Michael Hayden - Comments on Snowden, Anonymous, Hackers lyrics

If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do? [Snowden supporters are] nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite s** in five or six years. They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States. So if they can't create great harm to dot-mil, who are they going after? Who for them are the World Trade Centers? The World Trade Centers, as they were for al-Qaida. I'm just trying to illustrate that you've got a group of people out there who make demands, whose demands may not be satisfiable, may not be rational, from other points of view, may not be the kinds of things that government can accommodate. But certainly Mr Snowden has created quite a stir among those folks who are very committed to transparency and global transparency and the global web, kind of ungoverned and free. And I don't know that there's a logic between trying to [punish] America or American institutions for his arrest, but I hold out the possibility. I can sit here and imagine circumstances and scenarios, but they're nothing more than imaginative.