WEBVTT 00:00:10.313 --> 00:00:14.088 My name’s Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old. 00:00:14.104 --> 00:00:20.358 I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii. 00:00:22.421 --> 00:00:26.445 What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community? 00:00:26.445 --> 00:00:30.908 I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator, 00:00:31.693 --> 00:00:36.622 a senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency, 00:00:36.622 --> 00:00:42.129 a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer. 00:00:42.129 --> 00:00:45.427 One of the things people are going to be most interested in, 00:00:45.427 --> 00:00:50.001 in trying to understand who you are and what you’re thinking, 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 00:00:56.922 --> 00:01:01.304 to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. 00:01:01.474 --> 00:01:06.154 Walk people through that decision-making process. 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, 00:01:14.093 --> 00:01:19.750 you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee 00:01:19.750 --> 00:01:24.319 and because of that you see things that may be disturbing. 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. 00:01:29.241 --> 00:01:33.124 When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis 00:01:33.124 --> 00:01:36.591 and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses. 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, 00:01:44.128 --> 00:01:48.272 people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them. 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. 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, 00:01:58.601 --> 00:02:03.515 until eventually you realise that these things need to be determined by the public, 00:02:03.515 --> 00:02:06.206 not by somebody who was simply hired by the government. 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? 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, 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. 00:02:29.492 --> 00:02:36.229 Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. 00:02:36.229 --> 00:02:40.568 Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically. 00:02:40.568 --> 00:02:47.115 And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. 00:02:47.115 --> 00:02:49.783 It ingests them by default. 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, 00:02:56.249 --> 00:03:03.042 simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. 00:03:03.258 --> 00:03:10.216 So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government 00:03:10.216 --> 00:03:14.846 or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. 00:03:14.846 --> 00:03:19.496 Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. 00:03:19.496 --> 00:03:24.862 Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks 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. 00:03:31.029 --> 00:03:35.890 But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, 00:03:35.890 --> 00:03:39.264 from you or your accountant to a federal judge, 00:03:39.264 --> 00:03:41.902 to even the president, if I had a personal email. 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 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. 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. 00:04:01.341 --> 00:04:03.986 Why did you choose to do that? 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. 00:04:12.267 --> 00:04:19.029 When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. 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, 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". 00:04:35.112 --> 00:04:41.583 But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens. 00:04:41.583 --> 00:04:44.763 But they're typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of, 00:04:44.763 --> 00:04:49.015 these people are against the country, they're against the government. But I'm not. 00:04:49.015 --> 00:04:54.437 I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. 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, 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". 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. 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." 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, 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? 00:05:33.500 --> 00:05:37.348 Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. 00:05:37.348 --> 00:05:41.427 I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners. 00:05:41.427 --> 00:05:44.413 You know, they work closely with a number of other nations. 00:05:44.658 --> 00:05:49.575 Or, you know, they could pay off the triads. Or any of their agents or assets. 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 00:05:54.672 --> 00:05:58.374 and I am sure they are going to be very busy for the next week. 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. 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, 00:06:11.901 --> 00:06:16.907 because they're such powerful adversaries, that no one can meaningfully oppose them. 00:06:17.461 --> 00:06:20.457 If they want to get you, they'll get you, in time. 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. 00:06:26.347 --> 00:06:32.386 And if living, living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept – 00:06:32.386 --> 00:06:36.295 and I think many of us are, it's the human nature – 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 00:06:41.938 --> 00:06:46.112 for relatively little work, against the public interest, 00:06:46.112 --> 00:06:50.066 and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But… 00:06:50.435 --> 00:06:53.580 if you realise that that's the world that you helped create, NOTE Paragraph 00:06:53.580 --> 00:06:56.619 and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, NOTE Paragraph 00:06:56.619 --> 00:07:01.314 who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, 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 00:07:06.070 --> 00:07:09.713 so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied. 00:07:09.913 --> 00:07:12.337 Why should people care about surveillance? 00:07:12.629 --> 00:07:16.197 Because, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. 00:07:16.197 --> 00:07:24.556 And the storage capability of the systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude 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. 00:07:29.271 --> 00:07:34.096 You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call 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 00:07:39.528 --> 00:07:42.817 every friend you've ever discussed something with 00:07:42.817 --> 00:07:47.861 and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion 00:07:47.861 --> 00:07:52.625 from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. 00:07:53.009 --> 00:07:57.163 We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong 00:07:57.163 --> 00:08:00.716 which is where we are because you travelled here. 00:08:00.716 --> 00:08:04.848 Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here. 00:08:04.848 --> 00:08:08.867 And specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate 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 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 00:08:22.898 --> 00:08:27.703 with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that? 00:08:27.703 --> 00:08:28.531 Sure. 00:08:28.531 --> 00:08:32.976 So there's a couple assertions in those arguments 00:08:32.976 --> 00:08:38.998 that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong. 00:08:38.998 --> 00:08:42.920 The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not. 00:08:42.920 --> 00:08:48.660 I mean, there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government. 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. 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. 00:09:01.861 --> 00:09:07.425 Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. 00:09:07.425 --> 00:09:14.557 People think, "Oh, China, great firewall". Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but 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. 00:09:21.279 --> 00:09:24.908 The Internet is not filtered here 00:09:24.908 --> 00:09:27.654 no more so than any other Western government. 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. 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, 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? 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 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. 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, 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. 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. 00:10:28.154 --> 00:10:32.960 But that’s not my intention. And I think, for anyone making that argument, 00:10:32.960 --> 00:10:35.714 they need to think, if they were in my position, 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— 00:10:41.576 --> 00:10:46.468 what would it take to make you leave everything behind? 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. 00:10:57.455 --> 00:11:02.422 People will see in the media all of these disclosures. 00:11:02.422 --> 00:11:09.686 They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, 00:11:11.209 --> 00:11:16.506 to create greater control over American society and global society, 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, 00:11:25.379 --> 00:11:31.770 to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. 00:11:32.740 --> 00:11:37.678 And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse, 00:11:37.909 --> 00:11:43.032 until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, 00:11:43.032 --> 00:11:48.576 because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. 00:11:48.776 --> 00:11:51.594 Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, 00:11:51.594 --> 00:11:57.837 we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. 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… 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, 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 00:12:19.131 --> 00:12:23.546 and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.