The complete testimony of Snowden before the EU parliment
Introductory Statement
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 2
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.
Now the questions and answers the testimony is 12 pages long.
Link to the EU records, this way you can read what he said and not what a paper said he said...........and then its in CONTEXT.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf
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