Rep. King: NSA leaker put lives at risk
New York Congressman Peter King, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism, spoke with Anderson Cooper about the 29-year-old former contractor for the National Security Agency who revealed top secret information about government surveillance programs.
King believes Edward Snowden put American lives at risk by releasing security details that can be accessed by the country's enemies. "I think he's violated the Espionage Act, so in my mind...that would make him a traitor," he says.
When asked if reporters should face consequences, the Republican lawmaker says news outlets have legal and moral obligations. "If they willingly knew that this was classified information, I think actions should be taken, especially something of this magnitude," says King.
 |
Post by: Anderson Cooper Filed under: National Security • NSA |
About this Show:
Anderson Cooper goes beyond the headlines to tell stories from many points of view, so you can make up your own mind about the news. Tune in weeknights at 8 and 10 ET on CNN.
Questions or comments? Send an email
Want to know more? Go behind the scenes with AC361°
Subscribe to the podcast
On Twitter
Search the AC360 blog
King should be prosucuted for allowing these illigal acts to begin with.
Why should the country's needs to keep secrets not be extended to the public sector, The gov't allows our private info to be sold to countries that have hackers banging into our lives while we sleep. Our social security numbers and personal info is sold to collection agencies to harass us with in efforts to pay our bills, Sad thing here is some people have already paid off these bills and now some person in India or Pakistan or who knows from where is making calls to collect and our hours that here at home have limits now have no limits when they can call. Snowden open a panduras box that our gov't frantically is trying to cover up. Its their blunder for hiring him and giving such a position to where he could collect this info without constant supervision. Your focus on hiring the young who have no guidance and firing the knowledge is now back firing in your faces and it hurts.
Everyone keeps asking the "Wrong question" with the whole NSA wiretapping American's thing.
They say they need to have a court order to get into our privacy, but NO ONE has asked the question... who IS signing these warrents?? is it a set of judges that have been set up with oversight on them.. or is it just any judge they can get to sign the warrent???
Your reporting of Snowden's leaks are frustratingly lacking in detail: what EXACTLY is being stored and analyzed by the NSA regarding phone calls and emails. I would assume that actual voice recordings and complete email transcripts would constitute an amount of data that is simply not possible to store due to how much is generated minute by minute. I have a feeling that many Americans might believe this might actually be the case and is not put into perspective by CNN reporting. Also, data mining or meta data analysis is mentioned without elaboration. Could you elaborate on it?? Aren't these analyses based on information that, say for phone calls, is little more than on what is contained in a user's monthly phone bill and looks for relationships that might cause an alert when some phone number in the US calls repeatedly to a bunch of phone numbers in Yemen or, some years ago, to cell phones in Tora Bora?? Please delve into this in your news reporting because I do not know exactly what is stored and what type of analyses are being performed on these data. Thanks.
I figures that a congressman that want to destroy the first amendment would be from New York.
You’re kidding, right?
If anyone did, those who dreamed up and implemented these citizen-snoop programs have put lives in danger. Did they really think they would not be outed?
I will give everything to be protected,NSA wants to protect Americans,people who are against that should be putting on a different planet with the terriorist
im 100% agree with you Sarah..
I dont like King but i do agree with him more than 100%that the 2 journalist should be prosecuted too,they know more than they saying