0:00:10.313,0:00:14.088
My name’s Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old.

0:00:14.104,0:00:20.358
I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.

0:00:22.421,0:00:26.445
What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community?

0:00:26.445,0:00:30.908
I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator,

0:00:31.693,0:00:36.622
a senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency,

0:00:36.622,0:00:42.129
a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

0:00:42.129,0:00:45.427
One of the things people are going to be most interested in,

0:00:45.427,0:00:50.001
in trying to understand who you are and what you’re thinking,

0:00:50.001,0:00:56.599
is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower

0:00:56.922,0:01:01.304
to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower.

0:01:01.474,0:01:06.154
Walk people through that decision-making process.

0:01:06.355,0:01:14.093
When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this sort of intelligence community agencies,

0:01:14.093,0:01:19.750
you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee

0:01:19.750,0:01:24.319
and because of that you see things that may be disturbing.

0:01:24.319,0:01:29.241
But over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances.

0:01:29.241,0:01:33.124
When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis

0:01:33.124,0:01:36.591
and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses.

0:01:36.591,0:01:44.128
And when you talk to people about them, in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business,

0:01:44.128,0:01:48.272
people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them.

0:01:48.272,0:01:54.610
But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it.

0:01:54.610,0:01:58.601
And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem,

0:01:58.601,0:02:03.515
until eventually you realise that these things need to be determined by the public,

0:02:03.515,0:02:06.206
not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.

0:02:06.375,0:02:14.310
Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of Americans?

0:02:15.018,0:02:22.655
NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible,

0:02:22.655,0:02:29.076
and it believes, on the grounds of a sort of self-certification, that they serve the national interest.

0:02:29.492,0:02:36.229
Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas.

0:02:36.229,0:02:40.568
Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically.

0:02:40.568,0:02:47.115
And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone.

0:02:47.115,0:02:49.783
It ingests them by default.

0:02:49.783,0:02:56.249
It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyses them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time,

0:02:56.249,0:03:03.042
simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends.

0:03:03.258,0:03:10.216
So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government

0:03:10.216,0:03:14.846
or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so.

0:03:14.846,0:03:19.496
Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere.

0:03:19.496,0:03:24.862
Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks

0:03:24.862,0:03:31.029
and the authorities that that analyist is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything.

0:03:31.029,0:03:35.890
But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone,

0:03:35.890,0:03:39.264
from you or your accountant to a federal judge,

0:03:39.264,0:03:41.902
to even the president, if I had a personal email.

0:03:41.902,0:03:48.865
One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously

0:03:48.865,0:03:54.767
and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope, often, is forever.

0:03:54.767,0:04:01.341
You, on the other hand, have this attitude of the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures.

0:04:01.341,0:04:03.986
Why did you choose to do that?

0:04:04.216,0:04:12.267
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.

0:04:12.267,0:04:19.029
When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

0:04:19.029,0:04:28.252
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,

0:04:28.252,0:04:35.112
it will kind of give its officials a mandate to go, "Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side".

0:04:35.112,0:04:41.583
But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens.

0:04:41.583,0:04:44.763
But they're typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of,

0:04:44.763,0:04:49.015
these people are against the country, they're against the government. But I'm not.

0:04:49.015,0:04:54.437
I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills.

0:04:54.437,0:05:00.798
I'm just another guy who sits there, day-to-day, in the office, and watches what's happening, and goes,

0:05:00.798,0:05:08.519
"This is something that's not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong".

0:05:08.519,0:05:15.428
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.

0:05:15.428,0:05:20.637
This is the truth. This is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

0:05:20.867,0:05:26.951
Have you given thought to what it is that the U.S. government’s response to your conduct is,

0:05:26.951,0:05:32.870
in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you?

0:05:33.500,0:05:37.348
Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA.

0:05:37.348,0:05:41.427
I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners.

0:05:41.427,0:05:44.413
You know, they work closely with a number of other nations.

0:05:44.658,0:05:49.575
Or, you know, they could pay off the triads. Or any of their agents or assets.

0:05:49.575,0:05:54.672
We've got a CIA station just up the road, and the consulate here in Hong Kong

0:05:54.672,0:05:58.374
and I am sure they are going to be very busy for the next week.

0:05:59.405,0:06:04.076
And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.

0:06:04.292,0:06:11.901
You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk,

0:06:11.901,0:06:16.907
because they're such powerful adversaries, that no one can meaningfully oppose them.

0:06:17.461,0:06:20.457
If they want to get you, they'll get you, in time.

0:06:20.749,0:06:26.347
But, at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you.

0:06:26.347,0:06:32.386
And if living, living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept –

0:06:32.386,0:06:36.295
and I think many of us are, it's the human nature –

0:06:36.895,0:06:41.938
you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck

0:06:41.938,0:06:46.112
for relatively little work, against the public interest,

0:06:46.112,0:06:50.066
and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But…

0:06:50.435,0:06:53.580
if you realise that that's the world that you helped create,

0:06:53.580,0:06:56.619
and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation,

0:06:56.619,0:07:01.314
who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression,

0:07:01.653,0:07:06.070
you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is

0:07:06.070,0:07:09.713
so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

0:07:09.913,0:07:12.337
Why should people care about surveillance?

0:07:12.629,0:07:16.197
Because, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded.

0:07:16.197,0:07:24.556
And the storage capability of the systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude

0:07:24.679,0:07:29.118
to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong.

0:07:29.271,0:07:34.096
You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call

0:07:34.096,0:07:39.528
and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you've ever made

0:07:39.528,0:07:42.817
every friend you've ever discussed something with

0:07:42.817,0:07:47.861
and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion

0:07:47.861,0:07:52.625
from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

0:07:53.009,0:07:57.163
We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong

0:07:57.163,0:08:00.716
which is where we are because you travelled here.

0:08:00.716,0:08:04.848
Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here.

0:08:04.848,0:08:08.867
And specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate

0:08:08.867,0:08:15.778
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

0:08:15.778,0:08:22.898
which is China, and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States

0:08:22.898,0:08:27.703
with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that?

0:08:27.703,0:08:28.531
Sure.

0:08:28.531,0:08:32.976
So there's a couple assertions in those arguments

0:08:32.976,0:08:38.998
that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong.

0:08:38.998,0:08:42.920
The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not.

0:08:42.920,0:08:48.660
I mean, there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government.

0:08:48.660,0:08:55.523
But the peoples, inherently, we don't care. We trade with each other freely. We're not at war.

0:08:55.523,0:09:01.384
We're not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be. We're the largest trading partners out there for each other.

0:09:01.861,0:09:07.425
Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech.

0:09:07.425,0:09:14.557
People think, "Oh, China, great firewall". Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but

0:09:14.557,0:09:21.279
the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known.

0:09:21.279,0:09:24.908
The Internet is not filtered here

0:09:24.908,0:09:27.654
no more so than any other Western government.

0:09:27.654,0:09:37.033
And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments.

0:09:37.433,0:09:44.092
If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material gain,

0:09:44.092,0:09:50.154
were there things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn’t end up doing?

0:09:50.261,0:09:56.735
Oh, absolutely. I mean, anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had

0:09:56.735,0:10:03.674
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.

0:10:05.228,0:10:11.724
I had access to, you know, the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community,

0:10:11.724,0:10:19.168
and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.

0:10:19.431,0:10:27.201
If I had just wanted to harm the U.S., you know… you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.

0:10:28.154,0:10:32.960
But that’s not my intention. And I think, for anyone making that argument,

0:10:32.960,0:10:35.714
they need to think, if they were in my position,

0:10:35.714,0:10:41.576
and, you know, you live a privileged life—you’re living in Hawaii, in Paradise, and making a ton of money—

0:10:41.576,0:10:46.468
what would it take to make you leave everything behind?

0:10:47.192,0:10:57.455
The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

0:10:57.455,0:11:02.422
People will see in the media all of these disclosures.

0:11:02.422,0:11:09.686
They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally,

0:11:11.209,0:11:16.506
to create greater control over American society and global society,

0:11:17.382,0:11:25.163
but they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things,

0:11:25.379,0:11:31.770
to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

0:11:32.740,0:11:37.678
And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse,

0:11:37.909,0:11:43.032
until eventually there will be a time where policies will change,

0:11:43.032,0:11:48.576
because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy.

0:11:48.776,0:11:51.594
Even our agreements with other sovereign governments,

0:11:51.594,0:11:57.837
we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law.

0:11:57.976,0:12:03.160
And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, say that…

0:12:05.791,0:12:13.309
…because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat,

0:12:13.309,0:12:18.730
we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it

0:12:19.131,0:12:23.546
and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.