The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency's own internal auditor.The agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers.
The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
Before March 8, 1971, the FBI and CIA vigorously denied they gathering surveillance data on thousands of Americans. Subsequent disclosures revealed they lied. On March 12, 2013, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence who oversees NSA, lied to Congress when he denied that the NSA is collecting data on millions of Americans.
J. Edgar Hoover justified FBI political spying, the Security Index, and COINTELPRO, claiming he was saving the US from communism. But history has shown that it had nothing to do with threats from Russia or China but instead Hoover's prejudices.
This past June, Obama defended NSA surveillance, saying, " We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information." Pro Publica reports that the NSA has provided specifics on only four of these cases and there is little support for the President's contention that NSA surveillance actually "averted" these threats. In December, Federal District Judge Richard J. Leon studied NSA surveillance and observed, "the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature."
On March 8, 1971, the Media 8 served the public interest when they burglarized the FBI office and revealed the contents to the press. Amazingly, they were never arrested. On June 5, 2013, Edward Snowden revealed the NSA surveillance process to the press. On June 23 he sought asylum in Russia.
What we learned in 1971 is essentially the same thing we learned from the Snowden documents. The federal government is conducting illegal surveillance on Americans.
Edward Snowden is a whistleblower. He is a patriot.
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