[News] Edward Snowden Emerges as Source Behind Explosive Revelations of NSA Spying

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Monday, June 10, 2013
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/youre_being_watched_edward_snowden_emerges#


  "You're Being Watched": Edward Snowden Emerges as Source Behind
  Explosive Revelations of NSA Spying

Former CIA employee Edward Snowden has come forward as the whistleblower 
behind the explosive revelations about the National Security Agency and 
the U.S. surveillance state. Three weeks ago the 29-year-old left his 
job inside the NSA's office in Hawaii where he worked for the private 
intelligence firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Today he is in Hong Kong --- not 
sure if he will ever see his home again. In a video interview with The 
Guardian of London, Snowden says he exposed top-secret NSA surveillance 
programs to alert Americans of expansive government spying on innocents. 
"Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and 
recorded," Snowden says. "And the storage capability of these 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 this system to go back in time 
and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever 
discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of 
derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context 
of a wrongdoer. ... The public needs to decide whether these programs 
and policies are right or wrong."


    Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

*AMY GOODMAN:* We turn now to the man who blew the whistle on the 
National Security Agency and the expanding U.S. surveillance state. On 
Sunday, /The Guardian/ newspaper revealed the source of its explosive 
series on the NSA to be a 29-year-old former CIA technical assistant 
named Edward Snowden. For the past four years, Snowden has been working 
at the NSA as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz 
Allen Hamilton and Dell. Most recently, he was working at the NSA office 
in Hawaii. On May 20th, he boarded a plane bound for Hong Kong, where he 
has remained ever since.

Since Wednesday, /The Guardian/ has published a series of articles based 
on information provided by Snowden. First /The Guardian/ revealed the 
National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of millions of 
Verizon customers under a secret court order issued in April. Then /The 
Guardian/ revealed the existence of a top-secret program codenamed 
PRISM, where the NSA obtained access to the central servers of nine 
major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and 
Facebook. Then, on Friday, /The Guardian/ exposed how President had 
ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw 
up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber-attacks.

And then /The Guardian/ revealed details about an NSA data-mining tool 
called Boundless Informant that details and even maps by country the 
voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone 
networks. A top-secret NSA "global heat map" shows that in March 2013 
the agency collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer 
networks worldwide. The NSA most frequently targeted Iran, Pakistan, 
Jordan, Egypt and India. The Boundless Informant documents also showed 
the agency collected almost three billion pieces of intelligence from 
U.S. computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March of 2013.

In a few minutes, we'll be joined by /Guardian/ columnist Glenn 
Greenwald, who has written these exposés, but first let's turn to NSA 
whistleblower Edward Snowden in his own words. He recently sat down with 
Glenn Greenwald to talk about why he leaked the documents and why he is 
revealing his identity. The interview was filmed by Laura Poitras. It 
was filmed in Hong Kong. It was posted on the /Guardian/ website on Sunday.

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* My name's Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old. I work
    for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* What are some of the positions that you held
    previously within the intelligence community?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* I have been a systems engineer, systems
    administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency,
    a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems
    officer.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* One of the things people are going to be most
    interested in, in trying to understand what---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 to making the
    choice to actually become a whistleblower. Walk people through that
    decision-making process.

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* When your in positions of privileged access, like
    a systems administrator for these sort of the 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 recognize
    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 realize
    that these things need to be determined by the public, not by
    somebody who was simply hired by the government.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* Talk a little bit about how the American
    surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of
    Americans?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* NSA and the intelligence community, in general, is
    focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means
    possible, that it believes, on the grounds of sort of a
    self-certification, that they serve the national interest.
    Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign
    intelligence gathered 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 system, and it filters them, and it analyzes
    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 communications to do
    so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector
    anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on
    the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that
    analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to
    target everything. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the
    authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a
    federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* 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 this attitude of the
    opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind
    these disclosures. Why did you choose to do that?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* 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. When you are subverting the
    power of government, that that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to
    democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, you know, as
    the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action
    that it took, it will kind of get 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." But they rarely, if ever, do that when
    an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens. But they're
    typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of these people are
    against the country, they're 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, watches
    what happening---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."

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* Have you given thought to what it is that the
    U.S. government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they
    might say about you, how they might try to depict to, what they
    might try to do to you?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* 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 or, you know,
    any---any of their agents or assets. We've got a CIA station just up
    the road in the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I'm sure they're
    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'll 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---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 realize that that's the world
    that you helped create and it's going to get worse with the next
    generation and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of
    this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize 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.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* Why should people care about surveillance?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* Because even if you're not doing anything wrong,
    you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of
    these 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 scrutinize every decision you've
    ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and
    attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an
    innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong,
    which is where we are because you travel 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?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* Sure. So there's a couple assertions in those
    arguments that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice
    of Hong Kong. The first is that China is an enemy of the United
    States. It's not. I mean, there are conflicts between the United
    States government and the Chinese PRC government. But the peoples,
    inherently, you know, we don't care. We trade with each other
    freely. You know, we're not at war. We're not, you know, 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.

    *GLENN GREENWALD:* If your motive had been to harm the United States
    and help its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material
    gain, were there things that you could have done with these
    documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing?

    *EDWARD SNOWDEN:* Absolutely. I mean, anybody in the positions of
    access with the technical capabilities that I had 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. I had access to, you know,
    the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire
    intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world,
    the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and
    so forth. If I had just wanted to harm the U.S., you know,
    that---you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.
    But that's not my intention. And I think, for anyone making that
    argument, they need to think, if they were in my position, and, you
    know, you live a privileged life---you're living in Hawaii, in
    Paradise, and making a ton of money---what would it take to make you
    leave everything behind?

    The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of
    these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in
    the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the length that the
    government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to
    create greater control over American society and global society, but
    they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and
    fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually
    take a stand in their interests. And the months ahead, the years
    ahead, it's only going to get worse, until eventually there will be
    a time where policies will change, because the only thing that
    restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even
    our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to
    be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. And
    because of that, a new leader will be elected, they'll flip the
    switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that
    we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, 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.

*AMY GOODMAN:* NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden being interviewed by /The 
Guardian/'s Glenn Greenwald. The interview was filmed by award-winning 
documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in Snowden's Hong Kong hotel room on 
June 6. Edward Snowden left the U.S. for Hong Kong on May 20th, has been 
there since. When we come back, we'll be joined by Glenn Greenwald from 
Hond Kong and then NSA whistleblower William Binney. Stay with us.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20130610/acedee9a/attachment.htm>