9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 My name's Ed Snowdon, I'm a 29 years old 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And what are some of the [...] that you helped previously within the intelligence community? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I've been a system engineer, system engineer administrator, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 a telecommunications information systems officer. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 One of the things people are going to be most interested in, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 in trying to understand who you are and what you're thinking 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and to make the choice to actually become a whistleblower 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Walk people through that decision-making process 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this sort of intelligence community agencies, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and because of that you see things that may be disturbing 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but over the course of a normal person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 when you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and when you talk to people about them, in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 until eventually you realise these things need to be determined by the public, not by someone who's simply hired by the government 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions, does it target the actions of Americans? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by all means possible 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that it believes, on the ground of a sort of self-justification, that they serve the national interest 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Originally, we saw that focus [...] overseas 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 simply because that's the easiest most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 so while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 or someone that they suspect of terrorism 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they're collecting your communication to do so 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Any analyst at any time can target anyone 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 any selector anywhere 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 where those communications will be picked up depends on a range of decentered networks 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and the authorities that that analyist is empowered with, not all analysts have the ability to target everything 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but I sitting at my desk certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to even the president, if I had a personal email.