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Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, responsible for revealing evidence of the US government's vast surveillance capabilities, has scrutinized the national "Presidential Alert" test that sent messages to millions of cell phones on Wednesday. .
Snowden used Twitter after the inaugural test of the Trump Government's "Presidential Alert" to raise questions about the government's ability to simultaneously reach most of the United States.
"All our lives hang at the end of a thread. Ask yourself: who controls it? How else could it be used? , Writes Mr Snowden to his 3.8 million subscribers on Twitter.
"The same centralized infrastructure that allows them to send something to everyone allows them to read just about anything," said Snowden in a second tweet in conjunction with a 2016 article titled "Upstream ", a classified surveillance program of the NSA exposed by documents that it has revealed. 2013.
Mr. Snowden's remarks come a few moments after mobile phones connected to the country's largest wireless networks have received a false alert intended to test the operational readiness of the "Presidential Alert" feature, which is no longer needed. It had not yet been tested – a notification related to missing child alerts and existing wireless emergency alert system (WEA), but dissimilar in that they are mandatory because mobile phone users can not choose not to receive them.
About 75% of the country's mobile phones should display the alert, FEMA said previously, putting forth Wednesday's test message on the phones of hundreds of millions of mobile devices. FEMA has not responded with the latest figures.
Neither the WEA system nor the Emergency Alert System (EAS) used to broadcast similar warnings on television and radio collect any kind of data, a FEMA spokeswoman told the Washington Times. the opportunity to comment on Mr. Snowden's remarks.
"There is no database of mobile numbers," said FEMA spokesperson. "WEA messages are broadcast to phones that receive the signal from a cell tower."
"The NSA directs its intelligence mission abroad under the authority of the legal authorities established by the Constitution and Congress and is required by law and by law to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the United States. US people, "said a NSA media relations officer in response to a similar investigation. "The collection activities of the NSA under these authorities are subject to continuous and extensive monitoring by the three branches of government. In the interests of transparency, the government has declassified and made public thousands of pages of documents concerning its collection activities in recent years. "
FCC representatives did not immediately comment.
Mr. Snowden, 35, had his passport revoked while traveling abroad shortly after the disclosure of classified NSA documents in 2013. He was then stuck in an airport near Moscow. for several weeks before receiving the asylum of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Snowden has resided in the region ever since, notwithstanding the pending charges brought by US federal prosecutors over leaks.
"Upstream", according to the article quoted by Mr. Snowden, involved mass collection by the NSA of emails, cats and Internet traffic of US people while their data was traveling abroad.
"Because of its functioning, upstream monitoring represents a new monitoring paradigm, in which computers continually scan our communications to look for information of interest to the government," the article said.
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