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

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

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

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

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

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a telecommunications information systems officer.

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

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in trying to understand who you are and what you're thinking

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is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower

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and to make the choice to actually become a whistleblower

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Walk people through that decision-making process

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When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this sort of intelligence community agencies,

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you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee

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and because of that you see things that may be disturbing

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but over the course of a normal person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances

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when you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis

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and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses

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and when you talk to people about them, in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business,

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people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them

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but over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it

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and the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem

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until eventually you realise these things need to be determined by the public, not by someone who's simply hired by the government

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

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

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

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

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Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically

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And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default

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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

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simply because that's the easiest most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends

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so while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government

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or someone that they suspect of terrorism

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they're collecting your communication to do so

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Any analyst at any time can target anyone

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any selector anywhere

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

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

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

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