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.