Edward Snowden reveals how Congress passed "emergency laws" like the Protect America Act and FISA Am

[00:00:00]Uh, and so what happened was Congress uh passed an emergency law in uh 2007 called the Protect America Act. Uh, which should have been our first indication this is a very bad thing cuz they never name a law something like that unless it's something terrible.

[00:00:18]And what it did was it retroactively immunized all of the phone companies in the United States that had been breaking the law millions of times a day uh by handing your records over to the government which they weren't allowed to do uh simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying please do this.

[00:00:41]Uh and these companies went look now that we've been uncovered now that we've been shown that we're breaking or now that uh these journalists have shown that we've broken the law and violated the rights of Americans on a staggering scale that could bankrupt our companies because we can be sued for this we will no longer cooperate with you unless you pass a law that says people can't sue us for having done this. And so we get the Protect Protect America Act which they say you know it's an emergency.

[00:01:13]This [laughter] is all public history too. You can look this up on Wikipedia, you know.

[00:01:17]Um and so then they they go it's an emergency law we have to pass this now we have to keep this program active. Bush is going to end the warrantless wiretapping program and continue it under this new authority where it's going to have some special level of oversight and these kind of things eventually but for now we just have to make sure people are safe. Again they go to fear they say if we don't have this program terrorist attacks will continue you know people will die blood on your hands blood on your hands blood on your hands think of the children.

[00:01:53]Protect America Act passes the companies get off the hook the Bush White House gets off the hook, the Congress, uh, that was then sharing in, uh, criminal culpability for, uh, authorizing or rather letting these things go by without stopping them, uh, then passes in 2008, uh, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008. Uh, this is called the the FAA, uh, FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

[00:02:22]And rather than stopping all of the unlawful and, uh, sort of, uh, unconstitutional activities that the intelligence agency was doing, they continued it in different ways simply by creating a few legal hot hoops for them to jump through. Uh,