Amnesty International UK Q&A: Edward Snowden [Archive]

Suzanimal

06-03-2015, 02:44 PM

Snowden: NSA spies on Cameron; could have ‘backdoor’ into GCHQ

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticized the UK for playing an active role in the worldwide surveillance network set up by the US National Security Agency (NSA), saying the rights and needs of British citizens are being sacrificed.

“Why is the UK government so secretive? What is it so afraid of – its people? They are afraid of a damaging public debate,” said Snowden during a Q&A video link with London hosted by the human rights group Amnesty International.

“Because if we the public knew about what they were doing, we could bring legal public challenges against their activities and succeed… The UK government isn’t trying to preserve civil liberties, but to limit them,” he argued.

During the 40-minute session ahead of a special showing of Citizenfour, the Oscar-winning documentary about the whistleblower himself, Snowden repeatedly dismissed big-data surveillance as “ineffective” for catching terrorists, but said it allowed the government to pry into the lives of law abiding citizens.

“The government in the UK is actually trying to reform laws in a very negative way,” Snowden said, adding that politicians want to amend legislation to “hack into people’s computers who aren’t an intelligence target at all.”

As well as the UK government, Snowden criticized other British institutions, such as the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a legal panel designed to make sure that British intelligence agencies stay within the boundaries of the law. The former NSA contractor called the tribunal “a rubberstamp court, which is not even a real court, but pretends to be one.”

Snowden, whose trove of data, leaked in 2013, turned the attention of the mainstream media to the topic of government surveillance, also said that UK news outlets were not doing enough.

“Tensions between the government and the public, the need for information can never be resolved by a spy agency, or even an individual citizen, but this is the role for the free press in our society.”

Yet, according to Snowden, “other than the Guardian [which published Snowden’s files], the other UK media do not investigate or develop their security agency sources, but simply call up the government and ask what is going on.”

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http://rt.com/news/264409-snowden-answers-questions-spying/