Snowden says Australia watching its citizens ‘all the time,’ slams new metadata laws

Published time: May 09, 2015 15:02 Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden (Reuters/Charles Platiau)

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden accused Australia of undertaking mass surveillance of its citizens and passing laws on the collection of metadata that he says do not protect society from acts of terrorism.

Snowden, addressing the Progress 2015 conference in Melbourne via satellite link, criticized Australia's new metadata laws, which allow the government and intelligence agencies to keep a constant watch on citizens.

"What this means is they are watching everybody all the time,” the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower said. “They're collecting information and they're just putting it in buckets that they can then search through not only locally, not only in Australia, but they can then share this with foreign intelligences services.”

Last month, Australia passed controversial laws that require telecommunications firms to retain their customers’ phone and computer metadata for two years.

READ MORE: Congress mulls future of metadata collection after court's condemnation

Snowden decried this disturbing trend, warning that regardless of what you are doing “you're being watched."

He compared Australia's mass surveillance system to that being used in the UK.

"Australia's role in mass surveillance around the world is similar to the UK and the Tempora program," he said.

Snowden, who has been living in Moscow since June 2013 after receiving political asylum, criticized the Australian government’s passage of a metadata program that is being used, he said, to “collect everyone's communications in advance of criminal suspicion."

"This is dangerous," he told the conference.

The former system administrator for the CIA said such invasive surveillance technologies had nothing in common with traditional liberal societies.

READ MORE: NSA's telephone metadata collection not authorized by Patriot Act - appeals court

"This is not things that governments have ever traditionally been empowered to claim for themselves as authorities.

"And to have that change recently ... is a radical departure from the operation of traditional liberal societies around the world."

Snowden repeated his position that acts of terrorism in the US and elsewhere have not been thwarted by conducting mass surveillance on citizens.

"Nine times out of 10 when you see someone on the news who's engaged in some sort of radical jihadist activity, these are people who had a long record," he said.

"The reason these attacks happened is not because we didn't have enough surveillance, it's because we had too much."

READ MORE: Millennials worldwide show broad support of Edward Snowden – poll

Aside from average citizens, he warned that journalists are also at risk of having their contacts exposed by the mass surveillance.

"Under these mandatory metadata laws you can immediately see who journalists are contacting, from which you can derive who their sources are."

He excoriated such a turn of events, saying the purpose of a free press in society is to “act as an adversary against the government on behalf of the public."

Snowden’s comments came on the same day that a US federal appeals court ruled the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records was illegal. In a unanimous decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York called the bulk phone records collection "unprecedented and unwarranted."

The ruling, which Snowden called “extraordinarily encouraging,” comes as Congress confronts a June 1 deadline to renew a section of the Patriot Act that allows the NSA’s bulk data surveillance.

Meanwhile, Snowden seems determined to reveal more information from the National Security Agency (NSA) files, hinting there was yet more information about Australia’s intelligence work that would be revealed at a later date.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Your own 3D-printable Snowden bust! Artists upload instructions online

Collectors of action figures, rejoice – for the more politically-inclined out there, an 8-inch, 3D-printable version of the famed 4-foot tall, illegal Edward Snowden bust has now been made available online, to spread the word about surveillance.

The creators of Snowden’s likeness have uploaded the 3D-printable file online on to Thingiverse – the world’s leading source for such work. This happened shortly after the NYPD finally agreed to release the original bust back to the artists – they erected the 4-foot likeness of the NSA whistleblower illegally last month, leading to its removal from its resting place at Brooklyn park.

“We thought, ‘Let’s put the data out there, and find a way for it to proliferate to anyone who wants it,'”

Andrew Tider, one of the creators, told Wired. Now, anyone can download, print and make their own Snowden head – even go crazy with the colors, as the sky’s the limit with 3D printing.

Tider had opted to remain anonymous initially, but was then outed by the police, along with fellow artist Jeff Greenspan, when called to pick up the statue from police custody last week. They each had to pay a $50 fine for entering the park after hours and erecting the bust, which has now achieved worldwide renown and will be featured at a Brooklyn art show.

“We’ve heard from people that they want one for their lawn or to put in their home … so we’re letting the world do whatever it wants to do with this,”

Tider added.

The artists said they’re not out to encourage illicit behavior, but Greenspan admitted he’d be excited to see replicas or variations on the theme appear in places around the United States, or worldwide.

“It would be great if people put these in public spaces and Instagrammed them, or put photos on Twitter and Facebook to project them around the world,”

Greenspan said. “Anywhere it can get people thinking about surveillance, your rights and liberties, it would be wonderful.”

But the mission is more serious than that: the pair figure if they can get people talking about surveillance, that’s their work done. Even more importantly, the very idea that it is Snowden up there – and not, say, Beethoven – is tied to the notion that anyone can be made into a statue and canonized; it just depends on how willing you are to go with an official line on things.

“We accept sometimes without thinking that if there’s a bronze statue of some person, they must be good,”

Greenspan says. “We wanted to raise this question, whether the people you’ve been told are heroes are heroes or whether your enemies are really enemies … How your ideas are being massaged and manipulated.”

And the idea has supporters: just hours after police had toppled the original Snowden likeness, a visual art collective projected a hologram of the bust along with Snowden’s name on the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in protest.

Tider and Greenspan initially created a high-resolution model of the original bust for future reference. Then sculptor Doyle Tankina set about making a clay version, scanned with a handheld scanner before being made into a cast. The whole thing was then cast in fiberglass and concrete, before being covered in bronze and set on a pedestal at Fort Greene Park.

It looks like the pair’s enthusiasm is paying off – the model for 3D-printing is receiving wide acclaim, and many artists are coming up with their own versions; one was recently erected in Berlin, together with statues of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, while a 9-foot version has been making the rounds in New York.

On Thursday, volunteers moved the original statue to The Boiler, an art gallery, where it will be exhibited as a “special guest project”

in an annual collaborative exhibition called SEVEN. This year’s theme is: “Anonymity, no longer an option.” The show will begin on Friday. It features seven galleries from New York and London, with each presenting work by one artist.

View the original article here