part series of trauma facing the roma. find out more about them and the other stories that you have seen and heard on the website. find out what our correspondents are saying by logging on to our website. any time of the day - that's aljazeera.com. >> hi, i'm lisa fletcher, and you're in the stream. your government is spying on you, and here's reporting that says how. the president's reforms for the nsa. >> with waj and all we had to do was tell the community that glen

was going to be on the show, and twitter exploded. >> with cynicism and skepticism about the proposed nsa reforms. for example: >> jason a bit more snarky: >> i don't know about tapping president obama's phone calls, but senator berni sanders is quite concerned about the nsa tapping members of congress. >> and i'm sure that our phone calls are tapped. >> maybe yours is. >> definitely

. >> information provided to greenwald by former nsa contractor edward snowden. it reveals how the government collects phone data, and spies on world leaders. all of this is a concern for privacy advocates along with many americans, but the nsa maintains the program is nothing to fear. according to them they aren't monitoring calls or after the contents of your e-mail. the data helps them to connect the dots between those wish to go harm americans. recommendations it says will improve, not impair the agency. and ready to weigh in is journalist glen greenwald. welcome to the stream. >> great to be with you. thanks for having me. >> yes, take listen to this, president obama discussing the process. >> i'm taking this very

seriously. this is the debate that needed to be had. the question that we're going to have to ask, can we accomplish the same goals that this program is intended to accomplish in ways that give the public more confidence that impact the nsa is doing what it's supposed to be doing. >> so here are some of the recommendations. the president plans to keep the collection of phone data under the supervision of the news. he wants to put privacy safeguards in place for non-americans and create a public advocate to address privacy concerns at a secret intelligence court. is this mission accomplished? will this give americans more confidence in the nsa? >> i think that's the important point. the mission that he set when he created the review panel was not to reform the nsa in any meaningful way. it was to restore public

confidence, to make it seem for palatable. it's a way to make it seem like there is review when reality there is won't be. what the nsa does and how invasive it is, they will need more than a pretty speech by president obama to make it as though the concerns have been addressed. >> it appears the president is largely in favor of the idea of change but it looks like a lot of these programs are going to stay in place. if you were making the call, what would it be? >> i think there is a real question about whether or not we ought to have a government that is collecting literally billions of pieces of data every single day about the communications we engage in every day, the messages online and not just here in the united states but around the world. ultimately real reform means are we going to dismantle this

machinery that has been constructed in the dark in the wake of 9/11 to basically watch everything that the world is doing, everything that everyone is saying to the extent that they can, do do we want a sensible surveillance system where the government only watches those people for whom there is actual evidence to believe that they are engaged in serious wrongdoing such as terrorism, which i think is a much more efficient approach for people who are actually doing things wrong. >> a lot of focus has been put on the president's speech, but the truth is the president does not have unilateral power when it comes to changing how the nsa operates. that comes to congress. >> first of all, the president does have a fair amount of power because he is the commander in chief. of the armed forces, and this is an agency within the pentagon.

there is a lot they can do. congress authorizes the agency to go to a certain limit, but they don't have to go to that limit and he makes the decision whether they should. but even if there are reforms what confidence do they have that they will be abided by. the scandal in the bush years there was a scheme in place called fisa that the bush administration ignored it. both parties got together in 2008 and did nothing about it other than pass a new law that makes it retro actively legal. it is important to have this stop being done behind the wall of secrecy. the only real check on the abuse of power is if we the public knows what they are doing. >> glen, you mentioned having confidence in our reforms, and

you are doppelganger here said: >> samuel says: >> then zachary says: >> you know, glen-- >> go ahead. >> you know, i was going to say there are a couple of changes, and he's proposing that are decent ones like putting an advocate in the fi sa courts. but the history of the united states in the last 50 years and the history of president obama in particular is when there is some sort of controversy. the approach is to pretend you're changing things to

placate public anger and not actually change it. i think it's a big mistake to look at as the end of the process, the very most its just the beginning. of course there is not going to be serious change proposed by president obama. no president wants to give up surveillance power. he has to be forced to do that. the key is for public pressure to continue to build, for private industry to feel the pressure, and to demand that more changes happen, to look at this as a first step and not a last one. >> we want to shift gears, and a lot of newspapers are calling for clemency for edward snowden. >> he has brought to light an enormous amount of lying on the part of public officials and other forms of surveillance, and i think it was not only his right but his duty as a citizen and as an employee of the system to come forward and tell his

fellow citizens what their government was doing to their privacy in the dark. and the other side of that, if you look at james clappered, and alexander, who repeatedly misled the pfizer court, they have not been prosecuted or lost their jobs. none of them have paid a price. and they can be fully protected, and i think that someone like edward snowden, who is a low level individual who takes the conscience of the country should receive clemency. >> a lot of people say tha thatt powerful. but he received interception of nsa email and taliban members, and he tipped off how intelligence is collected in syria and mali, and does that

sound like it's a little bit beyond the cop scope of whistle blowing? >> he didn't publish those things. >> he handled the information over to journalists. >> but he did, when he handed it over to journalists, he said, i'm provided you with a lot of information, and much of this is material which needs to be published and much of it is material that you ought to read to understand how the system works, but it's not to be published, and i'm trusting you as a responsible journalist to vet this material and make choices, in newspapers, just as the pentagon papers, i'm trusting to to make decisions about what should be published and what should not be. so you ought to direct your criticism to them to publish it, and not to edward snowden for bringing the material to them.

>> glen, the overwhelming majority of our community, when it comes to the question of whether snowden should be prosecuted or given clemency: >> all right, so you like online gaming, raj? so does the nsa. >> every sunday night, al jazeera america brings you conversations you won't find anywhere else... >> your'e listening because you wanna see what happen... >> get your damn education... >> talk to al jazeera only on al jazeera america

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dispense with the fluff and get straight to the point. >> i'm on the ground every day finding stories that matter to you. >> in new orleans... >> seattle bureau... >> washington... >> detroit... >> chicago... >> nashville... >> los angeles... >> san francisco... >> al jazeera america, take a new look at news. >> welcome back, we're talking to journalist, glen greenwald about the scope of the nsa program. and recently it was exposed as a government online agent with world war games, and their mission to try to community with the guys. and it's unclear if any useable information came from this. so glen, what was the information from the surveillance that you were parley disturbed by that came out in the nsa documents that got lost in the snowden story?

>> i think that the underlying point is the most important win, which is the the goal of the nsa is to eliminate privacy globally by trying to collect all forms of communications. so the story that you just referenced, when someone said, why would they want to try to infiltrate video games in and the reason is simple. they want to infiltrate everywhere. and the scope and the limitness of what they want to achieve and are close to achieving is far and away most disturbing. but their methods of being able tto insert malware on computers x. being able to see every keystroke. >> laptops ordered online, is that right? >> and they did that by intercepting laptops ordered online to signal that malware, is that correct? >>

yes, there are different methods that they have, they can signal remotely if you click on a listening, and they can interdict products before they get to them, and they can signal and own your computer. doesn't matter what passwords you use, or encryption, they can see all of the activity inside of your commuter the minute that malware gets online. they got human amounts of data from israel and canada and the uk, surveillance and information they get from there. so really being anything that you do that's electronic in nature, online or by telephone, is susceptible to nsa monitoring and analyzing. and that's the true nature. >> our community has been really

disturbed by many of these revelations: i want to go to our gobble hang out. and we have julie here, a political analyst with freedom works, and i know that you have the questions for glen. go for if. >> hi, glen, my question is, what is your response to americans that say that they don't care about spying because they have nothing to hide? >> i think that people who say that pretty clearly don't actually believe it, and the way that you know they don't believe it is those same people put

passwords on their social media accounts, and if it it would be okay for them to put video cameras in their bathroom or bedroom in their home, they would react with repulsion. everybody has things to hide. not in the sense that you are doing things wrong, but in the sense that you don't want other people to know what you're doing. the private realm is important to who we are as human beings to make free choices, and privacy in words and behavior. so the other thing is, the government says that "doing something wrong" is much different than people usually say what that means. traditionally, in the last 40 or 50 years, the government has targeted dissidents, antiwar groups, anybody with dissenting views, because those people are "doing something wrong" and the question is, are people who

want to hide things and engage in criminality think that the government is doing something wrong and they want to spy on them, and we all have an interest in making sure that that doesn't happen. >> glen, the nsa programs are designed for security and track terrorism. and how does the government do that without using such means? >> all that we have used has nothing to do with national security. oil companies, and world leaders democratically elected, and indiscriminately on huge populations. no one is saying that the government never has the right to keep anything a secret. for example, i would not public the names of the specific target that the united states terrorism. >> but you have that information of. >>

profound implications that debt have anything. >> so to back up, you have that information, but you've chosen not to publish it? >> no, i'm just giving you an example. the kind of information that i wouldn't publish, whether i had it or not. >or not and glen, i have a question for you u. in edward snowden's letter, he suggested the following. he said, "these spying programs are never about terrorism, but about power." and the rev shows that the nsa is spying on the activity of israel, brazil and south africa, and it has a program called

follow the money. and if true, how does that level of surveillance advance our national security interests? >> let me just quickly address the thing about whether americans care. i think that a lot of times, we patronizingly say that americans only care about reality tv, and not about things like this. but there have been very substantial shifts about who you americans think about their civil liberties, and their view of these kinds of programs. in the short six months that we have been reporting on, it i think that americans are paying pretty close attention to it and care quite a bit. it continues to be one of the most significant news stories in the world, sparking all kinds of intense debate among citizens all over the world. and as far as the economics, a huge bulk of the spying doesn't even arguably have anything to do with terrorism or national security.

and the question becomes, what is the motive and there's no way to answer that question by concluding that the more a government like the united states knows about what populations around the world are doing, what they're planning, strategizing and thinking, the more power that people that have that information have, and especially the more power they become when they prevent anybody else from knowing what they're doing because of the wall of secrecy that they're building, and it's more about power than anything else. >> glen, do we need the nsa? >> i think that we need some degree of targeted spying. whether that can be done by the nsa or another agency, i have a strong opinion on it, and we don't need what the nsa has become, an agency dedicated to ubiquitous spying. >> so what is it? we'll be right back.

while you were asleep

ed. > >> welcome back, journalist, glen greenwald has been talking to us about the national security agency and it's

program. and glen, you're an author and litigator, and it's a new year and what's next? >> well, there's definitely a lot of documents that are given to us that we're still working with, and they have not yet been reported and we're working on those stories as consistently as we can and being accurate. and there are a good number of stories that are very significant that continue to be reported that will i think shape how people think about these programs in profound ways. >> two things. you said you have a lot of documents, and can you quantify that, and what's the trigger? when do you release the next round of information? >> i've never counted the documents. i said before that they number in the tens of thousands, and i don't know what the exact number is, buts this a large number of them. and they take so much time to read through and report and piece together. the trigger is that when we find documents that are interesting and important stories, we work

on them as quickly as we can, and as soon as the story is ready to be reported, we report t. >> our community is eagerlia waiting these revelations. >> i want to get to a blogger, xavier if you have a question for glen, go for it. >> i'm interested on how policy has shaped so rapidly since the revelation, and it used to be that you couldn't have any progress on civil liberties, and did you expect such a massive reaction from these revelations? >> if you look at the much more controversial they think in the news, the chris christie lane closure, that story was around

for several months, and people didn't pay attention to it, and the reason they did, it was impossible to know what happened because the documents that made clear what happened were concealed, and they weren't publicly available. and it was only once that information became publicly available that everybody realized what happened and paid great attention, and i think that the same thing is true for these nsa stories. people have known for sometime that the nsa is this massive out of control agency. since 2010, they have collected 1.7 billion telephone calls between americans every day, and yet it made no impact because without the deposits, you don't understand what they're doing and what the severity of it is. and i think that the ability to show people, not in our words, but to show them the nsa documents, has made people very upset and very engaged and has countried a real political candle and it has fundamentally

changed the way that the functions of this area, and president obama pretending to do reforms. and i think that it underscores the need for trance pearce is, and the need to come forward and not let the government officials conduct these port programs in the dark. >> it's unrealistic to think that the government is ever going to be completely transparent. but what would it take to restore confidence in these agencies if the nsa were to release a lot more information on these business before you do? >> i don't think that it would restore confidence. today destroy confidence, which is why they're not doing it. there are documents that have been released from the british part of the nsa that talk about the need to keep the documents secret because the public would not like when they have done. they would be upset by them.

and we don't know what documents they have. but if they were confident that the public would approve of what they're doing, they would do it on their own, and they wouldn't need an edward snowden. but they know that the public would be shocked and alarmed to see the time line. >> give us the timeline for your next report as we end the program tonight. when will it be? >> i'm working on several, and in the next several weeks, there should be a couple. >> glen, thank you for joining us, and "the streaming" community, you're the third host of this show. until next time, raj and i will see you online.

check check >> good morning. welcome to al jazeera america. i'm thomas drayton. here are the top stories we are following this hour: syrian peace talks are off to a rocky start. the syrian opposition threatening to withdraw from upcoming negotiations on sunday. after the u.n. secretary-general invited iran to the conference. a speaks woman for the state department said the u.s. could support iran's participation if iran accepts an earlier plan for a full transition to syria. the u.s. is threatening sanctions to ukraine f it doesn't stop the violence. rain interrupted violence. the white house blames the government for not easing temperatures. west virginia's waco