Citizenfour

1

"Laura, at this stage,

I can offer nothing more than my word.

I am a senior government employee

in the intelligence community.

I hope you understand that

contacting you is extremely high risk

and you are willing to agree

to the following precautions

before I share more.

This will not be a waste of your time.

The following sounds complex

but should only take minutes

to complete for someone technical.

I would like to confirm out of email

that the keys we exchanged

were not intercepted

and replaced by your surveillance.

Please confirm that no one has

ever had a copy of your private key

and that it uses a strong passphrase.

Assume your adversary is capable

of one trillion guesses per second.

If the device you store the private key

and enter your passphrase on

has been hacked,

it is trivial to decrypt

our communications.

Understand that the above steps

are not bulletproof

and are intended only

to give us breathing room.

In the end, if you publish

the source material,

I will likely be immediately implicated.

This must not deter you from releasing

the information I will provide.

Thank you, and be careful.

Citizenfour."

Bottom line is... surveillance means

that there are facts

that we no longer abide to.

If you take away the surveillance,

there are no facts that

the government can manufacture.

Ah, that's right, and this is all

about creating an independent record.

To me, this goes to the question

of independently verifying

what the government is doing.

That's why I keep going

back to that question.

More with David Sirota after CBS news,

traffic, and weather

on KKZN Denver/Boulder, AM 7...

Hey, can you hear me?

I am here, David, how are you?

Well I would just point...

start by pointing to

what Barack Obama himself

said about those questions

when he was running for the office

that he now occupies.

In December of 2007, he said, quote,

"The president does not have

the power under the Constitution

to unilaterally

authorize a military attack

in a situation

that does not involve stopping

an actual or imminent threat

to the nation."

So by Obama's own words,

the president does not have the power

that he is now exercising

under the Constitution.

And as far as why it matters,

in... on August 1, 2007,

when he laid out his reasons

why he was running for office

and why he thought it was so important

to change the way we were doing things,

he said, quote, "No more ignoring

the law when it's inconvenient.

That is not who we are.

We will again

set an example for the world

that the law is not subject

to the whims of stubborn rulers..."

You asked why I picked you.

I didn't. You did.

The surveillance you've experienced

means you've been "selected,"

a term which will mean

more to you as you learn about

how the modern SIGINT system works.

For now, know that

every border you cross,

every purchase you make,

every call you dial,

every cell phone tower you pass,

friend you keep,

article you write, site you visit,

subject line you type,

and packet you route

is in the hands of a system

whose reach is unlimited,

but whose safeguards are not.

Your victimization by the NSA system means

that you are well aware of the threat

that unrestricted secret police

pose for democracies.

This is a story few but you can tell.

Thank you for inviting me here

to give me the opportunity

to express my story.

Let me give you some of my background.

I spent about four years in the military,

and then I went into NSA.

Directly, so...

So I ended up with about

37 years of service combined.

Most of it was a lot of fun, I tell you,

it was really a lot of fun,

breaking these puzzles you know,

solving problems and things like that.

And that's really what I did,

I fundamentally started working with data,

looking at data and data systems

and how you do that.

I was developing

this concept of analysis

that you could lay it out in such a way

that it could be coded

and executed electronically.

Meaning you could automate analysis.

And it has to do with metadata

and using metadata relationships.

So that was the whole,

that was my whole theme there at NSA.

That was eventually,

that's what I ended up to.

I was the only one there

doing that, by the way.

So any rate, 9/11 happened,

and it must have been

right after, a few days,

no more than a week after 9/11

that they decided to begin actively

spying on everyone in this country.

And they wanted the back part

of our program to run all of the spying.

All right?

So, that's exactly what they did.

And then they started

taking the telecom data

and expanded after that.

I mean the one I knew was AT&T,

and that one provided

320 million records every day.

That program was reauthorized

every 45 days

by what I call the "yes committee,"

which was Hayden and Tenet and the DOJ.

The program was called Stellar Wind.

So first I went to

the House Intelligence Committee

and the staff member

that I personally knew there,

and she then went to

the chairman of the committee,

Nancy Pelosi was the minority rep.

They were all briefed into the program

at the time, by the way,

and all the other programs

that were going on,

including all these CIA programs.

I wasn't alone in this.

There were four others out of NSA,

and we were all

trying to work internally

in the government over these years

trying to get them to come around

to being constitutionally acceptable

and take it into the courts

and have the courts'

oversight of it too.

So we, we naively kept thinking

that could, uh, that could happen.

And it never did.

But any rate, after that,

and all the stuff we were doing

they decided to raid us,

to keep us quiet, threaten us, you know.

So we were raided

simultaneously, four of us.

In my case,

they came in with guns drawn.

I don't know why they did that,

but they did, so...

Laura, I will answer

what I remember of your questions

as best I can.

Forgive the lack of structure.

I am not a writer, and I have

to draft this in a great hurry.

What you know as Stellar Wind has grown.

SSO, the expanded

Special Source Operations

that took over Stellar Wind's

share of the pie,

has spread all over the world

to practically include

comprehensive coverage

of the United States.

Disturbingly,

the amount of US communication

ingested by NSA is still increasing.

Publicly, we complain that

things are going dark,

but in fact, our accesses are improving.

The truth is that the NSA

has never in its history

collected more than it does now.

I know the location of most

domestic interception points

and that the largest

telecommunication companies in the US

are betraying

the trust of their customers,

which I can prove.

We are building the greatest

weapon for oppression

in the history of man,

yet its directors exempt themselves

from accountability.

NSA director Keith Alexander

lied to Congress,

which I can prove.

Billions of US communications

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