In 2007, the CIA stationed you with a diplomatic cover in Geneva in Switzerland. Why did you join the CIA by the way?
I don’t think I can actually answer that one.
If it is what you were doing there, forget it. But why did you join the CIA?
In many ways, I think it’s a continuation of trying to do everything I could to prosecute the public good in the most effective way. It’s in line with the rest of my government service. I try to use my technical skills, in the most difficult positions I could find in the world. The CIA offered that.
If we look back, special forces, CIA, NSA, it’s not actually the description of a human rights activist or somebody who becomes a whistleblower. What happened to you?
I: Mr Snowden, did you sleep well the last couple of nights? Because I was reading that you asked for a kind of police protection. Are there any threats?
S: There are significant threats, but I sleep I sleep very well. There was an article that came out in an online outlet called Buzzfeed where they interviewed officials from the Pentagon, National Security Agency. They gave them anonymity to be able to say what they wanted. What they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals, and these are acting government officials. They would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, poison me returning from the grocery story and, have me die in the shower.
But fortunately, you are still alive with us
Right, but I'm still alive. And i don't lose sleep because i've done what i feel that i did what i needed to do. The right thing to do Not going to be afraid.
The greatest feel I have, and I quote you, regarding these disclosures, is that nothing will change. That was one of your yoru greatest concerns at the time. But in the meantime, there is a vivid discussion about the situation with the NSA. Not only in America but in Germany and in Brazil. And president Obama was forced to go public to justify what the NSA was doing on legal grounds.
What we saw initially in response to the revelations was a sort of circling of the wagons of government around the NSA. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights, the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights. What is interesting is though that was the initial response, since then we've seen a softening. We've seen the president acknowledge that when he first said "we've drawn the right balance, there are no abuses," we've seen him and his officials admit there have been abuses. There have been thousands of violations of the NSA and other agency's authority every single year.
Is the speech of Obama recently, the beginning of a serious regulation?
It was clear from the president's speech that he wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don't need. The president created a review board from officials that are personal friends, from national security insiders, former deputy of CIA. People who had every incentive to be soft on these programs. To see them in the best possible light. But what they found was that these programs have no value. They've never stopped a terrorist attack in the United States, and they have marginal utility for other things. The only thing that the section 215 phone metadata program, it's actually a broader metadata program, a bulk collection program. A bulk collection means mass surveillance. program was in stopping or detecting 8500 dollar wire transfer from a cab driver in california. And it's this kind of review where insiders go "we don't need these programs, these programs don't make us safe. they take a tremendous amount of resources to run and they offer us no value. They go, we can modify these." The NSA operates under the President's executive order alone. he can end, or modify, or direct a change in their policy at any time.
For the first time President Obama did concede the NSA collects and stores trillions of data.
Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace. And the government has decided that it’s a good idea to collect it all. Everything. Even if you’ve never been suspected of any crime. Traditionally, the government would identify a subject, go to a judge, say “we suspect he’s committed this crime,” they would get a warrant, and then they could use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the investigation. nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advance. Prior to an investigation.
You started this debate. Edward Snowden is, in the meantime, a household name for the whistleblower in the age of the internet. You were working til last summer for the NSA and during this time you collected secretly thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive moment, or was there a long period of time, or something something happening? Why did you do this?
I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper directly lie under oath to congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. See that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name and that which the government is doing against the public. But neither of these things, we were allowed to discuss, allowed to know. Even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programs. And that’s a dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the Pfiza court(?), which is a sort of rubber stamp authority. When you are on the inside, when you go into work every day, when you sit down at the desk and you realize the power you have, you can wiretap the president of the United States. you can wiretap federal judge. And if you do it carefully, no one will ever know because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self-reporting.
We are not talking only of the NSA as far as this is concerned. There is a multi-lateral agreement for cooperation among the surfaces. And this alliance of intelligence operations is known as the Five Eyes. What agencies and countries belong to this alliance, and what is its purpose?
The five eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post-WWII era where the anglophone countries of the major powers banded together to sort of cooperate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure. So we have the UK’s GHTCQ, the US NSA, we have Canada’s CSEC, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate. We have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was, over decades and decades, was a sort of supra-national intelligence organization that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries.
In many countries, as in America too, the agencies like the NSA are not allowed to spy within their own borders, on their own people. So the Brits, for example, they can spy on everybody but the Brits. But the NSA can conduct surveillance in England. In the very end, they could exchange their data and it would be, they would be strictly following the law.
If you ask the governments about this directly, they would deny it. And point to policy agreements between the members of five eyes saying they won’t spy on each others’ citizens. But there are a couple key points there. One is that the way they define spying is not the collection of data. The GHTCQ is collecting an incredible amount of data on British citizens, just as the NSA is gathering an enormous amount of data on US citizens. What they are saying is that they will not then target within that data. They won’t look for US citizens or British citizens. In addition, the policy agreements between them that say British won’t target US citizens, the US won’t target British citizens, are not legally binding. The actual memorandums of agreement state specifically on that they’re not intended to put a legal restriction on any government. The policies agreements that can be deviated from or broken at any time. So if they want to spy on a British citizen, they can spy on a British citizen. And then they can share that data with the British government which is itself forbidden from spying on UK citizens. So there is a sort of trading dynamic there. But it’s not open, it’s more a of a nudge and a wink. And beyond that, the key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data. It’s when people gather the data in the first place.
9:20 mark - taking a break.
How narrow is the cooperation of the German Secret Service with the NSA and the five eyes?
I would describe it as intimate. As a matter of fact, the first was I described it in a written interview was that German services and US services are in bed together. They not only share information, the information, the results for intelligence, but they share the tools and infrastructure. They work together against joint targets and services. And there’s a lot of danger in this. one of the major programs that face abuse in the NSA is what is called XkeyScore. It’s a front end search engine that allows them to look through all of the records they collect through worldwide everyday.
What could you do if you could sit, so to speak, in their place, with this sort of instrument?
You could read anyone’s email around the world. Anybody you’ve got an email address for, any website you can watch website to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it. Any laptop that you are tracking, you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. And what’s more, you can tag individuals using Xkeyscore where let’s say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was interesting. or you just have access that is interesting to me. Let’s say you work at a major german corporation. And I want access to that network. I can track your username on a website, on a form somewhere. I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends. And I can build what is called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you. Which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, hide your identity, the NSA you can find you and anyone who is allowed to use this, or who the NSA shares the software with, can do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries that has access to xkeyscore.
This sounds rather frightening. The question is: does the (?) deliver the data of Germans to the NSA?
Whether the BND does it directly, or knowingly, the NSA gets German data. Whether it’s provided I can’t speak to until it’s been reported because it would be classified and I prefer the journalists make the distinctions and the decisions about what is public interest and what should be published. However, it’s no secret that every country in the world has the data of their citizens in the NSA. Millions and millions and millions of data conniptions from Germans going about their daily lives, talking on their cell phones, sending SMS messages, visiting websites, buying things online. All of this ends up at the NSA. And it’s reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it in some capacity. Now whether or not they actively provide the information, I.. should not say.
The BND basically argues “if we do this, we do this accidentally, and our filter didn’t work.”
Right. So the kind of things that they’re discussing there are two things. They’re talking about filtering of ingest which means when the NSA puts a secret server in a German telecommunications provider, or they hack a German router and they divert the traffic in a manner that lets them search through things. They’re saying “what I think is a German talking to another German, I’ll drop it.” But how do you know? You could say, “well, these people are speaking the German language, this IP address seems to be from a German company to another Germany company.” But that’s not accurate, and they wouldn’t dump all of that traffic. Because they’ll get people who are targets of interest, who are actively in Germany using German communications. So realistically what is happening is when they say there is no spying on Germans. They don’t mean the German data isn’t being gathered, they don’t mean that records aren’t being taken or stolen. What they mean is that they’re not intentionally searching for German citizens. And that’s sort of a fingers crossed behind the back promise. It’s not reliable.
What about other European countries, like Norway and Sweden. We have a lot of under water cables going through the Balitic Sea.
So this is sort of an expansion of the same idea. If the NSA isn’t collecting information on German citizens in Germany, are they as soon as it leaves German borders? and the answer is yes. Any single communication that transits the internet the NSA may intercept at multiple points. They might see it in Germany, they might see it in Sweden, they might see it in Norway or Finland. They might see it in Britian and they might see it in the United States. Any single one of these places that a German communication crosses, it’ll be ingested and added to the database.
So let’s come to our Southern European neighbors then. What about Italy, what about France, what about Spain?
It’s the same deal worldwide.
Does the NSA spy on Seimen’s, on Mercedis? On other successful German companies? For example, to prevail, to have the advantage of what is going on in a scientific and economic world?
I won’t want to preempt the editorial decisions of journalists.
Ok
But what I will say is there is no question that the US is engaged in economic spying. If there is information at Siemen’s that they think would be beneficial to the National interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it
there is this old saying.. you do whatever you can do. So the NSA is doing whatever is technically possible.
This is something that the president touched on last year. Where he said just because we can do something - and this was in relation to tapping Angela Merkel phones - Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we should. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The technological capabilities that have been provided because sort of weak security standards in internet protocols and cellular communications networks. Have meant that intelligence services can create systems that see everything.
Nothing annoyed the German government more than the fact that the NSA tapped the private phone of the German chancellor over the last 10 years obviously. Suddenly this invisible surveillance was connected to a known face. Was not connected to a kind of watery-sheddy terrorist background. Obama now promised to stop snooping on Merkel. Which raises the question - did the NSA tap already previous governments in Germany, previous Chancellors. When did they do this, and how long did they do this for?
This is a particularly difficult question for me to answer. Because there is information that I very strongly believe is in the public interest. However, as I’ve said before, I prefer for journalists to make those decisions in advance, review the material themselves and decide whether or not the public value of this information outweighs the reputational cost to the officials that ordered the surveillance. What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency. The question is - how reasonable is it to assume that she is the only German official that was monitored? How reasonable is it to believe that she is the only prominent German face who the NSA was watching? I would suggest it seem unreasonable that if anyone was concerned about the intention of German leadership that they would only watch Merkel and not her aides. Not other prominent officials, not heads of ministry. Or even local government officials.
How does a young man from Elizabeth City in North Carolina, 30 years old, get in such a position in such a sensitive area?
That’s a very difficult question to answer. In general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatizing government functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer. A government employee for the CIA. But I have also served much more frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means in - you have private, for-profit companies doing inherently governmental work like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And anyone who has the skills, who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to do so, will be empowered by the government to do that. There is very little oversight, there’s very little review.
Have you been one of these classical computer kids? Sitting, red eyed, staring in the nights in the age of 12, 15, and your father was knocking on your door telling you to switch off the light, it’s too late now. Did you get your computer skills from that side? When did you get your first computer?
Right. I definitely have had a, shall we say, a deep informal education in computers and electronic technology. They’ve always been interesting and fascinating to me. The characterization of having your parents telling you to go to bed, I would say is fair.
If one looks to the little public data of your data, one discovers that you obviously wanted to join in 2004 the special forces to fight in Iraq. What motivated you at the time? Special forces, looking at you in this moment, means grim fighting and probably killing and.. did you ever get to Iraq?
No, I didn’t get to Iraq. one of the interesting things about the special forces is that they are not intended for direct combat. They are what is referred to as a force multiplier. They are inserted behind enemy lines. It is a squad that has a number of different specialties in it, and they teach and enable the local population to resist or to support US forces. In a way that allows the local population a chance to help determine their own destiny. And I felt that was an inherently noble thing at the time. in hindsight, some of the reasons that we went into Iraq were not well founded. And I think did a disservice to everyone involved?
What happened to your adventure then? Did you stay long with them? What happened to you?
No, I broke my legs when I was in training and was discharged.
So it was a short adventure?
It was a short adventure.
In 2007, the CIA stationed you with a diplomatic cover in Geneva in Switzerland. Why did you join the CIA by the way?
I don’t think I can actually answer that one.
If it is what you were doing there, forget it. But why did you join the CIA?
In many ways, I think it’s a continuation of trying to do everything I could to prosecute the public good in the most effective way. It’s in line with the rest of my government service. I try to use my technical skills, in the most difficult positions I could find in the world. The CIA offered that.
If we look back, special forces, CIA, NSA, it’s not actually the description of a human rights activist or somebody who becomes a whistleblower. What happened to you?
i think it tells a story, and that’s no matter how deeply an individual is embedded in the government, no matter how faithful to the government they are, no matter how strongly they believe in the causes of their government, as I did during the Iraq war… People can learn. People can discover the line between appropriate government behavior and actual wrong doing. And I think it became clear to me that that line had been crossed.
You worked for the NSA through a private contract with the name Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the big names in the business. what is the advantage for the US Government or the CIA to work through a private contractor to outsource a central government function?
Contracting culture of the National Security community in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees, at the same time as keeping lobbying groups and congress typically from very well funded businesses, such as Booz Allen Hamilton. The problem there is you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind. The result of that is what we saw at Booz Allen Hamilton where you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability. No oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone.
At the very end, you ended up in Russia. Many of the intelligence community suspect you made a deal. Classified material for asylum here in Russia.
The chief of the task force investigating me has recently as December said that their investigation had turned up no evidence or indicators at all that I had any outside help or contact or had made a deal of any kind. To accomplish my mission. I worked alone, I didn’t need anybody’s help. I don’t have any ties to foreign governments. i’m not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter. If I am a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who were reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for? The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy. Beyond that, as far as my personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.
After your revelations, none of the European countries really offered you asylum. Where did you apply in Europe for asylum?
I can’t remember the list of countries with any specificity because there were many of them. But France, Germany were definitely in there, as was the UK. A number of European countries. All of whom unfortunately felt that doing the right thing was less important than supporting US political concerns.
One reaction to the NSA’s snooping is that countries like Germany are thinking of creating national Internets in attempt to force internet companies to keep their data in their own country. Does this work?
It’s not going to stop the NSA, let’s put it that way. The NSA goes where the data is. If the NSA can pull text messages out of a telecommunication network in China, they can probably manage to get Facebook messages out of Germany. Ultimately, the solution to that is not to try to stick everything in a walled garden, although that does raise the level of sophistication and complexity of taking the information. It’s also much better simply to secure the information internationally against everyone rather than playing let’s move the data. Moving the data isn’t fixing the problem. Securing the data is the problem.
President Obama in the very moment doesn’t care too much about the message of the leaks. And, together with the NSA, they do care very much more about catching the message in that context. Obama asked the Russian President several times to extradite you, but did not. It looks like you will stay probably the rest of your life in Russia. How do you feel about Russia in that context? I there a solution to that problem?
I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that these leaks didn’t cause harm. In fact, they served the public good. Because of that, I think it would be very difficult to maintain a sort of ongoing campaign of persecution against someone who the public agrees served the public interest.
The New York Times wrote a very long comment and demanded clemency for you. The headline “Edward Snowden, whistleblower.” And I quote from that “the public learning to great detail how the agency has extended its mandate and abused its authority” and the New York Times closes “President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mister Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.” Did you get a call in between from the Whitehouse?
I’ve never received a call from the Whitehouse, and I’m not waiting by the phone. But i would welcome the opportunity to talk about how we can bring this to a conclusion that serves the interest of all parties. I think it’s clear - there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history, and it doesn’t take long for either an American or a German to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things which were not right.
President Obama in the moment seems not quite convinced of that. Because he says you are charged with three felonies, and I quote “if you, Edward Snowden, believe in what you did you should go back to America, appear before the court with a lawyer and make your case.” Is this the solution?
It’s interesting because he mentions three felonies. What he doesn’t say is that the crimes he has charged me with are crimes that doesn’t allow me to make my case. They don’t allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. The espionage act was never intended.. it’s from 1918.. it was never intended to prosecute journalistic sources. People who are informing the newspapers about information that is of public interest. It was intended for people who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments, who are bombing bridges, who were sabotaging communications. not people who were serving the public good. So I would say it’s illustrative that the president would choose to say “someone should face the music” when he knows the music is a show trial.
Edward Snowden, thank you so much for the interview.
Thank You.
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