Full Interview: Edward Snowden On Trump, Privacy, And Threats To Democracy | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

so add in Snowden, many people in this country are probably curious when was the last time they had substantive discussions about returning to the United States and would this still be their preference? Do you still refer to it as the home that America will always be? my house and I will always be willing to return on one condition and I have been quite clear about this over the years: that the government ensure that I have the right and every complainant has the right to tell the jury why they did right what they did. they did, we can disagree about whether this was right or wrong, we can disagree about whether this is good or bad, we can disagree about whether this is legal, illegal from the beginning, that is right and appropriate in a

democracy

, but we have to agree that the jury is supposed to be the proper authority to ultimately decide whether this is right or wrong and I hate to say it, but under current law that is explicitly prohibited under the Espionage Act which, as you know , is increasingly used against journalism sources rather than foreign ones. spies, the law makes no distinction between someone telling a secret to a journalist and someone telling a secret to a foreign government, so yeah, there's been no movement, unfortunately, there's been no movement on that conversation since the Obama administration when I said that. the government that all they have to do is give me the right to what we call a crime of public interest this is a fair trial an open trial where the jury hears what is happening and decides whether this is justified or not and unfortunately a then Attorney General Eric Holder responded and said we can't promise not to promise not to torture him, unfortunately I would say that's not enough.

Something you have said repeatedly is that you would expect and accept some punishment for your actions. What if that punishment package is working for the home team? What if someone said help us harden our choices against attacks using your abilities? I would volunteer for that in a heartbeat. You know they wouldn't even have to pay me for that. Remember that I volunteered to work for the CIA for the NSA when I came forward to reveal mass surveillance, which we should make clear that the courts found that it was in fact illegal by the government and one court said it was probably unconstitutional, so which I have no objection to. to help the government I ran to not burn down the NSA I ran to reform it to help it return to the ideals we are all supposed to share so there will never be a question about when my government will be ready and when my government wants me to help I will be there How has your opinion of Mr.

Putin since he was in Russia, well, I don't think he's really changed because the question might assume that at some point I had a positive opinion. I think everyone would agree, probably including the Russian president himself, that he is an authoritarian leader. I think that, in general, the Russian government does not have a good record on human rights and that has not changed. How strange do you find it that, while you were there, the consensus here strengthened that they are the actors who interfered in our last presidential election? I don't think it's particularly surprising, there was a story published in The New York Times that actually reported on a study in February 2018 and it was also published in the Washington Post a few months earlier about the history of election interference and they looked at the Russia story and the Soviet Union and an Intel election interference by intelligence agencies and they found, I think, 36 different cases of election interference in about the last 50 years, but then they also looked at the United States intelligence services and found that we pushed Enter. feared in foreign elections eighty-one different times, this is not to say that one is better than the other, it is not about budget or capacity, but what we do see from this is that what happened in 2016 was actually not unusual in the intelligence agencies perspective this is what they believe, they are hired to do what we need to do is figure out how to protect our systems against attacks that we know are inevitable, something you have been asked before, something you have answered before, but Since this is a new occasion, we will do it again, why don't you stay in this country and face the music?

If you believed in the strength of your conviction, this is a great question, Brian, and I'm glad you asked it when we say heads. the music, the question is, well, what song are they playing? They intentionally accused me, like all important whistleblowers in recent decades, with a very particular crime. This is a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 and this is a law that is explicitly designed. to prohibit meaningful defense in court, this is applied or this law is used against people that is the only thing they have done and this is, by the government's own terms, the only thing that the government accuses people defending themselves against This charge that I have made is that they have said something to a journalist that the government considers classified, that is, the entire crime, they do not consider whether it was good or bad, they do not consider whether it caused damage or not, you simply told something classified to a journalist, a journalist, yes. did, the jury cannot consider and, in fact, is explicitly prohibited from considering why he told journalists that they are explicitly prohibited from considering whether it resulted in a public benefit right, whether it furthered the public interest instead, they simply say Did you tell a journalist to buy the glass so I am NOT one if I had stayed in the United States and my good friend Daniel Ellsberg by the way has told me that I was right not to stay waiting for an inevitable arrest because the laws and the way The way they apply today is not the same as in the 1970s, when he presented the Pentagon Papers.

He wouldn't have received a fair trial, there wouldn't have been much of a trial at all. He would have only received one sentence and the question is what message that sends, whether you like it or not. He could be the best person in the world. It could be the worst. What message does a sentence send where you spend the rest of your life in prison for telling journalists things that change? laws in the United States that have resulted in the most substantial reform of intelligence authorities since the 1970s, if the only result of doing so is a life sentence in prison, the next person who sees something criminal happening in the United States government will be deterred from doing so. moving forward and I can't be a part of that where do your parents feel about what you did in the book?

We learn much more than we knew about them. They both were. We say this in quotes. Deep Staters. We learn that both. they had varying degrees of security clearances in their lives, yes I come from a federal family, my father worked for the military, my mother works for the courts, my entire previous line has worked in government service, so I think this was difficult for them and In fact, one of the things I will be eternally grateful for is the fact that they still support me today and believe that I did the right thing when they were present at your wedding.

You have gotten married in the years since we got married. The last time we spoke there hadn't been a wedding yet, we were actually married, but it was just paperwork. Sighs in a courtroom because Lindsay and I had been living together, we had been in love with each other, we had been in a relationship for over ten years one day there will be a wedding Brian and I hope you are there what do you think of Donald Trump? There's so much being said about the president right now and so much being thought about, and honestly, I try not to think about it.

There's so much chaos and so many aggressive and offensive things being said that I think even his fans would accept it, but I think it's actually pretty simple to understand. Donald Trump seems to me more than a man who has never really known love. so he hasn't had to pay and that's why I think everything he does is informed by a kind of transactionalism and what he's really looking for is just to make people like him, unfortunately that produces a lot of negative effects, do you think? He is a threat to national security. I mean, this is the question of who defines national security.

What is national security? When we used to talk about national security we thought about public safety, but now national security really means the security of the system itself, the institution of government, and I think its stated goal is to change the way the system works. I think we've seen tremendous damage to civil liberties in the United States increasingly since 9/11, and I haven't seen any reduction in the rate of that damage. having several important positions vacant in this country, including director of homeland security, national security advisor, is a threat to our security. I think he really says something about where we are and what this point in our history looks like when we find out there aren't enough people. in the country who are willing not to serve in the White House and qualify to serve in the White House, who all sides of the government feel comfortable working with and who they can support, we are in a time that is increasingly fractured and I think which is a product of that look if you look around the world right now when you look at news when you look at news coverage when you look at every controversy that we see something has changed and it has become more and more popular because your feelings matter more than the facts and I think that that's toxic to a

democracy

because if there's something that we have to have to be able to have this discussion to be able to learn to live with people that we don't agree with, we can't have a conversation about what we should do we can't have a conversation about Where are we going if we can't agree on where we are if we can't agree on what's happening The facts have to matter more than the feelings you've expressed Your biggest fear about what you did was that things wouldn't change if you did.

Things will change, would you do it again today knowing what you know now? This is an important part of the final chapter of my book Things Have Changed and I Would Do It Again If I Changed Anything. I wish I could have introduced myself sooner. It took me so long to understand what was happening and it took me so long not to realize that no one else was going to fix this. Believe me when I say I didn't want to. Light a match and burn my life to the ground. No one really wants to be a whistleblower, but the results have been astonishing.

I thought this was going to be a two-day story. I thought everyone would forget about this a week after the journalist. I published the first stories in 2013, but here we are in 2019 and we are still talking about it, in fact, data security surveillance, manipulation and influence of the Internet that is provided or produced rather by a corporate or government control of this permanent record of all our private data. lives that have been created every day by the devices we had before 2013, if you said there is a system that watches everything you do, the government is collecting records of every phone call in the United States, even for those people who do not They are suspected of any crime. it was a conspiracy yes there were some people who believed it was happening yes there were academics who could say this was technically possible yes there were technologists who could do it this is something that could be done but what we didn't have was we the world of 2013 we suspected that this was happening, the world after 2013 we know it is happening and this is the critical importance of journalism, particularly in this moment we have today, the distance between speculation and facts is everything in a democracy because that is what allows us , like we did after 2013, change our laws now, the first program that was real for newspapers.

I have since been fired. Barack Obama, who criticized me so strongly in June 2013, in January 2014 proposed that this program be ended eventually. ended under the USA Freedom Act, the NSA argued that mass surveillance was legal mass collection as they call it, they said 15 different judges authorized this, what they didn't tell us was that those 15 judges were all from the Rubber stamped FISA court that Over more than 33 years, the government had asked it 33,900 times to approve surveillance requests, it only said twice in 33 years, 11 times. This was a court that was never designed to correctly interpret the Constitution.

It was never designed to create new powers for the government. intelligence community was simply designed to seal basic routine arrest warrants now we know what has changed the first open court outside of these secret rubber stamp courts that brought this case to them I was Judge León in federal court and then in a court of appeals and said that the NSA's mass surveillance activities were violating even the very lax standards of the Patriot Act, violated the law and further said that these programsare probably unconstitutional and this would not have happened if we couldn't say that this is real, this really happened and I just want to make it clear that I'm not the one saying that that's not speculation, that was the determination of the Supreme Court just a few months before I filed a famous case Amnesty versus clapper.

I think it was February 2013 or door From December 2012 to the Supreme Court these surveillance authorities were being questioned the plaintiff said the government has a mass surveillance program that has impacted this human rights organization they have been secretly spied on by the governmentthe government said it may be just If this is happening, we will neither confirm nor deny that it is happening, it is a state secret and since it cannot be proven, the court should be prohibited from ruling on the case.constitutional of this program and unfortunately the United States Supreme Court agreed that they said this program could be unconstitutional, but if it can't be proven that it exists we can't evaluate it, that's what changed in 2013 on the legal side, now we have the GDP or we have first had the first European regulation that attempts to limit the amount of data that can be secretly collected and used against general populations and we have also seen how the basic structure of the Internet changes in response to this understanding that the network path that All of our communications cross paths When you request a website When you send a text message When you read an email For so long those communications were electronically naked or unencrypted Before 2013, more than half of the world's Internet communications were not encrypted now, much more than half are measured only by web traffic from where the world's leading browsers the Google Chrome browser some figures show it is more than 80 percent the entire world has not changed in recent years has not gone far enough Far away the problems still exist and in some ways have gotten worse, but we have made progress that would not have been possible if we did not know what was happening.

Related Question: What can the government do with your phone and laptop today? Every American's phone and laptop. What is the reach of the government if we are determined to get into your life. We could talk about this for

hour

s, Brian, but we don't have time, so I'll try to summarize. Hacking has increasingly become what governments consider a legitimate investigative tool. They use the same methods and techniques. criminal hackers and what this means is that they will try to take over your device remotely once they do so by detecting a vulnerability and in the software that runs your device such as Apple's iOS or Microsoft Windows they can create a special type of code attack called They then launch this exploit on the vulnerability of your device, allowing them to take

full

control of that device.

Anything you can do on that device, the attacker, in this case, the government can do. They can read your email. They can collect all the documents they can. look at your contact book, they can turn on location services, they can see anything that's on that phone instantly and send it home to the mothership, they can do the same thing with laptops, the other thing we so often forget frequency is that in many cases They don't need to hack our devices, they can simply ask Google for a copy of our email box because Google keeps a copy of everything you have typed in that search box.

Google has a copy of every private message you send. We've Facebooked every link you've clicked, everything you've liked. They keep a permanent record and all of these things are available not only to these companies but also to our governments, as they are increasingly seen as sort of miniature arms of government. What about enabling your microphone camera? If you can do it, they can do it. It's trivial to turn on your microphone remotely or activate your camera as long as you have systems-level access if you've hacked into someone's device remotely. Anything they can do. can do, they can look at your nose, they can record what's in the room, the screen can be off because it's on your desk, but the device talks all the time, the question we have to ask is who is it talking to, even if your phone isn't working right now you look at it, it's just sitting there on the charger, it's talking dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times a minute to any number of different companies that have apps installed on your phone, it looks like it's turned off. like it's just sitting there but chattering constantly and unfortunately, like pollution, we haven't created the necessary tools for everyday people to see this activity and it's its invisibility that makes it so popular in common and attractive to these companies because if you don't realize that they are collecting this data of yours, this very private and personal data, there is no way for them to object to it, what about your ability to track your own and talk to me specifically about the case of Jamal Khashoggi, in the case of Jamal Khashoggi, this is a Washington Post reporter and a leading critic of the Saudi regime.

He was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and while his fiancé waited outside for him to get the paperwork he needed. In order to marry her, he was murdered by the Saudi government supposedly on the orders of the Crown Prince. Now we have to wonder how the Saudi government decided he was worth killing. How did they decide when and how they would kill him? How did they decide? We knew this opportunity was going to arise, how did you know what his plans and intentions were that needed to be stopped from his perspective? We have no evidence that his phone was personally hacked unfortunately because we do not have his phone but we do have the phones of his friends who lived in exile in Canada and we know thanks to the investigation of a group called citizen laboratory affiliated with a university in Canada that his phones were hacked, meaning that his conversations with Jamal Khashoggi were intercepted and this allowed For the Saudi regime to know that he intended to create an electronic protest movement, they did not need to know from his friend's phone or even from his phone that he was traveling to the consulate because he had to make an appointment, but he did tell them his private intentions, his hopes and dreams for a different government for his country and perhaps, although we do not know for sure, on that basis they decided to assassinate him once he Your phone was hacked, what is in your hands is not simply your device, it is your future.

It is also important to remember how the Saudi Arabian government managed to hack these people's phones, which are modern phones. Well, they didn't have this capability in their government, they didn't have this level of intelligence capability available to them directly, so they bought it. from a digital weapons broker, a company called NSO Group, an Israeli company in this company, all they do is make digital weapons, sort of hacking tools that can be used against the critical infrastructure that we all depend on, phones and our pockets. They primarily target devices like Apple's iPhone and sell this ability to access people's phones around the world for millions and millions of dollars to some of the worst governments in the world and the only meaningful oversight they have, unfortunately, is due to export control laws. because these types of digital weapons are extremely weak in Israel it's its own internal ethics board this is fine we didn't break any rules that need to change what about the public attitude of millions of ordinary Americans?

All I have on a computer are photos from my family's CCTV cameras that are prevalent in a lot of American cities and foreign capitals. Those cameras are your friends if you are innocent and have nothing to hide. Well, I'd say that's largely what the average Chinese citizen does. You believed or maybe even to this day you believe, but we see how these same technologies are being applied to create what they call the social credit system, if any of these family photos, if any of your online activities, if your purchases, If your associations, if your friends or in some way different from what the government or the powers that be at the time would like them to be, you can no longer buy train tickets, you can no longer board a plane, maybe you can't get it. a passport you may not be eligible for a job you may not be able to work for the government all of these things are increasingly created, programmed and decided by algorithms and those algorithms are fed precisely by the innocent data that our devices are creating. most of the time, constantly, invisibly and silently, right now our devices are emitting all these logs that we don't see being created and that on the whole seemed very innocent.

You were at Starbucks at the time. You went to the hospital. Afterwards you spent a lot of time in the hospital. after you left the hospital you made a phone call you made a phone call to your mother you talked to her until midnight the hospital was an oncology clinic even if you can't see the content of these communications the activity records what the government calls metadata which they claim do not need a court order to collect, tells the

full

story and these activity logs are constantly being created, shared, collected and intercepted by companies and governments and ultimately it means they are sold and marketed as They do their business based on these records what they sell is not information what they sell is us they are selling our future they are selling our past they are selling our history our identity and ultimately they are stealing our power and making our stories work for them What devices do you use in your life now?

Have you accepted the notion that you are constantly being watched? Probably all the intelligences in the world are definitely pointing me in trouble, as much as they can, just like they did with Jamal Khashoggi. As far as what my plans and intentions are, I try not to make it too easy for them if I get a smartphone and need to use it. In fact, I open it before using it. I perform a kind of surgery to improve physically. I desolder or melt the metal connections that hold the microphone on the phone and I physically remove it, I remove the camera from the phone and then I close it again, I seal it and then if I need to make a phone call I will connect an external microphone and this is like this , if the phone is there and I'm not making a call it can't hear me now, this is extreme, most people don't need it, but for me it's about being able to trust our technology. my phone could still be hacked, my laptop could still be hacked and just as I told you before the same principles apply to me, if it is hacked they can do anything to the device that I can do, so my trust in technology is limited, but just because it is that way today doesn't mean it has to be that way, and a large majority of my work with the Press Freedom Foundation, where I serve as board chair, is dedicated to trying to make that the technology be more secure to try to create programs and protocols through which we can make the communications of sources and journalists more confidential because if we lose confidentiality between sources and journalists we lose access to those essential facts that allow us to understand what is happening in the world and unfortunately under this White House just as under the previous White House we see the sources of very important stories that have promoted the public interest facing retaliation from a very angry government.

I think it's in the first half of the book and I'm paraphrasing, come out and just say: the computer guy. knows everything or at least should know what part you are a computer scientist and what part you are a well-trained spy for the vast majority of my career I was what is called a systems engineer or systems administrator, an administrator maintains and expands a system that they have legacy and a systems engineer develops new projects, new capabilities for these systems roles, what this means in summary is that all the systems that the NSA and the CIA put me in charge of I had full access to and this is simply What What happens to the systems administrator when you think about a computer system that gives access to another person?

Well, someone has to be the original authority that has access to everything that I was, so I would say that the computer scientist knows everything. That's not a boast, it's just the way these systems are designed, that's the way they're structured and this is very much a vulnerability because it means you have to trust this administrator to work for the good of the users. , but what happens when people use that network? buildThat network goes against the benefit of society in general and this put me in a very interesting kind of conflictive position. It could do what the NSA wanted it to do or it could do what the United States Constitution tells the public of the country to do.

The United States needed me to do, which was to report that my agency had broken the law. Do you consider yourself a journalist these days? I'm not. I'm not. I have great respect for journalists, but I try to keep my distance, especially at this time. where a lot of journalism is under attack because the government has a tremendous incentive to discredit me to make people distrust me and so if I resist, if I start reporting stories, if I start talking to sources, if I try to start promoting what the The public knows on a personal level that my reputation could be poison.

Instead, I maintain a distinction. What I do is try to help the work of journalism, but I am NOT a journalist. Your book is very personal. Tell us about his then girlfriend price. now the wife paid for your actions and how you feel she was strangely portrayed in the eyes of the world when we got that first kind of thumbnail sketch of who she was, in the wake of the mass surveillance revelations in 2013, this suddenly became The biggest story in every country was talking about the same thing and unfortunately that meant that everyone who was connected to me in some way was also talking because they were trying to say who I was and where I came from and this unfortunately meant that Lindsey my life long partner She was investigated intensely by the FBI in the United States.

She didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't tell her what I was doing because if I had known, they would have said I was an accomplice to the crime. They would have said I was part of a criminal conspiracy. He couldn't immediately pick up the phone and say: help, help, someone is talking to a journalist, so this meant that he couldn't tell him that he found out what was going to happen the same way everyone else found out what's going on. happening the same way everyone else saw me on TV, which probably makes me the worst boyfriend in the history of the United States, but she stuck by me and today we are reunited and together and I will never be able to repay her. faith she has shown me, but the media had a huge amount of salacious reports when they found out that she taught toll fitness classes, which are quite popular for him these days they called her a stripper although she never has been one although She is a poet, although she is a photographer, they sexualized her, they focused on her body, they focused on her image because that is what caught their attention, she is much more complex and a profound figure than the media ever gave her credit for, she is braver than she thought. that anyone could understand and is more political and intelligent than any of these reporters at the time could appreciate.

Her politics, in fact, influenced mine and I would like to think that I learned as much from her or maybe even more than she learned from me. You paint a portrait of what some of us knew and that is that you were an all-American child in your upbringing. You wake up every day in Russia. You go to sleep every day. night in Russia, are you actively looking to leave? As has been reported, you are seeking asylum elsewhere. Well, this is not an active search. This is not something new and it is an important story, especially for those people who don't like me. people who doubt me who have heard terrible things about me it was never my intention to end up in Russia I was going to Latin America and my final destination would hopefully be Ecuador when the United States government found out that I had left Hong Kong where I met with journalists , they canceled my passport, held press conferences about it, which meant I was not allowed to board my ongoing flight that would take me to Latin America instead of applying for Russian asylum instead of saying "I'm going to play." with any Russian intelligence service, please protect me.

I said no, I will not cooperate with the Russian government or any government. Instead, what I did was I was stuck for 40 days in an airport. I don't know, the longest layover of a year is no more than 40 days. It was a difficult stage. I sought asylum in 27 different countries around the world, traditional allies of the US, places like France and Germany, places like Norway where I felt the US government and the American public could feel comfortable. That was fine for a whistleblower and yet every time. one of these governments was about to open its doors, the phone rang and they were in their Ministries of Foreign Affairs and on the other end of the line would be a high-ranking American official, he was one of the two people of the then Secretary of State John Kerry or then Vice President Joe Biden and they said, look, we don't care what the law is, we don't care if you can do this or not, we understand whistleblower protection and the granting of asylum as a human rights issue and you could do this. if you want, but if you protect this man, if you let this guy leave Russia, there will be consequences, we won't say what they will be, but there will be a response.

I still say to this day. Let's say look if the United States government if these countries are willing to open the door that is not a hostile act that is the act of a friend's front in any case if the United States government is so worried about Russia right Should they be? I'm happy that I'm leaving and yet we see that they are trying so hard to keep me from leaving. I would ask him why I assume that Joe Biden is not your candidate for 2020. I don't really take a position on 2020. race look, it's a difficult position to be in the executive branch it's a difficult position to be in power and you have to take unpopular decisions.

I would like to think that, having now seen in 2019 that all the accusations against me did not come true, national security was not. harmed as a result of these revelations but won the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism laws were changed as a result courts said these programs were unconstitutional we live in a safer world because the Internet is safer and more secure as a result of understanding these vulnerabilities common that we are not only exploiting the American intelligence agencies, but also our adversaries, you close these holes, we do not become more vulnerable, we become more secure in 2013, it is fair to say that some of these officials, some of these candidates. they grow well the intelligence services say this guy is dangerous they say this is a risk they say this should not have happened in 2019 we can see that no evidence has ever been presented that public understanding has caused mass surveillance to be real any kind of harm, no one has died, no terrorist attacks have been successful because we knew about these things, these programs work regardless of whether you know about them or not, but we have seen the public benefits corroborated year after year, so I would like to think that these people would reevaluate their position.

You know there are government officials who would strongly reject your claim that national security was not harmed. Did you choose not to stop with your revelations about what was being done to Americans and did you get On the United States and Its Allies and Perceived Enemies when we look at the reports that were published in 2013, it is important to understand that I never published a single story, the amount of documents that I revealed is zero, what I did was compile an archive of material. showing criminality or unethical or unconstitutional behavior by the United States government. I provided this file to journalists who were required, as a condition of access to this material, not to publish any stories because it is interesting.

They couldn't publish any story simply because it is newsworthy. They were only allowed, as far as the agreement went, to publish stories that they were willing to stand up and say it is in the public interest to know and this is not some crazy, passing organization; These are newspapers like the Washington Post. like the New York Times, like the Guardian, and in all cases, this process was now followed as an extraordinary check, in addition to this, in case I went too far, in case I collected a document that was too interesting, or that he did not understand things correctly, or that he deceived journalists.

They misunderstood things, the journalists were also asked to go to the government before publication and they were asked to do this at my request and they warned the government this is the story we are going to publish this is what it is about this is what that we are going to publish I am going to say that the government could argue against it to create contradictory control over what the journalists and I were trying to do to rebuild the system of checks and balances in the United States that was hidden failed in the government , you know, because that process was followed so scrupulously that's why I'm so sure that no damage occurred no damage occurred now if there are those in the government who say that there was damage if there are those in the government who say that people have died I ask you this why haven't they done it?

It showed, you know better than anyone, Brian, that these government officials are more than happy to pick up the phone and leak to the New York Times every day of the week. If they had any evidence that anyone was hurt, if they had evidence that a terrorist attack occurred because of this journalism, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and despite six years of history that has never happened, it describes your life today, what it is like every day, how you support yourself and as a simple equation: if the Russians have come so effectively into our lives and our electoral systems, they must be in your entire life, so they were several different questions, but yes, I'm sure the Russian government is trying to spy on me.

I'm sure the United States. the government is trying to spy on me everyone is trying to spy on me the thing is I don't cooperate with them my loyalty is to my country my loyalty is to my Constitution now in the terms of my daily life it's actually quite normal Oh, which one is Say that It's not that interesting. I've always been kind of an indoor cat between clubs and parties. My life since I was a child has always been mediated by a screen, that's my choice, so it doesn't really change much in my day-to-day life.

Whether I live in New York, Berlin or Moscow, in terms of my work, a lot of people are curious about this. I think it's a polite way for people to ask: Do you work for the Russian government? Do you accept money from the Russian government? Know? Do you live in Russian government housing? Are you in a bunker? Are there guards? And, of course, the answer to all of these questions is no, no. I'm not a professional speaker and now I'm actually an author. I have a speakers bureau called the American Program Bureau and you can call them and book a public event.

I speak at universities. I speak at corporate events. I speak at cybersecurity conferences to talk to people about what's happening on the Internet. the future of surveillance and how we can protect ourselves I'm very fortunate to have had that opportunity and that means I've had a pretty comfortable life and in a pretty difficult position, former White House aide HR Haldeman left us with an expression for Americans who feel like this is just a behemoth and there's no way they can have any control over it for Americans who long ago decided that "We're just going to have to live with this surveillance, how can that possibly happen?" remove, terminate or stop?

We can stop a program, we can thwart an attack, we can make a device more secure, but as you imply, the system is even better, the institutions and agencies and the companies that produced these attacks that are. creating new methods of spying every day will continue to be there. The fundamental change not only in the United States but around the world that needs to happen is that we have to stop thinking about the limitations on how data is used. like data protection regulations right now, when we talk about what Google and Facebook are doing right now, when we talk about what the NSA is doing right now, when we talk about what rival governments are doing, what What the Russians are doing, what the Chinese are doing, what the North Koreans and the Iranians are doing, we are constantly thinking about okay, this data has been collected and these companies have it, how do we regulate its use, regulate the use It's a mistake, we should do it, but that's the wrong approach, it's collection. of data that is a problem when you start trying to regulate the use that you are going to make the collection already happened the collection was already legal one of the fundamental defects in us.

Privacy legislation is the fact that we are one of the only advanced democracies in the world that does not have any basic

privacy

laws. We have the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which is why I ran, but that restricts what the federal government can do. to do thatit restricts what state governments can do it does not restrict what companies can do and as everyone knows these companies are playing an increasingly important role in the world today we have to say all these records that they are creating about all of us everything This control that they're developing from these surveillance programs, whether they say they're doing it to target ads or whether they're doing it to target murders, these records belong to the people they're about. not to companies and this is a fundamental change that we have never meaningfully discussed broadly and publicly, but we have to because all these governments have said they know the mass surveillance system, why do we have it?

Why is it useful? They say that because of terrorism they say it's saving lives, they're saving their oppressive ant attacks, but none other than Barack Obama and the response to the 2013 revelations created two independent commissions to investigate exactly the answer to that question: were these programs effective? to stop terrorist attacks? revelations cause harm to national security was called the President's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and despite having a huge budget despite having full access to classified information despite

interview

ing to the heads of the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, you know, the whole alphabet soup, they found in the government's own words the kind of mass surveillance that this mass collection program represents in which the NSA was secretly collecting phone records. of all Americans and everyone else around the world every day under an authority provided by a secret court order that no one knew existed that program had never made a concrete difference in a single counterterrorism investigation think about that over 10 years of operation and secrecy never made a single concrete difference these programs mass surveillance it is not about public safety it is not about terrorism it is about power it is about economic espionage it is about diplomatic manipulation and it is about social influence it is about understanding the actions of everyone in the world as carefully as they can no matter who they are No matter how innocent their life is.

The last question has to do with the Fourth Amendment. We have it today because Mr. Adams and others wanted to keep the British out of their homes and out of their horse-drawn carriages. What would mr. Adams and the founders emphasize the reach of government in our lives given its humble beginnings. I think if any of the founders of this country had looked at today, they would be shocked by the kind of rhetoric they heard and they would be shocked by the kind of government activities they saw if they read the Bill of Rights. Something that stood out to me when I was writing about it and in this book was that Half of the first ten amendments explicitly make the job of government more difficult, they are making the lives of law enforcement officials more difficult and all the The founding fathers thought it was a good idea because they recognized that the more efficient a government is, the more dangerous it is. we want a government that is always not too efficient we want a government that is always efficient enough because the government has extraordinary power in our lives we want the government to always use its powers in a way that is only necessary and proportional to the threat presented by whoever is investigating when the government scrapes by its teeth the people are free right the government should be afraid of the people the people should not be afraid of the government one of the ironies about the founding fathers for those who are skeptical of me, which is fair again.

I don't want them to trust me and I want them to doubt me. I want you to question me, but I want you to look at the facts. I want you to look further. how you feel in the moment how we all feel in the moment and look what these stories said in 2013 look that the United States courts where I am charged as a criminal said that the government itself was involved in criminal activities look at these things and then remember that the people who founded this country were called traitors the signing of the Declaration of Independence was a scandalous act of treason it was criminal but it was also correct the question whether or not I broke the law is less difficult and less interesting than whether you believe that what I did it was right or wrong what is legal is not always the same as what is more final prediction, so we will let you go to clubs and that is, do you predict?

Do you predict that at some point you will live? Leave your life and die in the United States. I think I'll come back when we see the kind of things that were said about me in 2013. The kind of hostility I face. The type of accusations I faced from the highest officials in the United States. government and we look at the world today, yes, there are still many who do not like me, but much less because we have seen that all the damages they alleged throughout these years never happened, they were never substantiated because they do not exist but the benefits are increasingly clearer with each passing year the question I think people have to answer whether or not you like me as a person whether you agree with how I did what I did whether you agree with the work of the journalists who decided what the public should know in order to cast your votes today you know that the government violated the law today, you know that the United States government violated the Constitution and the rights of people in this country and around the world, could you rather not I know, thank you and Snowden, thank you very much, good luck with the book, it's my pleasure, Brian, thanks for having me.

Hi, I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC, thanks for watching MSNBC on YouTube if you want to stay up to date. videos we are posting, you can click subscribe right below me or click this list to see many other great videos.