Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor who has been leaking information about government data collection programs, said on Friday before a debate on state surveillance that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance.
Snowden, who appeared via video link at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall during the semi-annual Munk debate, said that state surveillance today is a euphemism for mass surveillance.
“It’s no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” Snowden said in the brief video. “It covers phone calls, e-mails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.”
The video was screened as two of the debaters — former US National Security Administration (NSA) director General Michael Hayden and well-known civil liberties lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz — argued in favor of the debate statement: “Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms.”
In opposition were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whose work based on the Snowden leaks won a Pulitzer Prize last month, and Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of social media Web site reddit.
The Snowden documents, first leaked in June last year, revealed that the US government has programs in place to spy on hundreds of millions of people’s e-mails, social networking posts, online chat histories, browsing histories, telephone records, telephone calls and texts.
“Nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet,” in the words of one leaked document.
Greenwald opened the debate by condemning the NSA’s own slogan, which he said appears repeatedly throughout its own documents: “Collect it all.”
“What is state surveillance? If it were about targeting in a discriminate way against those causing harm, there would be no debate,” Greenwald said. “The actual system of state surveillance has almost nothing to do with that. What state surveillance actually is, is defended by the NSA’s actual words, that phrase they use over and over again: ‘Collect it all.’”
Hayden and Dershowitz spent the rest of the hour-and-a-half denying that the pervasive surveillance described by Snowden and Greenwald even exists and that the ongoing surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorism.
“Collect it all doesn’t mean collect it all!” Hayden said, drawing laughs from the audience.
Greenwald went on to spar with Hayden and Dershowitz over whether the current method of metadata collection would have prevented the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
While Hayden argued that intelligence analysts would have noticed the number of calls from San Diego to the Middle East and caught the terrorists who were living inside the US illegally, Greenwald argued that one of the primary reasons US authorities failed to stop attacks is because they were taking in too much information to accurately sort through it all.
Before the debates began, the audience voted 33 in favor of the statement: “Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms,” while 46 percent voted against. The debate ended with 59 percent of the audience siding with Greenwald and Ohanian.
The Munk debates are a Canadian charitable initiative established by cofounders Melanie and Peter Munk. Peter Munk is chairman and founder of the mining company Barrick Gold.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver