Sen. Wyden featured in Snowden film

Sen. Wyden featured in Snowden film
By Oregon Small Business Association

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has now been seen in two major motion pictures in the past two years over a single question. First it was the 2016 Oscar winning documentary on Eric Snowden entitled The Fourth Citizen. The film features a news clip showing a Senate Hearing where Ron Wyden asks James Clapper (NSA Director) if the NSA ever collects the personal data of millions of Americans. Clapper responds with a no — which is contrary to what leaked NSA documents reveal. This very same Wyden news clip is featured in the recently released Snowden film by Oliver Stone.  Wyden’s name also gets mentioned elsewhere in the film. The news clip seen in both films can be seen below (at 30 second mark).

It appears that Senator Wyden is becoming nationally known as a privacy and Fourth Amendment advocate. Earlier this month, Wyden sponsored the Stopping Mass Hacking Act along with Republican Senator Rand Paul. The Act would place limits on new rules expected to go into effect on December 1st. The new rules, that the Act wishes to stop, allows a single warrant to be used to hack into unlimited devices of citizens if these devices were affected by criminals. Read more here.

The Snowden film also makes a reoccurring plot point on the exploitation of laptop cameras as critical weakness in people’s everyday devices.  This same point was made popular a few weeks ago when a simple promotional photo of Marc Zuckerberg at his desk became an unexpected big news story. The photo, as seen below, reveals that Zuckerberg tapes both the camera and microphone on his laptop. These laptop tape symbols are becoming a national metaphor of people’s distrust of technology, hackers and surveillance in general.

untitled


Disclaimer: Articles featured on Oregon Report are the creation, responsibility and opinion of the authoring individual or organization which is featured at the top of every article.