NSA leaker

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee, unmasked himself Sunday as the principal source of recent Washington Post and Guardian disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs.

Snowden, who has contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, denounced what he described as systematic surveillance of innocent citizens and said in an interview that "it's important to send a message to government that people will not be intimidated."

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Saturday that the NSA had initiated a Justice Department investigation into who leaked the information — an investigation supported by intelligence officials in Congress.

Snowden, whose full name is Edward Joseph Snowden, said he understands the risks of disclosing the information but felt it was important to do.

"I'm not going to hide," Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden, at his request. "Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."

Asked whether he believed his disclosures would change anything, he said: "I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state."

Snowden said nobody was aware of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there wasn't a single event that spurred his decision to leak the information.

"It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence," he said.

Snowden said President Obama hasn't lived up to his pledges of transparency. He blamed a lack of accountability in the Bush administration for continued abuses. "It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law is 'for our own good,' " Snowden said. "That's corrosive to the basic fairness of society."

The White House did not respond to multiple e-mails seeking comment and spokesman Josh Earnest, who was traveling with the president, said the White House would have no comment Sunday.

A brief statement from a spokesperson for Clapper's office referred media to the Justice Department for comment and said the intelligence community was "reviewing the damage" that had been done by the leaks. "Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law," the statement said.

Snowden also expressed hope that the NSA surveillance programs would now be open to legal challenge for the first time. Earlier this year, in Amnesty International v. Clapper, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against the mass collection of phone records because the plaintiffs could not prove exactly what the program did or that they were personally subject to surveillance.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/intelligence-leaders-push-back-on-leakers-media/2013/06/09/fff80160-d122-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

My name's Ed Snowdon, I'm a 29 years old

I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii

And what are some of the [...] that you helped previously within the intelligence community?

I've been a system engineer, system engineer administrator,

senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and

a telecommunications information systems officer.

One of the things people are going to be most interested in,

in trying to understand 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

and to make the choice to actually become a whistleblower

Walk people through that decision-making process

When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this 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 may be 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 recognise 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 wrongdoing 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 realise these things need to be determined by the public, not by someone who's simply hired by the government

Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions, does it target the actions of Americans?

NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by all means possible

that it believes, on the ground of a sort of self-justification, that they serve the national interest

Originally, we saw that focus [...] overseas

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 its systems and it filters them and it analyses 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 associated with a foreign government

or someone that they suspect of terrorism

they're collecting your communication to do so

Any analyst at any time can target anyone

any selector anywhere

where those communications will be picked up depends on a range of decentered networks

and the authorities that that analyist is empowered with, not all analysts have the ability to target everything

but I sitting at my desk certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge,

to even the president, if I had a personal email.