Full Interview: Edward Snowden On Trump, Privacy, And Threats To Democracy | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

so add Snowden a lot of people in this country are probably curious when was the last time you had substantive discussions about coming home to the United States and would this still be your preference do you still refer to it as home the United States will always be my home and I'll always be willing to come back on a single condition and I've been quite clear about this over the years this is that the government guarantee that I have the right and every whistleblower has the right to tell the jury why they did what they did right we can disagree about whether this was right or wrong we can disagree about whether this is good or bad we can disagree about whether this is legal early illegal that's right and proper in a democracy but we have to agree that the jury is supposed to be the proper authority to ultimately decide was this right or wrong and I hate to say it but under current laws that is explicitly forbidden under the Espionage Act which as you know it's increasingly being used against the sources of journalism instead of foreign spies the law makes no distinction between someone who tells a secret to a journalist and someone who tells a secret to a foreign government and and so yeah there have nots there has not been any movement unfortunately on that conversation since the Obama administration when I told that the government that all they need to do is give me the right of what we call a public interest offense this is a fair trial an open trial where the jury hears what is happening and they decide was this justified or not and unfortunately a then Attorney General Eric Holder responded and said we can't promise that we won't promise that we will promise not to torture you unfortunately I'd say that's not quite enough something you've said repeatedly is that you would expect and you would accept a certain punishment for your actions what if that package of punishment in working for the home team what if someone said help us harden our elections from attack using your skills I would volunteer for that instantly you know they they wouldn't even have to pay me for that remember I volunteered to work for the CIA for the NSA when I came forward to reveal mass surveillance which we need to be clear the courts have found was in fact unlawful on the part of the government and one court said likely unconstitutional so I have no objection to helping the government I came forward not to burn the NSA down I came forward to reform it to help it return to the ideals that we're all supposed to share so there will never be a question of when my government is ready when my government wants me to help I will be there how has your opinion changed about mr. Putin since you've been in Russia well I don't think it really has changed because the question might presume that I had a positive opinion at some point I think everyone would agree probably including the Russian President himself that he is an authoritarian leader I think the Russian government broadly does not have a good record on human rights and that hasn't changed how odd is it to you that while you've been there consensus here has hardened that they are the actors who interfered in our last presidential election I don't think that's especially surprising there was a story published in The New York Times actually reporting on a study in February of 2018 and was also done in the Washington Post a few months prior to that about the record of electoral interference and they looked at the history of Russia and the Soviet Union and an electoral Intel interference by intelligence agencies and they found I think 36 different cases of electoral interference over roughly the past 50 years but then they also looked at the United States intelligence services and found that we hit enter feared in foreign elections eighty-one different times now this is not to say one is better than the other it's not about that it's about budget about capability but we do what we do see from this is that what happened in 2016 actually was not unusual from the perspective of intelligence agencies this is what they believe are they are hired to do what we have to do is find out how to secure our systems against the attacks that we know are inevitable something you've been asked before something you have answered before but since this is a fresh occasion we'll will ask it again why not stay in this country and face the music if you believed in the strength of your conviction this is a great question Brian and I'm glad you asked it when we say face the music the question is well what song are they playing I was intentionally charged as every major whistleblower in the last decades has been with the very particular crime this is a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 and and this is a law that is explicitly designed to prohibit a meaningful defense in court this is applied or this law is used against people who's the only thing that they've done and this is by the government's own terms the only thing the government accuses people defending themselves against this charge I have done is that they have told something to a journalist that the government considers classified that is the whole of the crime they don't consider whether it was good or bad they don't consider whether or not it caused harm simply did you tell something classified to a journalist if you did the jury is not allowed to consider and in fact they're explicitly forbidden from considering why you told journalists they're explicitly forbidden from considering did it result in a public benefit right did it further the public interest instead they simply say did you tell a journalist let the glass buy so I am NOT if I had stayed in the United States and my good friend Daniel Ellsberg by the way that has told me that I was right not to stand and wait for an inevitable arrest because the laws and the way they're enforced today is not the same as the 1970s when he came forward with the Pentagon Papers I would not have received a fair trial there would not have been much of a trial at all I would only have received a sentencing and the question there is what message does that send whether you like me or not I could be the best person in the world I could be the worst what message does a conviction where you spend the rest of your life in prison for telling journalists things that change the laws of the United States that have resulted in the most substantive reform so intelligence authorities since the 1970s if the only result of doing that is a life sentence in prison the next person who sees something criminal happening in the United States government will be discouraged from coming forward and I can't be a part of that where do your parents come down on what you did in the book we learn a lot more than we knew about them they were both we say this in quotes deep Staters we learn that they both had varying degrees of security clearances in their lives yeah I come from a federal family my father worked for the military my mother works for the courts my whole line going back has worked in the in the government service so I think this was difficult for them and in fact one of the things that I will be eternally grateful for is the fact that they still stand by me today and believe that I did the right thing were they present for your wedding you've gone and gotten married in the years since we've last spoken there hasn't been a wedding yet actually we were married but it was just a paperwork sighs in a courthouse because Lindsay and I had been living together we had been in love with each other we had been in a relationship for more than ten years there will be a wedding someday Brian and I hope you'll be there what do you make of Donald Trump there are so many things that are said about the president right now and so much thinking and honestly I try not to think about it there's so much chaos and there are so many aggressive and offensive things said I think even his supporters would would grant that but I think he's actually quite simple to understand Donald Trump strikes me like nothing so much as a man who has never really known a love that he hasn't had to pay for and so everything that he does is informed by a kind of transactional ism I think and what he is actually looking for is simply for people to like him unfortunately that produces a lot of negative effects do you believe he is a threat to national security I mean this is the question of who defines national security what is national security when we used to talk about national security we thought about public safety but now national security really means the security of the system itself the institution of government and I think he's made it his stated goal to change the way that system works I think we have seen tremendous harm done to civil liberties in the United States increasingly since September 11th and I haven't seen any reduction in the rate of that we have several important jobs vacant in this country including director of national security national security advisor is that a threat to our security I think it really says something about where we are what this point in our history looks like when we find that there are not enough people in the country that are willing not to serve in the White House and qualify to serve in the White House who all sides of the government feel comfortable working with and who they can back we are in a time that is increasingly fractured and I think that's a product of the fact that look if you look around at the world right now when you look at news when you look at news coverage when you look at every controversy that we see something has changed and that is that it has become increasingly popular for your feelings to matter more than the facts and I think that's toxic to a democracy because if there's one thing that we have to have to be able to have this discussion to be able to learn to live with people that we disagree with we can't have a conversation about what we should do we can't have a conversation about where we are going if we can't agree on where we are if we can't agree on what is happening facts have to matter more than the feelings you've said your greatest fear over what you did was that things would not change have things changed would you do it again today knowing what you know now this is a significant portion of the the final chapter of my book things have changed and I would do it again if I changed anything I would hope that I could have come forward sooner it took me so long just to understand what was happening and it took so long not to realize that nobody else was going to fix this believe me when I say I did not want to light a match and burn my life to the ground no one does nobody really wants to be a whistleblower but the results of that have been staggering I thought this was gonna be two days story I thought everybody was gonna forget about this a week after the journalist ran the first stories in 2013 but here we are in 2019 and we're still talking about it in fact data security surveillance the internet manipulation and influence that's provided or produced rather by a corporate or governmental control of this permanent record of all of our private lives that's been created every day by the devices that we have before 2013 if you said there's a system that's watching everything you do the government is collecting records of every phone call in the United States even for those people who are not suspected of any crime it was a conspiracy yes there were some people who believed it was happening yes there were academics who could say this was technically possible yes there were technologists who could went this is something that could be done but what we didn't have it was we the world of 2013 we suspected some suspected that this was happening the world after 2013 we know that it's happening and this is the critical importance of journalism particularly in this moment that we have today the distance between speculation and fact is everything in a democracy because that's what what lets us as we did post 2013 change our laws now the very first program that was real to newspapers I has since been terminated Barack Obama who criticized me so strongly in June of 2013 by January of 2014 was proposing that this program be ended eventually it was ended under the USA Freedom Act the NSA argued that mass surveillance was legal bulk collection as they they call it they said 15 different judges authorized this what they didn't tell us was that those 15 judges all belonged to the rubber-stamp FISA Court that over 33 years had been asked 33 thousand nine hundred times by the government to approve surveillance requests only said tow in 33 years 11 times now this was a court that was never designed to interpret the Constitution right it was never designed to create novel powers for the intelligence community it was just designed to stamp basic routine warrants now we know what has changed the very first open court outside of these secret rubber-stamp courts that got this case in front of them I was judge Leon in a federal court and then a court of appeals and said that the NSA's mass surveillance activities were violating even the very loose standards of the Patriot Act they broke the law he further said these programs are likely unconstitutional and this would not have happened if we couldn't say this is real this is actually happening and I just want to make clear that's not me saying that that's not speculation that was the determination of the Supreme Court just a few months before I came forward in a famous case Amnesty versus clapper I I believe it was in February of 2013 or door December of 2012 all the way to the Supreme Court these surveillance authorities were being challenged the plaintiff said the government has a mass surveillance program it has impacted this human rights organization they have been spied on in secret by the government the government said that may be but if it's happening we will neither conform confirm nor deny that it's happening it is a state secret and because you can't prove it the court should be forbidden from ruling on the constitutionality of this program and sadly the Supreme Court of the United States agreed they said this program could be unconstitutional but if you cannot prove it exists we cannot evaluate it that's what 2013 changed on the legal side we have now had the GDP or we have firt had the first European regulation that are trying to limit the amount of data that can be collected secretly and used against populations broadly and we have also seen the basic structure of the Internet itself change in response to this understanding that the network path that all of our communications cross when you request a website when you send a text message when you read an email for so long those communications have been electronically naked or unencrypted before 2013 more than half the world's internet communications were unencrypted now far more than half are measured by just web traffic from where the world's leading browsers the Google Chrome browser some figures showed it more than 80 percent the entire world has changed in the last few years it hasn't gone far enough the problems still exist and in some ways they've gotten worse but we have made progress that would not have been possible if we didn't know what was going on related question what today can the government do to your phone and your laptop the phone and laptop of any American what's the extent of the government's reach if they're determined to reach into your life we could talk about this question for hours Brian but we don't have time so I'll try to summarize hacking has increasingly become what governments consider a legitimate investigative tool they use the same methods and techniques as criminal hackers and what this means is they will try to remotely take over your device once they do this by detecting a vulnerability and in the software that your device runs such as Apple's iOS or Microsoft Windows they can craft a special kind of attack code called an exploit they then launch this exploit at the vulnerability on your device which allows them to take total control of that device anything you can do on that device the attacker in this case the government can do they can read your email they can collect every document they can look at your contact book they can turn the location services on they can see anything that is on that phone instantly and send it back home to the mothership they can do the same with laptops the other prong that we forget so frequently is that in many cases they don't need to hack our devices they can simply ask Google for a copy of our email box because Google saves a copy of that everything that you've ever typed into that search box Google has a copy of every private message that you've sent on Facebook every link that you've clicked everything that you've liked they keep a permanent record of and all of these things available not just to these companies but to our governments as they are increasingly deputized as sort of miniature arms of government what about enabling your microphone camera if you can do it they can do it it is trivial to remotely turn on your microphone or to activate your camera so long as you have systems-level access if you had hacked someone's device remotely anything they can do you can do they can look up your nose right they can record what's in the room the screen may be off as it's sitting on your desk but the device is talking all of the time the question we have to ask is who is it talking to even if your phone is not act right now you look at it it's just sitting there on the charger it is talking tens or hundreds or thousands of times a minute to any number of different companies who have apps installed on your phone it looks like it's off it looks like it's just sitting there but it is constantly chattering and unfortunately like pollution we have not created the tools that are necessary for ordinary people to be able to see this activity and it is the invisibility of it that makes it so popular in common and attractive for these companies because if you do not realize they're collecting this data from you this very private and personal data there's no way you're going to object to it what about its ability to track its own and talk to me specifically about the case of Jamal khashoggi so in the case of Jamal Khashoggi this is a Washington Post reporter and a primary critic of the Saudi regime he was lured into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in Turkey and while his fiance waited outside for him to get the paperwork he needed in order to marry her he was murdered by the Saudi government allegedly on the orders of the Crown Prince now we have to ask ourselves how did the Saudi government decide that he was worth killing how did they decide when and how they would kill him how did they know this opportunity was going to arise how do they know what his plans and intentions were that they needed to stop from their perspective we don't have evidence that his phone personally was hacked unfortunately because we do not have his phone but we do have the phones of his friends who were living in exile in Canada and we do know thanks to the research of a group called the citizen lab affiliated with a university in Canada that their phones were hacked which means their conversations with Jamal khashoggi were intercepted and this allowed the Saudi regime to know that he was intending to create an electronic protest movement they didn't need to know from his friend's phone or even from his phone that he was travelling to the consulate because he had to make an appointment but it did tell them his private intentions his hopes and dreams for a different government for their country and perhaps although we do not know for sure on that basis they decided to murder him once your phone is hacked what is in their hands is not simply your device it is your future it's important also to remember how did the government of Saudi Arabia manage to hack these people's phones which are modern phones well they didn't have this capability in their government they didn't have this level of intelligence capability available to them directly so they purchased it from a digital arms broker a company called the NSO Group an Israeli company in this company the only thing they do is manufacture digital weapons kind of hacking tools they can be used against the critical infrastructure that all of us rely on the phones and our pockets they primarily target devices such as the Apple iPhone and they sell this capability to break into phones of people around the world for millions and millions of dollars to some of the worst governments on earth and the only meaningful oversight that they have unfortunately because the export control laws for these kind of digital weapons are extremely weak in Israel is their own internal ethics board this is oh it was fine we didn't break any rules that has to change what about the public attitude held by millions of everyday Americans all I've got on a computer is pictures of my family CCTV cameras that are prevalent in a ton of American cities and overseas capitals those cameras are your friend if you're innocent and have nothing to hide well I'd say that's very much what the average Chinese citizen believed or perhaps even still to this day believes but we see how these same technologies are being applied to create what they call the social credit system if any of these family photos if any of your activities online if your purchases if your associations if your friends or in any way different from what the government or the powers-that-be of the moment would like them to be you're no longer able to purchase train tickets you're no longer a to board an airplane you may not be able to get a passport you may not be eligible for a job you might not be able to work for the government all of these things are increasingly being created and programmed and decided by algorithms and those algorithms are fueled by precisely the innocent data that our devices are creating all of the time constantly invisibly quietly right now our devices are casting all of these records that we do not see being created that in aggregate seemed very innocent you were at Starbucks at this time you went to the hospital afterwards you spent a long time at the hospital after you left the hospital you made a phone call you made a phone call to your mother you talked to her until the middle of the night the hospital was an oncology clinic even if you can't see the content of these communications the activity records what the government calls metadata which they argue they do not need a warrant to collect tells the whole story and these activity records are being created and shared and collected and intercepted constantly by companies and governments and ultimately it means as they sell these as they trade these as they make their businesses on the backs of these records what they are selling is not information what they're selling is us they're selling our future they're selling our past they are selling our history our identity and ultimately they are stealing our power and making our stories work for them what devices do you use in your life now and have you accepted the notion that you are watched rather constantly well probably every intelligence the world is definitely targeting me in trouble anything they can just as they did with Jamal khashoggi in regards to what are my plans and intentions I try not to make that easy for them if I get a smart phone and I need to use a phone I actually open it up before I use it I perform a kind of surgery on it to physically desolder or sort of melt the metal connections that hold the microphone on the phone and I physically take this off I remove the camera for the phone and then I close it back up I seal it up and then if I need to make a phone call I will attach an external microphone on and this is just so if the phone is sitting there and I'm not making a call it cannot hear me now this is extreme most people do not need this but for me it's about being able to trust our technology my phone could still be hacked my laptop could still be hacked and just as I told you before the same principles applied to me if it is hacked they can do anything to the device that I can do so my trust in technology is limited but just because that's how it is today doesn't mean that's how it has to be and a large majority of my work with the freedom of the press foundation where I serve as president of the board is dedicated to trying to make technology more secure to try to create programs and protocols by which we can make the communications of sources and journalists more confidential because if we lose the confidentiality between sources and journalists we lose access to those essential facts that let us understand what's happening in the world and unfortunately under this White House just like under the prior White House we see the sources of very important stories that have advanced the public interest facing retaliation from a very angry government I believe it's in the first half of the book and I'm paraphrasing you come out and just say the computer guy knows everything or at least he should what part computer guy are you were you and what part trained spy well for the vast majority of my career I was what was called a systems engineer or a systems administrator an administrator sort of maintains and expands a system that they have inherited and a systems engineer sort of develops new projects new capabilities for these systems roles what this means in short was that all of the systems the NSA and the CIA that I was put in charge of I had total access to and this is just what happens with the systems administrator when you think about a computer system who gives someone else access well someone has to be the original authority that has access to everything that was me and so I would say the computer guy knows everything that's not a boast that's simply the way these systems are designed that's the way they're structured and this is very much a vulnerability because it means that you have to trust this this administrator will work to the good of the users but what happens when the people using that network the people constructing that network are going against the benefit of the broader society and this put me in a very interesting kind of conflicted position I could do what the NSA wanted me to do or I could do what the Constitution of the United States the the public of the United States needed me to do which was report that my agency had broken the law do you regard yourself as a journalist these days I'm not I'm not I have tremendous respect for journalists but I try to keep a distance particularly in this moment where so much of journalism is coming under attack because the government has a tremendous incentive to discredit me to make people distrust me and so if I hold myself out if I start reporting stories if I start talking to sources if I try to start advancing what the public knows on a personal level my reputation could could sort of poison instead I keep a distinction what I do is I try to aid the work of journalism but I am NOT myself a journalist your book is highly personal tell us about the price your then girlfriend now wife paid for your actions and how you feel she was miss portrayed in the eyes of the world when we got that first kind of thumbnail sketch of who she was so in the wake of the revelations of mass surveillance in 2013 this was suddenly the world's biggest story in every country they were talking about the same thing and unfortunately that meant that everyone who was connected to me in some way they were also talking about because they were trying to say who I was where I came from and this unfortunately meant that Lindsey my lifelong partner was intensely investigated both by the FBI in the United States she didn't know what I was doing I could not tell her what I was doing because if I had they would have said she was an accessory to the crime they would have said she was part of a criminal conspiracy so long as she didn't immediately pick up the phone and say help help someone's talking to a journalist and so this meant that I couldn't tell her she learned about what was going to happen the same way everybody else did about what is happening the same way everybody else did she saw me on TV which probably makes me the worst boyfriend in the history of the United States but she stuck by me and we are reunited and together today and I will never be able to repay her for the faith that she's shown me but the media had a tremendous amount of salacious reporting when they realized that she taught toll pole fitness classes which are quite popular for him in these days they called her a stripper even though she's never been one even though she's a poet even though she's a photographer they sexualized her they focused on her body they focus on her image because that's what got attention she's a much more complex and deep figure than the media ever gave her credit for she is more brave then anyone can possibly understand and she's more political and intelligent than any of these reporters at the time could appreciate her politics in fact influenced mine and I'd like to think I learned as much from her or perhaps even more than she ever learned from me you paint a portrait of what some of us knew and that was that you were a thoroughly American kid in your upbringing you wake up every day in Russia you go to sleep every night in Russia are you actively seeking to get out are you as has been reported looking for asylum elsewhere well this is not an actively seeking this is not a new thing and this is important history especially for those people who don't like me for those people who doubt me who have heard terrible things about me it was never my intention to end up in Russia I was going to Latin America and my final destination was hopefully going to be Ecuador when the United States government heard that I had left Hong Kong where I met the journalists they canceled my passport they gave press conferences about it which meant I wasn't allowed to board my ongoing flight which was going to take me that's a Latin America rather than applying for Russian asylum rather than saying I'll play ball with any Russian intelligence service just please protect me I said no I will not cooperate with the Russian government or any government instead what I did as I was trapped for 40 days in an airport I don't know a year longest layover is but 40 days was was a tough stint I applied for asylum in 27 different countries around the world traditional US allies places like France and Germany places like Norway that I felt the US government and the American public could be comfortable that was fine for whistleblower being and yet every time one of these governments got close to opening their doors the phone would ring and they're in their Foreign Ministries and on the other end of the line would be a very senior American official it was one of two people then Secretary of State John Kerry or then Vice President Joe Biden and they would say look we don't care what the law is we don't care if you can do this or not we understand the protecting whistleblowers and granting asylum as a matter of Human Rights and you could do this if you want to but if you protect this man if you let this guy out of Russia there will be consequences we're not gonna say what they're what they're gonna be but there will be a response I continue to this day to say look if the United States government if these countries are willing to open the door that is not a hostile act that is the act of the front of a friend if anything if the United States government is so concerned about Russia right shouldn't they be happy for me to leave and yet we see they're trying so hard to prevent me from leaving I would ask you why is that I'm guessing Joe Biden is not your candidate for 2020 actually I don't take a position on the 2020 race look it's a difficult position being in the executive branch it's a difficult position being in power and you have to make unpopular decisions I would like to think having seen now in 2019 that all of the allegations against me did not come true national security was not harmed as a result of these disclosures but they did win the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism the laws were changed as a result the courts said these programs were unconstitutional we live in a safer and more secure world because the Internet is safer and more secure as a result of understanding these common vulnerabilities which not just US intelligence agencies we're exploiting but our adversaries were exploiting one close these holes we do not become more vulnerable we become more secure in 2013 it's fair to say some of these officials some of these candidates grow well the intelligence services are saying this guy's dangerous they're saying this is a risk they're saying this shouldn't have happened in 2019 we can see that no evidence has ever been presented that the public understanding mass surveillance is real has caused any kind of harm whatsoever no one has died no terrorist attacks have succeeded because we knew about this stuff these programs work regardless of whether or not you know about them but we have seen the public benefits substantiated year after year after year and so I'd like to think these people would reevaluate their position you know there are government officials who would push back very strong on your assertion that national security was not harmed you do you chose not to stop with your revelations at what was being done to Americans and you got into America and its allies and perceived enemies when we're looking at the reports that were published in 2013 it's important to understand I never published a single story the number of documents that I revealed is zero what I did was I collected an archive of material showing criminality or unethical or unconstitutional behavior on the part of the United States government I provided this archive to journalists who were required as a condition of access to this material not to publish any story because it's interesting they could publish no story simply because it's newsworthy they were only allowed as so far as the agreement went to publish stories that they were willing to stand up and say we're in the public interest to know and this is not some crazy fly-by-night organization these are newspapers like the Washington Post like the New York Times like the Guardian and in every case this process was followed now as an extraordinary check on top of this in case I went too far in case I collected a document that was too hot or I misunderstood things or the jernt the journalists misunderstood things the journalists were further required to go to the government in advance of publication and they were required to do this at my request and warned the government this is the story that we're gonna run this is what it's about this is what we're gonna say so the government could argue against it to create an adversarial check on what the journalists and I were trying to do to reconstruct the system of checks and balances in the United States that hid itself failed in the government you know because that process was followed so scrupulously that's why I am so confident that no harm happened no harm occurred now if there are those in the government that say harm took place if there are those in the government who say people have died I ask you this why haven't they proved it you know better than anyone Brian that these government officials are more than happy to pick up a phone and make a leak to the New York Times every day of the week I if they had some evidence that somebody was hurt if they had evidence that a terrorist attack got through because of this journalism it would be in the front page of every newspaper in the world and despite six years of history that's never happened describe your life today what is every day like how are you supporting yourself and and as a simple equation if the Russians have reached so effectively into our lives and our electoral systems they must be all over your life so that was several different questions but yeah I'm sure the Russian government is trying to spy on me I'm sure the United States government is trying to spy on me everyone's trying to spy on me the thing is I don't cooperate with them my allegiance is to my country my allegiance is to my Constitution now in my terms of my daily life it's actually pretty ordinary Oh which is to say it's not so interesting I've always been something of an indoor cat right among nightclubs and partying my life since I was a child has always been mediated by a screen that's my choice so not much actually changes in my day-to-day whether I'm living in New York or Berlin or Moscow in terms of my work which a lot of people are curious about this I think is a polite way of people asking do you work for the Russian government do you accept money from the Russian government you know are you living in Russian government housing are you in a bunker are there guards and of course the answer to all of these is no no I'm not what I do for a living is speak professionally and now I'm actually an author I have a speaker's bureau it's called the American program Bureau and you can call them and you can book a public event I speak at universities I speak at corporate events I speak at cybersecurity conferences to talk to people about what is happening on the internet what is the future of surveillance and how can we protect ourselves I'm very fortunate to have had that opportunity and it's meant that I've had a quite comfortable life and in quite a difficult position the former White House aide HR Haldeman left us with an expression for the ages and when he said you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube for Americans who feel that that this is just a behemoth that they could there's no way they could have any control over it for Americans who long ago decided we're just going to have to live with this surveillance how could it possibly be receded or rescinded or stopped we can stop a program we can thwart an attack we can make a device more secure but as you imply the system is still better the institutions and agencies and companies that produced these attacks that are creating new methods of spying every day will still be there the fundamental change not just in the United States but around the world that has to happen is we have to stop thinking about the limitations on how data is used as data protection regulations right now when we talk about what Google and Facebook are doing right now when we talk about what the NSA is doing right now when we talk about what rival governments are doing what the Russians are doing what the Chinese are doing what the North Koreans and the Iranians are doing we're constantly thinking about all right this data has been collected and these companies have it how do we regulate their use regulating the use is a mistake we should do that but that's the wrong focus it is the collection of data that is a problem when you start trying to regulate use you're going to the collection has already happened the collection was already legal one of the fundamental flaws in u.s. privacy legislation is the fact that we are one of the only advanced democracies in the world that does not have any basic privacy law whatsoever we have the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution which is the reason that I came forward but that restricts what the federal government can do that restricts what the state governments can do it doesn't restrict what companies can do and as you know as everybody knows these companies are playing a bigger and bigger part in the world today we have to say all of these records that they're creating about all of us all this control that they're developing from these surveillance programs whether they're saying they're doing it for targeting advertisements or whether they're doing it for targeting killings these records belong to the people that they are about not to the companies and this is a fundamental change that we have never discussed in a meaningful way broadly and publicly but we have to because all of these governments have said you know the the mass surveillance system why do we have it why is it useful they say because of terrorism they say it's saving lives they save its oppressive anting attacks but no less than Barack Obama and the response to the 2013 revelations created two independent Commission's to investigate exactly the answer to that question were these programs effective in stopping terrorist attacks did these revelations cause harm to national security it was called the privacy and civil liberties oversight board and the president's review group on intelligence and communications technologies and despite having an enormous budget despite having complete access to classified information despite the fact that they interviewed the heads of the FBI the NSA the CIA you know the full alphabet soup they found in the government's own words the kind of mass surveillance that's represented by this bulk collection program where the NSA was secretly collecting the phone records of every American and everybody else around the world every day under an authority provided by a secret court order that nobody even knew existed that program had never made their own words a concrete difference in a single counterterrorism investigation think about that more than 10 years of operation and secret never made a single concrete difference these programs mass surveillance is not about public safety it is not about terrorism it is about power it is about economic espionage it is about diplomatic manipulation and it is about social influence it is about understanding the actions of everyone in the world as carefully as they can no matter who they are no matter how innocent their life final question has to do with the Fourth Amendment we have it today because mr. Adams and others wanted to keep the British out of their homes and their horse carriages what would mr. Adams and the founders make of the reach of the government in your view into our lives given its humble beginnings I think if any of the founders of this country looked around today they would be shocked by the kind of rhetoric they hear and they would be shocked by the kind of activities of government they see if you read the Bill of Rights something that struck me when I was writing about it and in this book was that fully half of the first ten amendments are explicitly making the work of government harder they're making life for law enforcement officials harder and all of the founding fathers thought that was a good idea because they recognized the more efficient a government is the more dangerous it is we want a government always that is not too efficient we want a government always that is just efficient enough because government holds extraordinary power in our lives we want government always to be using their powers in a way that is only necessary and proportionate to the threat presented by whoever it is that they're investigating when the government is getting by by the skin of their teeth the people are free right the government should be afraid of the people people shouldn't be afraid of the government one of the ironies about the founding fathers for those who are skeptical of me which is fair again I don't want you to trust me and I want you to doubt me I want you to question me but I want you to look at the facts I want you to look beyond how you feel in the moment how we all feel in the moment and see what these stories said in 2013 see that the courts of the United States where I'm being charged as a criminal said that the government itself was engaged in criminal activity look at these things and then remember the people who founded this country were called traitors the signing the writing of the Declaration of Independence was an outrageous act of treason it was criminal but it was also right the question whether or not I broke the law is less difficult and less interesting than whether you think what I did was right or wrong what is legal is not always the same as what is more final prediction then we'll let you go nightclubbing and that is do you predict do you predict you will at some point live out your life and die in the United States I think I will return when we look at the kind of things that we're being said about me in 2013 the kind of hostility I face the kind of accusations I faced from the most senior officials in government and we look at the world today yes there are many still who don't like me but far far fewer because we have seen that all the harms that they alleged over the course of these years never came to pass they were never substantiated because they don't exist but the benefits are becoming more clear with each passing year the question that I think people have to answer whether you like me as person or not right whether you agree with how I did what I did whether you agree with the work of the journalists who decided what the public should know in order to cast their votes today you know the government broke the law today you know the United States government had broken that violated the Constitution and the rights of people in this country and around the world would you rather not know thank you and Snowden thank you very much good luck with the book that's my pleasure Brian thank you for having me hey there I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC thanks for watching MSNBC on YouTube if you want to keep up to date with the videos we're putting out you can click subscribe just below me or click over on this list to see lots of other great videos

Channel: MSNBC

Views: 16,263,477

Rating: 4.6604934 out of 5

Keywords: MSNBC, news channel, news station, newspaper, breaking news, us news, world news, politics, current events, top stories, pop culture, business, health, liberal, progressive, The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, The 11th Hour, Brian Williams, MSNBC News, MSNBC Live, Progressive News, Liberal News, Brian Williams msnbc, 11th hour, 11th hour msnbc, news, Edward Snowden, Trump, Privacy, Democracy, NSA whistleblower, Moscow, nsa, edward snowden interview, snowden, us government spying

Id: e9yK1QndJSM

Length: 54min 29sec (3269 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Minimal_Nigma]

Why do I feel like he is looking down like he is reading from a script?

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/slimpikkenz]

Ed is a Patriot and IMHO every American owes him a huge debt of grattitude for what he has done. We the citizens of this country should be demanding that Edward Snowden be pardoned and allowed to repatriate to the US. He is a true hero of the American people!

[u/LeeKingbut]

Well he tried to play the Russian's. No one tried to kill him. They just want to charge him with treason.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Toronto60]

This is a fantastic interview, and a must-see for anyone in IT Security.

[u/[deleted]]

I didn’t see the whole but I’m going to have to watch it now. I saw the part where he was talking about privacy and smartphones but I’m going to have to watch the whole thing.