Mass surveillance programs conducted by intelligence agencies often operate without proper oversight and can be unlawful, as demonstrated by the fact that courts have ruled many such programs unconstitutional; whistleblowers face significant legal consequences when exposing government misconduct, yet their revelations are essential for democratic accountability and reform.
Edward Snowden Interview: Surveillance, Privacy, and Government Secrets
Added:The basic structure and roles of the US Intelligence Community, specifically the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.
The legislative aftermath of the September 11 attacks, particularly the USA PATRIOT Act and its expansion of government surveillance authorities.
Fundamental concepts of digital communication, specifically the distinction between communication content and metadata (e.g., call logs, IP addresses).
The legal and ethical definitions of whistleblowing, espionage, and civil disobedience, including the context of the US Espionage Act of 1917.
The technical implementation of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), such as end-to-end encryption, virtual private networks (VPNs), and onion routing (Tor).
Legislative and policy reforms enacted post-2013, such as the USA FREEDOM Act and the judicial rulings on the legality of bulk metadata collection.
The concept of 'Surveillance Capitalism' and how private technology conglomerates harvest, store, and share user data with or without government cooperation.
The geopolitical dynamics of international asylum, extradition treaties, and the legal status of political dissidents in foreign jurisdictions.
6M views79.8Klikes1:43:30Original Release: 2020-12-21
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 researching this, I now think he did.
You decide. Here's our full interview.
You went to work for the government, you signed agreements saying you wouldn't talk about what you did.
Why go to the media?
We talk about awards for progress and civil liberties.
We talk about the importance of independent thought and the history of it.
And this is really what it is.
I did sign up to work for the government.
I volunteered for the Army. I applied to the CIA.
I worked as a contractor in NSA facilities on NSA computers again and again and again.
People think contractors like you're working in a different building, but no, it's just a continuation of government service.
And also, you joined the military after 9/11, because you wanted to fight I did. When everyone else was protesting.
I was a younger man, and I was a much less politically educated, I'd like to think, than I am today. Some things only come with experience.
But so yeah, it raises this question of how does someone like who I was become someone like who I am.
And I got to tell you, it was hard. It wasn't easy. It wasn't natural.
It wasn't something I ever expected to do.
But like I said, I signed up to all of these things.
I volunteered because I believed in a prevailing national mythos to which we are all subscribed when we're born into 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 you pledge allegiance to a flag.
We all have the same stories. We all watch the same channels.
We see men like you on TV telling us what's happening in the world, and what it's like.
And what changed me was a realization that as someone who held a top secret clearance and had access far beyond what a top secret clearance would entitle someone to generally, the private truths of what was actually happening in our government, what our government actually does, what our nation was involved in, without the knowledge or consent of the people that it purports to represent, was very different than the public representation of it.
And really, just that seed alone was the start of a journey that would take me many years to ultimately realize, and the decision, as you said, to come forward.
And the ultimate reason why I came forward was simply to bridge that gap in my own experience and share that with everyone else, to share the realization that I came to, that what we were being told is true and real and is the state of our world was, in fact, a witting and continuing lie by some of the highest representatives in our government.
And I felt that people needed to know that.
What was the lie?
I think the most famous one for me, and really, the turning point would be when you look at the exchange between Senator Ron Wyden and then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.
This is a sworn testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and for those who don't remember it, because it was some time ago, it looked a little bit like this.
[music] 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 at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
No, sir.
It does not?
Not wittingly.
There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.
Now the importance of 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 doing this for other major telecommunications providers as well, just didn't have the judicial 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 that was non-commercial, very individual, and simple.
It was pretty crude. Everything was cobbled together.
To this larger, more corporatized internet, where all of our communications, all of our interactions, all of our relationships, all of the things that we read and like online are being passed to us through a Facebook or a Google or an Apple.
And in secret, these companies had basically gone far beyond what the law required of government to join programs, where they would share information with the NSA through the front door of the FBI.
And it was continuing for years without the individual warrants and legal process that we expected, and we have become accustom to.
We're told in the Constitution, this is how our government works.
And so for me, when you ask what was the lie, the lie was not any one particular part in these programs.
It wasn't a particular detail.
It was the fact that there was a breathtaking sweep of intentional, knowing public deception by people at the level of the Senate, by people in these different executive agencies, intelligence agencies, and then in the White House itself, even from the President, then President Barack Obama, who campaigned on ending warrantless wiretapping, that he had criticized so heavily in the Bush administration, but had in fact, in secret, extended and embraced these programs and these authorities, to a level that I began to feel had truly narrowed the boundaries of our rights.
Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens' emails?
No.
Does the NSA intercept Americans cellphone conversations?
No.
Google searches?
No.
Text messages?
No.
Amazon.com orders?
No.
Bank records?
No. We're not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.
You're at the NSA, and you're dealing with these secrets before you even saw the head of the National Security Agency on TV, and what did you think about them then?
Well, so this was the thing.
When you look at the arc of my career in intelligence, I was always working on the technical aspect of it.
And so by and large, I was modernizing our systems because post 9/11, the intelligence community realized they weren't very good at using technology.
They thought they were, and in a way it was true that they were, but it was a different era's technology.
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 bunch of shaggy, young guys who looked like me They really liked what you did. You were a star.
Absolutely. But it wasn't that I was exceptional, so much that I represented a generation that was native to these new systems that they had shied away from because they didn't trust the security of them, it turned out with good reason.
But my generation came in, we shared our experiences.
We shared our specialties, and we were always looking at what we were doing through a straw.
And you have to understand, this principle that we hear of in the movies, need to know, means normally you get a project, you do a project.
You don't know where it goes.
You don't know who else is using it.
But bit by bit, I was redirecting and collecting the flow of intelligence, then always backing it up, permanizing it, making it so that if we lost a building, if we lost a site, we didn't lose everything that had passed through that, the information that had been passed through that.
My thought, this was information about terrorists.
I thought this was saving lives. I thought this was preventing wars.
But as I moved higher and higher in the organization, as I moved from CIA to NSA, as I moved from office to office, my straw that I'm looking through gets wider and wider and wider, until I land in this place called the Office of Information Sharing.
It turned out 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 labor and the different parts of your career, all brought together with the labor of others, of your entire generation, who themselves, not sitting in the position you are, can't see the big picture impact of what they're doing, and the public who never even knew this stuff existed.
And again, this was occurring without their consent.
But in theory, it was being carried out in their name.
It felt to me that we needed to know, we needed to actually decide, is this what we want to happen or not?
And you talked to your supervisors.
Yeah. I talked to my supervisors.
I talked to my colleagues on Constitution Day.
They we're all fine with it. This is just what we do, and no problem.
Actually, it's not quite that people had no problems.
When I brought up these programs that many of them had never heard of because they hadn't been exposed to them, I said, "Does this look right to you?"
When I show that we're collecting more internet communications in the United States at the NSA, than we were in Russia.
Meaning we are ingesting more Americans' communication than we are ingesting Chinese people's communications or Russians' communications or North Koreans' communications or whoever you're afraid of.
The bulk of our collection was happening domestically and happening with the aid of other partners in what's called the Five Eyes Network, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
And then the NSA would go, "Well, yes, we're collecting all of these communications, but we're not reading them all. We're capturing everything that you, John Stossel, are doing online.
We're capturing everything that your family is doing online, that your friends are doing online, but we just pinky promise it's not being used for anything bad."
And then, being an engineer, I see how these things actually are being touched, they are being processed, they are being sorted through every single day.
Algorithmically, it proves the lie that all of these promises, they don't really amount to much.
All of these processes and regulations and procedures don't amount to much.
And in reality, what the NSA is doing every single day, its ordinary course of business, is violating not only the laws as written, but likely the Constitution.
And I tell this to the guy sitting to my right, a good friend of mine, tell this guy sitting in my left, good friend of mine, to my office manager.
And all of them actually, in private, when you're not in email, when they're just speaking heart to heart about this, they go, "No, this is crazy.
I'm not sure why we're doing this.
I'm not sure how we're doing this.
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 office or that office.
They're not going to do anything about it.
It's not your job. It's not my job." This is way above our pay level, basically.
But what happens to us as an organization at the NSA?
What happens to us as Americans? What happens to us as a society?
If everybody sees something wrong and goes, "Well, if I say something about it, I'm going to get in trouble."
What happens if everybody goes, "I'm not going to do anything about this because it's not my job."
That's how things go wrong in a much more serious way.
And the reality was, I was just like them.
For a long time, I had a growing sense of unease, but in reality, it was not my job to fix it.
And this was actually one of the criticisms that was eventually leveled against me, was they go, "Who elected you?"
But it's not about who you are. It's about what you've witnessed.
It's about what you can prove and does that matter?
And I think the last seven years, when we've seen the courts review these programs and confirm that they were in fact unlawful, we've seen laws change even by the legislature that was implicated in the wrongdoing in the first place.
But at some point, you decided, I'm not going to keep my mouth shut Yeah. It's exactly because of this.
If I keep my mouth shut, the guy to my right, the guy to my left, we all think this is wrong, and we all keep our mouth shut, what does tomorrow look like?
And the year after that? And the year after that?
The reality with these extraordinary powers in government, particularly... and we all understand this now, in the post 9/11 moment, because it's not just surveillance.
It's happened in more, it's happened in international diplomacy, it's happened in economy with the financial crisis, and having to bail out the banks, but we don't bail out ordinary people.
When the government writ large identifies a moment of crisis.
They used that crisis for an exceptional demand for exceptional powers, to which they normally wouldn't be entitled.
This was the rise of the Patriot Act.
This was how the Bush administration got involved in more or less wiretapping.
This is how we got extra judicial killings through drone strikes, off the ground.
This is how we got involved in torture.
But it's always justified as, again, an exception to ordinary operations, something that's done for a narrow purpose in a narrow way, but then nobody objects to it.
These all happen in secret, remember.
They keep the body of witnesses small by design, to limit the amount of dissent that can occur internally, organizationally, and those who do complain are generally shuffled off the program.
They're put in a closet somewhere, and they ride out their days to retirement, if they're lucky, never doing anything that matters again, but also not having access to anything that could cause problems for those who are violating people's rights or our laws.
But this, as you said, why speak up?
If you sit by and see a system engaged in wrongdoing, and you do nothing, even if you don't participate in it any longer, even if you resign, you are perpetuating a system of wrongdoing.
You have become not just part of the wrongdoing, but party to it.
And for me, when we looked at this, this was affecting the country that I love.
This was affecting the internet that I grew up with, that was practically part of my family by this point in my life.
And then you extrapolate from how we got involved in this overreaching surveillance state to begin, with the national security state.
And step by step, bit by bit, exception after exception, these extraordinary and narrow authorities become permanent and perpetual authorities.
And bit by bit, as the domain of government expands, the territory that is claimed to the people narrows.
And this became such a concern to me that I was willing to risk a great deal to tell people about it and see if they agreed, or if I was just crazy.
My preference and I think, the American people's preference would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws.
A thoughtful, fact-based debate, that would then lead us to a better place.
There were other avenues available for somebody, whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.
So why go to certain members of the media?
President Obama later said there were other avenues available to someone whose conscience was stirred, inspector generals, Congress?
No. This is a great question.
We always look at these things because we don't want anybody in government to be able to go out and throw any secret about anything out on the media willy-nilly.
And this is one of the primary institutional criticisms against me.
Now on the other hand, are there internal channels, as Obama posited?
For me, no.
Even under the most generous reading of the law at the time, what he said was incorrect.
And he said, so at a time, that by the way, he knew it was incorrect, even though it was politically useful because this had been debated in newspapers around the country by this point.
I was not an employee of the NSA.
I was employed at a private company that was contracted to do work for the NSA, at NSA buildings, on NSA equipment.
The only difference between myself and the actual NSA employee sitting to my right in the office was he had a blue badge. I had a green badge.
Green was for contractor, blue was for staff, employee of government.
But the whistleblower protection laws did not apply to contractors.
This makes sense, if you think about it, in the context of the moment, because how can the government protect someone from complaints when it's not actually their employee?
How can the government prevent someone from being disciplined when they're private company for whatever purpose?
And the reality is, was even if I had gone through an internal process, had I gone to Congress, had I gone to the President himself, the ultimate result would have been the same.
I would have been stopped at some level by an individual like the NSA inspector general, who was supposed to be a watchdog that makes sure the NSA's activities are legally compliant, or the office of general counsel.
And I would have been terminated from my position.
I would have been investigated by the police.
And I very likely would have been charged under exactly the same laws that I've been charged under today.
We know this, not because I'm speculating and throwing this out of air, but because it had happened before in the case of a former NSA executive, at a much higher level than myself, by the name of Thomas Drake, who did go through proper channels and whose story I was very familiar with because I was determining, should I do this? Is it right? Will it work? Will it be effective?
William Binney, who was charged with Thomas Drake at the same time, were investigated at the same time as Thomas Drake, for the same disclosure.
He had men with guns drawn, coming to his house at dawn.
Yes, exactly. You have the FBI burst in your house.
They take all your computers. They arrest you. 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 personally knew there.
And she then went to the chairman of that committee we were all trying to work internally in the government for over these years trying to get them to come around to being constitutionally acceptable and take it into the courts and have the court's oversight of it too.
We naively kept thinking that, that could happen and it never did.
They decided to raid us, to keep us quiet, threaten us.
In my case, they came in with guns drawn.
I don't know why they did that, but they did.
Thomas Drake, who was an executive at the top of the US intelligence community, now works at an Apple store.
But it's important to understand that he did go through proper channels.
He did everything right.
And when he went to these officials, this is what they said.
This is the office of general council at the NSA, a man by the name of Vito Potenza.
If he came to me, someone who was not read into the program, and told me that we were running amuck, essentially, and violating the Constitution, there's no doubt in my mind, I would've told him, "Go talk to your management. Don't bother me with this."
The minute he said, if he did say you're using this to violate the Constitution, I probably would've stopped the conversation at that point, quite frankly.
So if that's what he said he said, then anything after that, I probably wasn't listening to anyway.
And this is the reality. And I think everybody understands this naturally.
These internal watchdog shops in government, they're great if you need to report sexual harassment.
They're great if you need to report some discrimination, if somebody's stealing office supplies.
If you go, the entire agency of government is engaged in a conspiracy to deceive the public about the reality that we are right now, of working in concert across agencies, to carry out a program that is in violation, not only law, but the Constitution, they're not equipped to handle that.
And they're not interested investigating that. That's not why they were appointed.
I got to say, in my endless 100 year career, no one has ever rolled in video before.
That's usually what I need to do. If you ever- I'm a technologist. Sorry, I can't help it.
That's good. All right.
Why do you think you were charged under the Espionage Act, that's pretty rare.
To send a chilling message.
To whom?
To other whistle blowers, to others in the government not to speak out or speak up.
Do not tell truth to power. We'll hammer you.
Drake on 60 Minutes, where he said the purpose was to send a chilling message.
Do not tell truth to power. We will hammer you.
I think that that's absolutely correct.
When you look at the lived experience of whistle blowers.
And again, these are separated by decades of different White Houses, different Presidents, different administrations, different Congresses, different policies, the response is always the same.
If someone inside of government reveals government wrongdoing, at the level that threatens the reputations and certainly the electability of, whether we're talking about agency heads, whether we're talking about politicians, whether in the legislature or the executive branches, their first priority is to stop you from talking because they want to control the narrative.
And this is really what this is about.
When you look at all of this mass surveillance, whether we're talking about internet surveillance, whether we're talking about telephonic surveillance, whether we're talking about domestic surveillance, whether we're talking about international surveillance... You've been in the news a long time, you've seen these officials, you've interviewed these officials.
They constantly tell us this is for your safety.
This is to investigate terrorists, right?
And I kind of believe it.
Right. We all believe it to some extent, particularly when we share the national trauma of 9/11.
But when you look from the inside, as an employee, at what we're doing with this, I see all the reporting, I've got access to the reporting.
And then you look at things that happened in the wake of scandal.
For example, after I came forward, Obama, who was facing extraordinary pressure, appointed two independent commissions to investigate these programs.
Because he was trying to basically justify these things and find where they were accurate, 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 of these groups had full access to classified information.
Both of them talked to all sides of the intelligence community.
They went to the FBI, they went to the CIA, they went to the NSA, and they said, "Look, we've got the clearances, give us your success stories.
Show us where this helped. Show us where this saved lives.
Show us why we should be doing this."
And they looked because at the time, we had people, we had Keith Alexander then, Director of the National Security Agency going in front of Congress, going on TV and saying, "This stopped 47 plots," or whatever.
"People are alive. Buildings are up because these programs."
Well, Barack Obama's own investigations into this found that in the case of the very first program that we looked at, this was the mass surveillance telephone records domestically, it didn't stop a single terrorist attack in more than 10 years of operation, and that's happening in secret, mind you, before it's the front pages and all of that stuff.
And in the only case, they also found, sorry, that it never made a concrete difference.
And that's their words. In a single counter-terrorism investigation.
There were plots that were found, but the court found that they already had the information.
They didn't need all this spying.
We've heard over and over again the assertion, that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted.
That's plainly wrong. These weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted.
The American people are getting left with inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of the NSA programs.
They actually never discovered a plot through these programs.
Never. Not once.
What they did do is they found information related to a plot in a single case.
And this was a cab driver in California, I believe, wiring about $8,500 to his clan in Somalia, which was affiliated with Al-Shabaab, which was on a terrorism list, according to State Department.
This was their great success story.
And in this case, judges had... sorry, we had already had watch dogs go through it.
Thanks. Fortunately, to Obama in this case.
And now, we have since had courts go at it and confirm it was unlawful, and it was unnecessary.
And mind you, this is with access to the classified record, because they said by the time the government had enough information to look these guys up in the NSA database, CIA, FBI, whatever, they also had enough evidence to go to a court through traditional means and get a warrant without relying on all this, right?
You didn't have to collect this by violating the rights of 330 million Americans when you simply could have used the old traditional means of law enforcement to get exactly the same material from exactly the same companies without breaking the law.
It's dozens of terrorist events, that these have helped prevent.
The tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54 Keith Alexander says these programs helped prevent dozens of terrorist events, the deputy director. The reason there hasn't been a major attack in the United States since 9/11 is not an accident.
The number of terrorist attacks the NSA programs contributed to stopping is 54.
That makes me feel safer when I hear that.
Right. But we want to believe it's true, but it's not. This 54 number has been looked at intensively by advocates and apologists for the national security state, by critics of it.
And since then, it's boiled down again to I believe one case.
And this one case in this is not a Somalian wiring $8,500.
I believe it's some guy with 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 you dump John Stossel, work at the NSA.
You do the job I did in my last position.
You go in every day, you've got the desk in front of you with your keyboard, connected to a system called XKeyScore.
This is basically Google for spies, right?
It allows you to search through all of the different methods of ingestion that we have, not just domestically, but overseas through our partners, in what we call second party countries these are these Anglophone countries in the five eyes I mentioned earlier as well as third-party partners.
We have sensors all over the world, some of them placed by hacking, some of them placed in data centers.
And you can type anybody's phone number and anybody's email and any website and any IP address for a phone or a computer or a laptop that you can see all the traffic that has passed any of these sensors.
You can write to your FBI analyst buddy, and have them pull anybody in the world's basically whole Facebook list, everything they've ever clicked on, anything that the Facebook Pixel tracker was on the website for when they were reading things, their Amazon order history, everything they've typed in that Google search box.
You have access to everything, and you want to stop a terrorist plot.
How do you know who to look up?
And this is why these programs don't actually stop terrorism.
You have to have a seed.
You have to have something to start your searches from.
You have to have a cause for suspicion.
Traditionally, under the Fourth Amendment, we require probable cause for these kinds of investigations to begin.
Police officers get a tip from someone.
They noticed something when they're working the beat.
They know their communities. They see someone acting strange.
They get a complaint and they investigate on this basis, right?
Well, in intelligence, the way these tips come across is generally from the same thing.
It's from a confidential informant. It's from law enforcement.
It's from whatever. But once you have this, once you have probable cause to begin investigating someone, you can go to a court. You can get a warrant.
You can access the same information without collecting it from the entire internet before.
And so this is the thing.
When you look at the fact that the government itself no longer makes these claims that it stopped 54 plots, right?
They have disowned that.
Keith Alexander no longer works for the NSA. He's out.
Now he works on the board of directors at Amazon.com.
The thing is, what are these things effective for?
Because you go, well, why does the government pay for these programs?
Why go to all this trouble if it doesn't stop attacks?
Yeah, why?
And the answer of course is because these programs are tremendously useful for something different, and that is information gathering, right?
Intelligence, general investigation about anything on anyone.
It may not be effective in preventing terrorist attacks.
Because again, it's not particularly more useful relative to the tools that we already have, because again, terrorism is rare.
It is scarce. And people don't realize this based on the way the media has changed.
But the incidence of terrorism over time is actually declining relative to the last century.
If you look at, for example, terrorist attacks in Western Europe, they have declined decade over decade since the 1960s.
People forget about it, but things like that IRA... Maybe because of intelligence in the NSA.
Well, again, I worked for these agencies and I would like to believe that was true.
But the rate at which they were falling is completely different from the rate of mass surveillance.
And this is what people misunderstand about my politics and my positioning.
I am not against the use of intelligence.
I'm not against the existence of intelligence agencies.
I'm not against surveillance.
I am against mass surveillance.
And this is what I brought information forward about.
And just to play devil's advocate here. Why should I care?
I figure Google and Facebook knows everything about everybody anyway.
I figure that teenage boy across the street could be picking up the stuff I send.
The cork's out of the bottle. What difference does it make?
Well, this goes back to kind of that nothing to hide argument, which is like, "I lead a very ordinary life. I watch my shows.
I go to work. I take care of my family. Yeah, I'm weird. Yeah, I look at porn."
If we're talking about the average person on the internet, everybody looks at porn, right? It's happened.
Even if you don't want to, there's a pop-up ad somewhere. It's in your history.
But the reality is most people do and they want to, and that's not strange.
People, particularly Americans, feel an enormous sense of shame about this, but it's a tremendously common activity.
At the same time, it makes us feel uncomfortable.
For a lot of us, if our family knew everything that we looked up on the internet, we would worry about how they would look at us.
If every company in the world knew everything that you looked at, we would feel uncomfortable with it.
But then what happens when your workplace knows?
What happens when your government knows?
And who decides what is normal, what's acceptable, and what's not?
We can do things that are very common today or we can 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 strange as long as we're not hurting anyone else.
But laws change, social mores change, the norms shift.
And once we are entered into this system where everything we've ever done, everything we were ever interested in, everything we've ever bought, everywhere we've ever gone, everywhere that we have... or anyone that we have ever talked to is instantly captured at the moment it happens and memorialized in some database somewhere just 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 things that you do which are harmless, which aren't hurting anyone, but institutions or railways or airlines or the Communist Party that sweeps into power, is already in power, decides it's disfavored, it should be penalized, it should be disincentivized, now you can no longer get a job.
Now you have to wait and go to the local police station to get a pass to be able to travel and visit your family.
We cannot anticipate these things.
And the problem that I have with this idea of argument is that we should have to prepare for it, we should think and constrain our intellectual curiosity, and even frankly, our weirdnesses, our distinctions, our differences, our weirdness, the things that place us in the minority, because we could potentially someday be judged on the basis for it, even if we had done nothing wrong, even if it wasn't strange, because the definition of what is wrong is constantly changing.
If Google's got it and Facebook has it, why is it so much worse that our government has it?
This is a great question. There's two ways this is typically responded to.
One, and this is one that I used myself and many used before, is that, well, the difference is Google can sell you a different pair of shoes on the basis of what it knows about you, right?
The ads that it places on the side of your bar, but they can't put you 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, requires a little bit more technical understanding of how these programs are implemented, but not so much that I think it loses even a general audience.
Google knows an incredible amount about an incredible number of people, but it is still finite.
There are things that they do not know.
Google does not necessarily know what you bought on Amazon.
Google does not necessarily know what you liked on Facebook.
Google does not 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're saying in your email on Google because it's a Gmail account, right?
There are silos in industry that even if they're very large, still limit what these different companies know, the maximum domain of their understanding of you as an individual and us broadly as a population.
Government, however, through its course of authorities in these kinds of systems is able to look into each of these different silos and then co-link them together.
They see everything that Facebook sees as well as everything that Google sees, as well as everything that Amazon sees, as well as everything that your phone provider sees, as well as everything that your airline provider has in terms of your travel history and so on and so forth to an extraordinary extent.
There are no limitations placed on this beyond their appetite and willingness to pursue these silos and find a way into them.
I am a little embarrassed in that I'm a consumer reporter and I report on markets, I haven't done much on spying or military secrets, and I hadn't paid much attention to you.
I got you confused before researching for this interview with Manning and Julian Assange, Snowden, which... who did what?
But now that I've done the research, I conclude that you really got screwed, yet you talked about this very dispassionately and thoughtfully.
Aren't you pissed off?
I mean, James Clapper lied to Congress and to the American people, and he wasn't fired.
He served out his term in the Obama administration, and now he works for CNN, and Keith Alexander... I think that's kind of a condemnation of the direction our media has gone in, but I understand your point.
Absolutely.
Keith Alexander now runs a private security firm, appropriately, and is on Amazon's board.
They made out. You're in exile.
Yeah. I mean, you don't do the kinds of things that I did if you're a pessimist.
You do them because you're an idealist. You believe that things can get better.
You believe that we can do better. When I came forward, it was in recognition of the fact that there is a two tiered system to the way American society is ordered today.
There are those in power who operate largely behind a veil of secrecy... and this applies even to people who aren't working for the NSA, right?
This happens to Congressman.
It's very difficult to find out who they're meeting with.
It's very difficult to figure out what lobbyists are having conversations with who and what laws are being shaped and what text is being written that is passed into law that impacts all of our lives but was corporately sponsored, right?
And these people are getting donations to their campaign, or famously, the justice system.
If you're a young person from a minority community with limited access to wealth and especially education, you're going to be treated very harshly by our court system.
But if you're one of these made men working on a high level, you will face a very different flavor of justice, shall we say.
none in the case of these two guys who lie.
Precisely, or no justice at all.
But that will never change unless we make it change, right?
Power admits nothing without a demand.
Government is not going to reform itself.
And the only way that things get better anywhere is through sacrifice.
We've known this since we crawled out of the swamp of history.
If you want to stay warm, somebody is going to have to go through 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 be doing it because it makes life better.
Somebody out there is going to have to do the hard work of growing the food that we all survive on.
And they don't get a lot of thanks for that. But society is a team sport.
Our society, as exists today, is flawed. I recognize that, right?
I am doing what I can to make it better as I can.
I don't have any illusions that I'm going to fix it.
I'm not going to save the world. That's not how this works.
And I think this is why I can be very much at peace with the choices that I've made and unfortunately, the price that I've 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 fixed the problem, people now can understand these things.
We can begin to argue for better policies.
And in fact, they're already happening.
Our courts, which for literally decades excused themselves at all from weighing in on the legality and constitutionality of surveillance in the context of national security, have since 2013 when I came forward ruled repeatedly on these programs and repeatedly ruled against the government.
They had backstopped these things fully again, for a very, very long time the NSA's engaged in repeated substantial legal violation.
The FISA court called, a systemic non-compliance by the government.
But the programs go on.
Some of these programs have been halted.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act is no more.
This was ended by an act of Congress and also at the urging of no less than Barack Obama, who at the very beginning of 2014, interesting in terms of timing, after the very first court to rule against these programs said it was likely unlawful and unconstitutional, came out in his State of the Union speech and said although he could never condone what I did, he felt that this conversation about surveillance, its legalities, 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 restraints on this.
But as you say, that didn't end the problem of mass surveillance.
That just pushed the tube of toothpaste, and now the toothpaste is in a slightly different part of the same tube.
However, mass surveillance occurs largely through certain technical principles, certain vulnerabilities mechanically in the way our communications move from your phone or the laptop on your desk across the internet to whoever it is you're trying to communicate with, right?
Whether we're talking about a website, whether we're talking about someone that you're talking to on the phone.
Now, fewer and fewer people use plain voice.
Fewer and fewer people use plain SMS.
Now they're using encrypted messages like the Signal messenger or WhatsApp, which I will not trust myself for a long period of time because it was bought by Facebook.
But WhatsApp was the world's most popular messenger.
It had 1 billion users, and post-2013, they adopted a new technical protection called end-to-end encryption, which is intentionally designed to limit precisely the kind of mass surveillance that was being discussed in 2013.
So now, at the flip of a switch, one billion people get a greater level of privacy that is not reliant on jurisdiction.
It's not reliant on law. It's not reliant on politics.
And encryption works?
Encryption does work. One of the lessons as a result of 2013, all these disclosures about how the NSA works, how the surveillance works, is you can be sneaky in a lot of ways as the NSA, as the CIA, when you're trying to steal a secret.
But encryption is basically just math.
And there is no, currently, with the best knowledge that we have of mathematics, any sneaky way to just make encryption go away entirely from a point of interception, right?
So as, again, your phone tries to reach this other person, wherever they are in the world, it has to go through the network of many other people, through the Starbucks that you're sitting at, through their internet service provider, through a data center, through a transatlantic cable that goes to, for example, France, their data center, their local internet service provider, their Starbucks that they're sitting in.
Any one of these points, anybody sitting on that line can snatch a copy of the conversation.
And if the wasn't encrypted, they can read it, whether it's a criminal hacker next to you at the cafe, or whether it is a national government, being that the American government or the French government or anybody in between, right?
But the thing is, the only way really to get around strong encryption that is properly implemented is precisely what the purpose of the 2013 stories was to achieve, which is to make governments shift from mass indiscriminate collection of communications to specific individualized targeted collection.
This means hacking, right?
So imagine for a second, you send this encrypted communication to the person that you're talking to.
People in the middle, tons of them, they all catch it, they all collect it, but none of them can read it because an encrypted message cannot be unlocked without a mathematical key.
It's just the answer to the math problem that you make up that you share with the other person on the other side.
You guys know the answer, but nobody else in the world can come up with it.
Now, mass surveillance no longer works.
Game over, finished. Doesn't work quite that way.
There's some more technical ways.
We can talk about metadata later if you're interested, but it's more in depth.
But the bottom line is how then if you're the CIA, and for example, this is not someone harmless in a Starbucks, this is an actual terrorist or a spy or a dissident in a place like Bahrain or Oman or Hong Kong, which unfortunately is all too real and happens every day.
How do they read this message?
And the answer is they steal a copy of the key.
Instead of catching it as it goes across the line, which they can no longer do... they can't do this for everybody en mass around the world... they have to target the two places in the world that that message is readable, where it's un-encrypted.
And that's on your device and the device of the person that you're talking with.
Now, instead of dealing with encryption, instead of dealing with that global network, that easy, cheap mass surveillance, they do the hard work, the traditional targeted investigative work, of hacking that phone, or selling that person an implanted phone that's got spy devices built into it basically.
And then when that person is encrypting messages or when they're receiving messages and decrypting them, because they have taken over the phone, encryption no longer matters to them because they can see it when it's unencrypted.
They can steal that encryption key, that answer to the math problem, when it exists on the phone before it's forgotten, before it disappears.
So long and short, because I know that was probably a complicated for a lot of people, encryption, end-to-end encryption, which is to say properly implemented encryption that doesn't have a man in the middle, it doesn't have some Facebook, some Google who's keeping their own copy of the key, but encryption where the keys are only held by the communicants, by the people who are supposed to know this information, that defeats mass surveillance in the generic general sense that we understood in 2013. It does not prevent all surveillance.
It does not prevent particularly legitimate targeted surveillance, but it returns the intelligence and law enforcement world to the more traditional means of investigation, which have fewer implications for our rights at large as a society.
Let’s talk a little more about your personal story.
You decide that you gotta do this. You ask 27 countries for asylum.
People are, shall we say, less familiar, particularly now with seven years of distance between.
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 media access.
It had a largely unfiltered internet, neither of which is true today, unfortunately.
But it was very easy for journalists to operate.
It was very easy for me to access, as a US intelligence employee, without popping up on any radars or anything like that.
And I would meet with them there.
And China also would not necessarily be free to operate against us, particularly the way they can today, because of rivalries and friction and bureaucratic infighting between the local Hong Kong services and the Beijing government.
So this was really an ideal kind of no man's land in which to operate.
I provided them with documents and explained the significance of them.
And I didn't publish any documents. This is important for people to understand.
I didn't put anything online. I instead told the journalists to look through this, explained it, and if they felt, as I did, that this was in the public interest to know, they would need to make an independent editorial judgment that this was the case, go to the government in advance of publication, give the government a chance to argue against this, say, "That Snowden guy's crazy, or he doesn't understand this or this document's incorrect, or if you publish this, people will get hurt."
Basically give the government the best chance to argue against this, which the government took and almost all cases that I'm aware of.
And they talked to the White House and talked to governments.
Exactly. What happened was, as I mentioned before, I had had a decade's worth of history, and actually more than a decade's worth of history, of cases to look over.
I looked at Daniel Ellsberg in the case of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, and the injunction against the newspapers working with him, how that was resolved by the courts, what that meant.
I looked at the case of Thomas Drake, how even though he went through the right channels, he ended up at the same place where his story, unfortunately, didn't get out.
He faced enormous consequences, policy, and the public were unable to grapple with this very important issue because of the government suppression of it.
And then I looked at the case of WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning with the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.
And one of the interesting things against this was Manning of course, was arrested. And they said Manning had blood on her hands, cost the lives of all these soldiers and publishing this material, which was only secret, not top secret, was going to cause basically the atmosphere to catch fire and the oceans to boil off. And none of this happened.
And in fact, at Manning's sentencing, the judge specifically asked the government, "Do you want to argue that people were harmed as a result of this?
Do you want to say someone was hurt, someone died, anything like this?
Because we'll take it into our sentencing consideration, give a harsher sentence."
And the government said, "Actually, no, we can't show that. It doesn't exist."
And this is what we saw actually in the case of Ellsberg. It's a constant refrain, where the government goes whenever they're put in the hot seat, they don't want to talk about the concrete harms 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 shift the conversation to the whistleblower, to the source of the disclosure, say they're weird, say they're disloyal, say they have problems, say they should've done this for whatever reason, Say that you're going to get spies killed or you're going to reveal troop movements.
Precisely. What they want to do is talk about the theoretical risks of journalism in an open society, instead of the concrete demonstrated harms as documented by the government's own malpractice.
And so this was something that I anticipated.
This was why this sort of process was designed.
I used three different journalists at three different outlets.
They could all go to the government.
The government would get a chance to do this so we could demonstrate we had gone in theoretically the most responsible way.
We had done everything the government thought was proper and appropriate as compared to prior cases, and see if it made a difference.
And the interesting thing is, even though this was sort of tremendously indulgent of the government's interests, it didn't make a single change in their messaging.
They use the same rhetoric against me as they did with Manning, as they did with Drake, as they did with Ellsberg.
But from here, I left Hong Kong en route to Latin America.
And I tell this story in my book, Permanent Record, how it happened.
But as I was leaving Hong Kong, the government... we're not sure... there's no true way to know whether this was an intentional strategic decision or whether they panicked and it was just a mistake.
But once the government had learned that I had departed Hong Kong, they canceled my passport, which meant I couldn't leave Russia.
And I spent the next 30 days and 30 nights basically trapped in this Russian airport, Sheremetyevo, trying to get asylum from, as you said, these 27 different countries, things that Americans wouldn't be particularly concerned with, Germany, France.
And every time one of these countries would appear to be leaning towards granting asylum, saying, "Okay, come here," they would get a phone call from one of two people, then Secretary of State John Kerry, or the soon to be possibly... excuse me... then Vice-President, Joe Biden.
And this is the interesting thing.
Why would the US government work so hard to keep me trapped in Russia rather than allowing me to go to a jurisdiction where they would be much freer to operate?
And much more comfortable, realistically, like France or Germany or Iceland or something like that, if they had even the slightest doubt about my loyalty?
And this is something, a question that even to this day, I have difficulty answering.
I would assume they just didn't want you to go anywhere, and you happened to be in Moscow. They didn't think it though.
Right. Imagine you're the director of the NSA, or you're the CIA, and you've got this guy out there, he's the person that you hate the most in the world.
And you know all your authorities, you know all your incredible powers, you know even the things that I didn't know with all of my access.
All the ways you can get people and they go, "We really don't like this guy. We really want to do something about him."
Would you rather me be in Moscow or literally anywhere else?
And so to me, it's very strange that the government worked quite hard to keep me exiled specifically in Russia.
And I've always been a little bit, particularly as years have gone by and you can't explain it away simply as a mistake of policy back then, they've had time to rectify it.
They realized that me being in Russia provides them with an evergreen political attack that doesn't have to be explained.
It doesn't have to be justified.
Simply the association with Russia is enough for them to call into question my character.
And some Americans would say, "Really, he went to China?"
And admittedly it was Hong Kong and different then, "And Russia? These two countries?
And there was no other way to get to Latin America except through Russia?"
Right, certainly. And I mean, this was a subject of much debate and it was again born out, there was a lot of public reporting on this back in 2013, when it was contemporary.
The reality is you can't fly from Hong Kong, or at least couldn't fly from Hong Kong at the time to Latin America without crossing US airspace, unless you went the long way around.
Then you do this and you have to go... It's a very short list.
What are the non-extradition countries to get from Hong Kong all the way over to South America?
And again, it's just building a bridge through the air step-by-step.
And my whole flight manifest to this point has been made public.
There were journalists on the flight that I was ticketed for from Moscow to Havana, taking pictures of my empty seat when I was prevented from boarding.
So, yeah, this has all been looked into and to me, it's frustrating, but it's also interesting because I wonder, if they did this intentionally, if they did this strategically, it was really the most brilliant move they made in terms of communications planning that they could have.
I'm not sure we can give them that much credit because it very well could have been a moment of panic, but it is, I think, disappointing that all these years later, they still haven't rectified it.
And it didn't work out well for you.
Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence.
She's now running for political office.
Politicians say you should be killed.
Well the funny thing is we see that much less now than we did in 2013.
The reality is there's sort of a pardon movement going on on my behalf.
I have not asked for pardon from this president or the prior president, but many others have on my behalf, and I'm tremendously grateful for that and the advocacy that people have brought forward. But... Excuse me.
The thing is, as each year passes and all of those claims, as you said they were like, "Oh, he got people killed.
There were agents, there were programs or whatever. All this stuff fell apart.
It didn't work."
None of it came to pass, and this was exactly the story in the Manning case.
Obama could not have commuted Manning's sentence politically, realistically, in this 2013 era, in this 2014 era, but years after when Manning's actions were actually in 2009, 2010, you start getting year after year after year.
The fact that what Manning did, did not harm national security in a material way.
It did not harm individual's lives and livelihood in a material way.
All it did is informed the public and embarrassed the US government and its partner governments in the case of diplomatic cables.
But largely it was about reputational harm, right?
The government had egg on its face and it retaliates as a result of this.
Moreover, you know from reporting on the justice system in other contexts, I think, the government is very interested in what it describes as the deterrent effect.
Manning becomes secondary to someone like me, or Ellsberg or Drake, any of these people, they become secondary to the point of the government pointing to the rest of their workforce.
Even if this person did the right thing, even if they did it carefully, even if they did it in the best way, we don't want you to emulate it, so we are going to come after this person, chase them all the way around the earth in order to set an example.
I hope you get pardoned. It's a little puzzling.
The Attorney General says you're a traitor and the information you peddled, you peddled it around like a commercial merchant.
Yeah you never tried to get money from it.
President Trump in 2013 said, "They got a lot of information out of this guy.
He's a terrible guy who's set our country back.
This is a bad guy and there's still a thing called execution."
This guy is a bad guy and there is still a thing called execution But then seven years later, a reporter asks him, "Do 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 gonna look at it. I’m not that aware of the Snowden situation, but I’m going to start looking at it.
Yeah, this is a good example of the distance Donald Trump has traveled from 2013 Trump to 2020 Trump.
But also more generally when you bring up the case of the Attorney General, who does not seem familiar at all with the basic facts of the case when he's speaking publicly on it, that is a lot of distance historically.
A lot of things have happened in between then.
And as we start to look at what happened in 2013, less with the heat of the moment and sort of careers on the line, and more dispassionately from a historic context, I think it's clearer and clearer that what I did was the right thing to do.
In fact, public opinion is swinging very heavily toward that side.
And in fact, even elite opinion, which is largely turned against individuals working outside of the organization in this kind of way, you will not find a lot of love for whistle blowers in corporate America, in government agencies, in any country in the world, I think.
But even there you are beginning to see people speak in, in fact, I would say large majority terms, favorably rather than disfavorably.
I think that's because history has a way of exonerating the truth.
In some ways, attitudes switch the other way. President-elect Biden before he became vice-president was against the spying, this data collection and said, "It's very intrusive. We're going to trust the president and vice-president to do the right thing. Don't count me in on that," The real question is what do they do with this information they collect that does not have anything to do with al Qaeda?
That we’re going to trust the president and vice president of the united states to do the right thing? Don’t count me in on that.
But he changed his tune once he was in power.
Yeah. And again, this was the same for President-elect Barack Obama.
Some people say, well, Obama was this raving liberal before now he's a Dick Cheney.
He tells this very briefly in his memoir.
He said yeah, he was campaigning against mass surveillance.
Yeah, it was wrong. Yeah, it shouldn't have been done, it was a problem, so on and so forth.
But then he says, after he became president, he realized he was seeing that from the cheap seats and now Bush's wars were his wars.
And this is very in line with his decision to move from investigating Bush era abuses, things like torture, things like unlawful killing, things like the massive domestic surveillance program that happened under the Bush administration.
He didn't investigate them at all.
Instead he said it was important that we look forward, not backwards.
And it's this, this lack of accountability amongst the American political elite.
At the same time we are constantly increasing the level of accountability for ordinary members of the public, particularly when we talk in the context of this mass surveillance.
Not only is the government policing you, Twitter is policing you, what you say online. YouTube is locking your channel, whatever.
There are people in little police hats everywhere you look.
At the same time, these people with power are excusing their behavior.
They are heightening the standard of accountability to which we are held.
And to me, I say, isn't this backwards?
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 scrutinize 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 and so we were meant to be left alone, but that is increasingly being inverted.
And we are under a constant gaze electronically, at the same time they are permanently sheltered by this fog of unaccountability, and that's by design.
Just to be clear, Twitter and YouTube can't put us in jail?
Yeah, they can't... well yet, but stay tuned.
Or force you to stay in Moscow.
You can't return to America at the moment.
You got married in Russia. What's your life in exile like?
My long-term partner of many years who was with me in the United States, Lindsay Mills, she is also American, and I got married.
We are expecting our first child, which is a tremendous stroke of fortune.
I'm really excited about it.
And this is really all consuming for us right now, I think. It's a scary thing.
I've never been through this before, and I think it's even more frightening for her.
But the reality is exile as a political weapon is beginning to fail.
These conversations, this, what's happening between you and I today was a rare and extraordinary thing when it first started happening in my story in the beginning of 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 from China as a result of his own criticism of his government.
And this idea from history that governments used to be able to go, "Fine, we're just going to divorce you from the public conversation.
We're going to silence you through distance," it doesn't work anymore because even though I put my head down on the pillow far away, I still very much live in the United States.
And our child, I think, will hopefully embody the best of all worlds.
You're applying for citizenship in Russia and some Americans say, "That's disloyal. That makes me suspicious."
Yeah, I mean, this is part of the same conversation that I think has been intentionally pushed by the government for many years now.
The reality is I've been in Russia now for seven years.
I cannot leave. I'm expecting to start a family and I want my son to not grow up as an outsider.
I don't want him to feel like he is born into exile, as I am.
I want him to feel at home wherever he is.
I don't want my wife to be separated from me because she doesn't have permanent residence in the same way that I do.
Particularly when borders to Russia are closed, as they are today.
So the only way that my family can be together is for me to do this, and I don't think that's wrong.
A year ago you released Permanent Record and the government sued, froze the proceeds.
They sought to, it's true.
But the reality is the government's judgment in the case of Permanent Record is not enforceable, certainly not internationally, questionably domestically.
And I don't have any assets in the United States' banking system or whatever that they could pull.
So that judgment hasn't had any material effect, but more broadly I speak publicly.
I did before, that was also a part of the lawsuit, and I continue to do so today.
I'm very fortunate for the invitations to speak because it's allowed me to live a good life in a difficult situation and I have no reason to expect that'll change.
Just to be clear, we're not paying you. These are other speeches.
What are some of the worst privacy violations left, and talk for example about LOVEINT Sure, so LOVEINT or love intelligence as it's a sort of portmanteau for, is the intelligence community's insider cute term for spying on spouses, romantic interests, exes.
Normally we use this INT to refer to intelligence.
There's SIGINT for signals intelligence, there's COMINT for communications, intelligence.
There's HUMINT for human intelligence, you would think of it as the James Bond, human enabled operations.
Well, LOVEINT is where you take this giant, world spanning surveillance system... or even just your local police force, whatever... and you turn it to going, "Hey, who did she call after she hung up the phone?"
Or, "Where's she going?" "What is he doing?"
And this has happened and the NSA has actually publicly confirmed this happened after the accusations came out, in at least 13 different instances.
One of the particularly interesting things about this practice of LOVEINT is that the government doesn't typically charge people with crimes when they're found to do this, even though this is felony behavior.
And this is true anytime analysts at the NSA or CIA or elsewhere in the intelligence community, abuse their governmentally granted authorities.
And you might go, "Well, why is that?"
But the answer is self-apparent when you think through it.
The existence of this program is a secret.
The operation of this program is itself possibly unlawful in the most charitable sense, likely unlawful in the way I would put it.
So avowing that these programs exist, avowing that a government employee who had gone through a polygraph, gotten a top super clearance, was actively using these programs to spy on Americans or any unauthorized target like that, simply admitting that is possible would expose these systems to legal challenges. So what does the government instead do?
It simply disciplines them, or worst case fires them.
Shuffles them out and gets a new body and puts it in the chair.
So this is the low level constant abuse that is not likely to go away because it's introduced by a human element in the context of this larger systemic problem.
What else is the problem? PRISM? Turbulence?
Well 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 matters, all of the facets of it, look at my book Permanent Record.
That's why I wrote it, is for you.
But what's not in the book, and what is a concern is what's coming down the road.
I see things like companies like Amazon.
For example, the fact that they just appointed the former NSA director who resigned in disgrace for having overseeing the mass surveillance program that now courts have condemned as unlawful, that should be of concern to people. Why are they doing that?
Why does that seem like a good idea to them?
But then when you look at what they actually do, Amazon's web services as it's called, which is a cloud provider for technical hosting on the internet, it runs basically like half the internet. I looked at statistics recently, and I think when you look at the largest sites, it is a substantial portion of the internet's traffic.
This is all going through Amazon's data center.
These are all things they can see. These are all things that can record.
Now, when you intersect all of the different devices that Americans have, that they visit websites from, this has an internet address associated with your device.
You likely have identifiers for the sites that you're connected to, you know, a username or a log in, or a phone number.
A Facebook or a Gmail login. You also have cookies.
These are little digital files that are planted in your browser, visiting a site, which allows them to show you different ads to keep you logged in, different kind of things.
Now, this means you can track to a more detailed degree what people are looking at on the internet, what they're visiting, what they're searching for, what their interests are, what their political leanings are.
You can do sentiment analysis, even without looking at anyone on the individual level, by taking these identifiers, these locations, these associations and affiliations, where they were in the world, because their location services were turned on.
Who they were there with, this is happening more in the context of COVID tracing programs.
Then you go with all this rich information that Amazon has about purchasing decisions, about financial information, they know what your card is.
They know what your shipping address is.
They know all of these things and you start to collate these 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 Sidewalk program or whatever, where it is listening not just to you in your home.
It's not just listening for your devices, but it's listening for the radio information provided by other people's cell phones by the wifi access point in the unit next to you in an apartment building, or on vacation or at a hotel.
And all of these things are being collated by Amazon and it's all being sent back.
What they are doing is they're getting a broader and more detailed sense of the world's identity, individual identities.
Collectively and individually, they are cross-referencing them with basically intellectual interests and pursuits and purchasing information. This is called enriching it, and then they're sharing it.
They're applying it to uses that we don't know about.
They're partnering increasingly with police through subsidiaries.
We see things like Google and they ring doorbells and all that.
What this means is we're entering increasingly a quantified world where everywhere you go, everything you do, everyone you interact with and everything you are interested in is now being pre-judged.
It is being collected and recorded and analyzed and assessed.
And not by humans, we don't have the benefit of human judgment here.
An algorithm makes a decision about whether you're desirable or undesirable, about whether the things you're doing are good or bad.
And we don't know how that is being applied yet, but we do know once they have this information, we can't take it back from them under the laws as they are written today.
The United States of America is one of the only, if not the only developed democracy in the world today that does not have a basic privacy law.
We have the constitution Would that make a difference?
Here's the problem Americans by and large don't care and I mostly don't care.
Alexa, are you spying on me?
Actually she answers, "No, I'm not spying."
So she's still going off.
John Oliver had to do a bit with you where 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, it isn't always on if the NSA is spying on us.
And they might take pictures of our private parts and show it to people, only that got a reaction.
The government should not be able to look at dick pictures If the government was looking at pictures of Gordon’s penis I definitely feel it would be an invasion of my privacy They should never ever, the US government, have a picture of my dick.
Yeah. This is something that I encounter constantly.
And again, I've spoken in places all over the world.
All kinds of different countries, all kinds of different audiences, all kinds of different age groups and I typically hear this as a question being asked by older people.
The interesting thing is it's formulated a lot of times as young people don't care.
They're on Facebook, they're on Instagram.
They're putting this all out there on social media.
And the reality is when I talk to audiences and I have these conversations, young people care more about privacy, and they care more about these intrusions.
Because just as my generation grew up with the web as it was in the 1.0 version, and now I'm aging out of the youth, even though I still consider myself young enough, right?
They know this web 2.0, this interactive web where you aren't just reading things on static sites, but you're interacting with them, you're posting, you're enriching, but that sharing is selective.
And this is clear when you look to these big, basically beauty pageant sites like Instagram, where people are putting themselves through filters, they're showing their wonderful dinner.
They're not showing their garbage piece of burnt toast in the morning.
Why?
They're doing that because they understand that they are selectively sharing.
They're looking at experiences in their lives, the parts of themselves, as thoughts.
Parts of a conversation that they want to bring other people into.
They want to invite you into this.
They don't give you everything and what is happening is that trust, that openness is being exploited by companies that could not sell us products when they commercialized the web 1.0.
Do you remember the tech boom and Pets.com.
Younger listeners have no idea what we were talking about, but the early forays into the internet were not wildly successful.
There was a boom and a bust because they were trying to sell us things that we did not need.
Once they realized that there was only so much they could sell us, they went searching for a new product, that led to the new web and their new product is us.
We are not the users of this system. We are being used by this system.
And the reason that you say you don't care about this is... and I say this without any offense intended whatsoever... is because you do not understand the way that that system is being used against you.
That's not due to a failing in you as an individual, that is by design.
These companies do not want you to understand how it is being used.
They work with lawyers- How is it being used against me?
It's profiling.
It is basically creating what's called a pattern of life and a social graph, not just for you, but for everyone.
This means that even if you're trying to do something anonymously, let's say you have something like a cancer scare, and do you want to look up an oncology clinic, you want to call a doctor.
Or there's a Planned Parenthood thing happening with a young woman, all of these different things, you just want a moment to seek help.
You're in a vulnerable state you try to open a private browser window... by the way that doesn't work for the kind of tracking that we're talking about here on the network level, just for anybody listening, but a lot of people think it does.
And they re-associate your identity based on what's called a fingerprint that they've established of your browser, of your device, of your logins.
Google's doing these things on your phone.
Apple's doing these things on your phone.
To different extents, but the idea is they're trying to encapsulate not just what you are, but how you think, how you live, who you interact with to make you a value in a database, in a set, in a solution that can then be influenced and controlled.
When you asked what they're doing to you, right?
This is where people start to lose it because it feels like an abstraction, it's not clear to them because they haven't seen a neighbor get marched off on the street, as happened in, like, World War II, kind of Nazi uprising context.
Where you've got datasets that were constructed for a census by a group like IBM and then it's abused and applied to a different purpose.
And we went, "Well, it's harmless. It's a census. It's something that you want."
You don't see how these things are going to be applied later.
But what they are doing today, in the most concrete form, as I said, is they are collapsing everything about you into a known value that can then be manipulated.
That is beginning and the end of the system.
They want to make you controllable.
We talked about mass surveillance before and how it's not effective in the context of surveillance.
What is it effective for? It is this kind of intelligence/surveillance which is a means of influence, right?
People ask me about terrorism, and they go, "Why weren't these effective for stopping terrorism?"
And it's because they were never designed to stop terrorism.
They are about diplomatic manipulation.
They are about social influence.
They are about an informational advantage.
They are about power.
The corporate variant is about the same thing.
When you look at all of these things we've talked about in the past, like election interference, and this last wave was really ugly with political advertising and targeting, that is just the smallest part of a very big game.
The bottom line is power is derived from many means.
It can be from violence. It can be from law.
It can be from money. Financial influence, right?
But the new means of influence.
The one that is most easily hidden, and the one that is the most reliable at scale, which is you can't buy off everyone in the world and you can't murder them all if you want to have something to control.
And even with law, there are law breakers, right?
There are the edge cases there. With information, applied at the right time, in the right way, you can change behaviors.
When you see a banner ad, they're trying to shape your behavior to sell you a new pair of shoes, but they can also control what you see and, in enough time, and this has been studied by academics, what you believe.
Facebook, which is a big company.
We're not talking like a small startup that's a little bit shady here.
They ran their own psychological studies on the current population to see if they could make you angry.
They intentionally wanted to manipulate their users It works! They did!
And it worked. Exactly. You are correct.
This is controlling human behavior by a private company.
For what end? Just to see if they could.
Well, the next variants, and this was years ago, are not going to be just to see if they could.
It is going to be for their advantage.
It is going to be to shape laws, it is going to be to shape elections, and it is going to be to shape individual outcomes.
They are going to change lives.
It might be good for you, right?
You might get a job that you didn't expect to have.
But it could also be very, very bad for you, and I think for a significant portion of the population, it will be.
I don't feel threatened.
You make a good case why I should.
I'm not scared of Amazon or Facebook because yes they want to manipulate me, but- I am a little scared of the algorithm and how it might divide America by feeding us more of what we believe and push us apart more.
But basically they want my money, and to get my money in a free market, a 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 the free market operating, we are presuming that there is open competition.
We are presuming that there is fair competition.
We do not live in a perfect world.
We do not have the benefit of a perfect market.
There are monopolies that exist.
There are companies that exploit flaws in regulations and the moats that have been granted to them, and it's hard to find a better example of this than a lot of the internet giants as they exist today.
And so I think it's fair to recognize that, even though, yeah, free market.
Even though we have consumer choice, even though we can do other things, that only is true where there is an alternative, where there is a reasonable competitor that can provide the same service.
Or that it's even possible to launch a competitor to do these things.
And I don't believe this is true in that larger sense.
But as you say... So you were saying, if I heard it correctly, that you're not super afraid of these things in the specific sense.
You understand the general sense. You have these fears.
But what can you do to protect yourself?
This is always a question that I get.
And it's very difficult to answer because the advice changes year to year.
Because technology is dynamic. The devices are changing.
The protocols are changing. The services are changing.
The platforms are changing. The laws are changing.
And so I don't like to give specific advice because it dates very quickly, and this video will live forever with all of the rest of the things on our permanent record.
What I will tell you is there are organizations out there that are dedicated to creating these kind of guides for how to protect yourself and keeping them up to date.
You can search for sites like privacy tools, like surveillance self-defense guides from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union creates guides.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation, which I'm the president of, creates a guide for working journalists.
But largely the most important thing to protect yourself is to recognize you are not going to win an arms race against the richest companies in history and the most powerful states that the world has ever seen.
The surveillance problem, first and foremost, is a political problem.
Because it is enabled by a political class that does not share our burdens.
It does not share our struggles.
And it exempts itself from this gaze.
It is not held to the same standard of behavior, the same level of accountability as you and I, and this system, this knowledge, this influence will increasingly be used to shape our lives while excusing them from these same methods of control.
So political action, I think, and concern is actually the root of resolving this.
And recognizing what are the ways that this can be changed?
What is the single point of failure that all of these exploitative practices are relying on?
That allows this system, as it is, to come into being.
And we talked before about these silos.
The Google stash, the Facebook stash, everybody's private records that are raining in there, being used in different ways, and the government can sort of open the lids to the different salt shakers and help themselves.
Well, how did those silos get filled?
We have, in the United States, as I said, no basic privacy law.
The fourth amendment binds the Federal government and the state government, but it does not define or restrain these companies that are basically acting in willful conspiracy with regulators, where each hand washes the other in a sort of monopoly position.
There is, I believe, a common failure in the laws as they are interpreted by the courts of the United States today.
In a 1970s-era case... this sounds random, but I promise it comes together very quickly... called Smith versus Maryland, and it led to the birth of what is called the Third Party Doctrine.
If you look back in American history, into what law enforcement could get through investigations, they were strictly limited to two categories of gains.
They were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime.
If they were chasing a burglar, they could get a warrant.
The warrant would allow them to go in the house, go in the business, whatever.
They could get the bag of loot, the fruits that they won.
They could take the crowbar, the mask, the gloves, the instrumentalities of the crime.
And they could use this as evidence to convict.
They could not go to that burglar's landlord and get records of payment.
They could not go to the phone company and seize the phone company's records.
Because they were neither fruits nor instrumentalities.
This new world, where the government can demand private entities' private records about customers or even your own records about yourself, your diaries or whatever, is a very, very new thing. It's about 60 years old, right?
And in this Smith versus Maryland case in the 1970s, the government interpreted one case of the cops investigating basically a man making harassing phone calls to a woman, where this was an individual who was suspect of wrongdoing, the cops went to the phone company and said, "Can we get his phone records to see if he called this house?"
because the woman saw his license plate as he drove by, sort of leering at her house, and thought it was him, and the cops agreed. Phone company turned it over, and sure enough, it was him.
They caught the guy making the harassing phone calls.
This seems fair. But they did it without a warrant.
And when this went all the way up to the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court knew he was a bad guy, knew he did a bad thing, they didn't want to let him walk.
And so they tried to create a paradigm in which they could go to the phone company, could do this, they could give this person's records of what they were doing over to the cops.
Without a warrant. And this was called the Third Party Doctrine.
The government said that, because these records did not belong to the man, even though they were records about him, they belonged to the company because the company created them.
That man had no privacy interest in those records.
Therefore, he had no fourth amendment protections regarding those records.
Well, in the decades since the 1970s when the court could not have imagined the world that we live in today, that our movements could be tracked by our phones, that companies have records of everything about us, the government has repeatedly leaned on this one single outdate court opinion of one guy making scary phone calls to go, "No one in the country, no one in the world has a privacy interest in any records that are created about them but held by a third party." If that changes, the surveillance ends.
Ends? Really? People won't find a way to get around it?
I think legally, if you recognize that people have a property interest or a privacy interest in information about them, that means it's no longer the company's records.
They're your records. And so you now are in the driver's seat.
Yes, Amazon could create a record about you with your consent, but you control it. You can revoke it. You can destroy it.
And this is what has changed. Right now, we have a non-consensual relationship.
It is premised on the illusion of consent, the idea that you clicked OK to continue, but that doesn't work in any other contract law sense.
You can't click OK to bind yourself into servitude for the rest of the life.
You can't click OK to be victimized repeatedly anywhere else except the internet.
And I think as soon as we recognize that this is not proper and is not appropriate life will be better for all of us.
Because we will have more control over our own destinies and over our own stories.
I confess that I'm a bad example when it comes to what you say about worrying about this, in that I've been on television since I was in my 20s, calling businessmen crooks, and I figured I had enemies, and some of them wanted to get me, and so I've been very careful, and when I got a cancer scare, I wrote a column about it, so I figure I have no privacy, really. And I've kind of come to terms with that.
But there ought to be a private sphere, where people could go.
It's a fair point. I will say there is a difference between you and shall we say the average person?
Because just like we talked about public officials and private citizens, we also have this other category of public figures.
And you aren't nobody. You have a platform.
You have a voice. You have influence. You have friends.
You have associations. You have connections.
And more importantly, you derive your power, I think, in society from sharing that voice and using that voice, but not everybody is as clever as you, as well spoken as you, right?
And has the history and the skill set that you do.
And I think recognizing that there are different people in this society with different capabilities isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing.
It's okay for someone to say they do not care about this, that, or the other.
But the way rights work is it's not for the average person, and it's not especially for the most privileged among us, right?
Bill Gates doesn't need rights.
Bill Gates writes the laws, right? Bill Gates can hire his own army.
Rights are for the least among us.
They are for the minorities. They are for the strange.
They're for the exposed.
They're for the people who 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, those new ideas always start out as a minority of one.
And just like a seedling, we, in free societies, make an intentional decision to structure our systems, our laws, to protect and shelter these weirdos, so that once they have been tested, we can benefit from those ideas.
Well, I thank you very much for giving us lots of time here.
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
Stay free.
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