Tag Audio

Photo (above) Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ68ZQhzwPs

I like to share with you this interview on the new book by James Risen, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter at the center of one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades who exposed the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency as early as 2005, 8 years before the Snowden revelations. Risen also hit headlines after being on Obama’s blacklist after he was threatened with prison terms by the Justice Department for refusing to reveal the source of one of his stories.

https://soundcloud.com/the_intercept/james-risen-glenn-greenwald-pay-any-price-the-war-on-terror-press-freedoms

And here is the transcript from The Intercept.

http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=357508522&m=357508896&t=audio

http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=350274814&m=350413177&t=audio

Some 43 veterans of Israel’s secret spy agency Unit 8200 has written an open letter of protest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and head of the Israeli army accusing the agency of targeting and collecting data of innocent Palestinians for political and not national security purposes, adding that they have a “moral duty” not to “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians”.

This relates well to a New York Times article last week about how the special relationship between the US and Israel – including how the NSA shared “unminimized”, ie. raw data (on Arab-and Palestinian-Americans with relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories) with Israel unlike the sharing of only “minimized” data with other countries – has motivated Edward Snowden to blow the whistle last year.