Submission + - Prominent civil liberties expert says he and Snowden were wrong on NSA 1
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, Geoffrey Stone, a longtime civil liberties stalwart, Constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago, and member of the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union, moderated a live discussion with Edward Snowden from Russia. As a member of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, Stone was given unfettered access to unfettered access to our national security apparatus, and told the NSA what he thought. This week, Stone offered more detail on his own findings that only someone with direct knowledge can provide: "So before I began the work on the review group, my general view was that, from what I learned in the media, the NSA had run amok and created these programs without appropriate approval or authorization or review. And whatever I thought of the merits of the programs, my assumption was that it was illegitimate because it didn't have appropriate review and approval. What surprised me the most was that this was completely wrong. [...] The more I worked with the NSA, the more respect I had for them as far as staying within the bounds of what they were authorized to do. And they were careful and had a high degree of integrity. My superficial assumption of the NSA being a bad guy was completely wrong. [...] I came to the view that they were well intentioned, that they were designed in fact to collect information for the purpose of ferreting out potential terrorist plots both in the U.S. and around the world and that was their design and purpose." Stone provided detail and examples, including rationale and justifications for the review group's findings, and concluded that Snowden "was unduly arrogant, didn't understand the limitations of his own knowledge and basically decided to usurp the authority of a democracy."
