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As released this weekend in The Guardian, Edward Snowden has given his first public comments in months — when receiving the Sam Adams award for “Integrity in Intelligence” — and he doesn’t mince his words.
The mass surveillance systems actually make us less safe, he says. Further:
They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely.
Not an opponent of all intelligence gathering, he identifies “dragnet mass surveillance” as the problem. He contrasts that with individualized intelligence gathering, based on reasonable suspicion.
The current state of affairs in the United States, he says, suffers from “undersight,” as opposed to too much oversight.
We have an executive, a Department of Justice, that’s unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country, on camera, but they’ll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth.
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