Glenn Greenwald - Interview On NSA Whistleblowing (Full Transcript) lyrics

Edward Snowden was interviewed over several days in Hong Kong by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAsk**. [Edward] My name's Ed Snowden, I'm 29 years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure an*lyst for the NSA in Hawaii. [Glenn] And what are some of the positions you held previously within the intelligence community? [Edward] I've been a systems engineer, systems administrator, senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a telecommunications information systems officer. [Glenn] 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 crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower, to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. Walk people through that decision making process. [Edward] When you're in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for the 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 maybe 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 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 the wrong-doing 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 was simply hired by the government. [Glenn] Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions, and does it target the actions of Americans. [Edward] NSA and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence where ever it can, by any means possible. It believes, on the grounds of, sort of, a self-certification that they serve the national interests. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored, as foreign intelligence gathered over seas. 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 a system and it filters them and it an*lyzes 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 with an a**ociation with a foreign government, or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any an*lyst, 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 an*lyst is empowered with. Not all an*lysts have the ability to target everything, but I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President, if I had a personal email. [Glenn] One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously, take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can which, they hope often, is forever. You on the other hand have decided to do the opposite, which is, to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures. Why did you choose to do that? [Edward] 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's a fundamentally dangerous thing to a democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, as the government does when it wants to benefit from that secret action that it took, it'll kind of give it's official mandate to go, "Hey, 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, it becomes a thing of these people are against the country or against the government, but I'm not. I'm not different from anybody else--I don't have special sk**s. I'm just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office and watches what's happening and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these policies are right or wrong.' And I'm wiling 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 doing this.' [Glenn] Have you given thought to what the US government's response to your conduct is, in terms of of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you? [Edward] Yeah. I could be rendered by the CIA, I could have people come after me, or any of their third party partners, you know. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or, you know, they could pay off the Triads, or any, any of their agents or a**ets. We've got a CIA station just up the road in the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I'm sure they're going to be very busy for the next week. And that's a fear I'll 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 they're 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 unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept--and I think many of us are, it's human nature--you can get up everyday, you can to go to work, you can collect 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 you helped create, and it's going to get worse with the next generation and 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, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decision about how that's applied. [Glenn] Why should people care about surveillance? [Edward] Because even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude. It's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you just eventually have to fall under suspicion from somebody, even if it's 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 wrong-doer. [Glenn] We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong, which is where we are because you traveled here. Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here and, specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate that you intend to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival to the United States, which is China, and what 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? [Edward] Sure. So there are a couple of a**ertions in those arguments that are sort of embedded in 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 are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government, but the peoples, inherently, we don't care, we trade with each other freely, we're not at war, we're not in armed conflict, and we're not trying to be-- we're the largest trading partners out there for each other. Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. People think, 'Oh, great China firewall.' Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech, but 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, no more so than any Western government, and I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of leading Western governments. [Glenn] If your motive had been to harm the US and help its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material gain, were there things you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing? [Edward] Oh, absolutely. Anybody in the position of access with the technical capabilities that I had could, you know, s** out secrets, pa** them on the open market to Russia-- they always have an open door, as we do. I had access to the whole roster of everyone at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover a**ets all around the world, the locations of every station that we have, what their missions are, and so forth. If I had just wanted to harm the US, you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. And 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're living in Hawaii, in paradise and making a ton of money--what would it take to make you leave everything behind? 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 see the lengths the government's going to to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society, but 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 when policies will change, because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state is policy. Even our agreements with foreign 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--some new and unpredicted threat-- we need more authority, we need more power. And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it and it will be turnkey tyranny.