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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

Barack Obama
President
KQED 06/17/2013
“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA. cannot target your e-mails.
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Larry Ellison
CEO, Oracle Corporation
KPIX 08/13/2013
Who has ever heard of this information being misused by the government? In what way? Rose: Let me just hear you clearly. You're saying whatever the NSA is doing is okay with me. A. It's great. It's essential. By the way President Obama thinks it's essential. It's essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It's absolutely essential.
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Charlie Rose
Host of Charlie Rose and Co-Anchor of CBS This Morning
KPIX 01/28/2014
Rose: This morning we know who will lead the NSA, surveillance program. President Obama is choosing Vice Admiral Michael Rogers nominated to replace army General Chief Keith Alexander.
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Tim Cook
CEO of Apple Inc.
KQED 09/16/2014
Cook: For us on the Snowden thing, we wanted tore instantly transparent because rumors were written in the press that people backdoored our servers. None of that is true. Zero. We would never allow that to happen. They would have to cart us out in a box before we would do that. If we ever get information -- and we finally got agreement from the national government to release how many times we had national security requests on Apple and it's between 0 and 250 that's the lowest number you can quote, 0 to 250. Rose: Could have been 1 or it could have been 249 Cook: Correct. So you can tell we have hundreds of millions of customers, so it's a very rare instance there has been any data asked.
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Matthew Olsen
Former Counsel to the NSA, and Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center
WHYY 10/09/2014
Olsen: These programs were aggressive. They were designed to be aggressive, especially the metadata bulk collection, That has been essentially, the President said we're going to work to stop doing that. Rose: Do agree with the President on that. Olsen: yeah, I agree at this point. It should have been done-- shouldn't have been done. Everything we did was right-- nothing was done that we shouldn't have done. Rose: Did the President say he was going to stop it. Olsen: He did say that. Rose: Does that mean you shouldn't have been doing. Olsen: No. Rose: What is the reason to stop it? Olsen: I think the reason is the public outcry over that. Rose: We thought it was a good idea, and we are happy we did it, the only reason we are going to stop doing it is because the public seems to be up set. Olsen: I wouldn't be quite so glib. We're always trying to get this right had. This is my main point. Had there is lots of discussion, what is the right thing to do here. That program was one that was believed to be necessary by the intelligence community. But once it was revealed and the President made the decision to reform it, then we're going to move forward.
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Matthew Olsen
Former Counsel to the NSA, and Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center
WHYY 10/09/2014
Rose: Is there any evidence that anybody lost their life because of the disclosures of Edward Snowden? Olsen: No, I'm not aware of anything that direct. That would be an extraordinary sort of example if there were anything like that. I think again look, what I'm concerned about is a drop in our ability to see these terrorists, as these plots unfold. I mentioned earlier our best chance of stopping an underwear bomb from getting on to an airplane not at the airport. It's when those plots are being hatched in places like Yemen. Rose: Intelligence. Olsen: Through intelligence collection, and that's largely through the collection and interception of their communications.
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Matthew Olsen
Former Counsel to the NSA, and Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center
WHYY 10/09/2014
Rose: But there was such an outcry about Snowden and being called a traitor and all the things, accusations made, yet, that successor to Keith Alexander in testimony, I think, said literally downplayed the harm done by Edward Snowden. Olsen: Right. You know, Admiral Rogers the successor to General Alexander. My interpretation is, first, there has been harm, no doubt there has been harm. But-- Rose: Along the lines you were suggesting. Olsen: They changed how they communicate, made it harder for us to collect. And I would say another, and potentially more far reaching damage is the relationship with these service providers. The internet service providers and the telecommunications companies. Rose: They are less cooperative. Olsen: They’re less cooperative. That is a real paradigm shift from where we were several years ago when-- where if we went to a company with an order or a lawful directive, you know there was a presumption that that was something cooperation. Rose: Now they pushback. Olsen: And I think that’s changed.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
KQED 10/25/2014
Rose: Snowden wrote you and he said you asked me why I chose you. He said I didn't, you chose yourself. What did he mean? Poitras: What he was referring to was the fact that I had been put on this government watch list, and so I had been for six years I had been, for six years, every time I traveled and returned back to the United States, I would be pulled aside, there would be border agents who would come to the airplane and pull me aside and ask me what I was doing, where I had traveled. And I had gone through this a long time, starting in 2006. When it began, I was naive. I answered questions, I said well, I had been making a film about the Iraq war. And then it became Increasingly, they photocopied my notebooks and I became a little less friendly at the border and had written about it. So Snowden might have seen it in two ways. I had written about it for the "New York Times," I had published a short video about N.S.A. whistle blower William Binney that was published in summer of 2012
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Rose: What do you hope the film accomplishes? Poitras: For me, it's a documentary or story about journalism, about what happens, journalists working on a story. It's very much a story of the sort of era of crackdown on sources and whistleblowers and journalism that we've seen in the last years where you have people like my friend and colleague James Risen who's being subpoenaed and potentially trying to, potentially will go to jail because he's not going to testify against a source, and the government is doing a lot of these things. We know they subpoenaed the phone records of the AP so I think it's also a portrait of journalism done in difficult circumstances and I think it's a story about somebody willing to take personal risks, sacrifices to expose information they think the public has a right to know.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: He's (Edward Snowden) definitely an idealist. He's somebody who very much grew up on the internet. He is a generation that came of age on the internet. And he came of age and says this in the film, where the internet was kind of a free place and he believes it was one of the most beautiful things that humanity ever had that you could have a means from which people from all over the world, from all, you know ages, communicating freely with each other. And I think that that’s what really motivated him. That to see that be something that was sort of taken away from people and used for other means -- means of surveillance, means commercial means. So I think he saw something that he thought was really profound and to be protected and that was slipping away. Rose: So that was his motivation? Poitras: I think that's the core motivation, yeah.
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