives if that country’s name were to be released.

However, Wikileaks did not agree with The Intercept and The Washington Post on the Afghanistan topic and chastised them publicly on Twitter for not wanting to disclose the name of the second target country, even though Wikileaks did not believe that the truth should be withheld or that knowing the truth would actually affect anyone’s lives or put anyone in danger. The Washington Post and The Intercept both chose to withhold the name of the second country but really, it seems quite pointless to have done so if Wikileaks was already going to release that information. Additionally, I don’t quite understand how The Intercept and The Washington Post necessarily rationalized that releasing Afghanistan’s name would somehow endanger lives. If anything, it would merely result in the US being pushed out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later, which is already an inevitability as it is already.

Not to mention, the Afghani people have the full right to know that the US is effectively spying on all of their cellular communications without their consent. They are already living with a heavy US military presence but in addition to that, everything they’re doing is effectively being monitored by the NSA and likely passed on to the military and CIA who are partaking in drone strikes. Overall, this information is certainly not surprising, but it is still quite worrying that the NSA is capable of spying on an entire country’s cellular communications and record every bit of it as well. Also don’t forget that the NSA is also collecting metadata on people in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines as well. None of this is surprising, but the sad part is that the NSA is allowed to continue to violate people’s electronic privacy in the name of ‘national security’.

It will be interesting, however, to see how the US’ dipolmatic relations and military engagements with the aforementioned countries will be as a result of this disclosure. No, I don’t think people’s lives are in danger, just the political climate is a bit more difficult than it was a few days ago.

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So, remember when the US Government was painting Edward Snowden out as an evil guy and someone that was harming our country? Well, today’s vote of the United States House of Representatives appears to suggest otherwise. Sure, the USA Freedom Act that was passed by the House today was a gutted and signifcantly weaker version of the bill that the EFF had originally backed, but now at least we can agree that Snowden’s disclosures were without a doubt pivotal in passing this legislation. Sure, it still needs to go to the US Senate and be passed there and then passed by Obama himself, but judging by how gutted this version of the bill is, it will likely be seen as enough compromise by many of the opposing parties to get passed the whole way up through Obama.

The USA Freedom Act’s creator (and creator of the despicable Patriot Act) Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin’s 5th district gave an extensive explanation of what the USA Freedom Act was intended to do, based upon Snowden’s revelations of NSA activities. However, Snowden’s name is not mentioned ANYWHERE on Sensenbrenner’s site nor the US Congress’ site even though without his leaks we would never know of these vast oversteppings of the NSA’s activities and therefore arrive at today’s bill. The USA Freedom Act should really be called shut down the NSA act, but the reality of the situation is that nobody in the US government want to be responsible for that or dealing with all of the military and political consequences of not having the NSA. The NSA gives the US an edge and they know it, but they need to make it appear that it isn’t violating the rights of its citizens at the same time. So, below you have HR 3361, or the political name, the USA Freedom Act.

H.R. 3361/ S. 1599

You can read the full text of the passed bill on the US Congress’ website which was passed 303-121 with 70 democrats and 50 republicans voting against. But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who voted against it because it was already a fairly gutted version of the bill that was fairly weaker than had originally been intended. Sure, there’s always going to be give and take in politics, but there was a lot more give in this than anyone, including the EFF would have liked to see. Sure, the USA Freedom Act is a step in the right direction, but ultimately, the Patriot Act should have never been passed to begin with. Without the Patriot Act, many of the things that the NSA partook  (and probably continues to partake in) would be flat out illegal and have no legal framework protecting it.

Furthermore, we now have to pass a bill called the USA Freedom Act after we allowed something so horrendous as the Patriot Act to pass? We get our freedom after we go for our patriotism? I don’t know, but I think that a lot of people are not going to be happy with how far this bill has gone and the fact that it completely and wholly ignores why it was even created. And the fact that the Patriot Act’s creator is the one that wrote is both ironic and a sign of how awful the Patriot Act has become in terms of violating Americans’ civil liberties that we supposedly cherish so greatly.

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Google has consistently tried to make themselves look like they are forced to cooperate with the NSA and that they aren’t participating in the NSA’s programs to monitor the general population, but Al Jazeera America has obtained documents via the Freedom of Information Act  that show a fairly close level of cooperation between Google and the NSA. Sure, the documents obtained by Al Jazeera don’t show any sort of cooperating ‘smoking gun’ but they do show that the NSA does work fairly closely with Google on National Security measures that might affect the security of Google and ultimately the security of the USA. In the letters, Keith Alexander is communicating with Sergey Brin through Eric Schmidt about meeting up in San Jose at a secure location to be briefed about security threats to Google and the US back in 2012, pre Edward Snowden. And if you read Eric Schmidt’s response to Keith Alexander, he clearly seems to have a very relaxed and familiar relationship with the head of the NSA, Keith Alexander.

He then gets a reply from Brin explaining that it isn’t his primary email but rather to communicate with him at another email address that he actually checks often. He is asking Brin to join an 18 CEO steering group that would help the NSA address security issues more effectively without issue, however the details of the documents themselves are very vague (intentionally) and are clearly designed to make the NSA’s mission to appear to be defensive security-based rather than offensive security based like the PRISM program. That program, Google claims, they had no awareness of, and that the NSA had effectively been doing behind everyone’s backs. So, either the NSA is working with these companies at the same time as working behind their backs, or there’s a level of cooperating that we’re not aware of and that the companies aren’t willing to admit.

For Google’s sake, we really hope its just the NSA being douchebags and not being forthcoming with exactly what they’re doing, which wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Its just that Google’s relationship with the NSA appears to be closer than they’ve led on, and there has been no mention of Google cooperating with the NSA on this ESF (enduring security framework).

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For their part, there is no denying that the Washington Post and The Guardian have done a great public service for the world in remaining steadfast in their journalistic principals, even when the GCHQ forced The Guardian to destroy their laptops and computers.

However, one must not forget that these newspapers are still businesses, and even though Jeff Bezos recently purchased the Washington Post to protect it and keep it safe, it doesn’t change the fact that they are still businesses. This means that many of the revelations that have been published about the NSA have slowly trickled out and resulted in many millions of hits for each publication, worth millions of dollars in advertising revenue. Sure, there’s a value in slowly letting out the information in order for certain important things not to be missed, but there’s also some criticism that they are milking the Snowden leak for their maximum benefit as Snowden is not responsible for how they distribute the documents.

In the end, the world is a better place with the Snowden leaks, at least in our eyes, and they have done the world a huge service by helping Snowden show the world the grave oversteppings of the NSA under the guise of national security and the protection of the United States of America’s interests. Sure, it makes the NSA’s job harder, but a lot of the things they’ve been doing are highly questionable, even with the ambiguity of the Patriot Act.

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