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.
One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously
and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope often is forever.
You on the other hand have decided for the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures.
Why did you choose to do that?
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 [?]
When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy
and if you do that in secret, consistenty, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took
it all kind of gives its officials a mandate to go hey, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side
But they rarely if ever do that when an abuse occurs
that falls to individual citizens
but they're typically malign, you know, it becomes a thing of, these people are against the country, or against the government
But I'm not. I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills.
I'm just another guy who sits there, day-to-day, in the office, and watches what's happening
and goes, this is something that's not our place to decide
the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong
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, this is the truth, this is what's happening
you should decide whether we need to be doing this
Have you given thought to what it is that the US government responds to
your conduct [?] in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you
what they might try to do to you?
Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA
I could have people come after me or
any of their third-party partners, you know, they work closely with a number of other nations
Or, you know, they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets.
We've got a CIA station just up the road, and the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I am sure they are going to be very busy for the next week.
And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.
You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies
and be completely free from risk, because they're such powerful adversaries, that no one can meaningfully oppose them
If they want to get you, they will get you in time.
But, at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you.
And if living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept
and I think many of us are, it's the human nature
you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck
for relatively little work, against the public interest
and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.
But if you realise that that's the world that you helped create
and it's going to get worse, with the next generation, and the next generation,
to extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression
you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk
and it doesn't matter what the outcome is
so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.
Why should people care about surveillance?
Because, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded
and the storage capability of the systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude
to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong
you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call
and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you've ever made
every friend you've ever discussed something with
and attack you on that basis just to sort of derive suspicion
from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.
We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong
which is where we are because you travelled here.
Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here
and specifically there are going to be people who will speculate
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
which is China, and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States
with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. So there's a couple assertions in those arguments
that are sort of invented. The questioning of the choice of Hong Kong.
The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not.
There are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government
but the peoples, inherently, we don't care. We trade with each other freely.
We're not at war, we're not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be.
We're the largest trading partners out there for each other.
Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech.
People think, "Oh, China, great firewall". Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech
but the Hong Kong—the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known.
The Internet is not filtered here, no more so than any other Western government.
And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments.
If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies,