Brussels, 05/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - Two years after his revelations on the mass spying activities by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on both American citizens and people from other parts of the world, former NSA agent Edward Snowden, currently living at an undisclosed location in Russia, has welcomed the first positive effects of the scandal.
In an article published by major daily newspapers in Europe and the US on Friday 5 June, the whistleblower says that “for the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear”, and he notes that “the balance of power is beginning to shift”. He says that he feared at first that the public might react with indifference or cynicism to the revelations. “Never have I been so grateful to be so wrong”, he says.
In the space of a single month, “the NSA's invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress”, Snowden goes on. The White House itself said that the programme had not stopped a single terrorist attack. “Ending the mass surveillance of private phone calls … is only the latest product of a change in global awareness”, according to Snowden. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights.
“Beyond the frontiers of law, progress has come even more quickly”, states Snowden: technologists, he says, have worked tirelessly to re-engineer the security of the devices that surround us, along with the language of the internet itself. The right to privacy remains under threat, however, he argues. He states that some of the world's most popular online services have been “enlisted as partners in the NSA's mass surveillance programs” and “technology companies are being pressured by governments around the world to work against their customers rather than for them”.
He criticises the reaction of some countries, like France and Denmark which, after suffering terrorist attacks, introduced laws which he feels curb freedom. Snowden's article comes after the US Senate has just adopted the Freedom Act which restricts the NSA's powers of surveillance. In Brussels, many MEPs are looking to this act as a model in drafting security measures, such as the European PNR system which gathers data on air passengers travelling to or from the EU. (Solenn Paulic)