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Curated research library of TV news clips regarding the NSA, its oversight and privacy issues, 2009-2014

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Primary curation & research: Robin Chin, Internet Archive TV News Researcher; using Internet Archive TV News service.

Speakers

Mark Klein
Whistleblower, Former AT&T technician
KQED 05/20/2014
Klein: I was furious because I never signed up to work for the NSA. But I was in my late 50s and I didn't want to lose my job. So I was stuck. And I was afraid. Narrator: Klein was afraid to speak out for several years. Audio TV reporting: The New York Times broke the story about the National Security Agency spying inside... Narrator: But went public after reading a front page New York Times story about NSA spying in 2005. Angwin: When Mark Klein came out and said, "I work at AT&T and the NSA is tapping into our network," that was the first time that the American public realized how far things had gone since 9/11. How much domestic surveillance there was. He raised this allegation. No one ever acknowledged that it was actually happening. It still remains an open question. But no one has ever denied it either.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Angwin: The biggest harm from government surveillance actually is that it leads us to be less free with our speech. So I write about this guy in my book who was surveilled of by the FBI. He and his friend, they’re both teenage young men in Santa Clara, and his friend had written a kind of sassy post on a social network called reddit. And he basically said I don't know why the TSA is so crazy at airports. You know I could just go to a mall and bomb it, no problem, right, which is actually true, but you know, may be unwise to say, but he said it. So, a couple of weeks later this guy and his friend were at a car shop getting an oil change and the friend, Yaser, saw that there was something under his car, it was a tracking device and the FBI had put this on his car to surveil him. And he later found out it was because of his friend's comment.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Angwin: (continued) But what I really found disturbing was what happened afterwards. So after they found out they were being surveilled by the FBI, their friendship fell apart. Yasir didn't want to be friends with a guy who might put him in danger, right? He became incredibly circumspect in his actions and he doesn't feel free to talk about anything subversive and he is Muslim American and he now uses a different name, Aladin, because he feels like it’s less Muslim. And he's still detained everytime he comes across international borders. And he doesn't feel like he has the same free speech rights that I feel like is a central part of our country.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Rosen: You argue so powerfully in that chapter that it's not just privacy but free speech that’s at stake, that at the core of what the framers were concerned about was enough practical obscurity to be able to engage in political dissent. And yet as you say the Supreme Court has not been sympathetic to claims that mass surveillance violates free-speech. Angwin: No, The Supreme Court has not. There are a number of reasons why they've taken that path but largely it's been over the issue of standing, which is you can't prove you’re surveilled and so that you can’t show any harm. You know we have an interesting case coming up which is now after Snowden, people can prove that they were surveilled. So it will be interesting to see whether the Supreme Court revisits that.
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Julia Angwin
Author, “Dragnet Nation, The Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” and Investigative Journalist at ProPublica
CSPAN2 09/01/2014
Angwin: but we do have a history of protecting freedom of association, right. The NAACP vs. Alabama case where Alabama wanted the list of numbers of the NAACP and the Supreme Court upheld the right to keep that list private. Now the thing is those lists are no longer private because you don’t have to join, the young Muslim man of Santa Clara, anymore. Yasir was automatically entered into that by the digital trail that he left behind.
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