Hi Reddit,
I am Daniel Ellsberg, the former State and Defense Department official who leaked 7,000 pages of Top Secret documents on the Vietnam War to the New York Times and 19 other papers in 1971. Recently, I co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Yesterday, we announced Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, will be joining our board of directors!
Here’s our website: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org
I believe that Edward Snowden has done more to support and defend the Constitution—in particular, the First and Fourth Amendments—than any member of Congress or any other employee or official of the Executive branch, up to the president: every one of whom took that same oath, which many of them have violated.
Ask me anything.
Here’s proof it’s me: https://twitter.com/DanielEllsberg/status/423520429676826624
If you want to take action against mass surveillance, visit TheDayWeFightBack and demand reform in Congress on February 11th.
Daily Archives: January 15, 2014
Mass surveillance: an “insurance policy”
I was struck by this passage in an admirable blog post by Ray Corrigan.
The latest from the NSA is that they now seem to be admitting (in spite of previous claims that this mass surveillance stopped 54 major terror attacks it didn’t really stop any, but may possibly have provided secondary supportive evidence in relation to one) that the best argument they can come up with is mass data collection might be useful as an “insurance policy”. What?! An insurance policy?! The infrastructure of mass surveillance might be useful in the future, somehow, to someone?
The relevant passage in the NSA testimony reads:
While Inglis conceded in his NPR interview that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by NSA’s bulk collection of all American phone data – a case in San Diego that involved a money transfer from four men to al-Shabaab in Somalia – he described it as an “insurance policy” against future acts of terrorism.
“I’m not going to give that insurance policy up, because it’s a necessary component to cover a seam that I can’t otherwise cover,” Inglis said.