Surveillance had ‘outpaced democratic controls’ before Snowden

Even before the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden of the NSA's mass surveillance programmes, it was clear to those had been following closely that surveillance technology and its spread "had outpaced democratic controls", Mr Snowden's lawyer said today.

Speaking in Dublin at the final conference of the EU-funded SECILE project on counter-terrorism measures, Ben Wizner said mobile phones were now essentially tracking devices and it was possible for one police officer to sit at a computer and track thousands of people in real time.

He cited what he said was the intelligence agencies’ mantra: “Collect it all.”

Mr Wizner said the technology existed to encrypt all our phone calls and all our emails but that this hadn’t been done because law enforcement authorities objected to it.

“Before Snowden revealed the extent of this mass surveillance, it was already clear to people that surveillance technology and its spread had outpaced demographic controls,” he said.

“It used to be commonplace to choose lives of practical obscurity, you controlled what could be seen about you by those around you. That option has now disappeared for all but the most isolated individuals.”

The SECILE project, a major collaborative initiative funded by the European Commission’s FP7 programme, found the EU had been very active in counter-terrorism since 2001. Some 239 counter-terrorism measures had been introduced between that time and 2013.

But they had rarely been assessed for their actual societal impacts, the project found.

Speaking to The Irish Times, Mr Wizner said his client, who is in exile in Moscow, was now "more socially connected than he has ever been in his adult life".

Asked how Mr Snowden was, he said: “He’s great. He said early on that his biggest fear was that no one would listen and that he would have made the sacrifice in vain. So the fact that there has been this extraordinary global debate is exactly why he did what he did.

But beyond that, at a more personal level, I think people imagine themselves separated from their families in Moscow and think this seems like a harsh outcome.”

Mr Wizner said that in the last decade Snowden had been embedded in undercover jobs in the intelligence community, rather than with friends and family.

“He now is in regular contact with journalists, his family members have been to visit. His long-time girlfriend has been living with him there since July. So he’s not even in isolation and he is participating in this debate, something that he would not be able to do if he was in an isolation cell in a maximum security US prison. So he’s in good spirits.”

Asked about the likely outcome for his client, Mr Wizner said he did not believe there was any question that Mr Snowden would be able to stay in Russia for as long as he wanted to.

"The question is will get a better choice before then. Ideally, he would like to return to the United States but not as a felon serving a long prison sentence. So that's something we will continue to explore with US officials.

"In the interim, if there were a country in Europe that would be willing to offer him asylum, he has said many times that he would come here."

Mr Wizner said Snowden would certainly consider coming to Ireland.

“Sure. He would. I don’t think he’s practising his gaelic.”

Mr Wizner said he believed more would be heard about other leakers who had provided information to journalists in the last year, including one who had been discussed in connection with documentary maker Laura Poitras’s new film about Snowden.

“There have been others. I don’t think others will do it on the scale that he did it, or who will undertake quite that amount of risk. But remember also that even before Snowden, everything we knew about the intelligence community came from leakers.

“Perhaps not as dramatic, perhaps not involving the documentary evidence; but everything we knew about what the NSA was doing came because people within the system were willing to share that information with journalists, and journalists were very effective at being able to pry it out.”