y, Gore said in a telephone interview. Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that those who would give up essential liberty to try to gain some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. the +2000 elections, when Gore won the popular vote but lost the presidency to George W Bush, the former vice-president has tacked to the left of the Democratic party, especially on his signature issue of climate change. spoke on Friday from Istanbul where he was about to lead one of his climate change training workshops for 600 global activists. Such three-day training sessions on behalf of the Climate Reality Project are now one of his main concerns.other leading Democrats and his former allies, Gore said he was not persuaded by the argument that the NSA surveillance had operated within the boundaries of the law.
This in my view violates the constitution. The fourth amendment and the first amendment - and the fourth amendment language is crystal clear, he said. It is not acceptable to have a secret interpretation of a law that goes far beyond any reasonable reading of either the law or the constitution and then classify as top secret what the actual law is. added: This is not right. former vice-president was also unmoved by some recent opinion polls suggesting public opinion was in favour of surveillance
I am not sure how to interpret polls on this, because we don t do dial groups on the bill of rights, he said.went on to call on Barack Obama and Congress to review the laws under which the NSA expanded its surveillance. I think that the Congress and the administration need to make some changes in the law and in their behaviour so as to honour and obey the constitution of the United States, he said. It is that simple. rejected outright calls by the Republican chair of the house homeland security committee, Peter King, for prosecution of journalists who cover security leaks, such as the Guardian s Glenn Greenwald.did say, however, that he had serious concerns about some aspects of the testimony offered by national intelligence director James Clapper during testimony to the Senate intelligence committee last March., in response to pointed questions from Democratic senator Ron Wyden, had said during that appearance that the NSA did not collect data on Americans.
I was troubled by his direct response to Senator Wyden s very pointed question, Gore said. I was troubled by that. has long had qualms about the expansion of the surveillance state in the digital age. He made those concerns public this year in his latest book, The Future: Six Drivers of Social Change, in which he warned: Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place. hours of the Guardian s first story about the NSA, the former vice-president tweeted: In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous? Said on Friday: Some of us thought that it was probably going on, but what we have learned since then makes it a cause for deep concern." Challenge NSA s claim to have foiled dozens of terror attacksUdall and Ron Wyden - critics of NSA s surveillance - say they want proof that programs have disrupted plots against USUdall and Ron Wyden, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, said they were not convinced by the testimony of the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, who claimed that evidence gleaned from surveillance helped thwart attacks in the US.
We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA s dragnet collection of Americans phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence, they said in a statement released on Thursday ahead of a widely anticipated briefing for US senators about the National Security Agency's activities.
When you re talking about important liberties that the American people feel strongly about, and you want to have an intelligence program, you ve got to make a case for why it provides unique value to the [intelligence] community atop what they can already have, Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told the Guardian in an interview on Thursday. testified before the Senate appropriations committee that maintaining a database of millions of Americans 'phone records was critical to thwarting dozens of plots. One of the examples Alexander mentioned, the case of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, appears to have been prevented by conventional police surveillance, including efforts by UK investigators.
Gen Alexander s testimony yesterday suggested that the NSA s bulk phone records collection program helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to have been identified using other collectio...
