Tinfoil Hat & Edward Snowden

Just after the horrific tragedy of 9/11, I began to see quite disturbing things unfolding in the U.S. in the name of “security” that was (in my, and many other’s, minds) clearly trampling on the Constitution. Most of my friends teased me for several years about wearing a “tinfoil hat” to shield my brain, but then Edward Snowden came on the scene, ensuring that the unconstitutional domestic surveillance underway by the National Security Agency (NSA) was exposed.

Edward Snowden
Photo by Laura Poitras, Praxis Films, under a CC BY 3.0 license.

While I was (and am) less disturbed by some of the global spying activities the NSA is performing—other than egregious hacking of world leaders’ mobile phones and such—there is no question that making U.S. citizens aware of the extent of the domestic spying was the first wake-up call for those ignoring the signs of the obvious, disturbing and unconstitutional activities going on.

After essentially reading every single news article and snippet about what Snowden (and others, I might add) have released to date, yes I believe Snowden did the world a great service and is a patriot. No, I don’t think he will get a pardon (yet) since it’s still too early on and Congress has not yet bothered to rein in the NSA in any meaningful way with regard to domestic spying.

The U.K. news organization The Guardian has an entire section called the NSA files which is likely the most comprehensive compendium of items sparked by Snowden’s whistleblowing document release. It’s a bit daunting to wade through, so I was intrigued this morning to see that Business Insider just compiled this bullet-point list of items Snowden had provided to select journalists that were released between 2013 and 2014. It’s pretty amazing to see them listed and realizing just how profound were these leaks and, in my view, extremely important. 

Here are just a handful of those links just to get you started:

• The NSA accessed and collected data through backdoors into U.S. internet companies, such as Google and Facebook, with a program called Prism. — June 6, 2013

• The NSA has a program codenamed EvilOlive that collects and stores large quantities of Americans’ internet metadata, which contains only certain information about online content. Email metadata, for example, reveals sender and recipient address and time but not content or subject. — June 27, 2013

• Internal NSA document reveals an agency “loophole” that allows a secret backdoor for the agency to search its databases for U.S. citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant. —Aug. 9, 2013

• The NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, according to an internal audit. —Aug. 15, 2013

• Expanding upon data gleaned from the “black budget,” the NSA is found to be paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year to U.S. companies for access to their networks. — Aug. 29, 2013

Read more here at Business Insider