The FULL Snowden Interview

i recently spoke with edward snowden a military contractor who revealed government secrets and now lives in exile did snowden do the right thing after researching this i now think he did you decide here's our full interview you went to work for the government you signed agreements saying you wouldn't talk about what you did why go to the media we talk about awards for progress and civil liberties we talk about the importance of independent thought um and the history of it and this is really what it is you know i i did sign up to work for the government um i volunteered for the army i i applied to the cia i worked as a contractor uh in nsa facilities on nsa computers again and again and again people think contractors like you're working in a different building but no you're in it's just a con continuation of government service and also you joined the military after 9 11 because you wanted to fight i did when everyone else was protesting i was a younger man and i was uh much less politically educated i'd like to think than i am uh today you know some things only come with experience but so yeah it raises this question of how does you know how does [Music] someone like who i was become someone like who i am um and i got to tell you it was hard it wasn't easy wasn't natural it wasn't something i ever expected to do but like i said i signed up to all of these things i volunteered because i believed in a prevailing national mythos to which we are all subscribed when we're born into our country when we go to a school system where we're basically the only one in the world where you get up in the morning and you pledge allegiance to a flag we all have the same stories um we all watch the same uh channels you know we see men like you on on tv uh kind of telling us what's happening in the world what it's like and what changed me um was a realization that as someone who held a top-secret clearance and and had access far beyond uh what a top-secret clearance would entitle someone to generally the private truths of what was actually happening in our government what our government actually does uh what our nation was involved in without the knowledge or consent of the people that it purports to represent was very different than the public representation of it and that really just that seed alone was the start of a journey that would take me many years to ultimately realize and the decision as you said to come forward and the ultimate reason why i came forward was simply to bridge that gap in my own experience and share that with everyone else to share the realization that i came to that what we were being told is true and real and is the state of our world was in fact a witting and continuing lie uh by some of the highest representatives in our government and i felt that people needed to know that what was the lie i think the most famous one um for me and really uh you know the turning point um would be when you look at uh the exchange between um senator ron wyden and then director of national intelligence james clapper this is a sworn testimony in front of the senate intelligence committee and for those who don't remember it because it was some time ago it looked a little bit like this so what i wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question does the nsa collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of americans no sir it does not not wittingly there are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps uh collect but not not willingly uh now the importance of this is to to think about what that represented um this of course was was false the nsa was collecting uh the phone records of every verizon customer on a daily basis um they were doing this for other major telecommunications providers as well i just didn't have the judicial order for that and this was happening to the internet this was happening to email communications what was happening was uh a change in technology from the old internet that was uh sort of non-commercial very individual and simple uh it was pretty crude everything was cobbled together to this larger more corporatized internet where all of our communications all of our interactions all of our relationships all the things that we read and like online um are being passed to us through a facebook or a google or an apple and in secret these um these companies had basically gone far beyond what the law required of government to join programs where they would share information with the nsa through the front door of the fbi and it was continuing for years without the kind of individual warrants and legal process that we expected and we had become accustomed to we're told in the constitution this is how our government works and so for me when you ask what was the the lie the lie was not any one particular part of these programs it wasn't a particular detail it was the fact that there was a breathtaking sweep of intentional knowing public deception by people at the level of the senate by people in these different executive agencies um intelligence agencies and then in the white house itself even from the president then president barack obama who campaigned on ending warrantless wiretapping that he had criticized so heavily in the bush administration but had in fact in secret uh extended and embraced uh these programs and these authorities to a level that i began to feel had uh truly narrowed the boundaries of our rights does the nsa routinely intercept american citizens emails no does the nsa intercept americans cell phone conversations no google searches now text messages no amazon.com orders no bank records no we're not authorized to do it nor do we do it you're at the nsa and you're dealing with these secrets before you even saw the head of the national security agency on tv and what did you think about them then well so this was the the thing when you look at the arc of my career in intelligence i was always working on the technical aspect of it and so by and large i was uh modernizing our systems because post 911 the intelligence community realized they weren't very good uh at using technology they thought they were um and in a way it was true that they were but it was a different eras technology they were great with radio they were great with satellite they weren't so good with computers they weren't so good with the internet so they brought in a bunch of shaggy young guys who looked like me and they really liked what you did and you were a star absolutely but it wasn't that i was you know exceptional um so much that i represented a generation that was native to these new systems uh that they had shied away from because they didn't trust the security of them it turned out with good reason but my generation came in we shared our experiences we shared our specialties and we were always looking at what we were doing through a straw and you have to understand this principle that we hear of in the movies you know need to know means normally you get a project you do a project you don't know where it goes you don't know who else is using it but bit by bit i was redirecting and collecting the flow of intelligence then always backing it up permanizing it making it so that if we lost a building if we lost a site we didn't lose everything that had passed through that the information that had been passed through that my thought this was information about terrorists i thought this was saving lives i thought this was preventing wars but as i moved higher and higher in the organization as i moved from cia to nsa as i moved from office to office my straw that i'm looking through gets wider and wider and wider until i land in this place called the office of information sharing it turned out i would be much better at this job than anyone expected um and i saw everything and it's only there when you see the consequences of your uh labor and the different parts of your career all brought together uh with the labor of others of your entire generation who themselves not sitting in the position you are can't see the big picture impact of what they're doing and the public who never even knew this stuff existed uh and again this was occurring without their consent but in theory it was being carried out in their name it felt to me that we needed to know we needed to actually decide is this what we want to happen or not and you talk to your supervisors yeah i talked to my supervisors i talked to my colleagues on constitution day they were all fine with it this is just what we do and no problem actually actually it's not quite uh that uh people had no problems when i brought up uh these programs that many of them had never heard of because they hadn't been exposed to them um i said does this look right to you when i show that we're collecting more internet communications in the united states at the nsa than we were in russia right meaning we are ingesting more americans communication than we are ingesting chinese people's communications or russians communications or north koreans communications or whoever you're afraid of right the bulk of our collection uh was happening domestically and happening with the aid of other partners in what's called the five eyes network the united states the united kingdom australia new zealand and canada and then the nsa would go well yes we're collecting all of these communications but we're not reading them all we're capturing everything that you john stossel are doing online we're capturing everything that your family's doing online that your friends are doing online but we just pinky promise it's not being used for anything bad and then you know at being an engineer i see how these things actually are being touched they are being processed they are being sorted through every single day algorithmically uh it sort of proves the lie right uh that all of these promises they don't really amount too much all of these processes and regulations and procedures don't amount too much and in reality what the nsa is doing every single day this ordinary course of business is violating not only the laws as written but likely the constitution and i tell this to the guy sitting to my right a good friend of mine said tell this the guy sitting on my left good friend of mine to my office manager right um and all of them actually in private right when you're not in email uh when they're just speaking heart-to-heart about this they go no you know this this is crazy um i'm not sure why we're doing this i'm not sure how we're doing this i'm not sure this is legal but you know what happens to people who talk about this right i wouldn't put this in writing i wouldn't go you know to this office or that office they're not going to do anything about it it's not your job it's not my job this is way above our pay level basically but what happens to us as an organization at the nsa what happens to us as americans uh what happens to us as a society if everybody sees something wrong and goes well if i say something about i'm going to get into trouble what happens if everybody goes i'm not going to do anything about this because it's not my job that's how things go wrong in a much more serious way and the reality was i was just like them for a long time i had had a growing sense of unease uh but in reality it was not my job to fix it and this was actually one of the criticisms that was eventually leveled against me as they go you know who elected you um but it's not about you know who you are um it's about what you've witnessed it's about what you can prove and does that matter and i think the the last seven years when we've seen the courts review these programs and confirm that they were in fact unlawful we've seen laws changed even by the legislature that was implicated in the wrongdoing in the first place but at some point you decided i'm not going to keep my mouth shut yeah i mean it's it's exactly because this um if i keep my mouth shut the guy to my right the guy to my left we you know we all think this is wrong and we all keep our mouths shut um what does tomorrow look like and the year after that and the year after that uh the reality with um these kind of extraordinary powers in government particularly we all understand this now in the post-9 11 moment because it's not just surveillance it's happened in war it's happened in international diplomacy it's happened in economy with the financial crisis i haven't bailed out the banks but we don't bail out ordinary people um when the government writ large identifies a moment of crisis uh they use that crisis for uh an exceptional demand for exceptional powers to which they normally wouldn't be entitled this was the rise of the patriot act right this was how uh the bush administration got involved in more or less fire tapping this is how we got uh extrajudicial killings through drone strikes off the ground um this is how we got involved in torture but it's always uh justified as an again an exception to ordinary operations something that's done for a narrow purpose in a narrow way but then nobody objects to it these all happen in secret remember they keep the body of witnesses small by design to limit the amount of dissent that concur internally organizationally and those who do complain are generally shuffled off the program they're put in a closet somewhere and they ride out their days to retirement if they're lucky never doing anything that that matters again uh but also not having access to anything that could cause problems for those who are violating people's rights or our laws um but this as you said why speak up if you sit by and see a system engaged in wrongdoing and you do nothing even if you don't participate in it any longer even if you resign you are perpetuating a system of wrongdoing you have become not just part of the wrongdoing but but party to it um and for me uh when we looked at this this was affecting the country that i loved this was affecting the internet that i grew up with which was practically part of my family by this point in my life and then you extrapolate uh from how we got involved in sort of this overreaching surveillance state to begin with the national security state and step by step bit by bit exception after exception uh these extraordinary and narrow authorities become permanent and perpetual authorities uh and bit by bit as the uh domain of government expands uh the territory that is claimed to the people narrows and this became such a concern to me that i was willing to risk a great deal to tell people about it and see if they agreed or if i was just crazy my preference and i think the american people's preference would have been for a lawful orderly examination of these laws a thoughtful fact-based debate that would then lead us to a better place there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions so why go to certain members of the media president obama later said there were other avenues available for someone whose conscience was stirred specter generals congress yeah no i mean this is a great um a great kind of question i mean we we always look at these things we don't want anybody in government uh to be able to go out and you know throw any secret about anything uh out on the media uh willy-nilly and this is one of the primary institutional criticisms against me on the other hand are there uh internal channels as obama posited for me no even under the most generous reading of the law at the time what he said was incorrect and he said so at a time that by the way he knew it was incorrect even though it was politically useful because this had been debated in newspapers around the country by this point i was not an employee of the nsa i was employed at a private company that was contracted to do work for the nsa at nsa buildings you know on nsa equipment the only difference between myself and the actual nsa employee sitting to my right in the office was he had a blue badge i had a green badge green was for contractor blue was for staff employee of government but the whistleblower protection laws did not apply to contractors this makes sense if you think about it in the context of the moment because how can the government protect someone from complaints uh when it's not actually their employee right how can the government prevent someone from being disciplined when they're a private company for whatever purpose uh and the reality is there was even if i had gone through an internal purpose or sorry internal process had i gone to congress had i gone to the president himself the ultimate result would have been the same i would have been stopped at some level by an individual like the nsa inspector general who is supposed to be kind of a watchdog that makes sure the nsa's activities are legally compliant or the office of general counsel i would have been terminated from my position i would have been investigated by the police and i very likely would have been charged under exactly the same loans that i've been charged under today we know this not because i'm speculating and throwing this out of air but because it had happened before in the case of a former nsa executive at a much higher level than myself by the name of thomas drake who did go through proper channels and whose story i was very familiar with because i was determining should i do this is it right will it work will it be effective william benny who was charged with thomas drake at the same time were investigated at the same time as thomas straight for the same disclosure he had men with guns drawn coming to his house at dawn yes exactly you had the fbi burst into your house they take all your computers they arrest you you know they interrogate you you lose your clearance you lose your job first i went to the house intelligence committee and the staff member that i personally knew there and she then went to the chairman of that committee we were all trying to work internally in the government over these years trying to get them to come around to being constitutionally acceptable and take it into the courts and have the court's oversight of it too we naively kept thinking that that could uh that could happen and it never did they decided to raid us to keep us quiet threaten us you know in my case they came in with guns drawn i don't know why they did that but they did thomas drake who was an executive at the top of the u.s intelligence community now works at an apple store right but it's important to understand that he did go through proper channels he did everything right and when he went to these officials this is what they said this is the office of general counsel uh at the nsa a man by the name of vito potenza if he came to me someone who was not read into the program and told me that we were running a muck essentially inviting the constitution there's no doubt in my mind i would have told him you know go talk to your management don't bother me with this i mean you know you you did the the minute he said if if he did say you're using this to violate the constitution i i mean i probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly so i mean if that's what he said he said then anything after that i probably wasn't listening to anyway and this is the reality and i think everybody understands this naturally these internal watchdog shops in government they're great if you need to report sexual harassment they're great if you need to uh report some kind of discrimination if somebody's stealing office supplies if you go the entire agency of government is engaged in a conspiracy to deceive the public about the reality that we are right now working in concert across agencies uh to uh carry out a program that is in violation not only of law but the constitution they're not equipped to handle that and they're not interested investigating that that's not why they were appointed i gotta say in my endless hundred-year career no one has ever rolled in video before that's usually what i need to do if you ever get back right i'm a technologist sorry i can't help it that's good all right why do you think you were charged under the espionage act that's pretty rare to send a chilling message to whom to other whistleblowers to others in the government not to speak out or speak out do not tell truth to power we'll hammer you drake on 60 minutes where he said it the purpose was to send a chilling message do not tell truth to power we will hammer you i think that that's absolutely correct when you look at the lived experience of whistleblowers and again these are separated by decades of uh you know different white houses different presidents different administrations different congresses different policies the response is always the same if someone inside of government reveals government wrongdoing uh at the level uh that threatens the reputations and certainly the electability of whether we're talking about agency heads whether we're talking about politicians whether in the legislature or the executive branches their first priority is to stop you from talking because they want to control the narrative and this is really what this is about when you look at all of this mass surveillance um whether we're talking about internet surveillance whether we're talking about uh telephonic surveillance um whether we're talking about domestic surveillance whether we're talking about international surveillance um you've been in the news a long time you've seen these officials you've interviewed these officials uh they constantly tell us uh this is for your safety this is to investigate terrorists right and i kind of believe it right and we all believe it to some extent particularly when we shared the national trauma of 9 11.

um but when you look uh from the inside as an employee of what we're doing with this i see all the reporting right i've got access to all reporting and then you look at things that happen in the wake of scandal for example after i came forward obama who was facing extraordinary pressure appointed two independent commissions to investigate these programs because he was trying to um basically justify these things and find where they were actually or where they were useful this was the privacy and civil liberties oversight board and the president's review group on intelligence and communications technologies both of these groups had full access to classified information both of them talked to all sides of the intelligence community they went to the fbi they went to the cia they went to the nsa and they said look we've got the clearances give us your success stories show us where this helped show us where this saved lives show us why we should be doing this and they looked because at the time you know uh we had people we had keith alexander then director of the national security agency going in front of congress going on tv and saying you know this stopped 47 plots or whatever you know people are live buildings are up because these programs well barack obama's own investigations into this uh found that in the case of the very first uh program that we looked at uh this was the mass surveillance of telephone records direct domestically um it didn't stop a single terrorist attack in more than 10 years of operation and that's happening in secret mind you uh before it's the front pages and all that stuff and in the only case they also found sorry that it never made a concrete difference and that's their words in a single counterterrorism investigation there were plots that were found but the court found that they had other they already had the information they didn't need all this spying we've heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted that's plainly wrong these weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted the american people were getting left with inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of nsa programs they actually never discovered a plot through these programs never not once uh what they did do is they found information related to a plot um in a single case and this was a cab driver uh in california uh mo allen i believe um wiring about 8 500 to his clan in somalia which was affiliated with al-shabab which was on a terrorism list by according the state department this was their great success story right and in this case uh judges said uh or sorry we had already had watchdogs go through it thanks fortunately to obama in this case um and now we have since had courts go at it and look at confirm it was unlawful and it was unnecessary and mind you this is with access to the classified record because they said by the time the government had enough information to look these guys up in the nsa database you know cia fbi whatever they also had enough evidence to go to a court through traditional means and get a warrant without relying on all this right you didn't have to collect this by violating the rights of you know 330 million americans when you simply could have used the old traditional means of law enforcement to get exactly the same material from exactly the same companies without breaking the law it's dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that nsa programs contributed to stopping was 54. keith alexander says these programs helped prevent dozens of terrorist events the deputy director the reason there hasn't been a major attack in the united states since 9 11 is not an accident the number of terrorist attacks the nsa programs contributed to stopping is 54. that makes me feel safer when i hear that right and but we want to believe it's true but it's not this 54 number has been um looked at uh intensively by advocates and apologists for the national security state by critics of it and since then it's boiled down again to i believe one case uh and this one case in this is not uh somalian wiring 8 500 um i believe it's some you know guy with mental illness who was thinking about bombing a subway in new york but it's the same context the same thing they didn't need this authority it wasn't necessary because look uh let's say you don't john stossel uh work at the nsa you do the job i did in my last position you go in every day uh you've got the desk in front of you with your keyboard uh connected to a system called x key score this is uh basically google for spies right it allows you to search through all of the different uh methods of ingestion that we have not just domestically but overseas through our partners in what we call second party countries these are these anglophone countries and five eyes i mentioned earlier as well as third-party partners we have sensors you know all over the world some of them placed by hacking some of them placed in data centers and you can type anybody's phone number in anybody's email and website in any ip address for a phone or a computer a laptop and you can see all the traffic that has passed any of these sensors you can write to your fbi analyst buddy and have them pull anybody in the world's uh basically a whole facebook list uh everything they've ever clicked on anything that the facebook pixel tracker was on the website for when they were reading things uh their amazon order history you know everything they've typed in that google search box ever you have access to everything right and you want to stop a terrorist plot how do you know who to look up and this is why these programs don't actually stop terrorism you have to have a seed you have to have something to start your searches from you have to have a cause for suspicion traditionally under the fourth amendment we require probable cause for these kind of investigations to begin police officers get a tip from someone they notice something when they're working to beat they know their communities they see someone acting strange they get a complaint and they investigate on this basis right well in intelligence the way these tips come across is generally from the same thing it's from a confidential informant it's from law enforcement it's from whatever but once you have this once you have probable cause to begin investigating someone you can go to a court you can get a warrant you can access the same information without collecting it from the entire internet before right and so this is the thing um when you look at the fact that the government itself no longer makes these claims that it's stopped 54 plots right they have disowned that keith alexander no longer works for the nsa he's out now he works on the board of directors at amazon.com

the the thing is what are these things effective for right because you go well why does the government pay for these programs why go to all this trouble if it doesn't stop attacks yeah why [Laughter] and the the answer of course is because these programs are tremendously useful for something different and that is information gathering right intelligence general investigation about anything on anyone it may not be effective in preventing terrorist attacks because again it's not uh particularly more useful relative to the tools that we already have because again terrorism is rare it is scarce and people don't realize this based on the way the media has changed but the incidence of terrorism over time is actually declining relative to the last century if you look at for example terrorist attacks in western europe uh they have declined decade over a decade uh since like the 1960s people forget about it but things like maybe because of intelligence in the nsa well again i worked for these agencies and i would like to believe that was true but the rate at which they were falling is completely different from the rate of mass surveillance and this is what people misunderstand about my politics and my positioning i am not against the use of intelligence i'm not against the existence of intelligence agencies i'm not against surveillance i am against mass surveillance and this is what i brought information forward about just to play devil's advocate here why should i care i i figure google and facebook knows everything about everybody anyway i figure that teenage boy across the street could be picking up the stuff i sent it the the corks out of the bottle what difference does it make this goes back to kind of that that nothing to hide argument which is like um i lead a very ordinary life uh i watch my shows i go to work i take care of my family uh yeah i'm weird yeah i look at porn you know if you were talking about the average person on the internet everybody looks important right it's happened um even if you don't want to there's a pop-up ad somewhere it's in your history but the reality is most people do and they want to and that's not strange people particularly americans feel an enormous sense of shame about this but it's a tremendously common activity at the same time it makes us feel uncomfortable you know for a lot of us as if our family knew everything that we looked up on the internet we would worry about how they would look at us um if you know every company in the world knew everything that you looked at we would feel uncomfortable with it but then what happens when your workplace knows uh what happens when your government knows and who decides what is normal what's acceptable and what's not right we can do things that are very common today or we can have positions uh or interests that are very uncommon today but harmless in a free society we are allowed to be different we are allowed to be weird we can be strange as long as we're not hurting anyone else but laws change social wars change the norms shift and once we are entered into this system where everything we've ever done everything we were ever interested in everything we've ever bought everywhere we've ever gone everywhere that we have or anyone that we have ever talked to is instantly captured the moment it happens and memorialized in some database somewhere just waiting to be used it will be used and we already see this happening in places like china right we don't want to emulate china where we have a social credit system where things that you do which are harmless which aren't hurting anyone but institutions or railways or airlines or the communist party that sweeps into power is already in power decides is disfavored and should be penalized should be disincentivized now you can no longer get a job now you have to wait uh you know and go to the local police station to get a pass to be able to travel and visit your family we cannot anticipate these things and the problem is that i have with this idea of argument is that we should have to that we should have to prepare for that we should think and constrain our intellectual curiosity and even frankly our weirdnesses our distinctions our differences our weirdness the things that place us in the minority because we could potentially someday be judged on the basis for it even if we had done nothing wrong even if it wasn't strange because the definition of what is wrong is constantly changing if google's got it and facebook has it why is it so much worse that our government has it this is this is a great question there's two ways uh that this is typically um responded to uh one and this is one that i used myself um many years before is that well the difference is uh google can sell you a different pair of shoes on the basis of what it knows about you right the ads the place is on the side of your bar but they can't put you in jail they can't bomb you right the government can and for a lot of people the government does the second thing which i think is actually more interesting um it requires a little bit more technical understanding of how these programs are implemented but not so much that i think it loses even a general audience google knows an incredible amount about an incredible number of people but it is still finite there are things that they do not know uh google does not necessarily know what you bought on amazon google does not necessarily know what you liked on facebook uh google google does not necessarily know what you posted on instagram facebook knows what you posted on instagram because they own that right amazon knows what you bought on this but they don't know what you sent in your email it's on uh google because it's a gmail account right there are silos in industry that even if they're very large still limit what these different companies know the maximum domain of their understanding of you as an individual and us broadly as a population government however through its course of authorities in these kind of systems is able to look into each of these different silos and then collate them together they see everything that facebook sees as well as everything that google sees as well as everything that amazon sees as well as everything that your phone provider sees as well as everything that your airline provider has in terms of your travel history uh you know and so on and so forth to an extraordinary extent there are no um limitations placed on this beyond the uh their appetite and willingness to pursue uh these silos and find a way into them now i am a little embarrassed and that i'm a consumer reporter and i report on markets i i haven't done much on spying or military secrets and i hadn't paid much attention to you i got you confused before researching for this interview with manning and julian assange snowden which who did what and but now that i've done the research i conclude that you really got screwed and yet you talk about this very dispassionately and thoughtfully aren't you pissed off i mean james clapper lied to congress and to the peop american people and he wasn't fired he served out his term in the obama administration and now he works for cnn and keith alexander uh i think that's kind of a condemnation of the direction our media has has gone in um but i understand your point absolutely keith alexander now now runs a private security firm appropriately and is on amazon's board they made out you're in exile yeah i mean you don't do the kind of things that i did um if you're a pessimist uh you do them because you're an idealist you believe that things can get better you believe that we can do better um when i came forward it was in recognition of the fact that there is a two-tiered system to the way american society is ordered today there are those in power uh who operate largely behind a veil of secrecy um and even this applies even to people who aren't working for the nsa right this happens to congressmen um it's very difficult to find out who they're meeting with it's very difficult to figure out you know what lobbyists are having conversations with who and you know what laws are being shaped and what uh text is being written that is passed into law that uh impacts all of our lives but was corporately sponsored right and these people are getting donations to their campaign or famously the justice system uh if you're uh a young person from a minority community with limited access to wealth and especially education you're going to be treated very harshly by our court system but if you're one of these made men you know working on a high level you will face a very different flavor of justice shall we say none in the case of those two guys who lied precisely precisely uh or or no justice at all but that will never change um unless we make it change right power admits nothing without a demand government is not going to reform itself and the only way that things get better anywhere is through sacrifice we've known this since we crawled out of the swamp of history if you want to stay warm uh somebody is going to have to go through the trouble of building a house it's not going to be fun they're not going to love it but they're going to be doing it because it makes life better somebody out there is going to have to do the hard work of growing the food that we all you know survive on and they don't get a lot of thanks for that but society is a team's board our society as exists today is flawed i recognize that right um i am doing what i can to make it better as i can i don't have any illusions that i'm going to fix it uh i'm not going to save the world that's not how this works and i think this is why i can be very much at peace with the choices that i've made and the uh unfortunately the price that i've paid as a result of that because it was the right thing to do and it has made things better even if it hasn't fixed the problem people now can understand these things we can begin to argue for better policies and in fact they're already happening our courts which for literally decades excused themselves at all um from uh weighing in on the legality and constitutionality of surveillance in the context of national security i have since 2013 when i came forward ruled repeatedly on these programs and repeatedly ruled against the government uh that he they had backstopped these things fully for again for a very very long time the nsa's gated repeated substantial legal violations the ficer court called a systemic non-compliance by the government but the programs go on some of these programs have been halted uh section 215 of the patriot act is no more this was ended by an act of congress and also at the urging of for no less than barack obama who at the very beginning of 2014 interesting in terms of timing after the very first court to rule against these programs said it was likely unlawful and unconstitutional came out in his state of the union speech and said although he could never condone what i did uh he felt that this conversation about surveillance legalities its limits had made us stronger as a nation and he uh urged congress to pass what was then called the usa freedom act to basically put new legal restraints on this but as you say uh that didn't end the problem of mass surveillance that just pushed the tube of toothpaste right now the toothpaste is in slightly different part of the same tube however mass surveillance occurs largely through certain technical uh principles certain vulnerabilities mechanically in the way our communications move from your phone or the laptop on your desk across the internet to whoever it is you're trying to communicate with right whether we're talking about a website uh whether we're talking about um someone that you're talking to on the phone uh now fewer and fewer people use plain voice fewer fewer people use plain sms now they're using encrypted messengers like the signal messenger or whatsapp which i would not trust myself for a long period of time because it was bought by facebook but whatsapp was the world's most popular messenger it had one billion users in post 2013 they adopted a new technical protection called end-to-end encryption which is intentionally designed to limit precisely the kind of mass surveillance that was being discussed in 2013 so now at the flip of a switch one billion people get a greater level of privacy that is not reliant on jurisdiction it's not reliant on law it's not reliant on politics and the encryption works encryption does work uh one of the lessons as a result of 2013 all these disclosures about how the nsa works how the surveillance works um is uh you can be sneaky in a lot of ways uh as the nsa as the cia when you're trying to steal a secret but encryption is basically just math and there is no currently with the best knowledge that we have of mathematics any sneaky way to just make encryption go away entirely from uh a point of interception right so as again your phone tries to reach this other person wherever they are in the world it has to go through the network of many other people through the starbucks that you're sitting at through their internet service provider through a data center through a transatlantic cable that goes to for example france their data center their local internet service provider their starbucks that they're sitting in any one of these points anybody sitting on that line can snatch a copy of the conversation and if it wasn't encrypted they can read it whether it's a criminal hacker next to you uh at the cafe or whether it is a national government be that the american government or the french government or anybody in between right but the thing is um the only way really to get around strong encryption that is properly implemented is uh precisely what the purpose of the 2013 stories was to achieve which is to make governments shift from mass indiscriminate collection of communications to specific individualized targeted collection this means hacking right so imagine for a second you send this encrypted communication to the person that you're talking to people in the middle tons of them they all catch it they all collect it but none of them can read it because an encrypted message cannot be unlocked without a mathematical key it's just the answer to the math problem that you make up that you share with the other person on the other side you guys know the answer but nobody else in the world can come up with it right now um mass surveillance no longer works game over finish doesn't work quite that way there's some more technical ways we can talk about metadata later if you're interested but it's more in depth but the bottom line is how then if you're the cia and for example this is not someone harmless in a starbucks this is an actual terrorist or spy or a dissident in a place like bahrain or oman or hong kong which unfortunately is all too real and happens every day how do they read this message and the answer is they steal a copy of the key instead of catching it as it goes across the line which they can no longer do they can't do this for everybody on mass around the world they have to target the two places in the world that that message is readable where it's unencrypted and that's on your device and the device of the person that you're talking with now instead of dealing with encryption instead of dealing with that global network that easy cheap mass surveillance they do the hard work the traditional targeted investigative work of hacking that phone or selling that person an implanted phone that's got spy devices built into it basically and then when that person is encrypting messages or when they're receiving messages and decrypting them because they have taken over the phone the encryption no longer matters to them because they can see it with unencrypted they can steal that encryption key that answer to the math problem when it exists on the phone before it's forgotten before it disappears so long and short because i know that was probably uh complicated for a lot of people uh encryption end to end encryption which is to say properly implement encryption that doesn't have a man in the middle doesn't have some facebook some google who's keeping their own copy of the key but encryption where the keys are only held by the communicants by the people who are supposed to know this information that defeats mass surveillance in the generic general sense that we understood in 2013 it does not prevent all surveillance it does not prevent particularly legitimate targeted surveillance but it returns the intelligence and law enforcement world to the more traditional means of investigative investigation which have fewer implications for our rights writ large as a society let's talk a little more about your personal story you decide that you've got to do this you asked 27 countries for asylum people are uh shall we say less familiar particularly now with seven years of distance between it what exactly happened in 2013 uh so i left the united states and met with journalists in a hotel room in hong kong hong kong was selected because it was a kind of no man's land that had very good media access it had a largely unfiltered internet neither of which is true today unfortunately but it was very easy for journalists to operate it was very easy for me to access as a us intelligence employee without popping up on any radars or anything like that and i would meet with them there and china also would not necessarily be free to operate against us particularly the way they can today because of rivalries and friction and bureaucratic infighting between the local hong kong services and the beijing government so this was really an ideal kind of no man's land which to operate i provided them with documents and explained the significance of them and i didn't publish any documents this is important for people to understand i didn't put anything online i instead told the journalists to look through this explained it and if they felt uh as i did that this was in the public interest to know they would need to make an independent editorial judgment that this was the case go to the government in advance of publication uh give the government a chance to argue against this say that snowden guy's crazy or he doesn't understand this or this document's incorrect or if you publish this people will get hurt basically give the government the best chance to argue against this which the government took in almost all cases that i'm aware of and they talked to the white house and talked about the white house exactly what happened was as i mentioned before i had had uh a decade's worth of history uh and actually more than a decade's worth of history uh of cases to look over i looked at daniel ellsberg in the case of the pentagon papers in the 1970s in the injunction against the newspapers working with him how that was resolved by the courts what that meant i looked at the case of thomas drake how even though he went through the right channels uh he ended up at the same place where his story unfortunately didn't get out he faced enormous consequences policy and the public were unable to grapple with this very important issue because of the government suppression of it and then i looked at the case of wikileaks and chelsea manning with the iraq and afghanistan war longs and one of the interesting things against this was manning of course was rested and they said you know manning had uh blood on her hands uh cost the lives of all these soldiers and you know publishing this material which was only secret not top secret uh was going to cause basically that the atmosphere to catch fire and the oceans to boil off and none of this happened and in fact at manning's sentencing the judge specifically asked the government uh do you want to argue that people were harmed as a result of this uh do you want to say you know someone was hurt someone died anything like this because we'll take it into our sentence in consideration give a harsher sentence and the government said actually no we can't show that it doesn't exist and this is what we saw actually in the case of ellsberg it's a constant uh refrain where the government goes uh whenever they're put in the hot seat they don't want to talk about the concrete harms of their policy they don't want to talk about how they violated rights they don't want to talk about how they broke the law instead they want to shift the conversation to the whistleblower to the source of the disclosure say they're weird say they're disloyal say they have problems say they shouldn't have done this for whatever reason say that you're going to get spies killed or you're going to reveal troop movements precisely what they want to do is talk about the theoretical risks of journalism in an open society instead of the concrete demonstrated harms as documented by the government's own malpractice and so this was something that i anticipated this was why this uh sort of process was designed i used three different journalists three different outlets um they could all go to the government the government would get a chance to do this so we could demonstrate we had gone in theoretically the most responsible way we had done everything the government thought was proper and appropriate as compared to prior cases and see if it made a difference and the interesting thing is even though this was uh sort of tremendously indulgent of the government's interests it didn't make a single change in their messaging uh they used the same rhetoric against me as they did with men as they did with drake as they did um with ellsberg but from here uh i left uh hong kong on route to latin america and i tell this story in my book permanent record how it happened but as i was leaving hong kong the government we're not sure there's no true way to know whether this was an intentional strategic decision or whether they panicked and it was just a mistake but once they learned the government had learned that i had departed hong kong they cancelled my passport which meant i couldn't leave russia and i spent the next you know uh 30 days and 30 nights basically um trapped in this russian airport chirometer uh trying to get asylum from as you said these 27 different countries things that americans wouldn't be particularly concerned with you know germany france and every time one of these companies accompanies one of these countries uh would appear uh to be leaning towards granting asylum saying okay come here uh they would get a phone call from one of two people uh then secretary of state um john kerry or soon to be possibly excuse me uh then vice president joe biden and this is uh this is the interesting thing why would the us government work so hard to keep me trapped in russia rather than allow me to go to a jurisdiction where they would be much freer to operate and much more comfortable realistically like france or germany or iceland or something like that uh if they had even the slightest doubt about my loyalty and this is something a question that even to this day i had difficulty answering i would assume they just didn't want you to go anywhere and you happened to be in moscow you didn't think it's true right imagine you're the director of the nsa or you're the cia and you've got this guy out there he's the person that you hate the most in the world and you know all your authorities you know all your incredible powers you know even the things that i didn't know with all of my access right all the ways you can get people and they go you know we really don't like this guy we really want to do something about him uh would you rather me be in moscow or literally anywhere else right and so to me it's very strange uh that the government worked quite hard to keep me exiled specifically in russia and i've always been a little bit um particularly as years have gone by and you can't explain it away simply as a mistake of policy back then they've had time to rectify it they realize that me being in russia provides them with an evergreen political attack that doesn't have to be explained it doesn't have to be justified simply the association with russia is enough for them to call into question my character and some americans would say really he went to china and admittedly it was it was hong kong and different than and russia these two countries and there was no other way to get to latin america except through russia right certainly and this i mean this was uh subject of much debate and it was again born out there was a lot of public reporting on this back in uh 2013 when it was contemporary uh the reality is you can't fly from hong kong or at least couldn't fly from hong kong at the time to latin america uh without crossing u.s airspace unless you went the long way around right and so then you do this and you have to go it's very short list what are the non-extradition countries to get from hong kong all the way over to south america and again it's just building a bridge through the air step by step and you know my whole flight manifest at this point has been made public there were journalists on the flight that i was ticketed for from moscow to havana uh taking pictures of my empty seat when i was prevented from boarding uh and so yeah this has all been looked into and it's just to me it's frustrating but it's also interesting because i wonder you know if they did this intentionally if they did this strategically it was really the most brilliant move they made in terms of communications planning that they they could have i'm not sure we can give them that much credit because it very well could have been a moment of panic but it is i think disappointing that all these years later they still haven't rectified it and it didn't work out well for you obama commuted chelsea manning's sentence she's now running for political office uh politicians say you should be killed well you know the funny thing is we see that much less now than we did in 2013. uh the reality is there's uh there's sort of a pardon movement going on on my behalf i have not asked for pardon uh from this president or the prior president um but many others have on my behalf and i'm tremendously grateful for that and the advocacy that people brought forward um but excuse me uh the thing is as each year passes and all of those claims as you said you know they were like oh he got people killed there were ages you know there were programs or whatever all this stuff fell apart it didn't work attacks are gonna get through none of it came to pass and this was exactly the story in the manning case you know uh obama could not have commuted manning's sentence politically realistically um in this 2013 era in this 2014 era but years after right when manning's actions were actually in 2009 2010 you start getting year after year after year the fact that what manning did did not harm national security in a material way it did not harm individuals lives and livelihood in a material way all it did is inform the public and embarrass uh the us government and its partner governments in the case of diplomatic cables but largely it was about um reputational harm right the government had egg on its face and it retaliates as a result of this moreover you know from reporting on the justice system in other contexts i think the government is very interested in what it describes as the deterrent effect manning becomes secondary right uh someone like me or ellsberg or drake any of these people they become secondary to the point of the government pointing to the rest of their workforce even if this person did the right thing even if they did it carefully even if they did it in the best way we don't want you to emulate it so we are going to come after this person chase them all the way around the earth in order to set an example i hope you get pardoned it's a little puzzling the attorney general says you're a traitor and the information you peddled were uh you you peddled it around like a commercial merchant yeah which you didn't you never tried to get money from it president trump in 2013 said they got a lot of information out of this guy he's a terrible guy who set our country back this guy's a bad guy and you know there is still a thing called execution this is a bad guy and there's still a thing called execution but then seven years later a reporter asks him do you want to give edward snowden a pardon and he says well i'm going to look into it do you want to give edward snowden a pardon well i'm going to look at it i mean i'm not that aware of the snowden situation but i'm going to start looking at it yeah this is a good example of the distance donald trump has traveled from 2013 trump to 2020 trump but also more generally when you bring up the case of the attorney general who does not seem familiar at all with the basic facts of the case when he's speaking publicly on it that is a lot of distance historically a lot of things have happened in between then and as we start to look at uh what happened in 2013 uh less with the heat of the moment and sort of careers on the line and more dispassionately from a historic context i think it's clearer and clearer uh that what i did was the right thing to do uh and in fact public opinion is swinging very heavily uh toward that side and in fact even elite opinion which is largely turned against um individuals working outside of the organization in this kind of way you will not find a lot of love for whistleblowers uh in corporate america in in government agencies in any country in the world i think but even there uh you were beginning to see people speak uh in in fact i would say large majority terms favorably rather than disfavorably and i think that's because history has a way of exonerating the truth in some ways attitudes switch the other way president-elect biden before he became vice president was against the spying this data collection and said it's very intrusive we're going to trust the president and vice president to do the right thing don't count me in on that the real question here is what do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al qaeda and we're going to trust the president and the vice president united states that they're doing the right thing don't count me in on that but he changed his tune once he was in power yeah and again this was the same for uh president-elect barack obama some people say well you know obama was this raving liberal before now he's you know dick cheney um he tells this uh very briefly in his memoir he said yeah he was campaigning against mass surveillance yeah it was wrong yeah it should have been done it was a problem uh so on and so forth but then he says after he became president he realized he was seeing that from the cheap seats and now bush's wars were his wars and this is very uh in line with his decision to move from investigating bush-era abuses things like torture things like unlawful killing things like the massive domestic surveillance program that happened under the bush administration he didn't investigate them at all instead he said it was important that we look forward not backwards and it's this this lack of accountability amongst the american political elite at the same time we are constantly increasing the level of accountability for ordinary members of the public right particularly when we talk in the context of this mass surveillance not only is the government policing you twitter is policing you you know what you say online youtube is locking your channel you know whatever uh there are people in little police hats everywhere you look and at the same time these people with power are excusing their behavior they are heightening the standard of accountability to which we are held and to me i say isn't this backwards right we used to call them uh public servants and we were private citizens because we were supposed to know everything about them and we were all supposed to scrutinize them and we were private citizens because no one was supposed to know what we were doing we had no power we had no influence and so we were meant to be left alone but that is increasingly being inverted and we are under constant gaze uh electronically at the same time they are permanently sheltered by this uh fog of unaccountability and that's by design and just to be clear twitter and youtube can't put us in jail yeah they can't well yet but stay tuned or force you to stay in in moscow you can't return to america at the moment you got married in russia uh what's your life in exile like yeah so my my long-term partner many years who was with me in the united states uh lindsey mills she's also american and i got married uh we are expecting our first child uh which is a tremendous stroke of fortune i'm really excited about it um and this is really all-consuming for us right now i think it's a scary thing i've never uh been through this before uh and i think it's even more frightening for her um but the reality is uh exile as a political weapon is beginning to fail um these conversations the this what's happening between you and i uh today was a rare and uh sort of extraordinary thing when it first started happening in my story in the beginning of 2014 but now due to this global pandemic it's everywhere all the time i just had a conversation with ai weiwei who lives in exile from china as a result of his own uh criticism of his government and this idea from history that governments used to be able to go fine you know we're just going to divorce you from the public conversation we're going to silence you through distance um it doesn't work anymore because even though i put my head down on the pillow far away i still very much live in the united states you know and uh our child i think will hopefully embody the best of all worlds you're applying for citizenship in russia and some americans say that's disloyal that makes me suspicious yeah i mean this is part of the same conversation that i think has been intentionally pushed by the government for many years now the reality is i've been in russia now for seven years uh i cannot leave um i'm expecting uh to start a family and i want my son to not grow up as an outsider i don't want him to feel like he is born into exile as i am i want him to feel at home wherever he is i don't want my wife to be separated from me because you know she doesn't have permanent residence in the same way that i do uh particularly when the borders to russia are closed as they are today so the only way that my family can be together um is for me uh to do this and i don't think that's wrong a year ago you released permanent record and the government sued froze the proceeds they sought to it's true but the reality is the government's judgment in the case of permanent record uh is not enforceable uh certainly not internationally questionably uh domestically and i don't have any assets in the united states uh sort of banking system or whatever that they could pull so that judgment hasn't had any material effect but more broadly i speak publicly i did

2020-12-24 15:28

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