Kate Tummarello

The National Security Agency’s (NSA) controversial sweeping surveillance distracts the agency from real threats, former government contractor Edward Snowden told European lawmakers.

“Suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe,” Snowden wrote in testimony to European Union Parliament members. “By squandering precious, limited resources on ‘collecting it all,’ we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads,” he said.

Snowden’s testimony is a response to a request from the European lawmakers, who are conducting a review of government surveillance -- including the NSA’s sweeping surveillance programs. Snowden pointed to government reports that questioned the efficacy of the mass surveillance programs as a tool to stop terrorist attacks, including a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

[March 7]

Civil liberties are a top concern at the National Security Agency (NSA), the agency’s new privacy chief said.

“In their blood is [the] protection of your privacy,” Rebecca Richards said. Richards has been the NSA’s privacy and civil liberties officer for a little over a month. The creation of the position was announced in 2013, as the Obama Administration responded to a series of controversial revelations about sweeping US government surveillance. Richards said that her agency is “very compliant” with its own internal privacy protections, along with the safeguards set by policymakers and the courts.

Under Richards’s direction, the NSA is working on a report to document the privacy protections it enforces under each of its surveillance authorities, including Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows for the collection of phone call data. Richards said her next focus will be incorporating privacy protections into the ways the agency collects information and uses new technology. The agency should “build the concept of the [privacy] assessments into the core of what the NSA does,” she said.

Executives from Verizon and T-Mobile will testify on competition in the wireless market in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights. Verizon Executive Vice President Randal Milch and T-Mobile Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Thomas Sugrue will appear.

The hearing is titled "An Examination of Competition in the Wireless Market" and will also include Eric Graham, senior vice president of strategic relations at Cellular South -- or C Spire, the eighth largest wireless company in the country -- and Jonathan Spalter, chairman of Mobile Future, a coalition of wireless companies and advocacy groups.

AT&T received more than 300,000 government requests for user data in 2013, according to the company’s first Transparency Report. The total number of government requests for civil and criminal investigations, 301,816, includes 248,343 subpoenas, 36,788 court orders and 16,685 search warrants, the report said. Of those 301,816 requests, AT&T challenged 3,765 requests and provided partial or no information in response to 13,707 of the requests, the company said. The report also outlined government requests for user data for national security purposes. AT&T received at least 2,000 requests for user data in the form of National Security Letters, affecting at least 4,000 accounts, according to the report.