Snowden Explains Why He Divulged Secret Information

"I think the government's going to launch an investigation. I think they're going to say I've committed grave crimes. I've, you know, violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I've aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems but that argument can be made against anybody who reveals information that points out mass surveillance systems because, fundamentally, they apply equally to ourselves as they do to our enemies."INTERVIEWER: "When you decided to enter this world did you do so with the intention of weaseling yourself in and becoming a mole so that one day you could undermine it with disclosures or what was your perspective and mindset about it at the time that you sort of got into this whole realm."

EX-CIA EMPLOYEE, EDWARD SNOWDEN:

"No, I joined the intelligence community when I was very young. Sort of the government as a whole. I enlisted in the army after the invasion of Iraq. I believed in the goodness of what we were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas but overtime over the length of my career as I watched the news and I increasingly was exposed to true information that had not been propagandized in the media that we were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all the publics, not just the american public, in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness. I was actually a victim of that.America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing but the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedoms of all publics."

INTERVIEWER: "Can you talk about some of the most important primary documents are and what they reveal?

EX-CIA EMPLOYEE, EDWARD SNOWDEN:

"The primary disclosures are the fact that the NSA (National Security Agency) doesn't limit itself to foreign intelligence. It collects all communications that transit the United States. There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental United States where a communication to enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analyzed. The Verizon document speaks highly of this because it literally lays out they're using an authority that was intended to be used to seek warrants against individuals and they're applying it to the whole society by basically subverting a corporate partnership through major communications providers and they're getting everyone's calls, everyone's call records and everyone's internet traffic as well. On top of that you've got Boundless Informant which is a sort of a global auditing system for the NSA's intercept collection system that lets us track how much, how much we're collecting, where we're collecting, by which authority and so forth. The NSA lied about the existence of this tool toCongress and to specific Congressmen in response to previous inquiries about their surveillance activities. Beyond that we've got PRISM which is a demonstration of how the U.S. government coops U.S. corporate power to it's own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. They all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA with direct access to the backends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store date, to put things in the Cloud and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life and the give NSA direct access that they don't need to oversee so they can't be held liable for it. I think that's a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly an organization that's demonstrated time and time again that they'll work to shield themselves from oversight."

INTERVIEWER: "Was there a specific point in time that you can point to when you crossed the line from contemplation to decision making and commitment to do this?"

EX-CIA EMPLOYEE, EDWARD SNOWDEN:

"I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in private without it being monitored. Without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems anytime they mention anything that travels across public lines. I think a lot of people of my generation a lot of people who grew up with the internet, that was their understanding. As we've seen the internet and government's relation to the internet evolve over time we've seen that sort of open a debate that free market of ideas sort of lose it's domain and be shrunk."

 INTERVIEWER: "But what is it about that set of developments that make them sufficiently menacing or threatening that you are willing to risk what you've risked in order to fight them?" "

EX-CIA EMPLOYEE, EDWARD SNOWDEN, 

"I don''t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded and that's not something I'm willing to support it's not something I'm willing to build and it's not something I'm willing to live under. So, I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act in a way that they can. Now I've watched and waited and tried to do my job in the most policy driven way I could which is to wait and allow other people. You know, wait for our leadership, our figures to sort of correct the excesses of government if we go to far but as I've watched I've seen that's not occurring. In fact we're compounding the excesses of prior governments and making it worse and more invasive and no one is really standing to stop it."