Snowden details in Pt 2 of the early June interview that NSA surveillance is omnipresent, that they consistently lie to Congress, and how the government is doubling down on it, instead of backing off. “There’s a monster on the loose / It’s got our heads into a noose / And it just sits there watching” – Steppenwolf, 1969.
“The NSA doesn’t limit itself to foreign intelligence. It collects all communications that transit the United States. There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental United States where a communication can enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analyzed.”
“You’ve got Boundless Informant, a sort of global auditing system for the NSA’s Intercept collection system that let’s us track how much we’re collecting, where we’re collecting, by which authorities and so forth. The NSA lied about the existence of this tool to Congress.”
PRISM “is a demonstration of how the U.S. government co-opts U.S. corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all the systems we use to communicate.”
“I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.”
I’ve waited to allow our leadership “to correct the excesses of government but as I’ve watched that’s not occurring. In fact we’re compounding the excesses of government.”