US President Barack Obama gave a highly anticipated speech last week in which he announced plans to reform some of those operations, which Mr. Snowden also addressed during Thursday's question-and-answer session.
"The timing of his speech seems particularly interesting, given that it was accompanied by so many claims that "these programs have not been abused,'" Snowden said. "Even if we accept the NSA's incredibly narrow definition of abuse, which is 'someone actually broke the rules so badly we had to investigate them for it,' we've seen more instances of identified, intentional abuse than we have seen instances where this unconstitutional mass phone surveillance stopped any kind of terrorist plot at all -- even something less than an attack."
Evidence of a bulk telephone metadata collection program waged by the NSA was leaked in the first classified document that Snowden disclosed to the media last year. Afterwards, the US government acknowledged that it interprets Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act -- the so-called "Business Records" provision -- to compel telecommunication companies for the phone records of millions of Americans on a daily basis.
"In light of another independent confirmation of this fact, I think Americans should look to the White House and Congress to close the book entirely on the 215 BR provision," Snowden said Thursday.
At the same time, however, Snowden told his online crowd this week that "Not all spying is bad." The problem with surveillance, he said, is that some governments have simply gone overboard.
"The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents' communication every single day. This is done not because it's necessary -- after all, these programs are unprecedented in US history, and were begun in response to a threat that kills fewer Americans every year than bathtub falls and police officers -- but because new technologies make it easy and cheap," he wrote, adding, "I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it's going to look like on their permanent record."
"This is a global problem, and America needs to take the lead in fixing it," he added. "If our government decides our Constitution's Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable seizures no longer applies simply because that's a more efficient means of snooping, we're setting a precedent that immunizes the government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same kind of indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the NSA is doing."
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