WEBVTT 00:00:10.483 --> 00:00:14.088 My name’s Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old. 00:00:14.104 --> 00:00:20.358 I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii. 00:00:22.421 --> 00:00:26.200 What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community? 00:00:26.200 --> 00:00:30.124 I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator, 00:00:30.124 --> 00:00:36.622 a senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency, 00:00:36.622 --> 00:00:42.129 a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer. 00:00:42.129 --> 00:00:45.427 One of the things people are going to be most interested in, 00:00:45.427 --> 00:00:50.001 in trying to understand what—who you are and what you’re thinking, 00:00:50.001 --> 00:00:56.599 is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower 00:00:56.599 --> 00:01:01.874 to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. 00:01:01.874 --> 00:01:06.341 Walk people through that decision-making process. 00:01:06.341 --> 00:01:14.093 When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this sort of intelligence community agencies, 00:01:14.093 --> 00:01:19.997 you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee 00:01:19.997 --> 00:01:24.027 and because of that you see things that may be disturbing. 00:01:24.027 --> 00:01:29.241 But over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances. 00:01:29.241 --> 00:01:33.124 When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis 00:01:33.124 --> 00:01:36.591 and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses. 00:01:36.591 --> 00:01:44.128 And when you talk to people about them, in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, 00:01:44.128 --> 00:01:48.272 people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them. 00:01:48.272 --> 00:01:54.610 But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it. 00:01:54.610 --> 00:01:58.601 And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem, 00:01:58.601 --> 00:02:03.977 until eventually you realise that these things need to be determined by the public, 00:02:03.977 --> 00:02:06.378 not by somebody who was simply hired by the government. 00:02:06.378 --> 00:02:13.496 Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of Americans? 00:02:13.496 --> 00:02:22.779 NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible, 00:02:22.779 --> 00:02:29.492 that it believes, on the grounds of a sort of self-certification, that they serve the national interest. 00:02:29.492 --> 00:02:36.137 Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. 00:02:36.137 --> 00:02:41.092 Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically. 00:02:41.092 --> 00:02:47.377 And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. 00:02:47.377 --> 00:02:56.577 It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyses them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time, 00:02:56.577 --> 00:03:03.536 simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. 00:03:03.536 --> 00:03:10.216 So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government 00:03:10.216 --> 00:03:12.495 or someone that they suspect of terrorism, 00:03:12.495 --> 00:03:15.616 they're collecting your communications to do so. 00:03:15.616 --> 00:03:19.496 Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. 00:03:19.496 --> 00:03:24.862 Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks 00:03:24.862 --> 00:03:31.029 and the authorities that that analyist is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. 00:03:31.029 --> 00:03:36.537 But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, 00:03:36.537 --> 00:03:39.495 from you or your accountant to a federal judge, 00:03:39.495 --> 00:03:42.133 to even the president, if I had a personal email. 00:03:42.133 --> 00:03:49.112 One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously 00:03:49.112 --> 00:03:55.029 and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope, often, is forever. 00:03:55.029 --> 00:04:01.495 You, on the other hand, have this attitude of the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures. 00:04:01.495 --> 00:04:04.094 Why did you choose to do that? 00:04:04.094 --> 00:04:12.498 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 model. 00:04:12.498 --> 00:04:19.029 When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. 00:04:19.029 --> 00:04:27.946 And if you do that in secret, consistenty, you know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took, 00:04:27.946 --> 00:04:35.112 it will kind of give its officials a mandate to go, "Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side". 00:04:35.112 --> 00:04:38.216 But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. 00:04:38.216 --> 00:04:43.575 That falls to individual citizens. But they're typically maligned. 00:04:43.575 --> 00:04:48.015 You know, it becomes a thing of, these people are against the country, they're against the government. 00:04:48.015 --> 00:04:53.976 But I'm not. I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. 00:04:53.976 --> 00:05:00.492 I'm just another guy who sits there, day-to-day, in the office, and watches what's happening, 00:05:00.492 --> 00:05:05.536 and goes, "This is something that's not our place to decide. 00:05:05.536 --> 00:05:08.696 The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong". 00:05:08.696 --> 00:05:12.861 And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them 00:05:12.861 --> 00:05:18.362 and say, "I didn't change these. I didn't modify the story. This is the truth. This is what's happening. 00:05:18.362 --> 00:05:20.976 You should decide whether we need to be doing this." 00:05:20.976 --> 00:05:27.136 Have you given thought to what it is that the U.S. government’s response to your conduct is, 00:05:27.136 --> 00:05:32.857 in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you? 00:05:32.857 --> 00:05:37.335 Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. 00:05:37.335 --> 00:05:41.862 I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners. 00:05:41.862 --> 00:05:44.816 You know, they work closely with a number of other nations. 00:05:44.816 --> 00:05:49.575 Or, you know, they could pay off the triads. Or any of their agents or assets. 00:05:49.575 --> 00:05:58.137 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. 00:05:58.137 --> 00:06:04.216 And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. 00:06:04.216 --> 00:06:09.456 You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies 00:06:09.456 --> 00:06:16.295 and be completely free from risk, because they're such powerful adversaries, that no one can meaningfully oppose them. 00:06:16.295 --> 00:06:20.536 If they want to get you, they'll get you, in time. 00:06:20.536 --> 00:06:26.812 But, at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you. 00:06:26.812 --> 00:06:32.695 And if living, living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept – 00:06:32.695 --> 00:06:35.695 and I think many of us are, it's the human nature – 00:06:35.695 --> 00:06:41.862 you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck 00:06:41.862 --> 00:06:46.112 for relatively little work, against the public interest, 00:06:46.112 --> 00:06:50.297 and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. 00:06:50.297 --> 00:06:55.028 But if you realise that that's the world that you helped create 00:06:55.028 --> 00:06:56.896 and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, 00:06:56.896 --> 00:07:01.653 who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, 00:07:01.653 --> 00:07:04.656 you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk 00:07:04.656 --> 00:07:06.335 and it doesn't matter what the outcome is 00:07:06.335 --> 00:07:09.946 so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied. 00:07:09.946 --> 00:07:12.337 Why should people care about surveillance? 00:07:12.337 --> 00:07:16.336 Because, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. 00:07:16.336 --> 00:07:23.696 And the storage capability of the systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude 00:07:23.696 --> 00:07:29.195 to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong. 00:07:29.195 --> 00:07:34.096 You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call 00:07:34.096 --> 00:07:39.528 and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you've ever made 00:07:39.528 --> 00:07:42.817 every friend you've ever discussed something with 00:07:42.817 --> 00:07:47.861 and attack you on that basis, just to sort of derive suspicion 00:07:47.861 --> 00:07:52.656 from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. 00:07:52.656 --> 00:07:57.256 We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong 00:07:57.256 --> 00:08:01.332 which is where we are because you travelled here. 00:08:01.332 --> 00:08:05.495 Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here. 00:08:05.495 --> 00:08:08.375 And specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate 00:08:08.375 --> 00:08:15.778 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 00:08:15.778 --> 00:08:23.576 which is China, and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States 00:08:23.576 --> 00:08:27.936 with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that? 00:08:27.936 --> 00:08:32.976 Sure. So there's a couple assertions in those arguments 00:08:32.976 --> 00:08:37.215 that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong. 00:08:37.215 --> 00:08:43.028 The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not. 00:08:43.028 --> 00:08:48.537 I mean, there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government. 00:08:48.537 --> 00:08:54.216 But the peoples, inherently, we don't care. We trade with each other freely. 00:08:54.216 --> 00:08:58.375 We're not at war. We're not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be. 00:08:58.375 --> 00:09:02.456 We're the largest trading partners out there for each other. 00:09:02.456 --> 00:09:07.656 Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. 00:09:07.656 --> 00:09:14.112 People think, "Oh, China, great firewall". Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech 00:09:14.112 --> 00:09:21.279 but the Hong Kong—the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known. 00:09:21.279 --> 00:09:27.293 The Internet is not filtered here, no more so than any other Western government. 00:09:27.293 --> 00:09:36.112 And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments. 00:09:36.112 --> 00:09:41.817 If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies, 00:09:41.817 --> 00:09:46.946 or if your motive had been personal material gain, 00:09:46.946 --> 00:09:50.216 were there things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn’t end up doing? 00:09:50.216 --> 00:09:56.735 Oh, absolutely. I mean, anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had 00:09:56.735 --> 00:10:02.537 could, you know, suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to Russia. You know, they always have an open door, as we do. 00:10:02.537 --> 00:10:11.096 I had access to, you know, the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, 00:10:11.096 --> 00:10:18.052 and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth. 00:10:18.052 --> 00:10:28.617 If I had just wanted to harm the U.S., you know, that—you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. 00:10:28.617 --> 00:10:29.976 But that’s not my intention. 00:10:29.976 --> 00:10:35.361 And I think, for anyone making that argument, they need to think, if they were in my position, 00:10:35.361 --> 00:10:41.576 and, you know, you live a privileged life—you’re living in Hawaii, in Paradise, and making a ton of money— 00:10:41.576 --> 00:10:46.946 what would it take to make you leave everything behind? 00:10:46.946 --> 00:10:57.455 The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. 00:10:57.455 --> 00:11:04.576 People will see in the media all of these disclosures. 00:11:04.576 --> 00:11:10.240 They’ll know the length that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, 00:11:10.240 --> 00:11:17.076 to create greater control over American society and global society, 00:11:17.076 --> 00:11:25.456 but they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, 00:11:25.456 --> 00:11:32.740 to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. 00:11:32.740 --> 00:11:37.909 And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse, 00:11:37.909 --> 00:11:43.294 until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, 00:11:43.294 --> 00:11:48.576 because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. 00:11:48.576 --> 00:11:52.456 Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, 00:11:52.456 --> 00:11:57.976 we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. 00:11:57.976 --> 00:12:03.455 And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, 00:12:03.455 --> 00:12:14.296 say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, 00:12:14.296 --> 00:12:20.417 we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.