Edward Snowden: "If I end up in Guantánamo I can live with that" | Guardian Interviews

I haven't been uncomfortable you know I haven't really been scared like I thought I might be you know there's always questions of asylum you know where I'm going to stay and how these things work out but regardless of what happens if I uh if I end up in Chains in Guantanamo I can move with that au hoppy in Russia or would you much rather be in Western Europe or back in the States you know I'm much happier here in Russia then I would be facing an unfair trial in which I can't I can't even present a public interest offense to a jury of my peers we've asked the government again and again to provide for a fair trial and they've declined and I feel very fortunate to have received asylum I've been totally open about the fact that I disapprove of the majority of the recent laws in Russia on Internet censorship and surveillance I think it's entirely inappropriate for any government in any country to insert itself into the regulation of a Free Press how good does your Russian do it give us a sentence in Russian I think I'm going to avoid that online because the last thing I want is float clips of me speaking Russian floating around the internet the context do you feel as if you're under surveillance I think it's reasonable to assume that I am under surveillance anyone in my position surely is subject to some surveillance but you take the precautions you can to make sure that even if you are under surveillance there's no sensitive information for you to expose you may not have the documents beefed all this knowledge in your head if I were providing information that I know that's in my head to some foreign government the US intelligence community would be able to detect that they would see changes in the type of information that's going through it they would see sources go dark that were previously productive they would see new sources of dissin information appearing within these channels and that hasn't happened did you read the book about you by Edward Lucas who works for the Economist which claims essentially that you're a Russian spy now do you know what I mean yeah it's crazy he's not credible at all I mean the claim is that this has got the Kremlin's fingerprints all over it and that if you're not actually a spy you're an unwitting agent of Russia I can give a blanket response to all of the Russia questions if the government had the the tiniest indication the tiniest shred of evidence that not even that I was working for the Russian government that I was associating with the Russian government it would be on the front page of the New York Times by lunchtime knowing what we know now what is the responsibility of professionals to change their behavior if they're dealing with sensitive information I mean journalists must know that if they carry a mobile phone on the way to meet a source that's going to be compromised the work of journalism has become immeasurably harder than it ever has been in the past journalists have to be particularly conscious about any sort of network signaling any sort of connection any sort of license plate reading device that they pass on their way to a meeting point any place they use their credit card any place they take their phone any email contact they have with the source because that very first contact before encrypted communications are established is enough to give it all the way what other forms of professionals should be changing their behavior as a result of what we now know it's a constantly increasing list and one that we're not even aware of today I would say lawyers doctors investigators possibly even accountants anyone who has an obligation to protect the privacy interests of their clients is facing a new and challenging world and we need new professional training and new professional standards to make sure that we have mechanisms to ensure that the average member of our society can have a reasonable measure of faith in the skills of all the members of these professions it is technology compatible with privacy absolutely technology can actually increase privacy but not if we sleepwalk into new applications of it without considering the implications of these new technologies the question is why are our private details that are transmitted online why are our private details that are stored on our personal devices any different than the details and private records of our lives that are stored in our private journals there shouldn't be this distinction between digital information and printed information but the government in the United States govern the United Kingdom in many other countries around the world is increasingly seeking to make that distinction because they they recognize that it vastly increases their their powers of investigation people use the analogy of the haystack and the needle that you need to collect all this information in order to look for the needle of specific intelligence that you're looking for I would argue that simply using the term haystack is misleading this is the haystack of human lives it's all the private records of the most intimate activities throughout our lives that are aggregated and compiled and stored for increasing frequencies of time it may be that by seizing all of the records of our private activities by watching everywhere we go by watching everything we do by monitoring every person we meet by analyzing every word we say by waiting and passing judgment over every Association we make and every person we love that we could uncover a terrorist plot or we could discover more criminals but is that the kind of society we want to live in that is the definition of a security state when did you last read 1984 actually quite some time ago contrary to popular belief you know I I don't think we are exactly in the 1984 universe the technologies that are in 1984 now seem unimaginative and quaint you know nowadays we actually buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a networked microphone that we carry around in our pockets with us voluntarily as we go from place to place and move about our lives 1984 is an important book but we should not bound ourselves to the limits of the author's imagination you know our times have shown that the world is much more unpredictable and dangerous than that do you think this is the end of cloud computing I don't I think what cloud companies need to pursue in order to be truly successful is what's called a zero knowledge system which means the service providers host and process content on behalf of customers but they don't actually know what it is that's the only way they can prove to the customers that they can be trusted with their information well it's a good example of that there's a company called SpiderOak SpiderOak is a competitor to Dropbox but Dropbox is a targeted you know want to be prism partner they just put the belief Condoleezza Rice on their board of directors now who is probably the most anti privacy official you can imagine so they're they're very hostile to privacy SpiderOak in response has structured their system in such a way you can store all of your information on them but they literally have no access to the content of that information so well yeah they could be compelled to turn it over you know the law enforcement agencies still have to go to a judge and get a warrant to actually get your encryption key from you do you use Google no no I don't use go to use Skype no I have used Skype and Google Hangouts which are great but unfortunately security compromised services for public talks where they've been required but I wouldn't use it for personal communications we trust them without verifying what their activities are how they're using our data and deciding for ourselves whether it's appropriate where they draw the lines so you'll feel sitting there inside the NSA you're a young man leads dancer crowding in do you think other analysts had the same dance was this something where you ever shared your dance absolutely I mean the reality of working in intelligence communities that you see things that are deeply troubling all the time and it's not just one person as many of them so I raised concerns about these programs regularly and widely more than ten discreet colleagues that I had worked with and that's both laterally and vertically in my work I went to when I show these programs I said what do you think about this is this unusual how can how can we be doing this isn't this unconstitutional isn't this a violation of Rights you're talking about patterns of behavior and just to rephrase the question were there specific interesting things where you where you actually felt uneasy that X was being targeted with a simple a simple example that everybody can relate to is you've got young enlisted guys 18 to 22 years old they've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records now in the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they're extremely attractive so what do they do they turn around in that chair and they show their co-worker and their co-worker has says oh hey that's great send that to bill down the way and then bill since it's George George sense it's Tom and sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people it's never reported nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak the fact that your private images records of your private lives records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communication stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights why is that in a government database and useful instance is that happening absolutely yeah numerous all its routine enough depending on sort of the company you keep it could be more or less frequent but these are seen as sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions you see the old to the auditing is not that good that it would pick up on the sharing of that kind of a 29 year old walked in out of the NSA with all of their private records what does that say about their auditing there's something particularly about this area of life when almost nobody understands it when we first sat down the documents I got some very very good reporters who were in their sort of 50s and 60s who had done in endless great stories and at some points they just literally couldn't understand what they were looking at and it took the sort of 25 year-old who would say look was a great story there and I was always had a great story if you're a an MP and you're in your late 60s and you spent your whole life thinking about economics or politics or farming the notion that you could you even understand what questions to ask that's probably the a single most important factor that explains the failures an oversight that we've seen in almost every Western government we need to think of it in terms of literacy because technology is a new system of communication it's a new set of symbols that people have to intuitively understand it's like something that you learn but just like how you learn to write letters at school you know you learn to use computers how they interact how they communicate and technical literacy in our society is a rare and precious resource are you confident that if you went back to the US and were tried in front of a jury of your peers that you would be acquitted you know I think it would be very difficult to find any 12 Americans in the United States right now who would uniformly agree that the last year's revelations about the NSA's unconstitutional surveillance programs did not serve the public interest I'm not going to presume to know what a jury would think or to say what they should or should not think but I think it's fair to say that are reasonable and enduring questions about the extent of these surveillance programs how they should be applied and that should be the focus of any trial recently we found out that Google and Apple don't just know where you are right now but no way you've been over the past week the past month the past year and how long you've been there this could have a massive impact on your life

Channel: The Guardian

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Keywords: nsa, edward snowden, the nsa, nsa spying on us citizens, nsa surveillance, snowden interview, edward snowden interview, edward snowden full interview, snowden full interview, the guardian, big brother, big brother state, guantanamo bay, gitmo, snowden trial, russian spy, orwell, george orwell, 1984, russia, usa, edward snowden putin, putin, war on whistleblowers, citizen four, citizenfour, ed snowden, ed snowden interview, ed snowden full interview, moscow, gchq, fbi, cia, mi5, mi6

Id: L_amBkYx_Fk

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 18 2014