CNN news 2013-08-05 加文本

cnn news 2013-08-05

New claims tonight about how much even lowlevel government employees in contractors can find out about you just a fewcomputer key strokes. They are their latest revelations from NSA leaker EdwardSnowden whether its top intelligence officials in Washington or the directnational security agency, the programmers conventions Los Vegas. People arefeeling the heat.

I'm saying I don't trust you.

You lied to Congress. Why would we believeyou're not lying to us right now?

He said hasn't lied to Congress, meantime,as the senate Judiciary committee held hearings, the office of the director ofnational intelligence released a batch of classified documents on its Domesticintelligence gathering operations, material that was not scheduled fordeclassification until the year 2038. It included a 2011 justice departmentbriefing paper describing two now familiar NSA programs for logging phone ande-mail data and says quoted only a tiny fraction of such records are everviewed by NSA intelligence analyst. But new information for Edward Snowdenshows accessing such information is available to a very wide range of NSAanalysts and is simple easy to get. Detailed extensively in Britain guardiannewspaper the program is called Xkeyscore, an NSA analyst requiring no priorauthorization from any court for using it to conduct searches on Americans.They only have to fill in the box stating there is some kind of foreignconnection. In addition, the article details how Xkeyscore searches not justemails, subject lines and addresses but also the body of the message of itself,also society activity or Web browsing history. Now the NSA maintains thataccess to XKeyscore and other search tools is limited.

Count Michigan Republican CongressmanJustin Amash is a skeptic. He tried and nearly succeeded last week in passinglegislation to rein in the NSA and is now backing a bipartisan effort to tryagain.

Congressman, this program revealed in"The Guardian" today, XKeyscore, how concerned should people be aboutit?

Very concerned. We're going to have aclassified briefings tomorrow with Keith Alexander and I intend to ask somequestions. One of the things that we don't know is where is the content comingfrom. There is a whole array of content coming in, whether it be e-mails orother Internet information and I'd like to know and my colleagues would like toknow where this data is coming from.

Did you know about this beforehand?Because, you know, what the people in the intelligence community always say iswell, look, there is congressional oversight but my understanding is, there'sonly congressional oversight about what the NSA happens to tell you about.

Yeah, we have these briefings and is itpossible that in some document somewhere when they hand you 200 pages and tellyou, you can only look at it in a room, that there's some line about thisprogram? It's possible. I don't know. The problem we have when we go to thesebriefings is that we have to ask exactly the right question to get the rightanswer. If we don't ask the precise question, we don't get an answer.

We've had a number of intelligenceofficials over the last couple of months or weeks certainly saying, well, youknow, these, some of these programs, these collecting of metadata, collectingof phone calls or phone numbers, it's stopped dozens of terrorist attacks.

Now Senator Patrick Leahy, he came forwardand said well, look, maybe it stopped or was involved in one, but when youactually start to look at the details of how these programs were used it hasnot stopped nearly the number that some intelligence officials have beenclaiming.

Yeah, and they've been, there are many ofthem who have been very careful to say under this program and other programs wehave stopped 54 terrorist attacks. There are some members of Congress who havenot been very careful and I think have bordered on giving false testimony tothe American people. And we should take a close look at that, but yeah, they, Ithink those who are careful and cautious about what they say realize that it'snot this particular collection of phone records, mass collection of phonerecords, that is doing the work here.

I spoke to Glenn Greenwald on this programlast night. He pointed out that people within the government, you know,high-level officials, leak classified information all the time if it suitstheir political interest or, you know, whatever interest they may have andnothing seems to happen to them and yet, people with no status, no politicalconnections like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or even lower-levelofficials, they leak classified information and get hit with the full blunt ofthe U.S. justice system particularly under the Obama administration. I'mcertainly not condoning the breaking of any law, but is the system unfair here?

I think the system is unfair. And we need abetter way for those who want to blow the whistle on the government to do so. Thereis a lot of talk that Edward Snowden could go to, for example, a member ofCongress and tell them about the program, that it wasn't being applied in whathe thought was a constitutional manner.

And that's just not true. Edward Snowdencould have come to me or most members of Congress and talk about it. He had togo to his superiors and he might be able to talk to some people on theintelligence committee. So they don't have a lot of avenues, and if you look atsome of the intelligence committee members, it's pretty stacked in favor ofpeople who support these programs with the exception of a few people likeSenator Wyden and Senator Udall and some others.