Are We Being Spied on? The NSA and Mass Surveillance

When Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked thousands of top-secret documents to the press, was asked why he did it, he turned to a 250-year-old warning from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Today, the NSA is one of the most powerful intelligence gathering agencies in the world. But at what point does the agency’s mass surveillance programs amount to an infringement on the democratic values it was created to defend? In an era when almost all of our communications are digital and all of our security threats are global, what expectations of privacy are even reasonable? Is it possible to protect individual privacy without sacrificing the intelligence capabilities needed to keep the U.S. and our allies safe?

Timothy H. Edgar, a long-time civil liberties activist who worked inside both the Bush and Obama intelligence communities, argues that the only way to protect Americans’ privacy is to do a better job of protecting everyone’s privacy. What must be done to bring transparency, accountability, privacy and human rights protections into comprehensive programs of intelligence collection?

SPEAKER:

Timothy Edgar
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

MODERATOR:

Aaron Sankin
Reporter, Reveal, Center for Investigative Reporting