NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

my name is ed Snowden I'm 29 years old I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii what are some of the visions that you held previously within the intelligence community I've been a systems engineer Systems Administrator senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer one of the things people are going to be most interested in in trying to understand what who you are and what you're thinking is there came some point in time when you cross this line of thinking about being a whistleblower to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower walk people through that decision-making process when you're in positions of privileged access like a Systems Administrator for these sort of intelligence community agencies you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances when you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses and when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and you know move on from them but over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it and the more you talk about it the more you're ignored the more you're told it's not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public not by somebody who is simply hired by the government talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions it does it target the actions of Americans a NSA in the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible that it believes on the grounds of sort of a self-certification that they serve the national interest originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone it ingests them by default it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends so while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone that they suspect of terrorism they're collecting your communications to do so any analyst at any time can target anyone any selector anywhere where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with not all analysts have the ability to target everything but I sitting my desk certainly had the authorities to to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email one of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can which they hope often is forever you on the other hand have this how to do the opposite which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures why did you choose to do that rule I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model when you are subverting the power of government that that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy and if you do that in secret consistently you know as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took it'll kind of give its its officials a mandate to go a you know tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side but they rarely if ever do that when an abuse occurs that falls to individual citizens but they're typically maligned you know it becomes a thing of these people are against the country they're against the government but I'm not I'm no different from anybody else I don't have special skills I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office watches what happening what's happening and goes this is something that's not our place to decide the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong and I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say I didn't change these I didn't modify the story this is the truth this is what's happening you should decide whether we need to be doing this have you given thought to what it is that the US government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they might say about you how they might try to depict you what they might try to do you uh yeah I could be you know rendered by the CIA I could have people come after me or any of their their third-party partners you know they would they work closely with a number of other nations or you know they could pay off the Triads or you know any any if they're agents or assets uh we've we've got a CIA station just up the road and the consulate here in Hong Kong I'm sure they're going to be a very busy for the next week and that's that's a fear I live under for the rest of my life however long that happens to be you can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk because there's such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them if they want to get you they'll get you in time but at the same time you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you and if living living on freely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept and I think many of us are it's it's the human nature you can get up every day you can go to work you can collect your your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows but if you realize that that's the world that you helped create and it's going to get worse with the next generation of the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk that it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied why should people care about surveillance because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded and the the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made every friend you've ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer we are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong which is where we are because you travel here talk a little bit about why it is that you came here and specifically they're going to be people who will speculate that what you really intend to do is to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival of the United States which is China and that way you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States with which you intend to seek asylum can you talk a little bit about that sure so there's a couple assertions in in those arguments that are they're sort of embedded in the the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong the first is that China is an enemy of the United States it's not I mean there there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government but the the people's inherently you know we we don't care we trade with each other freely you know we're not at war or not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be were the largest trading partners out there for each other additionally Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech people think of China Great Firewall mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but the Hong Kong the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets of making their views known the internet is not filtered here then no more so than any other Western government and I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments if your motive had been to harm United States and help its enemies or if your motive had been personal material gain were there are things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing absolutely I mean anybody in the positions of access with the tape technical capabilities that I had could you know suck out secrets pass them on the open market to Russia you know they always have an open door as we do I had access to you know the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world the locations of every station we have what their missions are and so forth if I had just wanted to harm the US you know that you could shut down the the surveillance system in an afternoon but that's not my intention and I I think for anyone making that argument they need to think if they were in my position and you know you live a privileged life you you're living in Hawaii in paradise and making a ton of money what would it take to make you leave everything behind the the greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change people will see in the media all of these disclosures they'll know the lengths that the the government is going to grant themselves power unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society but they they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests and the months ahead the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy even our agreements with with other sovereign governments we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law and because of that a new leader will be elected they'll flip the switch say that because of the crisis because of the dangers that we face in the world you know some some new and unpredicted threat we need more authority we need more power and there will be nothing that people can do at that point to oppose it and it will be turnkey tyranny you

Channel: The Guardian

Views: 2,468,617

Rating: 4.8881993 out of 5

Keywords: Edward Snowden, Snowden, Edward Snowden interview, Snowden interview, Edward Snowden Guardian, edward snowden girlfriend, nsa, nsa whistleblower, nsa files, whistleblower, Interview, government, security, National Security Agency, spy, wikileaks, surveillance, leaks, prism, china, russia, hong kong, bush, the guardian, guardian, edward snowden news, edward snowden nsa, ed snowden interview, snowden interview, snowden scene, julian assange, ed snowden interview 2019, barack obama, data, privacy

Id: 0hLjuVyIIrs

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2013