IN HIS OWN WORDS
Editor’s note: Snowden’s request is being posted
here with no comment in support or non-support by this blog. To date he has been charged with theft of
government property, unauthorized communication of national security
information and giving classified intelligence data to an unauthorized person.
Full document including Snowden’s request for EU
asylum and the submitted question and answer session as reported by NPR can be
seen at the following link.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/03/07/287459845/edward-snowden-tells-eu-parliament-he-wants-asylum-in-europe
SNOWDEN’S STATEMENT PRECEDING HIS EU
ASYLUM APPEAL
I would like to thank the
European Parliament for the invitation to provide testimony for your inquiry
into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens.
The suspicionless surveillance
programs of the NSA, GCHQ, and so many others that we learned about over the last
year endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the
foundation of liberal societies.
The first principle any
inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political pressure
to do so, no western government has been able to present evidence showing that
such programs are necessary. In the United States, the heads of our spying
services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass
surveillance, but two independent White House reviews with access to the
classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was
untrue, as did a Federal
Court.
Looking at the US
government's reports here is valuable. The most recent of these
investigations, performed
by the White House's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined
that the mass surveillance program investigated was not only ineffective – they
found it had never stopped even a single imminent terrorist attack -- but that
it had no basis in law. In less diplomatic language, they discovered the United
States was operating an unlawful mass surveillance program, and the greatest
success the program had ever produced was discovering a taxi driver in the
United States transferring $8,500 dollars to Somalia in 2007.
After noting that even this
unimpressive success – uncovering evidence of a single unlawful bank transfer
-- would have been achieved without bulk collection, the Board recommended that
the unlawful mass surveillance program be ended.
Unfortunately, we know from
press reports that this program is still operating today.
I believe that
suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually
makes us less safe. By squandering precious, limited resources on
"collecting it all," we end up with more analysts trying to make
sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real
leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at the expense of traditional,
proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified.
Despite the extraordinary
intrusions of the NSA and EU national governments into private communications
world-wide, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "Underwear Bomber," was allowed
to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United States in 2009.
The 290 persons on board
were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he failed
to detonate the device. While even Mutallab's own father warned the US
government he was dangerous in November 2009, our resources were tied up
monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary
tip-off didn't get Mutallab a dedicated US investigator. All we gave him was a
US visa.
Nor did the US government's
comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite
the Russians specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn't
do more than a cursory investigation -- although they did plenty of worthless computer-based
searching - and failed to discover the plot. 264 people were injured, and 3 died.
The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on
monitoring the call records of everyone in America.
This should not have
happened. I worked for the United States' Central Intelligence
Agency. The National
Security Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency. I love my country, and I
believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue. And I have risked
my life, my family, and my freedom to tell you the truth.
The NSA granted me the
authority to monitor communications world-wide using its mass surveillance
systems, including within the United States. I have personally targeted
individuals using these systems under both the President of the United States'
Executive Order 12333 and the US Congress' FAA 702.
I know the good and the bad
of these systems, and what they can and
cannot do, and I am telling
you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications
of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under
penalty of perjury that this is true.
These are not the
capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights,
risks our safety, and threatens our way of life.
If even the US government,
after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and
unnecessary, continues to
operate to engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem. I consider the
United States Government to be generally responsible, and I hope you will agree
with me. Accordingly, this begs the question many legislative bodies implicated
in mass surveillance have sought to avoid: if even the US is willing to
knowingly violate the rights of billions of innocents -- and I say billions
without exaggeration -- for nothing more substantial than a "potential"
intelligence advantage that has never materialized, what are other governments
going
to do?
Whether we like it or not,
the international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by
the work of bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience
of spies is more valuable than the rights of their citizens, the inevitable
result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe.
Thank you.
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