"It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA's work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio."
Jameel Jaffer, the significance of this, and the legality of what is happening here?
JAMEEL JAFFER: You know, I think that what bothers me most about these programs is the bulk aspect of it or the dragnet aspect of it. When the NSA has good reason to believe probable cause that a specific person is engaged in terrorism or something like that, it doesn't bother me that much that the NSA is surveilling that person. I think that's the NSA's job. The problem with a lot of these programs is that they are not directed at people thought to be doing something wrong. They're not directed at suspected terrorists or even suspected criminals. These programs are directed at everybody. Or, to say that a different way, they're not directed at all. They're indiscriminate.
And if you think about what the Fourth Amendment was meant to do, what the Constitution was meant to do, it was meant to ensure that the government couldn't engage in surveillance without some reason. And all of this, all of this surveillance that the NSA is engaged in, essentially flips that on its head. It collects information about everybody in the hope that the surveillance will lead to suspicion about somebody. It's supposed to be doing it the other way around, starting with the suspicion and then going to the search. It's starting with the search and going to suspicion. And I think that that's really, really dangerous, and it's exactly what the Fourth Amendment was meant to prohibit.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, when it came to the judge's decision recently, you have the judge that says that this is constitutional, but it followed the judge saying this is Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Why the difference of opinion between these two judges?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think one judge got it right, and the other one got it wrong. I mean, I think that, you know, Judge Pauley -- Judge Pauley was not very skeptical towards the government's claims. The government made claims about the effectiveness of the program, about the necessity of the program, claims that were contradicted by information already in the public record, information put into the public record by government officials. And Judge Pauley nonetheless deferred to the government's claims in court, which is a disappointment to us.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's get back to Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, I just read the first couple of paragraphs of the piece in Der Spiegel about the garage doors that wouldn't open because the garage door openers were actually operating on the same frequency of the NSA, which was really vastly expanding in San Antonio at the time. But could you take it from there? The significance of this and this Tailored Access Operations, this particular unit, and how significant it is?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, one thing I think that it underscores, this was in a community that had no idea that there was this gargantuan NSA hacking unit that had sprawled up in its community, and it shows just the power of how much they're doing, that they just simply shut down the electric devices of an entire community that didn't know that they were even there.
But the TAO, the Tailored Access Operations unit, is really remarkable because the government, the U.S. government, has been warning for many years now about the dangers of hackers, both stateless hackers as well as state-sponsored hackers from China and from Iran and from elsewhere. And the reality is that nobody is as advanced or as prolific when it comes into hacking into computer networks, into computer systems, than the NSA. And TAO is basically a unit that is designed to cultivate the most advanced hacking operations and skills of any unit, any entity on the Earth. And so, yet again, what we find is that exactly the dangers about which the U.S. government is shrilly warning when it comes to other people, they're actually doing themselves to a much greater and more menacing degree than anybody else is. And that's the significance of this particular unit inside of the NSA, is they do all of the most malicious hacking techniques that hackers who have been prosecuted by this very same government do and much, much more.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about White Tamale, Glenn Greenwald.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think that -- you know, a lot of the -- one of the good things about this particular story is that it was -- the lead writer on it was Jake Appelbaum, who is, you know, one of the world's leading experts when it comes to computer program. He's the developer of the Tor Project, one of the developers of the Tor Project, which is designed to safeguard anonymity on online browsing, to make it impossible for hostile states to be able to trace where people are. And one of the things he did was take some very technical documents and translated it into a way that the public should be able to understand it.
And so, several of these programs, including White Tamale, are about insertions of malware into various forms of electronics. And he actually gave a speech this morning explaining some of this. And what he essentially said is that, with these programs, the government is able to literally control human beings through control of their machines. We hear all of this -- these stories about the NSA being very targeted in the kinds of communications that they want to collect and store, and the types of people whom they're targeting that are very specific and discriminating, and yet what several of these programs are, that are revealed by Der Spiegel, are highly sophisticated means for collecting everything that a user does, and it implicates the people with whom they're communicating and a whole variety of other types of online activity in which they're engaging.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, who you were just talking about, who co-wrote the piece for Der Spiegel, who was speaking, as you just said, in Hamburg, Germany, at this conference, the Chaos Communication Congress.
JACOB APPELBAUM: Basically, their goal is to have total surveillance of everything that they are interested in. So there really is no boundary to what they want to do. There is only sometimes a boundary of what they are funded to be able to do and to the amount of things they're able to do at scale. They seem to just do those things without thinking too much about it. And there are specific tactical things where they have to target a group or an individual, and those things seem limited either by budget or simply by their time.
And as we have released today on Der Spiegel's website, which it should be live -- I just checked; it should be live for everyone here -- we actually show a whole bunch of details about their budgets, as well as the individuals involved with the NSA and the Tailored Access Operations group, in terms of numbers. So it should give you a rough idea, showing that there was a small period of time in which the Internet was really free and we did not have people from the U.S. military that were watching over it and exploiting everyone on it, and now we see, every year, that the number of people who are hired to break into people's computers as part of grand operations, those people are growing day by day.
AMY GOODMAN: Also speaking in Hamburg, Germany, at the Chaos Communication Congress this weekend was WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison, who accompanied Edward Snowden to Russia and spent four months with him. She spoke after receiving a long standing ovation.
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