1 00:00:10,313 --> 00:00:14,088 My name’s Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old. 2 00:00:14,104 --> 00:00:20,358 I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii. 3 00:00:22,421 --> 00:00:26,445 What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community? 4 00:00:26,445 --> 00:00:30,908 I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator, 5 00:00:31,693 --> 00:00:36,622 a senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency, 6 00:00:36,622 --> 00:00:42,129 a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer. 7 00:00:42,129 --> 00:00:45,427 One of the things people are going to be most interested in, 8 00:00:45,427 --> 00:00:50,001 in trying to understand who you are and what you’re thinking, 9 00:00:50,001 --> 00:00:56,599 is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower 10 00:00:56,922 --> 00:01:01,304 to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. 11 00:01:01,474 --> 00:01:06,154 Walk people through that decision-making process. 12 00:01:06,355 --> 00:01:14,093 When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this sort of intelligence community agencies, 13 00:01:14,093 --> 00:01:19,750 you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee 14 00:01:19,750 --> 00:01:24,319 and because of that you see things that may be disturbing. 15 00:01:24,319 --> 00:01:29,241 But over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances. 16 00:01:29,241 --> 00:01:33,124 When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis 17 00:01:33,124 --> 00:01:36,591 and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses. 18 00:01:36,591 --> 00:01:44,128 And when you talk to people about them, in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, 19 00:01:44,128 --> 00:01:48,272 people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them. 20 00:01:48,272 --> 00:01:54,610 But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it. 21 00:01:54,610 --> 00:01:58,601 And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem, 22 00:01:58,601 --> 00:02:03,515 until eventually you realise that these things need to be determined by the public, 23 00:02:03,515 --> 00:02:06,206 not by somebody who was simply hired by the government. 24 00:02:06,375 --> 00:02:14,310 Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of Americans? 25 00:02:15,018 --> 00:02:22,655 NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible, 26 00:02:22,655 --> 00:02:29,076 and it believes, on the grounds of a sort of self-certification, that they serve the national interest. 27 00:02:29,492 --> 00:02:36,229 Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. 28 00:02:36,229 --> 00:02:40,568 Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically. 29 00:02:40,568 --> 00:02:47,115 And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. 30 00:02:47,115 --> 00:02:49,783 It ingests them by default. 31 00:02:49,783 --> 00:02:56,249 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, 32 00:02:56,249 --> 00:03:03,042 simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. 33 00:03:03,258 --> 00:03:10,216 So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government 34 00:03:10,216 --> 00:03:14,846 or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. 35 00:03:14,846 --> 00:03:19,496 Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. 36 00:03:19,496 --> 00:03:24,862 Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks 37 00:03:24,862 --> 00:03:31,029 and the authorities that that analyist is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. 38 00:03:31,029 --> 00:03:35,890 But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, 39 00:03:35,890 --> 00:03:39,264 from you or your accountant to a federal judge, 40 00:03:39,264 --> 00:03:41,902 to even the president, if I had a personal email. 41 00:03:41,902 --> 00:03:48,865 One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously 42 00:03:48,865 --> 00:03:54,767 and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope, often, is forever. 43 00:03:54,767 --> 00:04:01,341 You, on the other hand, have this attitude of the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures. 44 00:04:01,341 --> 00:04:03,986 Why did you choose to do that? 45 00:04:04,216 --> 00:04:12,267 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. 46 00:04:12,267 --> 00:04:19,029 When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. 47 00:04:19,029 --> 00:04:28,252 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, 48 00:04:28,252 --> 00:04:35,112 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". 49 00:04:35,112 --> 00:04:41,583 But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens. 50 00:04:41,583 --> 00:04:44,763 But they're typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of, 51 00:04:44,763 --> 00:04:49,015 these people are against the country, they're against the government. But I'm not. 52 00:04:49,015 --> 00:04:54,437 I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. 53 00:04:54,437 --> 00:05:00,798 I'm just another guy who sits there, day-to-day, in the office, and watches what's happening, and goes, 54 00:05:00,798 --> 00:05:08,519 "This is something that's not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong". 55 00:05:08,519 --> 00:05:15,428 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. 56 00:05:15,428 --> 00:05:20,637 This is the truth. This is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this." 57 00:05:20,867 --> 00:05:26,951 Have you given thought to what it is that the U.S. government’s response to your conduct is, 58 00:05:26,951 --> 00:05:32,870 in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you? 59 00:05:33,500 --> 00:05:37,348 Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. 60 00:05:37,348 --> 00:05:41,427 I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners. 61 00:05:41,427 --> 00:05:44,413 You know, they work closely with a number of other nations. 62 00:05:44,658 --> 00:05:49,575 Or, you know, they could pay off the triads. Or any of their agents or assets. 63 00:05:49,575 --> 00:05:54,672 We've got a CIA station just up the road, and the consulate here in Hong Kong 64 00:05:54,672 --> 00:05:58,374 and I am sure they are going to be very busy for the next week. 65 00:05:59,405 --> 00:06:04,076 And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. 66 00:06:04,292 --> 00:06:11,901 You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk, 67 00:06:11,901 --> 00:06:16,907 because they're such powerful adversaries, that no one can meaningfully oppose them. 68 00:06:17,461 --> 00:06:20,457 If they want to get you, they'll get you, in time. 69 00:06:20,749 --> 00:06:26,347 But, at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you. 70 00:06:26,347 --> 00:06:32,386 And if living, living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept – 71 00:06:32,386 --> 00:06:36,295 and I think many of us are, it's the human nature – 72 00:06:36,895 --> 00:06:41,938 you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck 73 00:06:41,938 --> 00:06:46,112 for relatively little work, against the public interest, 74 00:06:46,112 --> 00:06:50,066 and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But… 75 00:06:50,435 --> 00:06:53,580 if you realise that that's the world that you helped create, 76 00:06:53,580 --> 00:06:56,619 and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, 77 00:06:56,619 --> 00:07:01,314 who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, 78 00:07:01,653 --> 00:07:06,070 you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is 79 00:07:06,070 --> 00:07:09,713 so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied. 80 00:07:09,913 --> 00:07:12,337 Why should people care about surveillance? 81 00:07:12,629 --> 00:07:16,197 Because, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. 82 00:07:16,197 --> 00:07:24,556 And the storage capability of the systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude 83 00:07:24,679 --> 00:07:29,118 to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong. 84 00:07:29,271 --> 00:07:34,096 You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call 85 00:07:34,096 --> 00:07:39,528 and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you've ever made 86 00:07:39,528 --> 00:07:42,817 every friend you've ever discussed something with 87 00:07:42,817 --> 00:07:47,861 and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion 88 00:07:47,861 --> 00:07:52,625 from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. 89 00:07:53,009 --> 00:07:57,163 We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong 90 00:07:57,163 --> 00:08:00,716 which is where we are because you travelled here. 91 00:08:00,716 --> 00:08:04,848 Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here. 92 00:08:04,848 --> 00:08:08,867 And specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate 93 00:08:08,867 --> 00:08:15,778 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 94 00:08:15,778 --> 00:08:22,898 which is China, and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States 95 00:08:22,898 --> 00:08:27,703 with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that? 96 00:08:27,703 --> 00:08:28,531 Sure. 97 00:08:28,531 --> 00:08:32,976 So there's a couple assertions in those arguments 98 00:08:32,976 --> 00:08:38,998 that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong. 99 00:08:38,998 --> 00:08:42,920 The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not. 100 00:08:42,920 --> 00:08:48,660 I mean, there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government. 101 00:08:48,660 --> 00:08:55,523 But the peoples, inherently, we don't care. We trade with each other freely. We're not at war. 102 00:08:55,523 --> 00:09:01,384 We're not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be. We're the largest trading partners out there for each other. 103 00:09:01,861 --> 00:09:07,425 Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. 104 00:09:07,425 --> 00:09:14,557 People think, "Oh, China, great firewall". Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but 105 00:09:14,557 --> 00:09:21,279 the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known. 106 00:09:21,279 --> 00:09:24,908 The Internet is not filtered here 107 00:09:24,908 --> 00:09:27,654 no more so than any other Western government. 108 00:09:27,654 --> 00:09:37,033 And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments. 109 00:09:37,433 --> 00:09:44,092 If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material gain, 110 00:09:44,092 --> 00:09:50,154 were there things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn’t end up doing? 111 00:09:50,261 --> 00:09:56,735 Oh, absolutely. I mean, anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had 112 00:09:56,735 --> 00:10:03,674 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. 113 00:10:05,228 --> 00:10:11,724 I had access to, you know, the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, 114 00:10:11,724 --> 00:10:19,168 and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth. 115 00:10:19,431 --> 00:10:27,201 If I had just wanted to harm the U.S., you know… you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. 116 00:10:28,154 --> 00:10:32,960 But that’s not my intention. And I think, for anyone making that argument, 117 00:10:32,960 --> 00:10:35,714 they need to think, if they were in my position, 118 00:10:35,714 --> 00:10:41,576 and, you know, you live a privileged life—you’re living in Hawaii, in Paradise, and making a ton of money— 119 00:10:41,576 --> 00:10:46,468 what would it take to make you leave everything behind? 120 00:10:47,192 --> 00:10:57,455 The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. 121 00:10:57,455 --> 00:11:02,422 People will see in the media all of these disclosures. 122 00:11:02,422 --> 00:11:09,686 They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, 123 00:11:11,209 --> 00:11:16,506 to create greater control over American society and global society, 124 00:11:17,382 --> 00:11:25,163 but they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, 125 00:11:25,379 --> 00:11:31,770 to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. 126 00:11:32,740 --> 00:11:37,678 And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse, 127 00:11:37,909 --> 00:11:43,032 until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, 128 00:11:43,032 --> 00:11:48,576 because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. 129 00:11:48,776 --> 00:11:51,594 Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, 130 00:11:51,594 --> 00:11:57,837 we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. 131 00:11:57,976 --> 00:12:03,160 And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, say that… 132 00:12:05,791 --> 00:12:13,309 …because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, 133 00:12:13,309 --> 00:12:18,730 we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it 134 00:12:19,131 --> 00:12:23,546 and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.