The FULL Snowden Interview

I recently spoke with Edward Snowden, a military contractor who revealed government secrets and now lives in exile. Did Snowden do the right thing after investigating this? Now I think he decided. Here is our

full

interview

. You went to work for the government. You signed agreements saying I wouldn't talk about what you did, why go to the media, we talked about progress awards and civil liberties, we talked about the importance of independent thought, um, and its history, and this is really what it is. You know, I signed up to work for the government um, I volunteered for the military, I applied to the CIA, I worked as a contractor at NSA facilities, on NSA computers, over and over again, people think. that contractors like you are working in a different building, but no, you're in it's just a continuation of government service and plus you joined the military after 9/11 because you wanted to fight.

I did it when everyone else was protesting. I was a younger man and had much less political education, I would like to think, than I did. Today you know that some things only come with experience, but yes, this question arises of how do you know how someone like me becomes someone like me and I have to tell you that it was difficult, it was not. It wasn't natural, it wasn't something I ever expected to do, but like I said, I signed up for all these things, I volunteered because I believed in a prevailing national myth that we all subscribe to when we are born in our country when we go to a school system where we're basically the only one in the world where you get up in the morning and swear allegiance to a flag, we all have the same stories, we all watch the same channels, you know, Seeing men like you on television, uh, it tells us what's happening in the world, what it's like and what changed me, um, was realizing that as someone who had a top secret clearance and had access way beyond uh, how top secret.

The clearance would entitle someone to know generally the private truths of what was really happening in our government, what our government really does, what our nation was involved in without the knowledge or consent of the people it purports to represent, was very different than the public representation of that and that really just that seed was the beginning of a journey that would take me many years to finally realize and the decision, like you said, to come forward and the main reason I did it was just to get closure that gap in my own experience. and sharing that with everyone else to share the understanding that I came to believe that what we were being told is true and real and is the state of our world was in fact an ingenious and continuous lie by some of the highest representatives of our government and I felt that people needed to know what the lie was.

I think the most famous one for me and you really know the turning point would be when you look at the exchange between Senator Ron Wyden and the then director of national intelligence. james clapper this is sworn testimony in front of the senate intelligence committee and for those who don't remember it because it was a while ago it looked a little like this so what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the Question: Does the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

This is to think about what that represented. This of course was false. The NSA was collecting the phone records of every Verizon customer on a daily basis. They were also doing this for other major telecom providers. I just didn't have it. the court order for that and this was happening to the Internet this was happening to email communications what was happening was a change in technology from the old Internet which was kind of very individual and simple non-commercial uh it was pretty crude everything was improvised on this larger, corporate Internet where all our communications, all our interactions, all our relationships, all the things we read and like online, come to us through Facebook, Google or Apple, and secretly , are.

Basically, these companies had gone far beyond what the law required the government to join programs in which they would share information with the NSA through the FBI's front door and continued for years without the kind of individual safeguards and legal processes that we had expected and had become accustomed to the constitution telling us that this is how our government works and, to me, when you ask what the lie was, the lie was not a particular part of these programs, it was not a particular detail, it was the fact that there was a stunning scope of intentional and conscious public deception by people at the senate level, by people in these different executive agencies, intelligence agencies and then in the white house itself, even by the president and then president barack obama, who campaigned on ending warrantless wiretapping that he had criticized so harshly in the Bush administration but who had in fact secretly extended and embraced these programs and these authorities to a level that I began to feel had really lowered the limits of our rights.

Does the NSA routinely intercept? emails from US citizens no, the NSA intercepts Americans' cell phone conversations no Google searches now text messages no orders from amazon.com no bank records no, we are not authorized to do this nor do we do it you are in the nsa and dealing with these secrets even before you saw the head of the national security agency on television and what did you think of them then, well this was the important thing when you look at the arc of my career in intelligence, I was always working in the technical aspect. aspect of this and in general it was modernizing our systems because after 911 the intelligence community realized that they were not very good at using technology, they thought they were and in some ways it was true that they were, but it was a technology from a different era they were great with radio they were great with satellite they weren't so good with computers they weren't so good with the internet so they brought in a group of young hairy guys who looked like me and they really liked what I had.

You did it and you were absolutely a star, but it wasn't that I was, you know, exceptional, so much so that I represented a generation native to these new systems, which they had avoided because they didn't trust their security. It turned out rightly, but my generation came along, we shared our experiences, we shared our specialties and we were always looking at what we did through a straw and you have to understand this principle that we hear in the movies, you know, it is necessary to know it means that you usually get a project, you do a project, you don't know where it's going, you don't know who else is using it, but little by little I was redirecting and collecting the flow of intelligence and then always supporting it, maintaining it.

So if we lost a building, if we lost a site, we didn't lose everything that had happened, the information that had happened, I thought this was information about terrorists, I thought this was saving lives, I thought this was prevention. wars, but as I got further and further into the organization, as I went from the CIA to the NSA, as I went from one office to another, my straw that I'm looking through gets wider and wider. until I land in this place called information office. sharing it turned out that I would be much better at this job than anyone expected and I saw everything and it's only there when you see the consequences of your job and the different parts of your career, all together with the work of others Your entire generation, which is not sitting in the position that you are in, they can't see the overall impact of what they're doing and the public didn't even know this existed, and again, this was happening without their consent, but in theory it was. was being carried out on your behalf, I felt like we needed to know that we had to really decide whether this is what we want to happen or not and you talk to your supervisors, yes, I talked to my supervisors, I talked to my colleagues on the day of the constitution, they We were all fine with this, this is just what we do and it's okay, actually, it's not at all.

People had no problem when I mentioned these programs that many of them had never heard of because they hadn't been exposed to them. Well, I said, is it okay with you when I show that we are collecting more Internet communications in the United States at the NSA than in Russia? Which means we're ingesting more American communications than communications from the Chinese or the Russians. or communications from North Korea or whoever you're afraid of, most of our collection was happening domestically and happening with the help of other partners in what's called the five eyes network, the United States, the United Kingdom United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and then the NSA would be fine, yes, we are collecting all these communications, but we don't read them all.

We're capturing everything you, John Stossel, are doing online. We're capturing everything that your family is doing online, what your friends are doing online, but we just pinky promise that it won't be used for anything bad and then as an engineer I see how these things are actually touched, processed. , they are classified every day algorithmically, it sort of proves that the lie is correct, uh. that all these promises are really not worth much all these processes, regulations and procedures are not worth much and in reality what the NSA is doing every day in this ordinary course of business is violating not only the laws as written, but probably the constitution and I say this to the guy sitting to my right, a good friend of mine said, tell this to the guy sitting to my left, good friend of mine, to my office manager, right, um, and all of them actually in private, right when I'm not on email.

When they just talk heart to heart about it, they're like, "No, you know, this is crazy." I'm not sure why we are doing this. I'm not sure how we're doing it. I'm not sure this is legal, but you know what happens to people who talk about this. I wouldn't put this in writing. I wouldn't go to this or that office. They're not going to do anything. On that note, it's not your job, it's not my job, this is way above our pay grade basically, but what's happening to us as an organization at the NSA? What is happening to us as Americans?

What happens to us as a society if everyone sees something wrong and leaves? Well, if I say something about how I'm going to get in trouble, what if everyone leaves, I'm not going to do anything about it because it's not my job, that's how things go wrong in a much more serious way and the reality was that I was like them for a long time I had had a growing sense of unease uh but it wasn't really my job to fix it and this was actually one of the criticisms that was ultimately directed against me as they went on, you know who you chose um, but it's not about knowing who you are, it's about what you've witnessed, it's about what you can prove and that matters, and I think over the last seven years we've seen the courts review these programs and confirm that in fact they were illegal, we've seen laws changed even by the legislature that was involved in the crime in the first place, but at some point you decided I'm not going to keep my mouth shut, yeah, I mean, it's exactly because this, um, yeah I keep my mouth shut the boy to my right the boy to my left we you know we all think this is wrong and we all keep our mouths shut um what will tomorrow be like and the year after that and the year after that uh the reality With these kinds of extraordinary powers in government, in particular, we all understand this now, in the post-9/11 moment, because it's not just surveillance, it's happened in war, it's happened in international diplomacy, it's happened in the economy With the financial crisis, I have not rescued. the banks but we don't bail out the common people um when the government largely identifies a moment of crisis uh they use that crisis to uh an exceptional demand for exceptional powers that they would not normally be entitled to this was the rise of the Act Right Like patriot, that's how the Bush administration got involved in more or less wiretapping, that's how we got extrajudicial executions through drone strikes from the ground, that's how we got involved in torture, but it's always justified as once again . exception to ordinary operations something that is done for a limited purpose in a limited way but then no one objects to it everything happens in secret remember that they keep the body of witnesses small by design to limit the amount of dissent that occurs internally at the organizational level and those who do complain are usually kicked out of the program, put in a closet somewhere and live out their days until retirement if they're lucky and never do anything that's important again, huh, but they also don't have access to nothing that would cause problems for those who are violating people's rights or our laws, um, but like you said, why talk if you sit back and watch a systeminvolved in wrongdoing and does nothing, even if he no longer participates in it, even if he resigns, he is perpetuating a system of bad deeds you have become not only a part of the bad deeds but also a part of them um and for me uh when we look at this this was affecting the country that I loved this was affecting the internet that I grew up with, which was practically part of my family at this point in my life and then you extrapolate uh from how we engaged in sort of this powerful surveillance state to begin with the national security state and step by step, little by little, exception after exception, these extraordinary and limited authorities become permanent and perpetual authorities, and little by little as the domain of the government expands, the territory that is claimed. people get close and this became such a concern for me that I was willing to risk a lot to tell people and see if they agreed or if I was just crazy.

My preference and I believe the preference of the American people would have been for a legal and orderly examination of these laws a thoughtful debate based on facts that would then lead us to a better place there were other avenues available to someone whose conscience was troubled and thought they needed to question the actions of the government, so why turn to certain members of the government? Media chairman Obama later said there were other avenues available to someone whose conscience was troubled. Congress of spectral generals. Yeah, no, I mean this is a great question. I mean, we always look at these things.

We don't want anyone in the government. uh, being able to go out and, you know, reveal any secrets about anything, uh, to the media, uh, whether you want to or not, and this is one of the main institutional criticisms against me, on the other hand, are there internal channels like Obama applied for me? even under the most generous reading of the law at the time what he said was incorrect and he said it at a time that by the way he knew was incorrect even though it was politically useful because this had been debated in newspapers across the country by En At this point, he was not an NSA employee.

He was employed by a private company that was contracted to perform work for the NSA in NSA buildings. You know, on NSA teams, the only difference between me and the actual NSA employee sitting to my right in the. the office was he had a blue badge I had a green badge the green was for the contractor the blue was for government employed staff but whistleblower protection laws did not apply to contractors this makes sense if you think about it in context of the moment because how can the government protect someone from complaints, uh when it's not really their employee's right, how can the government prevent someone from being disciplined when it's a private company for any purpose? and the reality is that there was even if it had gone through an internal purpose or I'm sorry, internal process, if it had gone to Congress, if it had gone to the president himself, the end result would have been the same.

I would have been stopped at some level by an individual like the inspector general of the NSA, who is supposed to be a kind of watchdog who makes sure that the activities of the NSA comply with the law or the office of the general counsel. I would have been fired from my position. The police would have investigated me and most likely charged me with the exact same loans they charged me with today. We know this not because I'm speculating and throwing this away, but because it had happened before in the case of a former NSA executive at a much higher level than me, named Thomas Drake, who did go through the proper channels and whose I was very familiar with the story because I was determining whether I should do this.

Alright? It will work? It will be effective. William Benny, who was accused of Thomas Drake at the same time, was investigated at the same time as Thomas Straight for the same revelation. He had men with guns in their hands coming to his house at dawn. Yeah, exactly, the FBI breaks into your house, they take all your computers, they arrest you, you know, they interrogate you, you lose your clearance, you lose your job first, I went to the house intelligence committee. and the staff member that I knew personally there and then went to the chair of that committee.

We were all trying to work internally in the government during these years trying to get them to become constitutionally acceptable and take it to court and have court oversight as well, we naively kept thinking that that could uh that could happen and it never happened, they decided attacking us to keep us quiet, threatening us, you know, in my case they came in with weapons in their hands, I don't know why. They did that, but they did it. Thomas Drake, who was an executive at the top of the US intelligence community, now works at an Apple store, true, but it's important to understand that he used the proper channels, he did everything right and when he went to these officials. this is what they said this is the office of the general counsel uh at the nsa a man named vito potenza yes someone who was not read in the program came to me and told me that we were doing crap essentially inviting the constitution I have no doubt that I would have told him, go talk to your management, don't bother me with this, I mean, you know you did it the moment he said, if I said you were using this to violate the constitution, I mean, there probably would have been I stopped the conversation at that point, frankly, so if that's what he said, then anything after that I probably wasn't listening to anyway and this is reality and I think everyone understands this naturally. internal surveillance stores in the government are great if you need to report sexual harassment they are great if you need to report any type of discrimination if someone is stealing office supplies if you go the entire government agency is involved in a conspiracy to mislead the public about the reality of that right now we are working together across agencies to carry out a program that violates not only the law but also the constitution, they are not equipped to handle that and they are not interested in investigating that.

It's not why they were named, I must say that in my endless career of a hundred years no one has recorded a video before, that's generally what I have to do if I ever come back okay. I'm a technologist, sorry, I can't help it, that's good. Okay, why do you think they charged you under the Espionage Act? That's pretty weird. Send a chilling message to whom. To other complainants. To others in the government. To not speak or speak. Don't speak truth to power. We'll hammer you, Drake. on 60 Minutes where he said the purpose was to send a chilling message, don't speak truth to power, we will beat you up.

I think that's absolutely correct when you look at the lived experience of the whistleblowers and again, these are separated by decades from uh, you. I know different white houses different presidents different administrations different congresses different policies the answer is always the same if someone within the government reveals government wrongdoing to a level that threatens the reputation and certainly the eligibility of if we are talking about agency heads if "We are talking of politicians, whether it's in the legislature or the executive branch, their first priority is to stop you from speaking because they want to control the narrative and this is what it's really about when you look at all this mass surveillance, um yeah we." We're talking about Internet surveillance, if we're talking about phone surveillance, if we're talking about national surveillance, if we're talking about international surveillance, you've been in the news for a long time, you've seen these officials.

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interview

ed these officials, they constantly tell us, this is for your safety, this is to investigate terrorists, right? And I think that's right and we all believe it to some extent, especially when we share in the national trauma of 9/11. You look from the inside as an employee at what we are doing with this. I see all the reports correctly. I have access to all the reports and then you look at the things that happen in the wake of the scandal, for example, after I came forward. Obama, who was facing extraordinary pressure, appointed two independent commissions to investigate these programs because he was basically trying to justify these things and find where they really were or where they were useful.

This was the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies both groups had

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access to classified information both spoke to all sides of the intelligence community went to the FBI went to the CIA they went to the NSA and they said look we have the clearances give us your success stories show us where this helped show us where it saved lives show us why we should be doing this and they looked because at that time you know we had people we had Keith Alexander so director of the national security agency, walking in front of Congress, he went on television and said: you know this stopped 47 plots or whatever you know, the people are alive, the buildings are standing because these programs, well, the own Barack Obama's investigations into this found that in the case of the first program that we saw uh, this was the mass surveillance of phone records directly at the national level um, it did not stop a single terrorist attack in over 10 years of operation and that is happening secretly, uh, before they are the covers and all that and in the only case They also regretted that it has never made a concrete difference and those are their words in a single anti-terrorism investigation plots were found but the court determined that they had others they already had the information they didn't need all this espionage we've done I heard over and over again the claim that 54 terrorist plots were foiled.

That is clearly wrong. Not all were plots and not all were foiled. Through these programs they never, not once, what they did was find information related to a plot, in only one case, and this was a taxi driver in California, mo Allen, I think he transferred about 8 500 to his clan in Somalia, which was affiliated with al-shabab, which was on a terrorism list according to the state department, this was their big success story, right, and in this case, the judges said, or sorry, we had already done let the watchdogs look at it, thanks thankfully to Obama in this case, Now the courts have since looked at it and confirmed that it was illegal and it was unnecessary, and keep in mind this is with access to the classified record because they said that when the government had enough information to look for these guys at the NSA. database, you know, cia, fbi, whatever, they also had enough evidence to go to court by traditional means and get a warrant without relying on all this right, you didn't have to collect this violating the rights of, ya You know, 330 million Americans when you could have just used the old traditional means of law enforcement to get the exact same material from the exact same companies without breaking the law.

Dozens of terrorist events have helped prevent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of terrorist attacks that the NSA schedules. contributed to stopping them was 54. keith alexander says these programs helped prevent dozens of terrorist events the deputy director the reason there has not been a major attack in the united states since 9/11 is not an accident the number of terrorist attacks that the nsa programs contributed to stopping is 54. that makes me feel safer when I hear that right and but we want to believe that it is true but it is not this number 54 has been intensely examined by defenders and apologists of the national security state for critics of it and it has since been reduced again to I think a case, uh, and this case in this one is not Somali wiring 8 500 um, I think it's a guy you know with a mental illness who was thinking about bombing a subway in New York, but it's the same. context the same thing they didn't need this authority it wasn't necessary because look, let's say no, john stossel, you work at the nsa, you do the work that I did in my last position, you come in every day, uh, you have the desk in front of you with your keyboard connected to a system called x-key scoring.

This is basically Google for spies. It allows you to search among all the different ingestion methods that we have not only nationally but also abroad. through our partners in what we call second party countries, these are these anglophone countries and five eyes that I mentioned earlier, as well as external partners, we have sensors that you know all over the world, some of them placed through hacking, some of them They placed in data centers. and you can type anyone's phone number into anyone's email and website into any IP address on a phone or a computer, a laptop, and you can see all the traffic that has gone through any of these sensors.

You can write to your FBI analyst friend and ask him to extract it. Anyone in the world basically has a complete list of Facebook, everything they ever clicked onanything that the Facebook pixel tracker was on the website when they were reading things, their Amazon order history, you know everything they typed into that Google search. box you ever have access to everything correctly and you want to stop a terrorist plot how do you know who to look for and that's why these programs don't actually stop terrorism? you have to have a seed, you have to have something to start your searches for you have to have a reason for suspicion traditionally under the fourth amendment we require probable cause for these types of investigations to begin police officers receive a tip from someone they notice something when they are working to hit they know their communities they see someone acting strangely they receive a complaint and investigate on this basis, very good in intelligence, the way these tips are conveyed is generally the same, it is from a confidential informant , it's law enforcement, it's whatever, but once you have this, once you have probable cause.

To start investigating someone, you can go to court. When you get a warrant, you can access the same information without collecting it from all over the Internet first, and this is the thing, when you look at the fact that the government itself no longer does These claims that he has stopped 54 plots, right?, have disowned him. Keith Alexander no longer works for the NSA. He now he serves on the board of directors of amazon.com. The question is, what are these things for? Because you're doing well. Why does the government pay for these programs? Why do all this? problem if it doesn't stop the attacks, yes, why and the answer of course is because these programs are tremendously useful for something different and that is information gathering, general proper intelligence research on anything about anyone, maybe may not be effective in preventing terrorist attacks because, again, it is not particularly more useful relative to the tools we already have because, again, terrorism is rare, it is rare and people don't realize this because of the way The means have changed, but the incidence of terrorism over time is actually decreasing relative to the last century, if you look, for example, at terrorist attacks in Western Europe, they have decreased decade after decade, since the decade 1960s, people forget, but things like maybe because of NSA intelligence, well, again I worked for these agencies and I would.

I would like to believe that was true, but the pace at which they were falling is completely different from the pace of mass surveillance and this is what people misunderstand about my politics and my positioning. I am not against the use of intelligence. I am not against existence. of intelligence agencies I'm not against surveillance, I'm against mass surveillance and this is what I presented information about just to play devil's advocate here, why should I care? I guess Google and Facebook know everything about everyone anyway, I imagine that teenager on the other side of the street might be collecting the stuff I sent him and the corks from the bottle, what difference does it make? go to work, take care of my family uh yeah I'm weird yeah I watch porn.

You know, if you were talking about the average person on the Internet, they all seem important, right, it's happened, even if you don't want to, there's a pop-up ad somewhere in your story, but the reality is that most people do it and he wants to do it, and that's not strange. People, especially Americans, feel enormous shame about this, but it is a tremendously common activity that makes us feel uncomfortable at the same time. You know, for many of us, like if our family knew everything we searched on the Internet, we would worry about how they would look at us.

If you knew that every company in the world knew everything you looked at, we would be uncomfortable with it. But then what happens when your workplace knows? What happens when your government knows and who decides what is normal, what is acceptable, and what is not okay? We may do things that are very common today or we may have positions or interests that are very uncommon today. but harmless in a free society we are allowed to be different we are allowed to be weird we can be weird as long as we don't hurt anyone else but the laws change the social wars change the norms change and once we enter this system where everything we We've done, everything we've ever been interested in, everything we've bought, every place we've gone, every place we've been or anyone we've talked to is instantly captured the moment it happens. and it is recorded in some database somewhere. waiting to be used, it will be used and we already see this happening in places like China, right, we don't want to emulate China where we have a social credit system where the things you do are harmless and don't harm anyone but the institutions. or the railways or the airlines or the communist party that comes to power is already in power decides that it is not favored and should be penalized should be discouraged now you can't get a job now you have to wait, you know, and go to the local police station to get a pass so you can travel and visit your family we can't anticipate these things and the problem I have with this argument idea is that we should have to prepare for that we should think and limit our intellectual curiosity and even, frankly, our quirks, our distinctions, our differences, our quirks, the things that put us in the minority because someday we might be judged for it, even if we hadn't done anything wrong, even if it wasn't weird because the definition of what is bad it changes constantly if google has it and facebook has it why is it so much worse that our government has it?

This is a great question. There are two ways it is usually answered and this is one that I used myself many years before. Well, the difference is that Google can sell you a different pair of shoes based on what it knows about you. The place's ads are on the side of your bar, but they can't put it up. If you're in jail, they can't bomb you, right? The government can, and for a lot of people, the government does the second thing, which I think is actually more interesting. It requires a little more technical understanding of how these programs are implemented, but not that much.

I think a lot is lost, even a general audience. Google knows a ton about an incredible amount of people, but it's still finite. There are things they don't know. Google doesn't necessarily know what you bought on Amazon. Google doesn't necessarily know. what you liked on facebook uh google google doesn't necessarily know what you posted on instagram facebook knows what you posted on instagram because they own that right amazon knows what you bought on this but they don't know what you sent in your email is on uh Google because it is a Gmail account. There are silos in the industry that, even if very large, still limit what these different companies know, the ultimate mastery of their understanding of you as an individual and of us as a whole as a population government, however, through their course .

Authorities in these types of systems can examine each of these different silos and then cross-check them. They see everything Facebook sees, as well as everything Google sees, as well as everything Amazon sees, and everything your phone provider sees. You see, in addition to everything that your airline provider has in terms of your travel history, you know, and so on, to an extraordinary extent, there are no limitations imposed on this beyond your appetite and willingness to chase these silos and find a way to get into them now I'm a little embarrassed and I'm a consumer reporter and I report on markets.

I haven't done much about espionage or military secrets and I hadn't paid much attention to you. I confused you before. researching for this interview with manning and julian assange

snowden

who did what and but now that i have done the research i conclude that you are really screwed and yet you talk about this in a very dispassionate and thoughtful way, aren't you mad? I mean, James. clapper lied to congress and the american people and was not fired, he served his term in the obama administration and now works for cnn and keith alexander uh, I think that's kind of a condemnation of the direction our media has taken In um, but I absolutely understand your point.

Keith Alexander now properly runs a private security company and is on the board of Amazon. They realized that you are in exile. Yeah, I mean, you don't do the kind of things I did. You are a pessimist. You do them because you are an idealist. You believe things can get better. Do you think we can do it better. When I came forward it was in recognition of the fact that there is a two-tier system in the way. American society is orderly today, there are those in power, who largely operate behind a veil of secrecy, and even this applies even to people who don't work for the NSA, right?

This applies to you. happens to congressmen, it is very difficult to discover who they are. When we meet, it's very difficult to know which lobbyists are talking to, who, and you know what laws are being shaped and what text is being written, that becomes law and that impacts all of our lives, but that was corporately sponsored. and these people are receiving donations for their campaign or for the famous justice system. If you are a young man from a minority community with limited access to wealth and especially education, our justice system will treat you very harshly, but if you are one of those made men who you know work at a high level.

You will face a very different flavor of justice, say none in the case of those two guys who lied precisely, precisely, uh, or no justice at all, but that will never happen. change um unless we get the right power to change it won't admit anything without a lawsuit the government is not going to reform itself and the only way things will get better anywhere is through sacrifice we've known since we left the swamp of history if you want to stay warm someone is going to have to go to the trouble of building a house it's not going to be fun they're not going to love it but they're going to do it because it makes life better someone is out there I'm going to have to do the hard work of growing the food we all know we survive on and they don't get much thanks for that, but society is a team board, our society as it exists today is flawed, I admit that, right?

I'm doing what I can to improve it as much as I can. I have no illusions that I'm going to fix it. I'm not going to save the world. That's not how it works and I think that's why I can. Being very at peace with the decisions I made and, unfortunately, the price I paid as a result of that because it was the right thing to do and it has made things better even if it hasn't been fixed. The problem is that now people can understand these things, we can start to advocate for better policies, and in fact it is already happening in our courts, which for literally decades were excused from weighing in at all on the legality and constitutionality of surveillance in the national security context since 2013, when I ran, I ruled repeatedly on these programs and I ruled repeatedly against the government, uh, that he had fully supported these things again for a long, long time, the nsa closed repeated substantial legal violations that the court stronger called systemic non-compliance on the part of the government, but the programs continue, some of these programs have been stopped.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act no longer exists. This was ended by an act of Congress and also at the behest of none other than Barack Obama, who in early 2014, interestingly in terms of timing, after the first court to rule against these programs said that they were probably illegal and unconstitutional, he came out in his State of the Union address and said that although he could never condone what I did, uh, he felt that this conversation about the legalities of surveillance and its limits had made us stronger as a nation and he urged Congress to pass what was then called the USA Freedom Act to basically put new legal restrictions on this, but as you say, that didn't end the problem. mass surveillance you just pushed the toothpaste tube right now the toothpaste is in a slightly different part of the same tube, however, mass surveillance occurs largely through certain technical principles, certain vulnerabilities mechanical in the way our communications move from your phone or laptop to your desk across the Internet to whoever you're trying to communicate with, whether we're talking about a website, whether we're talking about someone we are talking on the phone, fewer and fewer people now use the simple format. voice, fewer people use simple SMS now they use encrypted messaging like Signal Messenger or WhatsApp, which I wouldn't trust for a long period of time because it was bought by Facebook, but WhatsApp was the most popular messenger in the world, it had a billion.

Users after 2013 adopted a new technical protection called encryption.end-to-end, which is intentionally designed to limit precisely the kind of mass surveillance that was being discussed in 2013, so now, with the flip of a switch, a billion people get a higher level. of privacy that does not depend on jurisdiction does not depend on law does not depend on policy and encryption works encryption works uh one of the lessons as a result of 2013 all these revelations about how the nsa works how surveillance works um is uh You can be sneaky in many ways, like the NSA or the CIA, when you try to steal a secret, but encryption is basically just math and currently, with the best knowledge we have of math, there is no sneaky way to just make encryption completely disappear from one point of interception, so that when your phone again tries to communicate with this other person wherever they are in the world, it has to go through the network of many other people through the Starbucks you are sitting at. your Internet service provider through a data center through a transatlantic cable that goes, for example, to France your data center your local Internet service provider your Starbucks who are sitting at any of these points anyone sitting on that line you can get a copy of the conversation and if it was not encrypted they can read it, whether there is a criminal hacker next to you in the cafe or whether it is a national government, whether it is the American government or the French government or anyone intermediate, true, but the thing is um the only way to avoid strong encryption is properly implemented is precisely the purpose of the 2013 stories, which is to move governments from mass, indiscriminate collection of communications to targeted individualized collection and targeted, this means hacking properly, so imagine for a second that you send this encrypted communication to the person you're talking to people in the middle of tons of them, they all pick it up, they all collect it, but none of them can read it because an encrypted message doesn't It can be unlocked without a math key, it's just the answer to the math problem you make up. that you share with the other person on the other side you know the answer, but no one else in the world can find it right now.

Mass surveillance no longer works. The finished game doesn't work that way. There are some more technical ways. We can talk about metadata later if you're interested, but it goes deeper, but the bottom line is how, so if you're the CIA and, for example, this isn't someone harmless at a Starbucks, this is an actual terrorist, or a spy, or a dissident in a place like Bahrain, Oman or Hong Kong, which is unfortunately all too real and happens every day, how do they read this message and the response is that they steal a copy of the key instead of catching it when it crosses the line?

They can't do this for everyone en masse around the world anymore, they have to target the two places in the world where that message is readable, where it's not encrypted and that's on your device and the device of the person you're with talking. Now, instead of dealing with encryption instead of dealing with that global network, that cheap and easy mass surveillance, they do the hard work, the traditional investigative work aimed at hacking that phone or selling that person an implanted phone. which basically has spy devices built in and then when that person is encrypting messages or when you receive messages and you decrypt them because you have taken over the phone, the encryption doesn't matter to you anymore because you can see it unencrypted, you can steal that encryption key that answers the math problem when it exists on the phone before it is forgotten before it is gone for a long time because I know it was probably complicated for a lot of people, end-to-end encryption, that is, correctly implementing an encryption that does not have a man in the The The medium does not have any Facebook, no Google that keeps its own copy of the key, but rather an encryption in which the keys are only in the hands of the communicators, of the people who are supposed to know this information that defeats mass surveillance in the generic general sense that we understand. in 2013 it doesn't prevent all surveillance, it doesn't prevent particularly legitimate targeted surveillance, but it returns the world of intelligence and law enforcement to the more traditional means of investigative investigation, which have fewer implications for our rights overall as a society, let's talk a little more. about your personal history you decide you have to do this you applied for asylum in 27 countries people are, let's say, less familiar, especially now with seven years of distance between them, what exactly happened in 2013, so I left the United States and met with journalists in a hotel room in hong kong hong kong was selected because it was a kind of no man's land that had very good access to the media had a largely unfiltered internet, which is not true today unfortunately , but it was very easy for journalists to operate, it was very easy for me to get in as a US intelligence employee without showing up on any radar or anything like that and I would meet them there and China would also not necessarily be free to operate against us, particularly the way they do it today because of rivalries, frictions and bureaucratic infighting between the local services in Hong Kong and the government in Beijing, so this was really a kind of ideal no man's land to operate in.

I provided them documents and explained their importance and did not publish any documents. This is important for people to understand. I didn't put anything online. Instead, I told reporters to check this out. I explained it to them and if they felt, as I did, that this was in the public interest, they would have to do a separate editorial. judgment that this was the case, go to the government before publication, give the government a chance to argue against this, say that the Snowden guy is crazy or he doesn't understand this or that this document is incorrect or if he publishes this, people will basically get hurt. give the government the best opportunity to argue against this, which the government took in almost every case that I know of and they talked to the white house and they talked about the white house exactly what happened was like I mentioned before, I had had a a decade of history, uh, and actually, more than a decade of history, uh, of cases to review.

I looked at Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case in the 1970s in the court order against newspapers that worked with him, how that was resolved through the courts, what that meant, I looked at the Thomas Drake case, how Even though he followed the right channels, he ended up in the same place where unfortunately his story didn't come to light, he faced huge political consequences and the public couldn't deal. with this very important issue due to the suppression of the government and then I looked at the case of Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning with the war desires of Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the interesting things against this was that Manning, of course, was rested and They said: you know.

Manning had blood on his hands, he cost all these soldiers their lives, and you know, releasing this material that was just secret, not top secret, was basically going to cause the atmosphere to catch fire and the oceans to disintegrate, and none of this. It happened and in fact in Manning's sentencing the judge specifically asked the government do you want to argue that people were harmed as a result of this? You mean you know someone was hurt? someone died something like this because we will accept it in our sentencing under consideration we gave a harsher sentence and the government said actually no we can't prove it doesn't exist and this is what we actually saw in the ellsberg case it's a refrain constant where the government says uh every time they're in a bind.

They do not want to talk about the concrete damage of their policy. They don't want to talk about how they violated rights. They don't want to talk about how they broke the law. Instead, they want to do it. shift the conversation from the whistleblower to the source of the revelation say it's weird say it's disloyal say you're in trouble say you shouldn't have done this for whatever reason say they're going to have the spies killed or you're going to reveal the troop movements, precisely what they want to do is talk about the theoretical risks of journalism in an open society rather than the concrete demonstrated harms documented by the government's own negligence and this was something I anticipated, hence this.

A kind of process was designed. I used three different journalists, three different media. Everyone could go to the government. The government would have the opportunity to do this so that we could demonstrate that we had theoretically acted in the most responsible manner. We had done everything the government thought. was appropriate and appropriate compared to previous cases and see if it made a difference and the interesting thing is that even though this was tremendously lenient to the interests of the government, it did not make a single change in its message, they used the same rhetoric against me as They did it with the men like they did it with Drake like they did it with Ellsberg but from here I left Hong Kong en route to Latin America and I tell this story in my book permanent record of how it happened but what was it like When I left Hong Kong, the government did not We're sure there's no real way to know if it was an intentional strategic decision or if they panicked and it was just a mistake, but once they knew that the government had found out that I had left Hong Kong, they canceled my passport. , which meant I couldn't leave Russia and I spent the next, you know, 30 days and 30 nights, basically, stuck in this Russian airport chirometer, trying to get asylum, like you said, these 27 different countries, things that Americans would not be.

Particularly concerned, you know, Germany, France, and every time one of these companies goes with one of these countries, it would seem like they're leaning toward granting asylum and saying, "Okay, come here," they would get a phone call from one of two people, then the Secretary of State. um john kerry or soon to be, possibly excuse me uh so vice president joe biden and this is uh this is the interesting thing why would the united states government work so hard to keep me trapped in russia instead of allowing me to go to a jurisdiction where They would be much freer to operate in and much more comfortable, realistically, like France, Germany, Iceland or something like that.

If they had the slightest doubt about my loyalty, and this is a question that even to this day I have difficulty answering, I would assume. they just didn't want you to go anywhere and it turned out you were in Moscow and you didn't think that was true, did you? Imagine you're the director of the NSA or you're the CIA and you have this guy out there. the person you hate the most in the world and you know all your authorities, you know all your incredible powers, you even know the things that I didn't know, with all my access, all the ways you can get people and they go with you.

We know we don't really like this guy, we really want to do something with him. Would you rather he was in Moscow or literally anywhere else? So it's very strange to me that the government has worked so hard to keep me and I specifically exiled in Russia and we've always been a little bit um, especially as the years have gone by and it can't be explained simply as a policy mistake in that So, they have had time to rectify it and they realize that the fact that I am in Russia provides them with an undying political attack that does not need to be explained, does not need to be justified, simply the association with Russia is enough for them to put on He doubts my character and some Americans would say that he really went to China and it is true that he did.

It was Hong Kong and it was different from Russia, these two countries and there was no other way to get to Latin America except through Russia, of course, and this I mean was the subject of a lot of debate and it was born again, there was a lot of discussion. public reports about this back in 2013, when it was contemporary, the reality is that you can't fly from Hong Kong or at least you couldn't fly from Hong Kong at that time to Latin America, without crossing US airspace, unless you will take the long road. On the right path, then you do this and you have to go.

It is a very short list of which countries are not extraditable to get from Hong Kong to South America and, again, it is simply building a bridge in the air, step by step. and you know that my entire flight manifest at this moment has been made public, there were journalists on the flight for which they gave me the ticket from Moscow to Havana, taking photographs of my empty seat when I was prevented from boarding, and yes, all this It's been I looked into it and it's frustrating for me, but it's also interesting because I wonder, you know?

If they did this intentionally, if they did it strategically, it was really the most brilliant move they made in terms of communications planning that they could have made. I'm not sure we can give them that much credit because it could very well have been a moment of panic, but I think it's disappointing that all these years later they still haven't rectified it and it hasn't worked out well for you. Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentencenow he's running for political office uh politicians say you should kill yourself, well you know the funny thing is we see a lot less of it now than we did in 2013. uh the reality is there's sort of a pardon movement going on.

In my name I have not asked for forgiveness uh from this president or from the previous president um but many others have done so in my name and I am tremendously grateful for that and the defense that people made um but excuse me uh the thing is like every year it happens and all those claims like you said, you know they were like, oh, he got people killed, there were years, you know there were programs or whatever, this whole thing fell apart, it didn't work, the attacks will be overcome, none of that. happened and this was exactly the story in the Manning case, you know, Obama couldn't have commuted Manning's sentence in a politically realistic way, um, in this era of 2013, in this era of 2014, but years later, just when the Manning's shares were actually in 2009, 2010, you start getting year after year. year the fact that what Manning did did not materially harm national security did not materially harm people's lives and livelihoods all he did was inform the public and embarrass the US government. and their partner governments in the case of diplomatic relations, but to a large extent it was a matter of reputational damage, true, the government had egg on its face and retaliates as a result of this, furthermore, as you know from the reports on the justice system in other contexts, I think the government is very interested in what you describe as the deterrent effect the manning becomes secondary, right, someone like me, ellsberg or drake, any of these people become secondary until the point that the government points out to the rest of its workforce, even if this person did the right thing, even if they did it carefully, even if they did it the best way, we don't want you to emulate it, so we'll go after that this person will chase them all over the land to set an example, I hope that being pardoned is a little disconcerting the attorney general says that you are a traitor and the information that you sold was uh, you sold it like a merchant yeah, which you didn't do , you never tried to get money from her, President Trump in 2013 said they got a lot of information from this guy, he is a terrible guy who set our country back, this guy is a bad guy and you know there is still something called execution, this is a bad guy and there's still something called execution, but then seven years.

Later, a journalist asks him if you want to give Edward Snowden a pardon and he says, well, I'm going to look into it. Do you want to give Edward Snowden a pardon? Well, I'm going to look at it, I mean, I won't. I'm aware of the Snowden situation, but I'm going to start analyzing it, yes, this is a good example of the distance that Donald Trump has traveled from the 2013 victory to the 2020 victory, but also more generally when it is mentioned the case of the attorney general who does not seem to be familiar at all with the basic facts of the case when he speaks publicly about it, that there is a lot of distance historically, a lot has happened between then and when we start looking at what happened in 2013, except with The In the heat of the moment and the type of racing at stake and more dispassionately from a historical context, I think it's increasingly clear that what I did was the right thing to do and, in fact, public opinion is leaning very much that way. and in fact, even elite opinion that turns largely against people who work outside the organization in this way, will not find much love for whistleblowers in corporate America or government agencies in any country in the world , I think, but even there, you were starting to see people talking, in fact, I would say that the terms of a large majority are favorable rather than unfavorable and I think that's because history has a way of exonerating the truth of In some ways, attitudes shift away from President-elect Biden before. became vice president he was against the spying of this data collection and said it is very intrusive we are going to trust the president and the vice president to do the right thing, don't count me in because the real question here is what do they do with this information that they collect It has nothing to do with al Qaeda and we are going to trust the president and vice president of the United States that they are doing the right thing, don't count on me for that, but he changed his tune once he was in power, yes, over and over again Again, this was the same for the president-elect, Barack Obama, some people say, well, you know, Obama was a raving liberal before, now he's, you know, Dick Cheney, um, he tells this very briefly in his memoirs. , said. yes, he was campaigning against mass surveillance, yes, it was wrong, yes, it should have been done, it was a problem, etcetera, etcetera, but then he says that after he became president he realized he was watching it from the cheap seats and now Bush's wars were his wars and this is very much in line with his decision to move away from investigating Bush-era abuses, things like torture, things like illegal assassinations, things like the massive domestic surveillance program that occurred under the Bush administration, did not investigate them at all, instead he said that it was important that we look forward and not back and it is this lack of accountability among the American political elite, at the same time that we are constantly increasing the level of accountability of ordinary members of the public right, particularly when we talk in the context of this mass surveillance is not just the government watching you, Twitter is watching you, you know what you say online, YouTube is blocking your channel, you know what Whatever, there are people in little police hats everywhere you look, and at the same time, these people in power are excusing their behavior, they're raising the standard of accountability that we're held to, and to me, I'm like, isn't this just reverse?

We used to call them public servants and we were private citizens because we were supposed to know everything about them and we were all supposed to vet them and we were private citizens because no one was supposed to know what we were doing, we had no power, we had no influence, so We should have been left alone, but that is becoming more and more inverted and we are under constant scrutiny. electronically at the same time they are permanently protected by this fog of irresponsibility and that is by design and to be clear, twitter and youtube cannot put us in jail, yes they still can't, but be careful or they will force you to stay in jail.

In Moscow you cannot return to the United States the moment you got married in Russia. What is your life like in exile? Yes, my partner of many years was with me in the United States. Lindsey Mills, she's also American and me. We're getting married, we're expecting our first child, which is a tremendous stroke of luck, I'm so excited about it, and this is all-consuming right now, I think it's kind of scary. I've never been through this. before and I think it is even more terrifying for her, but the reality is that exile as a political weapon is beginning to fail, these conversations, what is happening between you and me today was something strange and something extraordinary when it started happening in my story in early 2014, but now, due to this global pandemic, it's everywhere all the time.

I just had a conversation with Ai Weiwei, who lives in exile in China as a result of his own criticism of his government and this. story idea that governments used to be fine you know we're just going to divorce you from the public conversation we're going to silence you through distance um it doesn't work anymore because even though I put my head down on the pillow, away, I still live in the United States, you know, and I think our son will embody the best of all worlds. You're applying for citizenship in Russia and some Americans say it's disloyal, which makes me suspicious, yes.

I mean this is part of the same conversation that I think has been intentionally pushed by the government for many years. The reality is that I have been in Russia for seven years. I can `t go. I'm hoping to start a family. I don't want my son to grow up as an outsider. I don't want him to feel like he was born in exile like I do. I want him to feel at home wherever he is. I don't want my wife to separate from me because you know she doesn't have a permanent residence. the same way as me, especially when the borders with Russia are closed like they are today, so the only way my family can be together is for me to do this and I Don't think that's wrong a year ago you posted the permanent record and the government sued and froze the profits they sought.

True, but the reality is that the government's judgment in the permanent registration case is not enforceable, certainly not internationally, it is questionable, domestically and I don't have any assets in the United States, uh, some kind of system banking or whatever they can do, so the ruling hasn't had any material effect, but more generally, I'm speaking publicly, I had it before that was also part of the lawsuit and I. I continue to do so today and I am very fortunate for the invitations to speak because it has allowed me to live a good life in a difficult situation and I have no reason to expect that to change and to be clear, we are not paying. you, but these are other speeches that should what are some of the worst privacy violations left and talk about, for example, love, I'm not sure, so I love it or I love intelligence, since it's kind of a suitcase for um it's the intelligence communities, kind of a nice insider information. term for spying on spouses romantic interests exes we normally use this ind to refer to intelligence there is sign int for signals intelligence there is command for communications intelligence there is human for human intelligence you would think of it as a kind of James Bond human-enabled operations well love int is where you take this giant, uh, sort of surveillance system that spans the entire world, uh, or even just your local police force, whatever, and you turn it on, hey, you know who he called after you knew he hung up phone, where are you going?

What are you doing and this has happened and the NSA has publicly confirmed that this happened after allegations came to light in at least 13 different cases? One of the particularly interesting things about this practice of lovevent um is that the government typically doesn't charge people. with crimes when they are found to do this even though it is criminal behavior and this is true any time analysts at the NSA or the CIA or anywhere else in the intelligence community abuse the authorities given by the government and you might say well, why is that?, but the answer is obvious when you think about it, the existence of this program is a secret, the operation of this program is itself, possibly illegal in the sense more charitable, probably illegal and the way I would put it, and therefore, confess that these programs exist, confess that a government employee who had undergone a polygraph obtained a top secret clearance and was actively using these programs to spy on Americans or any kind of unauthorized target like that.

Simply admitting that it is possible would expose these systems to legal challenges, so what does the government do? you just discipline them or, at worst, fire them, take them out and get a new body and put them in the chair, so this is the kind of constant low-level abuse that probably won't go away because it's introduced by a human element in the context of this broader systemic problem, what else is the problem? The turbulence of the prism. I mean, we could go on all day with this. I would say for the average listener. If you want to see the full scope of what's happening and why it's important. of its facets uh look at my book permanent record that's why I wrote it this is for you but what's not in the book uh and what's a concern is what's coming in the future uh and this is I see things like companies Like Amazon, for example, the fact that they just named the former NSA director who disgraced himself for overseeing the mass surveillance program that the courts have now condemned is illegal, that should worry people, why? what are they doing that?

Why does it seem that way? It's a good idea for them, but when you look at what they actually do, Amazon Web Services, as it's called, which is a cloud provider for technical hosting on the Internet, basically works like half of the Internet. I looked at the stats recently and I think when you look at the larger sites, it's a substantial portion of Internet traffic. All of this goes through Amazon's data center. These are all things you can see. These are all things that can record now when they come across all the different devices that Americans have. who visit websites from this have an Internet address associated with your device, probably have identifiers for the sites you are connected to, know a username or login or a phone number, a loginFacebook or Gmail session, they also have cookies, these are small digital files that are placed in your browser when you visit a site that allows them to show you different ads to keep you logged in on different types of things.

Now this means you can track in greater detail what people are looking at on the internet. are they visiting what are they searching for what are their interests what are their political leanings you can do sentiment analysis even without looking at anyone on an individual level by taking these identifiers these locations these associations and affiliations where they were in the world because their location services were activated who they were there with um this is happening more in the context of Leicester's tracking programs um and then you go with all this rich information that Amazon has about purchasing decisions about financial information they know what your card is, right? they know what your shipping address is, they know all these things and they start collecting them together and now we see Amazon because of their alexa or echo or whatever these things are called these days, they hire Keith Alexander, they implement this thing called the curbside program. or whatever, wherever you are listening to it, not just you in your house, not only listening to your devices, but also the radio information provided by other people's cell phones through the wifi hotspot, the unit a your side in the apartment building or you.

They know it on vacation or in a hotel and all of this is being collected by Amazon and everything is being returned. What you are doing is getting a broader and more detailed sense of the identity of the world, the correct individual identities, collectively and individually. They cross them with basically intellectual interests and activities and they buy information, this is called enriching it and then they share it, they apply it to uses that we don't know, they associate more and more with uh, like the police, through subsidiaries. I see things like google and their ringtones and all that um and what this means is that we're increasingly entering a quantified world where everywhere you go everything you do, everyone you interact with uh and everything you're interested in. now it is being pre-judged it is being collected, recorded, analyzed and evaluated and not by humans, we do not have the benefit of human judgment here, an algorithm makes a decision about whether you are desirable or undesirable, about whether the things you are doing are good or not. bad and we don't know how it is being enforced yet, but we do know that once they have this information we will not be able to take it away from them under the laws as they are written today and the United States of America is one of the only if not the only developed democracy in the world today that doesn't have a basic privacy law, we have the constitution, that would make a difference, I mean this is the problem that Americans generally don't care and I generally don't care Alexa, are you spying on me? um no, I Actually, I'm not spying on you, she says no, I'm not spying on you.

Learn more by visiting amazon.com. Alexa privacy. She's still leaving and John Oliver had to do with you a little bit, the only way he could get people interested in the invasion. of privacy was to point out that this little light here where I see the green light is not always on if the NSA is spying on us and they could take pictures of our private parts and show them only to the people who had a reaction. The government shouldn't be able to see dick pics if the government was looking at a photo of Gordon's dick I definitely feel like it would be an invasion of my privacy.

The US government should never have a photo of my penis. Yeah, this is something that I encounter constantly um and again I've spoken in places all over the world uh all kinds of different countries all kinds of different audiences all kinds of different age groups and I usually hear this as a question asked by older people and The interesting thing is formulated many times because young people don't care, they go, they are on Facebook, they are on Instagram, you know, they are publishing all this on social networks and the reality is that when I talk to the public and I have these conversations, the Young people care more about privacy and they worry more about these intrusions because just as my generation grew up with the type of web as it was in version 1.0 and now you know that I am getting older. young people, although I still consider myself young enough, right, they know this web 2.0, this interactive web where you not only read things on static sites, but you interact with them, you publish, you get rich, right?, but that is shared .

It's selective and this becomes clear when you look at these big beauty pageant sites, basically, like Instagram, where people put themselves through filters, you know they're showing off their wonderful dinner, uh, they're not showing off their burnt toast crap in tomorrow. why they are doing that because they understand that they are selectively sharing they are seeing experiences in their lives and parts of themselves as thoughts parts of a conversation that they want to engage other people in they want to invite you to this they don't give you everything and what is happening It's that trust in openness is being exploited by companies that couldn't sell us, you know, products when they market web dot 1.0, right?

Do you remember the technological boom and pets.com? Younger listeners. I have no idea what we're talking about, but the first forays into the Internet were not very successful. There was a boom and bust because they were trying to sell us things we didn't need once they realized there was only so much. No matter how much they could sell us, they went to look for a new product that took them to the new website and their new product is we, we are not the users of this system, we are being used by this system and the reason why you say you don't care.

This is what it is, and I say this without any intention to offend, because you don't understand the way that system is used against you and that is not due to a failure as an individual, it is by design, these companies don't want you. to understand how it is used, they work with lawyers, how it is used against me, it is profiling you, it is basically about creating what is called a pattern of life and a social graph not only for you but for everyone, and this means that even if you're trying to do something anonymously.

Let's say you have something like a cancer scare and want to find an oncology clinic. You want to call a doctor that you know or know that some planned parenthood is happening to a young woman. all these different things you just want a moment to seek help you're in a vulnerable state uh and you know you're trying to open like a private browser window by the way that doesn't work for the type of tracking that we do We're talking here at the network level just to anyone who'll listen, but a lot of people think so and they re-associate your identity based on what's called a fingerprint that they've established in your browser on your device from your logins.

Google is doing this. things on your phone Apple is doing these things on your phone to two different degrees, but the idea is that they are trying to encapsulate, encapsulate not only what you are but how you think, how you live, who you interact with, to make you an asset in a database in a set in a solution that can then be influenced and controlled and when you ask what they are doing to you, this is where people start to lose control because it feels like an abstraction that is not clear to them because they have not seen.

You know, a neighbor was taken to the street like it happened in World War II, in a kind of Nazi uprising context, where you have data sets that were built for a census by a group like IBM and then they are abused and applied to a different purpose and we did it well, it's harmless, you know, it's a sense, it's something you want, you don't see how these things are going to be applied later, but what they're doing today, um, in the most concrete way , as I said. Are they collapsing everything about you into a known value that can then be manipulated?

That is the beginning and the end of the system that they want to make you controllable. We talked about mass surveillance before that it is not effective in the context of surveillance. What is it? effective because it is this type of intelligence surveillance that is a means of influence, right, people ask me about terrorism and they say, do you know why they were not affected by the program to stop terrorism? It's because they were never designed to stop the terrorism they are about. uh, diplomatic manipulation, it's about social influence, it's about informational advantage, it's about power, corporate variation is a variation, it's pretty much the same thing when you look at all these things that we've talked about in the past, like elections. interference and you know this last wave was really ugly with political advertising and targeting, that's just the smallest part of a very big game, the bottom line is that power is derived from any medium, it could be from violence, it could be of the law, it may be, huh. money financial influence true, but the new means of influence is the one that is most easily hidden and the one that is most reliable at scale, that you can't buy everyone in the world, you can't murder everyone if you want to have something to control and even with the law there are lawbreakers, there are extreme cases with information applied at the right time and in the right way, you can change behaviors when you see an advertisement that is trying to shape your behavior to sell you a pair of new shoes, but they can also control what you see and given enough time and this is what you know, it's been studied by academics, what you believe in Facebook, which is a big company, you know, where we're not talking like a small startup. that's a little shady here, they did their own psychological studies on the current population, you know, to see if they could make you angry, they wanted to intentionally manipulate their users, it worked, they did it, you said and it worked exactly, you're right, that's right. control human behavior by a private company for what purpose just to see if they could well the next variation and this was years ago it will not be just to see if they could it will be to their advantage it will be to shape the laws, it is going to shape elections and it's going to shape individual outcomes, it's going to change lives, it might be good for you, right?

You might get a job you didn't expect to have, but it might also be very, very bad for you. and I think that for an important part of the population it will be. I don't feel threatened. You present a good case. Why should I do it? I'm not afraid of Amazon or Facebook because yes, they want to manipulate. me, but I'm a little afraid of the algorithm and how it could divide America by feeding us more than we think and separating us further, but basically they want my money and to get it a free market company has to give me what I want and that's a good thing, even if we look at this from the most libertarian perspective, when we talk about how the free market works, we assume that there is open competition, we assume that there is fair competition, we don't live in a perfect world.

In the world we don't live in, we don't have the benefit of a perfect market, there are monopolies, there are companies that exploit flaws in the regulations and gestures they have been given and it is difficult to find a better example. of this than many of the Internet giants as they exist today, so I think it's fair to recognize that, although yes, the free market, although we have options for consumers, although we can do other things, that is only true where there is an alternative where there is a reasonable competitor that can provide the same service or it is even possible to launch a competitor for these things and I don't think this is true in that broader sense, but as you say, I would be saying yes I heard correctly that no You are very afraid of these things, in the specific sense, you understand, in the general sense, you have these fears, but you know what you can do to protect yourself.

This is always a question I get and it's very difficult to answer because the advice changes year after year because the technology is dynamic the devices are changing the protocols they are changing the services they are changing the platforms they are changing the laws they are changing and that's why I don't like to give specific advice because uh The dates are very fast and this video will live forever with the rest of the things in our permanent record. What I will tell you is that there are organizations that are dedicated to creating these types of guides on how to protect and preserve them. updated, you can search for sites like privacy tools, such as surveillance and self-defense guides from the electronic border foundation, the american civil liberties union creates guides, the press freedom foundation, of which I am president, creates a guide for working journalists, but largely The most important thing to protect yourself is to recognize that you are not going to win an arms race against the richest companies in history and the most powerful states the world has ever seen.

The problem of surveillance, above all, is a political problem because it is enabled by a political class that does not share our burdens does not share our struggles and is exempt from this gaze is not subject to the same standard of behavior the samelevel of responsibility that you and I and this system this knowledge this influence will be used more and more to shape our lives and at the same time excuse them from the same methods of control, so political action, I think the concern is actually the root of figuring this out and recognizing what are the ways that it can be changed, what is the single point of failure that underpins all of these exploitative practices that allows this system to emerge and we talked earlier about these silos, you know, the Google hideout, the Facebook hideout, you know everyone's private records that are raining in there and being used in different ways and the government can open the lids to the different assault agitators and help themselves well, how do you Did they fill those silos?

We have in the United States, as I said, no, there is no basic privacy law, the fourth amendment binds the federal government. and the state government, but it doesn't restrict these companies that are basically acting in total conspiracy with the regulators, where each hand washes the other in a kind of monopoly position, I think there is a common flaw in the laws as they are interpreted. by the United States courts today a case from the 1970s uh this sounds random but I promise you it comes together very quickly uh called smith versus maryland and it led to the birth of what is called the third party doctrine if you look back in history American law enforcement agency about what law enforcement could obtain through investigations were strictly limited to two categories of profits they were called fruits and instruments of a crime if they were chasing a thief they could obtain a warrant the warrant would allow them to enter the house go to the business anything they could get the loot bag the fruits they won they could take the crowbar the mask the gloves the instruments of crime and they could use this as evidence to convict they couldn't go to the owner of that thief and you know how to get records payment, they couldn't go to the phone company and confiscate the phone company's records because they were neither fruits nor instruments in this new world where the government can demand from private entities, private records about customers or even your own records about yourself , his diaries. or whatever is something very, very new, it's about 60 years old, right, and in this case of Smith v.

Maryland in the 1970s, the government played a case in which police officers were investigating a, basically, a man making harassing phone calls to a woman, where this was an An individual suspected of wrongdoing, the police went to the phone company and said can we get your phone records to see if you called this house? Because the woman saw her license plate while she was driving, looking out of the corner of her eye at her house and she thought that was it. It was him and the police agreed that the phone company turned him in and sure enough, it was him.

They caught the guy who made the harassing phone calls. You know, it seems fair, but they did it without a court order. And when this went to the supreme court because the supreme court knew that he was a bad guy, he needed something bad, they didn't want to let him go and so they went, they tried to create a paradigm where they could go, the phone company could do this, they could give this. the person's records about what they were doing to the police without a warrant and this was called the third party doctrine, the government said that because these records did not belong to the man, although there were records about him, they belonged to the company because the company He created that man had no privacy interest in those records, therefore he had no Fourth Amendment protections with respect to those records in the decades since the 1970s, when you know the court could not have imagined the world we live in today where our movements can be tracked by our phones that companies have records of everything about us uh the government has repeatedly relied on this one outdated judicial opinion from a guy who makes scary phone calls to go to no one in the country, no one in the world has a privacy interest in any records that are created about them but are in the hands of a third party if that changes, this surveillance really ends people won't find a way around it, I think legally if you recognize that people have a proprietary interest or a privacy interest in information about them, that means it's no longer the company's records, it's your records, so now you're in the saddle. of the driver.

Yes, Amazon could create a record about you with your consent, but you control it, you can revoke it, you can destroy it, uh, and this is. What has changed right now we have a non-consensual relationship, it is based on the illusion of consent, the idea that you know you clicked "Accept" to continue, but that doesn't work in any other contract law. In the sense that you know you can. You can't click OK to bind yourself into servitude for the rest of your life, you can't click OK to be repeatedly victimized anywhere except on the Internet, and I think as soon as we recognize that this is not appropriate and that we don't is appropriate, life will be better for everyone because we will have more control over our own destinies and our own stories.

I confess that I am a bad example in what you say about worrying about this and that I have been on television since I was in my twenties calling criminal businessmen and I thought I had enemies and some of them were out to get me, so I have been very careful and when I got scared I wrote a column about cancer, so I guess I really have no privacy. And I've come to terms with that, but there should be a private sphere where people can go. It's a fair point. I will say that there is a difference between you and we will see the average person, because as we talked about it. public officials and private citizens we also have this other category of public figures um and you are nobody you have a platform you have a voice you have influence you have friends you have associations you have connections um and more importantly, I think you get your power in society, uh, from sharing that voice and using that voice, but not everyone is as smart as you, as well-spoken as you, and has the history, um, and the skill set that you have, and I think recognizing that there are different people in society with different abilities uh it's not a bad thing it's a good thing it's okay for someone to say they don't care about this or that um but the way rights work it's not for the average person and it's not especially for the most privileged among us, Bill Gates you don't need rights, Bill Gates writes the laws, Bill Gates could hire his own army, um, rights are for the least among us, they're for the minorities, they're for the outsiders, they're for the exposed, they're for the people who They stand out and are different.

Rights exist to protect the minority from the majority because it is our differences that lead to progress and those differences, those disagreements, uh, those new ideas always begin as a minority of one and only. Like a seedling, we in free societies make an intentional decision to structure our systems, our laws to protect and house these weirdos so that once they have been tested we can benefit from those ideas. Well, thank you very much for giving us a lot of time here. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being with you. Thank you, Edward Snowden, stay free.