“I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part,” Rick Leggett, NSA official, told CBS News’ John Miller.
“It’s not unanimous,” Leggett added, however, and NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander admits that he isn’t exactly in favor of suspending charges against Snowden, who is accused of theft and espionage.
Alexander admitted to Miller that the entire situation is quite a dilemma, but said that in his opinion, “I think people have to be held accountable for their actions.”
Alexander believes that if Snowden’s granted amnesty other government employees or contractors with access to sensitive information could consider it a go-ahead from the federal government to leak documents on their own accord and know a life-time imprisonment isn’t the only possible outcome.
Moscow expects that the international community will not ignore problems made public by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Russian Foreign Ministry Commissioner on Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Konstantin Dolgov said.
"It is positive that the impetus caused by Snowden's revelations has not fallen through the cracks. We expect international institutions to keep paying active attention to the problems revealed by the information publicized by Snowden," Dolgov said in his presentation at the World Human Rights Forum in Brasilia, the transcript of which is available on the Russian Foreign Ministry website on Friday.
"Information security experts, particularly American ones, have noted that Snowden's revelations have likely affected only the tip of the iceberg," he said.
"They are sure that the arsenal used by the United States and its partners in global surveillance is much broader and much more sophisticated. This inevitably causes concerns and perplexity, especially against the background of the lecturing regularly heard from Washington and some European capitals, urging other countries to uphold freedom of speech and the media," he said.
Dolgov also referred to former US Army soldier Bradley Manning, a WikiLeaks informer, who was recently sentenced to 35 years confinement for violations of the Espionage Act and other offences.
"The American authorities eagerly campaigning for freedom of speech abroad have made an unjustifiably tough decision, paying no heed to any human rights aspects," he said.
"The journalistic community and human rights activists noted in this connection that information publicized by Manning revealed numerous abuses on the part of the US Armed Forces during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including deaths of peaceful civilians, torture of convicts, and other gross violations of international law in the human rights area - in other words, everything that the US authorities care so much about and are trying to promote around the world so enthusiastically. What is it if not an obvious double standard?" Dolgov said.
Snowden's revelations caused diplomatic tensions when it turned out that the NSA tapped telephone conversations of 35 world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
NSA Director Keith Alexander said in November that Snowden had shared up to 200,000 classified documents with the media. Russia had granted Snowden temporary asylum for one year in August.
A group of experts appointed by the White House in connection with the surveillance scandal is to recommend a reorganization of the National Security Agency, including giving it civilian leadership, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The panel of experts called the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology was summoned in August following the public revelations of the NSA’s electronic surveillance by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. The task force is to submit its recommendations to the Obama Administration on Saturday, but the document is not quite ready yet, and it’s not clear whether the White House will make it public.
The Wall Street Journal received information about the document from four people familiar with the draft. According to them, experts’ suggestions mean a lot of changes in the agency’s work.
In particular, the experts suggested changing NSA leadership from military to civilian. They also recommended that the NSA should not collect and store millions of phone call records of Americans. The records should be stored by phone companies or a third party, and NSA should produce a new higher standard of proof in order to receive access to these data.
As for the concerns of the US’ foreign allies, expressed after NSA’s surveillance over their leaders and citizens became public, the experts suggest developing international norms for government activity in cyberspace and rules for cyber-warfare.
The Obama Administration is going to consider these suggestions in its own review of intelligence policies, which is expected by the end of the year.
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