United States lawmakers have been struggling to determine the best way to handle the recent NSA controversy the President and other Washington officials claim was approved and reauthorized by Congress multiple times.
U.S. Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has called for a reopening of the Patriot Act - the legislation that gave American intelligence agencies the power to monitor and collect data.
"I think we ought to reopen the Patriot Act and put some limits on the amount of data that the National Security [Agency] is collecting," Udall said. "We need to remember, we're in a war against terrorists, and terrorism remains a real threat but I also think we have to cut to the Bill of Rights, and the Fourth Amendment, which prevents unlawful searches and seizures, ought to be important to us.
"It ought to remain sacred, and there's got to be a balance here," he said.
Last week President Barack Obama made statements indicating lawmakers were consistently briefed on the so-called collection of metadata, a practice that began under the Bush administration in 2006, and the code-named operation, PRISM, which collected emails, chat logs, etc., and did not have a problem with the surveillance program(s) until last week's leaks.
In a 12-minute interview with the Guardian, high school dropout and former CIA computer technician Edward Snowden revealed that he was the source that leaked the information about the programs to the European newspaper and later additional information to The Washington Post, including a PowerPoint presentation.
"For him, it is a matter of principal," reports the Guardian. "'The government has granted power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.'"
"When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy and if you do that in secret, consistently, as the government does when it wants to benefit from the secret action that it took, it'll give its officials a mandate to tell the press, 'Hey, tell the press about this this... so the public is on our side,'" he deduced. "But they rarely if ever do that when abuse occurs that falls to individual citizens...it becomes a thing that these people are against the country, but I'm not... This is the truth, this is what's happening, [the public] should decide whether we should be doing this."
Watch the entire Guardian interview here:
Snowden is currently staying in a hotel in Hong Kong and is waiting to be granted asylum from another country.
