“No Bit of Information Too Minuscule” – NSA Spying Philosophy Revealed
In the continuing revelations about spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA), based on the documents stolen and gradually leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, an NSA official stated on this day that “no bit of information is too minuscule.”
The quote was in an article published by the New York Times on this day based on the Snowden documents. See June 5, 2013 for the first story based on the Snowden documents.
For another statement of the same idea, see the testimony by a Deputy Attorney General on June 18, 2013 who said that in surveillance activities the government wants not the needle but “the whole haystack.”
On April 14, 2014, The 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded to the Guardian US and the Washington Post for their stories on National Security Agency (NSA) spying based on documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden. The reporters also won the prestigious George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism for their stories based on the Snowden-released documents (see February 16, 2014).
Get the full story of the Snowden revelations: Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (2014)
Read Snowden’s autobiography: Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (2019)
Read about the history of the NSA: James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to Eavesdropping on America (2008)
Watch an interview with Snowden: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P_0iaCgKLk
Search the ACLU database of Snowden-related NSA documents (searchable by date, relevance, or date of release): https://www.aclu.org/nsa-documents-search?page=1