NSA: We were just about to stop spying on everyone before Snowden spoke out

NSA: We were just about to stop spying on everyone before Snowden spoke out
(Image credit: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

Agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) claim that senior officials within the department wanted to shut down the mass surveillance program before whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed it to the American public.

The Associated Press reports that a "proposal to kill the program was circulating among top managers but had not yet reached the desk of Gen. Keith Alexander, then the NSA director." However, the agents expressed doubt that Alexander would have been convinced to shut the mass spying program down — despite the fact that it has "no discernable impact" on stopping terrorism.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.