NSA Releases Snowden Email, Did He Tell NBC the Truth? - ABCNews [View all]

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NSA Releases Snowden Email, Did He Tell NBC the Truth?
May 29, 2014
By LEE FERRAN - ABCNews

Edward Snowden said in a recent interview he tried to go through internal channels to raise his concerns about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs before he slipped out of the country with a trove of secret documents. The NSA disagrees and says it has the email exchange to prove it.

“I actually did go through channels, and that is documented. The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of it – legal authorities,” Snowden told NBC News in a wide-ranging interview. “I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this, to say that they could be unconstitutional, that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response was, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’”

In the interview, Snowden called on Congress to verify that the communications exist.

Today the NSA posted online the email exchange to which the government agency says it believes Snowden is referring. The exchange released by the NSA took place in early April, months after Snowden reportedly contacted journalists in preparation to expose the secret programs.

And...

Snowden told NBC News that he also raised his concerns with his co-workers and superiors, many of whom he said were “shocked” at the programs he described. In December 2013, Snowden similarly told The Washington Post he brought his misgivings to four supervisors in two departments.

“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’” Snowden told the Post. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?”

In the Washington Post report, an NSA spokesperson said the agency had not found “any evidence” to support Snowden’s claims about raising concerns internally. Then, the NSA did not note the email it published online today.

Ben Wizner, Director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project and legal adviser to Snowden, dismissed the controversy over Snowden’s internal efforts as a “red herring” to the larger issue of mass surveillance.

“The core, the main substance of Snowden’s complaint was not some instance of fraud or misconduct that he stumbled upon that was unknown to inspectors general or Congress. It was an entire system that had been deemed legal by the… oversight mechanisms,” Wizner told ABC News. “The problem was the failure of democratic consent – that an entire system of mass surveillance had been constructed and deployed without [the] consultation of the American people. So, what was he supposed to do?... There wasn’t anyone to tell who didn’t already know it and hadn’t already approved it… There was no channel through which Snowden could have effectively raised his core concerns.”

More: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/nsa-releases-snowden-email-nbc-truth/story?id=23918598&singlePage=true