Edward Snowden Is Not Going Away
On the two-year anniversary of when his leaks detailing secret spy operations at the National Security Agency first emerged, landing like a thunderclap around the world, the former intelligence contractor appears more confident than ever that his actions have permanently altered the surveillance debate.
“The balance of power is beginning to shift,” Snowden said in a statement provided to select news organizations by Amnesty International and Privacy International. “With each court victory, with every change in law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear.”
Snowden has good reason to be riding high after the Senate broke a logjam this week to pass the first significant reform to government surveillance practices since the nation began supercharging its spying powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The USA Freedom Act, which was swiftly signed into law by President Obama, will effectively end the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. call data—the first program exposed by a Snowden-fueled article in The Guardian on June 5, 2013.
But the Freedom Act only deals significantly with one of the NSA’s many spying operations—one that has been deemed illegal by a federal appeals court, ineffective by two government review panels and not even that desired by some high-ranking officials.
And as a stark reminder of that, the journalists who possess the Snowden files were at it again just two days after the law’s passage. The New York Times and ProPublica published new documents Thursday from Snowden’s massive archive revealing that the Obama administration secretly expanded NSA spying beginning in 2012 to collect Americans’ cross-border Internet traffic as part of an effort to thwart and nab foreign hackers. (Read more from “Edward Snowden Is Not Going Away” HERE)
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