Above: Edward Snowden photograph by Alex Healey
Whistleblower, Edward Snowden, spoke to Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian about life in Russia, the NSA culture, his time there and the future of communication. Below are some highlights from the interview.
On Hong Kong: “It was a nervous period. You have no idea what the future’s going to hold and I was all right because I knew things would get out but I wanted them to get out in the best way, and that was [why] I didn’t want any mistakes. It was what I called the zero fuck-ups policy…”
“So this is the thing that nobody realises. They think there was some masterplan to get out safely and avoid all consequences. That’s what Hong Kong was all about. But it wasn’t. The purpose of my mission was to get the information to journalists. Once I had, that I was done.”
Why Russia and not Ecuador: “Going to Ecuador and getting asylum there, that would have been great … And that would have just been a bonus. The fact that I’ve ended up so secure is entirely by accident. And as you said, it probably shouldn’t have happened. If we have anybody to thank, it’s the state department. The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.”
On the NSA: “. . . we now have an institution that has become so powerful it feels comfortable granting itself new authorities, without the involvement of the country, without the involvement of the public, without the full involvement of all of our elected representatives and without the full involvement of open courts, and that’s a terrifying thing – at least for me.
“Generally, it’s not the people at the working level you need to worry about. It’s the senior officials, it’s the policymakers who are shielded from accountability, who are shielded from oversight and who are allowed to make decisions that affect all of our lives without any public input, any public debate, or any electoral consequences because their decisions and the consequences of the decisions are never known.”
“The reality of working in [the] intelligence community is you see things that are deeply troubling all the time. I raised concerns about these programs regularly and widely, [to] more than 10 discreet colleagues that I have worked with – and that’s both laterally and vertically in my work. I went to [them] and I showed [them] these programmes and said: . . . Isn’t this unconstitutional? Isn’t this a violation of rights?” and “Why are we intercepting more American communications than we’re intercepting Russian communications?”. . . The people that are staffing these intelligence agencies are ordinary people, like you and me. They’re not moustache-twirling villains that are going, “ah ha ha that’s great”, they’re going: “You’re right. That crosses a line but you really shouldn’t say something about that because it’s going to end your career.”
The Stasi: “When we look at the German Stasi for example, they were a state security bureau set up to protect their nation, to protect the stability of their political system, which they considered to be under threat. They were ordinary citizens like anyone else. They believed they were doing the right thing, they believed they were doing a good thing. But when we look at them in historic terms, what were they doing to their people? What were they doing to the countries around them? What was the net impact of their mass indiscriminate spying campaigns? And we can see it more clearly.”
Relationship between corporations and government: “So the way Prism [the program that deals with the relationship between the NSA and the internet companies] works is agencies are provided with direct access to the contents of the server at these private companies. That doesn’t mean the companies can, or the intelligence agencies can, let themselves in. What it means is Facebook is allowing the government to get copies of your Facebook messages, your Skype conversations, your Gmail mailboxes, things like that.”
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Actually quite some time ago. Contrary to popular belief I don’t think we are exactly in the Nineteen Eighty-Four universe. The danger is that we can see how [Orwell’s] technologies that are [in] Nineteen Eighty-Four now seem unimaginative and quaint. They talked about things like microphones implanted in bushes and cameras in TVs that look back at us. Nowadays we’ve got webcams that go with us everywhere. We buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets with us voluntarily as we go from place to place and move about our lives.”
The Failure of Oversight: “Normally the people who are overseeing intelligence agencies are the most senior members of a public body, they’re the civil servants who have been around longer than the furniture. And it’s because they feel these people can be trusted, they’ve been here, they’ve got their heads in the right place.”
Living in Russia: “…there are guys who are just hoping to see me sad. And they’re going to continue to be disappointed. … I don’t live in absolute secrecy. I live a pretty open life. . . . I’m much happier here in Russia than I would be facing an unfair trial in which I can’t even present a public interest defence to a jury of my peers. We’ve asked [the] government again and again to provide a fair trial and they’ve declined. And I feel very fortunate to have received asylum. Russia’s a modern country and it’s been good to me so, yeah, I have a pretty normal life and I would absolutely like to continue to be able to travel as I have in the past. I’d love to be able to visit western Europe again but that’s not a decision for me to make, that’s for the publics and the governments of each of those independent countries.”
Google: “Association with Google is voluntary. But it does raise an important question. And I would say, while there is a distinction in that – Google can’t put you in jail, Google can’t task a drone to drop a bomb on your house – we shouldn’t trust them without verifying what their activities are, how they’re using our data. … I don’t use Google. I have used Skype and Google hangouts, which are great but unfortunately security compromised services, for public talks where they’ve been required but I wouldn’t use it for personal communications.
His reputation: “My reputation is not worth anything … What matters are how people feel about these issues, regardless of your opinion of me. What matters are your rights and how they’re being infringed.”
Being a Russian spy: “We’ve got a new director of the National Security Agency, Michael Rogers, who just came in. He has full access to all classified information. He has full access to the details of the investigation into me. He has concluded and stated publicly, I believe to both press and to Congress, that I am probably not a Russian spy. There’s no evidence for it at all. If the government had the tiniest indication, the tiniest shred of evidence that, not even that I was working for the Russian government, that I was associating with the Russian government, it would be on the front page of the New York Times by lunch time.”
Right to privacy: “We need to recognise that people have an individual right to privacy but they also have a collective right to privacy. Nobody should have their communications seized and stored for an indefinite period of time without any suspicion or justification, without any suspicion that they’re involved in some sort of specific criminality. Just as it would be for any other law enforcement investigation.”
Telecommunications companies: “Telecommunications providers need to recognise that the interests of their customers come before the interests of any given state. Today, the standard response to any criticism that they face about participation [in] intrusive programs is “we follow the laws of X country when we operate in that country”.
“Now that may be true, and that may be legally wise, but that doesn’t mean they’re exempt from advocating for the rights of their customers. When we’re trusting them with the most intimate details of our lives, when we’re entrusting our private records to their care, they need to make sure that they’re a responsible advocate to us as customers, not just legally but socially. And that means they need to use their lobbying abilities, they need to use their commercial clout to force the government to be more responsible in whatever jurisdiction it is, in safeguarding our public interests.”
This is just a tiny part of the interview. We recommend you read it all here.
