Edward Snowden Today: Maybe We Don’t Need Any Spy Agencies At All

In a Google Hangout-ed interview to a D.C. Cato Institute
conference on surveillance that is going on right this second as I
type, former NSA and CIA guy Edward Snowden suggests something few
people with government agencies have the nerve to suggest: maybe
those agencies don’t need to exist at all.

Snowden suggested that our major modern spy agencies arose
during the rush of World War and perhaps didn’t need to survive
them at all, and now “can be replaced by methods of law
enforcement,” even when aimed at foreigners like Vladimir Putin:
“Do we really need an NSA and secret courts to wiretap Putin?” when
he thinks any judge through any normal specific targeted law
enforcement procedure would give permission to do so.

He seems to think the extension of normal law enforcement
procedures to even the countries’ overseas desires to investigate
would work OK, and maybe we don’t need “secret organizations that
inevitably push beyond” any limits we might imagine we want to hold
them to, once they are able to disappear behind a screen of
“national security secrecy.” 

Snowden also says he still hopes one day to be able to return to
the United States.