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<div id="content-navigation"> <span class="show-date">Monday, June 10,
2013<br>
<small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/youre_being_watched_edward_snowden_emerges#">http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/youre_being_watched_edward_snowden_emerges#</a></small></small><br>
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<h1 class="pageTitle" itemprop="name"><small><small>"You’re Being
Watched": Edward Snowden Emerges as Source Behind Explosive Revelations
of <span class="caps">NSA</span> Spying</small></small></h1>
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<div id="story-summary" itemprop="description">
<p>Former <span class="caps">CIA</span> 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 <span class="caps">NSA</span> 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."</p>
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<h2 class="section-header">Transcript</h2>
<div id="story-rush-transcript">
<p> This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. </p>
</div>
<p><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>
We turn now to the man who blew the whistle on the National Security
Agency and the expanding U.S. surveillance state. On Sunday, <em>The
Guardian</em> newspaper revealed the source of its explosive series on
the <span class="caps">NSA</span> to be a 29-year-old former <span
class="caps">CIA</span> technical assistant named Edward Snowden. For
the past four years, Snowden has been working at the <span class="caps">NSA</span>
as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen
Hamilton and Dell. Most recently, he was working at the <span
class="caps">NSA</span> office in Hawaii. On May 20th, he boarded a
plane bound for Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since.</p>
<p>Since Wednesday, <em>The Guardian</em> has published a series of
articles based on information provided by Snowden. First <em>The
Guardian</em> revealed the National Security Agency is collecting
telephone records of millions of Verizon customers under a secret court
order issued in April. Then <em>The Guardian</em> revealed the
existence of a top-secret program codenamed <span class="caps">PRISM</span>,
where the <span class="caps">NSA</span> obtained access to the central
servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft,
Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. Then, on Friday, <em>The Guardian</em>
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.</p>
<p>And then <em>The Guardian</em> revealed details about an <span
class="caps">NSA</span> 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 <span class="caps">NSA</span> "global heat map" shows that
in March 2013 the agency collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence
from computer networks worldwide. The <span class="caps">NSA</span>
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.</p>
<p>In a few minutes, we’ll be joined by <em>Guardian</em> columnist
Glenn Greenwald, who has written these exposés, but first let’s turn to
<span class="caps">NSA</span> 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 <em>Guardian</em> website on Sunday.</p>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
My name’s Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton
as an infrastructure analyst for <span class="caps">NSA</span> in
Hawaii.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
What are some of the positions that you held previously within the
intelligence community?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually
functions. Does it target the actions of Americans?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
<span class="caps">NSA</span> 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 <span class="caps">NSA</span>
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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
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?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
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."</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
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?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the <span class="caps">CIA</span>.
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 <span class="caps">CIA</span> 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
Why should people care about surveillance?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
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?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
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 <span
class="caps">PRC</span> 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">GLENN</span> <span class="caps">GREENWALD</span>:</strong>
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?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p><strong><span class="caps">EDWARD</span> <span class="caps">SNOWDEN</span>:</strong>
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 <span class="caps">NSA</span>, 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?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="collapsed-hide"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span
class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong> <span class="caps">NSA</span>
whistleblower Ed Snowden being interviewed by <em>The Guardian</em>'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 <span class="caps">NSA</span> whistleblower William
Binney. Stay with us.</p>
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