Edward Snowden is named in these excerpts only in passing, as the figure associated with disclosures about government surveillance. No excerpt describes his biography, his role, his employer or his whereabouts; he enters the record solely through two guests who invoke the surveillance he exposed as a point of reference for their own subjects.
Social media censorship and the PRISM program
In an episode on social media censorship, the discussion turned from the constitutional limits on private companies to the question of government access to data held by those companies. Bob Zadek had argued that the Constitution governs the relationship between citizens and government rather than between citizens among themselves, and a caller, Michael, pressed him on the point, asking whether there was anything Facebook could do that would be unconstitutional. Zadek agreed with the caller’s framing, offering the example of complaints that a boycott violates free speech rights, and stating that the Constitution only affects the relationship between citizens and government, not between citizens inter se Social Media Censorship (2019).
Bill Ottman then raised a counterexample, saying there was a constitutional issue with the NSA spying under the PRISM program that Edward Snowden exposed. According to Ottman, the NSA had revolving-door relationships with Facebook and Yahoo and other large technology companies, through which firehoses of data were sent directly to the NSA, raising Fourth Amendment issues Social Media Censorship (2019).
Zadek responded that Ottman was exactly right and described the legal mechanism involved: a specific holding by the court concerning the situation in which an individual gives data to a third-party carrier such as a phone company. On Zadek’s account, having surrendered privacy to a third-party holder, the prohibition on the government accessing that data through the third-party holder is diminished compared with privacy held by the individual directly. He described this as a very specific provision that was exploited at that time by the NSA Social Media Censorship (2019).
The same exchange also covered Twitter. Asked by the caller whether Twitter was any better than Facebook in this regard, Ottman said not really, citing closed-source code and lack of access to the algorithms, apparent involvement in surveillance, and an inconsistent content policy. He allowed that Twitter might be a little bit better and gave Jack Dorsey credit for seeming to have deeper conversations about these issues and for seeming like a generally thoughtful person, while suggesting it was possible Dorsey did not have the power to implement radical changes in policy and transparency. Ottman concluded that censorship, surveillance and lack of transparency exist on Twitter too, and that he tries not to use it Social Media Censorship (2019).
Snowden as the backdrop to the ALPR debate
Two episodes from September 2022, featuring Jonathan Hofer of the Independent Institute, opened with the same framing. Hofer said that post-Edward Snowden leaks, attention in the context of government mass surveillance usually goes to agencies like the CIA and NSA, but that in terms of numbers the most prolific tool of mass surveillance today is automated license plate readers. He added that the technology had only been around for a few years and was quickly exploding onto the scene in the United States, and that if a town did not have one, it was soon coming to a place near it The Mass Surveillance nobody is talking about (2022).
The same passage appears in the second of the two episodes, where Hofer repeated that post-Snowden attention usually fixes on the CIA and NSA while automated license plate readers are, in terms of numbers, the most prolific tool of mass surveillance today A PSA on ALPRs (2022).
In that second episode Hofer explained the technology in more detail. Automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, are specially designed high-speed cameras able to read the alphanumeric characters on a license plate using software called optical character recognition, which he compared to the technology that allows keyword searching of a scanned PDF or of printed books on Google Books. He said they were originally developed around the 1970s in the United Kingdom and later started popping up internationally, and that for many decades they were neither advanced nor practical, used only for things like regular traffic monitoring, electronic toll collection or parking enforcement. Around the early 2000s and especially into the 2010s, he said, they quickly exploded with law enforcement in the US when police began surmising they would be a good crime-fighting tool. As to how they work, Hofer described cameras stationed at busy intersections or over a busy roadway, or mounted on a police cruiser or other city infrastructure; when a car passes the camera or the camera passes a car, the license plate is detected from the image, a timestamp is applied to the scan, and a GPS coordinate is logged, recording latitude and longitude. He said this poses a number of civil liberties concerns A PSA on ALPRs (2022).
Bob Zadek’s introduction to the first of these episodes framed the subject in his own voice, paraphrasing an old public service announcement that asked whether parents knew where their children were at ten o’clock, and modernizing it to say that local governments, particularly police departments, could boast that they know where you are at whatever time it is — and, he added, where you have been. He described Hofer as a research associate at the Independent Institute based in Oakland, California, who has studied privacy law, local law governance, and the impact of emerging technologies on civil liberties The Mass Surveillance nobody is talking about (2022).
Across episodes: no development
Snowden is mentioned in three episodes — the social media censorship episode and the two September 2022 episodes on automated license plate readers — but the excerpts show no development in the treatment of him across them. In the earlier episode he is the name attached to the PRISM disclosures and the Fourth Amendment problem they raised; in the later pair he is the name attached to the public attention that, in Hofer’s account, went to the CIA and NSA rather than to license plate readers. The excerpts do not show either speaker revising or responding to the other’s characterization.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state who Edward Snowden is, what position he held, where he worked, when the disclosures occurred, or what became of him; they supply no biography and no account of the documents themselves. They do not name the court holding Zadek described in connection with third-party data, nor the case or amendment it turned on beyond his reference to the Fourth Amendment appearing in Ottman’s remark. They do not describe the PRISM program’s mechanics beyond Ottman’s phrase about firehoses of data, and they do not say what Snowden exposed about license plate readers, if anything. The excerpts also break off mid-conversation in the ALPR episodes, so the discussion of data aggregation and the Mosaic Theory announced in the topic lines is not present in the material.